Join our ambivalent explorer on a mostly unplanned adventure across the wastes of Newfoundland. Meet an incoherent karoake folk singer, commune with Viking spirits.
Shiver as he sleeps in horrible places and almost gets crushed to death whilst roughing it in a dumpster full of cardboard.
Hitch-hike across America with heroes and sweet-hearts, lunatics and Belgians.
Meet not-quite-right-in-the-head war veterans, aging Mexicans, stoned hippies, country hicks, and even the Mafia.
Sweat your socks off in Belizean paradise, learn how to build a bread oven, contemplate blowing up forty thousand little bitey ants and share in the peculiar experience of being home to flesh-eating maggots.
Discover just how many willies a kangaroo actually has. Eat bread and butter pudding at a sultan’s palace. Wonder just what the heck ‘Gout Chess’ might be.
Set sail from the Isle of Women for the shores of Cuba, shag the captain, get lost at sea and almost starve to death in the process… and we haven’t even got halfway yet.
Hang on to your trousers as one man wends his slightly random passage from Newfoundland to New Zealand via a decidely circuitous route, until he finally finds his quarry: the elusive Chocolate Pudding Tree in far-flung Borneo.
(or How I Eventually found the Chocolate Pudding Tree)
Newfoundland to New Zealand
October 2002 to November 2004
by Richard Terry
See pictures from the journey on facebook
Search ‘Richard-Terry’.
C O N T E N T S
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE: THE AMERICAS
Canada – Loonies, toonies and boonies
The United States – Not all bullets and bible-bashing
Mexico
Belize – Chocolate and karate chickens
Mexico – Heading seawards… eventually
England – Inside-out holiday at home
Isle of Women…..
Gulf of Mexico – Worse things really do happen at sea
Cuba
PART TWO: EUROPE
England
The Low Country – Singing with Sofie
England…. …Italy.. ….England
Sweden – Cheesecake and moose steak
Norway… …England Again
PART THREE: AUSTRALASIA
Australia – Prestidigitacity in the Nether Regions
Tazzie……..New Zealand – ‘I drown my sorrows with flan’
Australia Again
Brunei & Borneo – Bread and butter pudding at the sultan’s palace
APPENDIX ONE: The go-getting Adventure Pensioner Lyn’s inspiring Women’s Institute talk.
APPENDIX TWO: Papa Neutrino- Original Beat Hippie a life and an obituary.
PREFACE
Okay. I confess. I have no angle. I haven’t travelled a million miles on rollerskates, haven’t cycled a tandem across the Andes with an orangutan as my riding companion. I haven’t driven a tractor cross-country through Uzbekistan, nor have I traversed Route 66 on a solar-powered electric sofa. I haven’t pedalled a bicycle across the English Channel (though one particular Zetta Hills did*). I haven’t lolloped across India on an elephant. I haven’t done anything whatsoever for charity. Sorry.
Just me, my trusty worn-out rucksack and not much idea what to do next.
None of this would have happened without the spontaneous generosity and kindness of total strangers. En route, some of these people would become temporary friends.
Its a sobering thought to consider how far through life we would actually get on our own without the aid of others.
Hitch-hiking depends utterly on generosity. Without all those very many people, many of them very lovely, thoughtful, helpful and kind, I would never have got to experience all the wonderful places that I have throughout the course of my life.
Every person we meet contributes in some smaller or larger way to our comprehension of the world we find ourselves in.
In a very real sense, we are all in this together.
The passing of time is a funny old business. All that follows happened quite some time ago; when I was considerably younger. I got myself into tangles and knots that now I probably wouldn’t. I hope not anyway.
July 2012
*Zetta Hills was a well-to-do Edwardian Lady who cycled TWICE across the English Channel and then in 1920 cycled fifteen miles up the River Thames each time on a bicycle outrigged with eight foot long floating wooden stabilisers. After that she ran away with the circus and rode a big powerful motorbike on The Wall Of Death and then became a sea-lion tamer. And all that before tea-time.
INTRODUCTION
‘It is far better to do something and find it empty than to do nothing and leave life blank’ – Emily Bronte.
(Seen on a postcard in a caravan two days before I suddenly and unexpectedly decide to leave England.)
Sometimes – actually make that frequently – I get stuck. Besieged with lifestyle possibilities I have a habit of ending up getting in such a jam that it all amounts to nothing.
When that happens I sometimes imagine myself as an old man. He cajoles me, usually telling me to stop being such a twit and he sometimes succeeds in getting me off my backside. He will frown and sometimes help out when I have to figure which of the three hundred undone fantasies are actually worth bothering with.
TV is largely life-rotting blah-blah-blah, fooling our brains into thinking that something interesting is really happening in our lives, when actually it isn’t. Okay perhaps if you need a moment of distraction; but soul-destroying as a lifestyle choice.
I wonder how much human potential to create, interact, achieve and learn stuff is lost because of TV.
How many inventions get left unmade? How many bands go unformed? Classic new songs pass through heads never to get composed?, how many challenges go unmet, characters untested, people ungrown and left sucking on the tit of TV for all their adult lives?
I’ve always liked films though. The best kind of films, for me, are usually the ones that draw you into some heroic narrative and then spit you out the door at the other end with a renewed sense of ‘Go on then… do something wonderful!’
A time came when so many things in my life seemed to grind to a halt. It was one of those moments where everything falls apart at once. Home, girlfriend, direction. All gone.
It happens to everyone at some point or another. If I’d had a career and a big pile of stocks and shares, I would have lost them too.
If I’d gone to a wise old tarot reader she would have pulled up all the dramatic cards; Death, The Queen of Murkiness, The King of Cock-ups, sucked through her teeth and diplomatically told me she only likes to read their positive aspects.
At the end of summer 1999, behind a friend’s house, I sat under a huge old oak in Somerset, pondering my existence.
Me and my long-term girlfriend had just split up. My mother had just recently died. When that happened someone opened the family cupboard, and a whole pile of rotting skeletons fell out. My ‘home’ was a clapped-out Ford Transit van nowhere in particular. I had no career, save a few sporadic sculptures I’d made for a bit of cash. I was on the dole. What had I got to show for myself? Diddly squit.
Fortunately, something clicked.
I had to get my act together, shake off my Mogadon mindset and actually do that heroic thing the films kept telling me about. Not just feel a warm buzz for half an hour after walking out of the cinema, but actually live it out. Be my own film star.
I slept. I dreamed I was hurtling across a vast yellow African plain under a vivid blue sky standing in a pick up truck behind the cab, hot air rushing round my face, specks of sand smarting high speed and unseen on my skin.
When I woke up I was in my van next to a park in Swindon, not staying at my ex-girlfriend’s house. A seed was sown.
Now, to do something about that dream…
Ever since I was small I had been fascinated by maps of the world. Places with exotic and fantastic names, joined together by thinly meandering black lines, through vast rivers and mountain ranges, many of them in places populated by people just going about their ordinary everyday lives. Something to be seen. Something else.
In my adolescence I would ponder sex, making music and art, the demise of modern capitalist society, sex, and what it would be like to follow some of those tantalising black lines on the maps. How far could you go? How unlike my dreary life could I actually get? And then I’d think about sex again.
I decided at that point under the oak tree that I wanted to go to Africa and plant trees. Two weeks later I was on a mission to Africa (via Norway… but that’s another story). On the return journey a year later and much turbulent water having passed under the bridge, I somehow ended up in exotic Norwich England. I was doing the proverbial ‘dead parrot’; I was pining for the fjords. Flat suburban Norwich was a hell of a comedown.
I saved some cash specifically for going to New Zealand. Why New Zealand? Because when I was thirteen, my favourite band ‘The Beat’ did a song called ‘Dream Home in New Zealand’ about having somewhere safe to be in the event of a nuclear war. Now we’re past the scary times of the Thatcher/Reagan years of my youth but some things stick. The important factors about all this that I had stacked away in the back of my head were;
1) to be as far away from England as I could get,
2) to go somewhere exotic,
3) probably where there are palm trees and
4) that it will therefore be nice.
Anyway… I made all my travel preparations, and then did that classic ‘Likes-the-idea-but-doesn’t-actually-have-the-balls’ thing of not actually going anywhere. Later on over the course of my eventual road trip, I was going to encounter many people who had unintentionally ended up travelling alone because their best mate had bailed out on them at the last minute; Either out of anxiety or they couldn’t get the money together or they suddenly thought getting married would be much more exciting, or because their legs had suddenly and unexpectedly fallen off.
It was a couple of years of farting about in Norfolk before the electrical signals would eventually make their way from some obscure part of my brain all the way down to my generally immobile backside. That was my friend Helen’s doing largely. You can think of her as being a kind of female Dr. Frankenstein if you like. It has usually seemed to require a woman to short circuit me in some way or another in order to make anything interesting happen; but that, I’ll tell you about later…
Writing this book was my on-the-road security blanket.
It evolved from firstly being email missives to friends and then it became a diary, and now it’s a fully-fledged book. Primarily, it was an attempt to empty my head of far too many cluttered memories picked up en route.
I figured at the time that writing it all down would serve to free me of events as they happened so that I could enjoy the present by letting go of the past. All that has actually happened is that they would all jostle with each other on the stage in my head, have punch ups with my present, pick fights with my future and cause general chaos much of the time.
I have since taken up meditation. This works much better.
Secondly, writing helped me to maintain a certain kind of perspective. Perspective is somewhat of a comfort to an unsure person where every day is different and you never quite know who or what is coming next. When the shit hits the fan, writing at least takes on the guise of something a bit like a movie narrative. (Traveller’s truism; when you’re on the road somewhere exotic and shit happens, at least it’s exotic shit.)
There; that’s the ‘warts and all’ version of getting ‘the travel bug’.
Memories mellow and ripen with time like fine wine and old cheese.
Return to Contents.
P A R T O N E :
T H E A M E R I C A S
CANADA:
LOONIES, TOONIES AND BOONIES
Go West!
In your Sunday best,
Go West!!
In your pants and vest,
Go West!
I don’t remember the rest,
Go West! Go West!
(Me, a la Village People)
8-10-02
I’m in Toronto! I haven’t really slept for about a day and a half – I have been snatching little dozes in the only ways you can when you’re using public transport.
Early this morning, I left Helen’s quiet country cottage under a cold English mist, hitched a ride to London in no time at all, in the time saved got an unplanned bus to Reading to say goodbye to my dad, zipped and back to Gatwick by this afternoon. Eight hours of ariel time-warp later and here I am.
There is the slow dawning that I’ve shifted from the fantasising of several years into this situation where I’m actually, finally, at a foreign airport clutching a ticket that says ‘Canada’ on it. The surreality is slowly starting to wear off… It’ll take a little while to adjust.
We flew in via Chicago and over the Mississippi, I didn’t know the river starts from this far north. Remarkably, you can travel nearly all the way from Hudson’s Bay in the Arctic all the way to the Gulf of Mexico by various watery routes. A first glimpse of the mind-boggling scale of The Americas.
I meet two guys who are on their way to Minneapolis. They are nice friendly Americans, blowing negative stereotypes out of the window before I have even got off the plane.
I chat with an English ex-fireman from the Midlands who is busy emigrating out to Canada with his girlfriend. It’s good to have some reassurance that there is at least one other fellow Brit doing a runner from the safety and comfort of his own home.
We have flown over Greenland which is an astonishing sight – looking out of the window, the only three things I can see are the plane’s right wing, the thin sky of near-space and an endless sea of ice below. We are up so high that we are able to see the real life Earth and sea below resembling bits of the world map I had been looking at only the day before. It’s amazing to actually be able to recognise and put names to some of the coastal shapes far below.
When the Portuguese explored this part of the world with their horses and canoes in the sixteenth century they marked it down on their maps as ‘Ca’nada’. This translates as ‘Land of Nothing’. Don’t tell the Canadians. They are nice people and deserve to be treated as our friends.
Northern Canada looks as sparse from the air as it does from the map.
I’m provisionally thinking of visiting Niagara Falls as it seems to be local to where I now find myself. Then I fancy going to Newfoundland and then afterwards hitching to the Yukon, preferably all without freezing to death. It’s not too bad here in Toronto right now, about sixty degrees during the day.
Now it’s 11pm, and I need to find a place to sleep. Either I attempt to sleep in the airport, or I venture out into this completely unknown place and see what I can find. I opt for bedding down on a nice indoor carpet right where I am; with a metal bench and a corner of wall and window as my motel for the night. The room service is rubbish, but at least it’s free.
9-10-02
Niagara! The lush film location that launched the career of Hollywood’s most glamorous star ever.
Well, if you’re going to do something random, you may as well do it in style. I am at Niagara Falls. Its name alone conjures exotic filmatic images of romance and intrigue. Best leave it like that really, cos the real thing is something of a disappointment. Whatever natural grandeur it once possessed has been truly blighted, and has fallen from it’s former glory just as Marilyn Monroe ultimately did. If you squint and hold your right hand in front of your face, you can block out all the neon casino vulgarity and maybe see it how it really was before the conquesters turned up. Now it’s all full of Holidayhardrockinn hotelmotelthingblah. Anyway on the map, it’s just down the road from Toronto, so along I come, just for the whateverness of it. Okay, in truth so that I can casually toss into a conversation an ‘Oh yeah, I went there once’ just in case I’m ever with someone who is looking over a map of exotic holiday destinations or watching that particular Marilyn Monroe film.
The geography here is going to take some adjusting to. What looks on the map like it’s ‘just down the road’ is actually more than a hundred miles away. This place is hooooooge. If a Canadian road map was the same scale as a British road map, you wouldn’t be able to unfold it on the dashboard of a car, you’d need the back of an empty articulated lorry. Really.
Travelling by coach, I pass a few familiar places, causing slight confusion in my mind that has not yet quite totally arrived in Canada yet. London and Windsor are just down the road, and Whitby, Lincoln and Peterborough are nearby too.
I arrive at Niagara late in the evening. Task number one; find somewhere to call home for the night. It is dark and misty, which by my rules of engagement is a double bonus – lesser visibility means more likelihood of finding a suitable spot to be unseen in.
After having found a sleeping place, I dump all my stuff in the bushes here and go for an unencumbered walk. I am going to go and find an internet cafe. It really is neon Americana-a-go-go on the Canadian side. I am hoping that it’s only like this because the other half of the Falls is in the US (the town of Buffalo). I am hoping that Canadians in themselves have less excessive tastes.
10-10-02
Upon waking up I take my plastic poncho thing off me and my bags. Quite a heavy dew. My sleeping bag is damp on the outside, and so are parts of my coat that I am using for a pillow. Methinks I shall have an interesting time juggling me and my stuff in all the undoubtedly wet places I am yet to encounter, especially as I’m supposed to do it whilst being up a tree in a hammock and avoiding being eaten by bears. Camping out during the dry parts of the year is a doddle, but in winter I end up having to be vigilant in trying to keep rain out and end up making do with being either terminally damp or having to make fires regularly (something I’m not in the habit of doing).
Niagara Falls, or ‘Gahnawehta’ to the original local Cayuga Indians, is actually three falls; by the white man’s names – Horseshoe, American, and Bridal Veil (largest to smallest). Horseshoe is the most powerful waterfall in North America, whilst all three combined let through more water than any other falls in the world. Together they straddle the US/Canadian border. It is on the Niagara River which drains Lake Erie into Lake Ontario.
In the dark of the night, I knew I was somewhere near the water’s edge but in the morning it becomes apparent that my sleeping spot is a mere ten foot away from the edge of the 200 foot high gorge just downstream from the Falls. Fortunately there is a nice sturdy fence separating me from certain death. I can hear birds between the white noise of the falling water. Sun’s just coming up.
There is suburban sprawl on both sides of the gorge, I can’t really see from here what it looks like on the US side, all I can see is the sides of a few big houses and a few cars blanketed by a veritable throng of large friendly-looking deciduous trees. Actually my trip to Niagara has definitely been worth it just to wander in and out of the streets here on the Canadian side. It’s a bit of a thrill to actually be amongst all those big clapboard houses that you see on American films and TV, where houses have verandas and big beautiful trees in the garden. It’s all very cosy looking in a 1970s chunky knit jumpers kind of way.
Not many houses have really big gardens, but just seeing what stuff people have in their yards is fascinating; kids bikes, bits of wood, skateboards, gardening in progress. Ordinary life stuff, just slightly maple syrup flavoured.
I’ve always had a bit of a fascination for seeing inside other people’s houses (especially if they are creatively interesting) and this satisfies my voyeuristic tendancies to some degree. Added to which it’s also Halloween, and outside most of the houses seem to be engaged in a friendly competition to see who can get the best looking house front. There are pumpkins (real, plastic or orange rubbish bags with faces on them), ghosts (some are bed sheets hung in trees), Draculas at the window, cauldrons in the garden, fairy lights, ‘Happy Halloween’ hanging on the doors. There seems to be a vogue for having pairs of mannequin’s legs that disappear waist-down into the lawn and occasional limbs hanging from trees. No heads though, curiously.
I love the style of the houses. For a start they’re nearly all wooden which instantly makes them look warm and really homely. The rest – only a few – have vinyl sidings made to look like painted clapboard. Paradoxically, it’s only the motels and tourist stuff that looks horrible (i.e. concrete and bricks). Of the wooden houses, it looks like the town council must have said ‘Okay, here’s an acre of land, go and build whatever you like – just make it look good though.’ Houses have verandas upstairs and/or downstairs, round turrets (very Scottish), spiral staircases outside; and are for the most part painted really beautiful colours; Norwegian rust reds, deep blues, mustard yellows like you often find at an English seaside. No two houses are the same. I know we don’t have the same availability of space and wood, but the Brits are missing something here. So often there is potential for beauty and yet so often we pass up the opportunity.
I meet a scruffy English guy who is living here. He’s moved here from Portsmouth after having met some American woman on the internet.
Neither the United States nor Britain would allow them to legally live together in either country, so she’s moved to Buffalo NY and he’s moved here. It’s going to work out cos they are having a baby. Ah, the romantic naivety of relationship glue.
Last night I met two raccoons which are marginally less than totally shy; I say ‘Hello’ to one. It stops rooting about for food for a moment, looks up at me in interrupted surprise and then hops off into a bush where it can carry on its business without being looked at. They are slightly smaller than Jack Russels, have bushy stripy tails and a mask that makes them look like bandit foxes.
The squirrels here are completely black, beautiful and also completely crazy. They are going bonkers over something and then I see what – thousands of little tiny walnuts.
Unfortunately upon closer investigation, I discover that the walnuts taste like pants, so I won’t be foraging for those. I find loads of tree-garlicky type plants, which are like tiny garlic cloves clumped in a ball at the tops of stems. I stuff loads in my bag in the spirit of true huntery-gatheryness. And I’ve found a plant that looks quite like stag-horn sumach, but smells like malty-coffee when you rub the leaves. Doesn’t seem to be edible though.
It’s the middle of autumn here, and quite mild during the day.
I am on my way to Sydney later on today, which should take thirty-six hours by bus, and then after resurrecting myself with some of yer actual walking, I have decided to get the ferry to Newfoundland, where if you care to take a look at a map, you may find one or two class comic place names.
11-10-02
I get to the bus at the other side of town with five minutes to spare…
Running with a heavy rucksack always makes me feel like a prize turnip. It is an activity that no sensible human being should ever indulge in. I suddenly feel sorry for soldiers.
Toronto to Montreal looks much like southern England just more stretched out and as such is not very interesting, I like New Brunswick better – endless maple forest blazing in glorious red orange and yellow; it all looks self-sown too (i.e. natural) . Now I get why the Canadians have a maple leaf on their flag.
The symbol of the maple leaf was first used by French Canadians in the 18th century, and then in different forms by Ontario and Ottowa. In 1834 the first major of Montreal called the maple ‘The king of the forest, the symbol of the Canadian people’. In English-speaking Canada, ‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ was the unofficial national anthem. Eventually in 1965, the differing maple emblems were amalgamated and homogenised into the non-specific maple leaf-ish shape that we see today. Well, ain’t that just a 1960s type thing to do eh?
There are no villages or towns at all between Fredricktown and Moncton – that’s about 180 km of unadulterated forest colours.
Moncton, Nova Scotia. Change at the bus station, stretch legs, have a bite to eat, get some fresh air and write…
Oops! The next bus having loaded my rucksack onto it just left without me (too busy writing to notice it leaving). I am informed that all is well and it just means that it gets there before me. Phew. I hope.
It’s now about 2.30pm and a bright sunny day. My head seems to have a lot of music in it at the moment which is a good thing to have in your head (tunes from the funky Basement Jaxx album ‘Rooty’ almost exclusively).
Today’s observations:
I’ve seen three cop cars in two thousand kilometres.
There’s almost no litter at all.
I see a squashed skunk on the road. Maybe I’ll see a live one.
All the college kids are back home from New Brunswick to Cape Breton for Thanksgiving weekend. I meet a few of them that get on the bus. They’re really friendly and we talk loads. It seems the Englishman is something of a novelty.
End of the journey, North Sydney, Nova Scotia.
There’s been a family of four on the bus all the way from Ontario. They are the heroes of the journey. An unmanageable mountain of baggage and two quietly tired youngsters; quite an achievement to get all this way with their souls still intact. I reckon they must be on their way home.
A tall gangly guy, very friendly, ushers us foot passengers onto the boat from the shuttle bus. He instantly fulfils my image of the main character ‘Quoyne’ in the book The Shipping News.
The ferry that will carry us from the tired late night of North Sydney to the bewilderedness morning of Newfoundland is the ‘Leif Eriksson’; named after the first white man to set foot on America (more about him later).
It’s 11 pm and I’d been on that bus journey for thirty-six hours, with only two brief stops. I finally re-unite with my rucksack. I’m really tired. I cry small tears of joy at having finally arrived at a moment that feels like adventure, like I’ve let go of something that was holding me back for a long long time; fear.
Finally doing what I want feels rather like suddenly rediscovering an old friend and wondering where the hell he’s been all this time.
It doesn’t matter how far out you go, it’s still the centre of your world. I now find myself in the heart of my dream.
This time last week I was drinking whisky with Helen, David, Andy and Becky E. It’s curious to think that I had absolutely no inkling whatsoever of where I would be in seven days time…
It’s 11.30 pm. Time for bed said Zebedee.
12-10-02
I sleep on the vibrating wobbling ship and just before first light we reach Port Aux Basques.
It’s chilly and I am somewhat stunned into wakefulness. There is nothing to do but start hitching from the port straight away, especially as now is likely to be the only time I will get a ride out of here – it looks like the only cars here will be the ones coming off the boat; there doesn’t seem to be much other local population otherwise at this time of day. I make my way off the clanking ferry ramp and walk for the first time in what seems ages, out into a cold stark morning. At least it’s dry. Up a short hill away from the harbour, I find a decent vantage point for hitching.
Unexpectedly, a guy with one leg comes out of nowhere hopping past at a furious pace; he stops long enough to tell me that he’s had an argument with his girlfriend in the town the night before and now she’s driven back 850 km to the other side of the island without him. He’s an odd character; hopping off down the road swearing to himself. I have to presume that he is actually going to stop somewhere and hitch. St John’s a long way, even with both legs. Off he disappeared into the distance taking his swearing with him.
Not long after. I meet another hitcher with the most fantastic accent; I collect accents, and this one is a trophy. It’s a mixture of Dublin, Cornish and Canadian. Very good indeed. An accent so rich and rarefied, you could bottle it and sell it or keep it to get pissed with at Christmas.
The region of Nova Scotia/Labrador/Newfoundland is known as The Maritimes, and the accent fits it so well; all sailing and pipe-smoking salty sea-dogs. I get a lift to Doyles about twenty miles up the road with a guy who is going to dig his potatoes. Twenty miles is a long way to go to do your allotment. I think he is escaping the missus.
We drive through two very pointy mountains (Twin Mountains). Very booby. Auspicious perhaps?! Now all we need is a David Lynch moment (noooo!)
It’s another glorious sunny day, perfect for diary writing whilst waiting for a ride. That I have met two hitchers as soon as I start out is an encouraging sight in this unknown quantity of a place, but who knows how fortunes change.
Terrain-wise, travelling from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland is a bit like going from Scotland to Skye, except that Newfoundland is about the size of Britain almost.
One of the first things I discover about Newfoundland is the way you pronounce it; ‘Noof-un-len’. Maybe they are descended from English East Anglians who also have taste for short-cutting long place names; beginning to end with barely a middle.
I’ve discovered cinnamon and raisin bagels with margarine and raw onion makes a healthy eating snack option. They do not sell cheese and onion pasties here (bastard things – they are Satan’s smegma pies). Also in the grocery store I’ve just been to, I purchased myself a child-sized plastic bowl with a comedy giraffe on it.
My next lift comes in the form of another pick-up truck, with father and son Eric and Aaron who are very friendly. I join them in a breakfast of Crown Royal whisky with coke and ice. They have Thermos cups and the only thing I can drink out of is my new giraffe bowl. Not ideal; I have difficulty in not spilling any. Not very manly either; I can just imagine earnestly stepping up to my regular bar, the barmaid saying ‘Your usual?’, me saying ‘Yup’ and her reaching up to the shelf with my personalised plastic giraffe bowl on it.
They are off to snare rabbits. I find out quite a bit about the hows and whys of hunting rabbits and moose, which is all very interesting but I’m darned if I can remember any of it.
They drop me off at a service station but are really keen for me to go off eighteen kilometres into the forest with them; and if I want to go and ‘get a shower and get cleaned up’, Eric would wait for me to do that first. He tries to persuade me further by declaring that they ‘are just a normal healthy pair of regular guys’. Quite what prompts him to say that is unclear to me and an awkward brief silence follows, as I am rather inebriated and can’t think of anything to say to such a remark. Another cup of whisky and ice still fails to persuade me, and we part ways, with them turning back up the road to their hunting spot.
I don’t know how justified my anxiety is about this, but it is more friendliness from two hunters with guns, a better sense of direction than me and a keenness to get me drunk than I feel safe with. Instinct says it is all a bit too ‘Deliverance’.
I have to go and sleep off the booze in the woods.
Leonard Alexander who picks me up next reckons Newfie people are completely okay but that ‘yeah, anywhere else in the world and it would be a bit kooky’. Leonard is a TV mast repair man who isn’t supposed to pick up hitchers but does anyway. He is part Irish, part English and with Mik-mak on both sides, which he tells me is the most full-blooded Native American I will come across on ‘The Rock’. I try beef jerky, just for the novelty of it. It’s really chewy and a little bit salty. It seems quite healthy for a meaty thing, but I don’t plan making a habit of it.
Leonard is trying to convince me to stay on The Rock whilst I have the chance and not to leave, cos there’s nowhere better in all of America. (He’s driven all through the US and had lived in British Columbia for eight years.) He reckons that once I’ve met a lovely woman here, I’d never leave! As he goes into a garage to get his coffee and jerky, a song plays on the radio that goes ‘Had enough of being a rolling stone, I just want to hang out in St. John’s Town…’
Today I’ve seen two dead bears on the backs of trucks, but no moose. Also today I meet the amazing Jim who has cycled 6714 km from Vancouver Island for a cancer relief charity. He started on august 15th, which means he must be doing about a hundred kilometres a day. He’s doing it for a cancer relief charity.
Twice I have cycled long distance; once with a girlfriend from my home in southern England through the Pyrenees to Barcelona, and once from John O’Groats to Lands End (north to south through Britain). Its a wonderfully liberating thing to do with your time and a great way of getting yourself back in balance; nothing to figure out beyond what to have for lunch and where to stop to put up the tent, tons of physical exercise and lovely unexpected adventure. The best psychotherapy in the world.
Like hitch-hiking or walking, it has a rhythm of its own quite unlike ‘normal’ life, a beautiful kind of otherness.
Cycle touring seems to attract curious well-wishers, sometimes sparking inspiration for those that might be able, and offer an opportunity for old fellas to wax lyrical about a similar bike tour they made in 1932 or something like that. I love the stories of the old guys; they seem to underline the timelessness of thrifty living and the love of natural beauty that is an integral aspect of cycyling that comes, unbidden.
It gives me a glowing sense that what I am indulging in is fundamentally Good.
The only downside is, what do you do when you get to the end of the journey? Jim’s epic journey was about to end in about three or four days time, and I was very glad to learn from him that his family were going to be there to celebrate his achievement at the other end.
I wave Jim a heartfelt good luck and goodbye as he wobbles away down the tarmac and over the horizon.
The sun’s going down, and it’s getting rather cold quite quickly. I’ve had three lifts all day and get about seventy kilometres along the ways, which is a bit crap. I don’t mind it today, but it’s got to get better really.
13-10-02 Sunday.
I wake up just after Stephensville, then get picked up by a fire-fighter Christian on his way to church. He’d moved from northern Ontario about seven years previous and bought three and a half acres of woodland for twenty dollars (that’s seven pounds fifty) and built a house on it. I guess that’s the difference between Britain and a country with half as many people and twenty five times bigger.
It was quite cold last night, but I’ve got used to it and it doesn’t seem so cold now. This could just be my core temperature lowering itself; which is potentially rather dangerous, so I have to be watchful of hypothermia. I’ve had hypothermia before, so at least I can recognise when it hits me; it dulls my thinking, and makes me talk erratically. It’s warm enough in daytime, but my hands are a bit cold. I need to tighten up by getting a Thermos flask, gloves and string to make heat and habitation more secured and comfy.
I get picked up by Terry Brooks just as I am getting out of the last car. It’s at Cornerbrook by a really amazing gorge and Terry asks me to take a picture of him posing with his sky blue Dodge ‘street rod’, a souped-up 330 horsepower hot rod built on a 1940s car. Fantastic!
Not long after at Pasadena, I get picked up by Brent Griffith whose ancestors were from Bristol. We talk about cars and football and it is a really nice ride. He is smoking dope oil but I don’t want any. Smoking weed, I am later to discover, is the unofficial Canadian national sport; everyone seems to be at it. Brent is a fifty year old fire fighter too. When he drops me a hundred kilometres short of Grand Fall-Windsor he has a root about in his trunk to find things for me to have. He gives me a small radio, some fantastic socks and a tin of meatballs. The latter I would generally regard as being well dodgy probably, but in this instance are made karmically good by the spirit in which I am given them, I don’t think too hard about what is in them! Ordinarily I would never buy the things. Sitting in the boonies in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by natural peaceful lovelieness, the free food is delicious.
I get a nice big lift that more than compensates for my slow progress so far.
Steve is going to do a ten week electrician course in St. John’s, and he brings me in from just before Sheppardville at the Baie Verte Peninsula turn-off, so I guess he brings me 550 km, which more than makes up for yesterday.
Hitch-hiking, like everything else in life is subject to the laws of nature. No matter how events seem to be turning out, it ‘s funny how you always seem to get to where you going, somehow or other. If only I was able to apply this awareness to every aspect of my life.
We pass the splendidly named ‘Dildo’ on the way, but sadly don’t get a chance to visit any souvenir shops that may have been there. I wonder if they do a stick of rock with the name running through the middle? Or maybe there is a giant concrete effigy in honour of the town to welcome you as you arrive?
I could go to Avalon too, but I reckon I’m just not cosmic enough.
No-one knows how Dildo came to be named. It’s not something you would admit to is it? It is possible though that it might be Captain Cook’s fault, as he was known to have a habit of giving new areas rude names just to upset over-sensitive types. Apparently the locals have tried a few times to change the name. Its never worked (as is apparent).
Lesson one of speaking Newfie.
1) Take a Canadian accent (like a US accent, but more laid-back),
2) Say ‘d’ for ‘t’ and ‘oi’ for ‘i’. Should sound lazy and a little bit Irish, sometime west country English and sometimes Canadian.
The Newfies really are a friendly lot – When I arrive at the edge of St. John’s in the early evening I go to get some warming nosh to see me through the chilly night. I get given double portions of ‘taters’ (potato wedges) with two different lots of toppings because the two friendly waitresses can’t decide what exactly to give me. I kept telling them I don’t mind which one I get, so they give me both, just to make sure! This is all in between the counter assistant going all gooey and telling me that she’s got a thing for English guys. Unfortunately I’m on a mission and anyway she only looks about fifteen.
On her recommendation, I’m going to walk into St John’s tomorrow to watch the soccer game finals which should be fun. It will also be Thanksgiving day.
14-10-02
This morning I wake up in Paradise.
Really – I’ve been to Hell* (and back), and now I’m in Paradise. A couple of years ago whilst cycling with a girlfriend to Barcelona from England, we pass through a cute little village in France called ‘Richard’. So just for the record, ‘I’ve been to Paradise, and I HAVE been to me…’
*Hell is a quiet little village in northern Norway with a typically Norwegian amount of nothing going on in it. The best things about Hell are the great postcards you can get from the post office; a picture of the village with the sky painted red and ‘Greetings from Hell’ written in Gothic script across the top. The other great thing about Hell is the wooden shelter where you wait for the train; it probably has more heavy metal biker graffiti than possibly anywhere else in the world.
I am in a really dense and dank pine plantation strip between a housing estate and the highway and not far from a crackling fizzing electric pylon, which has between it and the highway a big advertising hoarding straight out of the 1950s which reads ‘Welcome to Paradise’ and shows a happy smiling family all holding hands and skipping in the sunshine.
As I get up from my sleeping arrangement, two people come into the pines to cut themselves some firewood…
I slept comfy under the pines last night, but I do need to get some cotton to sew up various draughty holes and make a snoooood out of the sexy thermal blanket I borrowed from the ferry. Okay, I nicked it.
I’ve been in Canada seven days and in the 2900 km I’ve covered I’ve seen only four cop cars, one of them being at the soccer match I watch in the afternoon. For three dollars (one pound-thirty) I watch the Gold Medal National Soccer Final (Men’s Team) – the ‘Ladies’ match was in the morning. It’s Manitoba V. Newfoundland, and the quality looks to be about third division (says me the footie expert, not). I expect a similar comparison could be made between our top national hockey team and yer average lower level hockey team here.
I ask a middle-aged man on a bike for directions, and have to stop myself from telling him how much he sounds like a Dubliner. I’m sure he’s already perfectly aware.
I could take endless pictures of clapboard houses, all beautifully contrasting colours, and sometimes Georgian-esque shapes. But I’m not going to. I’m also having to restrain myself from taking endless pictures of trees and V-neck scenery i.e. impressive mountain/valley conjunctions that ultimately end up all have a habit of looking exactly the same no matter where you are when you take them. Squashing a vast panorama into four inches of plasticised paper rarely does justice. You can’t hear the birds singing or the babbling of running water either.
(*Yes, I wrote this before the advent of mass computer gizmos.*)
15-10-02 Tuesday.
I wake up in the Anglican Cemetery in St. John’s next to some dead geezer called ‘Chafe’. There were weird kids in here last night spoofing about around the gravestones wearing big black capes. Well it is Halloween almost. It was a bit freaky for me curled up in my cocoon of a sleeping bag. Eating out last night at the Bagel Cafe reminds me of Galway City where I lived for a while. Gently laid back and friendly without being self-consciously ‘friendly for the tourists’.
Visit the town’s museum with history about the locals, Viking and the white settlers, and will probably get a bus out of town and start heading out west towards Labrador.
I get the sense that St. John’s harbour is ‘the other end’ for sea traffic that comes across from Europe. In a strange way, it feels like Scotland is just next door. I meet a guy from Aberdeen who’s come over with BP. There’s lots of talk (and work) of prospecting in the interior for oil. I hope it doesn’t change these people too much when it inevitably comes. Change didn’t do much good for the Beothuk who were here first… They got completely wiped out.
On my way to the university to get the use of a shower and use the library’s internet.
I wait at a bus stop and get chatting with a very lovely young lady; she also happens to be heading up to the university. We sit talking on the bus grinning and being into each other. She has a lovely face and almond pixie eyes that feel like they are the stillness in the world. Ooooh! Anyway, she goes her way and I go off to send emails, and am left feeling all gooey and romantic for the rest of the day.
Retracing my steps back to the west of the island, I walk out of St. John’s; the outskirts is a horrible mass of warehouse stores and pizzarama land. Something of a shock after so much glorious wilderness. A taxi stops, thinking he’s got a fare. Intuition tells me this is one of those spots I might never get away from so we haggled a cheap deal. He takes me to somewhere sane and useful miles away for about four bucks.
I get a lift with Preston Coole, who is anxious for a decent job – unemployment is high here, even though half the population of the island is in St. John’s. He is in the middle of a row with his father and it somehow has made its way out of St. John’s, onto the highway and into a completely different place miles up the road. All whilst shouting at each other via mobile phones and driving at a hundred miles an hour, which is all very dramatic.
Bizarre as this is, this suits me fine, and much progress is made for the hitch-hiker. (I hope the same can be said for the inappropriately named Coole family.) I’ve never hitch-hiked through the middle of an argument before.
It’s much the habit of all the drivers I’ve met here for them to introduce themselves with their full name and shake me by the hand as soon as I get in. The only people ever to do that before coming to Newfoundland were scary born-again Christians.
The other thing drivers do here is make a point of stopping at gas stations and filling me up with coffee/’pop’/anything else I might fancy, and then they’ll go out of their way to drop me at a decent hitching spot. My kind of people!
Paul Langdon, my next companero is a federal conservation officer, fighting oil pollution in the courts (if you see what I mean).
After some distance, he stops at an Irving gas station, where what looks like an air hose to me has the words ‘loonies only’ written on it twice. I have seen it before and wondered what an earth it meant. It takes me until today to discover that a ‘loony’ is a one dollar coin, named after the bird thats depicted on it (‘the loon’) and a ‘toony’ is a two dollar coin. Ah, I see.
Paul brings me a marathon distance halfway across the island to the bay-within-a-bay of Lewisporte, where he lets me sleep on his ‘pleasure-cruiser’ (i.e. spacious tug-boat) that he has spent the last ten years building. Being surrounded by water, it actually ends up being colder than sleeping out in the woods, but the novelty of the experience more than makes up for it.
16-10-02
I wake up with ‘Ordinary Day’ in my head, a song by a friend Paul Gill from back home who happens to be something of a folkie songwriter.
I am feeling a bit sad about leaving Newfoundland. Its been exaggerated by briefly meeting with the lovely woman on the bus in St. John’s.
Paul Langdon comes to move the boat to a different spot (for further internal construction work). After that he drives me to the edge of town where I spend a hooooge amount of money on a fur hat and decent gloves and waterproofs.
Today’s bizarre sign printed on the side of a pick up truck rather tickles my fancy. It reads ‘Hiscock’s Self Service’. Quite what it relates to I shall never know. Is it just me, or is there a bit of a theme developing here on this island?
‘Arch’ is my next lift today, a gritty cheerful drinks-plenty-of-rum and chews-tree-trunks-for-breakfast kind of a guy. Actually his speciality is doing dangerous metalwork in extremely tall places in desperate moments. Very fine chap indeed. James Bond, eat yer heart out. Eat your heart out. What a peculiar expression. Anyhow…
Then a military man called Gus on his way to Toronto for a seven week course in the martial art of pen-pushing. Another fine gritty salty kind of chap. Sorry, I’m making these people sound like road surfaces. Its a strange business when people that have lived and breathed the Island way all their life suddenly find themselves on their uppers. It seems to be the common story of the Island, of people leaving and going huge distances to live another life just to survive.
Echoes of the migrations of the last two centuries. This is another aspect, as well as the landscape and the character of the people that makes this place remind me of Scotland.
Then from Deer Lake a short ride of twelve miles with one of the old West Coast incomprehensibles.
I was warned back south a while ago of the probable difficulty in understanding some of the people here. Half Irish, half Nashville twang and way too much amphetamine. Just nod and say yes.
My ride is with a logging man (I didn’t catch his name), who is in ‘innatainmun’ which involves him singing along to his synthesiser which is pre-programmed to play blues and rock ‘n’ roll. He is very upset that the Japanese who made the synthesiser haven’t figured out that maybe someone might like to program Newfie music into it. Before I realise what I have said, I suggest that maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. I really can’t imagine synthesised folk music being in any way a good thing, excepting perhaps it having an extreme cheese comedy factor. He doesn’t notice my faux pas as he goes on to complain to me how he can’t get songs for his karaoke machine. Maybe I am as barely decipherable to him as he is to me. Any one out there got any Newfoundland karaoke?
No, thought not.
He is also telling me how the real unemployment figures have been smudged by the federal government, how the figures are close to seventy to eighty percent unemployed, and how the government have screwed Newfie people by bringing in ‘experts’ from outside to run mineral explorations etc, leaving nothing for the Newfies. Sounds familiar.
Newfoundland was England’s very first colony; the start of it’s empire, established in 1610, and it still retains a strong air of independence, identifying more with England and the Crown than with Canada.
(Whereas the rest of the provinces joined forces to become a constitutionally united Canada between the 1870s and mid-1890s, Newfoundland was the last to join, leaving Britain reluctantly in 1948 along with most of the rest of the British Empire; The end of the Second World War had left the British Empire close enough to financial ruin for it to off-load many of its former colonies as they had now become liabilties.
In Newfoundland, with its newly Canadian status, whole villages became derelict. Communities of people were being ordered out and shovelled off The Rock and into industrial parts of Canada right up to the sixties. The Ottawan central government didn’t want to support Newfoundland as it was ‘too marginal’ for them. It is still happening in a few places.
It’s quite usual for people to have to travel thousands of miles to as far away as Vancouver to visit distant parts of their families.
The Northern Peninsula has a different geographical feel to the rest of what I’ve been travelling through in Newfoundland; it feels like a distinctly different place. There are wide flat places by the sea, and grand mountains off to the east and fjords that disappear into the sky.
Another guy brings me all the way to Hawkes Bay where I am now halfway up Northern Peninsula. I am writing this by one of the few orange street lights, wrapped in my sleeping bag. I am right next to the sea and the Torrent River. Tonight I’ll sleep on top of a board-walk, and not under it, because it’s all on a slope and a bit rocky and crap. Much as my head might like to be ‘under the board-walk down by the sea’, I don’t think I’d get any sleep, and if I did, I’d probably wake up needing a piss, try and sit upright and hit my head.
From Gros Morne National Park and up along the coast is superb – the mountains drop down from the east to a flat plain that the caribou roam, across to some wind-flattened pine scrub looking like aero-dynamic go-faster bonsai. Across the highway to the west the land slides under the Atlantic where waves break gently on bouldered outcrops in the distance. Tiny white clapboard houses nestle up to the edge of the coastline defying all that the weather throws at them. That’s enough purple prose, I’m off for a walk by the sea to freeze my nuts off good and proper and then I’m going to bed. Moon’s about three days off being full.
18-10-02
Yesterday was a slow day, but it suited the surroundings for it to be like that, somehow. Lots of little scattered handfuls of clapboard houses, sheds and boathouses at the sea’s edge with place names straight out of fiction: Deadman’s Cove, Sally’s Cove, Nameless Cove, Torrent River, Shallow Bay.
Today: Thumb out. Bracing wind. Back to the tarmac.
Later I meet Dennis the lighthouse keeper and his friend Glen. That lift lasts about two minutes, so we’ll have to leave the fine details of that one to our imaginings.
Heading to L’Anse Aux Meadows, the site where two Norwegians, polar explorer Helge Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne-Stine Ingstad in the early 1960s dug up a Viking village. It put the boot into the whole notion of Columbus being the first European in America.
Towards the tip of the peninsula, the bays become sheltered by wild-looking headlands and huge rocky outcrops in the sea. It looks a really dangerous maze to have to get a boat through. My lift declares there must be a storm coming ‘cos all the boats is in’. As the peninsula to our right thins out and merges with the bouldered shore, the road rises, twists and falls away wearing through a landscape that’s much like a green boiling sea of giant waves that’s been frozen in time.
I arrive at L’Anse Aux Meadows just before twilight where the land settles down before finally disappearing under the sea once more.
There seem to be two sites; I’ve only looked at the first one so far. It is perched right on the shore. A psychedelically colourful bog rises behind it; rich in luminous lichens, white green and red mosses, and sprinkled with ground hugging blueberries and partridge berries.
The site has reconstructed A-shaped long-houses where it’s all turf roof and no wall. I can’t go inside it and look around cos it’s out of season and everything is disappointingly locked. I scramble up the side and look in through hatchways in the top. I can’t see anything but a long drop; it’s almost completely dark. I’m still impressed though; This is an awful lot of turf roof. I feel excited by the place. Viking stuff is something I like to think I have a feel for.
I pick lots of partridge berries and some nameless but delicious dark red berries (huckleberries?) which don’t seem to have killed me yet. (I tried four or five the previous day to no ill effect.)
I sleep in a similar and much smaller version of the long-house but which has no door; a Viking-style pigsty. After I put a load of hay down that’s been left over from summer tourist season and put my ex-army poncho across the doorway, it is relatively cosy.
What strange fruit shall come from plowing this flinty sea
first steady rock on which I set my eyes
shall be mine; for that I deserve as my just reward.
According to two Icelandic sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eric the Red:
Leif Eriksson is attributed with leading Viking ships here some 500 years before Columbus. He was the son of Eric the Red who before him had established a settlement on Iceland.
Eric the Red was exiled from Norway for manslaughter and settled in Iceland, and then after more murder was exiled again to Greenland where he established the first permanent European settlements. His son Leif Eriksson was born around 970 AD.
Leif sailed first to Norway in 999 AD where he converted to Christianity and was ordered by the king to take the new religion back to Iceland and Greenland. After hearing a story from a merchant of there being land to the west of Greenland. Eriksson sailed first to possibly Baffin Island, then Labrador before arriving at L’anse Aux Meadows, being aided by favourable winds and currents. The area is disputed to be the land known as ‘Vinland’ referred to in the Icelandic sagas; The archaeological discovery of butternuts found at L’anse Aux Meadows are not native to Newfoundland, but are from much further south on the North American mainland. It is suggested that L’anse Aux Meadows was only an over-wintering site and the Vinland of the sagas may be referring to lands further south to as far as the coast of New York.
I’ve been trying to imagine what it must have been like to sail to such far-flung places away from home with probably not very much in the way of resources on board their small ships. When the Vikings landed, they named the place ‘Vinland’. In archaeological diggings, Grape seeds have been found. It’s reckoned that back then, the climate was then somewhat warmer and was able to support a very different lifestyle than it can now. The climate getting colder and fierce opposition from the ‘Skraelings’ – the Native Beotuk people – meant that Leif Eriksson didn’t last very long in North America.
The first site I have visited is a community project constructed using partly modern materials.
The second site at L’Anse Aux Meadows though is the real deal and is even more impressive than the first, in fact it’s fantastic. The walls are made entirely of peat. Six foot high and eight foot wide at the bottom and about four foot at the top; pine logs for rafters. The original roof beams might well have been made of whale ribs, but both are of an authentic style. A thick wooden door hangs on leather hinges. The roof is dense with seaweed. This structure is made of what can be found right here anyway. Situated as it is, it feels like it is earthed solidly to this spot. The peat walls soak up all sound reverberation; the total opposite of what it feels like to be in a big stone church. It feels warm, intimate and deeply peaceful. This is my favourite building out of any I have ever encountered; anywhere, ever.
