Happy Easter!

Goodbye to all that, eh?

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

 

On our last morning in Darwin we walked down to the water and glared out at it with expressions of thwarted lust. 
            It was a lovely beach - long and blonde and sun-streaked.  The sand was white and it glittered.  The water was cerulean blue and it whispered and chuckled as it lapped upon the sand.

The joke was on us.  We absolutely could not go swimming.  Or even wading, if we were sensible.

Darwin's beaches are a triple threat:  The coastal waters here are home to the world's most venomous jellyfish, the world's most venomous sea snake and the saltwater crocodile. 

            Ye Gods.

            There's a reason that Wangi Falls (80 km from the city) is so popular on weekends.  You can get wet without being barbed, bitten or stung.

            Understandably, Darwin has a fantastic set of public swimming pools.

Right in the downtown there is a lovely wave-pool, so that Darwinians can get their surf on, and just outside of it, there is a wrought iron arcade that casts antic shadows so that those who aren't swimming can get their funny on.

We looked at the wave pool, longingly, but we hadn't brought our bathers, so we went to the other extreme and explored the tunnels that the Allied Forces dug into the bluffs during WW2 to protect their fuel supplies from Japanese Bombing Raids.  Mr Tabubil loved it.  Pipes and tunnels - an engineer's paradise.  It was terrifically cool after the heat of the coast - so I was happy as well.  Beatific in fact. We lingered.

We lingered until we had to say goodbye.  Thea and Sandor and Pippa and the Sproglet had to fly off to Fiji (it was on the way home, so what could they do?) and we had to fly back to Brisbane, to wait for our visas on an indefinite stay with Dr Tabubil.  Because she is a sweetie-pie that way.

Darwin

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

The next morning we drove back to Darwin.

            A Potted History:  The area of Port Darwin has been home to the Larrakia people for millennia.   The Europeans didn't arrive until 1839, and took another 30 years to think about stopping there to stay.  For the Larrakia people, that went about as well as you can imagine.  In 1870 Darwin gained some prominence as the site of the very first post of the Overland Telegraph - the great engineering achievement that connected Australia with the world.  The same year, workers sinking telegraph posts several hundred kilometers to the south struck gold - and the Pine Creek Gold Rush put Darwin onto the map, as an entry point for the North.

            Darwin has risen to national prominence twice in the twentieth century - It languished, a sleepy port town in the tropical heat until WW2, when it was a major point of national defense through the War of the Pacific.  In 1942 the Japanese bombed Darwin - dropping more bombs on the city than were dropped on Pearl Harbor (courtesy of the same fleet, in fact.) Darwin was bombed all the way through 1942 and 1943, until the Japanese were pushed back north up through Papua New Guinea.
            Darwin received another wallop - and its place in modern Australian mythology- when a completely unprepared city was flattened by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve, 1974.  In a single night, 70 percent of the city was destroyed - a whole city gone in a night.  1974 was before the days of cell and satellite phones so it took a day or so for the news to trickle out to the rest of Australia, but when it did, the result was the largest airlift in Australian History.  In a town of 43, 000 people, they flew out 30, 000 of them in the days between Christmas and the New Year.  There was - literally - nothing left for them to stay for.

            No water, no medicine, no homes, no clothes -

            Mum remembers it.  That year she was spending the New Year with friends in Adelaide.  She remembers flying into the Adelaide airport and seeing an aircraft hanger lined with tables piled high with donated clothing, and crowds of blank-faced people in t-shirts and rubber thongs (you wear 'em on your feet, people, not your bottoms.  Up North you call 'em flip flops and Hawaiianas) and ragged pajamas pawing through it all looking for something that would fit.

            The people that remained in Darwin - those that refused to go, and those that had nowhere else to go, lived in tent camps and on ships anchored in the harbor, and together they rebuilt the town.  It was a good time for them, considering: bank clerks and schoolteachers turned themselves into builders and construction suppliers, and launched the businesses that still control the industry there today.
            The city that was rebuilt after Tracy bears little resemblance to the sleepy town turned to splinters and sawdust back 1974. It's still a small town, hot and parched and spread out wide and panting under the sun -  but the population has quadrupled to almost 130 000 people.  They live in houses built up on breeze-blocks with concrete hurricane cores locked onto the foundations, or houses built small and bunker-like  out of concrete and veiled with bougainvillea and frangipani (that would be plumeria, for you benighted lot up in the northern hemisphere)and there is a 21st century downtown on the edge of the water - built sky-high with airy condominiums and business towers. The Darwinians who lived through Tracy look somewhat askance at downtown, and wonder what happened to the Post-Tracy building codes, and what will happen next time a blow like that comes through.

