Out of the Dorm

“Josh?” says a voice.
It is far to early in the morning to tell for certain, but I am reasonably sure that this is not my name. I blink awake and sure enough the owner of the voice is talking to someone else. That someone else is snoring.
“Josh.”
The snoring stops in fits and starts.
“Josh, you’re snoring man.”
Josh grunts. He is not quite awake yet. Nor am I. I manage to focus on my watch. It is ten past three. Maybe quarter past, the hands are still blurry.
“Josh.” The voice is more urgent now. American accent. The speaker and the sleeper look similar in the bare light of the dorm. They could be brothers. He’s turned the light on, I think blearily, it’s three in the morning and he’s turned the light on.
Josh makes a sound which the other accepts as language.
“Where’s the weed?” he asks. “We got any left?”
There’s a rustle of plastic bags. Something is passed from one to the other. The speaker thanks Josh, I can hear he is grinning.
“That’s the stuff.” He says. “Good man.”
“Save some for me.” Josh says.
“Is this all we have left?”
Josh grunts affirmative.
“Get some more in Byron, right?”
“That’s why we’re going.” Josh says.
“Thanks man.” Says his brother, he waves the bag at the third guy awake in the room who is not me. A blonde Scandinavian guy who looks like he has modelled himself on every surf magazine cliché he could find.
His eyes follow the bag of weed around mechanically. He does not say a thing.
“Oh, Josh.” Says his brother just as he is about to leave. “You were seriously snoring, man.”
“Uh-huh?” says Josh, almost asleep again.
“Yeah.” Says the other, “Sawing logs like a madman. Lie on your side, right? You’ll wake someone up.”
He pats him on the shoulder and leaves, hitting the light switch as he goes and holding the door so that it shuts without a noise.

The next morning – for unrelated reasons – I pack my belongings and leave. I issue my goodbye’s to the dormitory at large. The dormitory at large ignores me. I leave with uncharitable thoughts.

My new hostel is back in Glebe, and it is amazing what some time away can do to a place. I realise that I genuinely missed it, the cafes, the bookshops, the pseuds in every doorway wearing tie-die shirts and setting up incense burners. New cafes have sprung up since I was last here, but one of the psychic bookshops is still advertising a date in the near future during which punters can have their aura’s read for a nominal fee. A photograph shows a woman sitting in a yellow haze. It looks like bad photography to me, but apparently you can have your aura photographed as well.
My new hostel is homely and sweet, more like a bed and breakfast to be honest, but they do boast a pair of eight-bed dormitories but upon arrival, both are full.
“We’ll have to put you in a single room,” says Veronica, the owner, “Is that okay?”
Veronica has one of those bizarrely welcoming demeanours in which everyone is treated like a returning prodigal son.
“A single room is fine.” I say, actually rather pleased. The room is indeed more than fine, and I surreptitiously check that it can be bolted from the inside.

Saturday sees the arrival of the Glebe Market, which is held in the grounds of the school. The market underlines (several times, in thick pen) the suburb’s bohemian credentials and sells local arts and crafts and more tie-dyed produce than you can shake a hand carved boomerang at. This is clearly the place to come if you want to buy yourself shell necklaces and leather bracelets.
Surprisingly, I run into the two American brothers from The Pink House. They are buying bongo drums.
“Hey.” Says the one who is not called Josh.
“Hey.” I reply.
“Didn’t you, like, move out or something?”
“Yes.” I say, “I did.”
He nods, deciding that there is not really anything else he can add on that subject.
“We’re buying bongo drums.” He says instead, rather unnecessarily.
He performs a little impromptu human beat-box to illustrate, his brother accompanies him with a half-hearted toc-toc-toc rhythm on the drum he’s holding.
“Anyways.” He concludes, “See yous.”
They vanish into the crowd of brightly coloured shirts.
That night, in the single room at the new hostel. I lie awake, unable to sleep. I am not interrupted, I know that I will not be. I wonder if I miss it.