I want to live in one. The ultimate in earthy living. If I had known, I would have slept here (in fact I am tempted to just hang out here all day and stay the night again). I stay here for quite some time, mesmerised and quietly soaking it all in. No-one else here, right next to a rocky shore and a really heavy mist. It’s well ace.
The soundlessness and stillness is a magnificent respite from the battering outside of the relentless wind, rain and sea-foam. Now, it is something to imagine how it might have been to become uprooted into the unknown and then build this place with your people. With such a life of unrelenting dark weather, it is no wonder that they filled their hearts with Gods of fire and vigour.
The Vikings also left a trail of these black-houses on the northern islands of Scotland and western coast of The Outer Hebrides, whilst on their way to build the first Dublin. They are peculiar buildings in that they have no chimneys; smoke just seeps through the thatch and doorway, hence this is how these dwellings got their names. I can just imagine the occupants grimed head to toe like kippers, pouring out of the doorways coughing and gasping for breath and cursing the gods for not inventing chimneys yet. Still, it’s probably better than being outside in those harsh northern winters. No wonder the Vikings had a reputation for being so stroppy. It’s all that smoke in their eyes. ‘Harald! Lit erse eenverd air cerrntree weeth prurpur houssis!’ ‘Yaah, thet ees air gooot eydeeea.’
I take lots of photos of the building as well as the beautiful bronze sculpture which looks as if to represent the bough of a ship in a heavy sea. Seems to sum up my own feelings about the whole place, which is rather gratifying. (Note the previous poem.)
I have one of those ‘I never want to leave this place’ moments. But inevitably, I do.
Mind transported, I walk back into the slightly desperate-looking cluster of bungalows that is the village.
Even in the small isolated communities here, there is strong evidence of summer-time tourist stuff: quirky B&B’s (you can sleep in a miniature lighthouse in someone’s front garden), ‘antiques’ and Viking style crafts etcetera. Makes me wonder what people here do when the tourists have gone home. Go fishing or insane probably.
I buy the best tin of beans I have ever tasted (better than Heinz. No! Impossible! Maybe I’m just hungry) and I get invited in to someone’s house to eat them, I am feeling a bit inward and anti-social so I decline the offer; I am still full of the magic of the old Vikings.
I get to Cook’s Bay turn-off from just south of L’Anse Aux Meadows riding on the back of a pick-up truck sharing the back with 750 lbs of whelks, some of whom must be sensing that something is not right in whelkworld. As we speed down the highway they try to escape. Having a broader over-view of the situation than the said whelks, I can see the futility of their attempts and so do not assist in their escape bid. Very entertaining ride, and also I don’t freeze to death en route which is encouraging.
Next lift is with a clean-shaven smoothie local who is in the business of employment and regeneration (B&B’s and oil mostly). I put to him the notion of conservation holidays as way of getting tourists in. He has a habit of feeding back to me what I’ve just said, except by mutating it into some kind of government-speak sound-bite thing. Freaky. People like him make my skin crawl.
This place is in a rum old situation.
When I get to St. Barbe ferry terminal, I find a likely camping spot on the other side of the road.
I rig up my tent experiment using the poncho, pointy sticks and string, and gladly it works very well at keeping the wind and mild rain out, which makes a huge difference to my night time comfort, hoorah! Tis positively cosy.
I read some of ‘Biko’ the Donald Woods book which manages to knock this whole venture into a cocked hat of irrelevance. Hmmm..
19-10-02
I’m writing from indoors out of the weather. Waiting to cross the Labrador Straits.
Found a new berry to try this morning – it is white and in part has a taste similar to a few berries I have tasted before (i.e. cloudberries, sweet creamy/peaty/vanilla) but the main over-riding taste is very familiar, but I can’t quite place it at first. And then I get it; Euthymol toothpaste. Well strange. I eat three. I won’t be eating any more until I know what they are and I definitely and conclusively not died.
As I write, George W Bush is still threatening to blow Iraq to pieces.
St. Barbe is one of those places that looks like it spends all year hanging around in the rain with its hands in its pockets waiting for august. Like most ferry ports, it’s got a few concrete hotel buildings that look like they may have been built using cheaply hired-out Russian labourers during communism in the 1960s. How they might have ended up here I’ve no idea. Fell off the back of a fish processing ship perhaps.
There is a welcome interlude of drying gusts of wind, to undo the joint-gnawing terminally on-off drizzle.
The few other buildings here are the same as everywhere else around this part of Newfoundland, but slightly more hopeful and employed-looking.
As I look out the window I can see the charred foundations of what used to be the pub. Right behind it is the fire station. To the left is the gas station which is proclaiming ‘for every litre of gas sold, one cent will go to buying a new fire truck’. Think about that for a moment. I’ll leave you to fill the gaps, however you like. I wonder how much else will have burnt down by the time they’ve saved up enough pennies. (Got enough cents? …Doh.)
One of the minor drawbacks of hitch-hiking is having to satisfy local curiosity about how I came to be here; over and over again. I occasionally have lapses in enthusiasm for telling this story, which is bit awkward if I’m feeling too slow from a sleepless night. This is relieved by finding out what people do themselves and thus finding out lots about the locality.
Over the course of the journey so far I’ve learned to predict what people are going to ask me and I tend to pre-empt them with some sort of semi-autopilot introduction of myself: ‘Hello! I’m Richard, I come from England, sixty miles west of London, a place called Reading, I’ve been in Canada x weeks, I landed by plane in Toronto, got a bus to Nova Scotia, hitched round Newfoundland for two and a half weeks blah blah blah’. The other thing I get is ‘What makes you come to Canada this time of year?’ usually accompanied by an expression which reads as ‘You’ll freeze to death – everything’s closed for winter, you should have gone somewhere hot like a good sensible tourist’.
I tell them that it is all down to an ultimatum issued by my good friend Helen two days before I left England. She said: ‘Well you’ve been saying you’re going to go travelling for the last two years – either you should just go or you should just settle down, stop talking about it and forget about it’.
This shocks me out of my procrastinating pattern and the very next day I was standing in Norwich town centre asking myself what actually was stopping me from going. I realised it was actually nothing, except for buying a ticket and some travel insurance. In my habitual uncertainty, I went and bought both, leaving my senses in a strange ‘What the hell have I gone and done now?!’ kind of reeling feeling.
The woman in the travel agent says: ‘Where would you like to go?’
Me: ‘Canada!’
Her: ‘Whereabouts in Canada would you like to go?’
Me: ‘Er. Anywhere. East. Anywhere on the East Coast’
Her: ‘Okay, when do you want to fly?’
Me: ‘As soon as possible’
Her: ‘How about Thursday?’
Me: ‘No that’s three days away. I have to go today or tomorrow otherwise I’ll just change my mind and not go.’
Her: ‘Oh well then!’
Me: ‘Yes it’s a bit like that really…’
Next day I’m on the plane, and eight hours later, I’m in Canada, still not sure what the hell I’m doing, but liking it. The other reason for coming to Canada is that I’ve often fantasised about making a trip across the continent, maybe by push-bike. And anyway, being in the cold is no better or worse than the afflictions of various other countries; sunstroke, dysentery, malaria, mosquitoes or being robbed.
I say goodbye to Newfoundland. The ferry crossing is largely uneventful but for the joy of sofas (nice plump fluffy ones!). I am offered a lift to Quebec by a woman on the ferry (also nice, plump and fluffy), which I turn down in favour of more northern and worthy travel exploits; like rain and getting wet and trudging through bog.
For months after, I often wonder what sharing a motel room with her might have been like… Considerably warmer and less worthy for a start.
An old bloke on the ferry is wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a Dalmatians head on it with ‘Dalmatian’ written underneath. Which is how you might expect a native of Labrador to declare his allegiances.
After landing, there are a couple of hours of daylight left, and I manage to get to the scattering of houses that is L’Anse Aux Loup to erect my tiny dwelling blob.
Poncho tent held up by found twigs. Tricky to get in and out of. Not exactly ideal camping equipment for what is soon to become a full-on Canadian winter…
The next day (Sunday) after several miles of walking down the highway through endless empty moorland nothingness, I manage to get a ride across the vastest amount of spruce/larch filled wilderness I’ve ever seen. There is so much lichen on the ground it looks like peppermint green snow in lots of places. The landscape is even more spacious than in Newfoundland. Amazingly, Labrador’s only got 26,000 people which is pretty darned empty for a region that’s slightly larger than the whole of the United Kingdom.
After asking about on the ferry, there is much conflicting information about how I can get to Goose Bay way up in the north; 500 km of road is being built (for logging primarily and then tourists) and a huge stretch from Charlottetown to Cartwright (the last bit) isn’t open. Eventually it turns out that at the very northern end of the road, they’ve only got three and half kilometres to build in the middle…
So here I am eeny-meeny-miney-mo-ing a choice of route north from the Charlottetown junction. Either I go directly north on a road of dubious completeness or I hitch out to Charlottetown itself where I could take a boat from there. I hitch a ride with the first vehicle that passes; a construction worker. He stops and tells me that it is totally possible to get up through the incomplete road, so I let that be my choice and travel with him.
We arrive at his destination, the road-builder’s compound at the boggy far end of nowhere.
Looking like a modern-day Siberian gulag but with diggers and bull-dozers, this is literally the end of the line. No more road, just dense spruce forest all around and a broad stretch of smashed tree debris and mud ahead of us where more road is due to be laid. It all looks somewhat apocolyptic.
Going into the shelter and warmth of one of the grey portacabin boxes, I get introduced to some of the workers.
I end up sharing a cabin with an unsuspecting guy called Geoff who is left to keep me amused on his Sunday afternoon off. I feel a bit awkward really, cos I think hosting visitors is not really what he is after. They work twelve hour days, (sometimes eighteen!) seven days a week, and Sunday afternoon is his one bit of free-time. Anyway we get stoned and drunk, and that is the end of that. (It’s a luxuriously cosy night’s kip too)
Next morning is the first sight of snow, falling grimly on the construction site compound and disappering into the wet churned mud. EEK!
The hospitality is great. I guess when you are somewhere as vast and empty as Labrador, and you’ve got some boney arsed clueless English tourist on your hands, I suppose you’re going to do your best to make sure he’s going to travel well. As it is, I get absolutely loaded up with cake, coffee and multiple sausage sandwiches to take with me, and I get a ride with the famous Ian from England (London via Bovey Tracey) who everyone I had met since the St.Barbe ferry had told me about. ‘Wow! Two Englishmen! You must meet!’
Me and Ian confirm each others sense of random Englishness. Two random people is saner than one. He’s been living here for two years now, and is clearly in absolute desperation to talk to another Englishman.
October/November 2002
We get to ‘The Gap’ (as it is known) and am led through the qwog left after clear-cutting through the pine forest. Meanwhile, Ian from England has gone off to do his work of weilding a spanner at some piece of machinery or other. I am led by another guy that happens to be walking across The Gap too. It’s quite hard work stepping over endless small felled trunks and (trying to) dodge bog. I discover my boots are about as waterproof as an open packet of biscuits.
At the other end of ‘The Gap’ I get a ride in a hooge dumper truck. Sitting in the cab, I am buried under my luggage. We have to drive through a river about a metre deep which is immensely bumpy. The vehicle’s enormous wheels are obliged to scramble across huge submerged boulders. We get thrown all over the place and my rucksack cushions me from probably getting a right battering. At the other shore and somewhat disorientated, I thank my chauffeur for what has definitely been one of the very shortest, most bizarre lifts I have ever hitched.
My chauffeur, having radioed ahead, passes me over to my new driver.
I get a ride with the chief surveyor who takes me up to the other site compound on the other side, whilst telling me all about survey stakes along the route. I neglect to tell him that I already know all about survey stakes. (I had previously had a night-time hobby of removing them from building sites I didn’t approve of.) Curiously, his name is Kevin Stapleton, which I’m sure used to be an alter ego of Julian Cope (ageing pop star of the eighties who also didn’t think much of the environmental destructiveness of building sites).
Another ride to Cartwright up the unfinished road (bumpity-bump) and I find I have two days to wait for the freighter ship that goes to Goose Bay, my next proposed destination.
I somehow manage to find the windiest most exposed spot on a prominent headland right next to the Atlantic to erect my newly upgraded dwelling; a four metres by three metres sheet of blue poly-propelyne tarpauline. I just bought it in the local store; the sort of store that sells tinned fish, bread, wellies, fishing gear, bullets, bear-skin hats, cornflakes and last weeks newspapers and has weather-battered people wandering aimlessly around in it trying to escape the rain and/or remember who they are.
How will this tent upgrade fare? I can now truly say that I have experienced the full meaning of the expression ‘nylon nightmare’ (common phrase used by ‘new-age’ travellers in the UK). Whilst my tarp is unyeildingly and relentlessly trying to flap me to death whilst simultaneously trying to drive me into deafness with its endless gun-shot whip-cracking, rain has managed to creep into almost everything and my sleeping bag is sodden. And it’s too wet and windy to light a fire anywhere. My fantastically expensive Thinsulate Gore-Tex gloves completely fail to keep the rain out – they’re totally utterly crap. My poor cold wet thumbs keep buckling stupidly and anyway, my matches are damp and my lighter seems to need the merest excuse to rust to a standstill.
And my boots are no good.
Somehow, with a drip on the end of my nose, I manage to stay sane by thinking about nice people I know and by reading ‘Biko’ by wildly flickering candle light.
The next day I resolve to further improve my lot by going back down to the stores to buy a pair of wellies. It is then that I discover from the locals that last nights storm was one of the worst in living memory. So it wasn’t just me being a wuss then.
Cartwright sits at the entrance of Sandwich Bay and was settled by George Cartwright, a fish and fur trader in 1775. He sold it in 1815, and it was then later sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1873. The company has owned it ever since. In 1956 it became incorporated into the great Canadian empire.
Cartwright came to the attention of the world media in March 1978 when Greenpeace activists came here in protest at seal cub clubbing for fur-trading.
Cartwright is tiny (800 people) and has apart from its one general store no public buildings except a library which opens two hours a day, so I have nowhere to go and gently steam for free.
The freighter from Lewisville (Newfoundland) comes today! Hoorah! Hopefully there’ll be some fantastically hot boiler room I can go and regain my marbles in. I am seriously considering abandoning hitching and spending a couple of hundred quid on an all-Canada bus pass; or maybe I can find rides on the net?
Right – I’m off to take picturesque photos. Cartwright has got a pioneer character, nearly all the houses are small cabins, painted white and very basic. It gets cold up here so it makes sense to live small (and cosy). Some houses are so basic, they are little more than insulated sheds and boathouses with chimneys, cobbled together out of plywood and whatever else might have been handy at the time, decorated with old nets and ropes and old floats and buoys.
Sunday night 10-02.
I might have found a ride on the net, I’m not sure; a Norwegian chap called Morten is driving all the way from Montreal to Vancouver. That would be really handy if it works out.
Bad news. The freighter doesn’t come in cos the weather is so bad. I will have to wait until Sunday at the earliest. Tom at the freighter office (‘the only gay in the village’, earnestly religious and bitchy) offers me back to his friends house where he is looking after two mad boxers (dogs, not sportsmen). This gives me a chance to ‘re-group’. He decides to let me sleep in the harbour office, which I am extremely happy about – it has two heaters, and neither of us has to make loads of effort to try and get along. That and the fact that no doubt I must be smelling like lord knows what by now. The office offers me the chance to dry everything out too, which is an added bonus.
Getting dry = reclaiming sanity.
I spend two days reading Biko and taking photos of the houses in the town. I stop after a while cos it looks like I might be a spy or something. They had trouble with Greenpeace environmentalists a few years back over seal-clubbing; coming from their nice cosy affluent lives in the city and deciding they have the right to tell the locals here how to live. It’s curious to note how what might sem like a cut-and-dried moral issue to most of us in our cosy supermarket-enhanced lives looks actually quite different from the starting point of having to eke out a living any way you can on the edge of the artic tundra.
Cartwright has limited excitement. There is no pub and I end up having a long conversation with Heather the librarian, who is maybe related to TC Lethbridge (a writer on various subjects relating to British Pagan cosmology). I spend idle time talking to the woman in the post office who has family connection with Liverpool. She went there once and thought it was ‘very dirty, but interesting’.
Come Friday and I have to decide whether to try to meet up with Morten in Montreal or not, which is a total gamble as I’ve had no response from him. Do I wait two more days and head west to Goose Bay or do I to head back down to Lewisporte on the ferry that is coming in today and then hitch-hike onwards to Montreal?
Sitting up on the headland away out of the village, I decide that I can’t face another two days of spinning my wheels waiting for the next ferry. I hastily decide to leave; just as I see the ferry come rolling in. In something of a scramble I pack my stuff, dash down the hill and go to say my thank yous and goodbyes to Tom.
Coming back overnight on the ferry (another free kip indoors) I watch ‘Primal Fear’ (Richard Gere/Edward Norton) and ‘Dr Doolittle’ and two other really cheesy films. Watching TV is satisfying…
Sailing into Lewisporte is spectacular. We go past ninety miles of islands and craggy outcrops all drifting past. On the Labrador Straits I see my first whale and a couple of baby iceberg ‘growlers’ – so called because the noise boats make when they scrape along the underside of the hull.
Nothing really spectacular, but I can cross them both off the tourist list of ‘must-sees that I don’t keep.
I get chatting to a bloke out on the top of the boat and he gives me lift to Cornerbrook, stopping off first at the shop I bought my hat and gloves in. I swap the crap gloves for some nice cheap ones and get a part refund. It baffles me why in a place like this they would be happy to sell duff gear to people. Somebody might die!
We get back on the road again.
At Cornerbrook, I manage to blag a free use of the internet in a ‘Staples’ computer store right by the highway to see if Morten has responded (he hasn’t).
I get picked up just before dark. We quickly end up following right behind the bus I will need to catch at Stephenville that in turn will take me to the ferry in time for the night crossing to North Sydney. It’s all a bit ‘Phew! Will we make it in time?’
We do, and sitting on the bus getting my nerves settled I zone out watching ‘Shallow Hal’ on the bus’s video. At Port Aux Basques I watch most of ‘Serendipity’ with Kate Beckinsale (phwoar). Watching that left me feeling all spacey and lovely. Though I don’t see the last five minutes; I have to get on the ferry.
I sleep very well on the ferry.
In the early morning getting off the ferry at North Sydney again I have to wait twenty minutes for my rucksack to be extricated from the baggage hold by a uniformed chap driving what looks like a golfing buggy, by which time all the ferry traffic has gone. I end up walking seven kilometres in torrential non-stop rain with hardly any traffic on the road. On the boat I’d been umming and ahhing about directly asking truck drivers for a ride, I’d rather leave the choice entirely to them. I guess I’m paying for my own reluctance now.
This is the start of a really really weird day…
After running non-stop from Cartwright to Port Aux Basques, I come to a crunching halt. After walking the seven kilometres in the worst most miserable rain ever, I get cold and a bit grumpy and give up for a bit. I go and nurse my gloominess in a Tim Hortens cafe over a hot chocolate and two cheese croissants. (Tim Horten’s is what Canada has instead of McDonalds and is an altogether more pleasant experience.) Duly revived, I go to the phone-box on the other side of the road outside a curiously named burger bar called ‘Lick-A-Chick’. I call Greyhound buses about getting an all-Canada bus Pass (a 630 dollar ticket) and then go to sloop about in the rain some more.
I am ruefully thinking about how hitching is all ups and downs, and how I’ve got from Cartwright to Sydney almost without a stop, and now I am stuck. I literally am just thinking ‘Well, I can’t be here forever cos someone always turns up eventually’ when a woman pulls over, flings open the passenger door and in I get. She’s called Rhonda. She’s saved the day, my bacon and my sanity. And she’s great fun.
We chat non-stop all the way and we have a ‘real hoot’ as she would say. A slightly book-ish studenty-type in her early thirties she’s a bit of a globe-trotting type too. She tells me she doesn’t usually stop for hitch-hikers, but she thought I looked like I was in a bit of a jam. (I was!)
Partway through the journey we come across a truck that has jack-knifed on a bend and we stop to see if the driver is okay. We call him over. He’s hurt his back a bit and really is in shock. He’d been coming downhill round a bend in the heavy rain and had come really close to hitting another truck head-on. Now his truck is really close to hanging right off the edge of the road. Rhonda gives him her phone so he can phone the people he that needs to. His voice is really really shaky. We give him some coffee. I have tears in my eyes.
This man is a walking miracle. He was inches from being very dead, he’s literally stared death in the face (and so has the other truck’s driver – who now I think about it – where the hell did he go? Why didn’t he stop?)
Anyway our friend here will get to see another Christmas with his family. Astonishing. I am really blown away by how we really can’t take anything for granted.
The guy then goes and talks with a cop who’s turned up, and off we go, back on down the road. We marvel at the turn of events and their fatefulness. I’ve just started getting on a bit of a cosmic roll after seeing ‘Serendipity’ which is one of those ‘trust the universe’ type films.
We talk about folks she now knows around the world that she can go visiting. It must be lovely to be able to turn up somewhere exotic and exciting and have a friend there ready and waiting to meet you.
At the end of the ride at New Glasgow we go very happily our separate ways, and I say to her ‘There you are you see – we’re not all axe murderers’.
I really wish I hadn’t said that. As I am very keen to point out to Rhonda, I’ve spent seventeen years hitch-hiking, and I’ve only encountered two cars I refused to get into, and one that I wanted to get out of. I’ve been propositioned by a couple of men, an old guy once put his hand on my knee saying ‘Sorry I thought it was the gear stick’ and I’ve been prayed at, baptised, sermonised and even exorcised by various scary Born-Agains, and have been driven high-tailing it down the road by two teenagers on acid co-opting the steering, two pissed Irishmen out on a week long non-stop bender, and that’s been about it. Pretty good for seventeen years I think.
Cheerfully I walk up the slip road eating a very nice apple, admiring the exotic autumn colours, when a slightly battered old motor pulls over next to me, with a slightly battered old man in it. I get in, ‘Great!’ I say ‘I’m not even trying! I like it when that happens!’
He is an old guy, with the heater on full blast. At first I think it’s because he feels the cold but I later suspect it is an attempt to get me to take my clothes off. Fairly innocuous conversation at first, even though he’s not very forthcoming and it’s me asking most of the questions. It turns out he’s seventy and called Jim, never got married; was going to when he was seventeen and then he got told ‘he wasn’t allowed to’ and gave up the whole ‘man meets woman’ thing.
Next he volunteers to tell me how he once hitched a ride to Vancouver and was invited to share the too-small bunk with the driver every night. He goes into further details, but I’m not going to bother retelling them if you don’t mind. At this point I notice that he seems to have some sort of affliction going on down in his trousers that he seems to need to scratch. Maybe he has a catheter that is giving him some trouble. He becomes more persistent with his down-below goings on and I’m looking straight ahead and out of the passenger window trying to distract him with ordinary conversation (which fails). I start to think he’s doing what I think he’s doing. I’m not about to look to find out as this will probably just encourage him. I feel like saying ‘Look I don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t want to know, but either you stop doing it or let me out of the car right now’.
But I don’t. I don’t want to get abandoned in the middle of nowhere miles from the nearest anything just cos of some twisted old perv. I want to get to the next town. He doesn’t stop fiddling. I’m looking out of the passenger window. I give up talking to the creep. We get to the turning off the highway. I can’t wait to get out. Evetually he stops the car. I get my bags out, he’s sitting there grinning at me with his trousers very undone. Bleaurgh.
I don’t say anything to him and bizarrely, I feel really shitty as I walk down the road.
I realise I feel so shitty because I let him do it. I had felt like saying to him ‘I pray to god you’ve never been near any children, cos if you have, I hope somebody chops your dick off.’ Not nice thoughts.
After he’s gone, I stand by the side of the road saying it all out loud. It’s all a bit after the event, but better than not saying anything at all maybe.
I realise that after not asking drivers for rides on the ferry, this is the second time today that I let myself in the crap because I’ve kept my mouth shut, when really I should have done something about it. Hmmm
After about forty-five minutes of traffic and high wind, a pick-up slews over in front of me, loud country-rock music blaring. The door is flung open, beer cans all over the floor and this big red-neck leans over and yells ‘Yee-harr! Jump in! We’re going hunting!’
Sometimes I get picked up by people that are totally okay but I’m out of my depth with. This ride is a bit like that, but actually he’s dead friendly in a funny pissed machismo kind of way. He offers me a beer, which I accept as it is probably the best way of preventing myself from worrying about possible impending death due to drunk driving.
I tell him about the previous lift and he laughs and so do I. He tells me to ‘Look out for anything that moves in the woods, and we’ll stop and shoot it and call it road-kill! (Hyuk,hyuk!)’
Not revelling at the thought of seeing innocent creatures being brought to their knees by a drunken man’s bullet, I dutifully spot nothing much. I tell him helpfully that I saw a rabbit two miles back. He says ‘Did it have antlers? We calls them jack-a-loupe!’
Then I tell him I just saw an orange and black thing with a five foot neck. ‘Where?! Let’s get it!’
He considers shooting a cow when we drive past a field full of them. ‘They’re just over-weight deer after all, and anyhow, there’s loads of ’em.’
I see a shadowy figure in a trench coat walking in the side of the road, and we stop to pick him up. Even from this distance, he has the ambience of some baddie out of a horror film.
He’s called Travers, is about the same age as me, has short badly cropped hair, crap trousers and a serious piercing gaze. He looks like he’s just escaped from the local loony bin.
We have some seemingly lucid chat about history and ancestry and how Travers once lived in Ramsgate in Kent. I have an Auntie Gladys in Ramsgate who is convinced she’s related to the queen. Maybe it’s something they put in the water there.
Travers has a very serious expression and keeps looking at and wringing his scratched-up hands which have bruises all across the knuckles. He tells me that there are thirty million trees in the woods and that I shouldn’t mess with the woods because they are dangerous, and bad things happen in them.
Then he tells me that he feels like he is the father of Nova Scotia, and that in all the churches in New Brunswick they worship Judah and they are all very very heavy people. This guy has an intensity that makes a black hole seem like Hugh Grant. An odd pair to be wedged between.
We get dropped off and Travers taps us both for some change. He heads off across the highway in the direction of a cafe.
I try hitching in the last hour of daylight. I’m standing in a cutting on the highway, which is a really gloomy wind tunnel. It gets dark, I give up and head for the woods.
I set my tarp up and lay my stuff out under it and light a fire, which produces all steamy smoke and no heat for the first half hour, stinging my eyes and filling my nose with snot. I hope Travers doesn’t spot my ‘fire’ in the woods. Once it gets going properly, sitting by the fire is nature’s equivalent to watching TV at the end of the day. The firewood is wet and at its best still produces a ton of smoke, but little heat. I’ve since figured out that you should take upright deadwood and not stuff lying about on the ground.
October; a Monday.
Next morning, and having not spent any part of the evening with the delightful Travers, I find myself in full possession of my limbs. Capitalising on this fact, I attempt to find internet access so I can exercise my god-given fingers but it is too early in the day, and I am in the middle of nowhere special.
I make do with doing star-jumps in defiance of the cold.
The only sign of civilisation is a gas station and a couple of motels in the quintessential Americana style: 1950s concrete one storey high with jaunty angled architecture that screams ‘Tear me down! I’m a eyesore!’ at you whilst at the same time proclaiming to be something akin to a post-modern paradise. Somehow, it all makes me think of Elvis dying on the crapper whilst eating his last fatal burger.
I go back out onto the highway and after an hour, I hitch a ride ten miles along the road with two students going to the next town up, Sackville. Partly out of physical coldness, I verbally vomit about the previous day’s weirdnesses and apologise cos I just have to get it out of my system.
We talk about how life gets whipped up into little vortexes of strangeness sometimes. Like those times you bump into someone you know in the street, and you get talking and then someone that they know turns up, and then another… Before you know it, you realise that there are all these connections going on that you were previously unaware of, which is a nice surprise; then that half an hour trip to the shop turns into totally tangential event. That’s a friendly example; Sometimes shit just happens and coagulates like a blood clot all over your day (ergh!)
Sackville is a tiny university town which is the perfect antidote to yesterday. Like every other town, it is full of autumn colour and the place has a lovely quietly creative vibe like university towns usually do.
It’s beautiful but chilly. I decide that today I either find out what happens with Morten or I buy a big fat hairy bus ticket for the rest of the trip. I’m in a bit of quandary about abandoning hitching, cos it feels like I’m about to say goodbye to a large part of the roller-coaster drama of the journey.
I check out the internet in the university library (beautiful classic 19th century Scottish stone architecture).
Nothing doing with Morten, so – bus ticket it is. Off to the travel agent; They inform me that I can get a Canada pass in Moncton the next town up. The next bus to Moncton is in four hours. I celebrate my decision with a ten inch pizza and decide to see if I can get a ride to Moncton instead of loitering pointlessly.
I hitch a ride with a young guy about twenty-five who’s part-time army, part-time hospital volunteer. I’m really impressed by his glowing sense of knowing what he wants to do with his life. He’s also a really nice guy.
I splash the cash at the bus depot, and have to wait three hours before I can go anywhere.
I head down-town looking for a library to write in. Whilst I’m looking round a young woman touches my shoulder, smiles the most amazing smile, like she’s known me all her life and offers me directions. I thank her and wander off feeling like I’ve just been injected with pure love.
Later I get on the bus and wind up in Woodstock, New Brunswick. I notice happy smiley people getting off the bus, meeting up with family and friends, having hugs and then they’ll all be going home to big dinners, warm houses and comfy beds.
It’s cold and I head for the trees.
When I’m looking for somewhere to sleep at night, I go where there are no lights. Usually I’ll find one of three things: water, fields or trees.
I light a fire, more successfully than last time.
I sleep okay, go for a very early morning walk at first light and get to properly see where I am. I’m in a wood next to a paddock full of horses.
Going for walk thaws me out and I find what I think might be wild blackcurrants. There are loads of them and they taste really good. I am impressed that they seem to keep fresh whilst hanging on the vine long after the leaves have fallen. I have saved some seeds, cos they’re definitely an abundant, hardy and tasty fruit to have.
I spend the day in Woodstock (trying to) catch up with various financial loose ends and chat loads with a bloke in the community computer resource place whilst trying to use the internet. He’s a real chatterbox and we enthuse about gigabytes and that sort of thing.
I get the bus at 4.30 pm and wind up in Riviere Du Loup, Quebec at 8 pm. Getting off the bus it’s bitterly cold. I don’t really fancy sleeping out – it’s losing its appeal, especially when I’m in the middle of a town: Another thing I do when I’m expecting to sleep out is I’ll keep an eagle eye open on the way into the town I’m arriving in, looking out for possible places to sleep that I can head towards when I get off. Empty buildings, constructions sites, parks with cosy-looking dense bushes, under quiet bridges (not so good – cold stone sucks away any body heat completely).
Luckily, the bus terminal stays open until 4 pm, and then opens again at 6 am. It’s also very quiet, which is great. The staff are happy for me to sleep there, and they turn the heater on for me when they see me get a blanket out after a little while. The heater is a bit noisy, but I’m grateful for their consideration which makes me feel particularly welcome.
At 4 am a member of staff wakes me up and I wander into the connecting Normandia restaurant in my socks where I stay until six writing some of this, drinking hot chocolate and eating poutine (chips, cheese and gravy).
Along with very good pizza, for me poutine (pronounced ‘poo-tin’) is further evidence of true civilisation in Canada. Whatever other faults I might discover in the national character of this vast country, poutine is an anchor point of all that is good and proper (Amen).
At 6.30 I get on another bus to Quebec city and then another to Montreal. I don’t bother looking round either city; I don’t really have much of a taste for them, most cities tend to be fairly similar (mind you, so do most towns too). I suppose I would consider looking around just to be duty-bound tourist pfaffing. I just press on; West! West!
The region of Quebec is entirely Frenchified, lots of Virgin Mary shrines all over the place. Everywhere, roads and shops marked only in French. The trees of New Brunswick have almost completely disappeared under vast tracts of farmland, and won’t reappear again until Ontario.
I end up some miles out north west of Toronto; in Renfrew, Ontario where the cold is starting to be a challenge. Renfrew is a small town, which is often good because there are often more opportunities to find shelter than in big towns; often you can find an open doorway into something with a roof on it. I do my usual thing of wandering off in an obscure darkish looking direction and wind up at a hospital. I make the mistake of telling the security man on reception of my situation, and would it be okay for me to stay there the night? He apologetically but firmly says ‘No’. I sit in a waiting room for an hour round the corner, then decide to leave. The lights are too bright and I don’t want the humiliation of being chucked out after having being declined permission.
I go wandering round the town to see if anything crops up. Nothing much does, so I ask a cop who can only suggest a motel.
I wind up doing something I’ve never done before and hope I never have to resort to again. (Mostly because I don’t stay warm.)
Next to the recommended motel is a factory warehouse. Round the back I find a couple of large metal dumpsters. ‘Ah, this must be my motel’ I ponder whilst freezing my nuts off.
I get into a dumpster full of cardboard and manage to bury myself in it. It’s all a bit nasty really; the cardboard is all stacked at forty-five degrees and more-or-less completely fails to protect me from the cold-magnet effect of the dumpster’s metal body.
I have an early morning wake up call when I hear loads of crashing about.
I stick my head out of the hinged door on top to see a guy in a municipal truck halfway to emptying the dumpster next to me into a compactor. He stops when he sees me, and he asks me if I have a friend in the about-to-be-crushed cardboard. I reassure him that it’s empty as far as I know and he gets on with his job.
I was actually going to try to sleep in this other dumpster, but it was too full of cardboard. I wonder what would have happened if I had climbed in there, and I’d had few to drink the night before? I guess I would have been processed and recycled into a hundred cardboard boxes, and done a lot more random global travelling than I’d bargained for.
I get out of the dumpster, thank him for the alarm call and head for the real motel where the bus is to arrive in a couple of hours. Physically, I feel like an utter wreck.
It’s okay to wait inside the motel; I flumpf into a fat squidgy leather sofa and am invited to drink lots of coffee with ‘Gerr’ a sixty year old guy who tells me all about his passion for travel and steam trains.
He doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered about letting me get a word in edgeways but I don’t really mind – it’s a welcome contrast to the night I’ve just had.
On the bus I realise I really do need to figure out a strategy for not freezing to death. Literally.
This has probably been the worst rough sleeping I have ever had, and I have tried sleeping out in some strange places over the years…
One time near Dundee in Scotland I suddenly found myself stranded with about twenty pence: my gamble on getting to my final destination hadn’t worked out. I spent a humiliating half an hour trying to beg enough for a bus fare. I have never begged before or since, I was crap at it and only managed to get 50 pence.
It was raining and I had no tent and was in a town I didn’t know and had no money. A bad combination. Starting to walk out from the town centre, I found some garages.
One was broken open, and when I looked inside it was stacked nearly almost to the top with flattened cardboard boxes. With only about a two foot gap between the cardboard and the knobbly concrete ceiling, I slithered myself up into the gap.
Surprisingly, it was a very comfortable nights sleep; dry and warm and infinitely superior to the horrible stretch of hours I have just experienced in this Canadian cardboard pile.
Extreme cold though was once my saving grace on another occasion in Perth, not far from Dundee: Again, not quite managing to get to my destination of Inverness, I found myself on a quiet late night roundabout on the outskirts of town with nothing going anywhere.
It was snowing lightly and there was the beginnings of a bitter wind. No tent; I never ever carried one in the old days – I never needed to; reliable rides or ingenuity always saved my skin.
Following my nest-finding nose, I noticed nearby was a railway line. ‘Where theres railways theres workman’s huts’ I thought.
Scrambling through a thicket of wintered brambles in orange sodium-lit darkness, I scrambled through til I got to the chunks of clinker by the tracks. I was in luck; with my nose starting to go numb, I only had to walk about 200 yards til I got to the silhouette of a workman’s hut.
The door was ajar. Thank god. I pushed it open with my foot; it was stiff and it took some effort. It was pitch black inside (I had no torch) and I swept the floor blindly with my foot, to see what sort of space was there to lie on. I felt my foot moving aside small chunks of broken concrete and plaster and what felt like scuffed old newspapers. Feeling my way round, I lay out my sleeping mat and my sleeping bag and climbed in fully clothed. After having travelled 500 miles alternately standing in the cold by road-sides being mostly ignored and then being obliged make polite conversation in cars and lorries when I wasn’t, finally it was only my exhaustion that meant that I got any sleep at all I think.
On such nights, I would wake really early just as dawn was breaking. Probably a built-in defence to stop me dying of hypothermia from lying in the cold for too long. I creaked myself upright, rubbed my eyes and dimly saw the detritus I had been sleeping in.
I wiped concrete and plaster dust off my sleeping bag. Then to my surprise, I found that I had been sleeping with my face mere inches from a substantial mound of very frozen human poo. Very rarely is extreme cold such a marvellous friend.
One time I was moving out of a caravan in Mid-Wales and was ferrying my stuff out. I had been staying put a while and had accumulated apart from my usual detritus; a large A2 sketch pad, a unicycle, and some other random objects that seemed like a good idea at the time.
I was carrying it all by bicycle to the nearest train station in Llandrindon Wells. Over the course of three round trips I moved it and stashed it under a handy bush not too far from the station; ready for me to get the train, all ready to go, the next morning.
It was five miles each way and Wales doesn’t do ‘flat’. On the return of my last trip I was exhausted. ‘Stuff it’ I thought ‘I’m just going to sleep right here in this field. I’ll get back to the farm and say goodbye in the morning.’
It was summer, not all that warm but it was okay. I could afford to sleep in the open.
A beautiful night, the milky spread of stars in deep space above that you only see once away from dull orange urbanisation. I fell asleep grinning. I was awoken from reverie some time later. Splat. Wet in the corner of my eye. After first getting my sleeping bag wet, my face was the last to know; It was raining.
So gloriously tired in my bones I had just enough brain-power to decide that morning couldn’t be far away, and I’d be fine. I slept through the rain, fading again to sleep to the sound of soft random splatting on my sleeping bag.
Finally waking, a rising sun crow-barring my eyelids apart, birds making a raucous din, I found myself caked into my heavy sodden bag. I was wet through. ‘That was quite some kip’ I thought, awkwardly peeling myself out. There was still a bit of lingering drizzle in the air but fortunately it changed its mind, like Welsh weather does, and soon I was able to stand up and air myself to some degree in a slight breeze.
I went and said my goodbyes, and then spent the rest of the day on the slow train back to Berkshire, recovering.
These are just the really rough times though.
At its best, sleeping out meant making a brief but intimate aquantance with a spot; In high summer with no chance of rain, against a dry-stone wall for a sense of slight seclusion and to keep windy gusts off. Glittering stars for a roof.
A blanket of white to greying cloud will keep me warmer, though darker clouds mean possible rain.
I love watching high-altitude winds pulling clouds across the sky, the moon seeming to be journeying through them, it’s ever-changing light show holding me in total silent fascination until my eyes finally give up and sleep comes.
Sometimes for a degree of invisibility, but more often for the friendly companionship, I would sleep under the nurturing density of a hawthorn bush or the lofty assurances of a grand old motherly or fatherly oak. Oaks seem to be differing genders which seems to be dependant on the way it physically looks and carries itself.
Above, the spangle of twisty branches fingering out into the night. Maybe the gentle gush of wind blowing through leaves like a lullaby.
Anywhere there are signs that a sheep has been sleeping under a tree is a good bet. You can be sure that’s the driest spot in the field.
Oaks and sycamore in leaf will keep off all but the heaviest of rains.
Because of the way some trees branches bow down close to the ground, a tree will often retain a significant amount of day-time warmth in the air trapped under the branches – not a lot but certainly a noticable amount.
Gradually through the day the sun will heat the ground under the tree without breezes ever really being able to get in and sweep the rising warmth away. I notice it most in autumn and spring when the sun is still warm but the nights are stone cold.
Sleeping out, my mornings are nearly always the same, something of a ritual really. From having lay down and slipped away from the wonders around me and into sleep, so my waking is usually something like the same thing in reverse. Over the course of days, there is a certain rythym to it all.
If I’ve slept badly, it is like being stoned and having a slight hangover, but normally I will rest pretty soundly.
Bird song is the first thing I am usually aware of, sometimes a frantic dawn chorus, sometimes jackdaws and rooks, my favourites. Sometimes a lone blackbird, my other favourite, singing for all it’s life every unwritten symphony you never heard before.
Maybe a cold exposed limb has woken up the rest of me. Then, eventually or otherwise, depending how bleary or clear and ready I’m feeling, my eyes will open, and maybe I will see the place I’m in for the first time in daylight, maybe not. It will be different anyway; The weather changes, clouds move on, sheep move around.
Never ever sleep in a field with cows in it. They’ve got hard feet and they’re bloody heavy and I wouldn’t trust one not to acidently stand on me.
Maybe a farmer is brrrmming about some way off on a quad bike. Maybe there’s the dull insistant roar of endless traffic nearby.
I will sit up, maybe meditate if that’s what I’m into at the time. Lean against a trunk or wall. If I can do it without some unyeilding knobbly protrusion sticking into my back then that’s bonus. Otherwise I will prop up my rucksack as a back-rest.
If it’s cold, I will put on whatever clothes I didn’t actually sleep in, leaving as small a gap as possible of nakedness between getting out of my bag and getting dressed so as to conserve maximum body heat.
A casual breakfast of whatever random edible may be in my bag. Maybe there’s some blackberries nearby.
I will chew my way into readiness to go. Then folding all my stuff back into the compactedness of my rucksack, my spread of personal debris goes back to just being me and my bag; The place is now its own again and I’ve maybe a couple of things left to do before leaving. I probably need a wee. And then I will say thank you to the spot I have slept in; for getting me through whatever kind of night it was – for keeping me safe, for keeping me alive, for keeping me dry, for the peace of the place, for the dreams I had whilst sleeping, for the company of trees and/or whatever brief encounter with wild life that may have occurred.
Anyone sleeping out in town on a regular basis has almost certainly lost their way, but being in the country and on the move is a different matter altogether; I feel so blessed by what all this naked contact unclothed by houses has given me.
It’s not all roses of course; Often-times I’ve got so fatigued and beaten by weather and the inaccessability of warmth and modern comforts. Numerous times in my wanderings I have envied the man who comes home every day to the loving embrace of his wife and his children, eats a big hot meal, fills his head with TV and sleeps in a big warm bed with a fluffy duvet and a companion.
If it’s warm and the place is right, I’ll very occasionally just get up and stretch with nothing on at all, getting fresh air to my limbs as an alternative to being able to have a wash. Sometimes it’s nice to just sunbathe luxuriously on top of my sleeping bag; just me, my skin and the big wide place I’m in.
Being naked is only an occasional occurence and usually only something I will do in particularly beautiful and secluded places. It feels wonderful in hot summer air, but if its cold and clear I will last about five or ten minutes before I have to get my clothes back on, but even that feels like a rare meeting with the elements. Standing naked in the rain feels like nothing else, especially if its warm.
I don’t regard myself as a ‘naturist’; its not something I feel driven to do often but when I do its because it feels right to do it; to be in nature just as my mum made me and to acknowledge some deeply held part of my being in the world. Many people in the world are naturally naked every day, but we white westerners have left that behind somewhere.
One time in the summer when I was part of a conservation volunteer group living in a cottage in Snowdonia, we had a party at full moon one night and it all went rather haywire. I had had enough of someone throwing food round the house and someone else trying to nail planks across bedroom doors with people behind them.
In dismay, I left our house at the bottom of Snowdon, and went off for a walk up into one of its fine hanging valleys.
Finding myself in another world entirely and enjoying the pale blue glow of the mountainside, I felt myself wanting to merge even closer into this moonlit place. I stripped off to just my boots, walking naked through the night with my clothes tied in a bundle and the arms of something long-sleeved around my neck so everything rested on my shoulders.
A friend was at a dance camp in the next valley over at Nant Gwynant, so I thought I would walk through the night to where she was to get there hopefully in time for a cooked campfire breakfast. (I was planning on being clothed by that time of course.)
Walking up here with just my skin, the mountains and the moon just felt like heaven. It was amazing to be in one of Britain’s most popular tourist spots and be completely alone and intimate with the place. It felt as if the place gets the chance to be itself again for a moment, to breathe freely and remember what it is again before the chattering classes turn up again the next day. I congratulated myself for having extricated myself from our chaotic household and having turned a nightmare into such a beautiful dream.
On I walked. I tried briefly to walk without my boots on, but having to carry the clumsy objects bouncing on my back coupled with having to negotiate every sometimes stinging step soon made me put my boots back on again.
Over the night I carried on walking. Eventually I started to descend slightly, after having been walking on a long stretch of flat for the latter part of the route.
I saw ahead a small pine plantation. I couldn’t recall there ever being a plantation on the side of Nant Gwynant. I was puzzled.
As I went further ahead, the tops of houses started to appear over the brow of the bog in front of me. I must have taken a wrong turn and walked to Beddgelert. No I couldn’t have done; there’s an enormous lake on the way, I would have seen it.
Still walking, and still baffled, it gradually dawned on me that the place I was looking at was Llanberis. Where I lived.
Somehow I had managed to do a U-turn and come back home again, down the other side of the valley I had walked up. I could have sworn I was going in a straight-ish line. Well I wasn’t. Tricky places, mountains.
The sun was coming up and not wanting to surprise any early morning dog-walkers I re-clothed.
Obliged to break out of the magic of the moment at some point, I went back to our house, just long enough to slip unseen past unconscious snoring revellers, get my sleeping bag and some food and the fare for the first bus that would be heading down to Nant Gwynant.
One time, me and Gill, my girlfriend at the time, decided to go to Devon to pick walnuts.
We lived in Radstock in Somerset, the next county over so we figured it would just be a day out home in time for tea.
We set off on my Honda C50 moped; not only illegal but also slightly unfeasible given the lack of power of the bike. Struggling up the extreme hills of the Quantocks, we finally reached Porlock where we had heard there was an abundance of walnut trees.
Well… we found one walnut tree, in a car park, and we got a few nuts but it was nothing to shout about. Having a bit of a sit down and picnic in a field though, we did find an abundance of magic mushrooms.
Dum-de-dum-de-dum… Well have a guess at what happened next.Soon we found ourselves somewhere else entirely without even trying. We decided to go on an adventure in some nearby woods, and somehow before very long we were both completely stark naked and declaring ourselves to be the Queen and King Of The Woods. How we managed to avoid embarassing encounters with unsuspecting walkers is both a mystery and a god-send. Probably they saw us before we saw them.
Eventually we realised that time was indeed passing, it was soon going to be dark, we were neither of us in any fit state to ride a shonky moped sixty miles and we didn’t having any camping gear. And we had about sevenquid. Enough for a bag of chips each.
Ooh.
By now we’d put our clothes back on.
In the struggle to think coherently, we realised a bed and breakfast was out of the question. So…
We found our solution. Or rather, the only option available to us. We tried to ‘sleep’ in a baby-changing room in a public toilet in a car park.