We arrived back in town in time for the Mindil Beach Evening Market.  A weekly art-and-craft-and-homemade jam sort of street show and street fair down on the beach.  The goods were mostly the usual floating international tat, but there was a good fire-dancer and acres of good food -  and  there was a sunset.

            Mr Tabubil and I scratched our heads.  It was an all-right sunset, but nothing spectacular.  No color, no fire, no great glowing balls of flame sinking into the sea -  nothing at all to write home about, in fact, but as the sun dropped behind the sea what must have been half a thousand people materialized in twos and tens and hundreds out of the dune grass to take pictures of it.
            We couldn't see the draw ourselves.  So we took pictures of them instead.

The Sunset in Question:

The Crowd:

The Crowd when it was really fierce:

Litchfield National Park

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

Litchfield National Park is 260 km from Katherine, going northeast back up toward the coast.
            Finding the park wasn't entirely difficult.  Sandor drove and Thea did the navigating. 

            "Drive straight for 236 km and turn right." she said.  And then she went to sleep.

            She didn't stay asleep, poor darling.  The handbook of our trusty van swore up and down that the thing could hit 130 km/hour on the straight.  But it had no cruise control.  Sandor desperately wanted to put the van through its paces on the long straight road, but a van weighed down by five adults, one baby, four metric tons of luggage, and a picnic hamper full of hamburger fixings accelerates like a  turtle in a particularly sucking mud.

            He'd mash his foot onto the accelerator, and the little engine would whine and wheeze a little in complaint, and slowly, ponderously, bucking a little as it crossed through the round numbers, the speedometer needle would drift up toward the red, and five or six kilometers later, when we were pushing 110 on the flat, we'd run into a road-block or a road-train, and he'd have to slam on the breaks and slow right back down again to zero until we were allowed to pass.

            By the time Sandor had turned right through the gates of Litchfield and found some swoopy curves to play with on a long descent down an escarpment, our very own grand-prix racing driver had 236 km of frustration under his accelerator pedal and he was ready to roar.

            Except that top-heavy camping vans tend to wobble when you play grand prix on hairpin bends.

            And the people in the back seats don't think very much of it.  Including and particularly the Sproglet.  The shearing songs had to come out again. 
           By the time we reached Litchfield National Park, we'd had about enough of driving places.  We wanted to stay in one place and go swimming. 
So we did.

But first we had to stop and gawp at the termite mounds.

There are thousands of them, adobe arcologies like standing stones, like soldiers in serried ranks standing at attention facing north, a million termites in each one.
            The Top End's 'magnetic' termite mounds are a mystery.  It's a  miracle of nature - that the termites know the orient direction for the best sun and wind and ways to brace against the monsoon rain - a phenomenon of a billion termites with compasses inside their heads.

            This story-book version, park signboards told us, has been lately and largely disproved. The truth is less a miracle of nature than direct Darwinian intervention.  Termites build every which way, and the mounds that aren't built to precisely the right specs don't make it tall enough to be noticed before they fall down and blow away.  It's the three little Pigs as a morality play - straw and sticks are east and west, and bricks built to north and south keep out all the huffing and puffing that the big bad wolves can throw.

            It's not half as mythic this way.  This way, romance doesn't throb in your veins at all.

And it was hot. Blisteringly hot. We had our photos taken with the termite mounds and we went to Wangi Falls instead, and ate our picnic lunch on a blanket on a lawn, with a pair of black cockatoos peeling the bark off of a tree above our heads. 

Wangi Falls was bright with sun and loud with shouts ringing off the rocks.  The falls are only 80 km from Darwin, and very very popular with locals who choose not to swim in salt-water-crocodile-infested oceans.  There was a path to the top of the falls, but the climb took an hour and had no view of the water below.
             "Sod that," we said.  It didn't appear hugely popular with anyone else either.

