The Wobble

I really love Melbourne – Its a great city which I am very sad to have left, I would love to think that I would return one day and stay for just as long if not longer, the place has such a wonderful spirit and drive to be cool that you can´t help but fall for its clumsy charm. I spent 10 months there and have met some quality people, drank some quality coffee and devoured some quality nosh. The city has changed me for the better, but now I am gone, I am in the capital of Argentina.

I left my friends apartment in melbourne at 5 in the morning, ronaldo had just clipped in the second goal in 10 minutes against arsenal in the second league of the champions league – game over. I bid farewell to ian and cate and walked down fitzroy road down past st vincents hospital and on down thru the city centre. Public transport was going at this stage but I decide to walk it, backpack or no. Its not terribly far but far enough to know that you have walked some distance. A couple of weeks previously while showing my friend Debbie around melbourne we called into relations of hers who had been living in melbourne since the 60s, the woman of the house in her 70s sounded exactly like my own mammy, she cooked us a savage easter roast dinner before supplying us with a seemingly endless parade of beer. She asked me if I noticed how different the light is in Melbourne compare to at home, how twilight barely exists… I kinda understood what she meant, the evenings don´t seem to linger while dawn occurs quite abruptly, anyways this sprung to mind as I walked down collins street. At the top end of the street the place was dark, by the time I had made it to spencer street station it was almost fully bright. I guess its a weird quirk of australia that maybe doesn´t get reported so much and so I have probably deprived you of 5 minutes of your life just reading this – good luck trying to get that back!!

Anyways I took the bus to the airport and checked the bags in. If the plane left on time I had just over an hour and a half to negotiate customs, immigration etc etc in sydney, plenty of time. IF… The plane left melbourne 40 minutes late, panic set in. When we arrived I made a burst to get off the plane, ran down the ramps, across to the terminal transfer and onto the bus to the international terminal. I had 30 mins left till departure. Immigration was next, just infront of me a 40 strong troop of chinese tourists were in queue. I shuffled, skipped a couple of them and eventually made it to the desk. I handed in my brand new spanking passport, no stamps, brand spanking new. The girl stamped it out then asked – sorry mr gill, where is your entry stamp?

Thats on my other passport, here´, I handed over my old crappy photocopy jobbie which had big red ink cancelled scrawled all over the shop, I must have looked so dodgy, I get called into a room.. Feck Feck Feck, I tell them my plane is leaving in 20 mins, they didn´t seem to notice. Typing away on a computer, avoiding all eye contact she could well have been playing tetris. Palms were sweating something serious!! Eventually with a smile she hands me back my passports and asked if I  enjoyed my trip to OZ, she got a smile and then a vision of my ass disappearing into the distance. In true hollywood style i made it completely out of breath to the disapproving flight attendent and got my ass on the 13 hour flight to Buenos Aires.

Due to the quirks of planetary shape and rotation I arrived into Buenos Aires 10 minutes after I left sydney, May 6th 2009 was officially the longest day of Phil Gills life. Flights are boring and don´t require much explainin though on this one the pilot seem determined to land the plane on its roof! I got through immigration quite quickly. I did have to bluff the name of the hostel as I had nothing at all booked, came up with a name that sounded vaguely spanish and it did the trick. Once you are past that part the rest is easy, usually. They had managed to lose my bag in melbourne… Idiots, they said it would take two days for it to arrive to me.

Oh well, no need to pick a fight, not when there is much more pressing issue of accomodation. I jumped on a bus into the city without a guidebook or a map I should probably have gotten one or both. I spent 1 hour walking around the bustling city, up florida street in search for an internet cafe that would tell me where somewhere okay was to stay, it was warm and very very bright. Telling ya I was glad I didn´t have a backpack on me! QUantas should include such an arrangement as an option, twould be handy to bring enough clothes for 2 nights if you knew you would get all of your stuff within 48 hours of arriving.

