“Hey Kath” called Jed yesterday morning “Can you make banana bread?”
“Yeah, sure. As long as I’ve got the ingredients.”
Well it just so happened that Jed had overripe bananas, and flour. I put out a call through the party and came up with eggs, sugar, and milk. So last night I made banana bread and cooked it in the camp oven with hot coals from the campfire.
We have campfires every night here, and mostly cook on them.
There’s been a lot of freshly caught barramundi cooked over the coals, in many different ways. There’s a bit of a competition between some of the blokes to see who can cook the best meals. There’s been barra burritos, whole barra, barra with ceviche, even popcorn barra one night. Last night there were competing barra curries.
As a matter of fact the competition about food starts early. People discuss what they’ll do for dinner while having breakfast. These are my people. People who carry ingredients when travelling so they can do some real cooking on the campfire.
My meals are simple by comparison. As a vegetarian I have my own hotplate and generally just have marinated vegetables cooked straight over the coals. I’ve cooked cauliflower steak with tahini sauce, satay vegies, pizza, jalapeno poppers, a zucchini burger (with beetroot of course), corn ribs. I also made a smoky napolitana pasta sauce. Smoky because it was done on the coals.
We’re now halfway through the trip and people are getting concerned about running short of things, and what they’ve got too much of that they need to get rid of. The two young kids on the trip have put their entrepreneurial skills to good use and started a trading table.
That’s how I got the ingredients for the banana bread. I exchanged the raw ingredients for a slice of the final product.
The kids also exchanged some chocolate for a can of coke zero each so they were happy.
I’m now trying to work out what I can exchange for some tonic for my gin. I think it’s going to be cooking skills. Somebody mentioned tonight that they have a sticky date pudding, so that might be a three-way exchange. They can exchange some of their snacks for the tonic, then I can cook the sticky date for them and they can give me the tonic. Job done!
There’s also been a request for damper so we’ll see where that one goes. And some of the blokes have mentioned my tequila a couple of times. I don’t think I’ll need the whole bottle for margaritas so there’s another possibility. I might save that in case we need help with the car.
And now we’re having sunset drinks in Paradise.
We brought a couple of tables down to the water holes, everybody brought some snacks to share, and we’re having a social drink while watching the sunset. It’s magic.
And it is paradise.
Our tent is set up with a view of two lily filled billabongs in front, where we won’t even have to get out of bed to watch the sunrise tomorrow.
Behind us, a short walk over the rocks is a series of rockpools fed by small waterfalls where we can go swimming.
Where else would you want to be?
Though when 2 of the blokes walked into the campsite with a fresh water crocodile they’d caught by the pool we were swimming in earlier, I was questioning the paradise label just a little.
It’s been a fun, and relatively easy couple of days driving.
As we’re the first ones through this season, a lot of the time we’ve been opening up the track, when we can find it. We’ve lost it a couple of times and had to wait while Jed or Ronnie went looking for it. It was never too far away so all was good.
Well, except for that time when we were following a newer track and Ronnie pointed out the original track to one of the blokes. Up over the steep sandy bank of the creek we were driving through, then through the trees.
Challenge accepted. What was there to do but try to open it up again? Of course, he got stuck. Properly stuck. It was an exciting spectacle watching him go back and forth, digging deeper in the sand until he finally got in a position to winch himself to the top. Even then we weren’t sure he was going to make it. But he did, and cleared another track through the trees.
We were a little late getting in to camp that night.
