Different strokes

TWO men brave the wilds of Shoalhaven Gorge and the derision of their spouses for an overnight camp and a feed of fresh carp.

Shoalhaven Gorge

IT was watching Into the Wild on telly that did it. The story of Chris McCandless's epic journey to Alaska stirred something in me. Sitting there on my couch in inner Sydney, surrounded by empty chip packets and remote controls, I felt the call of the wild.

At least I did until he died at the end. That put a bit of a dent in it. Maybe true wilderness would be too rich for my blood, I reflected. I wanted to drink from the cup of Mother Nature, not gnaw on the steaming corpse of a moose. Being chased by wild animals wasn’t on my bucket list, either. No, what I wanted was a safe, enjoyable foray into the natural world, for just 24 hours, and preferably within a short drive of the city. What I wanted was Into the Wild Lite.

An overnight kayaking trip into Shoalhaven Gorge, in NSW’s Morton National Park, seemed just the ticket. It’s not exactly wilderness, but you could easily be fooled. On Google Earth the gorge looks like a deep gash in the fabric of the Earth, hemmed in by forest and huge cliffs. And a kayak will take you right into the heart of it: starting from the car park at the Tallowa Dam wall it’s a 15km paddle on flat water to Fossickers Flat, where you camp, before returning the next day. Motor craft aren’t allowed on this water - so there are no hard-revving jetskis or tinnies to shatter the tranquillity - and those sheer cliffs mean there are no roads or tracks either. Only paddlers ever get to see the place. It sounded perfect.

I talked my French friend Erick into coming. He needed a bit of persuading. First I softened him up by appealing to his sense of Gallic romanticism – sleeping under the stars, at one with nature, blah blah – then I delivered the coup de grâce by appealing to his stomach. “We’ll catch wild bass and roast them over a wood fire, then feast on their sweet, smoky flesh…” He started drooling. Hook, line and sinker.

A few days later we were waved off by our spouses, who - rather childishly, we thought - kept making references to Brokeback Mountain and nudging each other in the ribs. A couple of hours’ drive from Sydney brought us to Kangaroo Valley Canoes, where we rented sea kayaks (overkill, perhaps, but they’re fast and have lots of storage) and headed down to the launch at Tallowa Dam.

Loading up the boats was a breeze: there was none of that obsessing over weight that you’d do before an overnight bushwalk. These craft can easily handle 25kg of gear. So everything went in... not only tents, sleeping bags and stoves but folding chairs, wine, a selection of cigars, even an axe. (“For chopping firewood,” Erick explained, adding mysteriously: “And also for protection.”)

For reasonably fit people the paddle to Fossickers Flat – where rapids block further progress up the gorge – is a leisurely four-hour trip, so we weren’t in any rush. Pretty soon we were into that lovely headspace that kayaking affords: boats gliding through the water, sunlight sparkling off the ripples, rhythmic paddle strokes emptying the mind. The lovely duet of Eastern Whipbirds – the male’s long, drawn-out whistle and whip-crack, then the female’s quick choo-choo response – carried across the water from the low forested hills on either side of us.

I mentioned before that this place is not exactly wilderness; in fact, that’s an understatement. It’s totally man-made. The gorge was flooded when Tallowa Dam – centrepiece of the Shoalhaven Scheme for supplying water and hydro-electric power – was completed in 1976. A stark reminder of this came as we paddled through thousands of dead trees standing in the water – the so-called Drowned Forest. These were once proud gums and casuarinas high above the banks of the Shoalhaven River; now we were slaloming our boats through their sun-bleached remains.

The forest above the waterline was full of life, though. We startled a kangaroo and it thumped off through the undergrowth, sending a flock of birds clattering into the air. A big goanna sunning itself on a rock lifted its head a centimetre to appraise us as we passed. And a little further on there was the unmistakable gamey whiff of goat; we scanned the nearby rock outcrops and there they were, five of them standing in a tight formation, staring at us. They were totally motionless except for their jaws chewing, chewing, chewing. (Is it possible for wild goats to look insolent? Or was I being a bit uptight?)

Soon the gorge began to narrow and deepen. With every turn the cliffs on either side grew bigger. An amphitheatre of high rock walls on one bend was an amazing natural echo chamber; by manoeuvring our kayaks about and clapping we found the acoustic sweet-spot, somewhere in mid-stream, where any sound was reflected five times. We spent half an hour there, whooping and clapping and hollering.

We’d had enough by the time we reached Fossickers Flat; four hours in a kayak is plenty. We set up our tents in a clearing by the water’s edge and watched the cliffs above us turn deep red in the late afternoon sun. Towards dusk, big splashes indicated that the bass had started feeding; they were smashing insects that had fallen onto the water from overhanging trees. Remembering my promise of providing fish for supper, I dug out my rod and my new $15 bass lure – an imitation cicada that the bloke in the fishing shop assured me was the business – and stalked down to the bank, keeping my head low. The fish were jumping, my heart was thumping; I picked my spot, made my cast – and sent the lure sailing into the branches of a tree, 20 feet up, where it stuck fast. “Idiot!” I roared. It echoed off the gorge walls three times, as if in mockery.

So then I tried fishing for carp. This is the laziest, least technical form of hunting known to man. You put sweetcorn on the hook and lob it out, end of story. But what a lot of bang for your buck: I caught half a dozen in an hour, all of them big bruisers.

Carp is not renowned as a table fish – it’s a staple in Eastern Europe, which should be taken as a warning – but a promise is a promise, so I kept a nice one and presented it to Erick. Using every ounce of his French culinary cunning he rubbed its golden skin with lemon and sea salt, stuffed it with herbs and pine nuts, and grilled it over the glowing embers of our wood fire. It still tasted bloody awful.