I bought my first kayak when I was living in the small town of Katherine which is 300 miles south of Darwin.
Darwin is the capital city of the Northern Territory; it is closer to Indonesia than it is to Sydney.
When we kayaked on the Katherine River we would really enjoy doing it in the wet season because the river would have a lot of “white-water”.
The wildlife was also abundant and we saw a lot of freshwater crocodiles.
These crocodiles were fairly harmless…if you kept your distance.
They were not big enough to tip you out of a kayak if they did attack.

We had an opportunity to travel across the top of Australia to another small town called Kununurra which is situated on the Ord River.
This river is very wide and has no “white-water.”
But it does have big and dangerous saltwater crocodiles.
One of them surfaced in front of us as we kayaked down the river and my friend panicked.
He had a bad dream the night before and this had set him up BIG time!
I was amazed at my reaction.
Because we were out in the middle of a very wide section of the river we knew…if we were knocked out of our kayaks we had no way of getting back in.
When you are completely cornered with no escape you sometimes relax even though there is no reason to relax.
The struggle goes out and you are left with a feeling of the inevitable.
When there is nothing you can do about your situation.
What can you do?
NOTHING!!

An adrenaline junkie is accepted in society and looked up to by the younger ones.
Philippe Petit is a French high-wire artist who gained fame in 1974 for his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, on the morning of 7 August.

HE WAS THE CENTER OF ATTENTION.

EVERYONE WAS LOOKING AT HIM.
Even though this man did the walk illegally the public admired him for his bravery and boldness.
While he was high above the ground, he would have been high on adrenaline.

This French high-wire artist who walked on a rope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center is an interesting example.
When he was half-way across and in danger of falling.
What could he do?
Nothing.

He would have taken a deep breath and tried to relax.

Here is a more recent story:
We live just outside of Brisbane on 3.5 acres.
We have a lot of wildlife including koalas, wallabies, goannas and you guessed it.
Snakes!!
Most of them are carpet snakes which can be up to 6 feet long.
There are also tree snakes, they are very skinny and can get into your house.
We have been living here for 12 years and never had a snake inside.
But last year I was writing on the computer when my wife said:
“Don’t move a snake is behind you.”
Well I did move and scared the snake which had scared me.
It went into one of the kitchen cupboards.
The big problem was…we didn’t see which cupboard.
In the end, not knowing where it was, meant we may never find it.
The not knowing gets to you and plays on your mind.
You are constantly thinking, “where is that snake?”

I don’t like mysteries and I am always trying to solve them.
A lot of people are the same.
That’s why the scientists are going further into space.
They can’t stand not knowing.
Where did everything come from?
Were we created or was it an accident or incident?
If it was a big bang, what existed before the big bang?

As humans we have our own set of questions.

The biggest is, “Why does God allow suffering?”

I want to know why God created snakes..??

I visited New Zealand [which does not have any snakes] a couple of years ago.
When we drove out into the country I got out of the car and ran around the field at the side of the road.
I wanted to feel what it was like to walk through high grass and not have to worry about snakes.
A bit weird, I know!
Some people don’t know what it feels like to be free from pain.
Others don’t know what it feels like to be free from debt…the list goes on.

Let me repeat myself by remembering what happened when I was confronted by a large salt-water crocodile.
When you are completely cornered with no escape, you sometimes relax even though there is no reason to relax.
The struggle goes out and you are left with a feeling of the inevitable.
When there is nothing you can do about your situation.
What can you do?
NOTHING..!!

Tony Egar.

My first job after school was as a “laboratory sample
preparer” and I had to relocate from the city of Adelaide to the very,
very, isolated town of Dampier at the top of Western Australia.
Dampier is a port for most of Australia’s iron ore.
As the iron ore was loaded onto the ships, I had to take samples for the
laboratory.
The town had a population of 2000 people; most of them were young men from
different countries around the world.
They got these jobs because the place was so isolated.
[No-one else wanted to work there] and the money was good, this enabled them to
continue their travels after only working for a few months or a year at the
most.

I was meeting people from England, Ireland and Canada.
They loved to talk about the countries in Asia they had visited.
Guess what?
I picked up the travel bug; I got influenced by their stories.
When I finished my 6-month contract I began to travel.
The first place I went to was Bali in Indonesia, which I loved.
The beach lifestyle suited me in a big way.
Then I travelled up through South-East Asia to Nepal, then down to India and onto Europe.
While I enjoyed Europe, I did not enjoy the weather, it was so cold, I kept thinking of Bali and the beach lifestyle.
Eventually I gave in and bought a plane ticket to Thailand and then made my way back down to Bali, where I stayed for a long time.

