Surviving Australia

Informationen zum Autor Sorrel Wilby is an award-winning adventurer, photographer, and author of Journey Across Tibet and Surviving Australia. Klappentext Visiting the Australian outback can be a wonderful experience, but it isn't all about boomerangs and koalas, kangaroos and didgeridoos. It can be a wild and dangerous place if you're not prepared. Here is the essential travel companion for enduring the toughest stuff this rugged continent can offer -- a veritable survivor's guide to managing the unexpected when you're Down Under. Renowned Australian adventurer and bestselling author Sorrel Wilby provides you with the basic lessons on negotiating your way through the bush, across the outback, over the top end, and into the surf and sea. You'll get important lifesaving information on: where you should and shouldn't be driving your Range Rover dealing with natural hazards like river crossings, bush fires, storms, and rips warding off snakes, scorpions, crocs, and sharks encountering Aboriginal people, Bushies, Eccentrics, and Surfers finding food and water treating heatstroke, hypothermia, and tropical infections identifying proper emergency radio frequencies and much more! Leseprobe Chapter one: THE WILL TO LIVE Survival skills are important -- there's no doubting that. But having the will to survive is crucial. Knowledge is useless if you don't have the presence of mind to use it; focused determination is a singular force. There are plenty of cases where people, with absolutely no training or prior experience in the skills of survival, have managed to pull through life-threatening situations on willpower alone. I will never forget interviewing a woman by the name of Val Plumwood some fifteen years ago. She'd been out in a canoe all morning, bird-watching along a tributary of the East Alligator River in the Northern Territory's Kakadu National Park. It started raining, really bucketing down hard, so she began to make her way back to camp. She came around a bend in the creek -- which was already moving much faster because of the rain -- and saw a large piece of driftwood straight ahead. As she got closer to the driftwood, she noticed it had eyes. Two very beady eyes. She realized it was a crocodile. A huge "salty." Within seconds of that realization it attacked her canoe. Val froze. Bash...Bash... It whacked against the fiberglass hull of the canoe. Bash...Bash... Behind her, beside her, a blur of thrashing madness. Val tried to paddle away to a clump of paperbark trees growing on a steep, muddy bank. She started climbing one of the trees but didn't get further than the first branch. The crocodile rocketed out of the water, grabbed her between the legs, dragged her along the riverbank, and deathrolled her three times. When the crocodile let go to change its grip, Val managed to escape and tried to climb the paperbarks again, but the crocodile was right behind her. It grabbed her for the second time and pulled her down into the water. Fortunately, the water was only about a meter (about 3 feet) deep, so Val was able to grab big gulps of air between the violent deathrolls. The crocodile couldn't drown her and relaxed its grip a second time; again she escaped, but the croc was right at her heels, snapping at and deathrolling her for the third time. Val was exhausted and in agony but, in a final bid to save her life, managed to get away and drag herself up the mud bank and away from her assailant. She then crawled and staggered 2 kilometers (1 1?4 miles) to the edge of a swamp a short distance from her camp, near the local ranger station. She had lost a lot of blood and could no longer stand or even sit but somehow she found the strength to call out. A ranger heard her feeble cry and came to her aid. Her ordeal was far from over. The extent of her injuries and infection from the wounds led to a two-month, touch-and-go battle in hos...

Auteur

Sorrel Wilby is an acclaimed explorer, adventurer, photographer, writer, and producer of several TV documentaries.

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Visiting the Australian outback can be a wonderful experience, but it isn't all about boomerangs and koalas, kangaroos and didgeridoos. It can be a wild and dangerous place if you're not prepared. Here is the essential travel companion for enduring the toughest stuff this rugged continent can offer -- a veritable survivor's guide to managing the unexpected when you're Down Under. Renowned Australian adventurer and bestselling author Sorrel Wilby provides you with the basic lessons on negotiating your way through the bush, across the outback, over the top end, and into the surf and sea. You'll get important lifesaving information on: where you should and shouldn't be driving your Range Rover dealing with natural hazards like river crossings, bush fires, storms, and rips warding off snakes, scorpions, crocs, and sharks encountering Aboriginal people, Bushies, Eccentrics, and Surfers finding food and water treating heatstroke, hypothermia, and tropical infections identifying proper emergency radio frequencies and much more!

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter one: THE WILL TO LIVE

Survival skills are important -- there's no doubting that. But having the will to survive is crucial. Knowledge is useless if you don't have the presence of mind to use it; focused determination is a singular force. There are plenty of cases where people, with absolutely no training or prior experience in the skills of survival, have managed to pull through life-threatening situations on willpower alone. I will never forget interviewing a woman by the name of Val Plumwood some fifteen years ago. She'd been out in a canoe all morning, bird-watching along a tributary of the East Alligator River in the Northern Territory's Kakadu National Park. It started raining, really bucketing down hard, so she began to make her way back to camp. She came around a bend in the creek -- which was already moving much faster because of the rain -- and saw a large piece of driftwood straight ahead. As she got closer to the driftwood, she noticed it had eyes. Two very beady eyes.

She realized it was a crocodile. A huge "salty." Within seconds of that realization it attacked her canoe. Val froze. Bash...Bash... It whacked against the fiberglass hull of the canoe. Bash...Bash... Behind her, beside her, a blur of thrashing madness. Val tried to paddle away to a clump of paperbark trees growing on a steep, muddy bank. She started climbing one of the trees but didn't get further than the first branch. The crocodile rocketed out of the water, grabbed her between the legs, dragged her along the riverbank, and deathrolled her three times. When the crocodile let go to change its grip, Val managed to escape and tried to climb the paperbarks again, but the crocodile was right behind her. It grabbed her for the second time and pulled her down into the water. Fortunately, the water was only about a meter (about 3 feet) deep, so Val was able to grab big gulps of air between the violent deathrolls. The crocodile couldn't drown her and relaxed its grip a second time; again she escaped, but the croc was right at her heels, snapping at and deathrolling her for the third time. Val was exhausted and in agony but, in a final bid to save her life, managed to get away and drag herself up the mud bank and away from her assailant. She then crawled and staggered 2 kilometers (1 1?4 miles) to the edge of a swamp a short distance from her camp, near the local ranger station. She had lost a lot of blood and could no longer stand or even sit but somehow she found the strength to call out. A ranger heard her feeble cry and came to her aid. Her ordeal was far from over. The extent of her injuries and infection from the wounds led to a two-month, touch-and-go battle in hospital. But she survived to tell the tale.

The will to survive is innate. As I write this, the breaking story on the 6:30 P.M. news revealed th…