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and spying on the birds. At least I can hear them. The kingfishers speak with voices variously described by field guides as “loud chuckling” or “extended maniac laughter” or a “harsh, cackling scream.” When it comes to parrots, the ubiquitous and sassy galah sounds like a bird in need of lubrication, and the bulky corella almost purrs before it squawks.
    Not far from the roadhouse, one of my favorite birds is smacked by a speeding tour truck, right before my eyes. The red-winged parrot pinwheels through the air and makes his last landing only ten feet in front of me. I stop and pick him up, amazed he’s still alive, blinking slowly, moving his tongue in and out of a thick red bill tipped with orange. It’s the most beautiful bird I’ve ever seen, and its head lolls to a dead stop.
    This road, I’m told, was paved only this month. The old road was gravel, and slow going. Now people can get to Kakadu as fast at they want.
    That night I lie in my tent naked, with arms and legs splayed apart to maximize heat radiation. The night insects are going cha-cha-cha, like maracas in a hot salsa band. Come dawn, it’s 78 degrees. Dew slides down the tent poles, hidden birds purr like cats, and Typhoon Olivia is moving in for the kill. I get up and ride like a maniac, determined to race ahead of the weather. Olivia moves faster, platoons of cumulus with cauliflower tops and bottoms planed flat by the wind. The clouds run in packs, dumping on me, then fleeing so quickly that the sun’s out before the rain spatters my glasses. When I reach the town of Katherine I’m soaked from ten such cloudbursts, and I’m not surprised that today’s
headline for the Northern Territory News is “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.”
    â€œDon’t take it personal, mate,” says a grocery clerk. “The paper will print anything to get you to open it up. Last month the headline was ‘Family of five run over in hit-and-run,’ but when I reads the story, it’s not people that got run over, but a family of ducks.”
    It’s another sixty-five miles to Mataranka. If I’m desperate enough I can ride long and fast, and every time I look over my shoulder I see them coming: clouds like wet socks. They catch me, of course. I just ride faster, lashed on by the wind on my tail, all the way to town.
    Salvation is a friendly hotel and a little watertight room. But I’ve only one spare change of clothes, and they’re wet from the previous day’s ride. Everyone has their private horrors, and for me the prospect of slipping into soggy underwear in the morning ranks right up there with putting my hands in dirty dishwater and encountering a mangle of mystery food.
    I hang my clothes from the blades of the ceiling fan and hit the switch. It wobbles dramatically, but spins on. Sitting naked on the bed, I record my misery on the folding computer. After a photo of my clothes spinning overhead, I’m ready to send off a dispatch.
    A search for a plug on the phone or the wall reveals only a single seamless line. Lacking a wire cutter and soldering iron, I go to Plan B: the acoustic crumpler. Or sonic scrambler. Something. It’s a device that converts silent data to audible sounds. It straps on the phone’s mouthpiece and talks to another computer. It takes hours to send photographs that have been transformed to hisses and squeals. The only other sound is the groaning ceiling fan.
    Rain again in the morning, and only three miles out of Mataranka it turns from a sprinkle to a shower to a tree-bending blur. That makes up my mind: I’m hitching a ride south until I reach the land of dry underwear.
    Three hours and twenty miles later I’m still pedaling in the rain, acutely aware of a flaw in my hitching plan. Although this is the only paved road across central Australia, there’s only one car or truck every half hour. The Northern Territory is twice the size