May I point out a few observations from this story?

The first is, notice how I picked up the vision to travel.
Before I mixed with all those travellers, I had no thoughts about travel, I had no friends or family who had travelled.
It was the 1970’s…no internet, no computer and I was just out of school.
Yet as soon as I was hanging around people with a vision, I caught their vision.
I did not have one of my own so I picked up theirs.

The second point is, notice how I enjoyed the first part of my trip and then spent the rest of my travels thinking it was going to get better and better, but it didn’t and it took me a long time to realise this.
I wanted to recreate the past and I did… because it was an easy thing for me to do.
Just buy a plane ticket, no problem.
All through Europe I was only a plane flight away from Bali.
I was only one decision away from my favourite place in the world.
The main point of this discussion is…I wasn’t looking for a location.
I was actually looking for an experience.
When I was in Bali, I felt good from the inside out, it felt good to learn to surf, it felt good to live in a hut near the waves, and it felt good to be alive.
In Europe I felt like a tourist and that’s all I was really doing.
Looking at things instead of being involved in what I was seeing.
In Bali you weren’t just looking at the view, you were swimming in it.
You weren’t just looking at the sunset you were throwing frisbees’ at sunset on the beach along with the locals.

The result of my travelling experience was…
What I was looking for in life was still something that I had not found.
The thing that amazed me the most was… how similar people were on the inside even though they were so different on the outside.
Everyone wanted to be happy.
And have a good job or career with purpose.
Everyone wanted to belong to a family.
And have some good friends.

Tony Egar.

In my last year at school, the final year camp was located at a place called Wilpena Pound.
It is a natural amphitheatre of mountains located 429 kilometres north of Adelaide, South Australia.
The Pound is a very popular area for bush-walking, and therefore a good place to have a school camp.
The Pound traverses some of the most beautiful country in the Flinders Ranges.
The peaks are very rugged, and thick scrub and timber inside the Pound can make navigation difficult.
In 1959, a 12-year-old boy became lost while walking inside the Pound, and despite search efforts, his skeletal remains were not located until 18 months later.
A pass on the upper slopes of St Mary Peak is named after him.
His brother John Bannon, later became the Premier of South Australia.
Just outside the Pound is a motel and camping ground.

At the beginning of the school camp.
We were dropped off by bus and set up our tents for an overnight stay, before setting off in the morning to walk across the Pound, there were about 100 students.

My friend’s parents happened to be staying in the motel and they invited both of us to dinner in the restaurant.
We didn’t tell the teachers, but someone did.
As we were in the middle of our meal… in came the teacher in charge of the camp.
He rudely pulled me out of the restaurant and I was sent back to my tent.
He didn’t want me in the restaurant while the other students were eating basic food at the camp grounds.
My friend could stay in the restaurant because he was with his parents.
This teacher always gave me a hard time.
The next morning the students were separated into groups of six and a leader was put in charge of each group.
We were sent off at different intervals to cross the Pound and then everyone was going to come together at the end of the walk to camp on the other side of the surrounding hills.
There were not any facilities for camping where we were going and also we would be out of contact with the motel and everyone else because the two-way radios would not work as the terrain blocked the signal.
It was about a six-hour hike.

The group I was leading got to our destination in the afternoon, but no-one was there, we had not seen any other students for hours.
Then we understood why we had not seen any other students on our hike.
We were lost!!
The Pound was a dangerous place to get lost in, the weather was hot and we did not have much water.
We climbed to the highest peak and tried to get our bearings, but all we could see were the hills in the distance that marked where we began our journey in the morning.
We knew how to get back to safety so we almost ran for the next few hours and arrived at the motel and camping ground at around 7.00 pm.
A summer storm was brewing and it was getting dark by the time we tiredly walked into the motel and told the staff what had happened to us.
My friend’s parents were still there and they organised for us to stay at the motel, they also made sure we were fed… as we were very hungry.
Now the tables were turned, the night before I had been ingloriously dragged out of the restaurant and one night later, I am sitting in the same restaurant having a lovely meal, surrounded by well-wishers.
Meanwhile the teacher that gave me a hard time was now having his own hard time.
He did not know we were safe.
He spent the night looking for us in the rain.
Boy, did it feel good sleeping in the motel and waking up to a cooked breakfast.

The big problem was.
The teacher and the students who spent the whole night looking for us, never believed our story about getting lost.
They always believed we went back to the motel on purpose.
But the truth is…we really were lost.
Isn’t it tough when you tell the truth and no-one believes you.

Tony Egar.