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July 30, 2001
Overland Australia - Update 7
A Day of Damper
I woke in the earliest morning, starlight overhead, and my eyes first saw the reflected firelight on the canyon wall across the creek from last night's cooking fire. It was around 4:30am. I crawled out of my sleeping bag with three things on my mind: the upcoming day's ride, Billy tea, and Damper.
The upcoming ride I knew would probably be easier than the past few days as we gradually descended towards the Mitchell River and out of the rough Dividing Range. Easier? No rides are easy in this terrain. Steep climbs remained, I knew, but the net elevation change would be a decrease. It was the Damper and Billy tea, which mostly entered my waking consciousness.
We'll talk about Billy tea later, but it's Damper I want to share with you now. Crister is writing about how to cook Damper. What I'll talk about is how much we love it!
Damper is a type of bread cooked in a camp stove, which is put in a hole in the ground and covered with coals. We can't buy any bread out here, because there's no place to buy anything. Damper is what the miner's survived on, and it's the food we've come to love the best. It's the third thing which entered my waking, and hungry mind and body this morning.
We'd cooked enough Damper last night to feed all ten of us with our stew, and had enough left over to satisfy us through starlight breakfast and mid-morning tea 30 kms down the track.
We ate toasted Damper by the dawn's first light, cooked over the coals after we packed our tents and organized our personal gear. Peanut Butter, Apricot Jam and Butter heightened the gustatory experience. Gustatory experience? We're just plain hungry, famished after all our cycling, and Damper is what we need to fill our stomachs. Bread, heaps of bread.
At break time up on a mountain looking over the Mitchell River, we chowed-down on the rest of last night's lump of Damper. And now, in the starlit evening at our camp on the banks of the Mitchell River, after panning for gold, fishing, washing, swimming and relaxing, we're cooking up Damper again.
It's wonderful.. Read Crister's and Mike's updates in 'Education' for how to cook your own Damper!
Jim
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Posted on July 30, 2001 12:08 PM