Rain in Bondi

The next bar is only two streets away, across Bondi beach, but we are waiting for a cab.
"Can't we walk?" I suggest. My injured foot is slowly but surely coming back together again: impatient to make up for lost time.
The idea of a walk however, is met with unfriendly expressions.
"I'm not going out in that rain." someone says.
It is not raining, not properly. There is moisture coming from the air, yes, but it is no more than a moderately heavy drizzle at most. I find myself in the curious position of being proud of my nation's weather. We have proper rain, I think.
As we continue waiting, we are joined in the doorway by other people who also regard the weather with mortification and retreat hastily under the shelter of the bar's foyer. Mobile phones emerge, taxis are summoned.
Taxis must thrive in this weather, I think.
Most of the people waiting seem to have spent the morning on the beach, they are armed with towels and swimming gear. Why they should actively run to get themselves wet in the sea but express horror at the prospect of walking in the rain is probably not worth discussing without more unfriendly expressions.
It is Anzac day, a public holiday devoted to paying respect to the servicemen who fought in wars and campaigns from World War II onwards. The morning saw a procession pass through town past swarms of applauding observers waving Australian flags and cheering, the afternoon gives way to less sober reflection in every sense of the word.
"Australians don't usually drink so early," Clayton had informed me, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the bar. An improvised game of Two-Up was being played behind us, a traditional Anzac Day activity, it involves gambling against the outcome of two tossed coins, which does not sound much, but the volume and energy it afforded was impressive.
"Not like the English, anyway." Clayton continued, "We're just not used to it here."
There is an irony, perhaps, that a day of rememberence should be marked with the consumption of the sort of intoxicants whose side-effects include memory loss, but again, unfriendly expressions might be expected if this were discussed out loud.
Three taxis turn up at once, like vultures descending on a carcass. All are pre-booked by other parties.
"Are you table twenty-seven?" One asks.
We exchange glances and agree that we are indeed table twenty-seven.
The cab takes off along the sea-front, clouds gather over the surf and the beach looks even more like Weymouth than it did on my last visit.
"What if," someone says "The real table twenty-seven was a party of ex-servicemen?"
The cab lapses into a guilty silence which lasts approximately two minutes.

So much for the city

Clayton is telling me how he is training to be a pilot. Up ahead, the road is straight and clear, he guns the engine of his car and my head is pressed into the back of the head-rest.
"Is that right?" I say through gritted teeth. "What sort of plane are you thinking of flying."
"Oh," he says, breaking again, my head lolls forward, I blink stupidly, "Commercial airliner, you know?"
"Seriously?"
"Hell yes." He says. "I get this flight license, I'm a millionaire. Seriously."
He takes the next bend at heigh speed and I cling onto the handle by the door. It comes off in my hand.
"Oh, that's broken." he says helpfully, settling the car behind a slow four-wheel drive monster. Already he's impatient.
"I can just imagine that." I say, eying the traffic ahead nervously, "Captain Carlyle."
He turns to look at me in horror.
"Oh, shit." he says, "I hadn't thought of that."

Anyone who has met Clayton already knows what sort of car he has. It's black, it's low, it's shiny and is one red-flashing light short of addressing him by name. He picked me up in the morning with the intention of 'getting out of the city and seeing some desert'. Getting out of the city proves a little easier to discuss doing than to actually get done. A new motorway not documented in the road-atlas in the car is apparently the best way to get to the Blue Mountains, but where it might be found is anyone's guess.
Eventually we pick a direction and stick to it and slowly the city falls behind us and the altitude starts to increase. By road, the Blue Mountains appear stealthily, the view is shielded by an increasing density of trees and only the physical feeling in the base of the gut tells you that you're climbing higher and higher.
The view from Katoomba is worth the distance, but other than the rock formations of the Three Sisters, it is one of those landscapes which is better to view first-hand than to photograph. From Echo Point, the valley drops away in a series of crags and the basin below is thick with forest. To the right, the cliff edges arc round and across the valley the mountains rise from the tree layer in jagged shelves. It's beautiful, particularly on a clear day, where the blue sky, the green trees and the rich, red and yellow earth each conspire to create a physical spectrum before the viewer, but attempting to compose a satisfactory photograph proves to be a challenge. Getting the depth of the trees and the height of crags is a tricky thing to do through a viewfinder where there is either too much green or two much blue and not quite enough red. Better, perhaps to just stand and stare.
Standing and staring is, of course, a popular past time. Being a Sunday, the crowds are out in force and the spectacle is accompanied by a jittery soundtrack of babbling tourists and clicking and whirring cameras.
We do not stay for too long, I have a semi-formed plan to come up here again at some point and maybe stay a few nights, preferably mid-week with my camera-cleaning kit to hand, perhaps.