            The pool at the bottom of the fall has fish - if we'd brought swimming goggles and a snorkel to see them with. We hadn't, so we stood on a bridge over the little creek that ran out of the swimming hole and watched little fish quivering there, lined up in rows like the termite mounds, oriented parallel to the current, heads upstream.

            And then we went swimming. 

            There are freshwater crocodiles in the swimming hole, but the Parks Service is vigilant, and pitches out all but the baby ones that are as small as the fish in the pool and far too sensible to take a toothy chomp out of a toe.

            In the pool, the best sport was to swim up to the main waterfall - curving around sideways to avoid the current, and climb up the rocks as high as you dared go, then clinging crabwise to the wall, work your way into the waterfall itself until, just when the current tore you loose, throw yourself out into the pool and be spun and dragged half-way across before the current slacked. 

            Over and over again.

            Mr Tabubil came out of the water after an hour, and sat on the grass in the sun with the Sproglet.  The rest of us stayed in the pool all afternoon, until the sun started to drop behind the cliff and the air turned cool.  And the world was very good.

Nitmiluk

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

The morning after our night-time boat-ride, we had been promised a boat ride in the daylight in a place called Nitmiluk.  And that's all we knew about that.  Having done all of my schooling in other places, my Australian geography is rather spotty, and in all our driving we were busy being stunned by the geography happening outside the windows of the car and we never took the time to do half the reading in the guide-books that we ought to have done. 
            A necessary pause in the narrative: 

Take a moment and open up Google earth, or Google maps, set it to satellite view, and do a search for Katherine Gorge.  Then zoom in until you can see individual tree-dots and white-caps on the water on the Katherine River. I'll even cheat - there's a shortcut on this page: photo number eight.

            Do you see it? 
            Fissures in the landscape -  kilometers long, as if the great red back of Australia had taken a mighty continent-cracking blow and split open along its planes and faces.  The cracks snap out at right angles, regular, geometrical and rectangularly precise.  The damage is industrial, almost, at a planet-spanning scale - the fissures are kilometers long and a hundred meters deep.

            Imagine us, with no expectations beyond a ride on a pretty, silty-banked river in the daylight, approaching a bluff - a scrubbly, rubbly eucalyptus-and-mulga infested bluff, and stepping forward to see a wall of burnt red rock fall away from our feet,  down and down and almost out of sight, to a strip of limpid blue water.  A big water hidden in the desert.

In another twin-hulled swamp boat , we motored along the bottoms of those great cracks, through narrow passages between sheer red walls that opened into right-angled pools of electric blue water that turned its face up to an even bluer sky.  There was exhilaration,  an awareness of unreality like you walk through in dreams, with tall trees turned to matchsticks by the depth of the canyons, and twenty meters of blue water under our keel in passageways so narrow we could almost brush the walls with our fingers, and there was the knowledge of the mad and the miraculous. Nitmiluk was a place of mad, extravagant, spendthrift throwaway abundance, a slash of wild electric life  -technicolor manna in the desert.  In a dry country of want and hoarding - a bone-deep desiccated hoarding, of air and sand floors as hot as a scalding bath, and dry sun to parch skin from bones, there was this place only one long step away from sight, hidden between the red rock walls.

The Jawoyn call it Nitmiluk - Cicada place.  The place name was given by Nabilil, an important character of their dreamtime.  He was travelling across the landscape and when he came to the gorge he heard the cicada calling "Nit Nit Nit!"  And he stopped here for a time.  The waters of the Gorge come from Bolung, who lives in the second pool.  He is the creator and the destroyer -  the water as life, but also the floods and storms of the wet season.  Because of his capricious nature, Bolung is approached with caution.  There is no fishing in the second pool.  There is no drinking in the second pool, and pregnant women and initiates (all people on the cusp of great changes in life) may not swim in the Katherine Gorge in case that their own energies disturb him and make him rise.

