Perth, in 3,000 words or less

Periodically updating this blog has the happy side effect of improving my ability to make excuses for procrastinating.  If you were to accuse me of abandoning my blog for the past two months, I can just say that it’s because Perth clearly exists in that temporal no-man’s land that covers much of the Australian hinterland where the laws of space and time begin to break down.  Your relationship with time is a little different in a city that I like to think lies at the edge of the world.  When it’s 32 degrees Celsius at 7 pm, when you are sitting on a perfect white sand beach with a cider in your hand, when you watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean and realize that the next significant land mass in your line of sight is South America… you stop caring what time it is or what the rest of the world is up to.

Yes, life in Perth is nice.  Everyone sports a “no worries” attitude, the weather is as close to perfect as it gets (of the 60 days I was there, 58 offered highs in the 30s and no rain in sight), and beer costs 9.50 a pint. Two out of three ain’t bad, I guess.  Curse these mineral-producing export economies with strong dollars – as any economist worth their salt will tell you, when a state starts exploiting its natural resources for monetary gain, the first casualty is the price of alcohol.  All economists know this, of course, because nearly every professor of the dismal science I have met is a borderline problem drinker.  This excludes my ECON 100 professor, who had no problem at all with showing up to 10 am class a little tipsy.  Ah, undergrad at UBC Okanagan.

As I wrote in my last post, I have a theory that the laws of physics don’t work properly in the middle of nowhere.  Perth, one of the most isolated metropolises on the planet, has only supported this theory, for I have discovered a strange paradox: life moves at a snail’s pace here, yet the past 2 months have flown by.  I’ve had a bit of stuff to do, mind you, but it doesn’t seem to add up to 60 days in my head.  Let’s see if I can do the city justice anyways.

Upon arriving in town on the Indian Pacific, I wandered down to the CBD (Central Business District, or the uncharacteristically technical way Aussies say ‘downtown’) and proceeded to check into the worst hostel I’ve seen yet in this country – Grand Central Backpackers on Wellington Street.  I should have known something was up when I booked the place online, because in the height of summer it offered both low prices and high availability.  Let’s put it this way – I didn’t mind the price I was paying to stay alone in an 8-bed dorm room, but I was a little jealous because I suspected that my multitude of cockroach roommates were staying there for free.  Insects generally don’t carry a lot of cash.  I was reticent to touch any surface whatsoever, I felt dirtier after using the shower than when I stepped in it, and I was kind of afraid of the off-colour TV that was always playing in the lounge, even though nobody was ever in there.  I ought to send Stephen King there to get some fresh material.

It was obviously imperative that I find better lodging, and after a week or two of attempting to find a good apartment to rent with a couple Canadian friends, I gave up and moved into the Billabong Backpacker Resort, which is everything Grand Central isn’t. It’s clean (for a hostel), has a fantastic pool area, plenty of events to keep backpackers entertained, and at least while I was there it had a large group of friendly, long-term lodgers who became good friends of mine.  It really began to feel like a home by the time I left – if you ever find yourself in Perth, head up Beaufort Street and find the Billabong.  To paraphrase “Waltzing Matilda,” it’s a great spot for a jolly swagman to camp.

But enough waxing lyrical about the lodgings – I actually did stuff from time to time, apart from laying by the pool all day.  My first Australia Day experience put every Canada Day I’ve had to shame, except for maybe that BBQ party at the Turner house about 5 years back…  I mean, what party? Certainly not while no adults were about!  But I didn’t set a world record that Canada Day, although I think if there were one for polishing off boxes of Budweiser we might have made a good run at it.  On January 26^th, 2011, at Cottesloe Beach, I partook in the largest-ever flotilla of human beings riding on giant inflatable flip-flops that has ever been assembled on the face of the earth.  That might seem an overly specific accomplishment to some, but how many world records do you have, huh?!

After floating around in the Indian Ocean on a giant inflatable sandal for most of the day with some friends from the hostel, I met up with some more backpacker friends and headed to the CBD to watch a half-hour fireworks display that was launched from both sides of the Swan River and complemented by laser effects and music from the ground.  It beat the pants off the New Year’s Eve spectacle in Brisbane, and friends who had seen the Sydney NYE fireworks said that these were probably the best in Australia.  Top that off with a big night at the Mustang Bar in Northbridge and you have yourself a banner day right there.  I think the whole day – setting a useless world record, watching bright pretty lights and drinking expensive beer in a rowdy bar – is a great allegory for my experience in Perth: nothing substantial accomplished, which was exactly my goal.  Law school’s going to be hard, dammit, so I’m taking it easy while I can!

Not that I didn’t work hard while I had the opportunity.  I had the good fortune of finding a job at a relatively upscale cocktail bar called Niche, where I was able to work on my cocktail-making skills that were largely neglected working at Earls and Aurora Night Club in Banff last year.  Our cocktail list at Niche was much larger and far more complicated than what I had been used to, and the venue manager challenged me to be creative when I had the opportunity.  Even with my plans for the future I still want to be the best bartender I can be, so I’m really glad I had the chance to work there.  Mind you, I’m still much better at making tasty-yet-potent shooters and banging out highballs at high speed, but you’re only as strong as your weakest drink, right?

That terrible pun was uncalled for, but my battery’s getting low and I don’t have the time nor patience today to make this entry less cheeky, so it stays.  Take that, all of my English professors!

As is common with bar jobs, my position at Niche also exposed me to the seedy underbelly of Perth.  I had the pleasure of serving loud, violent bogans (rednecks) and speed-addled bikies (Australia’s term for bikers, but, compared to the Hell’s Angels in Canada, wannabe crime lords in sleepy Perth who wear the patch of the “Skull Boys” or “Jokers” are a bit of, well, a joke.)  All in all, I wouldn’t rag too much on the clientele in Leederville, the suburb where Niche is located.  The no-worries attitude still pervades social interaction everywhere – but Western Australia does have a bit of a deserved reputation for sketchy behaviour.  For example, on my walk home from work on Wednesday night I was offered a sexual favour from an Australian man in his late 30s, and he didn’t want to take no for an answer so he followed me in his car for a bit.  I opted to take a cab home and tried not to hold it against the city of Perth.  I have to say, though, that people are generally much more accommodating in Canada when you refuse to serve them alcohol.  I’ve had my fair share of drunken threats of violence in Perth from people that I’ve cut off – men and women in a roughly equal proportion, if anyone’s interested.  I really want to make a joke about Aussie girls here, but Mom might be waiting for me at the airport with a wooden spoon if I do!  Love ya, Mom!

I also had the opportunity to “bartend” (and I use that term very loosely) at Future Music Festival, a one-day electronic and pop music festival.  I literally was paid twenty-three dollars an hour to stand at a cash register, take money, and tell my bar runner to grab cans of beer or pre-mix (e.g. Smirnoff Ice) for me.  I occasionally had to check ID or cut off the occasional drunk, but that was all I did for eight hours. I was outside on a bright sunny day, my bar faced the stage that hosted MGMT and Pendulum, and I loved every second of it.  I also sold $16,000 worth of liquor, so here’s some music festival economics for you:  I was located at one of 6 bars, each of which had 30-40 pairs of cashiers and bar runners that sold somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10-20,000 dollars each.   That’s a conservatively-estimated four million in drink revenue, and even with the high wage (which is common in Australia) the margins are enormous, since Smirnoff Ice was selling for 11 bucks a can.  This is bar revenue alone – add that to $130 a head to get in, merchandise and food sales, and that’s a fair chunk of change.  Sure, it costs a lot to bring in the artists and set up the venue, but I could see a fair amount of profit being made from a properly-executed festival.  Not that I would ever want to do it; organizing a 50,000-spectator festival is a logistical nightmare.

I also had the opportunity to attend the Good Vibrations Festival for free, which was a good time, even though I’m not the biggest fan of reggae and hip-hop.  Damian Marley and Nas were fantastic, though: hip hop takes on a completely different feel when it’s accompanied by live instruments. I can also say now that I’ve seen Ludacris live in concert, so maybe that gives me some street cred.  I haven’t really been into rap since the 8^th grade so I was one of the few people who couldn’t sing along in the crowd.

One other adventure of note was my brief run-in with a bona fide cyclone.  In late January I made a few trips to the beaches of Perth with Ryan Davies, whom I initially just knew through work at Cabana.  We didn’t know each other very well but were both heading to Australia at the same time, so we made a pledge to meet up and eventually reunited in Perth.  It’s been the start of a great friendship, and our cyclone beach adventure definitely cemented it.  In the final few days of the month there was a bit of a fuss in Perth as Cyclone Bianca, which was categorized at one time as a sever category 4 tropical storm, appeared to be making a beeline for the city.  On Saturday the 29^th we headed to Whitfords beach, knowing that the cyclone was anticipated to hit the following day.  Being ignorant Canadian backpackers, we figured the weather wouldn’t get bad until the following day.  Indeed, during the whole train and bus journey (which was unnecessarily long because we kept forgetting it was Saturday – the time warp strikes again), the weather was the usual Perth summer fare: flirting with the 40s, not a cloud in sight.

As our bus approached the beach, however, we noticed some very ominous clouds beginning to thicken over the ocean – and how quickly they were thickening.  It had taken us most of the day to get to the beach, though, so we figured ignorance and stubbornness would prevail over the forces of nature.  Thus, we put on our sunscreen like good little boys and laid our towels out on the beach.

As soon as I reclined on to my towel, I felt a raindrop.  Then another.  Then many more.

Despite the rain, it was warm outside, so I was still kind of content laying on the beach, even with the annoyance of the rain, so I stupidly lay there in the hopes that the drizzle would stop.  I don’t know how long we silently waited in the rain for, but it felt like an eternity before Ryan piped up with the bright idea that we should probably get some shelter, at least because our bags were going to get soaked.  We retreated to some public bathrooms just off the beach, and used the outdoor showers to get the sand off, making it the first time I’ve ever taken a shower in the rain.  Sometimes life is about the small things, even if they are stupid, futile gestures.