Clayton drives on. Further West, we drop out of the hills and the landscape becomes less green and more yellow. Parched grasslands interspersed with the white-trunked Eucalyptus trees which look skeletal and bone-like in the heat.
"This," says Clayton, "Is the real countryside."
We stop at Bathurst, which is nice and clean and has a wild-west feeling of streets running straight to nowhere. Away from town, the countryside is hot and humid farmland, but still not desert. Clayton looks faintly disapointed. We drive on and the sun starts to set, shifting the colours of the scenery around us as it inches towards the horizon. By magic hour, the fields are on fire, the green of the Eucalyptus is rich green, almost black and the sky has become one of those delicate porcelain blues which set everything else off. The sun drops completely and we are left in darkness.
Clayton overtakes three trucks along a single track road. The car overheats and we pull over, the trucks zoom past smugly. At the next service station the water is topped up but we do not buy more fuel and so, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, a red light pops on, a warning in Japenese.
"What's that?" I ask.
"Out of fuel." he says.
"You're kidding."
"Nope."
At the next junction we slide off the freeway in search of a gas station. The place looks sparse, shacks drift by at the side of the road. It does not look very welcoming.
"Have you seen Wolf Creek?"
"Oh man. Don't."
The Mobil sign guttering in the darkness proves how welcome the ugly scars of civilization and consumerism can be. The guy behind the cash desk, has no teeth of his own and tells us with no little enthusiasm about a car crash down the road. It turns out that it happened very recently indeed.
"In fact," he says, "You should pass it on your way up the road."
We're half surprised that he does not charge us for the privilege.

We get home some two hours after we were expecting. Kings Cross is lit up in all its gaudy, gory glory. The traffic crawls through it as though the road were covered in treacle. We reach the hostel and I roll out and into bed. The next day it rains and so I stay there.

Welcome Visitors

Welcome Visitors | busgt

Last week we had to say goodbye to Michael and Wendy aka Jules's parents. After three weeks of travel through NZ's north island accompanied by the Tanaka's(Jules's Japanese host parenets) they headed back to blighty. It was great to see them and eventually meet the Tanaka's, hopefully it won't be too long till we see them again. Check out the photoblog for some images that prove that just because you might not be in the disco on a Friday night, you never loose it.