            These little stories are simple, incomplete- Jawoyn kindergarten tales.  The Jawoyn, like the other Australian peoples, measure their learning in their own personal knowledge of the world.  History lessons and morality tales are bound up in their creation stories, and tied to features of the landscape and the seasons.   Babies are taught toddler stories suitable to their own range of understanding - as are white Australians and tourists.  As Jawoyn children grow up and move through stages of life and initiation, they graduate to deeper, richer, versions of the early stories, and learn versions of new ones about new places  relevant to for their age, their gender, their moiety, and their position within their people.

            A man I met at Uluru last Easter had been working there for a year as a ranger with the parks service - babying tourists on walking tours around the rock. He told stories like these about Uluru.  The Anangu people there reckoned that since he'd been there about a year, he was about equivalent to a toddler taking its first steps through the place, so they gave him kindergarten stories.  Being a gringo isn't the same as being an Anangu.  Anangu kids will learn more - upgrading, if you like - as they moved through life and passed through initiations.  His initiation, if he chose to pursue it, would be one of endurance - staying there long enough to indicate he cared enough to be worth their sharing.

            Theres' a modern-day significance to Katherine Gorge as well.  It's the place where the Jawoyn people won the first successful native title claim in Australia. In 1989.

            Embarassing, isn't it?  The title claim was launched in 1978 and spent nine years grinding its way through the courts and - something that the Jawoyn speak of with a sort of amazed bitterness - days walking through Nitmiluk beside white politicians and judges -

            All a white man needed  to claim a piece of Australia was a flock of sheep and a gun, and once he had it, the land was his, forever and a day.  The whites with the guns wrote about the Aboriginal people hanging around the place when they got there.  You could say that there was clearly precedent, in fact: they even wrote down some of the blackfella histories, but that sort of stuff was anecdata.  Between the years 1978 and 1989, the Jawoyn people were asked to demonstrate their up close and personal relations, going back 40 000 years, with every bush and boulder and patch of scrub in the place.

            But they won.  Nitmiluk is theirs now.  They promptly rented it back to the park service and, and managing it themselves, share the place with us. 

Nitmiluk has thirteen gorges in total, but we only sailed through five of them. In the wet season, the water runs so high and fast that the boats can't run on it, and in low season, the water drops so low that in the necks of the gorges natural weirs block the river.  Three times we had to disembark (or demount, possibly - they were very  little boats) and walk across the neck of the gorge to another boat floating on the other side.

            We went until we couldn't go any further - by boat or on foot, and stood on a high wall of tumbled rock and couldn’t credit that in the wet the water would flood higher than our heads and sail right over the wall with only a few rapids to mark the place.

On our way back up the gorge, we went swimming - which was another surprise for us.  Back at the opening of the second gorge,  on the downstream side of the gorge, where the river trickled down through a natural weir of sandstone and bottomed into a wide, shallow pool, we were told that our excursion was going to stop for a while so that anyone who wanted to swim could go in. 

            And we'd no idea.  We wished we'd read the brochure. Our bathers were back in the car at the Visitor's Center.

            And I had to go in.  I absolutely had to -  so I pulled off my shorts and went in in my shirt and underpants and it was the very best swim I'd had since we had left PNG nine years ago.  A beach is wonderful thing, but fresh water has a glory, and that day, it was like crystal -  cold and clear and sharp.  I curvetted.  And there were no crocodiles within half a kilometer, so I rode the current up and down until we had to come out and go away from that place.

There were no salties there, anyway.  The whole park was a water paradise - with people in canoes and bright plastic kayaks and picnicking on the rocks and hiking on the cliffs. The parks service clears out the salties at the end of every wet season, and salts the gorges with saltie traps - the bait is weighed with a tripwire that a freshie isn't heavy enough to spring.  The rangers check every morning - if the trip wire is sprung, they go crocodile hunting and no-one goes into the water until the saltwater crocodile comes out.

Back at the Visitors Center, we went swimming again, and the swim there was less than glorious.   At the Visitors Center, downstream of the gorges, the water was thick and green and dark.  The same sort of silty water we'd been puttering through last night with all those freshwater crocodiles.  And right above the little swimming jetty there was a colony of fruit bats in the trees doing what fruit bats do.  No-one wanted to come swimming with me, not even the indefatigable Sandor.  I was faintly custard-like myself, I confess.  I didn't want to swim alone in the dark water, so I waited for another lady to come padding down to the jetty and went in when she did.

