How yus goin cobbers? Tie me kangaroo down sport, toss another shrimp on the barbie, "that's not a knife, that's a knife!" and all that gubbins. It's high time I crawled out of the woodwork and whacked an update on here.
After my long journey through Asia I have entered Australia on a working visa, to live, work, frolic and fornicate in this vast and plentiful land for a period of anything up to twelve months. I've been in Sydney for nearly four weeks now, doing some sightseeing, hanging round with other backpackers and living out of a suitcase at a hostel. I backpack, therefore I am. Halfway round the world already - who'da thunk it!
I flew in on 15th April, fresh from the madness of Hong Kong. It was a shock to finally be out of Asia and back in the 'real world' again. A world of drinkable tapwater, expensive coffee, sensible traffic and rain. Winter is fast approaching over here, and the hot weather is gone. There's still a decent amount of sun though, and not enough to get annoying.
Sydney is a nice place to wander round - it has a calm and relaxed feel and everywhere you turn there is either a harbour, a skyscraper, or a restaurant offering exotic cuisine from some far-flung corner of the globe. But it's a very expensive place to live and it can easily devour vast sums of travellers' money in the blink of an eye. All the fun stuff like bungee jumping and learning to surf is bloody expensive. Take the credit cards and bury them in concrete!
The cheapest way to spend time in Sydney is definitely walking round looking at things, as this costs nothing. As well as numerous picturesque bays and beaches (such as Bondi beach, my near-namesake), it also boasts the iconic opera house and close by, the Sydney harbour bridge. This is a magnificent towering iron structure dating from the 1930s that spans the entire harbour. Paul Hogan, aka Crocodile Dundee, used to be a maintenance worker on it before he was famous.
Sydney is the showbiz capital of Australia. Keanu Reeves was here the other week for the premiere of some film or other. There are big gigs on all the time. The Pope is coming for an official visit in July, meaning the city will be swamped with pilgrims, i.e. Christian nutters. If you want to see the Pope you'll have to a) make sure you buy a ticket, and b) be under 35. Apparently he wants a youthful crowd, to make Christianity seem hip and cool to the world's cameras. Isn't religion just the biggest load of shite ever!?
Anyway... after a few days staying at a city-centre hostel full of drunken yoofs I migrated out to the suburb of Glebe, a long leafy street that would be the preserve of middle-class snobs and ballet schools if it were in England. But it's a really cool area - full of Victorian-style pubs, restaurants and 'alternative' shops with incense sticks burning in them. The bottle shop (what they call an off-license here) has a mural of an Aboriginal flag and the word 'SORRY' daubed underneath it. There are cats in the gardens and possums lurking in the trees (a possum is sort of a cross between a cat and a rat).
The people are nice and friendly, and there is a local newspaper, the Glebe, full of parochial grumblings about how shocking the public transport is. It's an immensely likeable place, but after a few weeks here I've run out of things to do. So today, like most days, I sit here in the library on the internet, trying to write my blog and cursing my writer's block.
I've spent more than three weeks staying at Glebe Point YHA, a small and friendly hostel that lurks behind a forest of trees on the main street in Glebe. I've made friends, learnt to cook again and even helped out at the weekly rooftop barbeque, in exchange for a free night's stay. There are a huge amount of British, Irish and German travellers here. I look forward to the day when I can meet some real Australian people!
My week revolves around the quiz night at our local pub, the Landsdowne. The guy who does the quiz is an actor who used to have a bit-part in Neighbours! (He played Brett Stark, Neighbours fact fans.) Unlike most pub quizzes they seem quite happy to sidle up and whisper you the answers, and you get drinks vouchers for winning. The beer in Australia is great - there's no Fosters (thank Christ) but beverages like Toohey's New and Cooper's Sparkling Ale slip down a treat.
