A journey of the heart and mind

Competition Winners: Runner-up

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It's a jungle out there

A horse with no name

Call of the wild

"Hi Eileen, this is Mick. I work with crocs, salties, up to 20ft long. My arm is in a sling 'cos a couple of weeks ago Hercules snatched me into the pond and I waited for the death-roll."

Eileen's adventures, such as when she came with us to Australia for three weeks, are via the medium of a dictaphone. Eileen has multiple sclerosis and cannot move a muscle. She has a mind like a knife and, as she has been told by a visitor, "ears like a hawk". We recorded nine hours of tape for her.

The shyest locals, when told about Eileen, will make every effort to give an insight to their country, life or job. The guy who ran the On the Wallaby backpackers' hostel sat us on a bridge at dusk, made us pray to a large inflatable platypus, and then whispered to Eileen as two platypus cut V-shaped wakes across the darkened pool. The didgeridoo player on the quayside at Sydney played her his music. The boomerang thrower in Cairns explained his skills to her. The rainforest birds at Cape Tribulation sang for her. Eileen joined us for the "safety talk" prior to our snorkelling on the Barrier Reef, where she enjoyed her spell in the "glass-bottomed boat".

Difficult to explain to her how devastatingly blue it was beneath the surface. Our noisy helicopter flights back to Cairns from the reef saw us shouting to her about the migrating humpback whales that we flew over. She loves to hear about animals: the kangaroos, cassowaries, snakes and various other denizens that we talked about were all fascinating to her. However, she has a real dread of even the smallest spider, so we did not tell her about the large Huntsman encountered by one of our group of canoeists on our return from Dunk Island off South Mission in Queensland. He found the spider as he put his foot back in his shoe! Eileen "met" Will Gregory, a Mel Gibson lookalike who led us over Sydney Harbour Bridge at sunset. She had a chat from the owner of the Sirens B&B in the Blue Mountains (the only mountains Eileen knows where you drive to the top and walk down). There was a book on The Joys of Sex in each room, and Eileen now knows that "most of our guests are out for dirty weekends from Sydney".

She met only friendship, as typified by Mick, who bred crocs near Innisfail, North Queensland. He explained, "Eileen, we feed those crocs on dead chickens, bits of wild pig, beaks, bristles, bones, the lot, but do you know, that old bastard Hercules spat me out." He explained that he was giving us a present for her. When she eventually listened to Mick's voice, she had opened for her a parcel containing a little souvenir spoon with a small crocodile tooth embedded in resin on the handle. A gift from the heart of Australia.