G'Day, G'Day

When I was a kid, I dove into the deep end of a swimming pool before my very first swim lesson. When the lifeguard pulled me out I was totally naive to the severity of what I had just done. Sputtering and happy, I asked my mom if I was swimming.

“Did you see?!”

Sometimes, I feel as if my backpacking trip was of a similar vein. When you tell a stranger at a bar: “I backpacked Australia alone for nine months when I was 18,” it all sounds very impressive (or a little like a pregnancy cover-up). But to the people who knew me as a backpacker, I looked a little like I did when I was drowning toddler: too young to know better.

Drop Bears & Hoop Snakes was born out of four years of silence. I’ve been back in Canada four years, and not once have I sat down to seriously write about my experiences.

The shark accident, the cow accident, as well as that time I landed in Alice Springs without a water bottle, were all embarrassing details. A diploma and a stint at university was enough time for me to put some distance between where I am now, and that time I was flailing chum. If I told those stories four years ago, I might not have been so honest.

“Did you see?!”

I didn’t want to brag too much, either.

The truth is that travelling isn’t always romantic. Buying a plane ticket doesn’t guarantee that you’ll pick the right major when you start university. But if you remain humble and willing to share, and most importantly, willing to laugh at yourself, you’ll gain the single most important valuable key to everything in the universe, ever:

PERSPECTIVE.

That, I can promise you.

Oh, and if you buy me enough drinks at a bar, there’s a chance you might also hear about my tour of Europe... while I was in Australia…

No promises on that one, though.

Thank you Dear Readers, for all the love and support.

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CARA GOODWIN

Cara enjoys long romantic walks down the makeup aisle, and what hasn't killed her has made her chilopodophobic. Once she was a backpacker, but now she prefers her morning shower to be cockroach-free. An aspiring novelist and comedian, she can often be found making bad puns on social media. 

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Cow Shit & Curdled Milk

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On February 17th, 2011, I updated my Facebook status to: “F-YEAH I GOT A JOB MILKING COWS!”

I didn't bother to explain how or why I got a job milking cows, so no one knew if I was being facetious or not. Then I posted some pictures of myself with no makeup and wearing flannel, and everyone seemed to accept that I was, actually, milking cows. 

The farm was located in Nullawarre, Victoria, right near the Bass Strait. Every morning I would wake up in freezing temperatures to fetch the herd, start the dairy, and fondle the tits of roughly two hundred cows. I told my friends back home some story about honest work and self-realization, but to be honest, I was still a lost soul. Maybe it was the flannel, maybe it was the cow tits—I somehow felt more confused than when I started out.

I got the job because the man I worked for thought that all Canadian girls must be the good, strong type. (I weighed a little over a hundred pounds when I started out.) He also hired me because I had experience riding motorbikes—in fact, I had been riding since I was six years old.

So it came as a shock to everyone, including myself, when I ended up in a motorbike crash while I was on the farm. A bunch of cows escaped during their pregnancy tests one day, and I hopped on a motorbike that didn't have brakes. When faced with a choice between hitting the cow or the fence post, I chose the fence post. In those final moments I figured my headstone would read something like, “Loved animals, right to the very end.”

I don’t remember how I broke my wrist in the accident, but I knew it was broken the moment I tried to pull the bike out of the barbed wire. I remember yelling to the heavens: “I've been here six months, and now it’s ruined! I don't even know who I am yet.”

But I did manage to walk back to the farm with a piece of barbed wire imbedded in my thigh, a broken wrist, and all cows accounted for. The same week, I also survived a case of salmonella. 

I may have felt stupid at the time, but if I discovered one thing about myself while in Australia, it’s that I'm capable of surviving more bullshit than I once thought possible.

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CARA GOODWIN

Cara enjoys long romantic walks down the makeup aisle, and what hasn't killed her has made her chilopodophobic. Once she was a backpacker, but now she prefers her morning shower to be cockroach-free. An aspiring novelist and comedian, she can often be found making bad puns on social media. 

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Plenty of Chum

There are those phone calls that parents dread, and I have to admit, I made one of them while travelling. I’m convinced that, “Dad, Mom, I swam with sharks!” was the phone call that turned my parents grey. 

At least I did my mom and dad the favour of waiting until after I re-surfaced to tell them about the ordeal. I am a klutz by nature, someone you can’t take into a china shop. Someone you shouldn't drop into a pool of sharks.

As if the metaphorical sharks of the backpacking world weren't scary enough, the real ones swimming off Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia can grow up to 10 feet in length.

“But Mom! They weren't going to eat me! They were reef sharks!”

To them, it didn't matter. Their baby girl swam with sharks.

I had never been scuba diving before the moment I swam with sharks. This was my first lesson, and sharks weren't on the syllabus. So naturally, after 30 minutes of getting comfortable breathing underwater, I still wasn't ready to see my first shark. But the scuba instructor put her hand to her forehead, and there it was. My first reef shark.

In awe, I held my breath. And… as the law of physics in scuba diving goes, without any air in my lungs, I sank. I sank low enough to cut my finger on a piece of fossilized coral reef.

