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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Saturday 18 March 2006 (Day View) – I camp at Stradbroke.

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18.03.2006 – Saturday 18 March – Stradbroke

6:30am

• Deciding to try “camping” at Stradbroke with $30 and no camping gear or permit seemed like a great idea. Getting up at six thirty didn’t seem so good. However, even heroes must get up sometime, so I awake, eat a cup of yoghurt, and dump my pack in Maz’s car, which arrives complete with Maz and Clint, just on seven. We drive and park near the ferry, and manage to get student return tickets to Stradbroke for $12 each. A short catamaran ride later and we’re there, where we immediately waste a good portion of our remaining money on drinks. I somehow manage to end up with a $10 note and some small change, which doesn’t add up to my original $30 no matter how one looks at it, but such is life. We then manage to get student return tickets to Point Lookout for $5 each.
  Once at Point Lookout, we walk around the rocks, where Maz takes some photos, and then head to Deadman’s beach where we swim extremely hard for several hundred miles, just to remain inline with the blue umbrella on the shore. The waves are fun—I haven’t been to the ocean in a while now—but not fantastic, and the current is very strong. Just as we near exhaustion, the blue umbrella packs up and leaves, removing our vital landmark, so we clamber back to shore and collapse around our packs. It is here that the first of my budget decisions pays off badly. With ten dollars cash on me, and less than nothing in the bank, my pack splits apart. Fortunately, I invested a whole four and a half dollars buying some cord, which I can wrap around my pack several times and tie, and which will hopefully hold it together long enough for me to live to regret going camping with no food, no money, and no camping equipment.
  We depart Deadman’s beach and walk for an awfully long time down Flinder’s beach, looking for the mythical camping-site-number-three sign. Apparently Maz’s parents are camped somewhere in the campsite, and not bringing food, as clever as it seemed at the time, means we’re rather hungry and Maz is keen to find something to eat. After walking from campsite three right through to campsite five, we conclude that they’re probably at the Casino back in Brisbane, having a good chuckle about it all. We find a nice secluded spot behind a revegetation sign instructing no one to go there, where I pull out some of the pointy revegetation that was unthoughtfully revegetating right where I wanted to lie. It is here that Maz discovers that his feet and legs are rather sunburnt. I consider offering to chop them off, which would solve his sunburn problem and allow us to cook and eat them, but and have a sleep for an hour or so instead.
  Clint and I wake up to find that Maz has gone, presumably stolen to be sold as a slave. Unfortunately, he has also taken his legs, leaving us along and hungry. I arrange for Bronwen, who is also on the island, to come down and meet us—perhaps we can eat her, if all else fails—and Clint and I go and do manly things in the sand, like jumping and digging little holes. Proving that Allah cares for those who are thirsty, Maz arrives a short while later with his mother and a cold can of Pasito. She offers to cook us dinner, should we survive until dinnertime, which is greatly appreciated, as I had already eaten my single plain bread bun—left over from the BITS BBQ—for lunch, and I did not want to eat Bronwen, as I would miss her. We are also not sure if we will be able to light a fire without giving away our location, so cooking her could have been difficult.
  Bronwen arrives shortly after we have drunk our drinks and have begun illegally modifying the cans to turn them into racing cans, and then bombing them with skilled mortar-sand-fire. She is very impressed by our male bravado in can-bombing, but is unable to show it and mocks us instead. We consider killing her for this insult to our manhood, but realise we don’t have the money to attend the funeral, so opt for the far cheaper option of ignoring her and putting it down to her feminine misunderstanding of all things male, useful, or mechanical. This works, and she leaves none the wiser—somewhat like most of the university graduates I know.

Night

• Maz, Clint and I enjoy a lovely dinner with Maz’s parents, eat most of a packet of minties, watch some fireworks, and take photos of the moon. We then head back to our campsite, where I lay down my three-dollar piece of tarp, blow up my nine-dollar inflatable mattress, and go to sleep. Maz lies on his towel and complains about his feet—now red and swollen, and Clint sets up a military style bivouac at the appropriate angle for surveying the surrounding territories for enemies, although he has neither ammunition nor guns.

Late Night

• My inflatable mattress deflates, reinforcing the idea that cheap equipment behaves badly given half a chance.

Comment by Maz – Monday 20 March 2006, 12:13 PM

  As funny as that all sounds, It's basically the truth. Although I don't remember ever being asked if they could chop off my legs because if they had I might have taken them up on the offer.
  And I don't remember being made fun of by Bronwyn but as I was very interested in why my legs and feet were very red I might just not have been paying attention.