All the Roadrunning

For three days I stood in the rain, I sank in the mud and I shivered in wet clothes. The live music coming from the assortment of bands was probably quite good, but unfortunately I barely listened. And even though I stood right there on that hillside field along with the 10,000 other festival attendees, there was little festive atmosphere once everyone’s clothes had been soaked through by the first evening.

The festival began on Friday afternoon and it ended on Sunday evening. It rained almost every minute of each day and it rained hard. Saturday was actually the wettest day of the year in the state of Victoria. What a time for the drought to end.

When every step you take has to be calculated correctly in order to avoid slipping and tumbling into a pile of shin-deep mud and your $1 poncho proves to be as useful as a sieve, you can not help but dream of being some place else. A land full of warm bedding and hot food where you don’t have to jump into an inflatable rubber dinghy and slide down a hill of mud to reach your destination.

On a positive note, my tent (which I had borrowed along with a sleeping bag from a friend who could not attend the festival) was the only one in our group of 6 tents that did not leak and flood within a few hours of being set up. The other 13 people in our group had to spend a considerable amount of time scooping cups of water out of their tent and then having to spend two nights sleeping in puddles.

Unfortunately, though, I had other problems to deal with. As I went to sleep late Friday night, I began to feel hundreds of small moths flying around inside my tent. They would enter my nose and ears, swarm around my eyes and even enter my mouth with each breath. I found myself constantly opening the front flap and trying to shoo them outside as best I could, while wondering exactly how 500 moths could have infiltrated my tent in the first place.

I ended up falling asleep only after wrapping a thick blanket tightly around my head and face, as the moths continued their attack around me.

It turns out that they were not even moths in the end. When I awoke in the morning, I discovered that I had actually been attacked by millions of fluffy white feathers that had come from a four-inch hole in the bottom of my borrowed sleeping bag.

The floor was covered in a one-inch thick layer of feathers as a result. And so too were my clothes, backpack, hair and even my face covered beyond recognition. It was like a snowy Christmas scene on a cold Australian summer day.

When I stepped outside, not only my friends, but the hundreds of other campers in the immediate vicinity were quite amused, that is until massive clouds of feathers came flying out of my tent and scattered all over their belongings as well. To make it worse, the rain was pasting every single feather to whatever it landed on. Before long, dozens of people were unsuccessfully trying to pull feathers off of their clothes, cars, beer cans and tents.

The festival pressed on all day Saturday, with music being played from 10am until 5am the following morning. Few people danced, few people spoke and few people sang along to the songs. In fact, the happiest and most energetic people were those that had just bought a cup of coffee after waiting for over an hour in line.

Nonetheless, everyone gave their best effort in making the most of an unfortunate situation. Sometimes you could even hear the prayers aimed at stopping the rain more clearly than the singer on stage. We all simply huddled around and waited, truly believing that the rain could not possibly last forever.

Alas, the sun broke through the clouds! On Sunday. At. 3:00pm. That the festival ended at 4:00pm did not matter. When the sun shone, the crowd roared and cheered, throwing their ponchos, winter hats and even shirts to the ground in celebration. The band playing on stage at the time thought that the cheers were for them and kept thanking the crowd for their support. But the band had only arrived an hour before their set and therefore had no idea what the crowd had been through. We couldn’t care less who was on stage at that point, even though we were screaming desperately for an encore. We wanted the sun to re-appear and salvage the last remaining remnants of this festival to remember.

The sun stayed out for about 30 minutes before hurriedly fading behind another thick layer of rain clouds. Ten thousand people suddenly had to find their ponchos, hats and shirts in the mud and put them on once again, as the rain arrived shortly thereafter.

Everyone gave a half-hearted cheer as the final band played its final song, but by that point, there was only a few hundred people left standing. My friends and I walked back to our campsite, packed up our stuff and drove off, almost completely in silence. We were exhausted, grumpy and in desperate need of showers.

A few minutes later and we were on the road back to Melbourne. The sun was shining again and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen.

And it hasn’t rained since, a most welcome change as I spend hours in the backyard each day trying to get the feathers out of my tent.

On Thursday I am heading out into the country for the three-day Meredith music festival, where bands I have never heard of will perform on a stage at the bottom of a hill in the middle of whoop whoop. Apparently, several thousand people will be in attendance and everyone just camps right there on the hill. As lovely as that may sound, the forecast is most unfortunate – an 80% chance of thunderstorms all day, every day and temperatures hovering between 40 – 60 degrees. There sure is nothing like a summer festival! It’s a good thing I brought my winter hat and Himalayan mountain blanket with me to Australia.

Over the course of the past few weeks, I have been going through a list of ‘Comfort Challenges’ that I have decided to complete each week. The aim is, according to the book I read, to put a person in the proper state of mind that will allow them to turn any crazy business ideas they have into actual successes.

The first two exercises were easy and involved staring at everybody I passed in the street for 3 straight days as well as being the person to make the decisions any time a decision needed to be made when around other people. Even the challenge that involves saying ‘no’ to everything for 2 days, which happens to begin today, is not terribly daunting. But it is the following exercise that worries me.

I will be required to go to a crowded place (i.e. busy downtown street, coffee shop or department store) and just lie down on the ground for 10 seconds. That’s it. And then when people ask if I am ok or what on earth I am doing, I am simply to reply, ‘I just felt like lying down.’ This is supposed to eliminate all fear and boost confidence to unfathomable levels. Or it might just scar me for life. Or possibly it will become addictive. I just might end up spending a portion of every day lying down in random places and moving from city to city and town to town doing so.