It had a light that had no apparent light switch, a table top barely big enough for an adult to lie on and most thankfully, a door that was lockable from the inside. Being the gallant chap I am, I offered Gill first refusal on the table and she chose it; scrunched up barely able to squeeze herself on and her arse hanging precariously over the side. And she snores like a drowning train.
I lay on the tiled floor and got through the night by alternating which parts of my body to numb on the cold floor. There came a point where my back and thighs could take no more of the endless numbing and kneeling with my head tucked into my knees became the nearest I could get to being comfortable.
The fleuro light glared brightly and buzzed all night long, Gill didn’t get very much snoring in, and pretty much no fun was had by all.
We must have looked a right pair of zombies when we emerged in the morning…
More satisfactorily, I have slept out in a block of flats with an accidentaly open door in Marseilles only to be woken in the morning by some guy swearing at me loudly. I had no idea what he was bellowing, but it wasn’t hard to work it out.
Perhaps the strangest place I ever tried to sleep was when I was in Oslo one time trying to find work. Somehow I’d met some guy on the street and got chatting to him. When he discovered I was sleeping out on a hill-side in my tent (it was the Skandanavian version of late autumn), he told me that he worked in a hospital and that he reckoned he could get me a bed to sleep in. The Norwegians can be a funny lot sometimes and this seemed like a slightly peculiar offer, but I thought I’d give it a go.
I turned up at the hospital reception at 8.30 pm as he had directed to me to do, and I waited in the admissions area. He didn’t come for half an hour and I thought maybe the whole thing was just a wind-up.
Then he appeared, in his hospital uniform. He saw me and beckoned to me to come with him. We went to a lift and he whispered to me conspiratorially about what the plan was. He brought me to a dimly-lit ward specifically for eldery men. Nearest to us was a vacant bed. ‘Here – this is a nice bed for you eh? You will sleep warm tonight.’
I looked doubtfully at the bed. It looked very recently vacated. There were somebody’s family photos smiling enthusiastically over the empty bed.
Really not sure this is a good idea. I sit tentatively on the side of the bed. The family are still smiling at me. No, not at me; at whoever it is that isn’t here any more. I told my well-meaning friend that I felt like I was jumping into somebody’s grave. ‘No, no it is alright, the old man has just gone home to see his son and daughter for three days. He will be back on Monday.’
Great! I’m borrowing the bed of some old fella I’ve never met without asking! I tell my friend I can’t do it…
That night I slept out in a nearby pine forest. It was cold without my tent but at least I had my integrity to keep me warm.
In Norway because of the extreme cold of winters, the law there says that if you have no money, you may present yourself to the nearest police station and they will give you a nice warm cell to sleep in. (Otherwise the streets might end up by morning littered with the frozen bodies of wayward drunk people.)
I was on a Christmas break from a Norwegian school I was at for six months and was heading to the airport at Kristiansand. I got there a day early, and had nowhere to stay. I had almost no money, and a hostel would have been really expensive. I thought I’d try out the police station stunt. In order to look really stuck, I buried my stuff in a bin-liner under a snow drift in a car park and stuck a big stick in the top so that I would be able to find my stuff again the next day.
Feeling somewhat nervous about this cheeky escapade but bouyed up by being able to play the ‘naive tourist’ card , I walked into the station and told them I had nowhere to stay and had no money.
‘You must come back at eleven o’clock tonight and register.’ was all I got from a rather up-himself looking desk sergeant. His manner did not invite further questions, so I left.
With three hours to do nothing in, I went to the cinema almost directly across the road and watched a rather good James Bond film. (I forget which one; a Pierce Brosnan one with Robbie Coltrane hamming it up as a Russian baddie.) Afterwards suitably entertained I burnt off the remaining time looking at an exhibition about the Northern Lights which was lovely. At the appointed time, I duly made my way over to the cop shop once more and handed myself in.
Little did I realise that I would not only be accepted without too many questions, but that I would also be treated as if I was a criminal. Force of habit I suppose. As soon as I was through the desk hatch and ushered in towards the cells, what was anyway an almost total lack of friendliness evaporated completely. My attempts at pally chit-chat were lost on them. Into a grey shiny cell I was deposited with only one woolen blanket. The heaters blasted away noisily to compensate. It was a very odd night, though I did sleep soundly.
Still in Skandinavia and considerably better than that was the time I was inter-railing and found myself in Copenhagen. It was April and I had been wandering around the small city a little bit. Looking for a good place to sleep I thought maybe I could find a public toilet and lock myself in. When I investigated this as a possibility I understood immediately that I had hit dignity nose-dive central and immediately abandoned such a stupid thought (I was only about twenty and probably stoned).
Walking round aimlessly I really had no idea what I was going to do, excepting maybe that I might just walk around all night.
By chance I wandered into a quiet area full of very old buildings and stately plane trees. I happened upon a curious and ancient-looking large wooden door with a gothic arch, built into a high old brick wall. It looked very inviting and different from all the noisy modernness I had just walked away from. I tried the latch. The door openned.
Going through the door was like stepping into a secret garden. I had walked into a large square neatly-trimmed lawn surrounded by high brick walls, it was completely secluded and peaceful. All around the edges of the walls were double rows of rose bushes. In the middle was a large round pond. Sitting round the pond and milling about was about forty cats.
I had never been anywhere like it.
In one corner of the garden was a small shed. I went to the shed and found it was unlocked. In the shed was two old Christmas trees and some rolls of rockwall insulation. I lay out the trees, flattened them and lay the rockwall on top. Putting my sleeping bag on top of all that, I set myself up for sleep with my head at the door so I could watch the cats through a gap in the door.
I think this must have been the most amazing place I ever slept.
There have been many places I have stayed over the years that have left their mark in my memory, becoming it feels, like they are a part of me.
Meanwhile, back in Canada…
I am still recovering from my hellish night in the Dumpster Motel;
I have a relatively short ride to North Bay through endless trees, in the Ontario style. Actually, it reminds me a little of southern English countryside, with undulating hills, small patches of woodland and hedgerows hemming in around small farmsteads.
Gazing out of the window, I pretend that I am travelling through Berkshire where I grew up, and then tell-tale Canadian landscape markers burst through the fantasy: a Mack truck flashing past on the other side of the road, large clapboard farmhouses, enormous polka-dot stacks of pine trunks piled up along the roadside.
I arrive in North Bay late afternoon and decide that buying a proper winter sleeping bag would be a good idea. I get directions to ‘Lefevres’ winter sports shop from some guy called Gary on the bus.
I buy a huge thick sleeping bag (effectively doubling the size of my load) and a couple of camping knick-knacks. The man in the shop tells me my wellies are no good for winter and that they will get me killed.
He informs me that wearing them out in the boonies might keep the wet out, but all the sweat in my feet will stay in and freeze and kill off my core body heat. And then I would quickly die of hyperthermia.
He goes off for a moment and brings back a pair of walking boots. He tells me that if they fit me, I can have them! Gob-smacked (yet again) by generosity, I can just about get my murderously sweaty feet into them, but once on, they fit perfectly.
The previous owner has returned them unused cos they had ripped the Thinsulate liner inside trying (and failing) to get them on. They are Gore-Tex too, and I am to discover later, pretty good at keeping the wet out.
I bounce off back up to the bus depot – wearing decent footwear makes a difference psychologically as well as me not having to go flapping about in sweaty wellies. I was getting occasional sideways glances whilst wearing the wellies. I don’t think they say ‘upwardly mobile’ to the average Canadian somehow.
I chat with the woman at the bus depot, I’m okay to sleep there till the bus comes in the morning. I think she is subconsciously impressed by my dazzling new boots.
The journey on the bus passes through Saulte St Marie and onwards to Thunder Bay. The ride along the top of The Great Lakes is magnificent.
I get talking to an eighteen year old woman who says she has an alcohol problem and is off to Vancouver to try to find her dad. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she doesn’t find him. I can’t help feeling rather concerned, and I’m hoping she can make some good choices about who she decides to hang out with when she gets there. She’s running an activities group for kids in her home-town cos she doesn’t want them to get into drinking like she had. She’s a bit of a star I reckon.
Later I get talking to a guy of twenty-five who lived with his parents in Pakistan for two years who has lots of stories to tell, though I seem to be able to remember none of them. We get stoned along with another woman we meet (who looks like ‘Amelie’ from the film of the same name), and we talk unfathomable bollocks through the night. Arriving at Winnipeg and having exhausted the conversational possibilities, we all part company, heading where we need to head to next.
I’m absolutely in need of a scrub down, a clean-up and a break so I find the youth hostel and book myself in.
I lunge straight for the washing machine and wash everything possible. I am forced to resort to having a long soak in the bath because showers are not allowed. Tragedy!
After this bout of domestic heaven, I just hang out chatting with other nice people also patently foolish enough to travel in Canada at what many Canadians seem to regard as the wrong time of year. Actually if this is the level of back-packing that goes on around now, then I’m glad I’m not here in the summer; the place would be crammed chock-a-block.
I get talking to a Romanian guy of about fifty who’s trying to see his son in Winnipeg but his ex-wife doesn’t want to know him any more. He’s pretty upset about it understandably. I gather he’s got a bit of a gambling habit.
I meet an Indian chap (as in Asian) about forty who’s in computers in San Jose. Not literally. He’s up here to meet up with friends. He has a very refreshing sense of clarity, precision and honesty about him, which is very relaxing to be around.
I also meet a suave Quebecois guy who attracts the ladies with his Jesus-like looks without even trying (bastard). Also I meet a vegan Mennonite (a religious sect; not neccessarily an unusual fossil) peace activist from Maine who shoots video for Indymedia: Another American who blows the stereotypes out of the water again.
Also a Swedish couple who are young and seemingly stuck to each other (aah!) and a very lanky guitar playing stoner dude from Toronto who is so laid back I can see right up his nose whilst he’s happily admiring the ceiling. He’s very much the romantic on-the-road-wherever-the wind-takes-him type of character whom I instantly like – sometimes these kinds of characters can be so impossibly ‘cool’, that I just want to slap them. This guy though is a real good ‘un.
I don’t see much of Winnipeg and I can’t be arsed anyway. It’s a huge ariel shopping mall of a city; all shiny chrome and marble concrete blah. Apparently this is where Winnie the Pooh came from, which I refuse to believe, though I am somehow convinced that this is where Glen Miller crashed a plane and died. I think the cold has messed with my head.
I could stay put in the hostel for a while, but decide against it as I have the feeling that I just want to get on really. Actually the temptation is to hang out for ages just chatting to new people and getting lardy on endless pancake breakfasts and brunches. It rings alarm bells warning of a cosy but expensive inertia is what it really boils down to.
Escaping the evil clutches of comfort, I get the afternoon bus the next day to as far as the small town of Virden where I am going to stay the night, but the place is so bleak, dull and quiet that I decide to get the next overnight bus out again.
The bus doesn’t arrive until 11.30 pm so I check my bags in at the one and only hotel, stretch my legs for an hour and then go and see ‘Swimfan’ at the cinema. I should have realised how much popcorn I would get when I’m in the belly of the largest maize growing region in the world – tons; about twice the size of the largest tub you would get in an English cinema and it only costs a dollar (about forty pence).
I miss lots of scenery through the night. I think all I’ve missed is lots of oil derricks in a big flat dull place. I am reliably informed that the only thing interesting about Saskatchewan is its name. I’m almost in Alberta by the time morning comes.
Pass the time watching ‘Stepmom’ on the in-flight entertainment which is a soppy-goo family film which has me in tears even though it has the weirdly unpleasant distraction of Julia Robert’s bizarre and improbable zeppelin-sized lips. She must have arse-implants to stop her from falling forwards.
Aaaaah…. television….
TV has the marvellous/fantastic/appalling capacity to fulfill the most sedentary of lives.
It enables a vast swathe of physically and mentally worn-out 9 to 5ers to maintain an interest in life.
When I was a teenager I would come home from school and be systematically ignored by my parents because they were both absorbed in a bunch of dancing coloured dots.
I felt like the TV was a more important member of our family than I was.
But so it is that most of us relegate ourselves to the rank of dull spectator to the superior doings of the interesting, the informative and the occasionally talented people we see on TV.
As a teenager I always felt seperated from my parents by TV, and had a keen sense of urgency to not become another dulled victim of its power.
Someone once illustrated just how dull watching TV is; ‘There are two things you will never ever see anyone doing on a soap or a sit-com. One is going to the toilet and the other is watching TV.’
That observation was made in the 1980s. These days people make Hollywood blockbusters that often involve and sometimes rotate entirely around the doings of the internet. That must be some kind of measure of just how exciting we have collectively become.
I am, of course, an utter hypocrite.
(The world is world is full of strange paradoxes and contradictions, so I thereby reserve the right to be a hypocrite.)
As a teenager at home, instead of going out and having loads of mates, I retreated into the Vic-20 home computer in my bedroom, and I was so absorbed in it, I would actually dream solutions to gaming programs I was writing; streams of neon-green gobbledegook running past my sleeping eyes.
I grew up a nerd; in the days when being a nerd was not in the least bit socially acceptable. (Now we’re all nerds and don’t even realise it.)
If it was not for the Monday to Thursday late night ten to midnight slot on Radio One, The John Peel Show, I don’t think I would ever have realised that I actually really was a person that counted for something.
After leaving home at eighteen, I have struggled ever since to remain engaged in having a real life and not just fill myself up with television and computer screens.
I find it confusing when I sometimes get told by people what an exciting life I have led when by my own standards, there seems to have been far too many blank pages.
We fill our heads with far-away fantasies of how life could be better if only… (insert fantasy of your choice).
Come a bleary Saskatchewan mid-morning, it’s time to get off and stretch our legs and everything else that has endured the tortuous not-even-half ‘sleep’ of the night bus.. I’ve been told how scarily empty and dull the prairies are, but I am really quite surprised how much I appreciate the vast openness of it. The sun is beaming down which helps, and it is a crisp cold morning. Just the job. I think previously having lived near the East Anglian fens has had me in training, and it makes a nice change from being completely surrounded by trees nearly all the time.
I would reckon that up to here, about seventy percent of everything I’ve seen so far has either been trees, lakes or sea (all of it gorgeous too!)
I am going to get off at Medicine Hat, unwittingly making the mistake that maybe cute name equals cute town. When I get there it becomes apparent that actually maybe they should have called the town ‘Dreary-Estates-With-No-Particular Character-ville’.
Medicine Hat boasts of having ‘the Largest Tipi in the World’. What that involves, I soon discover, is a cone of steel tubes forty-five foot high by the side of the main road, which presumably gets clad with something equally unnatural and inappropriate during the tourist season.
I put my hands over my eyes as temporary blinkers and escape from planet Medicine Hat on the next available bus and head for Calgary with its re-assuringly dull name.
The approach along the highway to Calgary is famous (well, in Canada it is). From a distance all you see is a big bunch of skyscrapers slap bang in the middle of the prairies; very little in the way of suburbia. It’s like the whole place just rises up out of the ground from nowhere, looking like a giant concrete graphic equaliser.
I stop off for pizza for lunch. You can get a huge slice for a dollar, which is fantastic – it’s true what people this side of the Atlantic say about British food; the British make rubbish pizza – pizza here has soft tasty bread (not thick dry and tasteless like the in the UK) lots of freshly chopped vegetables, that taste new and actually nutritious. Num-num-num-num-num…
November 4th Monday 5 am.
Greyhound bus station Calgary.
When I arrive, I dump my stuff in a bus depot locker and head off round the city for the rest of the day.
Calgary has no litter, lots of trams and little other traffic. There are pan-handlers and down-and-outs who all seem to be First Nations people. I’m aware of a huge incongruence between the ‘Come and see our native crafts and cultures’ element to Canada’s tourism and the very apparent mess some of these people seem to be in.
The guys in the station cleaning all night are Sikhs, but I didn’t see them here during the day. As usual, they always seem to get the crap jobs.
The security guard here, very obviously a bit of a toker, lets me and someone else ‘sleep’ in the bus depot overnight (we are not supposed too). Before that, he first takes us down to the drop-in centre on the other side of the city, but the floor of the place is littered with bodies. Not really my kind of place ‘Ooooooh! Shit! The place is full of crack-heads!’ is the security man’s thoughts on the deal. Anyway it’s 5.30 am now in the bus depot, my head’s mashed and in a couple of hours I’m going to see some dinosaur thingies (hopefully).
November 5th 2002 written whilst sitting admiring a life-size plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur in a car park:
Well, the bus for Drumheller and its National Park turns up at 6.20 am. I ask the driver if he can drop me ten kilometres short at the Horseshoe Canyon. He says he can’t as there’s nowhere safe to stop. No matter. Halfway into the bus ride I ask him if he can drop me anywhere near it, to save me a long walk. I’m not really sure how this is offensive, but the man is blustering and looks and behaves as if he wants to swear and shout at me and/or give me a kicking. I’m confused by this. ‘Maybe I should just get off at Drumheller?’. He drops me off at Rosebud Junction which is just as far away as Drumheller is, but short of where I want to be. What a jerk. He gets my bag off the bus, he looks fit to burst. I apologise for seeming to have ruined his day. He tells me that I haven’t. Whatever has happened to him, I hope he gets it out of his system before he loses it and crashes his bus.
Here I am in undulating prairie with only the curiously soporific nodding natural gas derricks and a cold light wind for company. I start walking to keep warm. There aren’t many cars, and I can hear each one quietly roaring down the highway from miles away. I get a lift from a nice middle-aged couple from Saskatchewan on their way home from holiday in Banff and they drop me off right by Horseshoe Canyon a few minutes later.
Hey, whaddaya know? There’s loads of space to drop me off in. This is my first view of ‘The Badlands’.
‘Badlands’ is a pretty much self explanatory term really. It’s land that’s full of loose sand, slick clay and usually not much else but extreme wind and water erosion. Often difficult to walk across on foot and completely useless for any kind of farming.
And also a popular kind of area for governments to make as reservations for First Nations peoples.
This place is a much smaller grey to white version of the Grand Canyon. This one’s only about a hundred metres deep. It looks like the back-drop to either a cowboy film or the old-style Star Trek scenes where Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock are trying to find Dr. McCoy who’s been kidnapped by some bloke in a green shag-pile monkey suit with fangs and boggly eyes.
I dump my bags near the top out of easy reach and view of any passing traffic and very cautiously make my way down. I am cautious partly because of slippery fine clay surface and largely because of a lot of mixed-up foot prints in the snow. There are deer prints and some kind of dog (fox?) prints all crossing over each other like there has been some kind of scuffle. What worries me most are the really big prints that I imagine could be bear prints. Getting out quickly from here is steep and slippery. Bears can run at 50 kmph. I go down anyway, taking care to leave all foody stuff away from my bags. I’m on my guard. I half expect the boggly-eyed Star Trek monster to step out, claws raised – ‘Raargh!’. After about fifteen minutes of getting a feel for this strange landscape, I decide I’m not going to push my luck any further, and make my way out again.
Standing by the roadside and about fifteen minutes later, I get a ride into Drumheller; a town notable for its abundance of life-size plastic dinosaurs that are littered about the place. Rick’s the driver and decides he’s going to show me some ‘Good old western hospitality’. He messes about with gas drilling rigs for a living, but he’s hurt his ankle and he’s taking the rest of the day off. He takes me to a bar, then we visit a suspension bridge, stopping en-route at a liquor store, then we stop at ‘The Last Chance Saloon’ in Wayne which is a quirky weather-battered pale wooden place and serves its beer in jam jars. We have soup and beer here and Rick gets up and does a country music turn. He does a spiel about picking me up and plays ‘One More City’ a Merle Haggard song about a lost vagabond that can’t settle anywhere. I am touched (and drunk) and I have a tear in my eye.
Onwards through the Badlands we stop off at Rick’s work camp where it looks like he’s getting a bollocking for some reason. We change cars to Rick’s Lincoln (one of those big slab-like American cars with fins) and cruise over to a place called Patricia, drinking more on the way.
In the bar I have by now lost the plot majorly. I usually get drunk on three beers, and I’ve had nine beers and one alcopop thing. Rick gets the burgers in and tries to set me up with the barmaid for the night. Unfortunately she declines on the grounds that she is now married and has a baby. I wouldn’t be very able anyway and I probably look a right mess. More beer and before I know it, Rick’s paid half for a room for me for the night and he gives me his address and we part company. I ruefully can’t help thinking that I am not the tough drinking partner he might have been better off with. Ahhh, fuggit. I go upstairs, watch TV a bit and sleep off an awful lot of weird cobblers that’s whizzing randomly through my head that I can’t figure out at all until it occurs to me to count up how much beer I’ve had. Drink lots of water, feel dreadful and then sleep.
In the morning I’ve got a death-defying hangover and my body feels nervous all over, heavy and reluctant. Realise I’ve lost my fur hat, coat and penknife somewhere along the line. Usually anywhere I leave, I always double-check the space I am about to vacate. Too pissed this time. After a large fried breakfast to try to anchor me down, I pfaff about trying to figure out what to do about not having a hat and coat. The manager gives me some replacements that someone else has left behind, gives me Rick’s address and then gives me a ride up to Dinosaur Provincial Park. Just the place for clearing my head.
More canyon, but this time this place is much bigger than the Horseshoe Canyon. According to the information board, it is seventy-six square kilometres that has the Red Deer River running through it.
I make my way down to the visitors centre at the bottom and take a look round the various trails. There is practically nobody here except the warden, Fred Hammer (good name for an archaeologist). He’s a total chatterbox; cabin fever I think. I strongly suspect that I am the first person he’s seen up here for a long while.
Walking around here is the strangest place I’ve ever been in my life. Most of the time its totally silent except for when the wind blows through the abundant sage bush thats everywhere around.
The smell is amazing. I can see why its used for ceremonies by the Native Americans; the burning of it gives a wonderful evocation of this eerie and special landscape.
There’s also lots of prickly pear here. The wild life at night is quite noisy and next day after camping out here I am able to see some of the things that have been making all the noises. There are quite a few mule deer (called that cos they’ve got big ears), a couple of rabbits, very large owls (very impressive in flight), an eagle-y type thing, and a couple of porcupines which like to spend their time killing off the cottonwood trees by eating the bark. I’ve always thought that porcupines were supposed to be like large hedgehogs, but these ones climb up trees and sit on their hind legs, which makes them look a little like shaggy koalas, and in their languid manner, makes them quite sloth-like.
There are coyotes here, to complete the ‘Wild West’ effect.
At sundown and sunrise they all yowl and announce their existence to each other. The yowling lasts a couple of minutes and though I can’t see them, it sounds like there must be about twenty of them scattered across this fairly stark landscape.
I think I might have found a fossil whilst I was out and about, it looks like the end of a leg bone sticking out of a rock by a couple of centimetres. I haven’t written very much about this place, but it’s one of most interesting parts of the trip so far.
I am getting a bit bored of my own company, and am thinking about booking a flight home for Christmas.
After spending two days here, I decide to leave. I’m in the middle of nowhere, and this park is the end of the road and has practically no visitors. Fortunately, Fred Hammer the park warden and cabin-fevered chatter-box, gives me a ride back to Brooks, the town on the TCH (Trans Canadian Highway) fifty kilometres south. It’s where he lives, where my bus goes back to Calgary from, and where my hat, coat and penknife might be; Fred gives me a ride to Rick’s house.
Rick’s in the shower but I am greeted by a fluffy white dog and Rick’s Newfie girlfriend (‘If you can’t get enough, get a Newfie’ as the saying goes). She’s a diminutive country-and-western trailer-trash peroxide barbie-doll blonde and fabulously friendly. She helps me get the required objects from the trunk of Rick’s Lincoln, and I zip away again, cos my free ride has to go home and be with his kids. Wow people are amazing sometimes.
Stop by at Boston Pizza before the bus is due, and have absolutely fantastic Greek salad and lasagne which is cheap and could feed about three people. I am served by the lovely ‘Ebony’ who is dark, short and yummy. Hmmmm…!
On the bus to Calgary I get talking to a guy going to see his estranged son, and who doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about it. He’s a bit drunk and slightly odd in a dark sort of way.
It’s snowing for the first time and there’s a bit of a blizzard blowing, really big snow flakes. The traffic has been caught out and everything slows down.
We get to Calgary about 11 pm, I am hoping to stay in the bus depot overnight again, but there’s a different security guard on duty this time and I get kicked out along with two other guys. The guard helpfully suggests that we could stay in Tim Hortens all night; not an amazing prospect. I equip the other two with a hat each. (I have three for some reason, and we’re all baldies.) They smoke cigs, we all drink a beer or two (one guy has his coat seemingly lined with cans) and we eventually succumb to the inevitable and ‘do’ Tim Hortens.
We linger over hot drinks as if to make our stay legitimate, talk nonsense and ‘check out for hot chicks’. An assortment of befuddled night-owls pass through, including a couple who we reckon are either doing coke or shagging in the wash-room or both. They are unintentionally very funny when they come out, trying too hard to look inconspicuous whilst giggling and rubbing their itchy noses, obviously looking like they’re sure everyone knows what they’ve been up to. Which of course we do.
Counter service is provided by a chirpy middle-aged Serbian woman with too much eye shadow and big black hair and red lipstick which makes her look somewhere between Dot Cotton from EastEnders and an extra for The Munsters. She speaks fabulously broken English and tries to engage us with her passion for Nobel peace prize winners. When this doesn’t quite work, she tries to strike up a breezy conversation about Ernest Hemingway.
It gets to 6 am comes and we escape back to the bus depot and get our respective buses. I bump into the Swedish couple from Winnipeg and we grunt hello and fall asleep in front of each-other, then I wake up and go for the Vancouver bus.
I’ve been looking forwards to seeing what all the fuss is about with the alledgedly stunning Banff area, it being something of a tourist hive; but almost everything is obscured by low cloud. I’m deep in the heart of the Rockie Mountains now. The icy mist has the affect of making everything monochrome, like I’m seeing the whole place in black and white, and with the top of the picture chopped off by low cloud, rather like a badly taken photograph.
I stay at the Kamloops hostel which is a converted law court in the centre of town.
A grand building with a wood-panelled and spacious interior, it lacks the cosiness (and piles of people) of Winnipeg. I meet a nice Irish chap. It’s always a nice surprise to meet people from back home (or close to); it feels almost like meeting family or something.
The next morning at 7 am, I chat in the kitchen with a fantastically brimming woman who’s going to Seattle to meet someone who can teach her three-strung harp playing (it’s complicated). She’s an absolute elastic band of excitement and very funny.
I walk up through the ‘burbs and have to stop to soak up the amazing view of this little town hanging in two joining valleys in the Rockies:
November 10 Sunday.
Sitting on the suburban mountainside of Kamloops. A broad town of 50,000, sat in the ridges of the Rockies. Traffic rumbles, slight smog hangs, the sun rises warming my back. For the first time it feels warm without me having to do anything (i.e. walk lots).
A huge dark winding river dominates, anchoring the town to the mountains. A long distance freight train sounds its hello, echoing on the walls of the steep sided valley. Beautiful snapshot. Birds twitter, the sage smells cool and old. No snow – the sky brilliant blue, magpies glide. A distant kayak, a red blip on the vast sinuous black flatness of water.
At the Greyhound depot I get talking to Dana. We talk for the entire bus journey and she is really quite inspiring. She’s very bubbly and unfortunately has a fiance (lucky chap). She broke both her knees playing rugby at school when she was seventeen, she spent a year learning to walk, then another year learning to run. She had decided that she was going to make a list of everything that she wanted to do by the time she was twenty-eight. She’s done all of them except travel round Europe.
She’s the ‘executive manager’ (self-appointed title) of a company that makes gimp masks and latex fetish weirdness; what she likes most about this ‘job’ is the fact that she can spin peoples heads telling them about it, which I wholly approve of.
She’s also been ‘mum’ to a kid left stranded by her ex-boyfriends junkie ex-girlfriend. She’s such an all-round person, I feel really inspired by her. She and her man are having two weddings, one a dry Catholic affair for her Mexican chaps folks, and the other a shin-dig on the beach of Stanley Park (in Vancouver) to which they’ve invited every person that they can track down from their pasts who has had any sort of influence on their growing up, including the guy who was selling them hot dogs in the park when they first snogged nearby.
We are later joined by Jenn, a guitar player from Quinell, and we all end up telling filthy jokes and being too loud. (We eventually get reprimanded by the bus driver.)
We get into a conversation about porno, and I am wondering what the fascination with Japanese cartoon porn could possibly be, when you could have the real thing. As Dana points out, it’s because cartoons can do despicable naughty things that you can’t do in real life. Expanding on this theme we invent ‘plasticine porno’ where plasticine characters can morph themselves extra rude bits as desired. Over time, Canadian-scale bus journeys do tend to invite a certain level of mind-warp. Maybe you just had to be there.
Prince George is a major stopping off point between north south east and west traffic, giving it more of a hub than a lot of towns have; it still manages to feel like a small town.
I stay at Jenn’s for two nights which is great. It’s lovely to be able to sleep in a proper house. Well actually it’s her student halls (University of Northern British Columbia, a relatively new university). We watch films ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (excellent) and ‘Queen Of The Damned’ (not so excellent). We eat pizza and lollies and talk about animals, growing fruit and vegetables and our mutual love of the English language. She’s really warm-hearted and someone I could get to be good friends with.
November 12th (day after Remembrance Day)
I get a taxi down to the bus depot and bump into a middle-aged English guy and his Californian wife who are also going to Prince Rupert, where I’m off to as well. He comes and sits next to me and keeps himself busy by telling me lots of little bits of history of all the places we pass through. Me having the kind of mind that will only deal with three traffic directions at a time before it decides that my brain is full, has a bit of difficulty keeping up with John (for that is his name).
He plies me with some dodgy looking BBQ pork which afterwards sits strangely in my stomach. We stop for a lunch break halfway and I get fed some more. I am told that I am staying or not with them for the night. (This is in between some sort of minor domestic argument the two seem to be having between themselves.) I have a slight suspicion that the argument is over my staying. So that’s my accommodation sorted. Sort of.
I’ve got a serious head-cold by now, which adds a certain something to the whole continuous-no-gaps history lesson whether-I-like-it-or-not thing. Finally John gives up and he goes and sits with Peggy his wife.
I talk in a rather more bi-directional way with a couple sitting in front. We are talking about drugs and their various merits and tribulations and I end up telling them that I had snogged the bloke I lived with at a party when I was on ecstasy. This has the all-too-familiar effect of making the guy I’m talking to think that I’ve suddenly crossed the line into being some kind of scary monster that is ‘coming on’ to him. This partly amuses me and partly annoys me because it’s such a predictable and small-minded knee-jerk defence that most men have. Mention anything vaguely not heterosexual and they start feeling the need to pump up their defensive testosterone-ridden swagger. This must be because men seem to be only capable of operating on a sexual level much of the time. I don’t know. Funny creatures.
After freaking him out (he’s only a youngster) I get talking to a very nice chap from Bristol who has been in Canada for five months and is doing research for the Rough Guide books.
He is a non-religious Religious Education teacher who’d been to Canada before with his girlfriend and looks like he’s retracing old steps, I imagine that maybe he’s exorcising old girlfriend ghosts or something. He seems a very light kind of person so maybe not.
On this trip, he’d re-visited New York City where he had been with his girlfriend too. He tells me how they had met a Scottish backpacker on September 10th in 2001 in Times Square, and were going to meet her the next day for lunch at the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre. They didn’t meet up with her because they had to go and do something else. He remembers standing in Times Square the next day in the confusion thinking they could all have been up there. He says one of the worst things was the taste of the building’s dust and just getting his lungs full of it….
Upon arrival at Prince Rupert, I’m not exactly looking forwards to being a guest, which I suppose is a little ungrateful of me really. I think actually that I’m not really very well, and given a choice would much rather be hiding from the world in a snuggly bed. Anyhow, their flat is very nice and full of lovely art stuff.
I am talked at by John which is rather stifling as he seems to have failed to have noticed that I don’t seem to have very much to contribute to this unrelenting verbal history of Canada.
I like Peggy though, she’s an ex-nurse/therapist in a mental hospital and very gently spoken. We get on very well. I make a point of saying thank you to her for her cooking and hospitality, something her husband seems to take for granted.
He’s an alright chap really and well-meaning, we are none of us perfect after all. He reminds me of George Melly the large and loud jazz man and occasional BBC broadcaster. Not that that has any bearing on anything at all.
Lovely food and a big squidgy couch to sleep on is an excellent way to combat a cold.
I go out for a long walk in the pouring rain and discover the edge of town and some lovely dank forest.
Upon my return, John tells me that my vagabond ways put him in mind of a chap called Robert Service.
I round off my stay off by reading some poems by this chap, who I’ve never heard of before, but is very famous in the north of Canada. He is an English chap who’d come over for the Gold Rush and ended up writing about it’s colourful characters. He had come originally from Lancashire, so I read one out in my best Lancashire accent about a woman with a boil on her arse, and then I literally have to yank my boots on and rush across the street to get the bus before it goes.
Robert William Service was born in Preston Lancashire in 1874, and started adult life as a banker. He left England at the age of twenty-two and bummed his way round BC and the Western US on the hunt for gold and simultaneously dreamed of becoming a cowboy. He ended up working in a bank in Kamploops, and then finally got a transfer as a bank clerk in 1904 all the way up in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Service spent his spare time writing verses, and was asked to write something for a local show happening in town for which he wrote ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, relating the outcome of a bar-room brawl and featuring the larger-than-life characters who were the gold-rush hopefuls (called ‘sourdoughs’). His poem proved popular and soon other poems followed, being published in the local paper The Whitehorse Star.
His popularity grew and his first book in 1907 ‘Songs of a Sourdough’ was published.
His writing was considered doggeral but this was as he intended – to write straight-forward verses for the entertainment of the common man; he was regarded both as ‘The Bard of the Yukon’ and as ‘The Kipling of Canada’. He never regarded himself as a ‘poet’.
His work is freely available on the internet and best read with a broad Lancashire accent.
This grace was reputedly the first thing he ever wrote, when he was six and staying with his grandma in Scotland:
God bless the cakes and bless the jam;
Bless the cheese and the cold boiled ham:
Bless the scones Aunt Jeannie makes,
And save us all from bellyaches. Amen
Service was tapping the same vein as Jack London, both writing about the wildness of the Yukon and its inhabitants; they both went on in turn to influence writers like Jack Kerouac, also out searching for the nature of man in big wild country.
Such is his fame, he has a statue in Whitehorse, a main road in the Yukon, a postage stamp in 1976 and three schools bearing his name; one in Dawson City, one in Anchorage and one in Toronto.
Back on the bus again…
A few days of comfort indoors has made me realise just how much sleeping outside/dozily rattling overnight on buses and slouching in all-night cafes I’ve been doing, and it has finally caught up with me. Fantastically bunged up and snorting snot all the time. Yum.
The ride back from Prince Rupert I see in daylight for the first time, and it’s very beautiful, the road skirting endlessly round vast glassy grey lakes and big ominous mountains.
I get the next bus straight up to Whitehorse, which from Prince Rupert must be about 2500 km or something, most of the rest of the way from here is in the dark. (Dull verging on surreal.) I’m getting used to huge distances, and I am completely unfazed by it. I notice an increasing number of people complaining about the length of their bus ride. ‘I’ve been on this bus for eight whole hours’ (moan/whinge/squirm)
to which I nonchalantly respond; ‘I’ve been on the bus since Moncton, New Brunswick’ which artfully knocks the fart out of their sails.
Bizarrely, I bump into Rick again at Dawson Creek. I don’t feel like talking to anyone (lergy and historical overload in Prince Rupert) and make the terrible mistake of pretending I don’t see him. After all the goodwill he put in my direction, I realise (too late) that I’m behaving like a tosser and then spend the next couple of hours feeling crap about it. I tell him this when we stop for lunch. He’s visibly not impressed either by my attitude, or my whingeing, and reminds me that I still owe him lunch. Oops, I’ve screwed up. That bit of yikkiness bothers me for the rest of the journey until I ‘fall asleep’.
Rick leaves the bus early in the journey thankfully saving me from any further squirming.
We stop off three times on the way up – once in a lay-by high up in the Mackenzie Range. It’s a gloriously light place full of distant snowy peaks and black rock. One of those views that’s so vast and seemingly all-encompassing, it makes you think that this really is the only place in the world.
These are the slightly gentler mountains that bring the Rockies to their eventual northern conclusion.
Further on we stop at a house in the middle of nowhere, where the driver opens a luggage compartment under the bus and removes a car fender which he then delivers to a solitary small wooden house that stands resolute in the howling wind and snow. I guess Greyhound also doubles as a remote goods delivery service. The driver takes ages; I expect he’s having a bit of a chin-wag and giving the occupant some much-needed human contact along with their new fender.
The last place is a cafe/restaurant, also in the middle of nowhere. We all get out, grateful for the break, stagger round a gift shop, buy coffee and muffins and stagger back out again. Some of us smoke fags in the cold pure air. I don’t smoke so I just stand with my hands in my pockets and blow breath-vapour and pretend I do instead.
Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon (which isn’t that much of a claim considering its nearly all wilderness). It was named after the White horse Rapids (which look like a horses mane). For such a northerly town, its one of the driest places in Canada, most of the seaward rain landing on the mountains first.
It was established in 1898 as a gold-rush settlement until finally being incorporated into Canada in 1950. Before the sourdoughs turned up, the area had been used for several thousand years by several different First Nations tribes who would seasonally each pass through the area.
We arrive in Whitehorse at 4.30 am. Me and some other bus passengers head for Tim Horton’s and do the Hot Chocolate thing. The bus driver is in there too, and I can’t quite figure his accent. A short exchange goes thus:
me: ‘Are you a Kiwi?’
him: ‘Are you Irish?’
me:’ You must be Australian!’
him: ‘You must be English!’
That is the sum total of the conversation; We seem to have deduced each others nationalities by potentially offending each other, but it is all good-humoured.
I get talking to a native chap (half Cree/half English) who’s from Manitoba and a bit drunk. We have an interesting conversation about land and peoples different priorities towards it.
He asks me ‘if people in England like the Indians’ and I tell him lots of people are into the ethics of the cultures but that too many people put them on pedestals and romanticise them. He tells me about his medicine bag, and I reply that I used to wear a stone I once found, and used it as a ‘telephone to the gods’. We go off for a walk together, and then he goes off, on the chance of a mechanics job in town. I head off to the Bees Knees backpackers hostel.
I turn up and am not sure if I’ve made a mistake. There’s lots of boots in the hallway which is a good sign, but it’s just like I’ve walked into someone’s private house.
I sit on the couch without putting any lights on, not sure what to do next and a couple of minutes later, Dona, the woman who runs the place wanders in in her dressing gown. She’s slightly surprised to see someone sitting in her living room in the half-light. She sorts me out somewhere to sleep and I spend the next six days here, doing very little but sleeping in lots, going to see movies and messing around on the internet. I’ve decided to get over my cold before I do anything else.
I spend a day painting the bedroom of a friend of Dona’s, a nurse who’s just moved to the town and get a free pizza for my efforts. (Very good.) I go see the new Harry Potter film, The Chamber of Secrets which reminds me of home, especially the bit right at the beginning where they fly over English countryside. (It brings a tear to my eye.)
I go see ‘8 Mile’ the Eminem film, which does not remind me of home. It’s the only other film playing here. It’s provincal here.
Also staying in this tiny hostel, is a South Korean chap with hi-tech gizmos a go-go: a digital camera, a laptop and all sorts. He is a highly motivated chap; he’d been to Churchill to see the polar bears and now he wants to see the Northern Lights at least once in the three weeks before he has to go home.
Every night about 7 pm he would anxiously ask each of us ‘You fink I see Norrren Lie fiss erening? You fink?’
He’d peer out of the window for a minute and then scamper out into the snowy night-time gloom with his camera.
I feel really sorry for the guy. I’ve been blessed enough to see the Northern Lights six or seven times, and it is truly truly awesome as the Canadians would put it.
Each morning we would see him eating his breakfast with a worried far away look in his eye. ‘I did not see Norrren Lie’.
Trying deliberately to see the Northern Lights is probably like trying to pick up a beautiful woman. You can be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, but there’s nothing to say that it’s actually going to happen.
I think in my lifetime I’ve probably had better luck with glowing lights in the sky than I have had luck with women.
The first time I ever saw the Northern Lights I was in a place called Bracke in northern Sweden. I was inter-railing, my first travel trip outside of Britain and alone.
I’d made it down to Spain, and now I wanted to go as far north as I could. I’d got as far as Trondheim but because it was Easter, all the trains were messed up. I remember waiting at Trondheim Station and seeing the ice on the lake, where it had thawed enough to break up and re-freeze at crazy angles like icebergs. The ice was one metre thick.
In the waiting room a man introduced himself as an Iranian Catholic called George, who then goes on to express an interest in what I had under my trousers.
‘My underpants’. I looked at him crossly.
‘No,no, I mean underneath your underpants.’ He slimed a grin at me and I got up and waited outside.
The train comes, and dozens of brightly dressed blonde people bustled themselves and their skis onto the train. The train stopped in the middle of nowhere. It being Easter, this is as far as it went. A ski resort called Bracke.
Not having the funds or the inclination to go skiing, I bedded down in the nearest night-time abode, a small wooden hut in a children’s playground; no door and a square hole for a window.
Some time in the night I woke up and could see clouds moving swiftly across the sky. That’s strange. It doesn’t seem windy. A while later I looked again and this time the wind seemed to be blowing the clouds the other way. This was really weird. I stuck my head out the door to try to get a better view of what was going on. It wasn’t windy at all. It wasn’t clouds. It was lights.
From a midpoint in the sky, roughly above my head, beams of light were appearing from a single point, and radiating outwards in every direction down to the horizon. It was filling the whole sky.
These pulsing beams got faster and faster, pouring out to the horizon. When they reached a certain speed, they would start to slow down until they started going backwards, being sucked up back into that single point. They would go faster and faster and then start radiating outward again. This carried on for about four hours as far as I knew. Lying on top of my sleeping bag, watching utterly utterly transfixed by this breathing sky. Eventually the cold got the better of me, and I retired to my little hut.
Two days later in Trondheim I told a Norwegian from further north (Bodo) about it and he was totally unimpressed by it.
‘What colours did it have? Oh we usually see it with several different colours. It’s Gods apology to try to stop us from all killing ourselves in the winter time’.
I made the mistake of accepting this chaps kind offer to stay at his house in Bodo to sit out the Easter weekend. What joy. He invited me into his basement where he had pencil sketches of mutilated bodies all over his walls.
‘I am an artist’ he droned Norwegianly.
‘Oh!’ I said diplomatically, and high-tailed it out of there as soon as I could.
The second time was in Scotland on the Black Isle up by Inverness. I’d just come back from the pub and was being miserable about something, I don’t know what. Everyone else went indoors and I sat outside asking for cosmic help.
What I got was a bunch of dancing colours up in the northern end of the sky. It was a red shifting haze with a dancing green curtain that blinked on and off all the way through it. Well that’s some kind of answer I suppose.
The third time was just after I’d run away from a strange meditational cult group (Transcendental Meditation). I was in the suburbs of Newbury and I was wandering around aimlessly. Sitting in a patch of grass I meditated for five minutes, opened my eyes and found one single magic mushroom without looking for it. I ate it. Nothing happened of course – one isn’t enough to do anything.
I saw an orange blob of light loping about near the horizon to the north. Of course it could have been a man-made light or it could have been the mushroom. Whatever it was, I later discovered that the Northern Lights are visible roughly seven times a year as far south as London (near Newbury), but people don’t know it’s there to see cos there’s so much light pollution.
The other times I saw the lights (I definitely did see it these times) was back in Norway again, but further south near Lillehammer up in the mountains where a bunch of us lived at an international school. One notable occasion was when we were doing this game called ‘Busterton’ which involved a group sitting in a sauna at night-time til it got unbearably hot and then running outside to roll down a hill wearing just our underwear. (We were supposed to do it naked, but we were too shy for that.) And then, before your body got the chance to really register just how cold it was, we all ran back into the sauna and really pumped the heat right up. And then, when we all agreed that it was absolutely unbearably hot again, we would all run outside again and would have to run round the outside of the house, which in our case was an ex-skiing hotel; rather large.
Some tried to cheat by wearing flip-flops (jandals), which only served to slow them down. Have you ever tried to run in the snow wearing flip-flops? Wearing only your underwear?
The gods smiled down on us and rained upon the sky a glorious fire of lights, to serenade our silliness.
Another time, I guess it must have been before that, we had two African guys staying with us; Kenneth and Papius from Malawi. It had just started snowing, which was great – neither of them had seen snow before. They didn’t like it much. They both agreed that it was strange and beautiful, but didn’t really suit their hot African blood.
At the same time I’d wandered out and noticed the lights, and a German woman comes out with me and we lay in the new snow as flecks fell on our faces. We lay back and marvelled at the sky.
Every time I’ve seen the lights, it’s been different. This time it was like someone was holding a giant lighter just below the horizon behind the mountains, and the flame was flickering ten miles high across the whole sky. If I’d had the inclination it would have been romantic.
Meanwhile, back in the Yukon:
One night, we’re all sitting in the living room chilling out, regardless of the Norrren Lie when in strides this stranger, hands on hips, legs apart imposing himself into the middle of the room. ‘Hi! I’m Tom! I’m from the United States!’
He thrusts out his hand, shakes hands firm and brisk. Oblivious to any previous conversation, starts to tell us his story.
‘I just drove up from Chicago, I’m on my way to help out with my brother’s German-style bierkeller up there.’
Oh! He’s going to Alaska! This could save me from spending 350 bucks on a bus ticket (it’s 1500 km). I ask him if I can get a ride with him in the morning. He looks anxiously around at all these nice friendly people and nervously says that I can. Then he continues;
‘Wanna know why I’m leaving Chicago? Cos of the damned Mexicans that’s why, stealing all the jobs and anything else that’s not nailed down and generally lowering the tone of the place. Chicago used to be beautiful but now they’ve turned it into a shit-hole. Everyone wants a piece of America, but let me tell you we shall give Bin Laden and his Al Quieda buddies a lesson they won’t forget. The Arabs and the Jews are always going on about how badly they get treated, but do you know who the missing lost tribe are that God declared would rule the world? It’s ‘us’ as in ‘U.S.’ Yep, makes a lot of sense if you think about it… Who goes and keeps the peace in all these goddam crazy countries when everyone else just wants to sit and talk about it and do nothing? We do, goddam Canadians ain’t much better, letting anyone and everyone into their goddam country. Bin Laden could be in Canada for all they know.’
Throughout all this, me and the New Brunswick stoner I’ve been smoking with are raising eyebrows at each other in disbelief, me mouthing silently to him ‘I can’t go to Alaska with this nut!’. I’m pulling loony faces and he’s trying not to laugh.
This is my second American in Canada. The first one (the Mennonite in Winnipeg) was a nice guy, but this one wore all the negative stereotypes like proud badges. I suspect three days non-stop coffee-fuelled driving had brought out the worst in him. How the hell am I going to wriggle out of this? Lucky for me (probably for both of us) he goes to bed early and then leaves early before I have a chance to get up. Truth is, I just fake being asleep until I think he has gone.