We had been so focussed on escaping the downpour that we hadn’t really kept our eyes on the ocean, but from the shower stall I noticed a somewhat peculiar cloud formation a couple kilometres off the coast.  There seemed to be some sort of long, tube-shaped cloud quickly moving towards the land.  We stepped outside to get a better look and were awestruck.  Without the slightest hint of exaggeration, I can only describe it as a mushroom cloud, like you would see after an atomic bomb blast.  It was moving very fast, extended up and down the coast as far as I could see, and seemed to be bringing a lot of rain and perhaps lightning with it.  Not wanting to disappoint the readers of my sporadically-updated travel blog by suddenly acting out of character, Ryan and I decided to make another dumb decision by running outside with our cameras and taking as many pictures as we could. Sadly, I still don’t have a good enough internet connection to upload my travel photos, but to prove I’m not crazy I do have a link to a YouTube video taken by another witness to the same phenomenon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1topbniiRqk

As the wall of cloud passed over us, it brought hot winds and a torrential downpour. The rain was bad enough that we had to return to the flimsy shelter of the men’s toilets, and I began to seriously wonder if we had read the calendar wrong again and had actually gone to the beach during a category 4 cyclone.  Of all the ways to die, this had to be one of the dumbest.  I suppose going down in a blaze of glory has its merits, but it just doesn’t have the same panache if there’s only one person around to watch you do it, and that person is just as likely to be swept away by the storm surge as you.

I was about to start chiselling my last will and testament into the concrete floor of the men’s bathroom when, just as quickly as it started, the rain stopped.  I’ve seen enough disaster movies in my lifetime that I was prepared for the possibility that this was the eye of the storm, but the rain never returned.  We saw plenty of lightning striking the ocean far in the distance, but no other peril came to Whitfords beach that day – as it turned out, the cyclone veered away from Perth and lost a lot of strength.  Within half an hour, the sun was shining and we had a bit of time left to get our tan on.  We had stared down a cyclone and lived to tell the tale.  I can kind of see where storm chasers come from now, but I still don’t think I’d ever do that kind of thing on purpose.

As fun as my adventures in Perth were, I definitely felt an incredible sense of isolation at times.  It is literally on the opposite side of the planet from the places where I’ve spent the vast majority of my life, and as fun as it was, I began to feel the pull of home – friends, family, and my future all lie in Canada.  Last week I decided that I would rather head back to Kelowna early, so I decided to leave Perth, spend a few days each in Melbourne and Sydney, and fly back on April 5^th.  I’m currently in Adelaide, in the middle of my 4-day journey to Melbourne via Great Southern Railways.  I’m sure I’ll have plenty of adventures to share in my last couple weeks in Australia, but for now I’m signing off.

Over four thousand kilometres of rugged, empty Australia stand between Maroochydore and Perth.  Two weeks ago, I probably figured that I had a good grasp of how far that distance was.  A few hours by airplane, the width of the continental United States… you know, pretty far. I’m from the second-largest country in the world, I thought (soon to be first, if ex-soviet republics keep telling Russia to get buggered.)  No distance is too great for a swaggie from the Great White North!  As it turned out, I was wrong.  There is such a thing as too far, and it came somewhere around Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, which looks incredibly close to Perth on the map but is in fact still a solid 11-hour train journey away.  I have yet to test this, but I have a theory that the laws of physics break down in the middle of nowhere.  It’s why your odometer never matches up with those distances they post on the sides of long-forgotten highways, or why there are no obvious bathrooms between Golden, BC and Banff, Alberta – they have clearly been swallowed up by some rift created by a time-space anomaly. It’s also why it takes 11 hours to get from Kalgoorlie to Perth.

It probably didn’t help that I made the majority of the journey on the good old Indian Pacific, one of those magnificent Great Southern Railway leviathans which slugs along at a breakneck average speed of 70 kilometres an hour, finding any reason it can to stop, break down, and generally extend your old-timey cross-country adventure as long as humanly possible.  It also probably didn’t help that I was acutely aware that every second I stared out the window into the vast expanse of nothing that is the Nullarbor Plain would have to be repeated whenever I decided to leave Perth (null arbor is latin for no trees – yes, the best thing someone can say about that part of the outback is what it doesn’t have, but probably should).  In either event, it actually took me four days to cross those five thousand kilometres – many weeks faster than it took before the Indian Pacific track had been laid, but slowly enough that I firmly understand how big Australia actually is.

Not that the journey was terrible, though.  Since Brisbane was still underwater at the time, I elected to fly straight out of Maroochydore (they have a great airport with a fully functional bar – don’t worry, I checked) to Melbourne, Victoria, which is now the only state capital I haven’t spent any significant time in during this trip.  It is also the home of Uncle Lou and Aunt Maree, and they were kind enough to pick me up from the airport at midnight, provide a bed for the night, and drive me to the train station for 8 the next morning.  We also stayed up for a few hours and discussed family, sports, and the government.  I owe them a proper visit on the way back east, and I plan on taking in an Aussie Rules Football game in Melbourne so I’m sure I’ll see them soon.  If you’re reading this, thanks again!

After a short 10-hour train ride on the Overland track, I made a brief return to Adelaide, which, 2 months later, is still one of my favourite places in Australia.  The people are friendly, the weather is great, and I always have a much better time than I expected.  I decided not to stay at the eerily quiet Shakespeare International Hostel again – as much as I’d like to wake up in a tub of ice with my kidneys removed, I really didn’t have the time to file a kidnapping report with the police or haggle about health insurance coverage over the phone.  I instead settled in at Annie’s Place, which outclassed my previous Adelaide accommodation with its cheery courtyard, helpful staff, and lack of a great unwashed janitor who probably answers to the name Buffalo Bill.  Once I had checked in, the receptionist asked me a question you only hear in good hostels.

“What are you doing tonight?”

This is one of those situations where I know what is going to happen, and the voice of reason tries to steer me away from potential pain and shame, but my ego doesn’t listen and I stride unwittingly into the lions’ den.

“Well I don’t have any plans, why?”

“There’s a backpacker pub crawl tonight.”

I see that look in your eye, and NO, don’t do it.  If you go on a pub crawl, you will get drunk, and you will get a hangover.  Do you want to be on the longest train ride of your life with a bone-rattling hangover?”

“A pub crawl, eh? Go on.”

Fine, be polite, but respectfully decline the offer.  Be the classy guy, Jonboy.

“Well it’s only 10 dollars, and you get free entry to four bars and a club, no line, and a free drink at each one. You can also ride a mechanical bull.”

Wow.  That’s not bad…  I mean, NO! Hangovers. Trains. Bad Karma. You will live to regret this!

“Cash only or can I pay by card?”

Fine! You’re on your own from this point.  But don’t expect any sympathy when you come crawling back to me after your first week of law school. But for the love of god, don’t do the bull thing.  What is this, your stagette night or something?

Thus, a few hours later, I found myself at a bar called the Wool Shed, which I can only properly describe as the Calgary Stampede relocated to South Australia and crammed into a three-story night club, waiting in line to ride a mechanical bull, which for some unknown reason was perched above an inflatable crash mat decorated like the American Flag.  What can I say, cute American nurses can persuade me to do stupid things, especially after five free drinks.  As I rode that bucking headless bronco for a glorious two seconds, sailed through the air and flawlessly faceplanted into Old Glory, I decided that I rather like Adelaide.  This wasn’t exactly an authentic Australian experience, but  I always have fun here.

In completely unrelated news, I missed the start of Lance Armstrong’s final bicycle race by a day – the Tour Down Under, a weeklong race around South Australia, was due to start in Adelaide on Monday the 17^th, but I had to get on the Indian Pacific and make my way to Perth, slight hangover notwithstanding.  Taking a train over the Nullarbor Plain is the Ironman of boring travel – a 40-hour thrill ride with unforgettable sights such as DIRT and MORE DIRT.  As a stark reminder of how boring it actually is, the train crew likes to hype up your stop in Cook, South Australia at dawn of the second day – the nexus of the Outback!  We will be getting off at rush hour, so please look out for cars as you step off the train in Cook!

As our train pulled into the “station” at Cook, the first thing I noticed was the signpost.  It advertised, and I’d better make a list here in case I forget the dizzying array of amenities you can experience in Cook, the following things:

1. TOILETS
2. GIFT SHOP
3. SCHOOL

The first option seemed pretty self-explanatory, so I checked out the gift shop first.  It offered the usual cheap Aussie memorabilia that gets churned out of Bangladeshi factories on a daily basis: koala plushies, bushman hats, beer cosies (down here they call ‘em stubby holders – if I use that term when I get home don’t get all confused on me.)  In addition, however, they were selling “Certificates of Achievement” for crossing the Nullarbor Plain, which seemed a little dear, at 5 bucks, for something someone had made in 10 minutes in Microsoft Word and printed on card stock.  Never mind that we hadn’t even fully crossed the Nullarbor yet – do they hand these out to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that wanders through Cook? What if I had bought one and died between here and Esperance?  I’d like to see some accreditation credentials, that’s all I’m saying.  They also contained some enthralling demographic info on Cook.

POPULATION

2 PEOPLE

4 DOGS

100,00 FLIES

That comma placement error was theirs, not mine.  I think they may have been slightly exaggerating those numbers, though – I didn’t see ANY dogs.

Bored with the cheap schlock, I checked out the school house.  As it turns out, nobody goes to school there anymore.  Cook is a bona fide ghost town, but the strangest part is that it looked like the school had been recently renovated.  Not restored to its old colonial glory, mind you, but renovated within 10 years to better serve the students who actually went there.  Fresh paint, relatively new chairs and desks, and decent windows – Cook is a recent ghost town, which brings up all sorts of disturbing questions.  What happened? Why did anyone live here in the first place? Why did the train still stop here?  No, the homicidal janitor from the Shakespeare International Hostel hadn’t schemed to abduct me where nobody would notice – apparently the train changes crews in Cook.  But what do the train crews do when they’re on break here?  That signpost isn’t deceiving – other than a couple rusted, abandoned trailers, there are actually three buildings, plus one house that the couple who run the gift shop obviously own.  There wasn’t even a hospital, despite this humorous-yet-unnerving sign:

<Will post when I find a good enough connection to add photos.  The sign says “Our hospital needs your help, get sick.”>

Maybe staring at the unchanging horizon for too long was starting to get the better of my imagination.  In any case, the rest of the trip was rather uneventful, including our 4-hour stop in Kalgoorlie, home of the biggest open-cut mine in the world.  It didn’t really help that our 4-hour sojourn there was in total darkness, but maybe I’m just getting a little too bitter about a train ride that actually cost me nothing, thanks to the 6-month rail pass Mom and Dad got me as an early Christmas present.  It’s paid off in spades so far, and is probably the best investment possible for a backpacker.  Get one if you backpack Down Under!