            We swam with our heads above the water - the stuff was so thick we couldn't see our own limbs below the surface, and floating with yellow pollen besides.  We felt pale-fleshed and vulnerable, and we treaded water with our legs tucked up tight against our chests.

            "It's marvelous!"  We screamed, and waved enthusiastically, at Pippa and Thea and Sandor and Mr Tabubil and told them about all of the wonderful water that they were missing.  On shore, all were dour, so the two of us struck courageously out across the river toward the canoes pulled up on the other side, but we lost confidence five meters from the bank and we came back.  It wasn't that we didn't believe the harmless freshwater crocodile propaganda, exactly.  It was just that we weren't confident that they could sense us either in the murk, and didn't want to have to have to test their good behavior in a head-on collision.

So we came out.

Katherine: Freshwater Crocodiles

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy!

 

Sandor dedicated his holiday in the Northern Territory to eating his way through the flora and fauna of the Top End - prawns, crabs, sea-mussels, oysters, crocodiles, emus and buffalo, fried, roasted, par-boiled and served on a stick.   He even stooped to ringtail possum kebab.  (Roadkill style.)  I  never saw him defeated, even when faced with that most quintessentially Australian of gastronomic experiences:  the BBQ.  
            The Aussie BBQ is not an American BBQ - with its marinades and slow roasts and baked beans and breads - An Aussie BBQ is - well, it's a simple spread.
            There's your best cut of cheap beef, simple and stringy - the jaw-tearing sinews and tendons not tenderized by marinades or basting - but simply bashed into charcoaled submission over an open flame.  Ditto onions - thin and soggy and black.

            Wonderbread and margarine - or spongy, untoasted hot dog buns, if you're feeling swish.  Tomato Sauce (ketchup) and a big bowl of prefabricated Woolworths coleslaw, and if you're feeling really swanky, cubes of Tasty (TM) cheese and chunks of cocktail snags (sausages) for nibblies while the steaks are cooking.

            This menu has bested many good men and women, but it did not best Sandor.  He chomped his way through a rural Australian steak and declared it a wonderful, unmatched cultural experience.  And went back for seconds.

             In all fairness, Sandor had the right of it. That night we were eating our BBQ by torchlight on a sandbank on the shore of the Katherine River, drinking bush tea brewed from the leaves of the trees that brushed our tables, and in the company of five or six score of freshwater crocodiles, one of which had lumbered up onto the sandbank, hoping for a share of cow-meat.

            A frisson of exotic excitement (and a soupcon of bone-deep ancestral terror) is a seasoning that can't be beat.  Gnawing on a steak with the awareness of white teeth and pink gullet next to your ankles is a deeply moving culinary experience.

It had been a 300 kilometer drive from Kakadu to Katherine.  The road wound up from the floodplains of the National Park and headed into sandstone hills , our van chugging up the lips of escarpments above  great red valleys and swinging down the sides of crumpled red gorges.   We stopped in Pine Creek for lunch - where men had discovered gold while laying posts for the Overland Telegraph.  At the top of the plateau the road flattened out, and we came into Katherine.

            Katherine is not what one would call a lovely town. It looks as if once it was a thriving community, but now it is, more or less,only the gateway to the famous Katherine Gorges. There doesn't seem to be any industry here except the tourists coming through.

            We didn't fancy McDonalds, or  a BBQ in the backyard of our hotel.  Instead, Thea found us a night cruise with crocodiles. 

A history:  In 1879, a Mr Alfred Giles drove twelve thousand sheep  and twenty five hundred cattle from Port Agusta  at the tip of the Spencer gulf through the driest parts of the continent, all the way up to Katherine.  Most of them made it, too.  In one great sprint across a dry place  - ten days without sleep or water - he lost only 300 sheep.  It was a heroic endeavor by any standards of endurance, and it was meant to be the spearhead of a great northern wool industry.  Unfortunately, while the sheep, no-one followed him north. The trip was simply too daunting, and in Katherine in the 1880s, there was no reachable market for the wool. Within only 8 years, he had to sell up.