Anecdote

The vast woman with the electric pink shirt and angry blonde hair dwarfs the computer terminal in front of her.
"So who is she?" she growls.
The smaller woman at her shoulder peers close to the screen, she is thin and gangly with long, lank hair which gravity does no favours for at all. They remind me of the curious relationship between the giant hippopotamuses and the tiny cleaner birds that you see in nature documentaries.
"That's Mrs Macmillan." she says, "She had to go home."
"But I saw her in the waiting room."
"No, that's Mrs Cullen. What are you doing?"
"Well she didn't check in, she just walked in there."
"Don't delete her!"
"She's got to be checked in properly: Mrs Cullen!"
"Oh for heaven's sake."
The small woman pushes the large woman out of the way, she rolls across the carpet a surprising distance on the wheels of her office chair.I hunch down over the paperwork they have given me to fill in, hoping not to be seen. I'm only in here to check up about my still-sore feet, I feel like I've walked into a small war to ask about something trivial.
"See look," says the smaller woman, "Now she's checked in, I've got her to see Dr Harrison."
"Mrs Macmillan's doctor?"
"Yes."
"So if I delete her..."
The large woman comes at the computer, scooting across the floor on her chair, hands outstretched, huge pink fingernails already typing.
"No!" in a well practiced manuoever, the smaller woman stamps her foot in the path of the chair wheels, so that it grinds to a halt before it can reach the computer.
"Yeek!" says the large woman attempting to stretch the remaining distance.
At this point, Mrs Cullen ambles in, late-seventies, her trousers pulled up to her armpits. She smiles a sweet-old-lady-smile.
"Yes?" she says in a quavering voice.
The two women behind reception look at her blankly.
"Go sit down, love." says the large one, and Mrs Cullen obediently turns and ambles back out again.
The small woman snaps the monitor round to face her, businesslike.
"So who's next, then?" she asks.
"Vincent!" says the large woman triumphantly.
All eyes turn to me. I raise a hand in acknowledgement.
"Here." I say, also in a quavering voice.
"Have you finished with that form?" asks the big woman.
"I think so," I start, "There's some things I couldn't fill in..."
"Give it here." She snatches it away from me across the desk.
"Is everything okay?" I ask. There are boxes I have left empty, details of ailment, hereditary disorders...
"Yes, yes." says the big woman without looking at the form, "Go sit in the waiting room."
She gestures with one of her huge pink fingernails to the door and turns her attention back to the computer, shaking her head.
"I'm going to have a nervous breakdown," she says matter of factly.
In the waiting room, a small square space where everything from the carpet to the chairs to the potted palm are all the same shade of green, Mrs Cullen sits reading a magazine promising the "Top 20 Sex Tips for a Healthier Relationship".
Down the corridor, the sound of an industrial drill starts up, screaming into masonary. I shift uncomfortably in my seat and wait.

Baby You Can Drive My Car!

I thought I'd put up a severe danger warning to all the world's motorists, I'm going to sit my theory test this weekend!
I remember a vague attempt to past my test sometime back in the early nineties, which(and I'm not scared because of this) met with failure on not one but two different occasssions, even though I come from a small island with no traffic(bloody sheep!). All this said, I'm going to give it a go and what could be more exciting than giving me the ability to travel with more ease and thus increasing the chances that I could turn up on your doorstep! well, one step at a time, have to survive learning on the drag racing circuit that is Auckland.

Sacrilege!

Some beach or other... | Barquing

Bondhi Beach reminds me of Weymouth.
It’s a beach, there’s the sea, lots of shops, bars, check, check. Essentially, it’s not really my thing. I think I’ve been spoilt when it comes to beaches, by those wonderful empty stretches we visited in Peru, camped out on the sand, not another soul for miles in each direction, other than the bar which kept up a steady supply of nice, cool beers. Bondhi is just full of beautiful people (or rather people who were not beautiful but thought they were, or people who were beautiful and knew it only to well) lying on the sand or surfing. I ambled towards a quieter section of the beach and paddled half-hearted in the waves. Not surfing or sunbathing, I could have sworn I heard a collective low hiss from the rest of the beach.
I shuffled away, slipped past a number of cafes and restaurants each populated by other beautiful people either on their way to or from the beach (I think they work on a shift system) and after being stopped by a pair of Scandinavian’s who for some reasons thought I might be able to give them directions (perhaps I looked tanned to them, and thus could pass for local), I thought, sod it, and hopped on the bus back into town.