I have only been here little over a day, first impressions are ´How very european everything is´which is probably the most obvious thing you can say about the place, it reminds me of bilbao in so much that everything is spanish and it is highly industrialised, but that is but an initial judgement, more judgment to come 😉

I signed off my last post as I found myself on the aussie shore for the first time at last, I made the decision then not to blog as prolifically on my time here in australia as I did previously. The reason for this is simple, for the most part while I am here I will be catching up with old friends, new friends and relations. Its just not the kind of thing that would make interesting reading I am afraid. If and when I did strap on the backpack again and took off into the australian wilderness then of course I would get the itch to start rabbiting on about what trouble I contrived to get myself into.

Between finding a house to stay in melbourne and then finding a job and getting a start date for said job it has taken a while to find the chance to get out there and see the australian countryside. Well a couple of weeks ago I found some work and they had a couple of weeks before they were ready to have me into the office so I took this couple of weeks as a chance to go and do australia, or at least part of it. I did some research and narrowed my choices to these: Byron Bay, Tazmania or Broken Hill. Broken where you say? And you would be right, I was looking at one of them tourist rail passes you can get for the state of New South Wales and the most remote town you could find yourself in was Broken Hill, an old mining town and the site where they chose to film Mad Max 2. That was enough for me, who wants to lie on a beach all day long or swan around some world class national park. I wanted to go somewhere that it would take someone of emense stubborness to survive – the outback.

So the plan was simple, take the train up to sydney, check that place out for a few days – apparently they have some fancy shell shaped disco hall in the middle of it worth checking out. The train trip up through victoria and new south wales was a pleasant trip. From my blogs on india I’m sure you remember how much I enjoyed the train trips there. Now the trains are remarkably different here, cleaner, safer, air conditioned, more comfortable, more personal space but feck all that… A trip on an indian train is such an experience, this was more like a commute, a nice relaxing commute. I just stared out the window, day dreaming sometime concentrating just to count the number of minutes that pass between houses. This country is massive.

I arrived into sydney at 8 and met up with my old housemate from college debbie, she must be 90 at this stage. We went for some food and some pints to catch up on all the years that have slipped by in no time at all. After some much needed kip I got up on a glorious sydney day, I walked from bondi junction to darling point along the coast all the way to the opera house and up onto and beyond the harbour bridge. It is such a beautiful city to look at, to walk around. I had a wonderful day just traisping along not bothered by anything other than the occasional desire more than need to stick something in my belly. I met up with the girls later on for chow and yet more stories about past adventures.

Friday I took a trip out to see manly, the ferry ride out there gives you a great look at the harbour. While manly itself was built for fish and chips, up and down that beach, bit further on up to the cliffs and back and you are fit for some beers. Back to the house before hitting the town, well we did go see a rugby league match which started off great but the team we were meant to root for slowly slipped out of the game and by the end it was a bit of a cakewalk. No matter we didn’t let it dampen our night, more more more stories, travelling is great for the stories… The next day we all died a death but were revived when I cooked up a classic irish breakfast, at least 45000 calories per spoonful!!! 

While I sat on the couch in bondi junction, the most beautiful day outside the girls got at me to get out and pay bondi beach at least one visit while I was in this part of the world. So off we walked down the road, me ranting about all things possible under the sun, topics such as where to swedes get off being so damned beautiful to why the hell does canada even exist I found time to not only think of ringing but actually ringing the hostel in broken hill to make sure they were still open for business. So I rang them and to my absolute astontishment they only had one free bed in the place, this in a hostel with room for 100 people, this in a tiny mining village in the middle of absolutely no where. Sat on the beach in bondi I began to wonder what the hell is ahead of me…

I bade farewell to the girls early on the sunday morning, they will be down to visit me in melbourne at the end of november and I look forward to greatly the chance to return their wonderful hospitality. It was 6 in the morning, I got stuck on the subway with the post party, too tight to fork out for a taxi home brigade. One dude from liverpool insisted on starting up a conversation with me, but on hearing that I was irish changed his tune, litterally. ‘I fooking hate you irish, all naight long I was traiying to baiy drinks for these burds but them was aving none of it, these guys over ere are aayrish’, at which point he broke out into Father and Son in a ronan keating effort, thank christ my stop was next. Adios amigo

I slept most of the train journey to dubbo which is the get off point to get a bus the rest of the way. I shared the bus with one other person to broken hill, the bus driver, 700 km. His name was peter, he was a retired policeman who moved to dubbo to be closer to his siblings after the passing of his wife last year from cancer. He took particular interest in my time from thailand, that friends of his had got themselves a thai wife, very pretty, he shrugged his shoulders and expected me to back him up. I felt sorry for him, I have seen it so many times, not only in asia where you have a man in his later years sitting there with an incredibly pretty partner. They are both staring off in opposite directions just waiting, just passing time. It turns the gut. I told him this and the conversation went dead for oooh about 300 km.