In either event, I finally made it to Perth, and the place has been everything I imagined it would be: hot, sunny, friendly, and fun.  I’ll make another post on the place shortly.

Getting the hell out of Dodge

After days of deep contemplation, debate with my legal team, consultation of ancient star charts, and examining the entrails of a freshly-sacrificed goat, I have decided that it is probably in my best interest to leave Queensland as soon as possible, for the following reasons:

1. Food prices have risen in the past week by as much as 30 percent.
2. Jobs are becoming harder to come by, and those that exist offer shortened hours and lower wages.  Huzzah for supply and demand in the job market!
3. If some bogan so much as leaves a faucet running, my hostel will probably find itself in a foot of water soon.
4. I hear Perth is splendid at this time of year.

Yes, I am picking up sticks and swagging my way over to the most isolated metropolitan area on the planet, the only Australian state capital I haven’t seen, and The Economist‘s 5th-most liveable city in the world. I am not entirely sure how it tied with Calgary; maybe their writers haven’t been there in the winter.  Regardless, I’m quite happy to be escaping the danger, and judging by the amount of “are you alive?” e-mails, text messages, Facebook wall posts, and phone calls that I’ve been receiving, everyone else will be happy about it, too.

Since all of Brisbane has temporarily turned into Seaworld, only with more fetid stench and less Shamu, I’m going to avoid the transit nightmare there and fly directly out of Maroochydore tomorrow evening, to Melbourne – I have no idea why it is cheaper than going to Sydney, but I’ll take it!  Uncle Lou has offered to pick me up from the airport, let me crash at his place, and drive me to the train station the next day, where I will start my 3-day railway journey to Perth, stopping in Adelaide on the way.  I definitely owe him a proper visit on the way back, and this time it’s my shout.  I really didn’t expect to make it back that way, but the world moves in mysterious ways.  I’m going to leave it at that, as I have more arrangements to make and a dinner to eat, but rest assured I’ll be updating much more often now that I’m not stuck inside waiting out the storm.

Rain, rain, go away…

Wow, 4 weeks without a post. I deserve some sort of medal for my commitment to procrastination.  The problem is that I want to avoid the most common pitfall of most travel blogs, which is to bang out a list of things I’ve seen and done, post some accompanying pictures, and force-feed it to my friends and family.  I know you guys are all interested in that sort of thing to a point, but I would prefer to avoid being like Patty and Selma Bouvier, who foist their endless slideshows upon their unsuspecting family. I would rather write something of considerable length and literary quality about a specific, meaningful event than tick off some asinine list of cool things I did.  Unfortunately, once a couple such events occur, the dread of writing multiple such entries at once tends to push blog-writing onto the back burner.  I feel the ship has sailed on those entries anyway.  However, for the sake of continuity, I do feel kind of obligated to let everyone know what I’ve been doing, so without further ado, I have decided to do the exact thing I promised myself I wouldn’t, and humbly present a quick and painless list of interesting things that have happened to me in the past few weeks:

• Uncle Tony lent me Opa’s old Camry to drive around Tasmania.  I am convinced that the spirit of Opa was present and decided to play a practical joke on me, as I had the joy of contending with a flat tire, dead battery, and dead cigarette charge – which happened to power the GPS system – just as I got completely lost in downtown Hobart.  I may be partially responsible for the dead battery though. Love you, Opa!
• I drove to Wineglass Bay, wherein I engaged in one of the more difficult and painful hikes of my life in order to get “the best” possible view of the bay from the top of Mt Amos.  Worth it, I’d say:
• Spent a week in Hobart with the Direen clan: Aunt Gabby, Uncle Mal, Louie, Mathew, Jacinta, and Ruby. Even though I can count the number of times I’ve seen them all on one hand, I felt that we know each other much better than that might suggest. After all, we’re family!
• Developed a newfound appreciation for the sport of cricket as a result of staying with some cricket-lovers while the Ashes test was on.  Spurred on by fantastic speed bowling, Australia recovered from a dismal first innings by taking wickets like there was no tomorrow (including a couple ducks) to even the score in the Test.  You probably have no idea what that meant.
• Toured a real-deal darn-tootin’ BREWERY with Mathew: the Cascade Brewery in Hobart (he also married Jacinta there; he is a true Taswegian). Until 1995, brewers at Cascade were allowed to drink on shift, and would consume upwards of 20 pints a day whilst working.  This has been independently confirmed by Uncle Rudy, who used to work there but swears he wouldn’t drink on shift.  Your secret’s safe with Jono, Uncle Rudy!
• Spent Christmas around Launceston: Christmas Eve in Blackwood Creek with the Kapeller family, then Christmas Day at Galina’s Russian friends’ house.  I am convinced that I gained no less than 5 pounds on Christmas Day.  We did nothing but eat for 6 straight hours, and it was AWESOME.
• Went ziplining through the treetops with Tony and Victor, at speeds of up to 80 km/h and heights of up to 400 metres above the ground.  Very cool.
• Flew into Brisbane a couple weeks ago, and have been cursing the terrible weather ever since.  More on that later.
• Spent New Year’s Eve in Brisbane, having drinks with a fellow Canadian student, a Catholic Priest, a Scottish Army colonel, and a sheap-shearer from Western Australia.  A couple times throughout the night, I had to ask myself: “What is this, some kind of joke?”
• Attended Craig and Niki’s wedding at Sanctuary Cove on the Gold Coast.  Due to an outdoor concert in Surfer’s Paradise (where I stayed) that day, resulting in record crowds, I waited an hour and a half for a cab and was thus a little late to the wedding.  From what I hear, it was a beautiful ceremony. Jokes aside, it was nice to be there and be invited.
• Last week I took the train up to Maroochydore, a seaside town of around 40,000 on the Sunshine Coast.  I was spurred on by fond memories of a more relaxed pace of life and fantastic weather, year-round.  Life sure is laid-back here, but as for the weather…

Should anyone desire elaboration on any of those stories, leave a note in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

If you have opened a newspaper recently, you are probably aware that an area the size of British Columbia is underwater in Queensland.  It’s mostly to the north in the more low-lying areas.  I wasn’t expecting endless sunshine when I arrived on the Sunshine Coast (oh the irony), but I wasn’t expecting this kind of weather.  We have had half a day of sunshine in the past 8 days.  The rain comes down in torrents, the sky angrily thunders, and storm drains flood with alarming regularity.  A couple streets were flooded around town this morning.  And Maroochydore is doing just fine, by the standards of the rest of the state.  I really have no right to complain though, as many people further north have lost their homes and livelihoods, and I’m just worried about being a little soggy.  So don’t feel sorry for me, feel sorry for them.

As a result, however, I’ve been stuck inside for most of the week.  Since my hostel doesn’t have internet access – it’s a very low-tech affair – most of us have been spending our time watching movies and reading.  Today I managed to find a decent break in the rain, which allowed me to run to the Maroochydore Library to use their free internet.  Surprise, surprise, the library is closed today “due to flooding.”  Someone’s overreacting just a little bit, if you ask me – there are no flood waters anywhere near here.  Methinks a lazy librarian just wanted a paid day off. No worries though, as some kind/forgetful soul left their wireless router running, so I am sitting on a rock outside the library, typing away on my netbook, hiding from the rain like some sort of homeless internet junkie.  Ain’t life grand?

I have managed to occupy myself with a little bit of part-time work, however.  A furniture store called “Akasha” in a mall nearby likes to hire backpackers to do their heavy lifting for them.  Not the most glamorous job, but minimum wage around here is a whopping $17.70 an hour and I like money, so I spent a couple days last week unloading a freight container from India, unpacking and assembling furniture, and moving it around the store with John, another backpacker from northern England.  Great fun, wot wot? They are receiving another container from Bali this week (assuming it doesn’t get washed away in a monsoon), and I will be back to help them unload that one too.

As you can see, I am gradually transitioning from the “holiday” part of “working holiday” to the “working” part.  Even as a frugal backpacker, it isn’t cheap to travel around Australia.  My initial aim was to find short-term odd jobs as I traveled around, then move on to new places to find new work.  It’s much more risky than settling down and getting a steady job, but I think it will be the perfect antidote to the next phase of my life, which will involve hunkering down in libraries in some law school in North America.  I’m not sure where it will be yet (already accepted by Osgoode, though!), but wherever I am I will be staying put, working hard, and generally avoiding adventure.

I likely have a great opportunity in the next couple weeks, as Uncle Tony has a friend who runs a mushroom farm on the Sunshine Coast. From the sounds of it, I will work for him for a few weeks doing manual labour and all sorts of Charlie Work. The job includes a free place to stay and use of a car to get me around, so it should be a good way to save some money while I figure out where to go next.  Probably south, where it’s a little drier.

And so it goes

First off, I’d like to apologize to my 40-odd readers for not updating my travel blog recently.  I’m doing just fine, but recent events have sort of put the blog on hold. (As an aside, 40?! I didn’t know I had that many friends.  Maybe I’m big in Japan.)

One of my priorities for this journey was to see my Uncle Rod, who was diagnosed with brain cancer last year and declared terminal not long ago.  He was the husband of my godmother, Aunt Gertraud, and I’ve had nothing but good times when I’ve actually been able to see him, which hasn’t been too often, given the distance between Kelowna, British Columbia and Exton, Tasmania.  I will always have very fond memories of the motor-home trip my family took across western Canada with Uncle Rod and Aunt Gertraud – every time I see a bison, I still think of Uncle Rod’s single-minded determinedness to ride one after he’d had a few drinks.  Two weeks ago, Mom and Dad phoned me in Alice Springs and let me know that doctors had only given him two months two live.  I was happy I would at least get to see him one more time, because it had been 8 years since I last saw him, but he passed away on Monday, the same day that I was flying to Tasmania.