Glitterball

The sign on the door of the dormitory in my new hostel says there are six beds and eight berths. If you squint just so, two of the beds are slightly wider than the others, but only in a certain light.
The guy at reception told me that there were already three people in the room.
“It’s fairly quiet.” he admitted, although did not specify whether or not this should be considered a bad thing or not.
As it happened, identifying the unoccupied beds proved the bigger challenge – all looked slightly lived in. I picked a lower bunk – my still-tender feet not relishing the leaps of faith that the top ones would require each morning – and found I had picked one of the double beds by mistake. This came to light because the graffiti scrawled on the bunk above read “Best of luck grabbing ass in this creaky f**king bunk” and there was a disco ball suspended in the middle.
Just a small one mind, but definitely a disco ball.
The new hostel is located on the other side of town from the one I had been in before. I’ve now moved into backpacker land, also known as Kings Cross, also known as the red light district. Whereas Glebe Point Road was genuinely laid back and un-self conscious, this place is trying desperately to be a budget traveler Mecca, with plenty of cheap eateries, Internet cafes and launderettes. Judging by how many hostels and people are here, it seems to be working. Essentially, it’s a bit like moving from Jericho to East Oxford. I have paid for a week up front, I may move back yet.
The hostel is called The Pink House, so called because it is a house and it is pink. To say it was recommended by Gemma is not quite accurate, I seem to recall she actually claimed ownership of the place, which probably isn’t quite the same thing.
It’s a pretty impressive building, both halves of a semi-detached mansion, joined on each landing by interconnecting doors. My dormitory is on the top floor, and it reeks of competing brands of aerosol deodorant and sweat; boasting a view over one of the least inspiring pieces of parkland I’ve yet seen in town (a number of attempts to photograph the site line the stairwell, tellingly the most interesting feature in each seems to be a slightly squint litter bin beside the path).
It doesn’t sound very attractive, but it has its charms, most notably in its slightly hyperactive atmosphere, the sort generated by lots of people staying briefly and enthusiastically the moving on. Or not.
Last night I chatted to one of my room-mates, who happened to be boarding a plane this afternoon for Thailand. As usual in such encounters, lists of travel plans were exchanged and I reeled out the usual spiel about going up the West coast rather than the East.
“Ah.” he said sagely, “You’re going to see the *Real* Australia.”
“Well sort of,” I said, “I’m really just trying to avoid all the gap year students.”
He smarted a little, wide-eyed.
“Hey.” he said in a smaller voice that either of us were expecting.
“Uh,” I said, “The small ones. Some of them are very small.”
I gestured with my hand to demonstrate.
“Oh.” he said, “I see.”
“Small.” I said nodding, “Small gap year students… It’s a very specific phobia, I know but…”
As I said, he’s off to Thailand today.

Final note, having spent a night in the new hostel, I was kept away most of the night trying to bat away a particularly tenacious mosquito. Eventually, I thought I had pin pointed the noise and, aiming carefully, completely blindly in the dark, clapped somewhere ahead of me at random.
Two things happened, the whining of the mosquito stopped abruptly and my hands clapped on either side of the disco ball hanging from the top bunk.
This morning, I woke to find a mosquito corpse hanging off the disco ball, slowly rotating above me. Did I mention that this was a classy joint?
No, I didn’t think so.

An attempt at Gary-style bodily injury story (only not gross, promise)

My feet hate me.
Perhaps they have not yet quite recovered from the jet lag or something and are finding themselves being dragged into town when they fully expected to be put up in bed, but they are really not coping particularly well at all with the change in latitude.
It all comes down to shoes of course - blame the tools. Before leaving I decided that taking two pairs of walking boots was uncessesary, I could not justify the extra weight if nothing else. Besides, I was traveling to a climate warmer than I was used to, so the heavy, clunky walking boot was really not appropriate for the conditions I would be facing. I needed something lighter, airier.
And so, I invested in something new, and not being a big shoe buyer (i.e being male) this could probably be considered a big thing. This particular big thing had - and here for reasons unclear to me, I hang my head in shame - a bloody great big logo plastered to the side. It was branded, yes, branded. It was also something without any support for my feet whatsoever, but it did look kinda cool.

