J'arrive!

My jet lag has all but evaporated, and I'm now reclining in conspicuous luxury chez Chris et Leyla. The house is excellent; in fact, it's really more of a property than a house - chooks (chickens) out the back; a massive barbie (barbeque) on which to cook snags (sausages) and a fridge (fridge) full of beer (beer) in the basement. Admittedly it is slightly less full at the moment.

In addition to the blessed diminution of my jet lag, I have also returned to more or less normal impulses to eat. Airlines have this well-developed strategy to keep the cattle passengers so well fed and occupied with eating that they're distracted from their distinctly unnatural environment and hence do not descend into screaming anarchy. This strategy unfortunately means that I ate five airline/airport meals over the course of approximately a day and a half and proceeded to feel hungry pretty much all the time for the first day I was here. Luckily, a gigantic, delicious steak introduced to the barbeque for the briefest of encounters sorted that out on the first night here.

Yesterday Chris and I were driving semi-aimlessly around, looking for some generic rainforest to marvel at and somehow the conversation turned to both last year's and this year's road trips. I mentioned that in the States last year we'd considered, in passing, trying to find a shooting range. Quick as a flash, Chris was on the phone to an ex-work colleague, the car pulled a U-turn and we were heading south of the Brisbane river towards Belmont Rifle Range.

"Good God," I said. "What the hell are we playing at?"

We arrived to the sporadic crack of gunfire, parked and walked with mounting trepidation to the office. The woman behind the counter gave us a couple of forms to fill in, took our photo IDs and A$30 each and handed us a 12-gauge over-under shotgun, 25 shells and 25 clay pigeons. Just like that.

"How do we use it, exactly?" we asked.
"Oh, just ask the range officer," she replied.

We did. He didn't seem to know how to work the safety on the gun. I groaned internally. After a few minutes of dry-firing it, with the shells still safely in their box, we'd worked it out. Chris had been clay-pigeon shooting once before and had a few words of choice advice: "Hold it tightly against your shoulder."

Those were the all of the choice words he had.

I loaded the gun with the safety on and snapped it shut while Chris loaded the clay pigeon trap.

"Pull!" I said.
"What?" he said. We were both wearing earplugs.
"Pull!" I shouted.

The clay shot into the air. Bang went the gun. Smash the clay conspicuously did not go, and landed serenely on the grass. We were all still alive (including the clay pigeon); my shoulder did not hurt; the gun broke open easily enough and a wisp of smoke came out of the barrel.

"Holy crap," I said. "That was mental." And so it went for another 49 shells - the first box being expended with minimal loss of clay pigeon life - and we handed the gun back, broken open and perceptibly warm, after about 45 minutes.

"You guys still have a bit of time left on your gun hire. Do you want to try a rifle?" asked the cheerful woman behind the counter. "You could try a two-two, a triple-two or a two-two-three."
"Uh," we said. "What?"
"Well, the two-twos go pop and the others go bang."

Some confused conversation later, we were in temporary possession of a .223 rifle with a 8x scope and a box of twenty cartridges. The feeling was massively bizarre. A klaxon went off, and the range officer said through the tannoy: "The range is now open. You may fix your targets."

And so we laid the rifle on the bench, bolt conspicuously open, and crunched off into the field over the gravel-like carpet of spent cartidge cases with the other (surprisingly nerdy-looking) shooters to pin our targets on the 50 yard wooden fence. After some more reassuringly authoritative instruction from the range officer, Chris slotted a shell in, closed the bolt, sighted over the wooden rest and fired. A small puff of dust scooted up from the bank of earth behind the target.

"I think I missed," he said. Four more shots later we swapped over and I did the same until we'd fired all twenty. The range opened again and we trudged shakily out again to get our perforated targets. Adding it up later (it took a couple of goes because my mind was whirling), Chris edged it with 97 while I'd scored 92.

We handed the rifle back and thanked the range officer and the woman behind the desk. We sat in the car. "Mother of God," I said. "That was nuts."

It had been nuts, but it had also been disturbingly both easy and fun. The concept of shooting - pointing a loaded gun at something you wish to harm quite seriously - had been neutered by the good-natured atmosphere of the place and the reduction, on the rifle range, of the whole thing to a points-scoring game. Dangerously neutered, I think; we spent less money than we would have done if we'd gone ten-pin bowling and yet we'd gone from computer game snipers to pseudo-real ones in about an hour.

We drove back home, cracked open a beer and looked at our respective targets. What a mind-bogglingly surreal start to the holiday.