Eventually I get up.
New Brunswick: ‘It’s okay! He’s gone!’
Phew – what a relief!
The next day, I make an attempt at hitching to Alaska and spend five hours freezing my arse off (it’s minus ten). Well my hands to be more precise, and promptly give up – getting horribly cold is definitely not on my list of things to do. I get a lift back into town with a Tlinget couple and go back to the hostel, much to everyone’s surprise. I leave the following afternoon, this time heading back south again.
Bee Knee’s is a lovely place to stay; it is more like sharing a house with some mates. Very good. Must remember to send them a postcard of the Uffington White Horse.
The ride back down south is uneventful and long. I manage to actually sleep on the way which is a bonus. I woke up an hour or so before Jasper, a popular skiing resort. The snow-topped mountains roll by under the moonlight, which is really quite beautiful.
It occurs to me that the Greyhound drivers are superstars. Every day they can be driving over a thousand kilometres up through windy mountain roads and pine forest, often way out through the middle of nothing.
At a later point in the journey back down to Jasper, one driver tells a passenger very flatly to put their cigarette out whilst on the bus, not to give him any lame-ass excuses or he’ll put them off the bus right there and then. This is a serious threat; being dumped off hundreds of miles from anywhere in the middle of winter is not something you would want to have happen to you really. Just don’t piss off the driver, he’s got a job to do, okay?
When I get to Jasper the bus route ends and I have to find a different way of getting to Banff. The first thing I see when I get off the bus at 6 am is a small group of elk who’ve ventured into the town to munch grass. They’re pretty big, about the size of ponies, and very graceful. It’s freezing, so I wait in a shop/cafe where I am obliged to listen to the young guy running the shop telling me enthusiastically all about something or another. I am way too tired to pay any attention.
After a lost attempt at post-bus snoozing, I leave and attempt to hitch out of town. Bafflingly, I get two short rides which somehow take me round in a circle back to the edge of town, taking me almost nowhere.
I fatalistically consider staying at a nearby youth hostel, but it has a noisy boogie box going, which instantly inclines me to leave and get back down on the road again.
It’s a great place to stand and hitch, with a fantastic huge golden mountain staring right back at me. The sort of place and frame of mind where I wouldn’t care if I stood there all day.
It doesn’t take long to get a ride, and I travel all the way down to Banff with two really nice oil rig workers. I give them twenty bucks for gas, cos they seem a bit stuck. It’s a fantastic journey.
If anyone fancies cycling in Canada, Jasper to Banff is the one I recommend; it’s absolutely stunning. It’s about 350 km of endless mountains with only a couple of hotels, one gas station and two youth hostels. This time of year, both the hotels and one the hostels is shut.
I’ve been unsure as to whether to go directly to Vancouver from Prince George, or whether to give the Southern Rockies another shot; the time previous had been really cloudy and not very interesting. I’m really really glad I’ve come again, I’m going to check out some walking round Banff today, and then head out tomorrow.
November twenty-somethingth.
Banff, the world-class ski resort. The buildings look noticeably Alpine. This could be Switzerland.
At the hostel in Banff I feel like everything that comes out of my mouth is a verbal toad turd. I just don’t feel young and hip enough to hang out. A young guy of seventeen taking loads of drugs (but on the face of it extremely together) decides he’s going to talk to everyone else but not me and hints to others in the room we are sharing that maybe I am the sort of person that might steal everyone’s valuables. That’s the difference having stubble makes I suppose. I think he decided to take a dislike to me because I disagree with his argument ‘that drugs are good for you!’ – I think I pissed him off when I say it’s easy for him to say that when he’s seventeen – see what you say in ten or fifteen years time when you’ve rotted half your brain out.
I don’t even bother trying to talk to anyone, cos I know I won’t be able to make a conversation; I am having one of those needfull introverted kinds of times. I recognise it for what is is, and don’t give myself a hard time over it.
I see ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ Which is sooooo beautiful and very funny. Great film.
At some point I overhear a woman talking and I’m trying to work out where she’s from. I can’t figure it. She isn’t Australian and she isn’t South African. Maybe she’s from New Zealand. It eventually surprises me to realise that she’s actually English. I’ve been so saturated in Canadians that I’ve forgotten what English people sound like. Weird.
Actually I regularly get Canadians asking me if I’m Australian. There’s definitely a Cockney London accent and a Norfolk/Suffolk accent which both sound like a certain kind of Australian. Especially if you mix the two together.
The other question I get asked is ‘Where’s your dog?’ on account of me having my sleeping bag in large plastic ‘Pedigree Chum’ dog food sack.
I go for a short walk near the hostel and then come back when it starts getting dark – walking in the woods in the dark is a bit freaky, cos of the prospect of bears.
I am walking in an ex-river bed which is also weird. If it had been flowing, it would have been up over my head. I guess it must have been redirected for some hydro-dam somewhere.
As I am leaving the hostel, I get chatting to a very pretty Aussie woman, which re-instills my self-esteem to some degree, which is nice.
The bus ride is weird too. The guy I am sitting next to has taken Valium and sleeping pills (and then some more, and then some more, and then some more). An older guy keeps coming stumbling from the front of the coach to the back, bouncing off the other passengers, he drawls something incoherent and they do a deal. Oh great, a taster for Vancouver, fantastic!
Later on, the young guy steps on the foot of a really fat black woman sitting behind me. She tells him to watch what he’s doing, and he just drawls ‘Black on a black floor is pretty hard to see’. Then he goes to the toilet again for a mysteriously long time and manages to fall into it in the process by the sounds of it. The black woman with her other very portly friend cackle lots. They both have a real bitchy sense of humour.
They moan endlessly about the scenery going ‘Oh look! another lake! My! Did you just see that particularly tall mountain?!’ They are urbanite types, who have never travelled on the coach before, and are now wishing they hadn’t, presumably because of the lack of space. Their attitude makes me laugh too, as I am starting to get a bit mountained-out myself. I have just had about 6000 km of them after all.
We arrive at Kamloops (again) and stop for the inevitable ‘eat some food cos it’s different from sitting on the bus’ at the depot. Three Indian women (as in from yer actual India) are dismayed because a young man has just stolen a handbag from them. Guess who by? By Valium boy of course, who although not in the immediate area, is tangled up in making the world’s slowest getaway. He ambles out of the men’s toilet; just as we’ve figured out that it’s him that’s done the crime, and after we all guess wrongly that he must be miles away by now. We are told the police are on their way, and we watch him wander about the place like we don’t know what he’s up to. He goes and asks someone for directions, and then points grandly in the direction he’s about to attempt to escape in, just so we know exactly how to anticipate his next slothful move. Off he bumbles, out the door towards oblivion, and the bus driver and another depot worker go to haul him back in – he offers no resistance whatsoever and is calmly led back into the depot office.
Meanwhile the three Indian ladies are still standing around waiting, slightly baffled and wanting to know what happens next and whether this is normal Canadian behaviour.
Shenanigans over, we all board the bus except for thieving Joe Slowcoach, who we all reckon will probably end up heading straight back to the jail-house again. He had told a number of people that he’d just got out of prison. The rest of the journey to Vancouver is uneventful.
Upon arrival at 10 pm, it’s warm and dry. A friendly security guard at the bus terminal gives me tokens to store my bag in a locker (I’m stuffed if I’m carrying it all the way round Vancouver) and he helps me out with directions for the good hostels to go to for the night. I get the bus to Granville St, passing first through Chinatown, which has the biggest single population of Chinese outside of China.
My socks are stinking, hot and slimy and capable of murder. All I want to do is get clean and go to bed. I get lost trying to find the hostel, and when I do eventually find it, they won’t let me in, because I don’t have photo ID with me. (My passport is in my rucksack on the other side of town.)
I am rather miffed, and I rant for about a minute, just to let them know how I feel. I stomp out and try the Global backpackers hostel on the other side of the road. Same thing. Try another hostel. Same bullshit again, except this time I’m being reasonable. I get back on the bus, go back across town to the depot, blah blah blah and back again to the hostel, present my ID and money, et voila.
I sort out my very unhappy feet and then crash.
I’m sharing a rather stale and stinky room with one other snoring chap on the bunk below me; who I don’t meet until morning. I’ve got no bedding, but it’s not cold, so it doesn’t matter. It’s quite noisy outside, and I don’t have earplugs. I decide that I don’t like Vancouver.
Next morning, I meet my room-mate who’s getting up to go to work. It turns out he’s a Newfie, and as usual, I’m overwhelmed with generosity and good nature. This fine chap starts my day wonderfully and am led to decide that maybe I’ll give this city another chance.
I decide against my previous intention of just getting right back on the bus to Victoria, and go check out the Mountain Exploration Co-op near Cambie Street, on a recommendation from Helen in England. The whole block is full of shops selling hiking tat. I’m not especially excited by this; I’m already carrying enough stuff to make a grown man weep, but the surrounding area is rather lovely. There’s a good view of the down-town skyscrapers with the snow-topped mountains behind them.
Nearby there are lots of Chinese/Korean food shops selling lots of really cheap really good food. Just my luck, I’m not in the slightest bit hungry.
The housing just uphill is fairly middle-class but not snobby-looking. There are loads of brightly painted clapboard houses with lovely gardens and avenues of big fat beeches and oaks. It’s a dry warm sunny day in the last days of November. Now I’m starting to see why Vancouver has its reputation as being the second most liveable cities in the world (Melbourne is top it would seem, or is it Zurich?)
I get the bus, supposedly back to the Pacific Central bus depot, but end up somewhere completely different by mistake, which makes for an interesting diversion.
I buy loads of cheap raw vegetables from a Chinese shop, including some weird squidgy fruit thing and some puffy soya blob things that even though they taste like tin, are somehow rather more-ish.
I get the Skytrain, which is a round town train that can’t decide whether to be up in the air or under the ground, so it fluctuates between both. I get to Pacific Central Station and board my bus.
I’m pleasantly surprised that it is distinctly warmer in this end of the world (though as I write, it’s been pouring with rain for the last two days). Lots of people from the snowy places tell me that the weather is miserable here mostly. I just tell them that I’m from England, and I’m used to it. Anyway, apart from the novelty factor, I’d rather be warm(er) and wet than quaking and shivering my way through minus thirty degrees.
I take a short ferry ride from Tsawwassen to a place on nearby Vancouver Island called Swartz Bay, squeezing our way in between a labyrinth of densely packed islands that glide past each other. (This is called parallax motion, don’cha know.) As a first view of here, it’s as if the West Coast is a mirror image of the East Coast, a wild array of mountains dropping into the sea. Lots of people are out on deck soaking up this fantastic panorama. I think this may be one of my favourite types of journey (along with the journey into Lewisporte from Cartwright). It’s very cold, but worth braving the temperature for.
I chat with someone whose accent I can’t quite pinpoint. His name is Alex and he’s from just north of Glasgow, and has mixed his Scots brogue with Seattlified American. He’s showing a cousin from back home around, and when he goes back down below deck from too much cold, I stay up top talking to her, and of course in my own way fall in love with this travel-bugged older woman with the sexy Scots accent. Being me I’m not sure how to make the crucial moves, and before I know it she’s gone, maybe forever. I know she’s planning to look around Victoria for a few days so maybe we’ll bump into each other, maybe we won’t.
Maybe, maybe… I spend the rest of the bus trip to Victoria feeling emotionally glazed over, mourning my imagined missed opportunity.
Victoria is a pleasant enough but unpre-possessing place. As usual, the outskirts are full of the usual pig-ugly concrete ‘This-could-be-anywhere’ of Canadian Tire, Walmarts, motels and service industry detritus. The ‘city’ centre (it’s only small) is well-known for being particularly English, and I suppose there is something in the streets that reminds me of home – I think it’s the eclectic array of Victorian and different modern architectures.
I book into the youth hostel for three days and ‘do’ all the tourist places. I go to the Natural History Museum. What is it about museums that always makes my knees ache?
There is a First Nations section upstairs which is interesting/weird. I have very mixed feelings about looking at a ruined people’s heritage being put on display behind glass cases by the descendants of the people responsible for bringing it about. One particular ceremonial robe for some reason has the effect of emanating a fierce disgust, which I can feel rather strongly.
Also at the museum is an Imax theatre which I’ve never seen before. The screen is astonishingly big, a full six storeys high and eighty-one foot wide. I go watch a film about a space station. NASA giving itself a pat on the back for spending enough money on glorified boys toys to feed the whole world several times over (probably), and an infinitely superior film about Ernest Shackleton which is an absolutely incredible story of improbably heroism against all the odds, the images of giant icebergs, mountains and glaciers is fantastic, the music is beautiful and the story is narrated by Kevin Spacey and Michael Ganbon, who both have great voices. Wonderous…
Also on my unashamed don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself tourist trail (I am hoping that I might bump into The Scottish Woman again), I visit ‘The Crystal Gardens’ which is home to the most unexpected joy; a butterfly house. To stand in the middle of lots of giant exotic butterflies that are dancing round you is like being visited by angels. (Help, I’m going all new-age.)
One time at a friend’s house I happened upon a book containing the art of a painter new to me called Emily Carr. I tried looking for her work in British art bookshops, and being the largely Euro-centrics that we are, could find nothing. So it is a nice surprise to find that Victoria is her home town, and that there is a gallery with some of her work in it. When I go to visit, I am told I can’t see it because the room is being renovated. I’ve been looking out for this woman’s work for years, and am not going to be dissuaded by a decree from some dreary official. It’s an odd selection; none of her best work, but still worth a look. It’s always good to see paintings ‘in the flesh’.
Emily Carr was born in 1871 of English parents in Victoria. She was a writer as well as a painter but she came to painting late in life. She studied painting in England and Paris, and when she returned she was among the first in Canada to break free of the ordinary styles of the time. She had a modernist and post-impressionist style, and was heavily influenced by the native culture too. She painted very dark and moody forest interior landscapes – the forest interior is naturally dense, dark and sometimes claustrophobic. Her native scenes, usually featuring totem poles at the centre point of village life. She was chronicling a people who variously through subjugation, the ways of the Europeans and smallpox brought to them from the white man, were struggling and sometimes failing to survive.
Her work has a unique quality due in large part to her subject matter.
There is also on show some pretentious modern art bollocks; huge paintings of boring blobs that must have taken all of ten minutes to paint, with the usual verbose justifications on board. There is also a collection of Japanese ‘erotic’ prints of po-faced and uncomfortably flat-looking people with ridiculous over-inflated genitals. The Japs do seem to have an odd idea of what’s sexy. Something much more sexy is the movie I go to see later that evening about Frida Kahlo; who despite having a rod of steel up her spine was one of the unflattest people to have ever come out of Mexico.
Spending time in museums and in art galleries where creativity has been boxed in and commodified is sometimes weird. When ‘art’ become a rarefied ‘high’ thing it can become elitist and sometimes fails to acknowledge our common human.
Bring the creative spirit out into the open beyond galleries, make it a common thing that all may share and participate in; this is much more socially pro-active.
Something I find endearing about rural areas is the way that people celebrate what they’ve got in a way that cities don’t need to. In the city its harder to be a medium sized fish in a big pond full of excitement, but in the boonies people will make the most of what they’ve got.
To say ‘Wow!’ upon the sight of a mural on an otherwise dreary building says; ‘We can improve our world, we can share and celebrate what we have.’ Its not about money. Its about creating a sense of aliveness and hope and maybe moving people forwards even if its just a little.
On the way to Victoria, sitting on the bus pasing through a place called Ladysmith I was surprised to see a huge painting of Pamela Anderson spread over the side of a building. I’m not a fan of Pamela Anderson particularly, but it was a great example of how a mural can say something significant about a place without me even having to stop and ask. Ladysmith is where she grew up.
There have been quite a few free art shows to alleviate the boredom on my long bus journeys; scenes of local industries in Ontario, a massive Inuit (Tlinget) stylised eagle in red, black and white in Whitehorse, a great long stampede of horses in Alberta, loads of other interesting images and murals too frequent to mention; all of it telling me that the people that live there are alive and awake, and have something going for them that distinguishes them from everywhere else that you’ve been to. The perfect antidote to seeing the same old consumer warehouse chains spread ubiquitously across the world.
Back at the youth Hostel, the chap running the check-in desk is a guy from Middlesex. Both him and his Canadian desk accomplice have been to the south of England; we have fond reminiscences of Wiltshire, stone circles we both like, of White Horse Hill etchings and of the countryside. Very nice to have a taste of home. Another excuse to whip out my man-boobs, and show them my tattoo of the Uffington White Horse.
Whilst walking out one evening along the shore I climb up a little slope and bump into a man and woman sitting on a bench talking. We say our ‘hellos’ and exchange pleasantries, and then a short while later the woman leaves to go home.
It looks like they have only just met each other, and maybe she’s weirded out by my turning up. Anyway, he’s drinking wine (with a crystal glass – very refined) and I discover that he’s English and called Stuart. He’s been living here for seventeen years (came over with his mum) and has more recently been living with his Chinese girlfriend.
Now he tells me that his girlfriend is dying of cancer, and he seems to be not only losing her, but losing his faith in Christianity as well. Her parents don’t like him cos he’s not Chinese and he’s distraught; hence he’s talking to the woman on the bench and telling her all about it.
Now I’m the new listening post and I end up telling him about how I saw my mum come to me in a vision after she’d died; She came to tell me that death was a real liberation for her as she no longer had to carry the burden of her broken body any more.
He can’t deal with the unfairness of it all and says he wants to be with her; maybe he should jump off the cliff? He doesn’t look to me like he would, but he’s obviously very upset. After he’s drunk his bottle of wine, we decide to go to his flat and he arranges to meet me outside the youth hostel, whilst he goes off on his bicycle to get another cheap bottle of wine. I don’t see him again after that. I think this is more due to difficulty co-ordinating the bike than anything more sinister.
Having ‘done’ Victoria (and not bumped into the elusive sexy Scots woman) I hit the road on a ‘Laidlaw’ bus heading north to Port Alberni, via Nanaimo, Vancouver Island’s second largest town. It’s very foggy here, but not too cold.
I can’t seem to find the snack shop, despite directions and meet a middle-aged nurse from Lancashire who’s lived over here for years. She helps out a young woman who is having to juggle a crying baby and several bags of baby tat. I comment that the reason Indian goddesses have lots of arms is so they can cope with domestic living more easily. I realise afterwards that in this end of the world that such a joke might not actually make any sense. Oh well, I think it is funny. (In Canada, people from India are ‘East Indians’.)
It’s still misty in Port Alberni. I buy snack gunge at a petrol station and get a ride after ten minutes. (There’s only one bus a day to Tofino and I’ve missed my chance by over an hour.)
My drive is going to Ucluelet which is nearly where I want to go, but he drives me to Tofino anyway, which is very decent of him (especially as it is now dark).
So here I am, at the end of the road (literally). I couldn’t go any further west without leaving Canada on a ship.
From the moment I had stepped off the plane in Toronto, I had decided that Tofino (by recommendation before leaving England) was to be my actual ‘final’ destination.
There’s an old adage about travelling being all about the journey, not the destination; but I knew from a lot of previous confused experience that I needed to have a definite ‘end’ point. I needed to be able to pass through everywhere else en route without the hesitiation and uncertainty of wondering if this is where I wanted to stop/ live/ get married or not. It saves a lot of mental distress, especially when the traveller gets care-worn.
What happens next, I don’t know. Let’s see what the wind brings.
I book in for three nights at the Whale-Watcher’s youth hostel. On my first day I take a walk in a random direction to see where I’ll end up. I wind out to an edge of the town and reach a sign for Tonquin Park which leads to a very inviting looking board-walk which mysteriously descends a cranky mossy staircase down into the depths of the forest and disappears round a rocky outcrop. It leads to a lovely little cove on the right. I am looking for a potential camping ground; hostels eat money slyly and fore-shorten adventures rapidly.
I go exploring the interior with its many fallen trunks. These cedars are pretty big, around three or four foot wide, with very little salel (bush under-story) in this part. It looks like this must be the place that Helen told me about where people live in the summer. No-one here now, just a couple of old blue tarps (one ripped) and the occasional beer can. I explore further, and it gets dense, so I turn back.
This area is famous for being ripped apart by loggers. This bits okay though, I guess because its so close to a town. I notice that in a few areas, it looks like elongated triangular strips of bark have been cut from the trees. I guess this must be a native way of using bark without destroying the trees, but I’m not sure what they’d use it for. Roofing shingles perhaps? Dunno. I wander into another part of the forest just up from here by the shore, and am busy soaking up the dank muddy red hugeness of sculptural fallen trunks and root-plates that stretch out like monster and dragon skeletons when I bump into a grinning chap called Jim. He’s with his dog, and he and his girlfriend are living in the forest here. They’ve been here a day, so they’ve only just set up camp. I wander over and say hello to his girlfriend Jess who’s busy collecting firewood. We chat and then go and hunt out the tarps I’ve found; they’ll be useful for making a more secure camp.
Maybe I’ll come and live with these people; I’ve been thinking about it anyway, but thought it would be wet and lonely (i.e. horrible). It would be better with others.
The day progresses. Jim comes back, we collect wood and I look for somewhere to make camp; not really totally convinced that this is a good idea. Its very damp here and I am only just recovering from lergy, but maybe it’s better than throwing all my money at the youth hostel.
We have rice for tea with mussels found on the rocks on the beach, when two other newcomers turn up. One is another Jessy, a punky type from Quebec, a lanky chap who seems to have learned English from watching ‘Easy Rider’ and wears a yellow fleuro jacket, and the other a straight-looking young woman from Belgium called Sofie. Some dodgy fireside drumming inevitably ensues as a substitute for music, I sigh into the murky gloom and gnaw on the remains of the chewy not-quite-cooked rice.
It gets dark, we are supposed to be going to the pub as it’s jam night. (Every Friday local likelys get up and make some kind of musical noise.) Jessy, Sofie and me try to find our way back through the forest by holding hands in the dark. There’s lots of squelching mud, slimy slippery branches and trunks to cross, and some of the broken branches are sharp and pointy and prone to giving us an unexpected jab. It’s dangerous as well as nigh on impossible, so we give up and get the other Jess to guide us down over the rocks using her head torch.
Punky Jessy, Sofie and me split from Jim and Jess and head for the pub. En route we stop off at the trailer where Jessy and Sofie had spent the previous night. Rob’s a loud amiable pot-head surfer who lives with a couple called Mark and Jen. (Much quieter, older and wiser; the kind of people that will end up running a small-holding one day.) We stay a little while, Jessy stays behind saying he’s tired. I think he’s hoping Sofie will stay with him so he can attempt to get into her knickers. It’s been kind of obvious by the way he clucks round her like an over-sized cockeral. That he has a pink mohican on his head kind of adds to the whole effect.
Me and Sofie go to the pub. She talks about ‘finding god’ and we talk about doing things that make life worthwhile. She reckons I should be doing theatre. I like the notion of combining entertaining self-expression with sounding out a ‘message’. Afterwards, we swap email addresses and we might see each other the following day; I go back to the youth hostel.
I spend the next day visiting Meare’s Island with a young couple from Toronto. For twenty bucks each a guy motors us across the inlet in a tiny boat. We arrive on a rain-shined pebbled beach, and we are put in the direction of another of the mysteriously inviting board-walks that is breaking out through the dense trees and onto the beach. We spend four hours wandering round a trail that has some amazing old growth forest. It’s a place of dense dark greens, dripping lichens and mosses, tangles of vines and fogginess.
Many of the old cedars are over a metre wide, some two or three metres wide at chest height. There are two that are four and a half metres wide at chest height: I can put my arms round the girth twelve times. This place is truly wonderful.
In the evening I decide to go and check out a place called ‘Poole’s Land’ which belongs to one Mike Poole; he sometimes lets people put caravans, tents and other invented hippy dwellings on his property for a cheap rent. On the way there, I pop into Rob’s trailer to see if Sofie is there, but she’s not. I tell Mark and Jen about how I am on the way to Poole’s Land looking for a cheap place to stay, and right there and then they offer me a room in the trailer for a month for thirty bucks. Wow! the hostel costs me twenty bucks just for one night!
Rob is just about to move out, and the place is going to be torn down in a month (New Year).
I move in, bump into two other Belgians, Jerone and Roel. They are astonished when I guess they might be friends of Sofie. ‘Gosh! How did you know we are friends of Sofie?!’
Well it’s not like the place is crawling with Belgians is it guys…
They need somewhere to stay too, so it ends up with all six of us living in the trailer.
A few days later, Jen’s friend from Toronto Jessica comes to stay, and so does Sofie’s friend Jill. Making a total of eight.
Oh yeah, and then there’s Mark’s two dogs as well, Denali and Monashee (named after Alaskan mountains),two very chilled people just like their owner.
I’ve been spending my spare time writing the diary and putting it on the internet, taking photos and doing huge drawings on the beach drawing in the clean flat sand with a stick. It’s great to have such a huge canvas!
I’ve also had the feeling that I’ve been trying too hard with people. To go from a month and a half of not having to get to know people beyond ‘hello/story/goodbye’, it’s taken a bit of adjusting to suddenly share a confined space with seven others, all of whom know at least one other person there really well.
Sofie asks me to show her how to meditate and I think it intensifies my wobblinesses; I feel like we may have somehow ‘merged’ a bit in the process. That and the small amount of BC weed that I’ve smoked. One toke gets me very stoned, and any more than two puffs, and I’m practically tripping. This stuff is about ten times more potent than anything I’ve ever smoked in the UK. Actually it’s horrible; it sparks off all the usual paranoiac bollocks that I always used to get from smoking. So that’s enough BC weed for me thanks.
Coming up to full moon, we’re supposed to be playing a party game but it almost ends up in an argument. My heads too flipped out to untangle the cross-wires to really see what’s going on, so I just go out for a long walk, and amazingly I manage not to mentally beat myself up in the process, and not behave in any sort of melodramatic way that I sometimes can. Maybe in a small way I’ve grown up a bit. Anyhow the next day…
After Talking with Jessica in the Tofino Botanical Garden:
An inken sculpture, flat upon the page, It makes you think doesn’t it? I read an explanation, a story, here in the endless rain, among the fine expressions of intrigue about the world; other sculpture that fill this space. We speak over coffee. I wonder how to use what I have; don’t we all.
I meet who Jessica reminds me through her poetry book that ‘We are all like rabbits and potatoes in a big sackful of stars’.
Find the ground, see which way is up and see if you can find a smile in there too.
If we could all lay ourselves out flat like a poster, as we truly wish to be seen, as we truly feel we are, how different things might be instead carrying ourselves in the strangely crumpled ways that we often do.
Instead we have to feed each piece ready for interpretation through the funnel of the moment and the eye, that widens with safety and constricts in fear.
Yep. That’s the dope talking… What on earth is that about?
Full moon December 2002
On the midday I decide to spend some time alone; I’ve been getting rather emotional the night before, and figure that a day away would give me and everyone else a break. I decide to go on a photo-hunting mission. As I leave the trailer I go to the Esso garage and get myself a steak and cheese sub for my lunch. (A ‘sub’ is an American baguette roll.)
I walk down to McKenzie Beach and take pictures of ripples in the sand that the receding tide has left as it washes round small stones. It has a Zen garden kind of effect, leaving the stones with what looks like an energy flare emanating from them. I am always fascinated by the beauty of water flowing to its lowest place. I love the subtle fire-like swirling carving it leaves in the sand.
I also take photos of craggy rocks, which look like enormous lumps of coal, many have a gold and copper-tinged edges that give them more definition.
After this I walk back up the road and hitch a ride up to Comber’s Beach. We’d been to Gold Mine Beach the day before, and I thought I’d extend my photographic adventure. I figure with a name like Comber’s Beach, there’ll be loads of interesting stuff. I take about 150 or so pictures of curiously sea-worn logs, stones and ripples.
Having exhausted the possibilities with that, I start back along the enormously inviting stretch of beach in the direction of Tofino.
I am really getting into the walking and enjoying the whole wondrousness of the shore and its fantastic stretches of sand, so much so that I just keep walking and walking and walking and on after sun-down.
Walking Long Beach takes about two to three hours. Even though I can always see the houses at the other end of the beach, they never seem to get any nearer. My head is going into over-drive rather, worrying about not getting involved with Friends Of Clayoquat Sound (an environmental group concerned with ending the clear-cutting of the area’s old growth forest) and how I can justify to myself going to Mexico on a frivolous holiday (amongst other anxieties).
I decide to try out ‘walking meditation’, just focussing on footfall and breath, which is interesting, even though I seem to end up walking into the sea a couple of times, and getting water in my boots.
The full moon rises, and shines down across the vast arcing stretch of glistening beach. It has been so long since I’ve done any proper amount of walking. I really get into the endless stride that is leading me back towards home. It has just got dark, and I reckon I can be home by about midnight-ish.
It rains mildly a couple of time, which is okay even though I don’t have waterproof trousers on. After Long Beach, which seems to be about six to eight miles long, the scenery changes, and small craggy islands are dotted about just off-shore along the beach, it is like being somewhere very tropical. (Just not hot!.)
The coast gradually becomes rockier, and soon I have to start jumping from crag to crag to escape from getting wet – the bush at the edge is not something that you can just easily stroll through – and then I soon have to start figuring out the best ways to get up and down the rocks and across pools and little sea channels.
It’s dark and I never notice getting tired. I have a couple of dangerous rock faces to climb up (about five or six metres up) and then I notice that all is not well; and I am starting to realise that I might be neglecting my safety. After more scrambling and increasingly difficult routes, the crunch comes when I get to a sign that reads ‘Caution: area not patrolled. Headland impassable even at low tide, no trails marked.’
This must be the end of the line. There is no way I am going to do any more scrambling up and down on the rocks, I am too tired. Now what do I do? I can’t go back; I haven’t the energy or wits to deal with those rocks again, and the tide is still rising.
I sit for a while and start to get cold. I start to imagine coastal rescue coming out to find me, the folks back at the trailer wondering what has happened to me. Have I committed suicide? Have I slipped on the rocks and fallen into the sea? Am I just staying over and having a few beers with someone I have met on the road? Anything can have happened to me.
In something like desperation, the only route that seems left available to me is to head into the bush. This I quickly discover is about as easy as trying to push my way through a jungle of giant mattress springs. The salel is completely unforgiving. I push my way through it in utter darkness as it whips my face, tangles round my feet, bashes my shins and slips out of my control as I try to get past it. To make matters worse, the ground is uneven with slippery fallen trunks and I can’t even see the ground. I fall frequently, sometimes head first, and I manage to rip my trousers on the right leg from the backside to the knee. Everywhere is a dense mattress of thick moss, which saves me from being hurt in my numerous falls.
I eventually found a huge fallen trunk about sixty foot long and four foot wide. The underside of the trunk has dropped away onto the ground whilst the rest is left suspended above. The bottom half is flat and moss-covered and almost comfortable. I almost manage to sleep on it. At least it protects me as it briefly starts to rain.
As I lay there I realise my hopes of walking all the way back along the coast have turned into an awareness of how thoughtless I have been. I have no waterproof trousers; I am soaked from the waist down, I have nothing to light a fire with (although it is wet there are polystyrene floats on the beach that might get a fire going). I have no compass, have only a memory of what a road map of the area looks like. I have drinking water, and five pieces of kelp which I am merely presuming to be edible. I’ve also told nobody of my plans, except that I am going to Gold Mine Beach (where I consequently don’t go of course).
I also realise that I am very lucky for a number of reasons: I have very strong boots with amazing grip. (I am convinced they have saved me from slipping on the rocks and into the sea.) The road back home is parallel to the sea, so I can’t get too lost. I am especially lucky that it hasn’t rained very much. Otherwise I would have been really exhausted by now.
I give up trying to sleep, as it isn’t happening anyway. It was only my body-heat being reflected into the wet moss that was making it comfortable. Now that’s all used up and I can feel my back starting to get cold and tensing up a little.
I try to head up to the next part of the beach past the impassable rocks. I follow the sound of the sea. I eventually come to where the sea is again and pushing myself out through the edge of the salel, which is enormously dense and about as much fun as trying to squeeze through a cheese grater, I have the nasty feeling that I have come back to where I had started. Looking at the small bay, it takes me a couple of minutes to realise that I have struggled for maybe the last two hours using up precious energy in order to get precisely nowhere.
I stand out on the beached logs and start to panic slightly.
I wonder whether I might become another of those people you hear about on news bulletins who become a statistic just by going for an ill-prepared walk. I wonder how long it would take for a boat to come past and see me if I were to stay right where I am. I wonder whether I will die of exposure or hypothermia first. I think again about all the people in the trailer speculating on my whereabouts, knowing that ironically they are only a few miles away.
I can’t think what to do next so I figure that as I am very tired and starting to get a bit delirious (I am starting to hear things) I will try to rest and wait until daylight.
I am shivering almost constantly where I am standing, so I pull my arms in from their sleeves and pull my wet legs up under my upper body clothing. Hunkering down with my head tucked into my knees and my hands and arms variously under my armpits and over my legs, I try to conserve body heat. Leaning my head and body against a log, I think I doze off a couple of times. The night seems to take forever.
Light does eventually come though, and I feel more alert; relatively. The touch of my legs against my trousers is unpleasant, added to by the fact that I have an eleven inch rip down the back of one trouser leg. The weather is still dry and calm. I am lucky.
I decide against heading into the bush again, cos that is too difficult. I reckon as well that I must be really close to McKenzie beach, so instead of walking for miles back the way I have come, I think there must be a chance that I am only a few coves away from home. (I blank out the possibility that there might be twenty coves to a kilometre.)
I see next to the caution notice a visible trail, which is the encouragement I need. Following it is easy, leading me out to an easily traversable cove, and then round another. I come to the happy conclusion that the sign must have been indicating that the tricky length shoreline that I had already covered yesterday evening must be the impassable bit, and that now I must be on the much easier home run, however long that must be.
I am warming up and drying out. I can feel my stomach rumbling and I have a slight unsureness in my balance. I’ve been trying out some proper rock-climbing that I might never have tried before unless I really had too.
I come out onto a cove where there is no obvious way across the rocks, and have to force my way through the bush for about half a kilometre to find the next cove.
It’s hard work, but it is getting me closer to McKenzie Beach. I see with this cove I am in the same situation again and have to do the same dodgy clambering all over again. Hopefully there wouldn’t be many more coves like this, and that I will just be able to follow round on the exposed rock of the shoreline.
I come out onto a small cove with ten metres high sheer rock all the way round on the other side with overhanging trees and a black indifferent sea churning away icily below.
There is a trunk balanced on top of two pinnacles of rock from one side to the other. It’s wide enough to shimmy across, but there is nowhere to go after that. I’m not sure my judgement is up to the risk of dropping into the sea anyway. After spending a few minutes trying to see a way round, it is apparent that I have no options left except turning round and re-tracing my steps on some increasingly tricky footholds. My balance is too screwed and I am risking making an omelette of myself.
I don’t know how near or far I am from McKenzie Beach. The only thing I do know is that the road can’t be too far away; maybe a couple of miles inland? I find a stream that empties into the cove, and crawling on my hands and knees I start to follow it back upstream. The foliage is slightly less dense along the stream, which is good. I figure it must be taking me uphill and therefore inland in some kind of way too.
After a while, this logical hope dissolves, and I wonder whether I really am getting anywhere at all. I decide to go away from the sound of the sea instead.
After another unknown length of time, I come out on top of a minor peak, which enables me to see a little better through the trees.
On the skyline I recognise the twin peaks of Meare’s Island just opposite Tofino. For the first time, this gives me a bearing. This means that I now know which way home is, and can guess better where the road might be. I head off in a new direction, halfway towards Tofino, and halfway towards where I think the road must be. I stop occasionally and listen out for the sound of passing cars. Sometimes I think I can hear them, and sometimes I can’t tell it from the continuous dull roar of the sea. I think I hear voices a couple of times, but I suspect that is just wishful thinking and delirium. I call out ‘Help!’ now and again across the valley of dense vegetation just in case I might be near a trail with people on it.
A little while later I see something that really makes me hopeful: I see a TV transmitter on top of the hill opposite. It means that there must be a road or at least a clear track from there to the road. It becomes what I hope will be the end of all this bush-wrestling. I have no idea what time it is, and I really want to stop. A couple of times I feel my legs cramping up, and I am starting to lose the will to move. I don’t want to risk it getting dark before I get to the transmitter, even though it is only half a kilometre away. Once it gets dark, I will have to stay put – trying to move let alone keep my direction will be almost impossible. I am already running on empty, and I’m not sure I can shiver my way through another night so successfully this time. Apart from which, I don’t want to cause any panic back at the trailer.
I push on; downhill, through bog and uphill again, guessing which way the transmitter is, because by now I can no longer see it. I scramble up a steep bit and through particularly dense bush. It seems worth it to gain height so directly. To my surprise now, the transmitter is only about thirty metres away; my slog is almost over. Scrambling up, I see too a building here and in front of it a low concrete block wall. I clamber over it and onto a gravel track, my vision of sanity.
My head is sore with thirst and worry, but I give myself a pat on the back for getting out before dark. Walking down the long and steeply curving track to the bottom feels both bizarre to my fatigued leg mucles. It feels like trying to walk across an endless bouncy castle with my pockets full of lead. This doesn’t stop me though from having an absolutely heaven-sent sense of relief.
I wonder what the reaction will be when I get back?
I feed myself fantasies of miso and flat-breads and maybe some chocolate too.
I stand by the road, trying to thumb a lift, looking like what I am; a bum that’s slept in a wet ditch and then been dragged through a hedge backwards.
Eventually a car full of native Canadians stops and give me a ride back to the trailer park. I get indoors and no-one is in. Maybe everyone has gone looking for me or maybe they are just getting on with their day. There is no note or anything to say. I take off my wet clothes, put some dry ones on, and squat over the heater. I almost fall asleep on it. Waking up long enough to fix myself lots to eat, I then write a note which I leave in the middle of the floor: ‘Got lost in bush, V. tired so sleeping’. I later find out that Roel and Sofie had gone to Gold Mine Beach to see if they could find me and Roel mentions how he almost got washed out to sea standing on a huge log that got dislodged by the waves. He had wondered whether something like that had happened to me.
I am going to move into a cabin in the woods with the three Belgians, but we are all getting messed around by this builder guy who seems to be full of bullshit stories about how he’s going to get us a place to stay, and then making excuses as to why it isn’t working out. (Why do some people insist on being so unfathomably dumb?)
The Belgians get fed up and go off to trek through the bush and look at waterfalls, and I stay here to watch TV for Christmas on my own. Surprisingly, I’m quite satisfied with this arrangement – I get a whole day of peace and quiet to myself to be comfortable and get on with writing, watching some interesting programs about Islam, the origins of the Christmas story (Bethlehem and all that).
Canada is a place where its people primarily still belong to the land and sea. Now it’s the largest country in the world since the break up of the Soviet Union. The Canadian landscape of much of the country’s mountains and trees not so much dominates as engulfs whatever human activity lies within it. Most places there’s a good chance you can still drink mountain stream water straight (though BC has 500 contamination spots).
The air is still clean except where a town has a pulp mill, in which case the whole place will stink like rotting cabbage. What in most cases is perfectly good higher value lumber is being sent to the US for a fraction of the lumber value to make pulp newspaper, and even now the US has decided it can get its pulp cheaper from China which screws the whole Canadian process further. Japan are buying Canadian logs and just burying them in the sea, in anticipation of some future pulp shortage.
The logging companies now take care to do their dirty deeds on the other side of the mountains away from the highway, thus leaving the facade of intact wilderness.
The Maritimes on the East Coast, what was one of the largest fishing grounds in the world, is now forced to experiment with catching lobster and whelks; the waters having been fished almost out of existence. (The Newfies blame the Spanish and Portuguese for having greedy methods.) The West Coast is fighting battles over what fish remain, who they supposedly belong to and so on.
For such a vast expanse of natural resources, its relatively small number of people (thirty million) and its recent white settler history of only three or four generations, Canada must have been easy-pickings, with relatively little internal conflict. (Once you include First Nations peoples into this picture, this whole notion falls flat on its face of course.)
Now I don’t know who the political heavyweights of Canada now are, (but I imagine that First Nations peoples still only have a marginal influence), Canada seems to be reaching some sort of crisis point with itself. Some of the seemingly endless stable resources of the country have either gone or there is dispute over their future position in the country’s economy.
Tofino has a grand fairytale-sized beauty. Small offshore islands have trees bursting out of them like they’ve been playing ‘How many trees can we squeeze onto this tiny bit of rock?’.
Some of the islands have grand wooden cabins, and some cabins are ramshackle concoctions that somehow seem to belong there more.
Rising up behind these small islands in the wide inlet is the foreshore of Meare’s Island, home to some very very large trees, and beyond that, the icing on the cake (as it were), the snow-capped inland of Meare’s Island as it rises even more grandly out of the low clouds in the far distance.
In a more seaward direction, the small islands persist, and the ocean endlessly rolls in, sometimes in great curling folds to either stroke sandy beaches or smash onto rough pointy outcrops of black black rock. A haven for whale-watchers and neoprene-clad surfers.
You can see history in these rocks. Predominantly it looks like lava cooling, shrinking and splitting. Some of the rock looks to my inexpert eye, like it must be where the lava spewing out of ancient long gone volcanoes made this the new edge of the land. In some places, huge pale speckled grey granite boulders, all beautifully rounded, adorn the shore-side like a giant broken necklace. I presume these must be left over from some glacial retreat. I wonder whether the forests must be full of them, except we just don’t see them because they’re covered in moss and tree debris.
To see all this detritus of the earth; old trees, rocks from one age strewn across rock from an even older age is a bit like looking at stars – where you’re seeing all these time-spread objects right now, together, but actually they all got there at different times under differing unseen forces. Quite amazing really.
Apart from having the usual seams of white marbly rock running through them (whatever that is), some of the black rock seems to have a dull metallic sheen on parts of the surfaces which looks like copper or something.
Thousands of trunks pile up along the shore edge. Some of them are huge trunks weighing many tonnes, that some storm at some time back has thrown up into the most unlikely of places way up onto high rocks; some look as if the are there as bridges across otherwise impassable stretches. Most of them have washed up here after accidently breaking out of log-booms on the rivers of Washington and Oregan. They get worn and rounded in the same way stones do.
In the shallows, you can find anemones, sometimes starfish, frequently mussels. The bird-litter of mussel and oyster shells and the occasional orange bit of a crab’s leg fill the birds favourite feeding spots. (Out of the worst of the wind and rain I would imagine.) Over time the shells at older spots are so broken down they are halfway to becoming sand.
The villages (summer tourist towns) of Tofino and Ucluelet are a mixture of ultra-new (just being built) luxury housing down to your average Canadian house and all have been built using wood.
Thank god – I see one house with a ‘distinctive’ frontage of pretend dry stone walling (except that it looks like vertical crazy paving). Apart from it being obvious that whoever built it doesn’t understand how stone-built houses really look, it looks strangely really over-heavy, like it’s about to sink into the boggy ground. After being used to seeing only wood houses, seeing one made of rocks is really weird.
The old-styles and the hippy influences are the best, blending in more with a taste for the meandering lines of raw wood.
Probably the most ingenious dwelling I have seen is the body of an old aluminium caravan mounted onto a home-made raft. The raft is kept afloat by a fishing net full of plastic bottles lashed under the wooden base. Cannily, the guy that built the place, by collecting hundreds of plastic bottles off the streets of Tofino, earned himself the respect of the townspeople, and they are happy for him to be moored on the leeward side of a tiny island just off-shore from the town. No rent. Nice job!
Great testimony to this can be found in the beautiful book ‘Builders of the Pacific Coast’ by Lloyd Khan.
I have fulfilled an ambition, and am currently living as ‘trailer-trash’ which is most famously an American tradition, where all the industrial misfits live. (That’ll be me then.) I think trailer parks are great. They’re unpretentious and incline their owners to inventive construction.
The Belgians have gone off on a slightly abortive hiking trip whilst I stay nice and cosy in the trailer over Christmas. They’ve gone in search of waterfalls but the whole event turns into one big soggy waterfall as they get rained off after day one of what is supposed to be a three day hike.
Whilst they all disappear to Victoria to spend New Year with Jill while she house-sits there, I set a new world record in the field of ‘Distance Travelled Just To Go To The Cinema’.
I hitch all the way up to Nanaimo to see the ‘The Two Towers’, the second Lord of The Rings film, a round trip of 350 kms.
My first ride happens more-or-less instantly with a very friendly truck driver that I meet right outside the trailer park as he’s filling up with fuel at the gas station. I had met with him at the gas station before on another day, and we had spent some time ‘shooting the breeze’. It’s nice to see him again, and is further enhanced by having a toot on some of his fabulous home-grown.
It’s really exciting to me to be having a ride in a real live American Mack truck. I’ve been hitching for donkeys years – I must have sat in the passenger seat of hundreds of English trucks and some of them would have romantic ‘scenes of the road’ with big American trucks, confederate flags, eagles, noble Indian chiefs, that kind of thing. Now I’m in a real-life American truck! Perhaps I’m being a bit nerdy, but here I am, somehow inside ‘The American Dream’.
I get to spend my ride in very good company and also I have an incredible feeling of really ‘being’. Nothing to do with being stoned of course…
It’s something that happens so rarely that I don’t really ever notice how much real life just gets bunged up in the filter of my thinking head most of the time. There are rare occasions when my mind is quiet; either enjoying hard physical work or cycling long distances. (That’s why I love big cycling trips.) At these times I feel my body connecting with where I am. It’s good and I know that all is well. Doesn’t that say something about how much all that head-filtering monkey mind business is worth?
Anyhow, winding up through the mountain road, past a lake that I am told is totally full of fish; his house is on the far side of the lake, high above the road… somehow it’s all wonderful. A moment to be savoured.
It’s night-time by the time I get halfway to the tree-pulping cabbage-stinking town of Port Alberni.
Looking for a cheap place to stay the night, I knock on the door of a ‘hostel’ and get invited into the home of a middle-aged native couple who charge me the princely sum of just seven bucks. (That’s about three quid.)
Next day I arrive at Nanaimo in time for the film, which is good, but not as amazing as the first film. Too many long drawn-out battle scenes with CGI’d orcs roaring about continuously.
It takes me all day to hitch back to the trailer park, and I very narrowly avoid getting caught in the rain all night without shelter. (I did that one already thanks…)
I spent most of the Christmas period watching TV shows about the beginnings of Christianity, which is actually more interesting than I might have expected. Mostly when Mark is around, we watch ‘football’ (as opposed to ‘soccer’).
American football has got to be one of the weirdest games going; a staccato combination of a field full of guys standing around doing nothing for five minutes whilst a middle-aged guy with a baseball cap and a beer gut stands and points at random parts of the pitch, blows his whistle and then they all run at each other, crash, and then do it all over again. I have no idea what’s going on. Mark offers to explain it to me, but I much prefer the surreal entertainment offered by remaining ignorant of the rules.