Now, I walk a lot. Not just in the obvious sense, the getting up off the sofa to find the television remote control sense, nor exclusively in the "lets all go on a hike" sense, although that is certainly part of it. Not being able to drive - something I will get round to some day, I promise - I tend to walk to bus stops and on occasion, skip the bus altogether and walk the distance instead. On the whole, I have never really had any problems. My feet and I sort of see eye to eye on the subject, we just get on with it and no-one gets hurt. I pick the scenic routes with plenty of soft, comfy verges to get stuck into, I dress my feet up in nice, well-supported and waterproof footwear. It works. We get from A to B together. Hell, I've even started talking as though they work for me.
Or rather it worked, past tense. Suddenly I went all designer on them and something has gone terribly wrong in the process.
On my first day in town, in a fit of pique which should have been dismissed outright given that I had not had any sleep to speak of for something like thirty-six hours, I strapped on my logo-branded plimsoles and hot-footed it into town along tarmaced pavements. An hour or so later, my feet were hot and aching, with - and don't worry, this is not going to go into the sort of gory detail which would make Gary proud - small, painful wounds appearing where parts of the shoes had rubbed their way though the skin. I stumbled back to the hostel and after a fitful night's sleep, decided to use my walking boots for the morning's walk into town - so it was hot, I thought, but my faithful feet needed the support, dammit.
The trouble was that the walking boots I brought with me are the new ones which I have not quite finished breaking in yet, also my feet were already injured from the previous day's sortie, and the new wounds rubbed freshly against the old boot - talk about being rubbed up the wrong way. And so by the time I had walked into town and back I could barely walk another step. I was limping. Seriously, I had been in town for barely two days and already I couldn't walk.
I took the following day off and today ventured cautiously back into town to purchase a new pair of walking sandals (which will need to be worn in, I appreciate) and some natty little insoles which slip cunningly into the logo-branded monsters and give them a little bit of support. All from an unfortunately named shop named Athlete's Foot which goes to prove that just because you can have a punny title, does not mean you should. Anyway, these new purchases are all very well, but they now make the heels rub like bastards, which they didn't before.
As I said, my feet hate me.
And all because I kited them out in some designer togs. You see, fashion hurts.

Start with a long one, then...