           He left behind four giant Indian Rain trees - one planted for each of his four children, and Katherine Township. 

            Our river cruise was at the bottom of a gorge on the edge of Alfred Giles' homestead- a dozen passengers in a tinnie.  (a tinnie is a small aluminium boat with an outboard motor mounted on the back.)  The river was narrow and swift, with dusty, silted banks. The silt marked the high-water line, and in a good season, that line can be very high indeed.  In 1998, heavy rains swelled the river so much that in a matter of hours, the entire town of Katherine, way up on the plateau, was under two meters of water.  When the waters flood like this, salt water crocodiles are washed down into freshwater territory and cause… incidents.  (Two-and-a-half meter saltwater crocodiles cruising the streets of Katherine are certainly what I'd call incidents.)  When the waters went down, we were told, Woolworths employees found two of them, making themselves very comfortable in the meat department of the town supermarket.

            Tonight there were crocodiles every where we looked - freshwater crocodiles.  Freshies are smaller, narrower, and more finely built than the saltwater behemoths - and they are, in theory,  scared stiff of humans. 
            Interesting fact:  Up on the Arhnhem land plateau where humans don't and never did go, the freshwater crocodiles have no fear of people.  Up there they will attack and threaten boats and treat a human as lunch.  Down here, 40 000 years of hunting have exerted selective pressure on the psychology of the crocodile. The freshies that stayed when they heard a noise and stuck up their head to look around - they got et.  By humans or salties, depending who was hungriest.   Today's Top End freshies won't go for you unless you step on them, or treat them like Disneyland robots and prod at them, hoping for a photograph. 

            This last bit of information, courtesy of our night river guide, was delivered in a very airy manner, and we gave each other long looks that said that, for choice, one still would not swim in narrow river with a freshwater crocodile hanging out on a branch every meter or two of river-way.   Or picnic on a riverbank alone at night.  So there.

            We puttered gently downstream, riding mostly with the current, sporadically fueled on spurts of reptilian adrenalin.  Our guide would spot a crocodile, approach the crocodile, and we'd see it skitter.  They truly didn't think much of us - one even indulged our terrible tourist appetites with an exhibition of the famous crocodile gallop - standing up on his hind legs and galloping across half a league of sand-flat into the water at 10 miles an hour.
            As we puttered downstream, it grew dark, and the crocodiles on the banks and branches blurred into the trunks and as the light faded, disappeared altogether.  Like Alice's Cheshire Cat with it's smile left till last, the crocodiles were dark smears on a dark night - and two ruby lamps, one in each eye, shining in the dark.

            We came ashore with torches.  Rough tables and chairs were waiting on the sandbank.  Our guides lit a campfire and offered us champagne. I stepped in a tin bucket in the dark.  Clang!  My torch went wide and I landed on one knee. Our guides set a table with bottles of wine - incongruously, a South Australian Chardonnay. From Adelaide, our town. And a crocodile came ashore and waddled right up to us, and he was large.

            "Who wants what?" Our guide called out.  "White or red?"

            "We really don't have an answer for you right now." Thea clutched the sproglet to her chest. She laughed, nervously. "There's  - um - there's a very big crocodile about two feet from my feet. And,  um - ?"

            "Is that so."  He said. He picked up the bucket I'd stepped in, and pulled out a steak. "He's been coming here at dinner time for about six years now, I reckon." He said.  He hefted the steak in his left hand, and the crocodile unhinged his jaw and exposed about a meter and a half of pink gullet. The guide flipped the steak into the crocodile's mouth.

            "He's a good boy."  He said fondly.

Cruising back upstream in the dark, we played at looking for crocodiles, shining our flashlights across the water and watching for eye-shine.  Crocodile eyes glow red, like coals, like rubies.  They sparkled in the water and on the banks, between tree-roots and under fallen logs.  Fish swam in circles in our torch beams and turtles came up to the surface, gulping at our light.  Their eyes glittered yellow. We whispered softly, and watched the night.

Shaken, Rattled and Rolled!

We have had a fun weekend, we have!

At 4:30 on Saturday morning, the whole city was woken up by quite a NICE little earthquake - it was only a 5.1, but it was also only 41 km away, and it rang us like a bell.

