Sydney to Cairns – Part One

The trip started in late June when the group of eight came together in Melbourne, with six of them flying in from England for a three-week holiday. Apparently the best thing which happened in Melbourne was that everyone went on a Neighbours tour. Not liking Neighbours, I thought this was pretty tragic. But they got up to lots of fun antics and they were clearly having the time of their lives. Then they moved on to Sydney and I flew in to meet the party.

I was excited as I’d not seen any of my friends in fifteen months. For two years I’d lived over in Perth, doing my own thing, but now I was like a fish back in water. I knew Lindsay, Chris, Laura and Theresa, but Katie, Alex, Caz and Dave Cheese were all new faces. Sydney was like an old flame, as I’d lived there for a month in 2008.

Our very first outing was to Harry’s Pies. This was a dark corner near Central station with tables and chairs, where a bespectacled foreign student in a caravan served up all manner of pie-based exotica. Hangovers and tales of last night’s Irish pub abounded among us. My drinking libido was rising, a day late. We spent a quiet evening in at the hostel.

The next day: road trip! We girded our loins, assembled our party and set sail for the beach at Manley; by which I mean we drove there. We had rented two camper vans to take the nine of us and our luggage up the coast. Our eventual target was Brisbane.

Wicked Campers seem to have two styles of van for hire: ‘new’ and ‘junkyard death trap’. We paid extra for two nice new ones with automatic gearboxes and CB radios. Each van was adorned in a custom ‘graffiti’ paint job. The one in which I was travelling had ‘Skool-a-palooza’ emblazoned on the side in ghetto lettering. We were still Skoolies in spirit, if sadly no longer in age.

In Manley we strolled on the beach then went for lunch with Caz’s friend James. He grew up in Blackpool and now works in Manley as a groundsman at a golf course. We ate in a busy seafront restaurant. They served up a cracking seafood risotto. Later on Laura was sick in the bogs. We said goodbye to James and left.

“On the road again!” came Theresa’s sing-song call over the radio. We were up, up and away, travelling through New South Wales’s breadbasket. Heading north into the night we cut a huge swathe through the countryside, finally stopping for rest at Port Macquarie. Theresa and Cheese did a great job of driving – no doubt sustained by the game of ‘Blind Date’ they played over the radio.

We had expected ‘Port McFlurry’ to be quite a happening place, but when we pulled up, at 9.30 on a Sunday night, it was of course dead. The one and only food shop still open was a Dominos, so we all bought takeaway pizzas. Fast-food franchises are often your only friend in Australian country towns.

Beds were waiting for us nearby, at a tennis court motel run by a friendly Asian woman. We stroked her cat then took our pizzas back to our rooms. I shared a room with Laura and Theresa. I was to be on the receiving end of a lot of girly chats during this holiday.

The next day we had breakfast in Port MacQuarie – mainly memorable for Linz canoodling with a statue of Aussie politician Sir Edmund Barton. Moving on to Coffs Harbour, we found a curious community radio station that resided in a shopping centre. It was run by a friendly lady with a strange name which escapes me. She gave us all a tour of the studios and I waved at the DJ. It was like a step back in time to the mid 1980s.

The barbeque was good. We cooked many fine foods at the park by the beach –supermarket sausages and burgers basically. You’re either too full or not quite full enough after a barbeque. I think we were all very full and there was food left over.

For the next leg of the journey I took over as van DJ and dropped quality track after quality track. I remember selecting the classic hit ‘Bills Bills Bills’ by Destiny’s Child and treating my fellow passengers to some freestyle dance shit. You can take these risks when you’re on holiday.

Arriving in Grafton (a small country town) that evening we found it to be just that – a small country town. All the shops were shut and the streets were empty. It was an exact repeat of our experiences in Port MacQuarie with the added twist that this was a weekday. Perhaps everyone living there suffered from agoraphobia?

After the hotel bar closed at 7.30 we came up with the genius idea of having a shopping trolley race down the deserted high street. Chris and Cheese wheeled the girls along the pavement at full tilt. I think Chris’s team won the race. We whooped and hollered. Curtains twitched. The town slept. Grafton seemed to merit no more than an overnight stop but the hotel was very good. We stayed up playing dirty drinking games in Dave’s rented cottage.