This fancy living is eating into my travel funds, so I've been on the lookout for novel and ingenious money-making schemes. I tried busking with my travel guitar in a subway near Central train station, and made $5 from 30 minutes of afternoon troubadourage. It's somewhat gratifying to have a handful of coins chucked at your feet while you're belting out an up-tempo version of 'Dreaming of You', but it won't pay the bills at this rate.
No stranger to losing my dignity in surprising ways, I also tried my hand at medical testing for cash! Well, everyone has to once, don't they. It all started when my friend spotted a notice in the paper, advertising for paid volunteers to test suncream at Sydney University. I volunteered, and spent a week sitting on a chair in an office, reading a book, while a friendly old lady drew on my back with lipstick and sunblock then pottered around shining UV lights on it.
The photobiology department there is like a private company that carries out testing and research on new suncreams for cosmetics giants like Avon and Boots. They offer cold hard ca$h to penniless students and backpackers willing to risk a bit of sunburn. It's money for nothing in effect! As a pasty-skinned part-ginge I was a prized specimen, and after several hours' of tests I walked away with $180. There have been no side-effects, apart from a strange network of lipstick noughts and crosses on my back that didn't wash off for ages!
As well as suncreams, I've also been dosing myself up on culture. As the earliest European settlement in Australia, Sydney has quite a lot of history. The rash of humungous skyscrapers in the central business district is surrounded by streets full of quaint Victorian buildings. The oldest part of the city (known as the Rocks) reputedly has ghosts lurking in it.
Though it's true that Australia was once a prison colony, most of the convicts weren't really criminals in the modern sense. Minor crimes like sheep-stealing, forging a one pound note, or disrespecting the King of England's chin could see you transported half-way round the world in shackles. Within a few years all the prisoners were freed, and a new kingdom was on the rise.
Before the first ships landed, Australia had been an undisturbed continent populated with a multitude of ancient Aborigine tribes. Aborigines are one of the oldest civilisations in the world, but their days were numbered once the Europeans arrived and brought exotic new diseases such as smallpox with them. Some tribes still exist today in remote areas, but a lot of the indigenous culture and language has been lost for good.
Until late in the 20th Century the government had a shockingly medieval attitude to the Aborigines; they weren't granted full citizenship rights, and liable to have their children taken away and re-homed with white families (the so-called stolen generations). The Australian government only just this year issued a formal apology to the Aborigines for all the wrongs of the past. It's a harsh and unforgiving land with a surprisingly cruel history.
Australia is such an unfeasibly vast country and one month in, I've only explored the tiniest part of it. I've seen some of the countryside around Sydney, which features some areas of outstanding natural beauty. A few weeks ago I did a day trip to the Blue Mountains, but it was foggy and we couldn't see anything.
Last week I went on a wine-tasting trip to the Hunter Valley with Ross and Lucy (two chums from the hostel) and we gorged ourselves on the finest wines available to humanity. The Hunter Valley is a stunning area of rolling green hills and vineyards about two hours' north of Sydney.
We stood there, in glorious sunshine, getting plastered at ten in the morning on a farm. Brilliant. I learnt that to drink wine properly you're supposed to sip it and make "f-f-f-f-f" noises like Hannibal Lecter. It does taste better and more interesting when you do that.
I was originally planning to get a job in Sydney and stay here for a few months, but I've seen all I want to see and I'm ready to move on now. I've arrived in Sydney at a time when the weather is turning to crap, and the conventional traveller logic would be go somewhere else in the country where the weather is nice, possibly to pick grapes while wearing sandals that were made from hemp fibre in an ethically sound factory/commune.
On a whim I've bought a plane ticket to Perth in Western Australia. I fly there on Saturday, to stay with an Aussie guy called Josh that I met travelling in India (at the Banyan Tree in Goa). Perth is supposed to be very nice, and a lot cheaper to live in than Sydney.
Money is a pressing concern so I need to get a job over there for a couple of months, then Josh and I are planning to explore the country by road. My first month in Australia has passed by quite uneventfully, but it promises to be a gas from here on in.
This blog was brought to you by Coon - the racist cheese!
