In an attempt to escape the blistering 44
degree midday Melbourne sun, I sit down at a sizable internet café on Bourke
Street at the outskirts of Chinatown.
I have already spent roughly a month in
Australia, and I feel the time has come to type up a short report home and reflect a little bit
on my experiences in Oz thus far.
My last update was written on the night
before my departure from Suvarnabhumi, Bangkok, which now seems a lifetime ago
and half a world away, and it’s safe to say that a lot has happened since
leaving Siam.
Arriving in Sydney on December 10, one
thing above all is immediately apparent; I am not in Asia anymore! Not so much
because of the absence of Asians – the city is as multicultural as they come –
but because of the prohibitively expensive 35$ -a-night 12-bed hostel dorms
that instantly threaten to swallow up what little is left of my already thinly
stretched backpacker budget. That, and the fact that my flip flop island
wardrobe feels immensely out of place amongst the ‘business casual’ attired
Australians of the inner city.
With all the practicalities of SIM card,
tax file number, money transfer and banking details taken care of, I decide to
pay Sydney its due, see the mandatory sights, get a feel for the city and hang
with the backpacker crowd in two different hostels for a few days before moving
south.
Aussie barbeques in the park, plenty of ‘goon’
(cheap but horrendous 4 liter box
wines), the Opera House, museums, a tour of the city, Darling Harbour, wildlife
reservations and the obligatory close quarter encounters with koalas, kangaroos
and wombats, the magnificent Blue Mountains, a river cruise, the famous Sydney
beaches and a reunion with Thailand travel buddies were among the activities I
managed to pack into my stay.
With the express version of Sydney
sightseeing behind me, I journey southward to unassuming Wollongong (yes, they
named a city that) to visit Sandy, an awesome Aussie acquaintance made through
Irish Saint Patrick’s Day festivities in Aarhus – where else! ‘The Gong’ is
quiet, charming and quintessentially ‘surfer dude’, and my introduction to the
immediate circle of friends has me drawing a couple of quick conclusions:
Australians truly are a generally laid back, welcoming and friendly bunch. Sharehousing
here is an awesome and readily available accommodation option that allows for
plenty of good times to be had just hanging out at home. Aussies are very
health and lifestyle conscious people. Sports is big. So is an emphasis on having fun and not taking
things too seriously. And Australian is a language aaall of its own, and it is
[expletive] hard for normal people to understand!
I spend a couple of days hanging out and
taking it easy, suburban style, with morning and afternoon swims, home cooked
dinners (and home brewed beer!) and one absolutely epic mountain
trek-turned-leech-infested-jungle-survival-expedition beelining it straight to
Point Sublime for perhaps the best view Oz has offered me thus far.
With Christmas rapidly approaching, I
travel onwards to Melbourne, ‘Straya’s capital of diversity, coffee, AFL and
hipsters, and am invited (read: invite myself) into the home of awesome
Bruneian-Malaysian Melbournian, tarot card reading PhD student Janet for my
first ever CouchSurfing experience outside of my own apartment. Janet is kind
enough to show me the ropes around town (including some seriously wicked bars
in Fitzroy and the CBD) and to let me make her couch in North Melbourne my base
of operations for sliightly longer than the prearranged two day sleepover.
For obvious reasons – blue skies, 40 degree
heat and the absence of family among them – Christmas is a different animal
altogether Down Under. A pre-Christmas BBQ and beers in the sun at Shane and
Cate’s place in Thornbury (friends from Vietnam!) is warmup for a rather
alternative Xmas potluck with Janet and pals (I am one of two people at the party
who do not hold or is in the progress of getting a PhD degree). Most of
Christmas day is spent in a stupor, followed by a trip to the beach and
rendezvous with trekbuddy Luisa from the volcano climb in Indonesia.
As Janet leaves Melbs for a vacation in
Fiji, born and bred Melbournian Kara generously offers me shelter at her house in Hampton, deep into the
cold dark of infamously provincial and far remote Zone 2. Fully prepared to not
be on the move for a little while, and with introductions to Aussie rules beer
pong, house parties, soccer square, Victoria Bitter galore and a somewhat
intricate public transit system squared away, I begin to settle into my awkward
version of the Australian way of life.
As always, my birthday squeezes its way into
an already action packed schedule between Christmas and New Years, and a
combination of good company, plenty of Bloody Maries and a plethora of heartwarming
greetings from both home and abroad makes for an absolutely astounding day that
has me feeling extraordinarily grateful for my wonderful family and all the
amazing people I call my friends.
I am ruthlessly denied full appreciation of a fantastic Chadstone New
Year’s party through total incapacitation by means of vodka and
subsequent head trauma. Alcohol, soccer square and concrete driveways don’t mix,
evidently. The rookie mistake lands me a start to 2014 equipped with a pretty full on concussion, some decent
bruises, a pinched back nerve, short term amnesia, a few visits to the doctor’s
office and plenty of resolve to decide on a limited alcohol January.
A couple of successful job interviews
before New Year’s has set me up for me a pretty rough deal, starting work on January 2
both hung over, concussed and in somewhat of a daze. The next two weeks are a
complete blur as I simultaneously recover my faculties and hit the ground
running as full time charity fundraiser for the Fred Hollows Foundation (eliminating
blindness worldwide, one eye operation at a time). Working 12:00-20:30 with a
2-hour bus-train-walk commute in each direction, my days are pretty much work-work.
But life as a commission only independent contract doorknocker is something
entirely new and surprisingly challenging, and although it’s hardly bounty
beaches and spectacular volcano vistas, the experience is highly interesting
and offers sufficient potential for progression to keep me sticking with it for
a while. Turns out I have sort of a knack for the gig, and as of the coming
Monday I’ll be heading to the office as team leader for a freshly established division
of the company. Definitely a complete and wholly different way to ‘travel’, but in many ways
none the less rewarding than my previous months of proper exploration (- and in a
strictly financial sense, much more so!)
The immediate future holds a fair deal of ‘same-same
but different’, with the most significant disruption of the status quo a much
needed vineyard vacation in early Feb and a subsequent change of accommodation, as
a rent-paying tenant puts an end to my squatting occupation of Kara’s walk-in closet and
takes over my much appreciated IKEA cot.
Thus up to speed and updated on the current
state of affairs – sort of anyway – I offer you a probably relatively confusing
visual perspective of my journey through Terra Australis up to this point. Admittedly,
as I start feeling less and less like a tourist, I regret to have come to the
realization that I haven’t been wielding my camera as meticulously, proficiently or as often
as I would have liked since arriving – many apologies!
Pictures, Sydney: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152395743012262.1073741853.649632261&type=1&l=0f847cc6b3
Pictures, Wollongong: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152395750672262.1073741854.649632261&type=1&l=0d7ff3e32a
Pictures, Melbourne: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152395754162262.1073741855.649632261&type=1&l=726821fb8e
