Sorry for the Group Email

If you ever drive in Australia for a bit, sooner or later the following thought will pop into you head: “Man, kangaroos sure do love crossing the road.” Then, a few seconds later, that same voice will say, quietly: “But they’re not very good at it.”

Australian roadkill is everywhere. Every few kilometres – every few hundred metres and sometimes more frequently than that – you’ll come across the decaying remains of a substantial animal, often the large, blackening carcass of a kangaroo.

Australian trucks have huge, threatening-looking bullbars and massive chrome bumpers on the front, so if they hit a kangaroo they simply sweep it aside without needing to stop, in what I imagine is a fairly spectacular-looking event.

We hit a wallaby less than twenty minutes after we left Airlie Beach.

We were driving as usual when I caught a sudden flash of light brown from the corner of my right eye. Then, an almost impossibly short time later, there was a loud, horrible thump.

By the time the whole thing was over, my foot hadn’t even shifted on the accelerator. That’s how fast it happened.

I looked in the mirror and there, cart-wheeling limply and tragically to the other side of the road, was a small wallaby.

We pulled over, stunned. What exactly are you supposed to do when you hit something that big? Are you supposed to motor on, trucker-style, and let nature take its course, or do you go back and check that the thing you’ve hit is actually dead. And what do you do if it’s not? Running over a wallaby seemed bad enough without needing to return to it to stave its head with a camping shovel to put it out of its misery.

Mendy (who is almost always braver than me in these kinds of situations) went to have a look.

“It’s dead,” she announced.

I was appalled. Of all of Australia’s manic wildlife, wallabies are its most beautiful. They’re small, doe-like creatures that like nothing more than grazing quietly and (we found out at Featherdale wildlife park) having their ears scratched. And I had, directly and violently, accidentally and unavoidably, killed one.

 We returned to the car in silence. Miraculously, the Yaris survived without the slightest scratch, as had we. If we’d hit a kangaroo, which can reach the height of a small adult, things could have been rather different. Still, it was scant consolation.

We drove off in shocked silence, wincing every time we saw dead kangaroos for the rest of the day.

It turned out to be an extraordinarily long day. We left at seven thirty that morning and drove until half past four with a few short breaks. Around six hundred kilometres later we slid into Cairns. It might have made a good impression, but by that point I was in a kind of driving coma. To make matters worse, a cold descended around lunchtime, announcing its presence with a hacking cough and a nose suddenly and bewilderingly full of phlegm.

We had booked a hotel while we were driving, and we frantically unpacked and refuelled our car so we could bid it goodbye without needing to keep it another day. We patted our Yaris fondly on the bonnet as we left Hertz. I had collected it in Kings Cross, Sydney with fifteen kilometres on the clock: we left it baking in the afternoon Cairns sun over three thousand kilometres later. If you drove that far in Europe you could start in London and arrive in Morocco a few days later via France and Spain, with a few hundred kilometres left with which to find a hotel.

Our hostel was the kind of backpacker institution we hadn’t missed at all while we had been camping. The sign next door said “Dive! Dive! Dive!”, which I now understand was more of a warning than an inducement to rent scuba gear. The sign on the hostel itself promised “New Beds!”, which I presume was merely missing the suffix, “When we got them thirty years ago,” and our room had a vaguely sticky floor, a sagging mattress, and a line of ants running from the door to the fridge which quickly re-configured itself when we put our food down. The single saving grace was the loud but effective air conditioner.

The next day we had planned to go on another snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef, but when we woke up my head felt like it had been attacked by a sadist with a shovel and Mendy had caught my cold too. To compound matters, the sky was grey and the gloom was only sporadically broken by torrential downfalls. It didn’t look like the kind of day that called for six hours on a boat. We stayed in, guilty but warm.

Dave is in New Zealand, which makes a rainy afternoon in Cairns look like a baking desert. Also, killing wallabies and spending a day inside didn’t lend itself to great photographs, so the ones here are a sprinkling of those that didn’t make it into other posts. For more, visit the Flickr set.