My world walk blog Australia 78 - Four different roadside encounters in one day

Four different roadside encounters in one day.

I'm still playing blog catch-up. Time is short so I'm sorry for any typos as I want to get walking soon! Please check other posts below!

June 10th I walked 31 glorious kilometres and though I prefer quality to quantity, smiles before miles I still get excited when I add up my total: 22,740kms since I left Dublin some 640 road days ago.

I'm just a month away from touching the Ocean at Nights Cliff which is near my friend Terry Clearys home in Darwin. July 10th I will finish off this amazing continent and at the same time I will honour Brian, my late brother who died while I was on the road. It would have been his sixtieth birthday. He died from an unexpected heart attack when I was in China. 

This day on the road four lots of people stopped and as you will see they were all as different as the preverbial chalk and cheese.

I was in great spirits when a young couple and their two young sons stopped. They are on a six-month road trip and are homeschooling their boys aged five and nine. The nine-year-old mentioned that his lives ambition is to beat Husein Bolt in a race. He is the great Jamacian sprinter! Wonderful dream, and why not for most of us are limited by minds and are capable of more than we believe we can achieve. I gave my usual motivation talk and just go for your dream speel. 

 

A couple of hours later I was walking along the road and my great friend Adrian Dobson-Shaw and his mother pulled up. I don't think Adrian was following my walk but he knew I was still in the country. When he stopped I got such a surprise that I could have been knocked down with a feather! He lives in Canberra but was visiting his mother in Tenant Creek. 

I met him at the North Pole Marathon back in 2015. He is an indigenous  runner who showed such great promise that the race director, my friend Richard Donovan sponsored his entry along with his coach Rob de Castella (or the Deek as Rob has been known as since he broke the world marathon record in Boston back in 1983) Indeed, Richard, who has done so much for Irish athletics and is the most generous person that I have ever met also was the major sponsor of my world run between 2010-2014. As a reward for that, he generously presented me with an entry to the 2015 North Pole Marathon. At the end if my world run and only minutes earlier I had announced to the awaiting press that I had retired from running! So, I had one last race to run and I only just made it to the start line for I burried my mother on the very last day before we flew out that Easter Sunday. Yes, I guess mam was smiling down on me that day and I ran it, all be it slowly with my poor state of fitness in her honour. 

These days Adrian is still running and is also a coach and is inspiring young indigenous youths away from other temptations with his running and the positive change program that he helps to run.

After Adrian left I walked another kilometre and sat down for my lunch under a shady tree. Just then a man called Jacky, an around-the-world motorcyclist stopped by for an extended chat! He is on a career break from his job as a captain for Thai Airlines where he flies B777 jets. Riding a Harley Davidson 1700cc bike he pleaded with his wife for a time out to live his dream. Her reply was that she wanted a child first. "So I gave her our daughter and a couple of weeks later got into the saddle of my bike and headed down through Indonesia before shipping his bike to Darwin. After Australia he will fly to Ethiopia and ride to South Africa. Then it's the Americas, south first and from Canada to Europe to Asia and back home. 

The fourth person I met that day was unlike any of the above. She introduced herself as a Kiwi and from the moment she did a U-turn on the road to the time I departed she gave me a volley of rudeness. Starting with asking me if I was insane and was my sanity related to any abuse in my childhood. Then laughing that I enjoyed the outdoors.. 

" I heard all that before" she said and I wondered about that reply.

She continued by sneering at my cancer awareness walk even suggested that I shouldn't be walking in a first-world country but in Africa! After listing off about twenty poor countries her dehumanising and cynical talk continued, almost as if I was a two-year-old. This woman to me was a classic case of a mental abuser who couldn't even see that I'm walking with a big heart and laughed when I told her of the people who had discovered tumours after listening to my message.

"Ah cancer, cancer, cancer its a big racket." Then she continued with.

"Don't you know that many of these road train drivers are high on drugs to keep them awake?" 

Well that may be true for some of them but they are still safer than the drivers in the poor countries you prefer was my reply. Before I called her the rudest person I have ever encountered in all of my travels she went on to say that she is a realist and believes that people shouldn't travel because they will get murdered. My reply was that in that case there was no point in travellers leaving their homes. 

She had a lot more to say but I didn't want to hear. I have to admit that I found this encounter upsetting but then I remembered the previous three earlier that day. 

The next day I was to meet two more lots of inspiring walkers and runners. Please stand by for that post.