Day 11: The Spoon from God

First, I almost forgot to tell you one of the most awesome bits of the hike!

Up at Brinkley Bluff, once we finished taking pictures, Englishman -as usual- took off and quickly outpaced us. GrownUpFriend, however, said he wanted to finish writing something in the log book, and that we should go on without him. Since I was always easily outpaced by GrownUpFriend (and D was basically required to stick with me), this sounded fine.

About half an hour later though, after D and I happily bounced along the trail and made great time, we realized suddenly that it'd been a while since we'd left GrownUpFriend; we had rather expected him to catch up to us quickly with his longer stride. We were very reluctant to go backwards along the trail (and by that I mean, no fucking way was I going to triple my steps when every step hurt), so we sat and waited. And waited. And FINALLY, we spot GrownUpFriend in the distance, and he comes trundling up. It turns out he had stayed at the top of Brinkley Bluff to compose a poem for the logbook. D'awwwww.

JUST THEN, it was like a ray of sunshine descended from the heavens and lit up a patch of spinifex next to where D had been sitting for the last half hour, and I spotted it:

I shouted to D "THERE ON YOUR LEFT" (which, in retrospect, isn't exactly advisable in snake country on the side of a cliff), and behold, the spoon was ours.



Now, you might be wondering why I got so damn excited about a spoon, but let me tell you, this is the perfect spoon:

·         It's made of titanium, so it won't break in normal use (remember, we'd already broken all the airplane plastic cutlery I packed).

·         It's got a super long handle, so we can reach food cooked in plastic bags without getting our hands covered in sauce (important when you've got madras lentils and not much water to spare).

·         It's made of titanium, so it's super duper lightweight (we literally weighed every gram we put in our bags for this trip).

·         It came when we needed it most (see above re: previous rampant spoon destruction). 

·         It was FREE yaaaaaaaaaaay.

 

 We considered the spoon a reward for being safe hikers and waiting for GrownUpFriend to make sure he hadn't fallen off the cliff (because we wouldn't have found the spoon if we hadn't waited and looked back down the trail).