Even though I’ve only had a few occasions to spend time with Uncle Rod, the fact that I miss him so much is only a testament to how well he treated his nieces and nephews.  I’ll always remember him as a man who was as smart as he was funny, and who most often had a bit of a mischievous look in his eye.  I always saw him as sort of a “man’s man:” he knew a lot more about cars than most people I know, and knew how to herd cattle and shear a sheep, which I remember thinking was one of the coolest things in the world as a 15-year-old.  Looking back on it, those are all still pretty cool things.

As you can imagine, last week was a bit of a deviation from my first few weeks in Australia.  I flew out of Darwin on Monday morning (good riddance, humidity!), and landed in Hobart, Tasmania around 5 pm.  Aunt Gabrielle and Uncle Malcolm picked me up at the airport and broke the news there.  Their son Mathew was there with his wife Jacinta and their baby Ruby, and we all went back to their place to meet Louis, Gabby and Mal’s other son, and have dinner.  We spent the evening looking through old photos for some pictures of Rod, and we have scientifically determined that (A) the Direen family has more pictures of the Ungaro kids than of their own, and (B) Auntie Gabby has had more haircuts than John McCain has houses. Bet you didn’t expect a 2-year-old political zinger! I may lose part of my Japanese (and Canadian) audience on that one, but Jonny takes risks!

We drove up north to see Aunt Gertraud and the rest of the family on Tuesday, which went as you would expect given that a funeral was being organized at the time.  I saw most of my family for the first time in 8 years, including Oma, who looks pretty good for 84.  For anyone who is wondering, she still panics when the concept of driving a car is so much as mentioned, still pronounces it “Owsh-star” (Austar), and still tells stories in that engaging Kapeller way.  I don’t think she makes grießnockerl as much as she used to, though.  I also had the pleasure of meeting the Crowdens, Uncle Rod’s family, over the course of my stay at Aunt Gertraud’s.  Like everyone I’ve met thus far in Tasmania, they are incredibly down-to-earth and genuine people.  They are also, by admission of Rod’s brother Denis, very good at all things mathematical and mechanical, but incredibly bad at anything artsy-fartsy.  Thankfully they have decided upon jobs in the engineering sector, rather than setting out for Melbourne to be buskers. Jokes aside, it was great getting to know them and hearing them swap stories about Uncle Rod.

I spent one night and 2 days at Aunt Gertraud’s, then was kidnapped by Uncle Tony, his wife Galina, and her son Viktor, and taken to Blackwood Creek, about a half-hour’s drive away.  Well, it’s usually half an hour, but on Wednesday night it took a little longer because we had to drive through some flood waters.  The torrential rain that has been flooding the mainland has not spared Tasmania, so a couple creeks burst their banks last week.  Never a stranger to danger, Uncle Tony drove Opa’s old Camry through waters that were up to the doors, with Galina panicking in the front, and Viktor and I enjoying the thrill in the back.  As an aside, though, this flooding is getting ridiculous.  Half the mainland seems like it’s underwater.  Giving the timing of her much-hyped visit to Australia, Oprah is clearly the cause of it all, and it has become clear to me that we need to sacrifice her to the rain gods to appease them.  Who’s with me?

Thus, since Wednesday night I have been staying in Blackwood Creek, Tasmania, temporarily bumping the town’s population up from 314 to 315.  Viktor’s (age 11) new craze is nerf guns, so I have already been subjected to several bombardments from his battery-operated, belt-loaded nerf machine gun.  In the decade or so since I had nerf guns, they have progressed from the equivalent of colonial English muzzle-loaders to the kind of weaponry you read about in a Tom Clancy novel.  The world I once knew is gone.  I got my first taste of real firearms yesterday, however, as we boys took some pot shots at milk cartons with a .22 magnum.  Uncle Tony is planning on taking me wallaby-shooting with his friends soon.  To say life out here is rural is a bit of an understatement.

Uncle Rod’s funeral was on Friday. He joined the Tasmanian Police cadets at the age of 16, and since he remained in the force until his death, he was entitled to a full police service.  His casket was brought to the funeral home in a police motorcade, the commissioner gave a short eulogy (in addition to the excellent one by Rod’s brother, Harvey), and what seemed like every cop in the state showed up.  Uncle Lou was sitting in the pew behind me, and just before the service began (the pallbearers had already brought the casket in), he commented to me, entirely too loudly, that there probably weren’t any police officers protecting Launceston, the closest major city.  A stern scolding ensued from Aunt Marie, but Lou was adamant that family members were allowed to make such jokes.  I guess that “RESERVED” sign on the front three pews at funerals grants some sort of diplomatic immunity.  I may have suggested to Lou (in a much quieter tone) that we duck out and rob a bank; I like to think Uncle Rod would have laughed at the exchange, so I feel pretty good about it.

Speaking of Uncle Rod’s sense of humour, I think it was well-represented at the service.  His old police bike was set up outside, and atop it sat a framed picture of him doing a wheelie on a marked motorcycle, in full uniform, during his traffic-patrol days.  The back page of the program featured a photo of him mugging for the camera at a recent wedding, and Harvey made sure to tell some amusing anecdotes during the eulogy.  I’m going to make sure to remember a quotation he attributed to Rod: “there’s no point in getting old if you can’t get cunning.”  The service was informal, but it was still a funeral in the end.  It was hard to say goodbye to someone whose life was cut short and to whom I never got to physically say farewell.  Aunt Gertraud was clearly in grief, but I am amazed at how strong she has been.

After the service, the Kapeller and Crowden families retired to the Centennial, a hotel bar in Launceston where Oma and Opa used to have lunch every Sunday.  This was my first chance to really reunite with my whole extended Australian family in 8 years, but they are all such welcoming and open people that I felt like it had been no time at all.  Having a couple pints of Boag’s and watching my uncles argue over what Aussie Rules Football team to cheer for is already one of the highlights of my trip.  As in North America, sporting rivalries are heavily tied to geography.  A memorable line from Uncle Lou: “We could solve all of Australia’s problems if we just renamed the country Victoria and let the Victorian government handle it.”  I bet he would get along well with the Owsinskis.

I don’t have much else to add at the moment, as it’s getting late and I have to get up to drive to Hobart in the morning.  Yes, I will be driving on the wrong side of the road, through 2-lane roundabouts and down back-country roads.  Uncle Tony has given me a crash course in Aussie driving, so I feel pretty good about it.  I just wanted to keep my friends and family in the loop with this post, and I promise that I will return to regular updates. I love you all!

Walkabout

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Yes, this is a rare two-for-one posting in one day.  Don’t get used to it.

The walkabout, an Australian tradition of going for a walk in no particular direction (usually in the bush) when you need to sort through your thoughts, is in danger of becoming a lost art in a modern Australia that seems mostly focused on transporting its citizens between air-conditioned buildings in their air-conditioned cars.  Not owning a car down here and finding myself too cheap for public transit, I’m becoming a lot more familiar with the walkabout, and it’s something I’m glad I’ve started.

Readers of my previous blog entry might have found my thoughts to be a little scattered; that’s certainly how I felt as I was putting them to the digital page, and that’s how I feel all too often as a 23-year-old man-child who is pretty sure he has a mild and untreated case of adult ADD.  Today was just one of those days where all my anxieties, which have been percolating through my consciousness for some time, bubble to the top but won’t float away.  Usually I can deal with these one at a time, but on days like today I feel a little overwhelmed by the world ahead of me and have trouble dealing with a lot of things as a result.  After I published my entry and stared at my computer screen for what felt like minutes but might have been an hour, I decided the only solution was to start walking, and not stop until I had quelled a bit of the unrest inside of me.  This is, roughly, my train of thought as I walked.  I’ve never done this sort of writing before, and I’ve never really exposed my mind like this, so no guarantees as to what you’ll find.

Tonight’s Walkabout

I leave my hostel, the Dingo Moon Lodge, and walk down Mitchell Street toward Darwin Harbour.  The morning brought heavy rains, but the skies have cleared since, so it’s just another sunny late afternoon in Darwin, which means mid-30s and suffocating humidity.  I make my way through the dinner-rush mob that descends upon the downtown core every evening, my mind half a world away from the well-heeled sophisticates who are doubtless looking forward to snidely telling their poor server that their grilled fillet of sole is “too fishy.”  I’m concerned about friends and family back home; without naming anyone or going into detail, a few people close to me are going through some rough patches. Thanks to the marvels of the information age, I’m still in the loop, but it’s hard to provide emotional support when you’re 14,000 kilometres away.  This is a tough time of year in North America, especially for students, who make up most of my social circle back home.  Exams and due dates are weighing heavily on their minds, the weather is never nice in the late fall, and the uplifting holiday season is still too far out of reach to be of any comfort.  Add on a personal issue or two and life isn’t a lot of fun; I’ve drawn water from that well a few times, and it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.  I need to get away from the yuppies and partygoers, so I head in the direction of Bicentennial Park, a stretch of parkland several kilometres long that runs about half the length of the harbour.

I was here yesterday with Benny; it was nice at noon, but it’s more pleasant later in the day when the trees cast longer shadows.  Darwin has a history of tragedy, and it is marked in this park: shrines to fallen soldiers, memorials for those who perished in Japanese air raids in the Second World War, dedications to victims of Cyclone Tracy, the tropical storm that flattened Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974.  The owner of Dingo Moon was born in Darwin and remembers it well; his family owned the town funeral parlour and was pretty busy with the 57 corpses that were found in the aftermath.  His job, at age 11, was to clear the road for the hearse as they picked up corpses.  They had to pull 2 wagons full of spare tires as they did it, because so much shrapnel littered the roads.  His family must be a lot of fun at parties.

The entire town was rebuilt to stricter building specifications, and now it’s a bustling seaside city that likes to party and tries not to take itself too seriously. The sun is reflected off the lazily rolling waves of the harbour, and I feel a funny mix of guilt and loneliness.  I’m in a tropical paradise having a great time (and trust me, despite the melancholy tone of this entry, I’m having a lot of fun,) but it would be nice to have a good friend or two from home to enjoy it with.  None of them can be here, of course, because they are back in the frozen north, leading far more responsible lives than me.  There’s no sarcasm meant there; I think it’s important to work towards a better future for yourself, and they’ve all certainly done more in that regard than I have this year.  In 2010, I’ve moved from one resort town to another, partied a little too much, and generally just enjoyed the responsibility- free life of a bartender.  I guess I’m headed to law school next year, though, so I can’t be too hard on myself.