We felt two great bangs, as if our building had been hit with a huge sledgehammer, and a great roar with each one, and much vibration after each - like a struck bell vibrating until it dampens down.

I felt the first one in a dream and woke up to the after-shaking, and the second one hit while I was solidly awake and when it stopped Mr Tabubil and I lay still, waiting to see if there would be any more.  And it was some time before we went back to sleep.

So that was Saturday.

Today we went out to lunch with friends, and everyone was inspired to talk about earthquakes - we heard hair-raising stories about the 8.8 quake in 2010 - which is still big conversation here a year later. My friend Alba and her husband Sebastian live on the 10th floor of their building - they were having a party when it hit.  Sebastian told us "There were 50 people in our flat - so imagine 50 people's worth of wine glasses and wine bottles and water glasses and water bottles going smashing to the floor." 

The quake started small - and then grew, and the power went out, so Alba staggered to the kitchen for candles, and then it grew so big that Sebastian herded everyone into the point of the apartment where three door-frames and two structural walls met, and they sheltered there while the shaking and the roaring grew and picked them up and tossed them and threw them from wall to wall to wall.  Drifts of smashed glass were washing across the floor, back and forth, hissing on the tiles, and the earthquake was roaring, and outside, the dark was lit up by red and yellow explosions as power transformers blew up, and right in front of them, while they watched, a wall split open from floor to ceiling.

It was quite a night.

Another couple we know live on the third floor of a very small building and got down and outside during the quake, and afterwards, they climbed back upstairs to change their pajamas for real clothes, and packed backpacks full of water bottles and apples (which is what they had to share) and spent the night hiking across town to see if anyone needed help.  All the way through the city they had to step around sheets of smashed glass and fallen lumps of concrete the size of dining tables.

It's a damn good thing that that earthquake happened at night.  If it had happened during the day when people were out and on the streets - there would have been a terrible terrible mess.

At any event, we came home this evening feeling quite happy that the local tectonic plates had had their big stretch-out before we arrived.

And then tonight, at about half past seven, I stepped out of the kitchen into the living room where Mr Tabubil, who'd been sorting power cables for his electronic bits and pieces, was sitting upright on the sofa.
"Did you feel that?"
"Feel what?"
"Maybe it's dying down."
"Maybe. Is that -?"

The ceiling light was starting to swing and the floors were shaking - lowly, the way they often do, for we get many tremors here. They shudder,or they bang, and then they peter out, but this one started to build.  I looked out the window and the bamboo blinds on our bedroom balcony were swinging back and forth and then the BALCONY was swinging back and forth and the trees in the street were swaying and blowing and inside I could hear rattling in the kitchen as the plates and glasses danced in the cupboards. The whole solid world was turned to jeopardy - shaking and rattling and jumping; NOTHING was solid or stable or safe and Mr Tabubil looked at me and said "NOW." and picked me up by the shoulders and we danced across the shaking floor and landed in the doorway to our bedroom and it felt utterly, completely, helplessly inadequate.

It lasted a long time. We stood there, Mr Tabubil with his arms tight around my shoulders, until it stopped. 
And THEN I was frightened. There wasn't any time for it during - I had to worry about how I'd find shoes if glass began to smash, and how we'd get out during the shaking if it grew any worse -

So I had a little shake of my own and had to sit down for a minute while the adrenalin wore off!

The final verdict was a 7.1.  And THAT is quite a quake!  There has been very little damage, and only one reported death, an elderly woman from a heart attack.  Chileans build their buildings WELL.

There were some evacuations on the coast, but for precaution only.  The sea receded in places, but there were no tsunami warnings - and no tsunamis. 
But that's how it goes, you know?  If the ground shakes, you go uphill. 
And for some reason, many Chileans didn't learn that after the Asian Tsunami in in 2004- and they died here when they wouldn't go uphill on 2010.  Sebastian had a friend who was on the coast when it happened.  He ran for the hills, and he lived.  A man who'd stood next to him said "My car is down on the beach!" 
Sebastian's friend looked at him and said "You're crazy!  RUN!" 
But the man went for his car - and he died.

They all know now.  The ground shakes and they go uphill.