One morning Mark is fixing himself ‘Kraft Dinner’.
All the way across Canada, people would say ‘Ooh! Have you tried Kraft Dinner? It’s the national dish! You must try Kraft Dinner, Kraft Dinner rocks!’. I get Mark to show me this legendary but hitherto elusive Kraft Dinner stuff. It’s a small box of one-serve cereal packet proportions, about six inches high. In it is about sixty dried bits of pasta rattling around and a packet which when opened reveals a dried ‘cheese sauce’. Must be good stuff then. Mark cooks it.
Kraft Dinner does not rock. It is shit.
The pasta is the wrong side of al dente (probably Mark’s fault) and the ‘cheese’ sauce is a kind of watery plasticised slurry. I suspect that the love of Kraft Dinner is a measure of Canada being a nation of stoners that will eat anything given a bad enough dose of the munchies…
‘Oh Wow! Awwwwesome! I just tooted a TON of weed, and this here cedar tree tastes reeeaally gooood! HMM! Oh WOW!’
The trailer is due to be vacated January 6th; it is only me here now. Mark and Jen and the dogs have left. They have got themselves jobs in a posh hotel and have a new apartment to stay in. As I have no wish to wake up to the sight of a demolition ball crashing through the wall, I duly ease myself out and head up to Victoria to meet up with the others.
It’s great to see them all again as I stick my head in the Purple Turtle – Nobody was sure that we would actually see each other again. This is a refreshing hostel to stay in – it is really cheap for a start; ten bucks a night, about four quid.
There are a few shoestring travellers there, one an English guy (called Mike) from Woking who’s spent six years travelling round the world ‘looking for the perfect place to live’. As neurotic as that sounds, he’s a really lovely guy and introduces me to the possibilities of the blues harp (harmonica) – an ideal small lightweight instrument to play.
Most of the guys in the hostel are Canadians looking for work whilst escaping the harsh Canadian Winter thats settling in the rest of the country.
Our favourite room-mate is Tim, who looks like Meatloaf, with long straight hair and a huge scary tattoo on his back.
Tim is an ex-Hells Angel who’s biked over from Toronto and sold his bike in Vancouver. He tries really hard to keep up a ‘hard man don’t give a damn’ front that he must have been obliged to have whilst hanging out with the Hells Angels, but we all know he’s a soft and fluffy teddy bear really. We point this out to him, and he just looks surprised, then a bit sheepish, grins and says – ‘Shh! Don’t tell anybody! It’s a secret!’
The Belgians and me get the impression that Tim has seen an awful lot of shitty situations. He seems like he has gone through a lot to get to where he is now. He says if he had a daughter and she brought home a guy like himself, he’d throw him out cos he’d know the guy was full of shit…
Me and Tim occasionally goes down to the 7/11 supermarket for coffees and we sit outside and talk about life. Tim takes a slightly paternal attitude to us; and always wants to know how we are. Lots of wobblies going on; Roel and Jerone unable to make up their minds who they want to have sex with, Sofie wondering whether to have sex with God…
Tim is doing odd bits of building work here and there, and is aiming to save enough money to go to Jamaica in March.
Then there is Nelson who is a Native Cree, a chubby chap who can milk the native folklore cow for hours on end if you let him. A young chap who knows exactly how to survive in the wild, but actually what he wants is a JOB. I think maybe he could be a tourist guide with all that survival knowledge. Maybe he doesn’t want to.
The place is run by three white Rastas from Wisconsin who are heavily into the whole Rastafari religion thing, and live it in a somewhat bigoted way. Very serious people. Hmmm.
We hang out in various spots in the city. The library is the main one, we end up at the library a lot, addicted to emailing people. All a bit sad I suppose, but at least we are all at it together. That means I feel slightly less like a travelling computer nerd. (Only slightly mind you.)
Another place we frequent is at the Solstice Cafe where there is a rather attractive young woman serving behind the counter.
We are all sitting in there one day, either quaffing coffee or lingering over the cheapest drink possible depending on the awareness of the individual to notice how money likes to evaporate when you’re on permanent holiday.
There we are when we somehow get chatting to a rather loud and theatrical woman.
The first thing we learn is that she isn’t Canadian but actually German and has the European habit of affecting a perfect local accent. Having found her audience, she goes on to tell us her prize story of how she fell in love, deeply, madly and unfortunately with a guy who was next in line to be the boss of his local Mafioso. She tells us about how she was delivered an ultimatum – marry into the Mafia or never see him again. The ultimatum didn’t come from him, but from the people around him. She called it off, and they spent eighteen years apart.
After each having marriages and both breaking up, they started to see each other again in secret, but she knew that they were always being spied on by The Family. She was a security risk, and for the sake of togetherness, they both put up with having shadowy figures lurking about in the backgrounds of their lives, making sure that neither of them did the wrong thing.
Around this time outside a thrift store, I bump into the woman from behind the counter of the Solstice Cafe. She says ‘Oh I’ve seen you around in the library and the shops!’
Me fancying the wotsits off her can only manage a feeble ‘Umm, err, yes, errr, oh I’ve just remembered I have to go somewhere!’ and I wander off nervously, when really what I wanted to say is something slightly more along the lines of ‘Phwoar, I really fancy you, do you fancy going out and then if we still like each other, get on with some full-on shagging afterwards?’
I sit on the corner of the street feeling like a prize turkey, and it bothers me for the rest of the day until I see Jill and tell her about it.
She suggests that I could just into the cafe and ask her out and see what she says.
Der! Simple!
So summoning the knock-kneed courage, I go in and bumble an offer of an evening out. She smiles and says yes. Out I walk doing rocket-ships all over my insides. She Said YES!
This of course is at loggerheads to my ultimate plan to travel round the world. My head is in charge; you better believe it.
When we meet the next evening, we walk round the city, go for a coffee somewhere and I walk her home. My hormones are going crazy. I behave myself. It doesn’t end in frantic sex. It doesn’t end in frantic anything.
I walk off back to the hostel, wondering what’s going on. I can’t even figure out if my emotional roller-coaster is on a peak or a trough. Bonkers.
We see each other again a few days later. Her name is also Sophie and she’s lovely; a dread-locked ‘take it as it comes’ artist (a good one too) from Toronto way. I’m an artist of sorts too, and taking it as it comes is not what I’m doing at this point in my life.
Am I being a fool or just being more determined than I’ve ever been before about pursuing my dream to travel? My guts are on a permanent lurch.
It’s been a strange couple of weeks – a whole bunch of people having their own emotional wobblies with girlfriend/boyfriend/money/direction stuff. Seems like it’s been flavour of the month; everyone stewing in the collective juices of hostel-induced inertia.
Jerome has been getting sticky with Chris, Roel with Floor (Belgian version of Flora) and/or Jill, Sofie with God, me with the Other Sophie… Even through the confusion I have managed to keep a good humour, which makes a nice change.
I am trying to think of a joke about Roeling around on the Floor but this is as close to one as I am getting.
Then we all go to a disco in a bar at New Years Eve. I find myself dancing with Mi-Mi (stunning looking Quebecois). That’s never happened before, ever, with anyone. She’s so hot it’s not true. I end up asking her out (after deciding Sophie thing not happening, why not?), and she says no, but likes hanging out with me anyway. Now here’s someone who likes to take a risk;
Mi-Mi is the first stripper I’ve ever met. (French speaking too! Ooh-la-la!.) We go out for a walk up through South Park up to the seashore, and she tells me how she’d made about five thousand dollars one summer by becoming a stripper in Montreal. She’d always been shy and had decided to do something that really scared her, so she went to a strip club and made enquiries.
She was only seventeen and was taken under the wing of some Hell’s Angels bikers.
They did not try to take her earnings, try to have sex with her or try to get her to take drugs. They respected her and let her stay in their apartment. They escorted her to and from the club to protect her from weirdos. There now that blows away a presumption or two doesn’t it?
Tim from the hostel had been a biker from Montreal too. It would be strange if they’d met. I wonder…
I have discovered that yes, I can enjoy travelling alone, that yes, I can ask out gorgeous women (and they sometimes say yes) and yes, I can be sparkly and fun. Thank god.
All things I have been habitually scared of, sometimes turn out in reality to be not so scary at all.
This whole time feels ridden with growing pains; on the one hand emotionally yearning for safety in the form of a girlfriend, but conversely I am struggling to just stick with this notion of being an independent traveller.
I ache. I am trying to live in my dreams. Real life seems awkward. Sometimes it feels like I am making some headway. I feel relief and then remember to try not take myself quite so blinking seriously.
Try to be thankful towards these emotional contradictions; these beautiful experiences here and there, those yearnings, those undone dreams.
Possibility twinkles out there in front of me, scaring the wits out of me.
If I want to hug someone that’s not around, then I can imagine the spirit of them, and hug them there; it still feels like I am getting what I need, and who knows, maybe they can feel it too.
There is, and always will be, contradiction, conflict, and choices to be made.
There are no safety nets. The best I can do is try to learn different ways of truly embracing fearful, uncomfortable situations. There are always times of fear, sometimes great long stretches of it. With each deep tangle of self oppression hopefully we can learn to be gentle with ourselves first. What anyone needs first is love and fearlessness.
Keep taking the photos, keep writing the journal, and keep eating the bean sprouts. Try to keep some objectivity and feed the sparkle.
Bit by bit we make our choices – Roel is going to stay in Victoria to see how things go with him and Floor (they end up going to the Dominican Republic together), Jerone and Chris end up staying in Vancouver at her apartment because he can’t convince her to come to Central America.
Roel has been complicating his life by almost getting entangled with Jill. I think if that hadn’t been going on, I would have taken much more of an active interest in making friends with her.
Jill is from Nova Scotia, a part of the world I had liked very much. She has a lovely Irish-Canadian accent, and is very much a country girl with a down to earth character and a batty sense of humour. As I spent time with her, I have a sense that she’s someone who could be very good for me. We make each other laugh and loon about. Ah well, life is already complex, best not to make it any more so…
Belgian Sofie goes to a hostel in Vancouver to look for another travel partner as I am not being decisive about dread-locks Sophie.
A couple of days later in something approaching complete confusion, I leave Victoria to try to find Sofie in Vancouver, then I return again so I can write a note with my email address on it for Sophie, leave Victoria the second time and have another shot at trying to find Belgian Sofie in Vancouver.
Emotionally I’m feeling very uncertain; leaving Canadian Sophie is hard, possibly dumb.
I find Belgian Sofie is in one of the Vancouver hostels after I go checking into a couple of others to find out if she’d booked into any of them.
She’s put a note on a noticeboard asking for a hitching partner. I hope she hasn’t found one. She’s not in her room; I leave a note on her door and next to the advert. Eventually we find each other and we are both relieved. It’s an expensive hostel so we arrange to go visit her friends Gary and Donna in the suburbs to the south of Vancouver…
Surrey Vancouver, Gary and Donna’s January 19th 2003
Gary and Donna are middle-aged born-again Christians. I sometimes start to develop a nervous twitch at the thought of born-agains. Regular minding their own business religious types I can get on with quite sensibly usually. But some born-agains, well it’s like their own personality and identity often seems to abruptly end after a few minutes and then the very worst ones just seem to turn into brainless rhetoric regurgitators, seemingly incapable of rational two-way discussion or independant thought. There’s a whole range of folks in between of course, but these are the ones that really freak me.
They are the sort of people that elect morons like Bush just cos he’s a member of the same fan club.
Sofie warns me that this is the end of the spectrum that Gary and Donna are towards.
I am always intrigued though by the way that someone can go from being in confusion with themselves to having a simpler outlook on life which often seems to make them happy and have certainty. This in itself I admire and respect; there are lots of times when I wish I had this myself. I just don’t want to have to join a fan club and denounce anyone who’s not in it as being crap and wrong.
Before I met the Belgians in Tofino, they had been making money doing apple-picking in Kelowna (southern BC) where they met Jill and also Gary.
Gary and Donna are both from New Brunswick where money was tight, so they moved out west to try their luck. Donna was chained to the kitchen sink whilst Gary had gone apple-picking; he’s a carpenter and builder, but business was being a little slow.
Gary and Donna are hospitable, I’m in open-minded mode, we get well fed and me and Sofie help Gary put the roof on a shed in the back garden. Sofie gets to do menial things cos she’s only a girl, but Gary’s an old guy so we can sort of forgive him for being a bit like that.
Me and Sofie spend time walking about the ‘burbs, she having lots of instability about her spirituality and that kind of thing.
I’m really concerned she’s going to give in and become a born-again and I find it hard to be objective about what she wants. I have such a strong dread of bigotry, I wander just how un-bigoted I am being myself.
Things are okay at Gary and Donna’s. Gary is an interesting man who cares a lot about people and seems to have seen a bit of the world. He follows ‘the voice of God’ which I take to be his instincts, and that I find rare and beautiful. Donna on the other hand plays the good housewife but when we talk to her it gives both me and Sofie a headache. Gary wears the trousers and Donna makes his sandwiches.
She reels off Love of God in a blah blah way like she’s memorised it from somewhere. When we ask her what she was into before becoming a Christian, she visibly relaxes and seems to have fond memories of her hippy lifestyle. She catches herself and then turns back into God TV mode and goes all blocked up and cross looking.
Tensions come to a head when Gary brought back some churchy mates back to the house and everything is polite until the subject gets to the impending attack on Afghanistan by the Americans and Brits. Comments are made about the Afghanis being ignorant misguided Muslims, and this will be God’s way of sorting out the righteous from the rubbish.
I ask them if they mix with many people outside the church. They admit that they don’t. I put it to them that they probably don’t know many Muslims then.
They don’t know any.
So how can they start making judgements about a whole group of people they have no actual first-hand knowledge of? Yet here they are, making gutter-level jokes about them. That’s not very righteous is it? I thought it is supposed to be God’s job to make the judgements?
I’ve had a gut-full of the bollocks that goes on in the name of religion, and here are some of the idiots that perpetuate the hate, sitting here right in front of me, wolves in sheep’s clothing professing violence and murder in the name of love.
I get a bit loud and have to leave. These people are full of shit.
I go for a walk and try not to get too fried over the whole scene, what with Sofie wondering whether to throw her lot in with them.
Return to Contents Page.
THE UNITED STATES:
NOT ALL BULLETS AND BIBLE-BASHING
Spotted in The Drifters Cafe, Hobart Tasmania (January 2004):
‘San Francisco Man Becomes First American To Grasp Irony’
The UK paper the Daily Telegraph spoke to Jay Fullmer, thirty-eight, who became the first American to come to grips with the concept of irony yesterday.
‘It was weird’ Fullmer said, ‘I was in London and, like, talking to this guy and it was raining and stuff and he said, like, ‘great weather’ or something like that.’
Said Fullmer: ‘And I thought – wait a minute, it’s like, no way is it great weather.’
Fullmer soon realised that the other man’s mistake was deliberate.
‘This guy was pretty cool about it,’ Fullmer said.
Fullmer, who is thirty-nine next month and is married with two children, aged eight and three, plans to use irony himself in future. ‘I’m like saying it all the time.’ He said. ‘Last weekend I was like grilling steaks and I like burned the crap out of them and I said ‘great weather!’.’
There are a lot of misconceptions about Americans, as we are about to find out…
Finally getting on the bus with Sofie at New Westminster, Vancouver is strange. Leaving the Righteous Gary and the seemingly conflicted Donna is something of a mixed blessing. We both have this feeling that Donna needs to be rescued. On top of this Sofie is still boiling away with her ongoing internal dilemmas.
Canadians generally tend not to have anything good to say about Americans, and so I have a fear of the unknown United States. Leaving Canada though I love it so much there, abandoning a potential relationship… getting to the US border after asking lots of advice about what the right thing to say is… Finally I actually don’t care any more, my emotional confusion is so desperately mixed.
The border guy asks me why I am coming to the US. He couldn’t be asking me a more pertinent question if he tried, but he’s not to know that. I tell him the truth (except the bit about how much money I have, hitch-hiking, sleeping under bushes and voluntary work in New Mexico). He gives me a three month stamp. That’s one less hurdle to cross.
Sofie gets lots of hassle, mostly because she tells them two conflicting stories that add up to bullshit. Doh.
Anyhow, we are sitting on the bus, and I feel awful. Actually my heads full and I don’t want to hear about any more of Sofies dilemmas.
She talks to a couple of guys on the bus, and then we both end up talking to Kunte Kinte McDonald from South Carolina. He has a story to tell that is as dramatically loaded as his name; about being kicked out of Canada, being raped by a cousin and being very emotional… he lifts my spirits which I am very grateful for. He also has the most spectacular name I’ve ever encountered.
I Chat to a young guy from Australia/Canada, which is also inspiring; I take note when I encounter people that are choosing to live a lifestyle that is outside what is considered ‘normal’. His thing is to be living alternately between Oz and Canada, six months at a time. If he can do what he likes, then so can I.
It doesn’t seem to take very long to arrive in Seattle.
I really like it here, which is a pretty mean feat for a city and me. I am instantly struck by its sense of culture. Good place.
We book into a hostel down near the sea front. Wind whips up the sea. We can hear it crashing about nearby behind the uplifting smell of the fish market. A real live place, and its also good to get back indoors again too after tasting the vibes of this place.
In the hostel we meet Steve and Ray, from Tucson Arizona, who are on their way to Canada to escape the potential drafting up of young kids that may be obliged to join in George Bush’s ‘War Against Terrorism.’ They intend to write about freedom. Really really nice guys.
Sitting at the same table with us is a pair of young English newly-weds, on their honeymoon. They reel off their itinerary to us which basically amount to travelling around the world at break-neck speed; fly to New York, two days there, fly to Seattle, one day here, fly to San Fran, one day there, fly to Singapore, two days there, dumpty dumpty doo and so on to Sydney, two days there, fly to Cape Town, two days there etc and then home again. I’ll let you fill the gaps yourself if you haven’t got airsick yet.
They happily tell us how they are going to do this in three weeks. The rest of us are utterly bewildered by their approach and attitude to travel; I have always felt the idea of ‘doing’ a place rather than ‘spending time’ in it is something rather crass. Box-ticking and insensitive, like having a series of one-night stands instead of having a relationship.
For me, it is something to find the details; the plants, how people are similar or sometimes different. ‘Doing’ a place seems to involve little or no real connection.
Maybe this young couple are more concerned with the nuptial end of things anyway…
Next morning, Sofie does passport/visa enquiries (panicky phone-calls to the Belgian Embassy in Las Vegas) then we get the bus to Aberdeen.
It’s very windy, raining tons and all the lights in the town have gone out. It’s a bit grim.
Here I am, introducing Sofie to the delights of hitch-hiking and rough-sleeping and how you can get to feel a real connection to places… The conditions are really horrible. What a way to start. I know she could probably use some comfort. (Me too actually.) Anyway, she’s pretty brave/open-minded and up for it. My estimation of her staying-power is going up. I tell her it can get pretty grim. A guy on the bus going to Graylands says he’ll show us a good spot to pitch up for the night. Miracle.
We end up sleeping in amongst some old growth forest by the sea, on some old travellers camp; we rake together some plywood for a floor, eat food out of carrier bags and put a pick-up trucks rear hood over us as a roof.
Well cosy…well; I think so anyway.
In the morning, Sofie tells me that she appreciates it too.
A long time later, I am to discover that we have been hanging out on Kurt Cobain’s home turf (Aberdeen). That seems to figure, considering how dramatically malignant the weather has been; a place often makes a person. I am thinking of changing my name to ‘Burt Cocaine’, for absolutely no real reason that I can think of.
The first time I ever hitch-hiked was supposed to be a week-end trip made by me and Christine my girlfriend at the time and her super-gay mate Andy. We were all seventeen. It was Andy’s idea.
Andy had Big Hair in the Duran Duran mode and would frequently hitch-hike to nearby Oxford to indulge in ‘cottaging’, the noble art of pursuing casual gay-sex for money in public toilets.
When I asked him what he wanted to do with his life he would always tell me rather blandly and obliquely that he just wanted to ‘spank his plank’. Whatever that meant.
It was half-term from Newbury College and me and Chris were getting under her dad’s feet at home so we decided action was necessary. It was Andy that got us out onto the road and into our first grown-up adventure.
All three of us stood by the main road out of Newbury and by some miracle we somehow found ourselves transported to Wales. For Free! Meeting new people! Wow! One driver drove at breakneck speed down extremely windy lanes whilst having his head turned back to us in the back seats, blithely explaining that we needn’t worry cos he knew these roads like the back of his hand. We hoped that he was also psychically tuned-in to the random perambulations of stray sheep and cows on the road. We almost shat ourselves.
By the end of the afternoon we were suddenly in Exotic Aberystwyth. We found a field with a shed in it, purporting to be a camp-site. We duly paid our three quid pitching fee, stuck the tent up, got stoned and ate all our food. Being the inexperienced know-nothings that we were, we had pitched our tent on a fairly steep incline. We collapsed into the tent in a big human lump patently too bulky for the small tent. Gravity got the better of us and we slumped in a downhill direction and heavily into the now-bulging sidewall of the tent. It must have looked like a huge grotesque testicle from the outside.
Being stoned, we somehow slept, waking up the next morning having had our arms seemingly relocated to slightly different parts of our upper bodies and all the vertebrae in our necks rearranged. We ached. We needed breakfast. A fried one; from a cafe.
We staggered down into town and sought out a reviving breafast. Andy went off to do his own thing, which I suspect probably involved him ‘spanking his plank’. Mysteriously that was the last time we saw him for about two years, but we weren’t to know that at the time.
We had spent the early part of the morning sitting on the shingle beach, romantically waiting to watch the sun rise up out of the Irish Sea. Which it didn’t of course. That would have been a neat trick for the sun to rise in the West, but we weren’t to know that either.
The April morning merely became less turgid.
We headed for the nearby cafe ‘Y Graig’ – The Rock. It was a hippy cafe. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers should have been in there but I think we had just missed them. Egg, chips and beans all round and steaming mugs of tea. The radio played ‘What A Waste’ by Ian Dury and the Blockheads and everyone in the cafe was singing along to it – a cheery ditty about happily not achieving any kind of socially acceptable career and choosing to just to loaf about instead.
Outside we encounter a scruffy unshaven but happy-looking bloke with a dog.
‘Do you live here?’ we asked him.
‘Yeah! I do! I love it here!’
‘How do you get to do that?’
And he told us how we could sign on the Rock N Roll (Dole) and get ourselves a place to stay from the council. And then, Aberystwyth would be our oyster.
Tomorrow was the first day back at College. We were miles away. Both of us were bored of our courses and her dad was becoming sick of the sight of us cluttering up his small house.
We decided that it was better here.
It was this very morning that me and Christine ‘dropped out’ and officially became hippies. We duly spent the next few months indulging in all the usual hippy pastimes…
First comes puberty. Some years after; liberty.
I would go and visit my mum and dad and they just plain didn’t get what I was doing my my life.
After Wales I abandoned my poo-coloured Vauxhall Viva. Actually it got nicked which was a real bonus cos it was an unsaleable heap anyway. I was very happy to explain to my mum how now I was really free – I didn’t have to work, so I didn’t have to have a car. I could hitch-hike to the north of Scotland if I wanted (which I did, frequently) and it didn’t cost me a bean. And I got to meet loads of really great people too. Couldn’t do that on the 9 to 5 could you?
Aaahh… freedom, freedom…
Meanwhile back in the Good Ole U S of A…
It’s the morning after our sleep out under our impromptu den. Me and Sophie are rubbing our faces back into some kind of semi-reluctant wakefulness. Sophies hair is all messed up and speckled with pine needles.
The sun is shining and the sea is nearby. We are heading south along the coast on the famous Route 101:
U.S. Route 101, all 1,504 miles of it, runs from Tumwater, Washington at the southern tip of Puget Sound somewhere not too far from here, all the way south to the East Los Angeles Interchange; the busiest freeway interchange in the world.
It follows a trail originally laid by early Spanish settlers who called it ‘El Camino Real’ (The Royal Road). It became a metalled road in 1926.
It is known along its length by various names; The Oregan Coast Highway, The Redwood Highway round the forested areas of California and The Pacific Highway along the rest of it, or just plainly ‘The One Oh One’ everywhere else.
It passes mostly along the coast, sometimes through the Giant Redwood forests. The Golden Gate Bridge carries it on its shoulders.
Along with Route 66, it is recognised as one of the great legendary road-trip routes of America. (We didn’t know this – we got here kind of by accident.)
We stick out our thumbs and in almost no time get a ride with a guy who offers us half a day’s work cleaning shelves in a store he’s fitting out. He gives us thirty bucks each and then offers us a chance to crew on his boat going from San Diego to Fiji in June!
Next a ride in the back of a pick-up to South Bend that gives Sofie the beginnings of dreadlocks; her long blonde hair flaps uncontrollably as we tear along the country highway.
Almost out of Washington now. The coast is beautiful, it reminds me of Scandinavia. Then we get a ride with Hank, who’s of Finnish stock and tells us about his sailing adventures round the world. He feed us and houses us for the night. Pretty good for a days hitching.
Whilst bedding down in Hank’s office, I notice an envelope with a Norwegian stamp and name on it. When I ask Hank about it, he tells me this part of the States has a lot of ancestoral connections with Norway, Sweden and Finland.
I have a theory that maybe when the new settlers left old Europe maybe they would choose places to settle that were just like where they had come from. I am guessing that might be partly out of homesickness but then again it might have been for more pragmatic reasons; If you know how to grow wheat, you settle in wheat growing country. If you know how to live by fishing, then you settle by the coast. If you live by forestry, then you settle in a forested region. People brought their skills, habits and traditions with them. I am to realise later on that America is full of little pockets of living history.
It is astonishing to think how much this once wilderness land has changed in just a very few ambitious generations.
I have noticed too how much more quickly we get rides together than if was on my own. That’s the undeniable pulling power of having a woman with long blonde hair with me I guess.
January 23rd Astoria Oregon:
So here we are, off on our way to a place I’ve grown up with through TV and films and I imagine I know about but actually I don’t know at all…
From just south of Astoria, we get a couple of little rides to Seaside, and then a huge long one (ten hours in the car) with Angelo. He is a half Italian/quarter Cherokee/quarter French from Chicago, who enthuses about personal relations with god, the meaning of life and that sort of thing. Very nice chap indeed.
Even from the mere announcing of his family background, I get a sense of the vast unfurling of the American story.
I love way that hitching alternates doses of bad weather, friendly sometimes inspirational company, solitude, bad food, good food…
Angelo buys us a huge pizza and we discover we are going to pass through Giant Redwood country. Sofie says she’s on a mission and needs to get to L.A. as soon as possible and is somewhat panicked by the thought of us getting side-tracked.
I’ve been wanting to see the Redwoods since I was a kid, and compromising by spending half an hour in the dark (by the time we get there) isn’t going to be enough for me!
Angelo drops us at the visitors centre after we finally manage to find it just after sundown and we bid him our fond farewells.
Me and Sofie sleep on the wooden porch/veranda for the night. It’s already starting to feel warmer, which I’m very excited about; respite at last for my almost terminally soggy bones.
Sofie’s getting pretty worried about getting to LA in sufficient time, and after the closest thing we ever have to an argument, we arrive at a compromise about what happens the next day.
We spend a little time looking around a bit at some of the amazing redwoods. They are on average about six foot wide and 130-170 foot high. Beautiful.
Sofie has a big wobble, we have lunch, and Sofie chills out significantly.
Ah… its amazing what a spot of lunch can achieve.
Inside the visitors centre, I dazzle the volunteer wardens with my sparkling Englishness; I enjoy having this as a built-in conversational trump card. ‘Gee, I had a brother who was stationed in Glow-cester-shire during the war’ and all that sort of thing. In mid-flow a chap announces himself to me as being a New Zealander when I get to the bit about intending to travel to that end of the world. After almost no conversation with him at all, I find myself invited to his house back home in Wellington, and he gives me his business card. Right then, we’ll make it a date…
At 4 pm we start walking down the road to the highway. It’s a beautiful walk, passing an endless glide of majestic trunks that reach high and strong to the sky, but it gets dark before we get a chance to hitch.
We meet a park warden who recommends a place to sleep out. He also tells us that we are not supposed to camp out, and that also if we get picked up by any other warden that ‘He never saw us, okay?’
Next morning we hitch in an illegal spot on the 101; we’ll never ever get a ride otherwise. Two young dread-locked hippies pick us up. They are out and about looking for land to buy and do the homestead thing, and we all wind up in Ukiah, something of a hippy haven from what I can gather.
Then, after some friendly advice from a cop that we are standing in the wrong place, we get a ride with a yummy young woman who does environmental education in Northern California at Berkeley University as a volunteer.
Our last ride of the day comes from two young New Yorkers who look a bit like the Harry Enfield comedy characters Kevin and Perry. (Spotty overweight kids with sideways baseball caps.)
We end up visiting a friend of theirs in Santa Rosa who has lots of cats and dogs, and then we get a free look round San Francisco by night time with them. (Kevin and Perry, not the cats and dogs.)
We walk round Haight/Ashbury, which is frankly not very interesting. It’s full of all the kind of hippy tourist tat you’d expect it to be. The two New Yorkers are off to pick up a friend from Oakland airport, so we go with them; I’ve got an idea the airport might be a good place to sleep for free.
To our dismay, the airport is a mad bustling place even this late in the evening. Of course I should have realised that airports never sleep. The waiting lounge is all glaring lights and tannoy announcements…
Both of us are very tired and getting a bit irritable. We walk out of the airport in search of somewhere a bit more gentle to be, and end up walking about a mile, climbing a six-foot chain-link fence into a golf course where we sleep under gnarly old eucalyptus trees whose wonderful scent mixes occasionally with the wafts of a nearby landfill site.
Into California, mythical land of plenty, Hollywood, hope and immigrants:
‘One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking
And he said boys I’m not turning
I’m heading for a land that’s far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we’ll go and see
The big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains
There’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the box cars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the big rock candy mountain.
In the big rock candy mountains,
all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth,
and the hens lay soft boiled eggs.
The farmers trees are full of fruit,
and the barns are full of hay,
Oh I’m bound to go, where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall. The wind don’t blow
In the big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains,
you never change your socks
And there’s little streams of alcohol
come a-trickling down the rocks.
The brakemen have to tip their hats,
and the railroad bulls are blind,
There’s a lake of stew and of whisky too,
You can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe
In the big rock candy mountains.
In the big rock candy mountains,
the jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again
as soon as you are in.
There ain’t no short-handled shovels,
no axes, saws or picks,
I’m a going a stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk who invented work
In the big rock candy mountains.
(whistling)
I’ll see you all this coming Fall
in the big rock candy mountains.’
This wonderful song is about the hopeful dreams of a hobo, of some mythical place where the hard times end. Its part of the deep American story of peoples migrating to their future. This song has been sung by many singers, first recorded by a guy named Harry Mclintock in 1928, though its probably way older.
It gets sung as a song for kids with the words changed round a little. There are though, rougher versions too rough for putting on a pop record:
The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, ‘Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I’ll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.’
Coff.
I woke up this morning marvelling at these beautiful eucalyptus trees, to the mixed sounds of airplane take-off rumblings and quirky birdsong and hummingbirds flittering about over our heads. We didn’t see much of San Francisco so far, but this is really nice!
It’s taken us five days to come this far down the 101, roughly one thousand miles.
The gradual change in landscape has been welcome and quite sublime. Northern California is warm with mountains, gently rolling hills and rich alluvial plains at the bottom of them, full of vineyards and cows. A laid-back lifestyle is the norm. Lots of people with long hair and a noticeable number of old hippies. There is the occasional dead ‘magic bus’ sitting mouldering away on grassy properties. I get the impression there’s no self-consciousness about any of it, like no-ones got anything to prove.
It’s a beautiful morning, the birds are twittering merrily, and we haven’t had our arses kicked by security guards. Today we hitch to LA…
We discover we are on completely the wrong side of the city, and have to hop on and off a bus and a train and another bus till we end up in San Jose. I love being here; I can just about recognise San Jose from the end of ‘The Graduate’ where Dustin Hoffman is trying to stop his girlfriend from getting married to the wrong guy and he is running down the middle of the road to get to the church. I’m sure we’re on that very road.
We’re in film-land and it’s sunny and warm. I can get easily excited sometimes. We have lunch and try to hitch out on the interstate highway, get pulled by a cop, and then having been caught we head back into town.
We get a bus to Salinas and when we arrive we head back out to the free-way again ready for the next morning (except we get lost). A guy in a pick up sees we are lost and offers us a ride. He introduces himself as Frankie and tells us that he’s with ‘The Family’ and used to run guns and drugs in Las Vegas, but got out of the gun stuff cos it was too freaky. He is noticeably nervous and spends a lot of energy looking over his shoulder.
I really get the impression that he’s actually a nice guy. I have something of a revelation; that people don’t necessarily choose to be in the Mafia; some get born into it, and don’t have many options about whether they involve themselves or not. If you don’t want to be part of it you either kiss your relations goodbye and have to hide very very well, or end up dead. Not much of a family if you ask me.
Sofie checks out somewhere for us to sleep, and we end up under a bush not far from the intersection. Sofie is concerned that she has picked a rubbish spot and thinks that sleep will be an impossibility cos of being so close to the freeway, but I know better…
God bless wax earplugs.
The next day we travel with Carlos, a smooth speaking Hispanic who is working as a Chinese translator in the military. I get the distinct impression he’s muscling in on Sofie. This bothers me for a variety of reasons that I can’t quite put my finger on at the moment.
Oxnard, near Malibu; Looks like another Hollywood film location. It probably is. Bruce Willis nowhere to be seen.
We end up staying at a place that Carlos is doing up. Him and Sofie are pretty much ignoring me, running off for romantics and not telling me they are going off. Being a gooseberry is a pile of crap, especially as I have this protective thing about Sofie going on in my head. And I don’t trust this Carlos guy as far as I can throw him. He’s toooo much of a smoothie. I get the distinct impression he knows exactly what to do to impress Sofie. Maybe I’m just jealous. I don’t want her to get hurt; she’s already pretty flimsy about herself. Oh stuff it. It’s her life; I guess she just has to learn her own way.
It occurs to me that I spend a considerable amount of energy being in confrontation; with the born-agains in Vancouver, and around this situation with Sofie and Carlos. I’ve had to stop to try to understand what the Sofie/Carlos thing is about. I guess on both counts I feel very protective towards her – she worries and gets easily pessimistic, which I find very frustrating sometimes; getting caught up in that stupid game of trying to solve her ‘what-ifs’. I’m not sure I should be putting myself in this advisory role. It’s difficult seeing her appear to walk into situations and make conclusions that I just wouldn’t make. Part of that is that I want her to overcome the difficulties presented and not to give up; partly because I want to see her succeed, and partly because I would like to be able to see her again somewhere on this trip.
When I’m not feeling frustrated about her, I like her company. Some things I find really difficult about her. I don’t trust that she’ll go for an outlook that I would consider open-minded; too much emphasis on evil and sins of the flesh and a narrow view of who’s good and who’s bad. She’s astonishingly insightful very frequently, but it seems to come at the cost of sometimes not being able to see what’s right under her nose. She’s a little bit of a space-head and sometimes manages to look like she doesn’t know anything. I know it’s just her lack of confidence that’s making her fall over so frequently.
Or maybe that’s just me. I guess I recognise it cos I’m like that myself.
Anyway, currently listening to an extremely funky radio station (www.kcrw.com, Kevin Pointier) at 2 am after taking a walk round the ‘burbs of Oxnard listening to ‘Nonsuch’ by XTC, one of the most English bands to have ever come out of England.
I’ve really enjoyed California so far – it’s been quite amusing to be where all those Hollywood people live and make some of their films. Keep half-expecting to see Bruce Willis and John Travolta or Clint Eastwood come zooming down the road in a convertible shooting theirs guns off.
LA isn’t quite the nasty scary place as I’ve been led to believe (though clearly there are some really dodgy parts), though it is quite weird to see derricks pumping for oil right near the edge of the city.
We go to Malibu, which is a fun surprise; I have always vaguely thought that it was a Hawaiian island. Not really my style as a destination, but out of tourist season, I really enjoy it, despite the absence of Pamela Anderson. Maybe because of the absence of Pamela Anderson.
I’m also really enjoying the huge variety of trees and palms here – it must be great to be a gardener here – lots of lemons, oranges, strange fruit I’ve never seen before, nuts, sort-of dates and trees with the most fantastic geometric dimensions. Love it.
It looks like people here love their trees too – all the gardens look great and the town is lined with trees down every road. Lots of agriculture here. (Fruits mostly.) Fantastico!
I find a tree with a trunk like a eucalyptus, form like a weeping willow and the leaves smell of citronella.
Tomorrow, me and Sofie will head back up north; she to Sacramento, and me to Sequoia National Park then Las Vegas, Grand Canyon and then New Mexico for maybe a month to help build ‘Earthships’. (Eco-houses made of tyres and dirt.) Hopefully, I won’t get nuked. (Huge military area.)
Being with Sofie is showing me lots; about the debilitating effects of fear and anxiety, about letting someone figure things out for themselves, even though they sometimes look like they don’t have a clue. Gives me a idea what it might be like for a parent to have to watch their kid go off and make their own mistaks.
A passing open-topped car: Hurrah! Spanish Rap! Wicked!
I’m certainly no rap fan, but the scene makes it. There is something about hearing a type of music in the place that it comes from; rap in the Californian sunshine just seems right somehow. Bluegrass sounds fabulous on long journeys through the mountains and forests, and I expect that listening to country in the cab of a truck whilst driving through the vast flatlands of the Mid-west is the best thing ever too.
Having said that, I’ve heard rap music from different parts of the world where each language certainly changes the character of the sound: Sami (nomadic lapp-landers) rap sounds wonderful – like a magical incantation; German rap sounds horrific, Swedish rap sounds dreadful (the natural rythym of the Scandinavian languages clashes horribly with rap), English rap sounds – well just go listen to ‘The Streets’ and judge for yourself.
Me and Sofie get the public bus to Santa Barbara and then to Bakersfield via lots of orange groves. I let Sofie figure out how to plan the route – I can’t be arsed, and I know she’s the one who should be using her initiative. We get off the bus and we do a runner. (Neither of us paid.) It’s very naughty, but you can’t be good all the time.
We eat out at a Mexican place. I’ve yet to be convinced of the worthwhileness of Mexican food… Walking around town at 8 pm, a car stops and asks us if we need food. We turn down the offer, but instead get a ride out to the 99.
I look round for a halfway decent place to sleep by the freeway ramp. It would be hellishly noisy but for the saving grace of earplugs.
How much money I save with these things by not having to find a hostel (which would certainly be quieter than a freeway without earplugs).
Next morning me and Sofie have a bit of a heart to heart. She’s always freaking out about things cos she doesn’t have any confidence. I tell her to just do things she’d like to do anyway and the confidence will come afterwards. She just needs to give herself a kick up the arse, but I’ve a nasty feeling that she’s going to do religion before she does that. Oh well. Maybe that’s what she needs in order to find her motivation. I dunno.
We get a ride with David, a Christian chemical plant manager from Texas who tells us he’ll take us wherever we want to go!
He seems to represent for me the frequent imbalance of a religion which says ‘Be as nice as you possibly can to people’ but often forgets to say ‘Be as nice as you possibly can to the natural world around you’.
I am really sincerely impressed by David’s desire to be a servant to God by helping other people however he can. (This is apparent by his attitude to us and other things he says.) At the same time he’s obviously of somewhat frail health, the skin on his face and hands is all blotchy and flaky. He says it’s from working in the chemical industry, a highly poisonous business he tells us. I don’t challenge him on it, he’s such a nice guy, but it really seems odd to me that maybe it’s never occurred to him to make the connection between this ‘poisonous business’, his own health, what it must therefore do to the world around him, and his part slap bang in the middle of it all. Weird.
With some kind of understated significance to this, we go see the General Sherman tree, which lives in Sequoia National Park. It’s the biggest tree in the world. It is of course an amazing creature, but surprisingly, it doesn’t impress me as perhaps it should. It being a tourist honey-pot with cars and RVs all parked nearby and lots of people about doesn’t quite compare with the utterly wild magic of Meare’s Island off the coast of Tofino.
Big event of the journey though happens on the way up the mountainside to get here; Starting from the edge of the park in the foothills, we steadily follow a caravan of tourists in their cars. After not very long we hit what seems to be fog. I feel deflated that the trip is mired in an unfathomable inky whiteness. As we climb higher and higher, the fog gets worse. And then – The fog suddenly clears.
It isn’t fog at all. We have peaked; unbelievably, out above the top of dense low cloud. What is visible around us is a sea of pure white, interspersed with mountain tops rising out all around us like islands. Wow.
After this elevated journey we ride back down again, to the small town of Merced.
We say our grateful farewells to David; he resumes his random Californian house-hunting foray and we book ourselves into a cosy hostel for the night.
We are in small town suburbia. Friendly-looking clapboard houses line both sides of the dusty unmetalled street. The street is the width of an English dual carriageway. Houses can afford to be bungalows on account of the sprawling gardens around each property. The entire town is laid out in a neat grid.
This suburban arrangement explains a variety of things; why Americans can often be very chilled out. (Bags of elbow room.) Why Americans generally tend to drive everywhere. (All that elbow room makes everything else a long way off.) Why Americans in Europe stereotypically say ‘Gee ain’t that cute! Our houses/roads/cars/whatever are so much bigger back home!’.
It’s because they are.
Why Americans find England geographically confusing; we have too much lumpy geography and long complicated historical feudings to have anything whatsoever laid out in a systematic way.
Except Milton Keynes (whose bloody silly idea was that?)
The hostel, like Beesknees in back in Whitehorse, actually is just somebody’s house, barely modified to include extra bathroom sinks and showers.
Larry the owner is very interesting and we talk about agriculture and organic growing. This is the day that the Challenger space shuttle blows up, but none of us are aware of it at the time.
Next morning Larry drives me down to near where I can get a ride out to Yosemite, and I hug Sofie goodbye, which takes a little while. With a tear in my eye, I hope I see her again. I tell her if she makes it to Mexico, I shall DEFINITELY come and visit her.
I take three rides to get out to Yosemite. I get shown round by Patrick who has the horrible job of maintaining all the communications for the US’s state parks – he has to spend lots of time flying about in helicopters over massively pretty places. Oh well, someone has to do it I suppose… we scoot in and out of Yosemite in slightly less than an hour. (Shame on me for being such a grockle.)
The area was originally populated by Paiute (Ahwahneechee) and Sierra Miwok peoples. The Ahwahneechee were living here when the white man arrived. More white men arrived when the gold rush happened in the 19th century. In 1851 the US army pursued two hundred of the the Ahwahneechee in an attempt to drive them out. The Ahwahneechee were considered particularly violent by the Miwoks and they had frequent territorial disputes over the area. The Miwok word ‘yohhe’meti’ means: ‘they are killers’.
The US army eventually captured the Ahwahneechee, burned their village and relocated them to a reservation in Fresno.
The famous Tunnel Tree; The Wawona Tree was a Giant Sequoia that stood in the Mariposa Grove. It was 227 foot tall and had a girth of ninety foot. In 1889 had a tunnel hacked through it so tourists could photgraph themselves in their wagons. It finally gave up under the weight of heavy snow in 1969 at an estimated age of 2300 years.
Yellowstone was the first National Park anywhere in the world in 1872, and after lobbying for environmental protection by forward thinking Scotsman John Muir, in may 1903 Muir camped with President Roosevelt for three days there and by 1906 Yosemite was declared the second National Park.
Yosemite is UNESCO World Heritage Site and covers three quarter of a million acres.
Muir went on to further the idea of National Parks across other parts of America and played a crucial role in the creation of National Parks in Britain and elsewhere in the world. (Muir features on the Californian quarter coin.)
I had previously had an idea that I could cross through the Yosemite mountains eastwards into Sierra Nevada. There has been a heavy snowfall high up in the mountains and the road that leads out is shut. It’s broadly lit sunny day down here. We are at El Capitan, one of Yosemite’s most famous features. A wall of sheer rock that just rises up and up and up. We are hemmed in by mountains and it’s the kind of place where you get a crick in the neck from staggering round in total awe with your head tilted right back, and your jaw drops with dribble running down your chin.
A quick in and out – the grockeliest bit of touring I have ever done. Even down to the rapid duck into the on-site cafe loos and out of there with a handy burger from the cafe itself.
‘Oh look! Wow! Check out that wall of rock! Wow! Now howdya get out of this car park? Oh follow those other cars I guess…’
This is all down to shrewd hitching instinct, honest.
Patrick is here on a very brief business visit lasting about an hour. He has offered me a lift back out again, or I can stay here and make my own way back at my leisure.
One of the rules of hitch-hiking works like this:
some places are easy to hitch to and almost impossible to hitch out of. Tourists almost never pick hitchers up. QED, a ‘dead-end’ location which only gets tourist traffic obliges me to take my ride with Patrick back out again.
It’s a bit of a weird feeling for me, feeling so strongly as I do about ‘encountering a place properly’.
Back down in the foothills again…
A ride with Phoebe an environmental education type in Yosemite. She spends her entire summer up here showing kids from the city what else there is to experience in the world, taking them out on over-night hiking trips and building dens with them. What a fabulous thing to do with your life. We stop at the centre she operates out of. She has phoned ahead and has arranged another ride for me with one of her work colleagues.
Up through forested snow we go; then a ride with a couple of funky musicians from Berkeley (just across the bay from San Fran) out on a weekend trip.
They fill me in on how the coastal hippies very often get themselves parcels of land up here in the most secretive of places and grow themselves as much weed as they can manage.
I am out on to the backwaters of the 49, and it takes me ages to get a ride north up to Sonara; The country here is a bit like the Welsh Marches, undulating arable land. Cows. Another one of those standing in the breeze moments; recollecting and processing the people and places I have recently encountered, watching ears of wild grasses idly blowing about. Peaceful for a moment.
I get a ride with Mary and her drunk son Michael, a pair of hicks from Missouri, complete with matching red-checked shirts and battered denims. All they need to complete the outfit is a straw in the mouth each.
They have a colourful tale of running out of options back east, and risking all to try their luck out here with a cousin who had made the move earlier. I am put in mind of the Beverley Hillbillys. They really exist!
Towards the end of the day, I manage to get to the town of Sonara and instinctively do my thing of finding a dense clump of trees on a hillock at the exit end of town. Still next to a relatively busy road, but I am saved once again by the magic of wax ear plugs. (Little tip – only use wax ones; plastic ones will strip the insides of your ears of their natural oils and make them sore. And they don’t work nearly so well either)
The next morning I wake up covered in frost. I’ve dumped my black ‘donkey jacket’; a thick woollen workman’s overcoat that a friend from home had given me. It was a bulky thing so in San Jose I had shed the weight, glad to not be having to carry it and figuring it is all warm from here-on-in… Wrong!
I pack up my stuff and wander down to what amounts to being the early morning rush hour traffic. It doesn’t take long for someone to stop for me.