Law school.  There we go, the big issue of the day.  I won’t sugar-coat it; I am frightened by my future on a regular basis.  Sure, there’s a lot more to be optimistic about than there was a year ago, or two years ago.  I at least have a plan: get my JD, maybe a dual degree, start making enough money to actually save, and grow into a responsible adult who is ready to start a family.  I just keep getting the sinking feeling that I won’t be ready for the array of challenges that go hand-in-hand with a responsible life.  A couple months ago I was at Doc Willoughby’s Pub (5 bucks for the shout-out, Nick) in Kelowna with James, my old roommate and chef of Cabana, a place that has had a huge impact on my direction in life and on my evolution as a person.  Our conversation somehow devolved from a perfectly acceptable discussion of the merits of certain NHL goaltenders to the dreaded topic of the future, so I voiced essentially the above opinion to him.  Since he is almost 10 years my senior and is gradually succeeding in his quest for world culinary domination (I may be exaggerating), I figured I would ask him how he dealt with the challenges that life has thrown at him.

“Does it ever get any easier? Dealing with responsibility, I mean.”

“You know, Jonny, I asked my aunt that once (higher-up in an oil company who has far more responsibility than either of us could ever fathom), and she told me that it never does.  Every time you deal with the next hurdle, you feel like you aren’t ready to handle it, but in the end you have to deal with it, ready or not.  Everyone in here walks around every day with the same feeling you have right now.”

“I don’t know whether to be comforted or even more scared by that thought.”

Nearly every account of law school describes it as a soul-sucking institution of despair that attempts to break every creative bone in your body in order to re-shape you into a mindless automaton that is incredibly good at doing paperwork.  Don’t get me wrong, I still want to go to law school and become a lawyer.  I am not having second thoughts about my decision.   I also have realistic expectations; I don’t think life will mimic a Grisham novel on a daily basis…  I consider myself to be a better writer than that hack. I have, however, been genuinely interested in the law for many years and I’m looking forward to a somewhat-respectable profession with plenty of possibility for upward mobility.  Law school just looks to be very hard, slightly depressing, and incredibly expensive.  I’m also in the throes of the admission process, so I have no idea where I will be accepted, and thus no idea where I will be a year from now.  Suffice it to say it will be much colder than Darwin.  I don’t deal with uncertainty very well, which was never much help as an economics undergrad.

I walk down a set of uncommonly slippery stairs that lead to bare grassland, dotted with a few mangrove trees, on the harbour’s rocky shore.  In a town as rainy as Darwin, you’d think someone would have the foresight to install outdoor stairwells that weren’t covered in what I can best describe as rubberized linoleum, not unlike the floor of a 1950s-style diner.  Someone has definitely slipped and cracked their head on these stairs, but I don’t see any memorials for recently-deceased persons so that’s a small comfort.  The setting sun is still glaring at me over the harbour, and I now have a fine mantle of sweat, which of course doesn’t evaporate because of the amount of moisture in the air.  At this precise moment in time I stop caring about personal hygiene for the rest of the day and feel quite liberated.  Yes, ma’am, I probably don’t smell like a bed of roses, but you’re an unpleasant twit and I can shower.  Thankfully nobody brought up my hygiene, or the verbal arrows would have blotted out the sun.

I watch the fishing trawlers floating in the harbour, less numerous in the wet season, and continue to fret about things that I can’t control at this particular moment.  My grandfather used to say that the key to success was to learn the price that was necessary to achieve, and then be willing to pay that price.  An effective mantra, and fitting for a man who earned his keep for many years as a real estate agent and shrewd investor. My constant worry is that, when push comes to shove, I won’t be enough of a man to pay that price.  My list of failures in the past 5 years (I regard 2005 as the beginning of my actual life, but that’s a topic for another day), from academic to romantic to athletic, have generally all stemmed from an unwillingness to pay the necessary price.  Those failures seem trivial, even laughable, in the face of the tests I will be facing soon.

I walk to the shore, which is less of a beach and more a mound of marine detritus and discarded building materials, and pick up a large rock.  There is a young, attractive Australian woman talking to what sounds like her large, protective boyfriend on her cell phone, so I continue my walk along the rocky outcrop.  I am reminded of an exercise that Deborah, my therapist during the summer of 2009, forced me to do – much against my will, I’ll add.  Deborah figured I was beating myself up too much over my previous failures; she was rightly convinced that this was the root of the depressive funk that I’d been in for nearly 6 months at the time.  In late August, Deborah made me find a large, heavy stone and bring it to our next session, where she told me I would have to do two things with it.  I would have to carry it around with me wherever I went, and every time I had a negative thought about myself I would write it on that rock in permanent marker.

Since I was still at the emotional point of my life where I couldn’t bring myself to do anything other than sit at my computer until I had to go to work (SOMEBODY on Drak’Thul had to farm Eternal Fire),* and since there was no way in hell I was going to bring my rock of self-loathing to my bar, I felt comfortable leaving it on my desk for a few days (I figured it would be more subtle to wear a name tag at work that said “Hi! I am UNHINGED.”) I still wrote down all those negative thoughts, so by the next session it was covered in a wide array of mean and creative insults.  I showed my shame rock to Deborah, and we discussed the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the rock weighing me down as a carried it around.  I hadn’t been carrying the crazy rock around, of course, but it was indeed quite heavy so I got the gist of it.  She then looked me dead in the eyes and said “Jon, it is time to get rid of that weight.”

When I told Deborah what I did the following week, she seemed a little surprised.  Perhaps I took her directions a little too literally, but I felt bad about slightly bending the rules of the insult rock, so goddammit I was going to follow through on this one.  In my final act of self-flagellation for my past failures, I ran up the mountain behind my parents’ house with this boulder, which had to be a good 15 pounds.  Knox Mountain is really not one of those mountains you are supposed to jog (are any?), and I wasn’t exactly in peak physical form at the time.  Anyways, I gasped and sweat my way to something that felt like a summit, and came across a large duck pond in a wooded area.  With all the grace of an octopus falling from a tree, I shot-putted that rock as close to the centre of the pond as I possibly could, which in reality wasn’t very close to the centre at all.  That was the week that I turned my back on my habit of mentally tearing myself down, and I’ve been a much more happy and stable person ever since. I occasionally think of that rock, sitting at the bottom of the pond.  The mountain water will gradually leach away the insults, so soon the rock’s surface will be clean.  It will no longer be a shame/insult/crazy rock, just your average moss-covered boulder at the bottom of a fresh Canadian pond.

At this point I am nearing a fenced-off construction yard, so I stop and stare off into the Timor Sea, attempting to swat away some of Australia’s legendary flies at the same time.  Straight ahead lays Japan, I think, so home – Kelowna, Seattle, Banff – must be that way, over the other side of the bay.  Even though we go through some tough times, we always have other people to lean on, even if they’re on the other side of the world.  Our friends and family love us for our imperfections, and make us feel less flawed just by their company.

I hurl the rock into the ocean.  There is an overweight shirtless man standing beside his van, on the other side of the street, holding his camera.  He may have taken a picture or two of the rock ritual.  I wonder if insult rocks are big down under.

Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” is the next song on my iPod playlist.  As always, I remember yelling the chorus -“singing” just isn’t the right word after several Jack and Cokes – at Bernard Avenue with Lenny at 2 in the morning outside Doc Willoughby’s on a cold night last year (you might call this Doc’s thing a worrisome pattern, but I call it loyalty to a pretty good bar).  This was shortly after Lenny named me his protégé and began to hand down a list of rules of conduct that now form the central tenets of what I only half-jokingly call “Lennyism,” which is the Lenny Millions philosophy of life as I see it.  (If you don’t know the guy, you probably won’t understand the name – he’s one of my best friends, the guy who finally convinced me to move to Banff, and essentially a titan of the service industry.)  At its purest, Lennyism is a celebration of the moment, isolating it from the past and future, except where relevant to the story. The story, of course, is the main ritual of Lennyism – it is always funny, and generally is told in a dark and uncrowded bar, but doesn’t have to be.  Curiously enough, the dedication to living in the moment probably would make it compatible with Zen Buddhism, something else I’ve dabbled in lately – Buddhist meditation turns out to be great at helping me sleep without medication.  It also focuses on isolating consciousness from past and future; the only real difference between the two philosophies is the occasional dirty joke and a love of two things: “cold ones” and “down here.” **

As the sun sets, I skirt the construction site and continue my walkabout along the harbour.  I find a nice little fish and chip shop, which seems just a little seedy, like all good fish joints, and decide to treat myself: a grilled local barramundi sandwich with a side of chips whose portion size I can only properly describe as “heroic.”  I opt for takeaway, and take my mammoth meal down the pier, where I find a nice spot to sit facing the airport and watch planes leave the continent, bound for Asia, possibly connecting to North America, provided no more AirBus engines catch fire en route.  To strains of the Beatles and Johnny Cash, I eat my very Australian sandwich, which contains a nice slice of beetroot (it’s growing on me, which is worrisome), and further contemplate Lennyism.

Horace Walpole, an 18^th-century British politician best described as a true example of a renaissance man, is famous for the epigram “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”  I often do too much of both, but it’s when the melodramatic, “feeling” part of me gets off its leash that I tend to get into confusing melancholic funks, like the one I’m fighting through on my walk today.  I’ve felt for a while that the Lennyist way of life is the perfect antidote.  Zen Buddhism is the philosophy of compassion, while Lennyism is my philosophy of humour.  You might call them yin and yang, if that weren’t dangerously close to the sort of pseudo-religious populist bunk that I usually refer to as the bane of my existence.

On this pier, on the northern edge of the country, with the twilight darkening, I make a decision.  I have 5 months left to explore this wonderful continent, get to know its eccentric folk, and generally enjoy the hell out of life before I return to the serious continent and deal with the rest of my life, which I am definitely looking forward to, but can’t do anything about until I fly home in May.  I’m not going to lose my compassion, and I will do whatever I can to provide support to the people I love, but I am dedicating this journey to feeding the other side of my soul, the part that thinks and laughs and finds life to be nothing if not a grand comedy and adventure.  It’s the reason why I decided to make this journey, and even if I lose sight of it at times, I must always remember that it is there, and that I probably won’t get this chance again.   So you can expect plenty of stories, and even if they won’t be told in a dive bar, they will be funny and will (I hope) be the result of my living in the moment, rather than brooding on the past or worrying myself sick about the future.