Anyway, apart from having to wear my winter hat during summer, all continues to be well here in Melbourne. I have yet to have a large spider crawl across my face in the middle of the night (which usually happens at some point) and I have yet to get caught up in a neighborhood game of cricket. Those two points alone have made my first month quite a success.

I also managed to steal from the Australian Post Office, accidentally of course. It’s a long story that ends up with me receiving $20 of free Overnight Delivery Postage. All I did was walk out of the Post Office without paying for the envelopes I had picked up and which I planned to send the next day. When I went to send the package at a different Post Office, I tried to explain to the lady behind the counter that I had not paid anything. She did not believe me and kept telling me that I must have paid when I had originally taken the envelopes. But I never bought the envelopes; I just walked out of the Post Office with them. Anyway, she was so confused by my confusion that she just gave me a “Whatever sir” and sent off my package without taking any money. Turns out you have to pay for the envelopes before you leave the Post Office, not when you send them. What a strange place.

Today involves, apart from saying ‘no’ to everything, some more work on the book I am writing and some final preparations for the music festival. And then this evening there is the Wednesday night music and food festival at the Victoria Market. Every Wednesday night hundreds of ethnic food stalls set up in an open-air market while odd bands ranging from family ensembles to the local Victorian police band make their best attempt at creating bearable music. However, the atmosphere is excellent and the food is as tasty as it gets. So tonight, the plan is to once again enjoy the festivities.

If all goes well, upon finishing our burritos and paella, my friends and I just might even walk into the most crowded section of the festival, drop to the ground and lie down for 10 seconds. In the end, today is as good a day as any to conquer all fear.

I need a lemonade.

After spending two hours playing basketball this afternoon, I have become as useful as a toe nail clipping. I am exhausted and in pain. Sure, it felt wonderful to be back on the court, despite requiring a personal ‘timeout’ every 9 minutes to avoid collapsing to the floor (where I most likely would have stayed in order to take a nap). Being out of shape is not enjoyable at all, and so I now plan to start playing basketball 3-4 times a week. Within a month I should at least be able to shoot the ball without feeling as if I am trying to toss a refrigerator into a chimney from 2 miles away.

By the way, I am in Melbourne at the moment. All the way down here in the Southern Hemisphere, quite a distance from quite a lot of the world. It’s been some time since my last entry and as usual, the weeks have been filled with meanderings along my random path. At the end of the latest installment, I suddenly found myself here, in Australia, having arrived exactly two weeks ago.

The decision to relocate to Australia for the time being was actually made while I was on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. Back in early October, I somehow found myself there, helping a friend start a tour operation for a few weeks. (It’s an entirely different story that I might come back to at a later date.)

On one particular, and typically balmy, Caribbean evening, I returned home from a day at Emerald Beach. The sun was about to set over Charlotte Amalie harbor. I had a perfect view of this grand display from the large wraparound balcony of the resort apartment my friend had arranged for me. As I sat there, breathing in that warm, humid air, my mind began wandering as usual. The most popular of my brain’s forays into contemplation involve the simple concept of where I should go and what I should do next. On this particular evening, it therefore came as no surprise when I returned to that very same topic yet again.

However, only five minutes into my brainstorming (which had produced such results as moving to San Diego, walking across Mongolia and volunteering in Gabon), my cell phone rang. It was my friend Amelia, calling from Melbourne.

For years, I had always toyed with the idea of returning to Australia, a country that is one of my favorites due to the unique quality of happiness that seems to permeate the culture. As usual, this idea was also one of the thousands that quickly flashed through my head as I sat there on the balcony, but, as just like every other time, it failed to really stand out among its hundreds of competitors.

The telephone conversation I had with Amelia was actually nothing out of the ordinary, as we spent 30 minutes catching up since our last conversation a few months back. But as soon as I hung up the phone, everything changed. Within minutes, not only did the idea of heading back to Melbourne move to the forefront of my possibilities, it became solidified as an actual plan that was definitely about to be followed.

For a long time I have been looking for a place that offers me an energetic and diverse atmosphere, somewhat consistent warmth, a favorable cost of living and where I already know a good amount of people. With summer only a few weeks away, friends excited at the possibility of my return and an incredibly favorable exchange rate, Melbourne suddenly seemed like the only option.

“Why not?” was all I could mumble to myself as the sun flickered its last beam of light across the island, as if signaling to me that time was up for me to make a decision. I had spent exactly 7 minutes thinking about this new plan, however, it was clearer and more inspiring than any other I had had in months, and perhaps even years. Walking across Mongolia would have to be put on hold.

Maintaining the usual pace of my changes in direction, I left St. Thomas five days later, spent a few days re-organizing (at which I have become particularly skillful) in Florida and flew out to Melbourne. I traveled for 30 hours to get here, yet not even once during that long haul did I question the decision.

So far, everything has worked out perfectly. I found a house to live in only minutes from the city center, I have been re-connecting with old friends almost every single day and I have been more focused than ever on the book I want to write. I am attending festivals each weekend, enjoying the live music scene and eating Indian food every two or three days! And I am even playing basketball again, or at least attempting to.

Regular updates will now return, as I am settled into the comfortable, energetic and rewarding world that is Melbourne.