A big SUV slows and winding down his window, I get offered a blow job by a fat Mexican. No ta. Well I wasn’t expecting THAT this morning. So early too and I’m not even really awake yet. Derrr…
Then a little ride with a female student in a pick up (no offers of sex here which at least is not confusing), then a ride to ‘Frogtown’ – where they have frog jumping contests. (The good ones can jump about twenty foot.)
The town was made famous when Mark Twain published his very first story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County’ in 1865, which in turn brought Twain to the attention of the nation.
The guy giving me a lift through Frogtown is a Vietnam veteran who became a cocaine-busting bio-chemist in Bogota, Columbia for the US Federal Drugs squad. He declares George W Bush to be (and I quote;) ‘A whining spoilt rich kid jumped up little prick with a height complex’.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
I am really enjoying the diverse and entertaining characters that hitching down through the west of the US is bringing me. Coming overseas I have struck a new seam of human intrigue. It’s very satisfying to actually meet ‘in the flesh’ the kinds of people that I might only otherwise have seen on TV.
My next ride is with a slightly fire and brimstone Christian chap who seems not to be the brightest person in the world. Despite this, he had been a church minister in Mongolia, China and South America. Despite whatever my knee-jerk thoughts are about evangelical Christians, there is something about this guy I find quite endearing. The fact that he says he loves life and has no regrets I think may have clinched it. He has a simplicity about him that I envy.
After painted stories of the Far East, a ride with some druggy trailer trash who have come up from San Francisco, an hours drive away. They are out hunting for crystals. This at first seems to be the stuff of hippy bong-dreams, but evidently there’s a wide variety of rocks and minerals along the San Andreas fault line.
They drop me off by what at first glance seems to be a cherry tree laden with blooms but on closer inspection turns out to be an almond tree. The ground is littered with what looks like dried green peaches but is actually the nuts with their outer shells and green husks.
So I go from a car full of get rich quick hopefuls to stuffing my rucksack to the gunnels with almonds for free. I think there might be something poetic in that.
Its warmer now out here in the open, the sun is shining and I have free food. Three things that pretty much always make me happy.
Another ride with an old chap who feeds me some of his home-grown oranges. He is a very nice chap who looks Norwegian but is of Irish origins, his family name being Bellamy.
Hmm! I can really appreciate a place where you can grown your own oranges and almonds. Welcome to the fruit basket that is California.
California; ‘The Golden State’-
The name California originates from the Spanish conquistadors, taken from ‘Las Serges de Esplandian,’ a Spanish romance written about 1510 which describes an imaginary island; an earthly paradise.
Another ride with another war vet (Korea/Vietnam) who flew fighter planes (says it was great fun) and now builds ‘muscle cars’ for kicks; not souped up, he just wants to go extremely fast.
He drops me off at the Sierra Trading Post where I proceed to flirt with Julie who works there. She’s forty, very yummy and great conversation. I of course want to jump into her knickers but unfortunately she’s very married and a bit biblical.
She’s stuck in a rut – I tell her to get driving lessons. I tell her I wish I could take her with me, tell her her husbands a very lucky man and we swap email addresses. At least I tell her how I feel, which I’m glad I did. I’m bored of unanswered ‘what ifs?’.
After initially buying some bread, I had left the shop with a nagging ‘unfinished’ feeling, so I go back and tell her I like her; something my innate shyness usually prevents. At least I think we have brightened each others day a bit. She is dead sexy though…
Standing not far from the store. I get no ride all afternoon. The excitement of the day catches up with me so I sleep under a tree pretty solidly. I wake up to frost all around me. Eventually I get a ride with a nice chap who gets me stoned, an appropriate way to leave California I feel.
He asks me ‘What do I think of the Americans then?’.
I tell him that I have been really pleasantly surprised. I have met some really great people. ‘Where have you travelled in the States?’. Just down the West Coast. ‘Oh! Yeah it’s all pretty cool round the West. Where you heading?’. New Mexico. ‘Oh wow!’ (he laughs) ‘You might find people aren’t necessarily quite so friendly further east! There’s some pretty whacked out people about!’.
It’s a strange one for me. On the one hand I have had some anxieties about coming to the States, but then on the other hand I have had people telling me all my adult life that hitch-hiking is nothing but an invitation to trouble.
He is great company though so I feel pretty good (and somewhat stoned again).
A ride with a Mexican kid who is very odd and wants to know what I am carrying with me. (Well that’s a weird question and also none of his bloody business!.)
Then another ride with an older Mexican gentleman who more than makes up for the discourtesy of the previous ride. He takes me to a casino and buys me a huge fish and chips dinner, in honour of my Englishness, I suppose. Even though the effects of the dope have now worn off, eating fish and chips with an elderly Mexican ina sand-coloured suit and matching cowboy hat in a casino full of neon flashing fruit machines is still pretty surreal.
Finally waving goodbye to the old fella as he drives away, I gather my wits once more and walk out to the other end of town (Gardnerville).
I get a short ride further out, and then another ride to Topaz. I am in Sierra Nevada now. I am between 6000-7000 foot up and rather cold. In between shelling dozens of almonds (which serves to lighten my load considerably), I get a two hour ride to Mammoth Lakes ski resort.
Sierra Nevada (‘Range of Lights’) has a sublime high rolling beauty to it, but pretty much zilch going on in it except for a huge salty lake. (Lake Mono.)
During the time of the dawning of things, much of western America was under sea, and as this sea became land-locked, the huge lakes mostly evaporated to leave various extremely salty lakes. (Hence Salt Lake City.)
I have moved away now from the comforting richness of the lush green coast now the first time since arriving in the US. Having crossed the mountainous climb of the Sierra Nevada edging up towards the infamously bleak flatness of Death Valley, it is immediately noticable how there are significantly fewer people here.
The mountains sponging up most of the available rain that blows in off the Pacific, this is clearly a much tougher place to scratch a living from.
Now I’m in a red and yellow plastic McDonalds wondering where to sleep for the night – it’s going to be cold. I’m 8000 foot up and I have ditched my donkey-jacket. Yuk. There’s a hostel for thirty bucks a night but that’s too much, and I’m a tight arse.
Well, I ‘sleep’ in a half-constructed building, wearing everything, including my waterproofs; found a propped-up wooden ladder that lead to a first floor of bare hard concrete. No external walls, wind whistling in. I pull the ladder up behind me. The floor is dusty, scattered with empty cement bags and other builder’s junk.
I get up at 6.30 am, pack my stuff away, which is horrible as my body doesn’t like the temperature change from cold to colder, and my fingers are so cold that they hurt like hell.
I go back to the nearby McDonalds for a long slow coffee. Look in the mirror in the rest-room. I really do look like an over-sized tramps turd.
I am a zombie. I have a shave. That helps a lot but I still feel dreadful.
Funny how a change in circumstances makes me view McDonalds differently.
My camera is broken and I want to get it mended before I get to the Grand Canyon. I don’t have many pictures of California, which is a pity, as I have enjoyed California more than pretty much anywhere else – it’s got so much variety. I take my camera apart on the McDonalds dining table, and put it back together again, and now it works fine. God only knows how I did that, but never mind. Tomorrow I will be in Death Valley, and then I’ll make my way out to Las Vegas to meet up with Roel and Floor.
I start off down the road and soon get a ride, the heating’s cranked up and I thaw out physically, parallel with a nasty smell that comes out with it, filling the car. My brain is heavily in ‘duh!’ mode.
On our way, we pass through the ironically named town of ‘Independance’. Ironic in that during the Second World War, it was the location of an Japanese-American prison camp in an area called Manzanar. (‘Apple orchard’ in Spanish.)
After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbour in 1942, America was compelled the join the Second World War. Franklin D Roosevelt authorised the detention of all American citizens of Japanese descent. San Francisco even had its own Japantown, there were so many Japanese-Americans there.
In total, over 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, men, women and children were all deemed to be a threat to National Security and were held in ten camps situated throughout the Western US.
At Manzanar, 10,000 people were held during the war, two thirds of whom were born in the US.
This is a little-known part of American history; the camps were all way out in isolated areas. When the camps closed down after the war, they were largely cleared of most of the evidence of their ever having existed. (And we thought it was just the Nazis who liked to pretend nothing ever happened…)
All that is left of the camp is a guard tower, the remains of a traditional Japanese garden and the gymasium which doubled as a social hall. These days it is the museum for the Manzanar Natioanl Park, dedicated to the memory of the camp.
I get dropped off at the road junction for Death Valley and end up walking about six to eight miles into the desert, a good place to come to my senses finally.
After several encounters with a low flying jet fighter screaming about and baring it’s arse to me close up – it seems to be homing in on me as some kind of target practice – I get picked up by some sketchy old geezer who straight away tells me he’s been inside for hitting people and now he’s lost his right to carry a gun.
Great.
I tell him politely that no-one in England has guns, so there’s not really very much I can say about that. Thank god it’s only a short ride; He very soon drops me off by the collection of trailers you might vaguely and over generously describe as a small town. There’s battered old vehicles and dead aluminium dwellings scattered about spectacularly in the desert sand. Truly the land of trailer trash. The place is called Keeler. As in ‘keeling over’ perhaps.
This is not a place I want to stand waiting for a ride, so I walk some more into the desert, get a tiny tiny ride with a Kiwi woman whose aim in life seems to be trying to get citizenship in as many countries as possible. She married an American, got a divorce, works as a nanny, hence the baby in back of the car.
And now here I am, at the quintessential hitching point; a T-junction in a desert, and the only thing that’s going anywhere fast is a cold wind.
I Zen out on shelling almonds, and thus also usefully reducing the dead weight in my front bag. I’ve become one of those people who carries a huge rucksack behind, and a small one in front. I used to mock those people with their stupidly heavy loads. The moral of the story? Be careful who you mock, lest you inadvertently end up like them.
Anyhows.
I spend some indeterminate time going nowhere, maybe an hour or so, or seventy to ninety shelled almonds… hmm I like the thought of standing still at a speed of ninety AAH; (Almonds An Hour.)
I get a ride with a splendid chap called Mike who’s an attorney at law, one step away from being a judge. He likes: mountain biking, weed, peyote, rescuing messed up kids from a grossly inadequate judicial system, playing flamenco guitar (at the end of our day he plays it very well I discover), geology (a fountain of fascinating information), kitsch (we listen to cowboy film soundtracks as we head into Death Valley – very funny), the ‘Cows With Guns’ song – a pretty obscure anarco-folk song about armed revolutionary cows, and Kraftwerk. (Perfect for crossing the desolate Arizona desert afterwards.)
The journey into Paramint Valley, the most glorious, spectacular part of Death Valley just makes me laugh out loud, and not just because of the cowboy music.
At the bottom of the valley, we make camp. I go off for a little wander. I check out little badlands style hillocks which puff up and do weird things on the rare occasion that it rains, on account of the fact that they are made largely of bicarbonate of soda. They still look brown, but you can find whole whitened chunks of it lying about and in stream deposits. Weird.
After some camp-fire flamenco Mike sleeps in the car and me under yet another tree.
Death Valley is the lowest, hottest and driest area in North America.
Next day we drive out through the lowest point of all, an area called ‘Badwater’ and have to wait for twenty minutes whilst road works happen. There’s this poor guy who has to stand there in the middle of nowhere swapping round this ‘slow/stop’ sign every twenty minutes. I decide that this must be even worse than hitch-hiking, cos he doesn’t get to go anywhere.
Travelling out of the valley to the sound of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express album, we climb up and up and up and out into the Arizona desert, which frankly I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It’s vast, bare, ugly and brown. It’s scattered with distant trailer parks. I don’t see any industry here and there’s certainly no agriculture; there’s barely a blade of grass anywhere. It’s horrible. Mike reckons they must be itinerant miners (abundant and multifarious mineral deposits), and if they are not doing that, then its probably crystal meth factories. At some point we pass a sign offering land for sale at 400 bucks an acre. Think I’ll pass on that.
We arrive at Las Vegas. (Mike calls it alternately ‘The Belly Of The Beast’ and ‘Lost Wages’.) I am figuring Roel and Floor might be here, but given their previous ability for procrastination and the hideousness of this place and their love of the countryside, instinct tells me that they aren’t here anyway. (I am right as I later find out.)
I change my mind about getting out here, and jump back into Mike’s car and he takes me on through more of the desperately unlovely Arizona desert.
There’s a place called ‘Drop City’ out here somewhere. It was a failed community which was based on the premise of building lots of geo-dome dwellings out of old car panels out in the middle of nowhere and dropping lots of acid. I wonder why it failed. I can’t imagine.
I say farewell to Mike at Kingman, which is the end of the famous Route 66.
Just as I am about to hitch-hike out of this place, a young woman with red hair beckons to me, and I go to talk to her.
‘Hey there! What you doin’? You a hitch-hiker?’ You want some coffee? Come on over I’ll make you some! You English? Hey wow!’
I go back to her motel room on the other side of the road, where she lives with her kid. He’s five, in bed and watching TV five inches from his face with the volume on too loud and eating crisps.
This place is straight out of the fifties, right down to the trapezoid schizoid flickering neon motel sign flanked by two sad palm trees. An empty swimming pool behind it.
She’s Uma Thurman. Gary Oldman is next door shooting up some home cooking…
There’s a number of characters involved in this scenario, a couple of whacked-out freaks who live upstairs who claim to have nothing going for themselves but ‘violent men and easy women’. They’re barrel of laughs (not), but I have dinner with them. There’s broken glass all over the floor.
Downstairs afterwards a nice intelligent skater called Tom is trying rescue Tanya (the red-haired mum) from this mess.
They’ve both popped various pills and drunk lots. He’s holding it together, and she’s trying to get into my knickers. Why is it that I hardly ever find myself attracted to people who want to get into my knickers? I dunno.
Tom actually seems like a very decent chap. He’s worked in inner city kids projects, and has written a book about hobo-riding the freight trains round the States, and bizarrely, he likes Citizen Fish and Subhumans. (Two very obscure English punk bands from near my home town.) This minor detail is incongruously close to home for me in an event that is otherwise like being in a crap cops ‘n’ guns TV thriller. I wish him well in his interesting predicament. (Rescuing messed up woman and kid vs. his non-committal traveller lifestyle.)
Halfway through the night, various dope deals are made, and various conversations ensue about burglary, fighting and getting drugs. Pretending to be asleep, I keep half an eye on my stuff. I ease myself out of the place early next morning, mumbling some unconvincing ‘cheerio’, not wanting to be noticed leaving anyway.
In terms of casual migration, It often seems that those that find ordinary life with the masses not to their taste have a habit of moving away and ending up clinging to the edges of places.
Kingman, being the ‘full-stop’ of the western end of the iconic Route 66, is clearly ‘The End of the Road’.
With all it’s rock and roll/Quentin Tarantino associations, my encounter with Tanya and her associates has a kind of inevitability about it.
Kingman has that horrible sticky vortex feeling dreaded by hitch-hikers. I try for the rest of the day to hitch out of this place. Taking all day, I finish shelling my nuts (well that’s some blessing), and walk about eight miles and still don’t get a ride.
I walk to the airport, only to find it closed, so I can’t find out if there is a bus out of this place. I am cold, tired, very smelly, my back is totally messed up after trying to sleep on freezing concrete and I don’t know how to get out of this hole. I sit down dejected and get my wits together.
The place is practically deserted. A pick-up truck rocks up. A nice chap asks me how I am, and I tell him ‘Not very good actually’.
He is very pleased to meet an Englishman and I am pleased to meet someone friendly and trustable and with the ride back into town that he gives me. It’s a sad irony that my Englishness is often a kind of ticket to celebrity in the States, whilst Americans on the whole are often treated with such guarded hostility back home.
I get the Greyhound out to Flagstaff, an altogether much much nicer little bohemian town near the southern side of the Grand Canyon. It has a university with free internet and a very friendly hostel which picks me up from the bus depot for free. A rubbish day ends the right way up.
The ride on the bus from Kingman is interesting. It’s full of the kind of people who can’t afford cars. A very regal Mexican chap in his fifties wearing a casual suit and a cowboy hat sits next to me, and has very good vibes though we don’t say much.
I sleep a bit, and then listen in on the conversation that is going on in the two seats behind me; a young black guy and a young woman talking about astrology, which turns into some deep stuff, with him reeling off his fears; mostly about whether he should fight for his country or whether he should stay home and marry his heavily-pregnant girlfriend. The woman tries to give him some answers. It’s very interesting, and none of my damn business.
It’s kind of odd that a black guy is so keen to fight for a country which has regarded blacks as second class citizens even within his own parents’ lifetime.
I’ve spent about three days at the Flagstaff hostel, sleeping a lot, and taking full advantage of their free breakfast option. Lots and lots of fruit and jam on toast.
I almost feel ready to go and see this Grand Canyon thing; I think when I arrived here, if I had gone out again I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I’m a bit sceneried-out. That’s cool; after the Grand Canyon I should be ready to go to Taos, New Mexico, which I found out on the backpacker’s grapevine is not only ‘a very nice place’, but also where Georgia O’Keefe lived/came from.
I’ve been feeling a bit lost and missing Sofie a bit; I guess I just need to get my energy back, write all this up and send it off (it has the effect of letting go of it all, which is good for my head), and I’ve bean sprout production back in full swing. Okay! What’s Next?? Oh yeah, the Grand Canyon…
I really should have gone back to bed and got my energy back, but instead I go to a highland music thing with Chris (a female office clerk from Bicester) and then spend the rest of the evening drinking, complete with Steve (from Peterborough, England) and Avery (from Ohio) who are verbally acting out all their sexual fantasies all over Chris, which is surprising to say the least and bluer than the deep blue sea. Chris seems to find it quite flattering on her ego.
Next morning I’ve got a god-awful hangover, and me and Chris pick up her hire car and do a whizz-bang 600 mile round trip grockle-style tour of Monument Valley. I am truly awed by the stunningly peaceful and beautiful colours when we actually bother to stop anywhere and actually breathe in this place, Chris being keener to do the rocket-paced thing.
We reach our penultimate destination: the Four Corners landmark (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico all meet together). We think about playing inter-state twister but instead pose in lewd ways for each others photos.
We buy Navajo fry bread, which pretty much is Yorkshire pudding. Maybe Yorkshire pudding is a global psychological archetype. I like to think so. In deepest darkest Congo, they’ll be eating Yorkshire Pudding for tea. In communist China they are wearing their grey uniforms and eating Yorkshire Pudding. In antarctica the penguins are all noshing on Yorkshire Pudding. Okay I don’t suppose they are. Anyway, the Navajo fry bread is very good of course.
This Four Corners place is odd. The meeting points of a white man’s map. Actually a lot of Arizona is spectacularly odd. The four states marker is a big brass thing inlaid in concrete with a wide ring of native traders stalls cobbled together largely out of plywood, sensitively obliterating the view.
Actually, beyond that, the scraggy desert out of the corner of one eye bears more than a passing resemblance to a large quarry or an empty landfill site. I mention this to Chris and she agrees with me. We reckon we’ve both got scenery overload. Apart from this little insight, it crosses my mind what a spectacularly desperate place this must be to try to live in. All the dust and rocks you can eat. What spectacularly ungenerous people the American government have been to give the Native Americans this seemingly dreadful scrap of land to exist on.
After the deliberate cheesy tourist approach we feel hugely incongruously appropriate to this particular site (it’s all Chris’s doing honest), we zoom off another thousand, sorry, 100-odd miles through more sublime desert and weird outcroppy rock things.
The area is smattered with little bits of ‘res’ (reservation settlements), that have names like ‘Many Farms’ and ‘Mexican Hat’. We figure Mexican Hat is named after a particular outcrop of rock which is a pointy thing with a boulder and then a flat slab on top. Doesn’t really look like a Mexican Hat that much. They should have called it ‘funny-slab-on-a-blobby-rock’. They would have done that if it was England I’m sure.
We see lots of freshly killed dogs on the roads that have yet to be gobbled up by the local carrion. (Ravens I expect.) There should be at least one place called Dead Dog. Maybe I’ll start up an intentional community back home and call it that in memory of the experience. The rocks are weird and orange, the sky huge wide and blue and the air thick with quiet. This is an astonishing part of the world, but it doesn’t look like you could grow a darned thing here.
We arrive at the petrified forest park off the I-40 with five minutes to spare before closing. The park attendant in her little booth lets us in for free on condition that we pass through without stopping, which of course we pay absolutely no heed to at all having come all this way. The park consists of a ten mile drive with various view points which look out over fossilly things we’ve already seen for free. When we eventually reach the strange forest remains, our greedy tourist appetites are at last sated. Laying down like tree trunks that have broken into chunks upon impact with the ground, and scattered like the fallen pillars of a Pompei Colosseum, these ‘rocks’ are unlike any fossils we have ever seen. Much of the surface round the trunks still looks like shiny hardened bark and wood fibre, even after 250 million years. Across the rings, there are some fabulous works of ancient abstract art. The rings are worked into bands of different colours; greys, whites, red, pale blue and lilac. As hard as we look at them, we can’t figure out in the slightest how these colours have managed to appear sometimes random and sometimes banded. Weird.
Dusk arrived, and we set off to complete this 600 mile loop back to Flagstaff.
Chris is very refreshing to be with, having so many common reference points really makes a nice change from what has become my usual. We talk about sex and relationships on the way home. Very good. When we get back we realise how tired we are and totally flake out in our respective boudoirs.
I’m still full of snot, wiped out and not sleeping. Next morning I go off on the fifty dollar bus trip and tour of the Grand Canyon. I was going to do it unaided and for free, but I’m too wiped out for that. Money is for spending, so I take it easy.
On board is Julie, from London, a healery type who’s bouncing round the States doing new-agey therapy courses on a wodge of money she won from some Reader’s Digest type thing (‘It was obviously my destiny!’), Steve from Dorking, an estate agent with a skinhead haircut and a big navy-bred personality. Very decent chap, even if he does too much talking for my liking once in the Canyon. Nadia, twenty, from Eastern Australia somewhere, a young mousy first love couple from my home town of Reading who are very quiet and coy, another quiet and coy Ozzie bloke who looks like the main character from ‘Shine’, and Leona from Darwin in Australia who looks about forty-five-ish and is great fun.
Leona looks dapper in tweeds and coming from tropical Darwin she’s feeling the cold a bit. Talking to Leona is hilarious. She talks and I just grin at her.
‘What? What are you grinning at?’
‘I’ve got to come to Australia!’
‘Why’s that then?’
‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about!’
‘Oh – well – what I am saying is … (blah blah blah)’
I didn’t realise it, but Australia has its own slang different from English slang. Unwittingly, Leona is trying to explain her slang with other equally bizarre sayings. She must think I’ve got kangaroos in my top paddock. My favourite expression is a piece of Aussie abuse: ‘I hope your ears turn into arseholes and they shit all over your shoulders.’
The Grand Canyon.
Well – you already know what it looks like.
After a spot of lunch, we take the South Kaibab trail down to the halfway point from the bottom. I race off ahead so I can savour the too short time that we spend down here, away from the chattering classes behind me – I’ve come here to feel something of this place, not listen to Steve from Dorking banging on loudly about his mortgage repayments…
It’s beautiful, we’re all in the middle of it blissed out and tired and the stunningly tranquil vibe has got the better of Steve. Our guide Tim is a quiet hiker type who I instantly like. The walk back up is not as hard as I thought it would be, after seeing the knackered faces that have come into the hostel previously. I guess carrying twelve tons of rucksack every day must be doing me some good then. I am surprised how okay I feel, considering my general wiped-outness.
We all go out for a Thai meal that night to complete the group thing. A nice big plate of hot chilli to blast the crap out of me (hopefully).
The next day I sleep lots, and Julie does her healy thing on me, and Leona gives me a load of Chinese medicine which thankfully is easier to deal with than the dried rats legs and tree bark that Chinese medicine often seems to be.
I am going to go back up to the Canyon again, but in my current state I think I’d be asking for trouble.
Me and Julie go out for another Thai meal and on the way we spot an old drunk who has collapsed near the rails just off the railroad crossing on the way. We pull him up and literally two minutes later a sodding great train comes thundering through. He thanks us for saving his life. (We didn’t really, though it would have scared the crap out of him having the train come by so close to him.)
Two drunk Native Americans do some wobbly ritual to bless us all, and then they tap us for a couple of dollars each. It’s a strange encounter. One of them tells Julie his phone number in an offer to continue his blessings…
Next day after no sleep yet again; snot, dry throat, thundering tooting trains ALL night (every night; warning drunks to get off the track I guess), me and Julie say our goodbyes, and I get a lift up to the I-40 where I can look forward to an afternoon of sitting doing nothing waiting for a ride either for a long time or not long at all, which actually seems at the moment like a win-win situation.
I get picked up by BoDale, a young guy driving his dad home. He’s an utter freak. Full of a mixture of ecological concern, hatred of almost everybody, Masonic/governmental/alien conspiracy theories and then seems to have a certain amount of respectful insight into whole groups of people that I previously imagined that he hated. One thing he tells me I vow to him I will write down because it is so cranky:
He and his sister used to keep rabbits, and one was born with two heads, but was almost dead. His sister tried to revive it by putting it in the microwave.
This story seemed to sum up this strange mixture of off-the-wall goodwill that this guy has.
Strange road sign spotted en route-
‘Meteorites! 50% off!’
After he drops his dad off at home in Holbrook (desert trailer trash central) he buys me dinner and tells me how he’s hooked up on speed, crack and heroin.
Bodale’s life thus far has been financed by trading hard drugs and ‘native trinkets’;
He goes down to ‘a gap in the fence’ on the US/Mexican border and buys drugs, which he pays for in a combination of cash and items made by the Navajo Indians. He then returns to the Navajo, sells them their drugs and barters for more trinkets.
He feels totally trapped by his circumstances and wants to make something of his life. He talks about getting out into the world more and finding new opportunities.
I tell him about WWOOF; World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A network that offers learning and experience about lovely Green lifestyles in exchange for about five hours a day labour. You get good food and a nice place to stay, meet nice people and learn genuinely useful skills whilst doing them. It costs twenty-five pounds a year to join and apart from that it’s free. And there are thousands of hosts all over the world.
Very handy if your life’s gone up Shit Creek.
We drive on and at some point he informs me that he doesn’t have enough gas to go any further. Knowing that I want to get to Albuquerque, he offers to take me there if I can pay for the extra gas.
February 14th industrial site, Albuquerque. Almost full moon.
I sleep out in an industrial estate and am quite warm for a change. I have a strange feeling of peacefulness. I think it’s from still being a bit ill and my ears are bunged up.
Just had a freaky ride into town. Bush has issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to show him where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are hidden and everyone’s waiting for the war to start.
The driver is paranoid about what Al Qaeda might do to him when Bush finally kicks off. The Christians are getting holier-than-thou and maybe it’s the ‘End Days’. The government has put the country on Orange Alert from terrorist attacks. The guy giving me my lift stops for gas and discusses with another stranger at the gas pump possible tactics for defending themselves from ‘Those Crazy Towelheads’.
Okay. This is all too weird.
I decide to abandon the Earthship thing in Taos to get out of the States sooner rather than later, I don’t think I can tolerate any more American paranoia. Either I go to Brazil with Sofie, or I go to Australia directly. Dunno.
If we travel through Central America will we get mistaken for Americans and get shot by the locals? Maybe paranoia is an infectious disease…
I get into Albuquerque and try to find a travel agent, but can’t find one open cos it’s Saturday. I go to a library to see what I can find out on the net. Greyhound bus is 135 bucks to LA, sixty-five bucks if I wait three days…
Albuquerque is a very pretty city – Hispanic architecture is really different – lots of soft marshmallowy-looking concrete squares, cubes and zig-zags with lots of mural paintings and street art. I like Albuquerque. I have lunch in a groovy cafe playing wonderful funky jazz on the stereo. I ask the manager who the music is being made by. It’s The Rebirth Brass Band ‘Rebirth B. B. Kickin’ it Live’ on Rounder Records and a brass band rapper called Coolbone (V. Good!)
I get a bus back out to the freeway and attempt to hitch back out west. Totally crap.
I go to Wild Oats Health Store at dusk and discover a better cheaper bus to LA going tomorrow, courtesy of the good people who work in the store. Also I find MARMITE! I buy two jars, and also some turkey jerky, just so I can have the opportunity to say:
‘I bought turkey jerky in Albuquerque; how quirky.’
I stay in the shop writing this and reading free health magazines until 9.30pm and then go and sleep behind a pile of pallets behind K-Mart on the other side of the road.
I get into town the next morning by the skin of my teeth just in time to get the LA bus which even though it’s much cheaper than the other bus, first travels east several hundred miles via El Paso in Texas before heading back to L.A. How’s that for a roundabout route?
The rest of New Mexico and the little bit of Texas I see is nasty desert. Some people really like desert. I don’t get it. To me its the geographical equivalent of Artexed ceilings.
El Paso is pretty big, poor looking and industrial in a digging the ground up and wrecking it kind of way.
El Paso is probably one of the seediest, grimiest low-down places I have ever accidentally found myself in. I have a wait of about two hours, which is about as long as I would want to stay here. I am certainly glad that I don’t need to stay over-night. The place just feels like it is in a permanent state of crime waiting to happen. I leave before any does.
Boarding a bus is sometimes the cue for a gut-felt feeling of sadness about leaving, sometimes mild excitement about what might be coming next. Sometimes its gratitude to be safely out from inclement weather, of rain or cold.
This time it’s a sense of mild relief mixed with a sort of worn-down reticence about making yet another super-long distance haul across country, made worse by the fact that I am going back exactly the same way I just came; an almost completely pointless act of arse-aching travel.
The ride back to LA is long and uneventful, but for about half an hour when I calculate that I must be roughly in the area of Roswell, home of UFO/government conspiracy theories; there is a strange blob hanging motionless in the sky, which then slowly drifts off somewhere. I am really hoping that it would zoom off at some impossible speed, then I would be certain that I have had a Close Encounter of some kind.
I arrive in LA at 5 am Duh! Seems like it’s been National Make No Sense Day… I get the bus up to Bakersfield just north of LA, look at my emails to see if Sofie had dropped me a phone number… Nope, but she does seem to be heading out of the US pretty quickly too…
I make various abortive attempts to find out what the phone number where she’s staying is, fail, start to get stressed, stop, eat pizza, buy a ticket to Sacramento, then cancel it – I have this nasty feeling I am going to find out where Sofie is a day late and it will all be a stress nightmare anyway.
I change direction and get me a ticket back through LA and down to San Diego. And then remember that I’ve got a load of pre-Central American preparing to do: get Larium (anti-malaria drugs that sometimes either give you psychedelic dreams or make you psychotic), buy a Spanish phrasebook, a guidebook, things like that. Argh! Next stop, land of linguistic incomprehension. This will be interesting in the Chinese sense. At least I’m less likely to get anthraxed.
February 20th
I have been in San Diego for three days sorting things out. I meet a guy from New Zealand who’s been all round Central America and South America for two years (carrying nothing but a small leather shoulder bag too). By virtue of just being here being able to talk to me, i.e. being alive, he puts a lot of my worries to rest.
Sofie’s doing her own thing, which makes most sense, and she gives me loads of WWOOF addresses in Central America. This is fab as I now have somewhere to aim at.
I meet a big round chap outside the library who runs a coffee and bagel stall who when I ask him why he has a computer and a digital camera with him, tells me he’s using the stall as a basis for a book about all the people he meets whilst he’s running the stall. I take a picture of him and tell him that now he’s in my story.
I’m in the hostel, there are lots of people writing travel journals – I feel sorry for publishers.
The militaristic gung-ho attitude here is starting to really wind me up; the media reports are so one-sided it’s just plain manipulation and not many people seem to see it. Scary and crazy. I’m outta here, and if anyone asks; I’m Canadian.
I finally get to get out of this super-affluent cosy fluffy dollar bills glass and chrome skyscrapery place in about an hour.
Return to Contents Page.
MEXICO:
Borders are funny places. They’re like the geographical version of New Years Day. Out with the old and in with the new. Crossing into Tijuana Mexico is something vaguely monumental. The border infamous for its illegalities; drugs, immigrants, border patrol shootings, border rushes of crowds of a thousand strong that the police can’t deal with.
Off the tram from San Diego, some helpful directions from a woman I could happily have diverted some time with, up a convoluted concrete walkway complete with iron bar windows (very Kafka-esque) across a road and down more ugly twisty stairs fit for herding cattle through. I go through a football-ground type turnstile cla-cla-cla-cla-clank, and thats it; me at the beginning of Central America; of probably unbearable heat, unfamiliar food, fearful wolf-men following my every rich white man move, slavering at the mere sight of a camera or wallet, ready to befriend me, and then lure me to some nasty end. Speaking a language so ill-understood by me, I might as well try to perform Shakespeare to a shed full of excited turkeys. Mosquitoes and bad food waiting to break me down, empty me out and send me running cross-kneed to the nearest airport home.
Standing there, in Mexico Scary Place, fumbling with my bum bag, my passport in a money belt and trying not to be spotted retrieving my valuables from my supposedly secret places. Paranoid as you like, wondering how it’s going to work out trying to find things out, buy malaria drugs, get my passport stamped, buy a bus ticket.
I try to get a stamp first. ‘Desculpe, puerde darme un stampe por ma pasaporte, por favor’. Talking turkey gobble that I’ve concocted out of a phrase book fantastically produces results of a kind. I get directed up the ways. I try again. The man asks if I go by bus or plane. By bus I tell him. ‘Go to the bus terminal; they will do it.’ he tells me. I follow a series of further convoluted directions and end up quite unexpectedly at the bus/plane man again in his little sharp uniform leaning back in his chair watching a TV hanging high above on the wall. He’s not very keen to see me a second time.
‘Err.. I couldn’t find the bus terminal?’ I squirm apologetically.
‘You told me you go by plane!’
‘No, by bus’
‘No! Plane!’
‘No – bus’
‘No! Plane! You lie to me! Why you lie to me?!’
This isn’t making sense, so I walk out and leave him to fester in his delusions. The guide book insists that I must get a stamp in my passport at the border, or I’ll get sent all the way back to the border again when patrols check passports halfway down the country. Nobody wants to stamp my passport, no matter how many people I ask. They all tell me it will happen on the bus, in the next town, later on, not now. I guess my whole vaguely freaked paranoia about getting into some kind of trouble in this alien land is much more to do with stories I’ve heard than with what is actually going on. No-one tries to rip me off. I don’t get hassled by scary beggars, apart from the idiot Hitler border guard, every one is nice, and even he doesn’t really count cos nearly all border guards are idiot Hitlers.
The first things that greet me once I get into Tijuana proper is lots of little stalls selling tacos and tamales etc and a whole block of farmacias. I try about eight in a row to buy Larium and then give up and get Chloroquine the alternative which you have to inconveniently take every day, unlike Larium which is a once-only dose.
A chap on the street tries to set me up with a prostitute, which I decline, and then I get a taxi to the bus depot which is very inconveniently somewhere totally other. I guess I could find out where it is and walk, but frankly I am rather baffled and the willingness to spend money to get out of a jam overcomes me. The taxi driver is very decent, is obviously used to baffled visitors, and he sorts out buying the bus ticket for me. My bus is due in twenty minutes and – hey presto – I am on my way to some place that I’ve picked at random that looks like I wouldn’t arrive at two in the morning or something crap like that.
The patrol that is supposed to send me back to TJ arrives in the middle of the night. They don’t give me a stamp, nor do they turn me back. They check everyone’s bags, and on we go. I wonder whether technically I am an illegal immigrant in Mexico. I quite like the idea of that.
In the morning, in some town I forget the name of, I sit reading my Mexico guide book and Spanish phrase book in the bus terminal for about an hour trying to figure out which way is up, and what I am going to do about it. I eventually go and get some money out of a bank, do some shopping and buy another bus ticket, all in gloriously botched Spanish.
By now, I am feeling thoroughly touristed out. I feel no inclination to go look at Inca or Aztec ruins or anything like that. I’ve got a couple of farms in Belize that I’m aiming at, and that’s where I’m going. Besides I’m starting to run out of money, so I can’t really afford to hang around pointlessly.
The ironic thing is, that you can’t hitch hike for free here so I may as well get the bus. The guide book has been trying to convince me that Mexican buses are cheap. They might seem that way if you are used to going by plane or trains. It eventually costs me about 200 US dollars to get down to the Caribbean coast at Chetumal. It’s just as well that Mexican buses are the best I’ve ever been on anywhere ever. (A long time afterwards I discover that I have been riding the posh buses, and not the cheapo pleb buses.)
Mexico City doesn’t seem to be the smelly mad hell-hole that people say it is. Mexico City has supposedly the worst air pollution of any city in the world, but I find the air perfectly breathable and the populace generally pretty ordinary and pleasant. I manage to negotiate my way round the underground/overground metro train system to the southbound bus terminal. It strikes me as a fairly adequate and interesting way to see the city.
I can’t believe how many Volkswagen Beetles there are here. Most are green and white taxis, there must be thousands (well definitely hundreds anyway). There’s loads of VW campers as well, all of them white. Here’s a travel photography competition for you: see how many VW’s you can get into one picture in Mexico City. It’s not allowed to be of a taxi rank. Form the metro overground, I think I managed six. It’s a bit like hunting gazelles in the Serengeti in a Land Rover. Oh all right then, it’s nothing like.
On, on, on through the night, stopping briefly at Villahermosa for a mid-night bus swap until finally arriving at Chetumal a whole day later. I have missed the 5.30 pm to Belize City by twenty minutes, which is a relief actually, I don’t think my sanity can cope with another bus ride quite so soon. I wander off into the dusk, nibbling spicy tacos from a vendor, do some food shopping at a nearby supermarket and then have to put up with all the shoppers looking at me outside the shop, like they’d never seen a gringo eating yoghurt before.
I walk back over to the bus depot wondering how I am going to get through the night. I spot a backpacker wearing a please-don’t-shoot-me-I’m-not-American Canadian red maple badge and a wonderful trilby. We get chatting; he’s called Shelby, comes from Winnipeg and is feeling lonely. A bit strange since he’s only been away from home for four days. We clump together with a Danish woman, Kristen who seems to wear a glum expression I think in order to scare blokes off.
We sleep in a pile of rucksacks outside the depot on the grass. Morning comes… me and Shelby discover a shared enthusiasm for the English band XTC (which is very satisfying – I’ve never met anyone else that likes them even if they’ve heard of them). Kirsten and Shelby disappear off to Tikal, a ruiny thing in Guatemala and then I get the later bus to Belize City.
Return to Contents Page.
BELIZE:
CHOCOLATE AND KARATE CHICKENS
Most people I meet seem never to have heard of Belize. It’s only a small country, 400 miles long and has only seven towns. It used to be part of Guatamala, and then a bunch of British pirates (really) got their mitts on it and renamed it British Honduras and plundered it for timber and sugar. Then they bored with it for some reason and it re-gained it’s independence. The Belizeans are happy for the Brits to leave a few soldiers hanging about, just to keep the Guatemalans from trying to claim it back as theirs. In retaliation for this, I am later to discover, the Guatemalans are very keen to swamp the southern end of the country with the sounds of their very terrible radio stations crashing across the border.
Back in Mexico, Chetumal is practically on the border with Belize and seven miles on we cross;
A black Belizean customs woman with a familiar Caribbean lilt in her voice nods her head from side to side in a ‘I’ve said this a thousand times in the last hour’ kind of way as she reels out a list of things I might want to declare, the last one being ‘more than 5000 US dollars’. ‘I wish!’ says I,
‘Yeah, me too!’ she grins and laughs.
We pass through sugar-cane country, which bizarrely reminds me of Thetford Forest in Norfolk back home. Big flattish fields with trees in the distance. I guess I must be getting a little homesick.
The Belizeans are a smudged cultural mix of black Caribs, Mayans, Hispanics, assorted westerners and a group of Carib/Mayan mix called the Garifuna. Apart from spots of Spanish, it’s a great relief to be able to understand what folks are saying. As soon as I step off the bus in Belize City, I instinctively like the place. It’s very colourful, slightly shabby and very Caribbean with lots of calypso and reggae about the place.
Belize City is actually a medium-sized town really. No sky-scraping office blocks here. The country’s tiny and has a real sense of cosiness about it. I’m by the Caribbean Sea! That certainly isn’t anything I had in mind when I left England, but I can cope with that!
I eat bread and cheese by the harbour sitting on a jetty just watching the sea slopping about lazily round little wooden boats. Eventually I decide I’d better book into a hostel after deciding that buying a bicycle and cycling through Belize is not really something I can afford to do; though after so many buses, cycling would be great.
I book into the Seaside Hostel which is cheap, very wooden and cosy and run by a lovely big round Caribbean woman. I go out to dinner with a couple in their early forties who are on honeymoon. They are from Colorado.
Checking my email at the hotel, I discover that both the WWOOF farms I have written to have a space for me to visit them. They both sound pretty good, the second one in the south has kids and works with ‘Green and Black’ an English chocolate maker that sources it’s chocolate from the south of Belize, which sounds pretty interesting.
I leave the warm and sunny slightly higgledy-piggledy town and take the bus to Hummingbird on the Hummingbird Highway where I am to visit Mr. Mike Scott at Hidden Falls farm. A young girl at the village accompanies me partway until she reaches the village store. It’s hot and small wooden houses speckle the tarmac highway against a background of vivid green chaos. The road follows along the bottom of a wide and spectacular winding mountain valley alongside a small river. The lower reaches are predominantly of matrices of orange groves which have a fantastic jasmine odour and contrast dramatically with the high mountain forest behind them.
Mike Scott’s place is quite a ‘regular’ garden with ‘lawn’ and rows of cabbages. Apart from his orchard of oranges he’s focusing on growing fruit trees; breadfruit (you can fry it like chips), bananas, grapefruit and sapodilla which has a distinctive taste a bit like papaya and cinnamon and I discover is very good.
Mike has a simple two room cabin on stilts with the most astonishing vista overlooking the length of the valley. Sunrise and sunset being particularly dramatic. I am housed in a tent with a traditional style palm-thatched roof over the top.
There is a waterfall with a pool which we spend some time trying to get the silt out of. I see hummingbirds zooming around in a blur (they never stop!), the very occasional lizard, and fireflies in abundance at dusk.
The place is quite nice but very exposed and hot and sweaty, I get bitten lots by mosquitoes, and I’ve yet to get used to the heat: I don’t have much appetite. Mike is a single man of sixty-five who barks rather than talks, and likes to contradict most of the things I say. I find him very difficult to talk to, and leave after he decides to shout at me for cooking my very own pancake in not quite the way he wants me to. He’s had two visitors since I’ve been there, so I suppose he must get on with some people. The fact that I’m not a young impressionable woman that he can vent his ageing lusts at I suspect has something to do with it, judging from some of the remarks he had come out with regarding ‘the perks of being a WWOOF host’.
I pack my bag with an angry knot in my guts and get on the first bus down to Punta Gorda. Other people seem normal and friendly, which is a big relief. I spend the rest of the three hour journey on the bus fluctuating between enjoying the ride and trying to get this bully out of my head.
On the bus the radio is on (Love FM) and in between quirky calypso tunes there are all sorts of party political announcements telling me to vote for the Peoples United Party. It plays Rick Astley’s enthusiastic pop number ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ which does a wonderful job of cheering me up.
Along the road various political banners in Creole: ‘Tek di money, tek di land – Dave we fi da man, so vote for Dave’. Now you know.
Memorable tunes on the radio, a typical sugar sweet calypso beat with a blistering heavy metal guitar solo slapped in the middle of it (very good) and a medley of tunes based round the ‘Hawaii 5-0’ tune played on steel drums that just seems to go on forever. (About fifteen minutes, very cheesy, beyond a joke; marvellous.) If I could only have one piece of vinyl recording in the world, it would be of this.
I don’t actually need to go right to Punta Gorda itself so I get off at a place called ‘The Dump’ which I later discover is where everyone used to come from the nearby villages to get rid of unwanted maize husks before heading off to the market in P.G.
I buy a bottle of raspberry Fanta (fantastic) and jump in the back of one of two waiting pick up trucks going to San Pedro Columbia, the Mayan village I have been instructed to go to. When I arrive, an old lady directs me to another woman called ‘Miss Connie’ and tries to sell me a basket in the process.
Miss Connie is a grinning American woman who runs, rather incongruously, a computer lab in the middle of the village. Today it is full of young kids playing educational games and a young girl of about fourteen is reading up something about polio.
After a pleasant chat with Connie, I get myself a computer fix and do some writing for a while and then sit out in the sun whilst an assortment of piglets cavort joyfully about the place.
At 4 pm Connie leaves for home and drives me up to where she lives, way back into the bush, and then I walk up another track next door even further into the bush to where Chris and Dawn live.
To get to their patch I have to plough through a small field of ten foot high maize plants and towards a river. I take off my boots, getting ready to cross this wonderful waist deep sparkling flow when I hear someone coming downhill from the other side, and then a young girl about six years old with long blond hair and a guy with short cropped hair and a ZZ Top beard appear, along with a madly barking black dog. I call out ‘Hello!’ to the girl, who just looks at me dumbstruck. (Most unusual I am to discover later.)
‘Are you Chris?’ I call over to the guy.
‘Hi! You must be Richard! Come on over!’
We exchange hellos, the dog decides it likes me, wagging its tail like there’s no tomorrow, and as I wade across the shallow river and on up the short hill to the house, the two get into a dug-out canoe and punt off downstream looking for ‘good rocks to build a house with’.
With my new canine friend, its nose magnetised to my legs, I walk up the path past a stand of huge bamboo, assorted jungly-type trees and a partially excavated garden patch, all disintegrated raised beds, scattered dry sticks and weed vines.
At the end of the track is the house; another cabin on stilts. (They are popular in Belize.) It’s just like hippy farm-steading places all over, lots of bare wood and dozens of jars of edible practicality.
Dawn is at the bottom of the stairs looking slightly shocked and confused by my presence; I never got as far as actually speaking to them on the phone to tell them I am coming cos the phone in Chris’s office in town is always engaged. Anyhow, Dawn accepts this and shows me where the WWOOFer house is, a ten minute walk through a dense jungle of wild bananas (Heliconias) which is like walking through a green tunnel.
About two weeks after arriving here, it is March 13th and I’ve let it be known that it’s my birthday.
The lights are out and Zoe (the previously dumbstruck girl)brings over one of Dawn’s special cakes, a big heavy duty serious thing but well appreciated all the same, decorated with some creamy stuff and candles. Everyone sings Happy Birthday and I feel really quite touched. Chris plays the fool and makes some grand speech in his typically over the top way and makes everyone laugh. He gives me a ‘Toledo Cacao Growers Association’ tee shirt, which although it is too hot to wear it out here in the bush, it becomes a treasured memento. (Even though I subsequently lost it somewhere – oops…)
You couldn’t wish for a more incongruous character to meet in the Belizean bush.
Unmistakably, Chris is from New York City; not the arty neurotic Woody Allen type, but the brash street-level kind of guy. ‘Yo, here’s a guy who’s D wid da P, he’s down with the people, knows what’s up and what’s going down, you know what I’m sayin’?’ Chris had been to school with one of the Beastie Boys, he’d bunk off school and get into mischief and he loved his ma and smoking weed.