I can’t finish my meal.  I am not enough of a hero to polish off the French fries, and I once again find myself the subject of an insectoid assault; I’m starting to feel like King Kong as he vainly tries to fight off the Air Force.  Defeated, yet optimistic, I call it a night and walk back to Dingo Moon.  I listen to “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” by Warren Zevon as I walk.  It seems strangely fitting for this point in time, and I’m not sure why.

*This is a World of Warcraft joke.  Don’t worry if you didn’t get it, any WoW nerd will assure you that it wasn’t that funny to begin with.

**This is another inside joke, but it’s actually funny.  Had you lived in Banff this summer you would probably find it hysterical, so you should probably laugh anyways, so as not to make the situation awkward.

It’s a hostel life for me

One thing a backpacker learns early on in his travels is that the “free food” shelf at any given hostel is quite possibly God’s manifestation of himself on this mortal plane of existence.  I’m already losing track of the number of times that I have been in need of one essential ingredient to complete a meal, only to have that exact thing appear on the shelf, as some other backpacker has checked out and left behind exactly what I’ve been looking for. Fruit, spices, even a tube of Vegemite that I have been lugging around in my backpack for over 1,500 kilometres… it’s like the Room of Requirement, for my fellow Harry Potter fans (and I know you’re out there, don’t lie to me.)

I’ve been a little quiet on the blog lately, because as you can probably guess I’ve been laying low at backpacker hostels.  It was a conscious choice in Alice Springs, because as enchanting as the dusty Outback is, Alice Springs is a town with some serious issues.  It has a large aboriginal population, and the social problems that our First Nations face in Canada (in Kelowna, at least) pale in comparison to the degradation of the human spirit that you see in the faces of the Aborigines of Alice Springs.  Alcohol and substance abuse are rampant; a simple walk around town will show that.  Many Aussies will make the joke “it’s 10 o’clock somewhere” if they have a drink a little early in the day, but it seems a common mantra for the Aborigines who stumble around the town square, drunk before lunch.  Child sexual abuse and violence are also pressing issues; the situation got so bad that in 2007 the Howard administration intervened with the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, a package of laws designed mostly to protect the at-risk youth of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.  As in Canada, the issue is complex, the outlook bleak, and the situation depressing.

The Alice Springs YHA, however, is an oasis of cheer in a town that has earned the distinction of being the stabbing capital of the world. The staff were incredibly friendly, and I had some great experiences inside the heavily-fortified confines of the hostel.  As one travel partner parted ways with me, I met another – Benedikt, a 28-year-old guy from Berlin that was on the same train to Alice with me, and headed out to Darwin on the same train as me, too.  He’s from East Berlin, so I light-heartedly call him Benny from the Bloc, but I’m not sure if he’s seen the J-Lo video.  On Saturday we earned ourselves a free night’s accommodation by putting together a barbecue dinner for the other hostel residents.  It was as simple as buying ingredients for burgers and salad at Woolworth’s, doing a bit of prep and firing up the grill.  He’s had a fair amount of experience working in kitchens, and I decided to use my front-of-house sales experience, along with the in-house PA system, to drum up some sales:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Alice Springs YHA, may I bring your attention to a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to have an authentic Australian barbecue meal cooked by the two young men you see standing in front of you.  Benny is a legendary red-seal German chef with a wealth of experience in the restaurant industry, and while I lack such credentials, my mother tells me I am incredibly handsome, so we have that going for us too.”

It was pretty dumb, I’ll admit, but when you put a microphone in my hand you have to expect the unexpected. I may have exaggerated a bit on both counts.   We sold a fair amount of burgers, not quite covering the cost of food, but it was the hostel’s money so no skin off my nose.  Our BBQ also featured some outstanding live music, courtesy of Brad, a 21-year old traveling Adelaideian guitarist who looks suspiciously like a young, black-haired Gimli the dwarf. He showed up with his guitar, harmonica, and bongo drum, and together with the hostel’s didgeridoo we had the all the ingredients for a sunset jam session after he regaled us with his insane blues-guitar skills during dinner. I am not exaggerating here, Brad’s a bloody savant.

As my friends and family know, if I’m within 100 metres of a guitar, and if neither the axe nor I are locked down under Fort Knox-style security, I will get my grubby paws on it, and I will probably play a song or two that you did not expect to hear. Thus, within about an hour of the jam session beginning, I found myself playing a medley of I Want it That Way by the Backstreet Boys and One of Us by Joan Osborne, accompanied by a slightly reluctant choir of Australians, Germans, Kiwis, French, and Italians.  I think our take on “Piano Man” sounded a little better (when will I ever again have the chance to play that song accompanied by a skilled didge player like James, one of the hostel staff?), but nothing quite bridges cultural divides like bland 1990s pop music.  The songs made me miss my Cabana crew and Seattle friends, respectively, but there was something mystical about the whole experience.  The night also made the headline of the inaugural Alice Springs YHA newsletter. Somehow I don’t see this nickname sticking:

After another night in the YHA (another communal meal, Die Hard 4, then beer and poker with another international crowd –  who ended up winning that game, Steve?), it was time to catch the Ghan to Darwin.  Once again, the valiant railroad engineers were met with fierce adversity, and pulled through on nothing but their wits and stunning good looks.  Apparently a rather nasty desert storm, perhaps a tornado, derailed a freight train over the weekend and destroyed 300 metres of track.  The Ghan coming through from Adelaide had to wait in one spot for 11 straight hours, and pulled into Alice Springs some 7 hours late.  Through some feat of engineering magic that I clearly don’t understand, we left 5 hours behind schedule and still made it to Darwin on time.

I can’t believe that the same territory that houses Uluru is also home to Darwin.  They’re two completely different worlds.  Gone are the goannas, dry heat, and vast expanses of nothing, replaced by monsoons, a pervasive stickiness, and lush rainforests.  The only common thread between the two is that in both places there is a constant sense that Mother Nature is doing her very best to kill all humans who dare cross her path.  In the Outback we had to watch out for venomous snakes and spiders, dehydration, and dingoes.  In Darwin, if the box jellyfish and crocodiles don’t kill you, there’s always a murderous cyclone or a war with Japan.  The last one might be a little outdated, I’ll have to look it up

Skäll: Jonny’s Outback Safari

If I had a bucket list, I’d be crossing out a few items today.  I’ve seen Uluru, camped under billions of stars in the Southern Hemisphere, and even cooked and eaten a camel.  Well, not the WHOLE camel, but… just read on, and I’ll explain.

On Monday afternoon, I stepped off the Ghan, the infamous train that links Adelaide, on Australia’s southern coast, with Darwin, to the far north.  This line is said to follow the trail cut through the Outback by Afghan cameleers over a century ago; hence the name “the Afghan Express,” which was shortened to the Ghan because one of Australia’s greatest pastimes is to shorten phrases to the point where they become unintelligible.  It wasn’t completely linked through to Darwin until 2004, and has been plagued by floods, conflict with Aborigines, and economic woes since it first underwent construction back in 1878.  My journey was no exception to the curse of the Ghan, as our locomotive died about halfway between Adelaide and Alice Springs.  I can’t blame the poor bugger for giving out, though, because our train was a full 760 metres long.  That’s half a mile, to my metrically-challenged friends.  I really wanted to take a picture of the front of the thing when we were stopped, but I didn’t feel like a 10 minute walk to the front of the train.

It was “no worries,” though, as it only took about half an hour to retrieve a replacement locomotive from a nearby rail station, which did a fine job until it ran out of fuel about 2 hours out of Alice Springs.  Now before you point a derisive, triumphant finger at me and say “HA! Is the train so much better than air travel now,” keep in mind that if I were aboard an airplane that lost its only engine and then ran out of fuel, I would probably be in too many little pieces to write this blog post.  It took around 45 minutes to get some new fuel delivered, everyone laughed it off, and we still pulled into Alice Springs ahead of schedule.  Chalk up another victory for the railroad engineer, that noble, dying breed of übermensch.

When Tim and I first stepped off the train, I initially thought this journey might have been a bad idea.  The temperature was above 40 degrees Celsius, there was no shade, and Alice Springs, a town of 28,000 people, is about 1500 kilometres from anything else that you could accurately call a modern civilization.  After a 10 minute walk to our hostel, I was already drenched in sweat and cursing the vengeful god who put the sun in the sky and the flies in the air .  Four days later, though, I’ve changed my tune a little.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still unbearably hot for the majority of the day, and I still think that after the plague of insects was done devouring ancient Egypt in biblical times, it decided to set up shop in Central Australia.  The flies here are RIDICULOUS.  They eat razor blades for breakfast, then wash it down with a tall, cool glass of that insect repellent that you naïvely thought would protect you from the ravenous swarm.  I currently have between 20 and 30 bug bites on me, and judging by the look of some of the people I saw in the hostel this morning, I’m doing pretty well.  I saw Tim before he jetted off to Canberra, and I was kind of tempted to play connect-the-dots on his arms.  Bugs and sun aside, though, the Outback is home to some weird and wonderful things, of which I saw plenty on my three-day Outback safari.

I booked the trip with a company called Adventure Tours.  I didn’t know much about it when I booked the tour the night before, but it became obvious that we would be roughing it when our guide, James, pulled the van over about halfway to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and told us that we needed to collect firewood.  I was personally ecstatic to do manly things such as making fire and grilling dead animals, but a few members of our 15-person troupe might have been slightly taken aback.  We were a regular model UN, with representatives from Germany, Holland, Switzerland, France, Poland, South Korea, and Japan.  I was the lone member from the Commonwealth (excluding our guides), and possibly the youngest of the group.  I’m not exactly an avid outdoorsman, but my Eurasian comrades were a little less used to camping than us Canucks.  I liked our weird, dysfunctional little group, though.  The common language was more often German than English, and communication from our guide to the rest of the group tended to devolve into a hilarious multilingual game of telephone. I was disgusted by the Europeans’ use of mayonnaise on everything, and the rest of the group in turn reviled me when I proudly spread Vegemite on my toast yesterday morning. Ah, the joys of the cultural melting pot.

