The Sea of Green

Last weekend, Oki, Chris, Monty the Dog, and I went into the countryside just for a change of scene. We drove to Parkes, which is about two hundred miles (300 kilometres) south-west of Sydney. We had two main purposes in mind:

1) To test Oki's new mobile home, complete with kitchen, dining room, bedroom, shower and loo.
2) To check out a mysterious light near Parkes, in an area where there is no civilisation and no lights!!

There has been some good rain recently in many parts of New South Wales, after over a decade of devastating drought. Many farmers have gone bankrupt, families have broken up, crime and violence have increased in the usually peaceful countryside, and many farmers have committed suicide. It has been the worst drought in a century. Anyway, the rain had fallen in the south-west, and we sailed through a beautiful Sea of Green. It was so green, it was like the English countryside. It was so beautiful after all the years of the brown, lifeless, crispy-crackly that I couldn't take my eyes off it. After oxygen, water and food, I think the next most important essential of life is to be able to see the colour green, and we had been starved of it until our trip to Parkes.

We used the Lady Robot Navigator to guide us to our campsite, and she got hopelessly lost. Every time she should have gone right, she insisted on going left, and really led us up the garden path. Usually Navmen and Navwomen are fantastic, but Chris has a naughty one in his car, and she sometimes goes beserk. We finally reached our campsite for the night after totally disobeying our Lady Robot's commands, and we didn't trust her again, until we left the town the next day.

Chris and I hired a cabin for the night, while Oki plugged his camper into the power point at his camping bay, and got his fridge and hot water going. His vehicle is a Toyota Hilux four-wheel-drive, with a very comfortable little house attached to the chassis. It has a double bed, a single bed, a four-seater dining table with a nice view out the back window, a loo and shower, hotplates, sink and plenty of cupboards. Oki is just about to install a television and DVD player, and then he will be ready for his three or four circumnavigations of Australia, which he plans to do once he is retired at the end of this year. Monty slept with Oki for the night, and once we had seen that everything in the mobile home worked for the night, that was the end of Mission #1.

The next day, we totally ignored the Lady Robot Navigator, who still couldn't work out where the hell she was, and drove north-east to find the location of the mysterious light. If you look on "Google Earth", the towns of Parkes, Forbes, Orange and Bathurst are lit up on the night-time map of the area. All uninhabited places are in pitch blackness. Astronomers are interested in these "light maps" because they help them find good, dark places for setting up their telescopes, so they can get optimum viewing conditions. On "Google Earth", you can see the lights of Parkes, but then just to the north-east, there is an enormous light that looks as big as a city. It is in the middle of nowhere. Very strange. Our mission was to find the cause of this light that shouldn't have been there. We drove into the area, and as expected, there was nothing there. No houses, no electricity of any sort, no sports grounds, no industrial estates ... only trees and a lake. Just as we were about to go, a local farmer turned up. We asked him about the area, and told him why we had come. He said that we were right. There was nothing there that would make any light. We talked for a while and then he said that about seven years ago, there had been some terrible bushfires in the area. They had swept through the whole place, burning the trees on the hills and in the valleys. The "light maps" are averaged over a period of time, to give as accurate a picture as possible, and it just so happened that the bushfires created such an intense amount of light that they were recorded on the maps of the area. Mystery solved.

With second mission accomplished, we headed for home, back through the beautiful Sea of Green. The farmer had told us that the countryside looked green, but that it was only surface-deep, and that if they didn't get a lot more rain, several times over, the green would turn back to crispy brown very soon.

And that was what we did last weekend.