I've always had a pretty good memory, one way or the other. It certainly comes in handy when I'm caught on a bus with nothing to do, or walking home from work with nothing to think about. I'm always able to recollect part of my travels, and can picture fairly closely what it looked like at the time - the buzzing neon of Akihabara, the creeping heat of Sydney in December, or whatever. It means I never get bored, as I can drift off and think about somewhere I've been - which to me is the very best thing about travelling, building up this huge memory bank of sights and sounds that I can call up when I need to.
With that in mind, the other day I suddenly found myself thinking about whales. Not the rainswept Geography fieldtrip to Carnarvon when I was at college - the large sea creatures I'd never seen until I was in Australia. I did try to see them before, but heavy weather torpedoed my attempt at Kaikoura in New Zealand - one of the most famous whale watching locations in the world. In the end, I managed to see truly wild Humpback whales in the far, far Northwest of Australia - near the remote town of Exmouth.
At Cape Vlamingh there's a lighthouse that looks out over a broad earthy bay housing the Harold Holt Communications Station, established by the US to track Soviet submarines in the Indian Ocean. At the end of a long day of snorkelling and sunbaking (as the Australians call it) we rolled up the hill to take in the sunset. Bus driver Steve produced a battered box of cheap wine and a stack of plastic cups, and we toasted another successful afternoon. I was idly gazing out to sea, when I saw something dark grey splash out of the water in the middle distance. Someone else saw it too, and we both said at the same time "Ooh! Was that a...?" seconds before a Humpback Whale vaulted out of the sea and thumped back in a soundless plume of foam.
Very soon, everyone was eagerly watching as the whales launched themselves spectacularly out of the ocean every half-minute or so. We were so far away that I could hold my thumb and forefinger an inch apart and they weren't obscured - but in many ways it was much better than point-blank whale-watching aboard those intrusive boats. Here nobody was hassling or pressurising them, they were leaping about in the late afternoon sun purely for the hell of it - and had no idea we were watching.
Steve turned to us and said something like "It's a pity they're so far away and we can't see them, eh?" whilst casually leaning against a large copper telescope. I pointed it out to him, and by his reaction I don't think he had even noticed it. So he rolled a dollar coin into the slot and enthusiastically twiddled the focus dial for a while, before swearing and standing upright again. "Bloody thing's broken! The one time someone needs to use it, and it doesn't bloody work!". He thumped it a couple of times, before noticing a brass plate screwed to the top, with a contact phone number etched on. "I'm bloody ringing that".
"G'day mate", he said "I'm standing here at Cape Vlamingh trying to look at these whales jumping out of the sea, and the telescope has swallowed about five bucks of my money". He paused for a moment. "Ah, right. So you're the bloke that fixes it, yeah? Are you in the lighthouse?" We all turned expectantly to look at the lighthouse. "You're in Broome?" [three days drive up the coast] "Bugger mate - the whales are all over the place down here. Can't you send a helicopter or anything? Hello? Hello?"