Food can also bring people together, however.  I had the pleasure of doing the lion’s share of the cooking for our hot meals (joined every time by Roger, a nice young guy from the Netherlands.)  I jumped at the chance for the first meal, as James informed us that he had brought some authentic Australian meat for us to barbecue and eat on the first night: beef steak, kangaroo steak, and camel sausage.  Roger and I wasted no time in snagging the icebox and firing up the grill, because how many times in your life will you get the chance to throw camel on the grill?  Kangaroo tasted as I expected – a little tough unless cooked very rare, but similar to bison in flavour.  Camel was a complete surprise, as I expected an animal that spends most of its time walking in the desert to be dry and stringy.  Those sausages, though, were some of the best I have ever had.  Mom, when I get home I would like camel sausages in the freezer.  That is my only request!

Our last dinner was spaghetti bolognese, and what does any Ungaro man do when spaghetti is for dinner? He makes the sauce.  We didn’t exactly have the ingredients for Nana’s famous tomato sauce, so I dusted off my three months of Earls saucier experience and whipped up what I figured would be a decent ragu alla bolognese – North American style, of course, which means excessive amounts of tomato base.  I was asked several times during dinner where I had learned to cook, so either I did an acceptable job or I can’t understand sarcasm when delivered in accented, broken English.  I liked the sauce, though, so I’ll go with the former.

The real highlight of the camping experience, however, was camping in swag under the stars.  Our swags were canvas bedrolls that were both waterproof and insect-proof, so long as you pulled the flap over your head.  It was warm enough each night that you didn’t need to put a sleeping bag inside, and I wouldn’t have even used the bedroll if I wasn’t a little concerned about bug bites and snakes.  Animals in the Outback are far less shy than those in North America, and we were visited by snakes, goannas, scorpions, and bugs of all shapes and sizes.  The only thing we didn’t see was a dingo, but we were told to keep our valuables besides us as we slept, because dingoes are known to sneak up to the edges of camps and steal bags. For an hour or so after I went to bed, the full moon was still below the horizon, and I was able to see the most brilliant night sky I’ve ever laid eyes on.  Hundreds of kilometres from the nearest urban centre, there were basically no sources of light pollution.  I couldn’t take a picture of the sky without a tripod, but here’s a picture of the spot I saw it from.

As much as I enjoyed camping, though, the main event of my tour (and this blog post, in theory) was the sights.  Our first stop was Kata Tjuṯa, also known as the Olgas, a group of large rock formations only 25 kilometres west of Uluru (but 400 km southwest of Alice Springs… it was a long drive).  They were impressive structures, and it was very interesting to learn their geological history and their significance to indigenous groups, but it was 2 in the afternoon when we toured them, and the weather was somewhere in the low forties at the time.  Coupled with the reflection of the sun off the rock walls and ground, it was just a smidgen too warm for my tastes.  We walked around, sweat like whores in church, took our pictures and set off for Uluru, the main attraction.

I know that everyone who travels to natural wonders like Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, says this, but it’s worth repeating the cliché: nothing prepares you for how impressive it actually is in person.  I thought it was big.  It’s VERY big.  I thought it was red.  It’s VERY red.  It’s easy to see why the site is so sacred to the Anangu people, the aborigines who now have title to the rock.

And how sacred it is to them.  There are several large portions of the rock where pictures are legally forbidden – I think the fines can reach $10,000 if you so much as snap a closeup picture of the sacred sites.  None but the Anangu even know why these spots are sacred, as they will not reveal their religious practices to anyone who is not a fully-initiated member of their tribe.  Outsiders are allowed to learn the stories of Tjukurpa, the ancient giant animals who are said to have formed some of the rock’s features in Dreamtime, their ancient period when the world was created, but these stories are taught to the Anangu children as simple fables.  The one exception to all this is the climbing of Uluru – the Anangu don’t do it, and plead with visitors not to do it, but people have been climbing Uluru for decades, well before the Australian government handed the title back to the Aborigines in 1985.  There has been much talk of banning the climbing of the rock, but you are still allowed to do it as long as the temperature is below 36 degrees Celsius, which it definitely was not while we were there.  I would have felt far too guilty about doing it, anyway – what if somebody thought it would be fun to play basketball in the Sistine Chapel or set up a shooting gallery in Angkor Wat?

It was more than enough of an experience to see sunset and sunrise at Uluru, then make the 9-kilometre walk around its base. The rock actually changes colour as the sun rises and sets, and we were lucky enough to have a nearly-full moon hanging directly over Uluru during sunrise.  The same moon that spoiled my view of the night sky; the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

The entire collection of Uluru shots can be found in my picasa album, which should be open to the public now. I personally enjoyed the walk around Uluru far more than sitting a couple kilometres away and watching the sun rise.  I fired up my iPod with some inspirational music and set off at my own pace – an authentic walkabout with a 21st-century touch.

After another night of sleeping in swag under the stars, we spent the final day of our safari hiking King’s Canyon, a few hundred kilometres north of Uluru and the Olgas.  This was a much more demanding walk than the flat ring around Uluru, but it was worth it.  The canyon has sheer faces, impressive rock formations, and an oasis in the centre known as the Garden of Eden.  Well, it would have been an oasis, except this winter was one of the wettest on record for Central Australia, so the whole desert was blooming with spinifex and leafy gum trees.  It’s the reason there is so much green in my shots of Uluru, and while some were disappointed that they didn’t get to see a “real desert,” I feel that we had a once-in-a-generation opportunity.  The desert won’t look like this again for decades, which gives us some pretty unique pictures and memories.  Ah well, there’s no pleasing some people.

Thankfully, a cold front had moved in, so it was overcast and a frigid 32 degrees Celsius as we walked the canyon.  James had a fair knowledge of the canyon’s geological history, and shared it with us as we toured the area.  By the end of the tour, though, everyone was completely exhausted, and happily piled into the van for our 6-hour ride back to Alice Springs.

That about covers my first foray into the Australian Outback.  I’ll be in Alice Springs for a few days, then I’m taking the Ghan all the way to tropical Darwin for a spell before I fly to Tasmania for Christmas with my Aussie relatives. Until next time, give a hoot! Read a book!

Sydney to Adelaide

That does it.  We need to drop everything we are doing back in North America and start funding high-speed rail.  Roads, schools, insulin – all should be secondary to getting me across the country at a decent clip without having my groin groped by a ham-fisted TSA agent, cramming myself into a chair that Herve Villechaize would call snug and catching dengue fever from the airplane ventilation system.  Raise taxes, eat the rich, whatever – just get me my high-speed rail network.

I’m clearly a fan of the Australian railway system, which – besides its snail’s pace – beats flying in every single aspect.  Like a good little traveller, I checked in 2 hours before my journey on the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Adelaide, figuring it was similar to air travel.  I probably showed up an hour and a half too early, as I probably could have carried on my whole camping backpack and sat down on the train 15 minutes before departure.  There was no baggage screening, no ID check – heck, nobody even bothered to ask for my ticket on my first rail trip because the train was so empty (the Ghan, which I am currently riding to Alice Springs, is a much more popular route, so my ticket has been checked this time.)  I have plenty of leg room, there’s a shower in my car, and my seat actually reclines enough to allow for a decent night’s sleep.  The caveat here is that it took 25 hours for the Indian Pacific to slouch its way to Adelaide from Sydney, but it really isn’t much of a hassle to an unemployed man with 6 months to see Australia.  If we could buy a bullet train or two from the Japanese, I’d be set.

Rail travel is also a pretty nice way to see the countryside.  I’ve now seen the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney and the red-hill mining town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, the latter of which was a little strange.  The train left Sydney at 3 in the afternoon on Wednesday, and we arrived in Broken Hill just after dawn the following day.  First of all, daybreak in the barren Australian outback was a surreal experience.  I couldn’t take the greatest picture because we were moving westward at the time, but here’s an idea.

Stepping off the train in Broken Hill, I felt a little like Marty McFly when he realizes he’s just travelled 30 years into the past.  Broken Hill is a lonely, dusty town mired in a forgotten time, and it seems to be home to naught but miners and retirees.  Its claim to fame is the only foreign attack on Australian soil during the First World War: in 1915, a passenger train was assaulted by an ice cream cart flying the Turkish flag.  As the Turk driving the cart crested a hill, he opened fire on the train, so some Odd Fellows onboard returned fire.  No casualties were reported <citation needed>, but you can chalk up a victory for the Allies, as no other attacks were reported in the years following.

After another 8 hours of rolling through the South Australian hinterlands, we finally pulled into sunny Adelaide, the capital of South Australia and home to over  1 million Australians.  I shared a cab into downtown Adelaide with a nice Dutch couple and Tim, a 25-year-old Englishman who proved to be an excellent partner in mischief for a couple nights on the town in Adelaide.  Over a few pints, we spent Thursday night chatting with the friendly Adelaideian barmaids, espousing the glories of the Commonwealth, and swapping stories.  The local brew is Cooper’s, and while it’s no Kokanee, their pale ale was decent enough that I was willing to part with 6 bucks for an imperial pint (20 ounces of liquid gold – glory to the British Empire!) I spent my two full days in Adelaide by myself, taking advantage of the city’s free bike hire program.  With nothing but a piece of photo ID, anyone can borrow a city bike, helmet, and lock, good for use for the whole day within the city limits.

I decided I wanted to check out the beach on my first day, so I cycled about 15 kilometres from the city proper to Glenelg, the site of the first colonial landing in South Australia.  I took the scenic path along the not-so-mighty Tarrens River, which provided for some bird-watching that’s a fair bit better than watching ducks and Canada geese.  The locals probably thought me an easily-amused foreigner when I stopped to take some pictures of pelicans and black swans, but am I the kind of guy who cares?

The piers and dunes on the way down the coastline reminded me of Oregon meets White Rock, but Glenelg itself was a slice of the Australia’s goofy character.  I poked around the town hall and discovered an exhibit dedicated to Australia’s greatest “inventor,” Henry Hoke, who created such brilliantly useless contraptions as the manual chainsaw, decompressed air, Swiss cheese holes, and his magnum opus, Hoke’s Random Excuse Generator.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that I was about halfway through the exhibit before I realized there was, in fact, no Henry Hoke, but they put it in a town hall! I figured they might be showcasing the forgotten talents of some Glenelg resident, but I guess you can’t put a price on pulling a fast one on thousands of clueless tourists every year.  I left my mark in the guestbook, mentioning that I had purchased Hoke’s dehydrated water tablets (just add water!) the previous year and would definitely buy them again. A-plus, Henry.  Trivialities aside, the beach was pretty nice, but a little empty due to the high winds.