Chris is off in Punta Gorda during the week working for the chocolate collective, but on Saturday mornings work in the garden happens to the accompaniment of Black Uhuru’s dub reggae, The Clash or maybe Saturday Night Fever. Yo! Getting kinda funky in da jungle!
There endeth my astonishingly bad New Yorker impressions.
Back in the day, Chris had bummed round Guatamala, picked up hippy tat and sold it at Grateful Dead tours around the States. He liked to blag his way into the gigs, saying he was with the band’s road crew, the son of the theatre owner, climb in through the toilet window… any way that was free.
It didn’t matter if you never got in – ‘Dead Tour’ as it was known was a continual circus running two seasons – Spring and Fall tours round the States. Thousands of people would follow them in their station wagons, pick-ups, buses and by thumb. Usually there would be a nice big space somewhere to have an impromptu festival, and if there wasn’t, well then I guess it would just get a little chaotic.
Chris loved the sense of family that came from getting to know so many faces that had also made Dead Tour part of their lives. As Chris says, when Jerry Garcia died, a whole other world died with him too. Lots of vendors and followers had their lifestyles and livelihoods blown sideways. The Dead carried on, but it would never be the same without Jerry.
The whole bluegrass sound is something I have come to appreciate whilst being in North America. There is a side of home grown American music culture that is ‘old timey’ and romantic about nature. Far from the popular image of America being the snotty brat of the world, this style of music and a lot of country stuff leaves a lot of English pop music I like (and still like) sounding pointlessly whingey and even infantile sometimes.
Chris inherited money and he bought a hut in the bush not far from where he’d been hanging out with the Garifuna Rastas in Punta Gorda.
If Belizeans emigrate, they tend to go to New York City and Chris had got to know one of them there. Chris was looking for somewhere to buy land now that Dead Tour had fallen apart, and this guy told him he’d love Belize.
So Chris goes off to Belize, already being familiar with the general area, and buys the land from an old guy who’s too old to farm any more and has moved back to the village to be taken care of by his family.
He hacks a trail to the hut, grows weed and smokes himself into oblivion for three years, keeping himself afloat doing a bit of wheeling and dealing; fixing up old cars and things like that. Anything that comes along.
Then one glorious sunny day whilst up country doing some business in Belmopan, he meets Dawn, a nineteen year old backpacker from Idaho. They fall in love; she sees Chris’s knackered orange trees plot and decides to turn the place into something more interesting and productive.
Chris jokes that the main reason that he and Dawn and all these backpackers are able to enjoy this piece of paradise is because Jerry Garcia had gone and died on him.
On weekdays Chris is either in Punta Gorda officiating over the Toledo Cacao Growers Association or out and about seeing how things are for the Mayan farmers out in the real world. The farmers collective pool their organic cacao (cocoa) after fermenting it for seven days until it goes just the right shade of purple (this helps get rid of bitterness) and then it is sold to the Green and Blacks organic chocolate company in England. The cacao gets roasted in Italy cos they know how to do it best.
All the other cacao grown in the area is bought by Hershey’s who of course don’t offer the local farmers much by way of a decent deal. They also make the worst chocolate I have ever tasted in all my life.
Dawn is quirky, smart, funny and intellectual. She’s fascinated by words and language (which is good connecting point for me) and sometimes likes to listen to classical music during the day. It takes me a little while to open up to her, but I like her very much. She’s a cool person to know.
There’s three kids, Zephyr a generally well-behaved baby, Esperanza, two and a half, blonde and cute, falls over and cries at the drop of a hat, and Zoe, six, who talks non-stop. She’s a very full of jumping beans kind of kid.
There are four or three cats, I’m not sure. Two or three are skinny black Toms with white bibs and socks and a mostly have a slinky evasive ‘I just did something bad’ way about them. I think they might be clones. The other is a tiny skinny brindle cat which spookily looks and behaves just like our old cat Tiki we had when I was growing up.
Then there’s Lulu and Hoover, two lurcher type dogs, one white and brown, the other black. Lulu likes lying slap bang in the middle of the floor baring her bits to the world and grinning through sleepy eyes just to show everyone just how blissed out she is. Hoover likes to bark at the workmen whenever they walk past.
In my heat-addled way, I have decided that they are both ‘Dogs of Doom’. Every time I see them I go ‘DOGS OF DOOM!!’ at them in a menacing voice and stroke them and play with them lots. Ahhh! I love them!
I’ve decided that there should be a story based on them. It should be called ‘Hoover the Groover and Lulu the Zulu, International Dogs of Doom.’ They should both be wearing shades and be very daring. That’s as far as my character building and plot goes. Any suggestions will be warmly received.
For meals, we generally have oatmeal with milk powder and little chopped finger bananas and pineapple in it. I like sugar in mine. You can have bilogo, which is halfway between banana and plantain and has peach coloured flesh, but it’s not sweet enough for my taste buds. Sometimes we have grapefruit too.
Lunch is the main meal and could be a combination of coco (a root, tastes like sticky potato), flying potatoes (they grow in the air on a vine), cassava (surprisingly okay to eat), cho-cho (or chayote, vegetable pear, insipid boiled green thing), nopales (young prickly pear pads, innocuous tasting, oozes sticky snot. Bit like eating aloe vera stems. Best eaten raw, less snotty), rice (grows in Belize). Calalou – amaranth – it’s a green spinachy leaf thing – I really appreciate this stuff – it’s very healthy and tastes good, and is the perfect antidote to all those weird starchy tubers. I sometimes go and eat it straight off the bush to make sure I’m getting enough nutrients.
Maize – which is very satisfying, but now it’s gone hard and is like chewing old donkeys’ teeth.
Out of everything we eat, ninety percent is from the garden, and the rest is Belizean except for milk powder, oats, occasional butter (tins of liquid from New Zealand) and bakers yeast.
With lunch we usually have some fruit-juicy squash stuff I make with the Jamaica limes. Jamaica limes look like oranges but have a sourness that turns your head inside out. In the absence of a fridge, the Jamaica limes perform an essential role in keeping us refreshed.
Oh yeah, we have squashes too, and now the chickens have decided to start laying so there’s eggs as well. The four chickens announce the arrival of each egg as a great event with a flurry of wing flapping and loud clucking. You can hear their announcements from the kitchen; it’s very handy.
I love eating bananas! Which is handy cos there thousands of them, all hanging like fat green chandeliers all round the edge of the kitchen.
Water for the house is pumped up above the house using a surprisingly small hi-tech pump about twelve inches long which is powered by three large solar panels. We have no hot water, but that’s like wanting ice cubes in Alaska.
Supper is usually tea/coffee and some serious cake thing or other.
Being cacao country, after having visited a couple of the local Mayan growers and being shown round what they do, it’s only right that we get a go at making our own chocolate at home.
First we picked a couple of pods. Either green or yellow or red or a tiger-striped mixture of these colours, they crack open like a hard melon. Inside is the good stuff; about forty seeds about the size of a very fat almond and covered in a jelly-like substance that tastes like lychees. This we chew off very satisfactorily. The next step is usually to put the seeds in a sealed bag and let them ferment in their own juices for a couple of weeks until they have a purple sheen on the outside. This helps take the bitterness out, and you can bypass this stage if you want.
Seeing as how we want to make chocolate right now this afternoon, we go onto the next stage: we throw the beans in a frying pan (no oil) and roast them until the smell of hot roasting chocolate fills the kitchen. Mmmm!
Next we feed them through an old-fashioned heavy-duty meat-mincer. Out comes the macerated beans in a heavy brown sludge. There is a small amount of time to manipulate this goo until it sets hard again.
Tasting the mashed beans on its own isn’t that great, it’s really bitter. We add a little bit of fine sugar and milk powder to it and then the taste is transformed!
I eat a truffle-sized lump of the stuff and then find myself having to run almost uncontrollably round the garden for about a quarter of an hour. I know people who think they are hardcore cos they like eighty percent cocao chocolate. This stuff is ninety-eight percent.
Theobroma Cacao (theobroma – ‘food of the gods’) has been used by the Central Americans since forever, mixing it with maize syrup to make a thick sweet chocolate drink. The name either comes from the Aztec Nahwatl word ‘xocolatl’ meaning ‘bitter water’ or it comes from ‘chocolatl’; a mixed derivation of the Yucatec Maya word ‘chokol’ meaning hot, and the Nahuatl ‘atl’ which means ‘water’.
There is another theory that goes that when the Spanish turned up and amongst other things decided to steal the locals’ brown stuff, they changed the name from ‘cacaoatl’ to ‘cocoatl’, due to ‘caca’ being Spanish for ‘shit’. ‘Shit-water’ wouldn’t have gone down well in the new faddish chocolate drinking emporiums that were sprouting up all over Spain.
Apparently Montezuma the great Aztez king drank fifty cups of chocolate drink a day. He must have been speeding round like a pneumatic drill all the time. Must have been quite a scary guy.
It’s a strange thing – where I used to have the usual sexual fantasy stuff going on in my head to keep me amused has to a large extent been replaced by food fantasies, usually about chips with Heinz tomato sauce, of cool yoghurt and Marmite on toast. I really miss apples too. But hey – this is pretty darn groovy too – I just like some familiarity in my world, even if I have to imagine it – that’ll do.
I find myself on fantasy journeys to places well-loved; along the Kennet and Avon canal in summer and winter, to Newbury, Devizes, Bath, along the Ridgeway, to Swindon, Camarthen, London, Edinburgh, Inverness, Glen Coe, Skye, Harris, Callanish, Norwich, to Helen B’s garden, Don’s house in Newbury drinking tea, visiting my dad and my sister Glynis.
Mentally tripping out to Tofino, Victoria BC, Whitehorse Yukon, Newfoundland, California. I keep meaning to write a poem of American place names I have passed through.
The sound of ants cutting leaves next our house late at night sounds like quiet tiny rain. Elsewhere, watching ants carrying small pink and yellow flower petals along their highway looks like an armada of tiny sailing ships.
There are toads that chortle like rattling marimbas very loudly all along the river valley. They are enormous (bigger than a big man’s fist). Zoe picks one up to scare me with and it seems to be about the size of her head (and it frightens the life out of me – I really wasn’t expecting it).
Dawn laughs when I tell her about Zoe and the frog ‘Yeah she’s totally fearless!’. Dawn then goes on to tell me about the time a scorpion’s nest finally fell off the upstairs ceiling from where it had been hanging and landed on the big bed that the whole family all slept in together. ‘We’d been watching it for about a month, we knew it was gonna fall some day we just didn’t know when. When it did, hundreds of little black scorpion babies went crawling all over the bed. Zoe was fine with it but Esperanza just screamed! She was only a baby then anyway. We all had to sleep downstairs that night.’
March 18th night after full moon.
I dream I am being taught magic by an old man, along with another middle-aged man and a small girl. The small girl’s ability is better than us chaps as her mother is a witch, so naturally she will have picked up stuff from her. He says for magic to work is a question of it being directed by the heart and not by the ego, otherwise all you get is cheap conjuring tricks and not real magic.
Sunday, date unknown.
I feel wiped out and do nothing. I have a real appetite for being on my own with some quiet, which is lovely. Prompted in part by Chris recounting how he gave up on his dreadlocks, I cut off the dread-locked ponytail thing on the back of my head. Essentially it is just annoying me anyway.
I go down to the river where the solar pump that supplies fresh water to the house is. The bank is pure clay, and I cover myself completely as an alternative to the soap that I don’t have. (The clay works wonderfully.) A curiously unanticipated effect of being covered in wet mud is the cooling effect I feel as the sun draws out the water from the mud. This in turn draws away heat too. I am my own fridge.
Then the mud is dry, and the cooling effect ends.
Whilst I am baking the mud dry in the sun, a huge animal comes crashing through the grass about a metre from my head. I think maybe it’s a large snake but it turns out to be a large iguana about two foot long and it slaps into the water right next to me, and it freaks the bejeesus out of me.
Tuesday.
I am still feeling a bit wiped out, so I don’t do very much but shell a load of cajunas (pigeon peas) and get a buckets worth. I drank real home-roasted cacao, which is pretty good. I try it with a little sugar and a habenero pepper ground into it. Quite uplifting and groovy.
Wednesday March 19th.
Having ‘landed’ somewhat I am starting to tentatively lay some new plans. I feel very good about the idea of going to Western Australia by boat, and am fantasising about Scotland too.
Well the knowledge that I’m staying put for a while has afforded me a number of luxuries. One is not feeling the necessity to write every day or so, which helps nurture a general feeling of slack timelessness and of just being present.
Another is the slightly overdue and well anticipated inward reflection opportunity which anyone who’s known me for longer than a week will realise this means me being an anti-social, and largely grumpy bastard and perhaps some other kind of random dysfunction thrown in to the pot for good measure. This time it’s been a vague paranoiac self-doubt ‘people think I’m weird’ thing which goes on for about a week. It’s tedious and repetitive for me, having been there and back pretty much with every group of people that’s ever been in my life for more than two days (i.e. a lot of times).
In another way I don’t really mind cos it’s just my old psychological blind-spots up to their old tricks again, yawn yawn: leaving a mixture of ‘Shit when will I ever get over this?’ and ‘ Oh yeah, that old bollocks again’.
I am wondering whether to press on with this epic journey which has no purpose other than I want to do it. I often feel the need to justify it.
Aside from all this navel-gazing, it seems like I’ve been experiencing more of the fruits of very delayed gratification. Messing around with oranges and bananas and cacao (cocoa) and other tropical curiosities is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a kid.
Sitting at home, slightly bored probably, in our brown living room with it’s 1950s decor I would ask my mum ‘Where does all this stuff in the fruit bowl come from?’
My mum had lived in Durban between 1953 and 1957, and had a slightly different take on exotic fruits than a lot of people of her generation. She’d been a teenager through the Second World War and lived with all the austerities and food rationing same as pretty much everybody. Then my mum shipped out to South Africa with her ambitious accountant of a husband (not my dad) and had had the post-war excitement of experiencing real-life bananas and oranges first hand, straight off the tree. When I was a kid, the merest sight of an avocado (a real luxury in 1970s Britain – my, how things have changed) would send my mum weak at the knees with happy memories of all sorts of weird and wonderful fruits than her children at her knee could only guess at. In her own little private bit of her universe, my mum was probably the only person on our street to have ever tasted a custard apple.
Me being a stubborn not-taking-anyone’s-it-word-for-it kind of character, I’ve eventually got round to checking it all out a quarter of a century later. Wow, I wish I hadn’t written it like that – makes me feel old. Blinky blimey – where’s the wife and kids I should have by now?!
In Belize, a ‘bakut’ is a tree that grows enormous sweet sticky pods that ooze a tasty toffee-ish goo that is good to eat, except that you have to be sharp about collecting them; They drop to the forest floor and the ants have a habit of getting to them first. You could beat them to it by climbing a hundred foot into the canopy I suppose. The ‘bakut’ is also the name that Belizeans use to refer to a man’s Old Chap, his knob, his pecker, his didgerydoo, cock, John Thomas, Peter, Dick, Percy, Willy, winkle. Bell end. Whether the Belizeans named the pod after the penis or the wedding tackle after the pod I don’t know. Only the resemblance between the two is worryingly similar; the pod is just the right shade of brown. It has curious ribbed undulations all down it’s length of the sort that a lady might find invigorating. And it’s about thirteen inches long.
Today I am in The Bakut Bar. I have come in because there is a TV on the wall showing the CNN channel.
Blasting out Truth across the supposedly developing world, today we get to see the latest on the Bush/Blair/American fundamentalist Christian crackpots and military survivalists Vs. the stupidly misguided Almost-Everyone-Else-In-The-World thing. Tonight at 8 pm is the end of the deadline for Saddam to ‘fess up about his weapons of mass detruction. Iraq may or may not get bombed to into the ground.
CNN flashes up fifteen seconds of footage of a ‘Stop The War’ demonstration that had been taking place in London. The footage shows Muslim marchers, waving placards and chanting. Any reasonable person would get the impression that the only people that don’t want the war are just a bunch of the usual kind of shouty Muslims. What the footage conveniently manages to miss was the other 950,000 non-Muslim British people who were also there with them, also believing the whole enterprise to be immoral.
‘Not In My Name’ is the general slogan of the protest.
Outside in sunny Punta Gorda is a generally healthy looking kind of low level poverty and lots of chirpy Caribbean music. I sit and wonder what it must be like to be in Iraq and the Middle-East right now.
I’m also wondering what it must be like back home in England, especially after seeing the pictures on CNN of the tanks at Heathrow. I know it’s all a ploy to generate paranoia. It must be rather strange in England even so. I know what it’s like in the States; people are either sensibly concerned, rabidly foaming about ‘towelheads’ or think it’s some kind of video game going on Somewhere Else.
It seems churlish to write about what my world has in it when this nightmare is going down, but that’s what I’ve chosen to do.
I’d make a terrible DJ, my links would be rubbish. Okay smarty pants, how do you change the subject?
Out here living in the tropical bush, the nearest I get to the threat of germ warfare and suicide attacks is finding eight bot fly maggots embedded in the side of my arse. (Hey that isn’t too bad…)
Today I give birth. In fact, I have quintuplets.
Actually, I squeeze five dead maggots out of the side of my arse. I am having a truly tropical experience, it is most gratifying.
Unfortunately, there are seven holes in me which, having only pulled only half of one out with a pair of tweezers, means there are still one and a half of the little darlings still floating around in my butt-cheek. Maybe I can expect a pus extravaganza. Yum, I certainly hope so. They are bot fly larvae. One end is the breathing hole that stays snorkelled at the skins surface and the other end with its little black jaws munches its way inwards (which feels like being stabbed with a hooked needle and then twisting it), until the maggot is about two inches long, whereupon it leaves the body, unhappy at the taste of bone perhaps.
Next Morning:
I put ‘Marine Goop’ glue on my arse to get last hardcore bot fly out. It’s now wriggling away merrily on top of the cassette cover of Julian Cope’s ‘Floored Genius’, approximately half of my record collection.
Daily I stop in wonder at what surrounds us here. We are deep in Mayan ruins country, where most of them are left to the decays of time. (There’s so many of them.) I haven’t visited any; it doesn’t really grab my attention.
On the bottom slope from Chris and Dawns wooden house is the chicken run with its lemon, Jamaica lime, guava trees and a rooster that combines it’s ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ thing with a strange Japanese-sounding noise you might make if you’re pretending to do karate. Maybe he’s working out. I’ve never looked. Chicken Chi Gong or something.
The garden is partly raised beds with dead sticks everywhere which I am told rot down really quick. Bizarre. The fence all around this lot is held up by pollarded nitrogen-fixing acacias. All good textbook tropics stuff. Very exciting! No really it is! I can see I might be digging myself a hole here.
Below that is a hooog stand of fantastic looking bamboo which the stems are about four inches thick and about twenty-five to thirty long. Fantastic. Surrounding all this is young cacao, bananas, grapefruit, cajunas (pigeon peas), oranges planted seemingly willy nilly. There’s pineapple planted as a ground-level erosion control.
For the past week or so I have been hauling waterlogged hardwood tree trunks out of the river to use to rebuild the old ant-chewed raised bed system. The trunks probably weigh a quarter of a ton each. Moving them through the water is easy enough but trying to lift them out onto solid ground is a major effort. I devise an A-frame whereby I can shunt the trunks a couple of feet at a time to where we want them. The frame consists of two sturdy straight pieces of wood with a rope tied between them (hence the ‘A’ shape). Then it is eased under the trunk to roughly where the middle is and then lifting the A-frame up, it levers the front half of the trunk off the ground a foot or so, drags it forward a couple of feet and then drops it back down again. Repeating the process over and over I eventually, single-handedly move several tonnes of trunks.
Its been over 100 degrees every day and what with the healthy bush diet, I’m losing excess flab like nobody’s business. I’ve got a six-pack! (muscly abdomen) I’ve never been so fit in all my life. If you ever feel like the drastic need to sort your body out; come here.
Sent some more emails trying to figure how to get to Australia by boat. This could take a while I think.
Above Chris and Dawn’s current home is the new house being built oh-so-slowly by three lads from the village. It has beautiful wood work that I want to take lots of arty photos of.
Right at the bottom edge of Chris and Dawn’s land is the fantastic river. You can drink directly from it and we don’t get hassled by insects down there either.
I am in the river on my own one day (very peaceful;) up to my neck in water when a white heron flew over about four foot above my head. Wow.
There are lots of wow moments:
Diving into deep blue pools accompanied by the continual crazy hootings and cacklings of various mostly invisible birds.
Sitting in the wild banana bush leading up to the WWOOFer’s house. It’s a tunnel of shade with all these long dangly bromeliad things which are strange enough, you’ll get investigated by hummingbirds, who sound like the purring of very pleased cats.
Mostly they zip about like flies, but it’s great when they stop in front of you and just hang there in mid-air going ‘Me, I’m well tiny I am. Just you watch it matey, or I’ll peck yer ears’. Actually no they don’t, they’re dead cute.
So there’s them, all two inches of them, and then there’s the Blue Morpho butterflies which are cobalt blue and five inches across. They’re real people tarts too, a bit like robins, except robins don’t flap around the dinner table and occasionally test out the food in the various bowls.
What else is wow? Ant highways. These stretch all over the place. They are the thoroughfare of ants bringing whatever chomped up bit of plant material they’ve found that they can carry back to the nest to grow into mushrooms. Usually it’s just bits of leaves, but it has frequently been whatever happens to smell edible in my rucksack. One day, I almost lost all my Californian almonds to them, but I take the bag, nuts and ants to the river and drown them and make friends with lots of tiny fish in the process by giving them a bonus free lunch.
The fish in the river are cute. There’s a few hundred of them, and there’s two sorts; little zebra-striped ones and smaller silver ones with blue eyes (but not blond hair). They are mostly an inch to two inches long, and like to hang out round us really close when we stand in the river or are going swimming, like they want to be our friends or are trying to tell us something. Makes a change from dolphins I suppose.
I have not learned the language of these fish, but maybe they are in some mysterious way connected to ancient space travellers who popped in on Central America for a quick cup of shit-water on their way back from Egypt on a pyramid-building mission. Maybe they hold the key to special secrets only they can tell us about the real roots of human evolution.
After asking Chris about where our lovely river comes from, I learn that in this part of the world rivers can surface out of nowhere like mammoth springs, travel some distance, disappear down another hole and then re-appear somewhere else. The river at the bottom of the propery is one such river and upon their recommendation is a good way to spend a day off. I decide to swim/wade/walk up the mile or so of river through the unpopulated bush to where the river miraculously does indeed appear out of nowhere. The source is a wildly gushing pool hemmed in by a high wall of roaring reverberating rock. An incredible place to be alone in.
Most of my travelling has been great; I’ve met great characters, seen beautiful places and encountered people with interesting lifestyles.
I shall have some fantastic memories at the end of it all, but since I’ve been on the farm in Belize, it’s allowed me room for introspection.
In that time I’ve found myself feeling really easily rejected by the people around me and I’ve sometimes been quite snotty with the people I’m living with. In actual fact, I know a lot of it is just me having a bad attitude for some unknown reason. A couple of times I caught myself reacting in such a bad way… Maybe it’s just what happens when I finally get the chance to stop moving; I finally step out of the transient superficiality and relax into all that buried psychological crud that must have have accumulated along the way.
Sunday March 30
I have to hitch to PG to get my visa extended, it is a mercifully cool day. When the sun is up, being in the bush is not so hot as being in the open.
I really enjoy getting out of the bush every now and again; its a lot hotter though on account of there being no shade, but its great to see town life going about its business; hustling and bustling in its Carribean laid-back pace.
Chris had been telling me about the Scottish Higlander guards that regularly come to the town to practice manoeuvres: In my head I can see them all doing their SAS-style barrel-rolls whilst clutching their machine-guns; all-blacked up faces and in their kilts, hiding behind big mamas with their fish stalls and piles of oranges.
In the Cafe in town there’s a Mennonite in his demin dungarees and his fabulous beard. ‘Sprechen Ze Deutsch?’ he grins
‘Err? Nein!’ I reply
‘Oh! Too bad! Have yourself a nice day there!’
And that is that.
I spy a suspiciously lobstered European newcomer, a young lad about nineteen. All the new people go pink and horrible-looking until they get themselves a proper tan. It takes about a month.
‘Hello! You been out here long?’
‘No – just a couple of weeks. I’m doing Operation Raleigh, counting turtles’
Hmmm…
We have a good chat; always nice to talk to someone from back home. I tell him that next time, he could save himself 3500 quid and go wwoofing instead of what he’s doing now. Probably not the most tactful thing for me to say, but at least he’ll have an idea for next time.
Heading back home, I walk out of town at 3.30 pm passing lots of local Garifuna wading about playing volleyball at waist-depth in the warmest sea I’ve ever experienced. Very lovely. I’ve been pretty worried about various useless head-trips for a while, and this is the moment that I realise I actually really like being in Belize.
Belize has such a tangible peace about it. There are a range of ethnicities living here, the Ketchi-Mayans, the Mennonites and the Garifuna:
In 1635, two Spanish ships carrying Nigerian slaves sank off the coast of St. Vincent. The slaves that survived and swam ashore found shelter in the existing Carib Indian settlements. Over the next century and a half, the two peoples intermixed, intermarried and eventually fused into a single culture, the Black Caribs or Garinagu.
The Garinagu people, more usually known as the Garifuna are recent arrivals to Belize, driven here by civil war and settling the southern coast of Belize in the early 19th century.
Today the Garifuna live principally in Punta Gorda in Toledo, and two Garifuna villages – Barranco (the oldest Garifuna settlement in Belize) and tiny Punta Negra.
Today, the Garinagu struggle to keep their culture alive. It is the devotion of the Garifuna to their roots which sets them apart from the other ethnic groups in Belize. While many Garifuna are professed Catholics, they have retained many of the spiritualist traditions and rituals from their Afro-Caribbean heritage. They are famed for their arts, their music and dancing and their Independance day is a national holiday for everyone.
What a good place to be…
Whilst riding the bus on my first trip down to the south, and a few times in the Belize City and in Punta Gorda, I had noticed something of a social anomoly. In amongst all the people you would reasonably expect to find in a sweaty Carribean community were also some other peculiar looking people. Going about their business like everyone else were folks that looked like ghosts from the 19th century. Men dressed in smart stay-blue denim dungarees, collarless white farmers shirts, neat straw hats and sporting wonderful ZZ-Top beards walked hand-in-hand with their formidable-looking wives equally dressed in starchy aprons, ankle-length skirts and bonnets. Children dressed as mini-copys of their parents. And each family dressed the same. Weird.
When I mentioned to Chris about these strange-looking folk I had seen, he told me that they were Mennonites.
According to Chris, the ones I had seen were the full-on ‘orthodox’ version of them; living their version of Christianity to the letter, eschewing all modern trickery; using only horse and buggy for transport and field tillage, having no electricity and therefore no TVs, computers or phones and living simple farming lives for the most part, believing that the modern world is an infringement upon their faith. They live in two enclaves in Shipyard and Little Belize.
There are, living in Blue Creek, other Mennonites though that are halfway to being like ‘normal’ people; there are Mennonite truck drivers whose families have electricity, engines, radio and phones etc. They help to enable the other more orthodox Mennonites to do trade with the outside world at an outside world pace.
In 1959 about three thousand Mennonites relocated to Belize from Canada and Mexico, and are originally of Dutch/German descent; they still speak the dialect of Old Dutch/German that they have kept alive for over 400 years, as well as English and Spanish.
The Mennonites were welcomed to Belize with open arms to practice their religion unhindered, and have flourished, establishing their own form of local government and run their own schools, businesses and banks.
Mennonites are members of the Protestant religious sect that originated in Switzerland and the Netherlands at the time of the Protestant Reformation.
The Mennonites emerged in the Netherlands in the 1520s during the Radical Reformation period in Europe. The sect derives its name from the reformist Protestant leader of the movement Menno Simons.
They are radical protestants, pacifists, condemn slavery and are against state-controlled religion. My kind of people.
One of the principal tenets of the Mennonites was that the conscience of the individual is the sole authority on matters of Biblical doctrine, and that no clergy was needed to interpret religious text or mediate between an individual and God, rather like the Quakers in the UK.
The state regarded them as subversive and so were persecuted. They left holland, germany and Switzerland and migrated into eastern Europe, Russia, Canada and the US.
They fell mostly into distinct groups who followed different leaders such as Jakob Hutter (Hutterites) and Jakob Amman (Amish or Amish Mennonites). Migrations continued throughout the 18th and 19th century and following World War I Mennonites from Russia, who were primarily of Dutch stock, migrated to Canada. More migrations occurred after World War II, particularly to Paraguay, Brazil, and Mexico.
In all cases the tendency was to take up unoccupied land in isolated outlying rural areas and as a result Mennonites have been rural farming people for much of their history.
The Mennonite migrants have customarily obeyed the civil laws of the society in which they live but many refuse to bear arms, to support violence in any form, or to take judicial oaths, or to hold public office.
So here I am, on my way back from getting my passport stamped on a sweaty sunday afternoon.
I walk about a third of the way back in-between hitching rides to San Pedro Columbia village. By the time I get there, it’s just getting dark. I have two miles of bush to get through. That’s a long way when you’ve got no torch.
Luckily two thirds of the way is a wide track used by the Mayan corn farmers. Hopefully, cracks of moonlight through the clouds will be enough to see me through the denser bush later. The evening night life is starting up in the village. Cheesy calypso pumps from one of the bars in the village, Club Exotica. (A place the size of a shed with a kids-sized pool-table. It’s so small that everyone has to stand outside.) Further up some kids are having an electrified band practice which the entire village gets the benefit of hearing. It’s like the reggae version of scraping your fingernails down a blackboard.
The village was wrecked after Hurricane Iris in 2001. This combined with the fact that Mike Espat the politician for the PUP – the People’s United Party – lives nearby meant that the villagers received a disproportionately large amount of overseas aid money and help. Hence lots of electric household equipment, water stand pipes and pumps and nice new concrete houses.
This has given the village a text book togetherness; water pumps and stand pipes very frequently, everyone’s house looks nice, with evidence of nice new zinc roofs and tongue and groove walls in lots of places.
Out the other side of the village (I can just about remember the way) I follow the track. The rain is making the clay soil slippery and sticky. My flip flops are becoming more and more useless, slipping upside-down in my wet feet when I stand anything on a slant. I take them off and sing a ‘Bugger off snakes, bugger off spiders, bugger off scorpions too’ song to warn said creatures of my coming so I don’t stand on them, and they don’t sting me.
The rain is getting heavier, the going more treacherous, the moonlight disappears in a dense rain-cloud and the track reaches the bush track. I can barely see a thing. I try three times to get onto the bush track but give up after getting lost after about four metres. After that it’s total darkness. I can’t even see my hands in front of my face. I’ll see more with my eyes closed probably.
I yell for help at the top of my voice. I can’t be very far from the house; someone must hear me and bring a torch. I don’t really want to spend the night out here in the rain. (I did that already thanks back on Vancouver Island.) I get pissed off at there being no response. I guess the sound of rain on leaves is drowning out any other sound.
After about ten minutes of feeling stuck, and it not occurring to me to walk back and stay in the village, I decide to try to get home even though I can’t see anything.
The strap on one shoe disintegrates and I lose the use of my footwear, and this I discover is a blessing in disguise.
I realise that what distinguishes the track from everything else is; that even though there are plenty of low branches, fat roots and fallen logs to negotiate, the mud track is mostly smoothed out from long use – everywhere else is twigs and leaves. With this invisible insight to go on, I feel my way through the muddy slippery inky blackness of foliage rain and thunder, arms outstretched feeling for branches ready to spring in my face, and inching my way along with my feet. I make surprisingly good progress, even though I don’t remember much of the tracks twisty turning route.
I have a suspicion though that I may well have disappeared off a side track into rainforest oblivion. Where jaguars live. With sharp pointy teeth.
I am so relieved when I come out at what I call the ‘mangrove tree’ with its distinctively snaking buttress roots.
Thank god! I’m actually going the right way! I congratulate myself in between all the ‘bugger off snake’ singing I have to do. I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I want to be home already. Nothing for it but to keep going. I get stuck for direction as now no path is apparent underfoot. I guess lucky and come out at a cacao tree I recognise in the edge of the bush. There are silhouettes here and I can guess where I am, though I still can’t really see much. Following along the edge of a corn field is easy and flat. I get through the corn towards the river and out I pop into our small island of civilisation again. All I have to do is get across the river and up to the house.
Dawn and Chris are in ‘Sunday space’ mode where they are not to be disturbed under any circumstances whatsoever. There’s nothing to eat in the kitchen. I leave and make my way through the track to the WWOOF house, another ten minute walk which turns into half an hour of more random stumbling about as I yet again plunge into total darkness in the heliconia. I shout out for help again, with no response. This is really frustrating as I’m also really disoriented with tiredness as well being hungry.
I get back and only Kristina is awake, and she goes to sleep pretty much immediately. I’ve had a crazy journey, and I really want somebody to sit me down with a nice cup of tea and some biscuits and get me to tell them all about it. I resort to wishing I am with my mum, something that doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s very comforting. I Imagine having a big hug with her, and end up involving my dad too. My mum died three ago, and my dads eighty-four, and a whole load of emotional stuff to do with this and the day I’ve just had overwhelms me, and I disappear off into the bush again to have conversations with them and to cry rather a lot. Afterwards it puts into perspective a lot of feelings of rejection I’ve been having.
The week following has been less heavy in my head and am having better conversations mostly.
I have enjoyed picking cajunas beans this week. Picking has been so easy and satisfying, it’s like plucking money from a tree. The bread-nut trees are pretty groovy too. They drop these spiky looking but inoffensive fruit about eight inches long shaped like spiky green giant mangoes and after we let them rot slightly you can pull out about forty seeds that we cook up just like big roast chestnuts. Very tasty and you don’t have to ruin your thumbs trying to get them out of shells.
Living with five young Germans is a new experience for me, and they are happily quick to point out that they do indeed fall into the stereotype of being super-efficient. Up at 7 am for yoga, breakfast at 7.30, busy doing clever Permaculture projects by 8. They are really a nice friendly lot to be with, and I find their straight-forwards approach to just getting on with the tasks set is really refreshing; no interpersonal dramas on their part that I can detect.
I have started making a bamboo chair using the saw on my pocket-knife. I show Frederick how to make bread, and now he makes all the bread (very good it is too), the garden beds have been cleaned up and mulched with a mixture of heliconia leaves and stems and the remains of wee-wee ant nests which have a pheromone in them that keeps other ants away.
Jana and Rosie’s solar oven now ninety-five percent successfully cooks rice (which I’m about to have for breakfast) and we are halfway through building a stone and clay bread oven. It suddenly dawns on me that we are all in the middle of a lifestyle I’ve fantasised about for years. We’re actually doing it.
We fetch clay from a huge wee-wee nest. It’s good clean stuff and perfect for making pottery things with. The stones we fetch from the river bed nearby and sand is retrieved by swimming upstream with a big bucket, filling it from a shallow where silt is deposited and swimming back downstream pushing the box in front. It seems like the river is our highway and this is our commuter route. Nice.
I take the top out of a Madre De Cacao tree which is one of the fast-growing pollardable fuel-wood trees; its growing habit is much like willow, but much neater looking. I have an exciting time thirty foot up the tree hacking poles out of the top with a machete. All whilst not being attacked by sticky turpentine ants a few feet below me at the main fork halfway up the tree. (They sting like hell.)
Third time lucky; the first two times I get about fifty ants all up my legs. As soon as I swot one, they all start biting me at once like some kind of telepathic killing machine. I throw the machete out of the tree (I avoid accidentally impaling myself and fling myself down a shoddy home-made bamboo ladder as fast as I can. The ladder promptly disintegrates on my first two attempts.
Yesterday I get bitten right on the end of my jiggery-pokery by a leaf-cutter ant, much to the amusement of Dawn who is there at the time.
Another tree job, which I gather hasn’t been dealt with for years, is the removal of ‘wiss’ from the tangerine tree. I discover why. Wiss is a bit like a parasitic ivy that is growing rampantly all over the tangerine tree. Only problem is, the tangerine tree has the most horrific thorns I have ever encountered on a tree. Its covered with nasty hard spikes that get up to about six inches long before they even begin to think about actually becoming branches. Me being the stubborn type, can’t resist the challenge; ‘None of our other wwoofers has ever managed to deal with it at all’.
After an hour or two of getting cut to pieces and getting full of thorn splinters, I cut most of the wiss out, excepting a few bits right at the top of the tree that you would only get out by using a crane or by cutting the tree down.
I’m up and down like a yo-yo, fragile like I’m on thin ice. Sometimes I feel invisible. I need to spend extra time finding out how I get to Australia, get some music sent out here (spent the last three months listening to two albums) and write a list of the plants I’ve encountered out here, print out wot I writ from Seattle onwards. More-or-less continuously wavering between depression and a sense of wonder of this fantastic place. Maybe it’s just a dumb fixation, but Australia/New Zealand has become my Mount Everest. There, how melodramatic d’ya want it?
Rosie leaves, taking her bubbliness with her and everyone has quietened down, maybe it’s coincidence, but now I’m feeling more on a level with the others. I’ve felt much more balanced the last few days; less withdrawn and more chatty. We finish the clay bread oven and now we’re waiting for it to dry out before we fire it proper and use it. The three layers of clay in the dome structure are three inches, six inches and two inches thick.
At the same time Rosie leaves, a wind licks up and brings cool air for about four days. It even gets cool enough to warrant wearing something on top of a tee-shirt in the evening. Some complain about it being cold, but I relish it. I think this has some bearing on my mood.
Walking around bare-foot in the mud is at first quite a lovely sensation, but I soon tire of continually sliding about and having no firm footing; it takes so much more effort to get anywhere. The other thing I find is the mud has without my noticing, worked its way under my toenails to such an extent that my big toenails look like they are starting to come off! By now I have completely ripped out the thermal lining of my boots, and I have to put them back on as they are the only footwear that seem to work for me in this mud.
Today is Sunday, the day off, and it’s warmed up back to normal again. The days previous are refreshing and give me renewed vigour, and a taste of climate I’m altogether better suited to. Today, just lounging around reading ‘Cold Mountain’, a variation on The Odyssey set in the American south during the Civil War.
I’m back to the eternal sweating. If it wasn’t for the easy access of the beautiful river, I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
I think this has some bearing on my geographical fantasies. In place of sexual fantasies, I indulge in comfort fantasies of being in the rain on Vancouver Island, in the cold and fog in London or Wiltshire. The need for a jumper and coat and hat feels appetising. Cool wet crunchy apples. It’s funny how being in the exotic delights of the tropics has given me a keener perspective on the exotic possibilities of a dreary English winter, like coming home to a crackling fire and hot tea and soup and being outside all wrapped up from the weather. I think I’ve rediscovered a dormant beauty.
Also in the past few days, I finish making a three person seat from lengths of bamboo lashed together so that they hang like the seat of a deckchair and are supported by a couple of bamboo posts tied to a couple of trees at an angle. Very simple.
We decide to do something about a particular wee-wee nest that has just plain gotten too big. Every evening thousands of ants come marching out of a huge thirty foot long network of tunnels and stomp off to eat random chunks of the surrounding bush. This is becoming a problem as they are starting to threaten the existence of the young cacao trees.
Chris has the wonderful idea of pouring gas (petrol) down the holes and blowing the bastards sky high. As exciting as it sounds, it doesn’t seem particularly permacultural or sensitive and Dawn successfully talks us out of actually doing it. We feel slightly crest-fallen, and so we try out an ingenious idea to build a chicken pen round the nest and (obviously) put some chickens in it, so the chickens can eat the ants out of existence.
‘What’s permaculture?!’ I hear you cry. Basically it’s common sense gardening put into a systemised concept. For a better description, go look on the internet…
I really really want this idea to work; it seems such a good idea. The theory being that as the ants march out on their nightly trek, they would all march conveyor belt style into the eagerly waiting beak of the Chicken Of Death, the ants will be eradicated and the chickens would lay lots of anty-tasting eggs. All that actually happens is that the two chickens we put in the pen freaked out big style and go ‘OHMIGODYOUBASTARDSTHISISN’TMYPENWHEREAREMYFRIENDSYOUBASTARDSPUTMEBACKWHEREIBELONGMYTINYBRAINDOESN’TKNOWWHATSGOINGON!YOUBASTARDSAAAARRGGHH!’
All in chicken speak of course. Then the chickens settle down to a nice long long miserable sulk, don’t eat anything and are generally no use whatsoever.
Ah, chickens. Such ridiculous creatures.
April 21 Belize.
I am intrigued by Jess’s ideas of not having a dark/shadow side and her being concerned not to ‘misrepresent’ herself by behaving in what she sees as ‘unacceptable’ ways.
Maybe I can still have my withdrawn moments and be still able to say to new people ‘Hello, I’m Richard, I’m actually a nice guy but I’m having a wobbly moment – I’m saying this in order to check out how you are about this’.
What if I can find more ways to say how I’m feeling? Even with people I don’t know too well? Maybe it doesn’t have to take me a month (or three) to get to know or feel comfortable with people first.
Being continually superficial gets lonely after a while.
It would be so much better all round if I could figure out how to be more authentic more of the time. Maybe this ‘across the world’ journey is as much about giving myself new vistas on the inside as it is about seeing new geographies. Yeah. That old chestnut.
April 31st
I’ve taken two and half months to find my feet at Dawn and Chris’s. I’ve come through some clouds and finally connected. I’ve started to settle in, got used to the food and climate (mostly).
I know the routines and I am starting to appreciate the cycles of being here; anticipating the progress of the new house, the harvesting of mangoes, pineapples and cashews, almost seeing in the rainy season and the swelling of the river.
Appreciating the new puppies who in no time at all will become big dogs. After I’m gone, Esperanza will grow up enough to fight back Zoe, and everyone will change somehow or another. This has become a place I would like to return to some day; bring a girlfriend maybe even some kids (my kids?) and see how everything’s progressed. I’d like to stay in touch; I could send DVD movies in exchange for cacao maybe… see how Chris and Dawn’s planned road trips turn out. (They want to drive through South America in a bio-diesel truck.)
In a strange sort of way, I’m almost glad that I’m a bit sad to go; it means that I’ve ended up really valuing the place and people here.
One of my most beautiful memories of being at Dawn and Chris’s place is the day Dawn asks me and Zoe to go and fetch some eggs and tomatoes from Maria and Bonancio’s place just upstream from us. They are a Mayan family who sell some of their produce in the market in Punta Gorda to support themselves.
It’s raining, a month before the wet season is going to arrive.
Zoe is excited about going to get eggs, and relishes the prospect of being in charge of the expedition. She decides that we should swim there even though it will take loads longer than walking. The rain is bouncing off the river, making a layer of mist above its surface.
Zoe swims off ahead of me, shouting and laughing as usual. I am in some kind of paradise with a child happy and blessed to live in such a beautiful world as hers. Walking through the maize on the other side of the river trying to find our way through, Zoe leads the way and we have a really good conversation about the things I liked to do when I was a kid and how she loves to go on adventures; to go squelching in the mud and go swimming afterwards and to ride her bike around the place if she can.
That is a gift of a day, of simple wonders; she brought out the kid in me.
I’ve had no kids so far, and I often get clucky over kids. It’s moments like these I really value.
Zoe would often come and be loud at me when I am trying to be quietly alone when I am working. One day she comes over to me when I am shelling cajunas beans and she goes off on some verbal journey about going to stay over with some young friends who live up country. It involves sleeping over, midnight feasts, bags and bags and bags of sweets, riding bicycles in impossible places and being in charge of who could join in. At first I found her excited rambling annoying; partly because I am already busy filling my head with my own nonsense, and partly because what she’s talking about is becoming increasingly unlikely and over the top.
After a while it dawns on me that Zoe is doing exactly what I often do when I’m not in a position to have the things I want – she is imagining it instead. She’s telling me about a good time she’d actually had with friends up country and then embellishing it with all kinds of wishful kid-sized fantasy. I really get the impression that Zoe misses her friends a lot and wishes she could see them more often. I guess that’s why Zoe spends almost all of her time with the visiting WWOOFers, either being a bit of a pest or just hanging out talking, depending on the readiness of the WWOOFer to engage with her whilst trying to do work and also how much bounce Zoe has at that particular point (usually lots!). Zoe demands a lot of attention like most kids do, and sometimes she bugs me, and sometimes she really surprises me with how much she knows about where she lives. She certainly is a smart kid.
Inevitably, Esperanza is frequently the butt of Zoe’s frustrations. They both vie for the attention of others and inevitably Zoe will usually win, being twice the size and twice as loud. Zoe doesn’t always win these little battles though; Being only two years old, Esperanza’s solution to this seemed to be to fall over or get the sympathy vote somehow.
Esperanza is a real cutie pie, and set off my broodiness big time. One of the cutest things I remember about her is her stripping the hibiscus bushes of their vivid pink flowers and then showing me her ‘high biscuits’ dollies that she would hold out in her hand or arrange on the dining table in a line, whilst babbling a great long toddler-shaped explanation of what her dollies are all doing.
Such is the way of regular family life…
The kids both always want to go swimming, and whenever the WWOOFers would go to rid themselves of work sweat, the kids would hassle to come too, and most of the time they would come along, though Esperanza needs to be kept a close eye on being so young. Zoe would stand on the rocks on the other side yelling ‘Look at me! Look at me everybody!’ and then she would dive off the side with a big grin on her face, loving the attention.
May 7th-8th
The journey up from Dawn and Chris’s to Merida:
I leave Dawn and Chris’s with a simple goodbye like I am just going out for the day, no big emotional speeches. I guess I am worried that I haven’t actually been such a great person to have around (cos of my eternal worriedness) and that I would be embarrassed by anything that I think might smack of insincerity. I could equally be wrong on that count, and may just have ended up snubbing everyone unintentionally. Maybe I’m just being emotionally bunged up (more likely actually).
I wish I could count on my confidence more often than I do. Well, I know for certain that I’ve definitely put a lot of physical work in – I’ve got the muscles to prove it. I had an okay time with Dawn considering I have been a bit flipped out during my time on the farm. Chris is a radically different kind of person from me; he having a big wide-open kind of personality, and me being much more inward and just observing whats going on more. I think me and Chris would have found more common ground given enough time.
I remember Chris would make his attempt at a Dick Van Dyke ‘Would you like a cup of tea Mary Poppins?’ English accent which was always hilariously wide of the mark. It makes me wonder if my attempts at American accents are as bad as his English ones.
We have some good conversations about the stereotypes that English and American people have about each other;
The English are all ever so polite, drink tea and know the Queen personally. We all wear flat caps or bowler hats, we say ‘Do have another cup of tea won’t you?’ when we mean ‘Get out of my house’. We are all obsessed with football and despite an a dreadful history full of global dominance, wouldn’t say boo to a goose.
The Americans are all loud and over-emotional and think through the barrel of a gun and are by and large mad.