In moments when I feel that my ego is too big, I remind myself of the time I held my breath when I saw a shark under water. Nothing brings a person back to Earth like a gentle reminder of that time she made herself flailing chum.

This story was left out of my phone call home.

“I mean it wasn’t that scary, they just kind of swam around. Completely ignored us.”

Good thing, considering how fast I tried to swim away from my own blood.

That being said, I was in good hands with scuba instructor, as well as my travel buddy.

Having experienced enough adrenaline for a lifetime, we hopped a tour bus from Ningaloo to the city of Perth, and spent the next few days enjoying the wildlife in Western Australia. We even picked up a few dance moves along the way:

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CARA GOODWIN

Cara enjoys long romantic walks down the makeup aisle, and what hasn't killed her has made her chilopodophobic. Once she was a backpacker, but now she prefers her morning shower to be cockroach-free. An aspiring novelist and comedian, she can often be found making bad puns on social media. 

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On Sunstroke & Common Sense

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I was in Australia four months with no job.

There was a restaurant in Brisbane where I was called for an interview, but when I got there, the restaurant address appeared to be non-existent. Or maybe I was never meant to work in Queensland, because a week later I flipped on the news and saw a waterfront patio floating down the Brisbane river.

Terrified of ending up like that patio, I left Queensland in search of the driest place in Australia. I chose Alice Springs (a misnomer if I ever heard one) and landed there with a single mission: to hike the perimeter of Uluru. 

If the floods weren't a sign of biblical proportions, the oppressive heat and flies that swarmed the airport in Alice Springs should have sent my butt back to Canada, back to Yellowknife, back over the Bering Strait (Arctic child that I am). 

But it wasn’t until the next day, when I left the city in search of Uluru that I experienced real Australian heat. If you must know, it feels like someone holding a hair dryer in your face, and you can’t turn away.

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For three days I slank my way through the desert, out of my swag bag every morning, and over rocks and cliffs. I squatted over poisonous spiders to pee. I slept under the stars with deadly snakes. I lathered on my SPF 15 sunscreen every half hour (I’m allergic to SPF 30). I drank out of a melted Evian water bottle purchased at the airport. I also drank copious amounts of warm beer and sang Waltzing Matilda.

One girl I was hiking with swallowed a fly and didn't know it. At least, she didn't know it until the fly buzzed out of her sun-stroked vomit.

I didn’t “find” myself in the outback, but I discovered the real importance of Uluru. That giant rock in the middle of the desert? It’s a temple, a life-source, a refuge from direct sunlight (need I say more)? I learned a hint of what Aboriginal peoples in Australia already know:

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Sunscreen and deadly adventures are for bored, melatonin-deficient tourists. So find yourself a cave and a community and a water source. Eat a witchetty grub or two. Maybe you will survive. Maybe you will learn how to survive long enough to participate in a culture-specific self-actualization ritual.

Alas, it was two years until I was able to use a hairdryer again.

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CARA GOODWIN

Cara enjoys long romantic walks down the makeup aisle, and what hasn't killed her has made her chilopodophobic. Once she was a backpacker, but now she prefers her morning shower to be cockroach-free. An aspiring novelist and comedian, she can often be found making bad puns on social media. 

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The Miss-Adventurer: An Introduction

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On my 18th birthday, I made my first two decisions as a legal adult:

1. I turned down my university acceptance, and
2. I applied for an Australian visa.

The most supportive member of my family offered me counselling, and when that didn't dissuade me, a self-defence course. Unfortunately for my parents, there weren't many positive news stories about solo female backpackers to convince them that I would be all right.

And it turns out that they had every right to worry.

I remember waiting for the bus that would take me to my hostel in Alice Springs: I was in the middle of the Australian desert with the most recent copy of The Lonely Planet guide to Australia, but I didn't bring a bottle of water. To say that I was unprepared is an understatement.  

I romanticized that I was going to be a mysterious foreign waitress in Australia who would make a few lifelong pen pals, and get some necessary (and I mean necessary) enlightenment before returning to Canada and starting a degree. But jobs are hard to come by when half of Australia is underwater, and the other half is on fire.

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The floods that devastated the state of Queensland in 2010 dictated that I work on a dairy farm, pulling tits to afford my stay. As it turns out, farm life is hardly romantic when you’re combing cow shit out of your hair before bed.

But that’s not to say that my nine-month stint in Australia was uneventful. Far from it. Whether it was food safety, encounters with poisonous critters, tractor driving, or swimming with sharks—I learned everything the hard way.

So if you’re wondering how a young Canadian woman with no life skills, an allergy to sunscreen, and no water bottle made it out of the Australian desert alive—stay tuned.

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CARA GOODWIN

Cara enjoys long romantic walks down the makeup aisle, and what hasn't killed her has made her chilopodophobic. Once she was a backpacker, but now she prefers her morning shower to be cockroach-free. An aspiring novelist and comedian, she can often be found making bad puns on social media. 

Twitter | Instagram | Flickr