I hit the hay early on Friday night – blasphemous, I know, but cycling around 35 kilometres in a day will do that to you – and did a little more sightseeing on Saturday.  Using the free bike hire again, I took a look around the north end of Adelaide, making my first stop at the Adelaide Oval, home of many a cricket test match, rugby game, and of course, the mayhem that is Aussie Rules football.  It has a certain sense of history (and lack of advertisements, by the look of it) that is rare in North American sports venues. I might have to come back here for game if I have the chance.

My next stop was the Botanic Gardens, home to all sorts of plants that I’ve never heard of:  Amazon water lilies, an enormous ficus, and cacti – lots of cacti. I considered stealing the blue agave plant to make some low-grade tequila, but I wasn’t sure if they would let me into the distillery with a plant that probably violates several quarantine laws.

I’ve never been all that into botany (a hatred dating back to a poor performance on a lab test in first-year biology, I’m sure), but it was a welcome break from the glare of the sun, and the old greenhouses are a step back into the 19^th century.  They are also really, really hot, but you probably could have guessed that one, eh?

Hungry from another day of cycling around town, I bought a gyro (or yiro, as they spell it here) with Lars and Marius, two Norwegian students my age who were staying in my hostel room.  I was initially just ecstatic that I could have an intelligent conversation about hockey with people from another country, but we all got along pretty well in general, and went for a few drinks with Tim from England last night, which resulted in the Norsemen’s revelation unto me of perhaps the greatest toast of all time.  I’m a bit of a fan of clever toasts (especially the infamous “here’s to honour,” but that’s another story altogether,) but this was so manly and barbaric that I have to concede that it’s leagues better than anything I’ve ever heard.  If you’re a little squeamish, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

It is a one-word toast. Skäll. Pronounced “skoal,” like the tobacco company, it is an homage to the Viking heritage of all Norsemen.  Vikings never simply killed their enemies; they completely dominated them in the most insulting and demeaning ways they could think of.  After a great battle, (which, of course, always ended in victory,) Vikings would remove the heads of their vanquished foes, hollow out their skulls, and fill them with grog that in all likelihood tasted like distilled moose urine, and probably had a good chance of actually being that.  They would then let forth with a bloodthirsty skäll, which from what I gathered last night essentially means “let us drink from the skulls of our enemies.”

Yeah, I needed a minute for that one to sink in, too.

I vowed to carry this toast forth in my travels, and only to use it at points in my life where I feel like a true man who has accomplished something of extraordinary magnitude.   Right now I am riding a train into the barren red desert in the middle of Australia, in preparation for a hike to the biggest rock in the world, so perhaps a skäll will be in order once I get back from Uluru. I don’t care if they take busloads of gawkers there every single day; it’s a big deal to me!

Sydney

AUTHOR’s NOTE: Since free wireless internet is hard to come by in the Outback, this post is coming to you slightly delayed from the State Library of South Australia in sunny Adelaide. Cheers!

As I write this, I’m slowly rolling away from Sydney through the Blue Mountains, aboard the Indian Pacific Railway.  This was the first railroad to connect Australia’s east and west coasts, but it didn’t continuously connect to Perth until 1970 – in a classic example of why centralized government is good, each Australian state had its own gauge of railway track for decades, and when entering a new state, passengers would have to change tracks.  Not anymore! I won’t be crossing clear over to Perth just yet, though; I’m  getting off in Adelaide, South Australia, for a few days of sightseeing before I take the Afghan Express to Alice Springs, which is geographically situated somewhere next to the middle of butt-#@$! nowhere.  Turns out that’s where Ayers Rock, or Uluru, is!

I can already tell that old-world forms of travel are going to be a recurring theme of this journey – I put on some serious mileage on Sydney’s public transport system over the past days, and I only rode a bus once, opting to use trains and ferries instead.  For a pittance, as they say here, you can buy a one-week pass to all of these in Sydney.  Even for a few days, it’s worth it if abused to the level to which I abused it.  Day 1 involved taking a train from Fairfield, where the Owsinkis live, to Parramatta, the business hub of Western Sydney, then taking a ferry on the Parramatta River directly into Sydney harbour, followed by another ferry to Manly, a suburb northeast of Sydney.  Even in the rain, riding a Sydney ferry is a unique experience.  The chug of the engines, the wind in your face, the addictive scent of the briny deep mixed with good-old-fashioned gasoline and industrial pollutants… Australia’s colonial past meets modernity!  In addition, sailing underneath the Harbour Bridge, also known as the Coat Hanger, provided some nice photo opportunities.

<Photos will be added once I have reliable internet>

Manly seemed like it would be a nice place to put down roots if I were staying awhile in Sydney: nice beaches for surfing, a little slower than the pace of the city proper, and some laid-back bars and restaurants.  Lacking the money for the restaurants and the cajones to try surfing at this point, I opted to take a stroll in the bush surrounding North Head, one side of the mouth of Sydney Harbour.  In the halcyon days of the city’s inception, a wise city elder looked at North Head, and, noting its partial isolation and dense scrubland, said “There.  That is where I shall build a prison for the lepers and immigrants that I don’t like.”

Thus, the construction of the Manly Quarantine Centre began.  It was later converted into a gun battery to fight off the Japanese during World War II, but remained an icon of Australian protectionism until the 1980s.  After decades of use, it is still heavily isolated.  There is one road in and out, and the only other land route is the one I chose: a winding, mountainous path through the heath.  I was about halfway down this path, happily snapping photos, when the forecasted “light showers” (read: angry, murderous monsoon borne from the raging maw of Poseidon himself) decided to pop in, so I was a little soggy once I reached the centre.  This is why we stick our valuables in Ziploc bags, kids! Chalk up a point to Mom and Dad for telling me to bring some.

I toured the gun emplacements and lookouts, but the rain and fog were heavy enough that my views were obscured to the edge of the island.  It was still a good hike, and I had the trails to myself because the other tourists were apparently afraid of getting a little drenched and wind-lashed. In retrospect, they were probably the smart ones.  Wet and tired, I hiked back to Manly, took the ferry back, and hopped on the train to Fairfield.

Day 2 brought sunny skies and the promise of some much more comfortable hikes around Sydney.  I figured I would continue the theme of nature-meets-military-history and check out South Head, the other end of the mouth of the harbour.  I rode the ferry from Circular Quay to Watsons Bay, an even sleepier burg, home to upper-class sophisticates, squawking birds of various feathers, and perhaps Sydney’s only nudist.  Yes, on my hike toward North Head, I spotted this sign:

<Lady Bay Nudist Beach Sign>

Since I’m the kind of guy who is willing to do almost anything for the story, I figured I would pop in and see if it was actually a nudist beach.  Faithful reader, you can sleep soundly, because the sign does not advertise falsely.  It didn’t inform me, however, that I would see naught but a solitary, middle-aged, very naked man.   Picture the scene: me, fully clothed in backpacker gear (the only thing I was missing was the good old zinc on the nose, but judging by the redness of it today I should have had that too), and a proud nudist, standing on the same beach.  Do you acknowledge the other person in that situation?  I often profess myself to be the king of awkward situations, but I had really outdone myself.  I tromped back up the hill to check out the actual heavy artillery (hi-YO!)

<Cannon picture>

So what’s the logical progression from a nudist beach and a derelict artillery emplacement? How about Sydney’s number one spot for suicides?  I won’t hazard a guess as to whether it is related, but in addition to Sydney’s only nude beach, Watsons Bay houses “The Gap,” an ominous sandstone cliff where sucidial Sydneysiders often choose to leap into the abyss, in the plain view of slack-jawed Yankees, camera-wielding Southeast Asians, and whatever other tourist stereotype you can think of.   It might have been the angle of the sun, but even in 30-degree Celsius temperatures, it just looked so cold.

<The Gap>

In need of some more inviting surroundings, I hoofed it down to Bondi Beach, home to a lot of people who apparently look much better in a bathing suit than pale, recently-arrived Canadians do.  I still wasn’t ready for my first surfing lesson (I’ll probably save it for Queensland), so I decided to seek out the Rum Diaries, a cocktail bar which is managed by Colin Duignan, also known as the best man who made that inspirationally irreverent and drunken speech at the wedding of my cousins Mike and Courtney. Shout-outs on my blog are 50 bucks apiece, so you can all courier that to 21 Myna Park Rd, Old Beach, Tasmania, 7017. Thanks guys!  I figured rightly that it would be closed, but I found it all the same and was copying Colin’s number off the front door when who showed up but the man himself.   He originally thought I was about to steal his juice delivery (and I won’t lie, it looked like some tasty juice), but the Canadian flag on my backpack gave me away.  He showed me the place (the office is behind a secret bookcase, why I didn’t take a picture is beyond me), and we talked about living and working in Bondi over a beer, which was probably one of the best drops of my life after hours hiking in the sun.  Seems like a great place to get set up for a spell when I’m done riding the rails around the country.

Colin had to get to class, so I caught the bus and train back to Fairfield and spent my last night in Sydney with the Owsinskis at an RSL club, which is apparently the place to be in the Sydney suburbs if you’re anyone.  They’ve become the centre of social life in the outlying areas, and it’s easy to see one.  Number one, it’s a club – you have to apply to belong, which by definition makes it inherently cool.  I’ve been told this was a tiny one, but it had a restaurant, bar, pool hall, lounge for socializing, and lots of “pokies” – the Aussie word for VLTs/virtual poker machines.  Apparently the bigger clubs have pools, fitness centres, and plenty of other amenities.  Every age bracket above legal age was represented – my hunch is that clubs are a popular “pre-drinking” spot among the young’uns.  We had some pretty decent five-dollar schnitzel, a beer or two (I’m taking a shine to this “Toohey’s New,” but I’ll save an entire post some time later for Aussie beer), then called it a night.

That essentially wraps up my first stay in Sydney.  For now I’m off to wine country, then the outback, but I’m sure I’ll see it again soon.  Until next time, stay alert and stay safe!