The donkeys and I left Cooktown as planned on 1 May 2004. Our first two days were along the main Port Douglas road. There was no way to avoid the bitumen, as thick vegetation occupied every square centimetre of what would probably be bare ground with lower rainfall. The hard surface was tough on my joints and we walked facing the frequent oncoming traffic. This meant managing the donkeys from the same side all day; by mid-afternoon my hips and shoulders were hurting.
About every fourth vehicle on this busy narrow road was a motorbike, something my donkeys had not been exposed to. At first sight of these raucous machines with round heads, no eyes and no mouth the donkeys leaped 3 or 4 metres into the scrub. After a couple of hours, they began to warily accept them as part of our world on the road, until we reached our first concrete bridge. Grace looked a little nonplussed at the strange echoing noise of her hooves, but she kept going. Charley, who was tied behind, baulked at stepping onto the concrete. Grace was yanked to a stop, startling us both, as a motorbike approached, its engine noise resounding many times louder on the bridge.
Grace and I had no choice but to reverse off the bridge and stand aside with Charley to let the bike pass. Both donkeys were now extremely edgy.
The motorcyclist slowed down, lifted his visor and called out, “There’s twenty-two of us!”
The donkeys wanted to get well away, but I held my ground next to the bridge so they could learn from experience that the racket and menacing-looking motor cyclists would not hurt them.
The donkeys were still tense when the last rider appeared. He waved his camera at me, drove close to us, paused with the noisy bike engine echoing under the bridge, snapped a photo and took off again. I think the donkeys were as stunned as I was. They seemed to relax after that—or maybe they knew the noisy ordeal was over—and crossed the bridge with no further ado.
My biggest concern about travelling and camping in this part of the country was coming across a saltwater crocodile. Well, much as I’d have been keen to see one in the wild, my fear was that a crocodile might see my donkeys and me first. I had trouble finding local information about the habits of crocodiles and how to avoid them. The men I spoke to could only tell horror stories of people and animals who’d been attacked.
At the Cooktown Botanical Gardens I’d asked permission from a group of warm and friendly local Aboriginal women to walk through their country. They directed me to an elder, Agnes Walker at Wujal Wujal, several days’ walk south of Cooktown. I also asked what they knew about avoiding the dangers of saltwater crocodiles. They said that when they were children and lived out in the open, a fire was kept burning night and day because their fathers said crocodiles will never go anywhere near a fire.
The first night I camped in flat, lightly timbered coastal country. To cook dinner I made a fire between my tent and where the donkeys were tethered. Afterwards I found a big log to burn till morning. Watching the glowing embers and drinking a last cup of tea my mood was soft. I felt poised, somehow open to the good and the bad, light and dark, feminine and masculine in myself and all I might encounter on this journey.
Day Two saw another five hours of bitumen before turning onto the dusty road towards the historic Lion’s Den Hotel set in lush tropical rainforest intermingled with 100-year-old mango trees. The hotel proprietor was happy for the donkeys to browse under the shady trees of the park-like setting. Instead of camping I opted to stay in a cabin for two days to give my joints time to recover from 30 kilometres of pounding the bitumen. The donkeys took turns at being tethered so they each got time to explore their new environment, seeking the feed they needed. As long as one donkey was restrained the other would never stray too far from her friend.
I slept for a large part of the first day. Most of the second I spent sitting on the cabin veranda enjoying my temporary home in the jungle and an occasional chat with hotel patrons who came over to ask about the donkeys.
A weather-beaten man in his late 50s introduced himself as ‘Irish Mick’, a Vietnam War veteran. It wasn’t long before we were joined by his very young, very chatty Vietnamese wife Twee and their two children, all enamoured with the donkeys. Twee asked me lots of questions about where I was going and why. Next day I would be walking through Rossville, right past their house. Mick and Twee pressured me to call in for lunch. My ‘yes’ was tentative as I felt somewhat overwhelmed by Twee’s chatter and enthusiasm. And since Mick’s Asian wife was young enough to be his daughter, I assumed he was probably a ‘racist redneck’. Not nice to admit but it turned out to be the first of many encounters to challenge my prejudices.
We left Lion’s Den next morning at seven o’clock. The donkeys set such a cracking pace that we covered the nine kilometres to Rossville before breakfast. From Mick’s description, I easily recognised the track leading to their house. It was so pretty I decided to call in. We turned along the narrow stony driveway shaded by rainforest trees until emerging at a small clearing. Here a roughly built, very old looking timber house seemed to need all its energy to keep the rainforest from encroaching on the surrounding little patch of lawn dotted with children’s playthings.
Sitting atop four rickety-looking steps to the back door was Mick, rolling a cigarette. He had the look of someone who had survived extreme trauma, his grey hair and lined face matching the vulnerable-looking house, yet with the enduring strength to survive against great odds. He greeted me with such a twinkling smile that social niceties seemed superfluous.
I simply asked, “Where can I tether them?”
“Anywhere you like,” Mick answered, waving his arm to indicate his 5-acre domain of thick rainforest. “But the grass could do with mowing so what about just here?”
I tied Grace to the closest tree and Mick wandered over to Charley who had already started munching on the grass. He picked up the short lead for connecting to Grace’s saddle and walked Charley to another tree where he uncoiled the long lead rope from her saddle, clipped it on and expertly twisted the rope into a slipknot to tether her.
“Want a cuppa tea?”
I hesitated, not because I was not sure about the tea; I definitely was keen on that. The question was if I’d be here long enough to justify the heavy job of lifting the donkeys’ packs on and off. When I took a break, I liked to give the donkeys a rest too, and offloaded their packs for stops of more than half an hour. Later in the trek, when the going got a lot harder, sometimes I was too tired to do it even for one-hour lunch stops. Although I felt guilty about it, I hoped the donkeys understood that getting the packs on and off without upsetting the balance of the saddle was the hardest single job of my day.
I had been warned that a donkeys’ shape makes it very hard to keep a load stable for long periods. Part of the solution was to take care that the saddle was exactly centred on the donkeys’ bodies before finally tightening all the girths and straps. But the most important thing was making sure the weight of each pair of packs was exactly balanced. This was so critical that I carried a spring balance to check the weights before doing up the packs and loading them on the donkeys. I’d learned also to make sure that once loaded, the balance of the packs did not change because of reduction in weight by consumables. I carried my food for the day and thermos flask in a small backpack. On top of Grace’s saddle was my day’s drinking water in a plastic water bag with a spout (like the ones that cyclists use). Ensuring the saddles remained centred worked so well that I never needed to adjust the donkeys’ loads; even once when Grace slipped and fell coming up a muddy slope, her load still didn’t move. But it did mean loading the donkeys was a demanding task on my own: I had to hook the first 20-kilo pack onto the saddle and hold it in place while dashing around the other side to hook on the second 20-kilo pack before the saddle slipped sideways.
Mick must have read my mind. “Since I’m here to help with the packs, do y’want to give the donkeys a break too?”
We unloaded the saddle bags, put them together in the shade of a third tree and I followed Mick inside where he put the kettle on and I fished breakfast out of my back pack.
Twee had taken the