Chapter 10: Is this an omen?

I am in Broome, on the North West coast of Australia. The region is known as the Kimberly, which raises an interesting question: Why do so many ex-British colonies have regions called the Kimberly? Two others: South Africa and Canada. Anyway, Broome is incredibly remote: an outpost of youthful hipness, caught between desert and sea, and fed by a constant stream of backpackers. There is: a home-made ice-cream parlour; two – yes, two not one - tattoo and body piercing parlours, Yuen Wing’s general store, a hospital with four doctors working in it; several internet cafes with the latest equipment; a shell shop; a gym (which closes for lunch between 11am and 2pm); a historical museum, more fantastic restaurants than all of Johannesburg; a Japanese cemetery for pearl divers; a shop called McKinneys which purports to sell clothing but which rather deters prospective clients by siting, on the pavement outside the entrance to the shop, a battered one-armed female manikin modelling an extremely ugly brown shift; more shops selling expensive pearl jewellery than I can count; a post office; several very trendy hair salons; a bead shop; one big supermarket; and, most interestingly, Bob’s Shoes – No Frills. There is something appealing about Broome. A lot of the traditional architecture has been preserved, so the town is composed principally of low-slung bungalows with peaked tin roofs which extend beyond the walls to create broad and deep veranda’s running square around each building. The sun bakes the street, but there is shade everywhere.

Some 11,000 people live here, capitalising off Broome’s history as a pearl cultivation center and its current situation as the only decent watering hole on the long, hot, barren stretch from Exmouth (where the whale sharks swim) to Darwin. The first submarine cable linking Australia to the outside world was laid from here, hence the name Cable Beach for the gorgeous stretch of sand and water right outside my backpacking hostel. The weather right now in March is unseasonably hot and dry – the locals keep asking where “The Wet” has gone. I’m not complaining; the weather has kept the deadly Box Jellyfish, also known vividly as the Sea Wasp, away from these shores, so we can swim. But it is hot. To sleep at night I have to first cool the room with airconditioner – its only temperature setting could freeze a side of beef in 20 minutes so I can’t leave it on the whole night - and then put on the overhead fan to gently sweep my body. Lying in my dark room at night, I feel like a coral in the sea, fanned by the soft currents.

The night is special here; the air is soft and balmy. Outside my room I can hear frogs. They are bright green with huge spatulate sticky fingers, which they use to climb into the toilet bowls and showers where they frighten the English backpacking girls no end! I love it. At night the cooled earth breathes, and everything starts to smell edible and delicious. Riding my bike back from the gym I pass many frangipani trees, with their dark glossy green leaves and lustrous waxy cream-coloured flowers and a heady perfume. Later on a stretch of quite barren road, with only scrub on either side, I suddenly smell honey, and then later again an earthy toffee scent. Bugs are everywhere at night, but funnily they don’t bother me. I just narrow my eyes and shut my mouth tightly. Their carapaces clatter off my bike helmet. Things rustle in the bushes; nocturnal marsupials, I hope. Above my head I can see the Southern Cross and Orion’s Belt and the Seven Sisters or Pleiades. I am remembering weekends with my friends in South Africa at Mountain Sanctuary Park in the Magaliesburg, watching the stars.

The other night, for a treat, just before sunset, I went flying in a trike. What is a trike? Well, basically it’s just a winged motorised eggbeater: a tiny bucket suspended from paraglider wings with a scrawny propeller attached. My pilot is a peripatetic Englishman named Charles. He is totally barking mad. He is building a flush toilet in the middle of an open field beside his house because he thinks it will be “nice”. He confesses that he hopes this will be the attachment he needs to drive the wanderlust out of his soul. I think he has rats living in his hair, which stands straight up. Still, the flight was glorious. We flew over the Broome peninsula, the port, the boats in the bay and then 11 knots northward up Cable Beach until we reached a controversial detention center for illegal Indonesian fisherman and immigrants. Turning back, I could see manta rays, dolphins and turtles swimming in the water, which was the colour of Chinese jade. I could hear the shouts of the people playing in the waves as we flew over them. I’m totally hooked. An ex-girlfriend of Charles, got her solo pilot license for one of these microlights after just 8 hours of instruction, so I’m highly, highly tempted.

This morning I went walking on Cable Beach; the golden sand stretched to the far horizon in both directions, gently curving out to sea. The sand was too hot, so I walked at the intersect of land and water, just where the waves licked the lips of the beach. The wet sand was soft and cool between my toes. I soon found a lucent white shell, with swirls of caramel in its perfect curves. The shell had a satiny texture. It was so perfect that I wanted to eat it. Other shells soon joined my collection. Glossy and delicately patterned poisonous cone shells, purple cowries, scallops the colour of sunsets, squat tepee-like shells with threads of pink along running up to the tips, thin brown spirals like jousts, tiny alabaster fluted conches, razor clams whose edges really could cut a filet steak, clam shells the colour of the rainbow. They were all different, all beautiful, all perfect.

I collected these shells, remembering happy times with my mother when I was very young at the Blue Coral Sands hotel in Hawaii when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Every day we would get up very early, at first light, and step outside before the others woke to comb the beach for treasure left overnight. One day I found a huge Golden Cowry, perfect, which for many years was my most treasured possession, because I had found it; it was not bought, or harvested live, or found by someone else. I, Peter Michael Worthington, aged 7 (or 8) had found a Golden Cowry, one of the rarest cowry shells in the Hawaiian waters! So, I will send these shells which I have found and collected on Cable Beach, bubble wrapped, in the parcel post from Broome across the Indian Ocean to Johannesburg, where my little friend, 5-year old Melanie Moagi, lives. I will tell her to put them in water so that she too can see nature’s infinite beauty and play. I will also tell her to lift the seashells to her ear, to hear the voice of God whispering songs of mystery to anyone who cares to listen.

From one mystery of God to another: Lunching today at the Town Beach Café, eating the most delicious Thai Chicken Salad which man could ever conceive and drinking an apple, carrot and ginger juice, something astonishing happened. I was munching the salad, staring at the beach, dripping with sweat, and contemplating my future. Suddenly, I heard a rustle in the palm tree shading my table, and – BAM! – something slammed out of the tree onto my table, upsetting my cutlery, and then rolled quickly onto the pavement. It was an astonishingly beautiful lizard - its back was patterned with concentric circles of rust, gold and black – and its mouth was clamped fiercely around the neck of another lizard about half its size. The beauty, which I think is called a sand monitor, thrashed this smaller lizard from side to side like a terrier would deal with a rat, all the while keeping a beady eye on me lest I should lose interest in my Thai Chicken Salad and take a fancy to his meal of delicious gecko instead. Still, in brazen full view of me, he manoeuvred the smaller lizard around and then proceeded to slowly gulp it down head first, even as the smaller lizard continued to thrash and struggle. I could see the movement in the monitor’s throat and sides where the small lizard continued to fight even after he was fully ingested! I ask you: Is this an omen? Opinions welcome!