Guess where | Barquing

The woman at the check-in desk didn’t even look at me when she told me that there was no chance of me getting a free upgrade for the flight.
I had suspected that the signs weren’t good when she had looked to her left when I initially approached her from her right.
“Passport.” She barked, sounding bored already. I handed it over and stammered my well rehearsed question. Not even a pitying glance, not even contempt.
“We have none.” She said instead to the passport before her.
I coughed, embarrassed.
“Worth asking, though, right?” I said, starting to suspect that this might not actually be true. She didn’t answer, at least not directly, although I think I heard a little snort.
She passed back the passport with a boarding pass tucked between its pages. Finally she met my eyes, her eyebrow slightly arched. I thank her and shuffle off, quietly mortified with my performance. If I were more suspicious than I suspect I am, I might have taken this as a particularly bad omen for the start of the trip.
Everything else seems to go smoothly, however. In stark contrast to the nightmarish ordeal we put ourselves through to get on an American Airlines plane to Ecuador a few years earlier. On that occasion, the check in queue took so long that we did not have any time for strung out, tearful farewells. On this occasion however they were strung out, tearful and probably not the sort of scenes that might be expected from a bunch of stiff upper lipped Brits.
As it was, I shortly afterwards found myself wondering around the Duty Free shop in the departure lounge with reddened cheeks and sticky eyes, and it was under these circumstances that I found myself purchasing an electronic sudoku toy in order – I had convinced myself – to cheer me up a little.
Ironically, as I discovered once I had parted my remaining pound coins for it, that it was not actually supplied with batteries, and that should I buy some, they could only be inserted into the device with the aid of a small screw driver – the sort of tool which is, of course – now banned from being taken onboard airlines. Even more frustrating, was that when I tried to open the packaging itself, the plastic bubble which housed it proved embarrassingly stubborn when not – as I was not – armed with any other sort of sharp instrument which should not under any circumstances be found in hand luggage.
Thus, for your own amusement, you might like to imagine for yourself the exact details of the scene in which I was sitting by the departure gate, wrestling with a small plastic package illustrated with a grinning photograph of Carol Vordeman. And yes, teeth were indeed employed for the task.
My non-upgraded seat suffered from the usual crippling lack of leg room, despite being next to the aisle. The entertainment system, piped into a tiny screen on the seat in front of me, was fairly impressive, but sadly the screen became almost unwatchable when the woman in front of me clunked her seat back and proceeded to snore for the rest of the trip. The lack of easily viewable in-flight entertainment might have been a more forgivable loss if the company in the seat beside me had been more interesting, but the only two details that I managed to ascertain about the man sat beside me were the he was the spitting image of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and that judging by the way he coughed expansively and generously throughout the trip, he was a likely candidate for patient zero for the human strain of bird flu.
One of the programs that I did manage to catch before my screen ended up in my lap, was an episode of the Hugh Laurie drama, House, in which – and this strikes me as being in questionable taste given the context of where it was shown – the hero treats a woman diagnosed with Deep Vein Thrombosis, complete with computer generated recreations of what this looks like from inside the body. I watched silently, then nervously pulled up my flight socks.
The twelve hours to Singapore proved very long indeed. I don’t think I managed to get comfortable for the entire trip and given that our hosts had decided that the flight took place at night-time (the shutters had to be lowered because it was blindingly bright outside) they turned all the lights off, so reading was out of the question. So too was sleeping, apart from one occasion, during which by some twist of fate I managed to get three seats to myself (something which karma has clearly been making me pay for ever since) I don’t think that I have ever managed to fall asleep properly on a plane. I had a little more success from Singapore to Sydney, but this was – I suspect because the aisle seat that I had specifically asked for turned out to be a window seat, which had less leg room, but did have a wall for me to lean against, which was an acceptable trade.
My plane arrived in Sydney this morning, and I could see the cities and towns below, sparse, glittering dew-drenched cobwebs in the darkness. The sun was just starting to make itself known beyond the horizon, yellows and reds gathering strength before the final push. Fog banks kissed the surface of the harbour as the plane turned for its final descent. A little unnerving watching the ground I had already seen was so close vanishing into clouds as we crept dangerously close. The lights rushing by of the runway came as something of a relief.
I shared the shuttle bus from the airport with a trio of American couples who had arrived, quite separately, from San Francisco. Excluded, I hunched by the window and got privately annoyed by the way they complained about the customs process and laughed at quaint little details they spotted as the bus rocketed around town.
“Look at that,” said one, pointing out the window, “It’s Burger King, but they’ve called it Hungry Jack’s!”
They all agreed that this was a perfectly ridiculous name, as though the original – advocating as it does that grilled meat patties might opt for a monarchical government was any less silly.
Once they had all been dropped off at a string of slick looking hotels, I was left alone in the bus with the driver, who apologetically informed me that my hostel was quite a way away from all the other hotels. I told him that I was in no rush whatsoever, which was a rather smug thing to do, but pleasingly accurate.
Although my original plan had been to get to the hostel and then pass out, I had clearly come upon a second wind of some description – something, perhaps, to do with the huge mug of coffee I purchased at the airport. Having dumped my bag at the hostel, a scruffy but charming little place set in a long suburb rich in colonial architecture, I chose to walk into town, all the way down to the harbour to gawp at the bridge and the opera house (plus a ghastly great big cruise ship which dwarfs both) just to make visual confirmation that I had ended up in the right place.
However, I had arrived on Good Friday, and everything – and I mean everything – was shut. Less, I suspect, to do with any devout adherence to Sunday and Bank Holiday trading laws, and more to do with the Australian personality’s ability to take any public holiday very seriously indeed.

And He's Off!(not a dig a Vince's odour)

Well Vince that April 12th date that seemed so far away when booking tickets and getting visas(with a little trouble) has sneaked up apon you, and the day is here!
Just a big good luck in Oz, I look forward to tracking your journeys on the blog, I guess for me its bit of an opposite emotion to everyone else in Oxon, whilst they all communily breath a hugh sigh of a relief, I 've got to come to terms with the fact you'll be in touching distance. For this very reason I've changed my name by deed pole to Barry Thompson and that way you'll never track me down!

Going, going...

A serious miscalculation Barquing

For you entertainment and my humiliation, a choice selection of photographs from Friday's leaving do in Far From The Madding Crowd are now up online for you perusal.

Paulette's photographs also seem to be online, and are - frankly - even scarier than the ones which slipped through my rigorous selection process.

Once you're done, have a look at the photoblog part of the site, where I've uploaded a pair of leaving cards which brought a tear to the eye, a lump to the throat and other related ailments.

Click through, browse, giggle.