| The bike ride that went horribly wrong. The story of Nimrod Kuti and Huw Vellacott reported missing in the Otways on Sunday 17th August. |
| The search and rescue operation that kicked off at first light Monday morning was called off soon after it had started because in the end we saved ourselves. The police helicopter headed back to Melbourne as we strolled into the car park where we were supposed to have met Paul and Trudy the day before. "Sorry we're late". Huw and I had been on a bike ride we thought would last no more than 2 hours. Two hours of fun, each dressed in nothing but a few tops and shorts, rushing mostly downhill starting on the Wild dog track towards the beach at Apollo bay. Instead, we chilled our bones for near on 20 hours after wading through the Barham river east branch for several hours before abandoning our bikes and nevertheless spending the night huddled together under a damp fern in complete darkness enjoying the early stages of hypothermia. The only light we saw for almost 12 hours emanated from glow worms that don't move much and so provide little entertainment, and from the blinding screen of the mobile phone, good for nothing other than periodically checking the time out there in the soggiest freaking god forsaken pit of moist I've ever had to endure a night in. The point of no return came soon after we started the ride. We had no reason to be feeling anything other than confident at that early point so, following the shonky trail map, we knew we had to go off trail and through the scrub for a while before meeting the river, whereupon we expected to make relatively swift progress to the meeting point with Paul and Trudy at the car park. However, after bum sliding down the better part of a 400 meter booby track we ended up in some kind of mountain cess pool swamp that was supposed to be our entrance to the river. We were already struggling with the bikes and I had starting casting mine off the high places to clear the way ahead of me. That was the first of the low points, and not the lowest, to come. Huw scouted and returned, and as it turned out, the river was not far away. Just over the nearest rise. Lifting my rather heavy late model free ride dual suspension, hydraulic braking, feature packed, go anywhere, good for nothing mountain bike over a muddy rise was nearly asking too much. But distance is the least of the obstacles in the Otways as we were discovering. Once on the river, our hearts lifted practically into song. Relatively clear skies, damn the river was cold but neither of us cared. A short skip and the occasional jump, hopefully more than a few shallows and banks to burn through on the bikes and we're out-a-here. That notion was dropped almost as quickly as our body temperatures. Not only was this river not generally shallow and pebbly, it was bank-less and covered in logjams every 100 meters or so. Logjams of the type that would make a beaver proud enough to stand for president. We're talking logs on logs on logs. Around every snaky repetitive corner of this twisted waterway, more logs than you'd find in log town Mississippi, if there were such a place. More logs that Echuca in a gold rush. Logs everywhere. But virtually all of them were neatly stacked from bank to bank, straight across our intended path. On a few occasions it seemed better to mount the riverbank and walk around the offending logjam, albeit through sword grass, blackberries and camouflaged false footings. Nothing was proving easy. After 50 or so of these stinking, never want to see them again, log jams we abandoned the bikes. Boohoo. Mope. Sniff. We considered it a pretty fair trade for a slightly greater hope of spending the night in dry clothes. We were loosing daylight faster than an alley in Kings Cross. We'd been in the river for nearly 3 hours of stone walking enclosed on each side by steep inclines of mountainous peaks that seem never to end. Progress was slow and we were not at all sure how much further the river exit was. We even thought we may have missed it entirely, leading us to believe we would be carrying on like this until we came to either the ocean, still some 10 kms away and hundreds of logjams at least, or a road, or a farm house with a dimly lit stable and several farmers daughters in attendance. No such luck. We ended up with a total of about ten minutes to find a dry patch on the bank before complete and utter darkness fell upon the face of the earth (was that too biblical?). We stacked extra fern leaves atop a bit of a natural enclosure at the base of a big fern and sat our tiny asses on a weenie little hard edged and none too level log with zero room to spare. As much as we would have preferred spooning for the night, the best we could manage in our modest but unencumbered little ramshackle shack was a very bent over, half seated, back to front variation of the side-to-side hug. Hormonal teenagers aside, human bodies cannot stand this excruciating position for more than a short while. We endured at a stretch, rotating our positions as few times as possible while our legs and toes dropped in and out of conscious recognition. Like Homer Simpson's heart restarting, "oh there it goes again". Standing up to take a piss was a feat of such epic proportions, that I considered warming myself, or both of us, with the comforting flows of urine, right where I was, without moving. What the heck it rained the whole night, and even before that we were already wet. But gentry prevailed and Huw had already shown it was possible so I was compelled to put it off no further. Or to put it off as far away as possible, depending on how you take my meaning. We rationed the 10 butter scotch lollies that we both hate, throughout the night. Bless that faithful sentry our friend Paul who apart from spending the cold night in the car park and together with the lovely Trudy orchestrated the planned rescue, jammed the lollies into my pocket on the afternoon before we started. We don't know what made him do it but even in their soggy and hard to unwrap state we handled them like gold. Paul later asked me if either of us had an epiphany. Aside from 'never to do this again', I would say my thinking throughout the night was dominated by concerned tedium. If Huw had an epiphany, he kept it to himself. Keeping warm was such a preoccupation that each moments passing was fully dedicated to this end. Looking back, I still have no further wisdom. No revelations have come to me. No new inspiration. Maybe I am dead? Maybe neither of us made it out of there and we have turned into ghosts wandering the face of the earth, only later to realise no one is listening when we speak. I think not, but someone should use that theme for a movie. By the wee wee hours at around 5:30 am, it was getting harder and harder to stop the violent shivering. Nevertheless, at first light, after a brief discussion about purely theoretical alternatives, we dipped our toes back into the logjam infested river that seemed less cold then our feet, for the final two hour wade to the car park. Little pink ribbons graced our path for the last stretch where the local hiking club had outlined the now friendly walking track. It's hard to describe how happy we felt at the sight of them. Soon thereafter we were eating Hanna's yummy hot porridge back at base camp in Apollo bay. The bumps, scratches, twisted ankles and stubbed toes were all finally making their presence felt in the process of thawing out. Such was our excellent adventure. |