The road is dead straight, the sun setting over the horizon is breathtaking, the colours are phenomenal. The road soon becomes a focal point for the kangaroos, they like to lie on it because it hold heat better than the scrub wasteland, some like it a bit too much, there was road kill all over the place. Pulling into broken hill at 11 in the pm I began to think about what could possibly be drawing so many people to broken hill, so many that it would fill a huge hostel. Now I’ll be honest, I’m an optimistic person, I had visions of a bus load of lost impressionable nubile princess beauties lost in the middle of nowhere looking out for someone with a funny accent to pass the days with them. I figured the odds on this were pretty slim, but what I got, what I got dealt must surely rank in the same order of short odds.

Mildura is 300 km from broken hill, on the very same week that I chose to take 4 days to take in all there is to take in from the not so famous silver city, that very same week, Milduras Mental hospital had booked out the broken hill hostel for its annual excursion for its patients, all bar one room of course. Seriously, you could not make this stuff up. For 4 nights I stayed in an insane assylum. At times I felt the need to protest to to the chaparone on the door that I wasn’t crazy and that I was actually allowed to go outside on my own, I swear I was just waiting for the big red indian to walk through the door with a massive pillow. I even got done for accidentally nicking some of their milk for a cup of tea, one of their mentors lost the plot with me… I felt chastised, felt like slapping her one. A drop of milk fer fecks sake. Luckily enough there is enough to do in broken hill to keep you away from the crazies. I spent my days in the local art galleries or in the local book stores before spending the evenings in the various bars either getting fed or full.

I fled broken hill a few days earlier than planned, ironically the quickest way back to melbourne was via a town called mildura. The taxi left broken hill on the 300km spin to mildura, took about 3 hours. We landed there just before ten in the morning, the bus leaving for melbourne was at 11, that night. So 13 hours in mildura. It was an effort, between terrible coffee and even worse hollywood movies I was driven into the arms of the pub nearest the bus station. I sat up at the bar with my pint and my book keeping my own business but sure of course such a blissful existence could only last a couple of minutes. Two lads the far side of the bar noted the foreigner, they came over and sat either side of me.

Now let me describe these two gentlemen. I’ll start with the guy who sat at my right as his right ear was deaf, he wore a cowboy hat, a denim shirt with those brown bits on the collar tips and a pair of jeans that were sown onto him. He also sported a moustache which in classic aussie fashion wrapped around his lip and down this throat in under his shirt, twould surprise me if it went all the way down this chest and down the side of his legs to his ankles. Now he was gone sixty if he was a day. He went by the name of cowboy believe it or not. His friend was an even more beautiful specimen. This lad was missing not only an ear but and eye and all the teeth from the left side of his mouth through a ‘disagreement’ he had some years back.

Over the course of the evening the second fella began to talk about his impending marriage, he already had 3 marriages behind him and so thought nothing of taking the plunge again, he began to talk about his wife to be, a 29 year old girl. I thought jaysus man, you must be some charmer to have a woman so young on your arm. He looked into his drink, shook his head and said simply that she wasn’t the best looking lassie in the world. The lady herself walked into the pub soon afterwards to pick up her fiance. Lets just say he wasn’t lying!! The girl was obviously a junkie but seemed genuinely lovely. She gave me a hug and there on the spot invited me to the wedding in 5 weeks time, they reckoned I would bring a bit of class to proceedings, you know you are fecked when you are relying on me to bring the class.

Anyways they left me there on my own with my book at last and sure it wasn’t a whole lot longer before I was down the road at the bus station and off back to melbourne. The road took us through the town of bendigo which at its height gave the most stunning view of the sun rising over phillip bay and melbourne. First day of work in 10 months the following monday – can’t wait…

adios folks