Day 445 | Walker Creek: it's quiet here, so far

77 km | zzOz total: 13,618 km

There was more to the story last night even after I’d dropped off to sleep.

I’d noticed a 4th group coming in just on dark camping directly opposite me at the waterhole, couldn’t help but notice, they built an enormous bonfire then abandoned it after a while.

Sleepytime for me.

Blam, Blam, Blam.

Was awakened at 10 pm when they returned, at night in a dozy state it’s hard to comprehend what’s going on but there were a fusillade of 10 or 12 shots from the direction of the road. Then a 4WD came and parked on the bridge, about 500m away, driving lights blaring, spotlights out.

Another round of 10 shots, sounding poppy across the water.

Some time elapsed, some more shots around 11pm.

The 4WD maintained a vigil on the bridge, I stayed in my tent thinking I’m rather prominent on the edge of the bank in my only slightly faded orange tent.

Then about 12 am they drove off, parked opposite and cranked up the bonfire. No more shots but it did take some time to get to sleep after that.

As I biked out this morning I counted 4 corpses of Euros along the road, may have been more considering they were shooting both directions but at least it seems they were solely aiming at the fluffy marsupials.

I saw about 400 living Euros on my ride today, mostly early on when they were really thick on the ground, 20 vigorously hopping off across one cleared area over there, 10 this side of the road, etc.

Blam Blam Blam was the name of NZ’s most interesting band, at least to me, in the early 1980s, I saw them a few times, the last up at the Windsor Castle on Parnell Road when they were poised to conquer the world, more musical and professional than other bands around at the time, a 3 piece with overtly political lyrics, the drummer was its singer.

(Later they did a The Jam to Style Council type of devolution, after the bass player lost a finger or two when the band van crashed on tour and the singer changed to a smoother style.)

So I’ve been humming away to my memories of “Don’t fight it Marsha”, a tuneful song about love, or was it just Cold War tensions and the more sing along “There is no Depression in New Zealand”. It was back in the last days of Piggy Muldoon, just after the major upheaval of the 1981 apartheid era Springbok tour and the start of Maori land rights protests with the occupation of Bastion Point in Auckland.

Some days you just get these obscure tunes from the memory bin in your head and the rhythm is perfect to your cadence.

“There is no Depression in New Zealand,

There are no sheep on our farms …”