Here’s a fact. To fly any helicopter, and especially a Robinson R-22, you need both hands. And yet Fox could whizz along at 100 mph, six feet up, while rolling a cigarette. He could even light it — not easy as the doors had been removed and it was a bit draughty in there.
It was somewhere between awe-inspiring and terrifying before we saw any cows. But afterwards, all hell broke loose. Fox engaged what can only be described as ‘plummet mode’ and we simply fell out of the sky to a height of three inches.
In the process, the dashboard had lit itself up like Regent Street on Christmas Eve. Warning buzzers were drowning out the rotors and a massive red light in front of me warned ‘low rpm’.
Whoa. Now we were going backwards and wait, what’s this? A spin turn in reverse. New lights were coming on. New buzzers were joining in.
We were working in tandem with another helicopter and two trail bikes. Well, ‘tandem’ is probably the wrong word because there didn’t appear to be any coordination at all.
It was surprising, therefore, to note that after a minute or so, a giant herd of maybe a thousand cows was heading at full speed for the pens. Whenever the stampeding mass passed close to more cows, they’d join in, and if they didn’t, we’d simply dart down to encourage them a bit.
One cow, though, was not going to play. He’d found a Michelin three-rosette piece of grass and he wasn’t going to budge. He held his ground until the very moment when our helicopter’s skids landed on his back… and began to push.
As soon as he did the decent thing, we had reversed into the ionosphere in a lurid spiralling move that very nearly resulted in a breakfastular explosion.
To take my mind off it, I engaged the intercom button and told Fox that the Robinson has a poor reputation for safety in Britain. He mumbled something about not losing too many each year and turned off the engine.
We were now in ‘super plummet mode’ and I was scared like I’ve never known scared before. The ground was coming at us like we’d pressed the hyperspace button and then we hit, the rear tips of the skids first and then the front.
We slithered along the ground for a while, by which time Fox had the Porsche engine restarted. And we took off. ‘No worries,’ he said.
Apart from the mess in my pants, I guess he was right.
Now I have a deep-seated fondness for helicopters, and it was patently obvious that the heli-musterers knew exactly what they were doing. The camel musterers of Alice Springs, on the other hand, did not.
Camel is now a fairly regular main course in some of the more fun-filled Aussie eateries, but you can’t just wander round the bush shooting them.
Here’s why. There are more camels in Australia than there are in the Middle East and a booming export trade is the result. There are a few quid to be made but everyone in the business is hoping one day to catch a fast one. In Saudi Arabia, top racing camels fetch up to $8 million.
Primed, we arrived at a 10,000 square-kilometre farm out towards Ayers Rock where our hosts turned out to be a bunch of men who, at the age of seven, had walked into a hospital and had their brains amputated.
They’d invited us down for the hunt, saying we could stay at the Million Stars Motel, which turned out to be a patch of grass by their chow house. Crawling into my sleeping bag was like doing a lucky dip where the first prize was life. Just what was in there? A snake? A funnel-web spider?
It was a poor night’s sleep for several reasons, chief among which was the enormous thunderstorm which passed by at 2.00 a.m. Then there was the ever-present threat of creepy-crawlies treating my nose as a light snack. And every rustle in the bushes was a large and fierce animal that scientists had believed, until that night, was extinct.
I spent most of the time shining my torch into the void until at 5.00 a.m. we were up, eating beans and clambering aboard a wide variety of seriously knackered old Toyota off-roaders. One towed a trailer full of spare wheels. ‘On a bad day, we can use maybe 40 tyres,’ said Gun, Denmark’s only camel-catcher.
‘We have Michael Palin coming here next month,’ he added. ‘Do you think he’d mind if we picked him up from the airport dressed as Gumby?’
Probably.
And off we went in search of camels who, it is said, have the intelligence of a nine-year-old child. Like hunting in Britain, therefore, the prey is brighter than the pursuer.
A lot brighter, because at 2.00 p.m. we’d seen diddly squat; no tracks, no shit, nothing. Motorcycle outriders had been to the top of every hill for a better view and each time they’d come back to say we were at the epicentre of a completely camel-free zone.
Except once. After half an hour of waiting, one outrider hadn’t come back and we were concerned. His Australian colleagues didn’t care less, though. ‘What if he’s injured?’ I asked.
‘He’ll crawl home,’ came the reply.
‘But what if he’s dead?’ I went on.
‘Well then it doesn’t matter.’
The conversation dried up because, 200 yards in front, Mr and Mrs Camel had wandered out of the bush with their three children, Janet, Wayne and Paul. And the chase was on.
I made the mistake of leaping into the back of the lead vehicle, a Toyota pickup truck which took off into the scrub at, oh, about 80 or so.
Wherever the camels went, we had to follow and this was a big problem for little old me in the back. I had to stand up, holding on to the rollover bar, which, under the tropical sun, had become hot enough to fry an egg. Within twenty seconds my hands had become fountains. There was blood everywhere.
Then there was the ride, which was bad enough for the first mile when all four tyres were intact, but over the next six miles each one burst. To absorb the bumps, I had to keep my knees bent, which is fine for a few seconds in a stationary room, but in the back of a bucking off-roader which had no tyres, for two hours, it was intolerable.
Worse, though, were the trees. Regularly, our driver headed under a bough which, if I’d been looking the other way, would have taken my head clean off. This was abject misery.
When we finally caught up with the camel, Gun leaped off the Toyota, attached himself to its neck, and wrestled it to the ground. It was barbaric and when I asked why they don’t just use tranquilliser darts, I was told ‘Where’s the fun in that?’
And all we had to show when the chase was over was a manky little bull worth about three quid and half-a- dozen shagged Toyotas.
Which kind of answered my original question. What good is a car in outback Australia? Well for catching camels, it’s vital. And for doing bits and bobs round the ranch, it’s essential.
But as a means of transport, as a device for getting from A to B, it’s no good at all. I was going to say that outback Australia is the only part of the civilised world where the car doesn’t work. Distance defeats it. But I’ve just thought of something. Outback Australia isn’t civilised.
Texas
The plane began its descent into Houston’s international airport and I peered out of the window for my first- ever look at the Lone Star State — Texas. Land of the Free. Home of the Brave.
Oh deary me, I thought, I’m on the wrong jet. The pilot’s gone mad. We’ve been flying around in circles for eleven hours. That’s not Texas. That’s Lincolnshire.
For as far as the eye could see — and from 15,000 feet on a crystal-clear day, that’s a very long way indeed — it was flat, unrelenting and dull beyond even the ken of a party political broadcast speech-writer.
In the next two weeks, I would crisscross what is America’s second-largest state looking for some geological eccentricity, but apart from a miserable little canyon up near Lubbock, there was nothing.
I’m told it’s a bit deserty over by El Paso in the west but elsewhere it’s a series of completely flat fields broken only, and very occasionally, by the odd corn thingy.
The towns, too, are unremarkable. God only knows what Tony Christie was thinking about when he immortalised the hateful sprawl that is Amarillo. There aren’t even any decent titty bars.