It’s good to discover some truth. It seems people everywhere often have fixed ideas about people from other countries when most of the time they have never even had any real contact with them. It’s only by meeting some real live people you get to find out what they are really about. Even though Chris and Dawn are here, evidently in the arse end of nowhere, they still manage to be great international diplomats.
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MEXICO
HEADING SEAWARDS.. EVENTUALLY.
The ride up to Belize City is pleasant enough, everyone cheerful and friendly on the bus.
On my first encounter with the Hummingbird Highway three months ago it was full of the gorgeoues jasmine smell of orange bloom. On the way back up again, it has become the smell of valleyfuls of thick yummy marmalade.
I arrive in Belize City, hang out at a Shell gas station (it’s weird seeing one of those again) and spend a couple of hours listening to the reggae emanating from the shop radio and watching people go about their evening socialising.
Having had my fill of social resusitation, I go and I sleep at the edge of a cemetery on the other side of the road.
I go into town next morning to be told by the US Consulate that I don’t need a visa for the US. This is great news – it means that I can get a ferry from Yucatan to Florida and see what happens from there.
I get a bus to Chetumal, equally pleasant and straight-forwards, sharing the ride with seven of those curious folks, the Mennonites. I try being jolly with one of them and promptly give up when I suddenly remember that the Mennonite thing is to take a vow of grumpiness. No laughing or earthly pleasure allowed. Very puritan. I seriously hope that God is doing his love thing for them, I reckon you’d need it. It certainly doesn’t show on their faces, though the retro bumpkin dungarees clobber combined with the ZZ Top beards is quite jolly.
I get some money at Chetumal, having shared a taxi with a briefly met spotty red-skinned Irish woman. Ten months in Asia has not done her complexion much good bless her.
I get the second class night bus to Merida. I discover that ‘second class’ means a reckless driver who likes going as fast as humanly possible and then slamming on the brakes as hard as he can with no warning.
Imagined job interview:
Boss: ‘Senor, all our first class driver positions are filled. How badly can you drive?’
Applicant: ‘Oh, very bad sir, I drive like a drunk man wearing moon boots who has just had an argument with his wife, and is now looking for indiscriminate vengeance’.
Boss: ‘Excellente, you start on Monday’.
Well I suppose that’s another traveller cliche I can cross off the list.
I arrive at Merida 5.30 am, almost totally sleepless and rather battered. In my sleep-deprived fug, I completely fail to communicate anything intelligent with anyone about finding a boat to Florida, thus reminding me why I have no interest in being Central America generally; my almost completely useless Spanish.
I spot and flag down an equally stupored looking Aussie, in trouble cos he’s been refused to be allowed on a plane cos he has no visa for the US. (It has run out by just one day – bastards!.) We hook up as we have mutual obstacles – visas, lingo, place to stay, and more pressingly, a lack of breakfast.
I go to get funds out of an ATM, and to my shock, I seem to have the very surprising and disastrous sum of fifty dollars in my account.
Ah.
Merida May 20th (ish) 2003
Oh crap. No money. Like almost zero. A slight Spaniard in the works. I currently have 550 pesos (thirty US dollars, about twenty-five quid), which will last me about five days. I have emailed three people asking them to send money. I hope to God someone does – I don’t know what else I can do. I have to get to the US somehow whatever happens – all flights are via Miami.
For the moment I have to draw my strings in. How do I keep going on fifty bucks? Maybe I can work at the hostel or a nearby WWOOF farm. Worst case scenario: I have to go to the British Embassy and get myself deported to England, in which case, I have to pay them back, I can visit people, go earn money and start again. That doesn’t sound so bad…
As a security measure before I had left England I had asked my bank to transfer one thousand pounds into my friend Helen’s bank account so that supposedly I would still have safe money if I ever happened to get robbed. ATM machines at this time very unhelpfully do not show you what your current balance is, so the only way I can know how much money I have is to make a note of it on paper as I am going along. I had phoned Helen whilst in Belize two weeks ago to check that she has recieved the transfer, as I figure it might be time to move it back into my current account; I was reckoning that maybe I only had a few hundred US dollars left in it. Seeing as how Helen seems not to have received the thousand pound bank transfer, I presumed (wrongly) that the money was still in my current account.
WHERE’S IT BLOODY GONE THEN??!
Next day.
I feel like going back to Norfolk for a bit and starting over, and having a recharge. After all, it’s been eight months without hugs, excluding one with Sofie in Victoria. Wow – I can remember the one hug I had in eight months!
I get a response from a very old girlfriend after a plea for financial assistance. She tells me to get a job to pay for the ticket. Imagined unsent email back to her goes thus:
‘If I worked as you helpfully suggest I would make six dollars a day (the going rate), and if I sleep on the streets and never eat anything, I would have enough money for a ticket in approximately six months. Thanks for your thoughtfulness. Not.’
Just stupid bitterness really. Feeling slightly desperate. Realise the pettiness of it and so don’t reply. Life’s short and should be kept sweet.
Next day.
I phoned dad last night at 2 am here, 8 am in England. He tells me not to worry and that he will sort it out. I start making new plans for what to do in England; see people, tie up loose ends and suchlike.
Weird.
I was supposed to be going to Florida.
Saturday may 10th?
I am staying at a hostel. Well it looks like I shall receive money by Wednesday/Thursday if all goes well, which is a great relief. So big thanks to my dad. Also I have just discovered there is lots of nice free vegetables and cheese here at the hostel, so I can feel at ease now. I notice how calm I’ve been about all this, with only really one brief feeling of panic. It seems like I am really lucky in coming to Merida in the first place. It’s a nice city and the hostel is really good too. I’m glad I’ve got the opportunity to actually stay awhile someplace in Mexico, to feel what it’s like and discover how friendly the locals are here, so actually it’s been very nice, the architecture is very interesting here too, the colours very beautiful. As are the Mexican Mayan women by and large yum yum it’s been tooooooo long godammit.
The grand plaza is truly romantic, with lots of entwined couples on benches, two clowns regularly perform in the evening, and it’s lovely to people watch here. Really people watch, not just letching at women. There are wandering mariachis as well. All I need now is to find a free art gallery or two. It’s a nice way to end my current trip – half in the tropics, half in a grand old Mexican town; a halfway step to the bustling grey suburbia that’s about to become common to me again back in England.
Merida was founded in 1542 by the Spanish. It has a sixty percent Mayan population, the highest of any Mexican city. Its cultural influences are a mix of Spanish, Mayan, French, and British.
Sunday May 11th or 12th
Hey guess what? Anxiety again! This is what the vessel of me expects to be filled with, it pretty much seems like it. Anxious about getting caught up in Norwich and never getting to New Zealand, of having a repeat situation of procrastinating for two years (or of not going at all). To keep me inspired: thoughts of tropical exotica in Australia. Funny really cos yesterday I had the realisation that there are so many things I’m scared of that I don’t need to be. Maybe there are many elements of Norwich I can relax and be involved with, and still be focussed on going to New Zealand/Australia.
Ye Gods. I haven’t even got back yet.
Wednesday 17th May
Well I’ve got my ticket to England now… well, I will have when I go to pick it up this afternoon, no problems I hope.
I can’t take photos cos I’m waiting for a CD to be made and the shop has the memory card out of my camera, so not much to do.
I go shopping for fruit and veg with my new-found riches (mango! mango! mango!) and then go to see ‘Shanghai Kid in London (London Knights)’ (Jackie Chan and Owen Williams). Watching a movie is a real treat, though really expensive – almost the same as English prices.
I have met some very nice people in the hostel; two Mexicans (who I will try to help find work in England), Esther Ann Nisha Boller who fantastically lives next to Vigeland Park (a wonderful wonderful collection of sculptures) in Oslo. She wants to go to Molde Jazz Festival and we are travelling on the same flight back to Amsterdam, which will be good. I can’t really go anywhere until I get my pictures back from the photo processing place.
I would like to see a Cenotes (blue pool/cave) though I may go to Chitchen Itza instead. It’s almost as if I’m only going to go in case I regret it when I get home. Might go to Tulum on the coast where Moby is supposedly playing at a free full moon beach party. That might be good, though possibly a hassle. (As it turned out, the Moby gig was a mere rumour.)
Esther has invited me to hang out with her on Isla Mujeres in order to lie on the beach to improve sun tans; she’s Norwegian so she needs to. Seems like I should figure out how much money I’ve got first.
I meet a nice Czech chap who has cycled from Mexico City to here (obviously) and we are going to watch a European football semi-finals thing between Real Madrid and Juventus in a bar somewhere.
Football interests me not a jot normally, but to be hanging out in a bar with a nice guy with lots of cheering Hispanics is fab.
Bored bored bored bored bored…
I am in waiting mode. I get my plane ticket, get my photo CD, buy mangoes and bananas (bargain).
I had lovely night with Lydia (self-doubting but beautiful Korean woman) and Penny from Wooten Bassett no less (close to my roots). We get on absolutely famously – she’s definitely best mates kind of a person. Down to earth Wiltshire lass. We understand each others humour. That’s pretty rare.
Tomorrow I’m off to the Isle of Women (Isla Mujeres) to meet up with Esther and/or Penny. I seem to be doing better at women right now, which makes a change. This morning a rather interesting Belgian woman appeared, so like a desperate bugger, I decide to stick around one more day and see if we have anything more worthwhile to say to each other. She comes back to Belgium in a month, so maybe…
It feels like the old three buses at once scenario… that has habit of being a bit messy. I am quite up for a casual flingette. Now, do I go for Esther or Penny? Knowing me, I’ll just end up making a steaming twit of myself/oh well it’s just people being into each other.
Today I take about 250 photos of walls and doorways purely for their abstract art thing potential. I love the way the Mexicans know how to make the most of boring old concrete. In many places, people’s house fronts are painted fabulous bright sunny colours, and where different surfaces or properties meet there are the most spectacular blocks of colour combinations. This is interspersed with flaked paint revealing the previous lurid colour underneath, or exposed rocks where the concrete has fallen off makes endless beautiful compositions. Eventually after a few hours I have to stop taking photos as it starting to make me spin out.
*IN* THESE PICS ARE VIEWABLE ONLINE?
Upon reaching Isla Mujeres, I book into a clubby trendy hostel that is stingey with the food and full of nubile young women. After asking for the whereabouts of Norwegian Ester, a guy tells me that she has been shagging anything that moves, which leaves me feeling pretty dumb.
I get very pissed on the beach with Penny and two women from Manchester and an Ozzie guy who’s very upfront about his sexuality which of course I find really annoying. I am afterwards fed up and frustrated at my own inability to get beyond a certain shyness.
I turn down golf cart riding with them the next day. Partly cos I feel like I’m bad company at the moment, partly cos it looks like a real waste of money and mostly because I can’t bring myself to pretend to enjoy an activity so spectacularly vacuous.
I decide to walk round the island instead and sing in the sea. It’s too bloody hot and apart from the joys of singing my woes in a reggae stylie and enjoying the warm blue surf, walking is hard on bare feet and I have to wear my shirt on my head turban-style. To keep the hot weight off my feet I am walking with a stick. I seem to be attracting the attention of the locals. I probably look like Gandhi.
Most of the way round I pass a woman walking her dog. We say ‘hello’, and we walk past each other. I turn round and look at her and she is still looking at me. I walk on and turn again after a few moments and she’s still looking at me. She’s an unusual looking woman. Tall and big with a strange bobbed hairstyle that is slightly wild and a tatty home-made skirt that’s been made out of an old pair of jeans. It seems she is equally intrigued by this man wearing his shirt on his head and who has no shoes.
‘Are you a walker?’ she calls out to me.
I don’t quite understand what she means.
She further asks me where I’m going and whether I’d like to crew on a boat. This blows my mind slightly. It sounds really interesting. She’s quite sexy in an obscure kind of way and it’s come at an obviously really really crap moment – just after I’ve got myself in debt to my dad and bought a plane ticket home. I ask to see her boat anyway, and it’s cramped but groovy, and smells like small boats have a habit of smelling; like chemical toilets.
Despite the weird smell, we engage enthusiastically and finally I give in to the urge I have to pull her to me… fantastic sex then ensues along with intense conversation for the next two days, and then I leave. Which is hard to do when the woman you’ve just met has her tongue in your mouth and is trying to have sex with you whilst you’re trying to scramble out through the boat’s tiny hatchway…
Feeling intensely conflicted between obligation and desire, I almost panic, but I do leave – she insists that I do – and once away from the boat and her, I feel curiously strong and capable.
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ENGLAND:
INSIDE-OUT HOLIDAY AT HOME.
23 May 2003
The flight home is uneventful, except that Esther isn’t on the flight which is probably just as well.
I love seeing the drizzle as we arrive at Schipol Airport in Holland, the country looking gloriously green and grey at the same time. Welcome back to Europe. The ride home is easy.
On the ferry, I realise that I do have shyness issues that I need to get past as it leaves me in victim mode, which is crap. I pluck up the courage to ask for rides off the ferry, and I am successful. Ask and you shall receive. Good stuff. Seek and you shall find. Exercise your weak muscles. It turns out afterwards that my ride to Ipswich mysteriously has done a runner (or has collapsed stoned in the toilet or something), which isn’t too much of a bother. Still I learn something useful.
Oh, to be back in England; It’s a wonderful fresh view for me to see my green green homeland, as if through the eyes of a foreigner…
The first thing I notice is the gleaming tiled roofs of packed together old Victorian terraced houses.
As well as the wonderful sense of seeing everything as if through new eyes, I also feel a familiarity that soaks deep into my bones. I feel strangely more of a person than the version of me that had left for Canada somehow.
There appears to be inadequate train information regarding how to escape from the grimy rainy port of Harwich. Eventually I get to Ipswich where I have to change trains.
Two old boys, probably relics from the Golden Age of Steam chat to each other and stand on the platform looking dapper in their perfectly neat green uniforms and peaked caps.
‘Dennis, what has happened to the 5.15 to Stowmarket?’
‘Well Eric, I do believe that there has been a mechanical failure on the lines just after Colchester. I have been told that it is going to be ten minutes late.’
‘Well Dennis, may I suggest that we make full use of this unexpected time and go and make a nice pot of tea?’
‘Very good idea Eric, let’s go and make a pot of tea’.
This is just the kind of detail that makes England the quirky little place that it is. Wonderful!
Now then. Norwich….
First day back in England, at Nautia housing co-op, receive a very lovely welcome from Richard Jackson. I’m feeling pretty good, focussed and relaxed.
May 24th
After initial jubilation with friends in Norwich I come crashing down again and I feel weird and anxious about what and where next. Nothing I’m not already expecting then. Helen’s friend Teresa is here, she reads Tarot cards for me and tells me I need to use my healing abilities – she says I have a lot to give.
I feel weird about what Shawn is/was all about. As much as I fancy Shawn it comes at some risk; of course it does – it’s a huge change/challenge. Maybe talking with Teresa may clarify things.
It transpires that the reason I had no money in Mexico was because my bank had mislaid one thousand pounds and put it in a holding account. (Whatever one of those is.) I tell my dad and he refuses my offer to pay back the airfare he gave me.
Oh. Suddenly I don’t need to earn any money to continue on my way. I am so relieved by this and the fact that I have had an excuse to be back home briefly that I forget to be angry at the bank for screwing up.
So.. I buy myself a new ticket back out, ready for the next bit.
I go to a party and have weird pleasure of saying hello to long unseen friends and then explaining to them that I am flying back out to Cancun within the week…
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MEXICO:
ISLE OF WOMEN.
11th June Isla Mujeres, Cancun.
I am back on the AA (Absolute Absolution) again. Very weird.
Despite my anxieties whilst in Mexico last time about what coming back to England would be like, I absolutely loved being back there, and was pretty much comfortable that England is ‘here and now’ just as the AA is going to be ‘here and now’ too.
Days one and two on the boat have actually been awkward and uncomfortable, despite some fairly satisfying sexual stuff with Shawn.
So it’s goodbye to the familiarity of Englishness, the lush green of the deeply-loved countryside, the refreshing coolness of the air, the greenness all around, people I know well, relationships most of which seem to be working better; I certainly notice a significant shift in my confidence generally, though I was still a bit wobbly at the party. I have always found parties a bit tricky.
After having no sleep Saturday and Sunday and then travelling by plane for eleven hours, it’s come as a shock to rediscover how much I love what I have back in Norwich. I have deliberately stepped out of what is safe and comfortable to do what? I need to be clear about this in order to remain objective (and stay grounded and get not wrapped up in head trips).
This boat trip is not forever; a luscious land-based reality is still going to happen.
To be here in an environment where I hope I will be actively encouraged to be more able. To get better at working in a team, and on a practical level learn how sailing works, get better at Spanish, and stay fit and healthy.
I spend two weeks on the boat moored up at Oscar’s restaurant with Shawn and June whilst we wait for Ed and the rest of the crew to turn up. Me and Shawn spend time getting to know each other, which is quite satisfying after a year of sexual abstinence. Everything else is a bit psychological and tricky sometimes, but I’m up for it. I feel like I need a bit of mental stimulation and challenge. I’m a bit concerned about how things are going to be when everyone else turns up. Shawn has warned me that she will ‘become a different person’ when she has to be captain. This I am to discover later I will find quite difficult.
Shawn tells me that she wants there to be no presumptions about how our new relationship might function. We are to progress very deliberately and cautiously (mostly on her part, I still presume too easily). Holding hands and flirting when other people are present is a no-no amongst other things. It’s weird, but it’s really quite worthwhile to have my assumptions about relationships challenged and woken up a bit.
Lots of things around the subject of me being vague, non-precise in my language and claiming to have a bad memory because of previous drug abuse are all challenged too. It winds me up and feels freeing by turns. This is going to be quite a strange ride I can tell.
The night everyone else turns up, Shawn conducts a conversation, asking each of us present what the most ‘lined up’ experience we have ever had was (i.e. when we felt the most fully functioning as a person).
Everyone tells their story and I say how swimming in the river in Belize with Zoe has been mine. We note how sometimes when you ask people when their most amazing experience was, it often seems to have happened years and years ago. We conclude that we would do ourselves a service by doing things that will make us feel absolutely wonderful much more frequently.
After this interesting discussion I go and say hello to the night by standing in a quiet spot on the front-end of the boat on my own. What starts out as a bit of a stretch turns into an enormous sensation of energy flowing into me, opening me up and making me literally vibrate physically for about half an hour. It’s amazing. I release a lot of pent-up old crap. I take this to be a good omen, most definitely.
I guess that any sense of deep connectedness and of feeling ‘right where I am’ has for the most part come in the first place from being in the historically-rich landscape that I grew up around:
The last time it happened spontaneously without meditation was a long time back at ‘The Rollrights’, a circle of standing stones in Gloucestershire England…
It happened two days after Christine, my girlfriend at the time announced that she didn’t want to see me any more. We were both about twenty and I’d just come back from Inter-railing on my own round Europe in order to try and get some perspective on our increasingly wonky relationship.
I was staying at Wendy’s house in Newbury, a mutual friend, and Wendy and a couple of her mates were going off to ‘visit the ancient sites’. Sue and Steve were travellers of the ‘New Age’ variety; into having dreadlocks, drinking beer and smoking dope and probably were into other drugs too.
They lived in an old Panorama single-decker bus painted dark blue with a large flower painted on the back: The Bluebell Bus.
So I jumped aboard, on this short vacation from a life where everyone was on the dole busily achieving precisely nothing but a stoned mind.
At that time, I’d had nothing to smoke, and about two mouthfuls from a tin of cheap lager, but I was quite upset about me and Christine – the day trip was to give me something else to think about whilst I got myself back on track.
First we visited the Uffington White Horse near Swindon.
Its old. Very old;
There is a theory that the Belgae tribe copied the design from a Gaulish coin.
Some believe it to be ‘non-representational art’; but who the hell would want to put a huge ‘random’ squiggle on the ground and preserve it for centuries for no reason?
Most likely it was a cult-figure/tribal symbol.
There is a novel: ‘The Scouring of the White Horse’ by Thomas Huges published in 1857, and much more recently, one my favourite bands XTC from nearby Swindon feature the White horse on the cover of their album ‘English Settlement’.
In more recent times, nearby Marlborough College has been taking care of it, cutting away encroaching grass to prevent it from gobbling up the White Horse over the years, alongside other individuals and groups at different times throughout history.
The White Horse Hill is situated on a five thousand year old walking track called The Ridgeway. The Ridgeway was probably established for walking livestock and as a trading route. Back then the entire south of England was forest and it must have been quite difficult to find your way across the country, hence this route followed the distinctive ridges of the Chiltern Hills just north of London, passing westards to the south of Oxford, across the Berkshire Downs and Lambourne (next to Uffington and itself racehorse training country), and then to Avebury, another ancient place with the largest stone circle in the world.
Avebury has been in me since I was six years old, and I went there on my first school trip; away from the town and everything I’d ever seen. I don’t think I’d even been to the countryside before. Then one day, I got off a coach with a bunch of other six year olds, and I’m there in this really weird place, a tiny village surrounded by this huge circular ditch, twenty foot deep and twenty foot wide, dotted with huge towering stones. It seems huge to me as an adult. The effect on six year olds must be incredible! Living only just down the road about twenty or thirty miles for a lot of my growing up, we would visit occasionally. I think of it as a huge belly button; an umbilical.
From Avebury another track follows down to Stonehenge, and from there you can follow another ancient track to Devon. These routes I suspect were mostly practical in their original uses. Ancient ways of thinking have rubbed off and given these places their magic that still endures with some people.
The White Horse is a 150 metres long and carved out of the turf, exposing the chalk beneath. There are about eighteen others around Wiltshire, (crop circle country) most of them made in the nineteenth century. I personally think the bit about the Uffington White Horse being non-representational art is crap. Various cults were known to have had featured horses as an aspect of Goddess worship, one variation being that the Goddess rides a chariot pulled by a White Horse.
This one may have been dedicated to the Roman goddess Epona (hence the word ‘pony’) who would pull the moon through the sky.
If you sleep in the eye of the White Horse at full moon and make a wish, it will come true. I tried it once and wished I wasn’t so blinking cold, so I retreated to my tent – Hey! My dream came true!
Back again on our perambulations, we doodled about on the side of the hill and admired the windy view, looking out over the vast flat expanse to the north of the Ridgeway. Good place to blow out the cobwebs.
Afterwards we drove off up to a different part of the country, Gloucestershire about thirty miles away. In the middle of nowhere, not on any ancient tracks that I knew of at least, were ‘The Great Rollrights’. The name derives from an old name ‘Rollendrith’ which in turn came from ‘Hrolla-landriht’; ‘The Land of Hrolla’.
At the time, the place just seemed like an insignificant circle of rough stones. Standing at mostly about three foot tall like broken teeth at strange angles, over the last six thousand years gravity and weather have sucked the stones back down into the soil.
There the stones stood, fenced off in the corner of some picturesque but otherwise unremarkable undulating farmland, hemmed in between a strip of tree cover and a narrow country lane. It was a fairly un-touristy spot. None of Stonehenge’s stunning grandeur, and consequently none of its tourists; I hope it stays that way.
The kids larked about running round and squealing and laughing.
Wendy made a grandiose show of ‘feeling the stones’ – ‘Oh this ones hot!’, ‘Oh this ones cold!’ Wendy was a bit messed up after going through a bitter divorce and was frequently prone to shows of what I thought was irritatingly fake ‘witchy’ behaviour. I feel utterly unimpressed and fairly lost by the whole event, me busy being a sulky bastard over the loss of my girlfriend; not doing ‘cosmic’ today thanks.
I leaned against the tallest stone in the circle. Not for any reason other than the rest were too stubby and I couldn’t lean against any of them.
Being fed up, I blanked out from Wendy and her kids. I breathed out. I found myself relaxing and feeling increasingly comfortable, leaning against this stone in my little mental refuge. I mentally sank further into somewhere safe and internal. I felt myself getting somehow glued to the stone. Something like relief or release. Somehow I felt something in the air; dare I say it – an energy. I felt a twisting spiral that came down out from the top of the sky, down through me and this stone and then coming outwards again way down into the ground. It was going the other way too, coming up out of the ground, through the stone and me, and way up into the sky. I was freaked. I was transfixed and astonished. Physical reality became a blur way outside of me.
I heard a woman’s voice. It wasn’t Wendy or anyone I recognised. She said:
‘Don’t be afraid. I am part of you, and you are part of me.’
I was almost dumbstruck.
‘What should I do?’ I don’t know if I spoke it out loud or just in my head.
The reply came.
‘Do whatever you want. Just remember to always take me with you.’
The voice receded, and the energy carried on spiralling.
Wendy approached and tried to speak. I’ve no idea what she said. She went away and came back later, I’ve no idea how long she took, my brain wasn’t understanding things like ‘time’.
She gabbled at me. We were in different worlds. I think she wanted to leave. I became vaguely aware that everyone was waiting for me.
She stood in front of me rolling a cigarette. When she’d rolled it, I took it from her and smoked it to nothing in one long hard draw. She looked surprised. I absolutely detested cigarettes. ‘You don’t smoke!’ she exclaimed.
‘I do right now.’
Reluctantly I left the place and went back to the bus.
Steve: ‘You alright man? You looked like you was trippin’ out!’.
Sian, Wendy’s seven year old daughter ‘Mum, is Richard alright?’
Wendy ‘Yeah man, where did you go!? Tell us what happened!’ a big grin on her face.
‘Er. I’ll tell you later’
I didn’t feel frivolous. I didn’t speak to anyone for three days after that.
Meanwhile, back on the boat…
David, aka ‘Poppa Neutrino’ is a tall slightly overweight robust looking guy with a big white beard and a battered sun hat. He’s in his seventies, could enter the Ernest Hemingway look-a-like competition and possibly win, and is spoken of in reverential terms amongst the rest of the crew. He is a classic patriarch.
This kind of human dynamic gives me the creeps a bit; I’ve seen it before with the Transcendental Meditation people and think I can keep myself out of trouble with it. I’m not going to be anti or resistant and I’m not going to suck up just because it’s expected of me. These are just ordinary people who’ve constructed their own weird social dynamic. That’s all it is to me.
Shawn loves this guy like a father – with good reason. She was born in a hippy commune in Vermont with a gay sperm-donor father absent in New York City from year zero and has a lesbian mother, being conceived by artificial insemination. The commune lived by the principles of Gurdjeff, a hard-nosed Russian free-thinker of the turn of the 1900s whose idea of life seemed to be one of spiritual development through giving yourself a hard time as often as possible. It’s one thing to deal with difficulty when it happens in as constructive a way as you can and when you need to, but quite something else to get on a self-flaggelating head first melodrama roller-coaster. Been there, done that, tore the tee shirt to shreds. It’s crap with no end. (Yes I know I’m a hypocrite; I should get off the boat right now before it’s too late. Still maybe some hot sex might make up for it.)
Anyhow, Shawn grew up with a bunch of hippies whose idea of nurturance was to discourage her mother from cuddling her and to leave her to stew in her own juices until she stopped crying (which apparently indicated that all was now well again). I wonder if they were just using the Gurdjeff thing as a handy excuse for being a bunch of emotionally-retarded idiots.
Shawn grew up, got straight ‘A’s in everything at school because she’s blessed with genius, but is ultimately bored by the whole school system thing. She got into drugs and turned into a 300 lb drug-addled TV couch potato. Eventually something up her arse finally exploded (apart from possibly her appendix) and she travelled to the other side of the States with the grand ambition of being a bum on the streets of Phoenix Arizona. At least it’s warmer there. Predictably, she had an eye-opening time, met too many of the wrong sorts of people and eventually in her late teens goes back to her strange relationship with her mum in Vermont.
Whilst there wondering what the hell to do with a family monster called ‘Thanksgiving’, she met two friends of her mums who’d come up to visit. They seemed to understand where she was at and took her under their wing. They were David and Betsy who liked to live on the move. (They are both on the boat now, Betsy having changed her name to ‘Aurelia’.) They had firstly lived out of station wagons and old buses in the sixties and seventies, and had latterly taken to the water and lived and worked in sailing boats and rafts. They were the first people to sail a raft across the North Atlantic, in a raft built from junk. Water rats on a grand scale (www.floatingneutrinos.com). They were Gurdjeff people too.
They had a couple of grown-up kids of their own, and one their hobbies seemed to be rescuing screwed up kids with no lives and useless parents.
David took Shawn off on a walking trip across Mexico where he taught her about playing music on the streets; him twanging his cheap guitar and she learning to sing swing and blues tunes. They had no money, they lived at ground level with the Mexicans, they ate with them, slept in their porches and sometimes their beds, and Shawn lost weight and got her act together.
I’m not big on Gurdjeff, but that’s one interesting father figure. The winter previous to me meeting them, David had gone back to Greenwich Village to conduct something like a social experiment. The FN’s had previously built a junk raft on a quayside in New York City and squatted the spot, sending a vocal message through the New York media that anyone can have their own space even if you don’t have any land. (If they can do it in the Far East, then why not in the States?) It’s a bit ‘Waterworld’ but I’ve come across people living this kind of lifestyle before. (Like the guy on his caravan raft in Tofino.)
When I ask David, he tells me that the Floating Neutrinos have met the various wacky house-raft people themselves when they went up there looking for giant driftwood trunks to build their own new raft. They didn’t use them in the end as it was very illegal – the driftwood is all protected as a natural preserve, ironic in the extreme as most it is there on West Coast beaches because of trashed old growth from Oregon and northwards that had broken free from log booms and washed up there…
Anyhow, a later solo experiment of David’s was to live in a box on wheels on the streets of Greenwich Village and the surrounding area. He knocked up the box out of plywood and did his thing; playing chess with passers-by during the day. He reasoned that nobody takes any notice of bums and having a portable bedroom would be warmer for an old man like himself and even more anonymous. So this he did for three months. How much of this was driven by choice or circumstance I don’t know.
It tickles my own notions of mobile living; whether it’s being in a van, a caravan, living out of panniers on a bicycle, having a horse and wagon or living out of a rucksack. I’ve imagined folding bow-top caravans that you could pull with a bicycle. How could you retain comfort and a sense of security whilst not turning your load into a freedom-restricting burden? I am really quite intrigued by this man’s thinking, who so late in years hasn’t finally given up on his dreaming and retreated towards the casket. Having said that, he did try to get me into the idea of travelling round South America with him on foot whilst sleeping in a similar mobile box at night. I don’t know whether he has thought of this himself, but it seemed to me to be like taking the funeral casket with him, easing into that ultimate day, still moving but with death in mind. There seemed to be something very beautiful about this to me. It didn’t seem polite to ask how he regarded it.
Along with a pile of kids he’s fathered who mostly didn’t seem to get along with him (him being more left-field than most), he’s had four divorces and as many heart attacks.
Come the day, I suspect they won’t want him in Heaven or Hell, and he’ll just have to come back and dance the whole ballet all over again… I don’t think he’d thank me for saying that somehow.
David says himself that if he has any regrets it’s that he hadn’t hit the booze so much and had such a god-awful bad temper. (This I can vouch for.)
Galen is one of David’s grandchildren, is from San Francisco, is in his mid-twenties and is along for the ride. After hearing so many messed up stories about his grandfather he decided that he finally has to meet the guy and make up his own mind. Galen is conscientious in an ecological sort of way, sharp-witted and down to earth. He feels a little like an outsider too, so he’s good to be around – he’s interested in, but not buying into the whole Gurdjeff thing lock stock and barrel. Galen wants to ‘make a difference’ somehow and also wants to open a cafe-style place in San Francisco, and now he’s here looking for inspiration in the operations of group dynamics.
Return to Contents Page.
THE GULF OF MEXICO:
WORSE THINGS REALLY DO HAPPEN AT SEA.
Boat life, I discover, does not fulfil many of what I feel to be my travellers’ version of home comforts. I normally enjoy the variety of visual perspectives you get on the move. Here everything is reduced to a monotone blue swirling upon a mostly flat horizon.
My cabin is cramped up in the bow-point (right at the front); It’s sweaty, and the sea gurgles round the outside of it like it has terminally bad guts. It rolls around constantly, which for the first few days is horrible. After a while I don’t really notice it so much, and the feeling of being right up where the boat is slicing through the sea is a cross between being inside a plough cutting through a liquid field and being right up in the top part of a rocket voyaging through blue space on some grand mission.
The skies are fantastic, and I do really enjoy doing the night watch on the helm between four in the morning and 6.30 am. The light on the compass is often too dim to see by, so I line up the two fore-masts with a particular star in between them and follow that. This really creates a feeling of following in a fantastically old way of living, of finding your way through unknown waters using what signs the heavens show you and having to rely on whatever the winds and currents give you. It really feels like that; it’s lovely. It’s a nice mental space to be in, in the silently gurgling darkness with everyone else asleep, just me, a creaky boat, fluttery sails, the sea, the moonlit sky, a ginger cat and my wandering imagination.
Unfortunately, its not just the my imagination that is wandering; I have completely failed to realise that my method of star-following navigation hasn’t taken in account the fact that stars revolve round the Pole Star and move through the night sky, so I’ve been sending us on a curve rather than a straight line. Oops.
Our journey, we are informed by our captain and by some of our very experienced crew, will likely take between three and five days, and so we are thus provisioned with food and water. If you were to look at the map, you would probably say ‘Oh yes, Cancun is just here, and Havana is not so far away, just about two hundred odd miles. Good’.
What actually happens is that the combination of a new captaincy and a new-ish boat that has not been fully tested for sailing the hard upwind short route and probably my wonky steering (I’m saying nothing) ends up with us taking the very very long way round up into the Gulf of Mexico and spending a certain amount of time drifting…
The water runs out first, and we hail a passing container ship asking them for assistance. Luckily for us, we can rely on the fact that international shipping laws dictate that if anyone in distress hails another ship, you are legally obliged to come to their rescue.
We drop sail as this big grey freighter bound for Guatamala changes course and sidles up to us and dwarfes us with it’s lumbering elephantine enormity. It’s offer of assistance is like having King Kong offer to pick grit out of your eye. It radios us telling us it has dropped a wooden pallet with water containers strapped to it and then turns and disappears to the south. We all stand on deck straining our eyes to find a brown coloured blip in the rolling sea. After we have nearly given up hope of finding it, Ed spots it through the binoculars and we turn the engines on and motor up to the pallet. We drag it aboard; it has two five gallon containers attached to it, containing about four gallons of water in total.
The water gets dubbed ‘Dr. Pepper’ water on account of its peppery taste. To me it tastes like it’s been drained out of an old radiator or something. I won’t drink it it’s so foul.
This water obviously doesn’t change our situation much. The food’s running low too. No vegetables left except a couple of onions and two bulbs of garlic and several limes.
It’s been a mad journey so far. I’ve been analysed, criticised, loved (so I am informed) and it’s all been a bit much for my fragile but carefully-guarded ego. No sex with Shawn, in fact almost zero actual conversation that isn’t loaded with some kind of psychoanalysis. But lots of short temper and instruction barking instead. She has this notion that if she barks urgently enough, I’ll instinctively understand how to do things I know nothing about, like dropping an anchor for example. She may well be the captain, but respect is something you have to earn, regardless of who you are. I’m not into it. On the other hand, I’ve had a few psychological possibilities opened up to me – like my self-image of vagueness and bad memory is rubbish and I don’t have to be that. I can choose intentionally what kind of interactions and what kind of day I want to have. It’s up to me to make them happen.
In amongst the intense psychological wranglings that are inevitable with a bunch of New Agers cramped in a tiny space, has been the curious set of interactions between Galen and Shawn.
Galen being male and single has been ‘coming on’ to Shawn which leaves me with a mixture of feelings. Me feeling generally powerless cos Shawn seems to have disconnected from me completely without any explanation other than ‘she would become a different person when she became captain’, which emotionally I don’t understand. I also feel a kind of bitter amusement that Galen doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for if he tangles with her. I’m also horribly jealous because he’s more her age, better looking, he can conduct himself more eloquently than me and he’s ‘family’. It occupies the ‘nagging anxiety’ part of my brain.
Some time later, the balance shifts. Shawn is trying to get Galen to drop anchor. She treats him the same as she did me.
He doesn’t understand the boating terminology because no-one has explained any to him. He asks what to do. She yells at him. He politely says he doesn’t understand the procedure. She just yells more angrily ‘Just fucking do it you fucking idiot!’
He does nothing. There’s nothing he can do except maybe shout back at her. He can see that this will achieve nothing useful.
I step in quietly, bypassing Shawn and explain slowly and quietly what he needs to do. Shawn backs off. She thanks me later; she realises she’s handling things wrong.
I have a very strong suspicion that, knowing a little of how she grew up, she’s probably at a point in her life where she’s venting a lot of anger and frustration. She readily admits that she doesn’t ‘do’ emotions. Anger is usually the first emotional expression that has to come if you’re going to get yourself on the way to being a fully functioning person. Unfortunately we’re on the receiving end of it.
At another time, towards the end of the journey, having nothing better to think about, Shawn decides she’s going to have a go at Galen because he’s going to put the wrong flavoured (chicken) stock cube in the rice. Galen coolly and rationally says it is a mistake, and he’s sorry and he’ll put the right flavoured stock in the rice.
Shawn won’t let go of it, and practically accuses Galen of trying to mess with David’s health. (He can’t eat anything meaty because of blood pressure.)
Galen points out why would he want to mess with his own grandfather’s health. Shawn is being very irrational.
June drops in: ‘What’s going on?’
Shawn says her piece. Galen says his piece. I’m looking on, incredulous at this huge debacle over a chicken stock cube. June asks me for an outside view of what’s happening.
Shawn interjects ‘Oh don’t ask him, his opinion isn’t worth anything.’
I’m smirking at Shawn’s ridiculousness and me and Galen are giving each other silent wide-eyed knowing looks of ‘She’s mad!’.
When it looks like we heading into a rainstorm we decide to make the most of it. We are nearly out of water again and this is the only opportunity we have to restock.
Dave and Ed inform us that under ordinary circumstances we would steer well clear of the lightning storm; there is a very real danger that with the boat being the most prominent object in the sea, we would stand an uncomfortably high chance of getting blown to pieces by a bolt-strike.
Given this information we vote on whether to sail into the edge of the storm. We vote yes. We like a little bit of adventure now and then.
We reef the sails (lower them) to slow us down and kept in the rain storm for as long as possible. We run round madly collecting containers to collect water in and pots to scoop up water out of the reefed mainsails.
We hit rain. It is joyous. We’ve been really low on water for a few days. Here is a bountiful gift. It makes me think of those who go much further without water. I’ve never gone without water before. I gulp deliciously at the fresh nectar in the tin cooking pot I am using as a scoop.
I have not been drinking any of the ‘Dr. Pepper’ water because of the chemicals in it and it tastes like it has been drained out of a rusty old radiator. I’ve drunk about a pint in three days. I’ve been getting delirious with dehydration. Drinking the caught rain is cool and heavenly. I am banned from drinking the rainwater without putting bleach in it first. Well you can stick that. I drink it ‘straight’ anyway. It’s nectar. Guess what? Everyone else comes down with buggered throats. Oh! What might have caused that I wonder?!
We are passing through an area in the world which is directly responsible for our wet European weather, the Gulf Stream. Warm air rises off the sea, high-tails it up the East Coast of America, across the Atlantic and then dumps half an ocean of rain on us.
I decide that floating in an over-sized yellow matchbox in a desert of sea is not really my cup of tea.
Eating food that manages to have no fruit or vegetables in it is just plain nasty. We have been provisioned for a five day journey that so far has taken more than two weeks. There’s only so much unadulterated rice beans and soya mince a reasonable human being can take.
My cabin is dead sweaty too. Wahh! I want land!!!
Then again, I am learning some basics about sailing which has been very worthwhile, though I seem to have developed a talent for screwing things up a lot. Aided by inadequate sleep, food, water and criticising persons breathing down my neck.
We have to get rescued again a week later by an absolutely enormous cruise liner called the ‘Inspiration’ who give us food to last us a few days. Fruit! Wonderful!!
The cruise liner is over the horizon but we pick it up on our radar. The distress call is made (again), and a short time later, the ‘Inspiration’ appears; a dot on the horizon.
Within half an hour its size is becoming apparent. As it gets ever closer it gets bigger and bigger and bigger; a quarter of a mile long I would say, and two hundred metres high above the sea line, a gleaming white and polished chrome monument to pointless affluence.
Shawn speaks on the radio and asks how we should approach the ship. The captain of the cruise liner replies that we should stay right where we are and they will motor up to us. He doesn’t want to have the potential added burden of having to deal with scratches on his nice shiny boat. It’s really weird hearing this tinny little voice on our radio thats coming from such a huge object.
We bob about like a cork as this floating white elephant draws up to us sideways. It must have enormously powerful docking engines to be able to do that. The captain of the Inspiration radios further that on absolutely no account must our craft touch theirs.
We are untouchable hippy filth with the potential to ruin their glossy white ship. Certainly a yellow paint scratch or a rubber tyre scraping down its side wouldn’t look very nice.
We crane our necks upwards and exchange waves with American tourists videoing and taking pictures of us. Probably happy to see something other than the sea and cheesy cabaret shows whilst skipping about in their giant floating shopping mall.
There is an idea on board that we are providing these ships with opportunities for good karma, but I agree with Cory who thinks it smells of bad organisation and the abusing of other people’s better nature. I get the distinct impression that the crew who bring us food from the cruise liner think we are inept. They certainly don’t look impressed with our claims to be sailing round the world when we seem unable to even supply ourselves with an adequate amount of food and water for the short distance we have so far come. This is compounded by the way David seems to be more interested in using the event to advertise the Floating Neutrinos website than displaying any humility. The crowd seem to enjoy the spectacle of this little yellow wooden box full of lost Americans though, and I guess that ultimately it is a good public relations exercise for the ship.
I wish I was doing something more en-nobling.
Seeing all these ‘normal’ people smiling and waving at us, I register a feeling in my heart that I want to be with ordinary people again.
It reminds me of the time me and my Transcendental Meditation chum Mike went to do Yogic Flying for World Peace. (Bouncing up and down on our arses on foam whilst meditating.) We were in Washington DC in the height of a sweaty summer surrounded by ordinary black Americans busily occupying themselves by being normal. They obviously and correctly took us to be crazy. That and the sight of so many women blew my mind. Upon returning to the TM ashram in England, I lasted one more week of male sexual repressedness registering only the feeling of ‘BULLSHIT’ through every bone and nerve-ending in my body.
The painting of the Big Man Guru Dev fell on my head during meditation the morning I decide to run away. Someone looked at me slyly and grinned that I must be thinking impure thoughts. At 11.35 am I packed a bag and left, telling only one person I was leaving, for fear of being talked into staying. (That had happened twice already.) I got back home to Don’s house in Newbury and looked up an astrological chart; it seemed I had left at exactly full moon. A sign from the gods to my confused mind that I’d done the right thing.
Three quarters of the way through the boat trip I decide (in my mind at least) to press on towards New Zealand. I’ve got a real appetite for temperate climes, fresh cool air, decent water and a sense of culmination of aforementioned ambitions. Most of these things are basic down to earth desires. If I don’t sort out the basics, then I’m not really doing myself any favours.
Our trip has been marred with hazards. The crew of the ‘Inspiration’ that came out to give us food had regarded us most disdainfully. I imagine one object of their disdain might very well have been the shonkiness of our boat.
I was once a volunteer for a couple of days with Sea Shepard, an anti-whaling direct action protest group. Nothing spectacular, I merely spent a weekend angle grinding rust off of a knackered looking old fishing tug. Two guys helping were well-seasoned old fishermen from Hull.
‘Bloody hell, this is tough going’ says I.
‘Aye, well why do you think that steels so bloody thick?’
‘Dunno – why?’
‘Well you imagine being out in the North Sea, and a bloody storm kicks up. You imagine what weight there might be in a huge thirty or forty foot wave?’
‘Ooh. Loads I ‘spect.’
‘Right, and you imagine what it might be like if two of them waves came right at your boat both at the same time?’
‘Err..’
‘You’d be bloody crushed like a tin can, that’s what’d ‘appen. Now you know why this steel’s two inches thick.’
And here we, planning to sail round the world into the vastest watery spaces, through some of the nastiest currents. In a boat made of marine ply and household insulation foam.
July 12th
Do I stay with the boat during/after Cuba? It depends on what I want to achieve and where the boat goes. I have a feeling I don’t want to be obliged to live by a set of someone else’s mental principles, even though the ride is otherwise free. Maybe I can get appropriate ‘training’ elsewhere. Thinking of groovy eco things to go for in New Zealand. Maybe something bicycle based or theatrical.
This is the whole Floating Neutrinos philosophy in a nutshell:
‘If you could do just one thing before you die, what would it be?
Open yourself to the idea of gauging the best you’ve ever felt and opening to the possibility of consciously changing your state of mind at any given moment.
Being conscious of how we approach scenarios and other people.’
Feeling like I want to run away from situations doesn’t mean I have to. It’s a chance to resolve difficulties and learn from them.
I have to ascertain whether I believe the person(s) involved is or are ultimately on my side. This will make dealing with the situation more balanced and adult.
What Goes down, Must Come Up…
Then finally it comes to me!
Talking to Cory about bikes and alt-tech.
Wanted:
People interested with combining WWOOFING, cycling and teaching alternative technology in schools and festivals, to tour all over the country. Must be drug-free with an active interest in practical and personal problem solving.
Satisfies: building friendships with active practical fun teaching good for the planet focus, with travel and hands in the dirt, face to face with hearts and bodies in the hills and the wind.
Vision:
To cycle as an evolving collective of people learning and sharing personal and practical ability. To teach and demonstrate practical and appropriate eco-technologies in schools and colleges, demonstrate at festivals, work on WWOOF farms in between and cycle the land in between. Bicycle based.
Income to come from donations (?) from schools, and be self supporting working on WWOOF farms.
What was meant to take a few days has taken weeks and now unbelievably we are waiting to get rescued yet again for an third time, this time by the Cuban coastguard.
We are tantalisingly close to the shore, only a few feet away. There is land! Solid and green! Full of people and things happening! Gimme!
I feel like a failure today for feeling socially useless. Take a change of perspective. Understand that I have been programmed to feel failure. I don’t have to buy into it.
A brief tickle with actual land. The day before yesterday in the middle of the Gulf I could smell the refined and unmistakable smell of horse-poo. (I grew up next to a stable yard, so I should know what it smells like.) As distant grey mounds on the horizon appear a day later, they fantastically rise and join together to form the north-western coast of Cuba some seventeen miles away. As we eventually draw in close in the dark of the day, I can smell earth.
Majestic grey mountains laid up like a king’s feast on a platter of glorious green mangrove. Decrepit fishing boats spice the coastal waters. Yes, I am obsessed with food. As in Belize, I’ve had some further insights into where the mind can go in the absence of sex and other home comforts.
A sparsely supplemented diet of tortilla, eggs, beans (a modicum of fruit and veg blagged over the radio from the ‘Inspiration’ cruise ship) leads me to fantasise of raspberries and cream, carrot cake (with lemon dates and walnuts), fish and chips (crunchy batter, tomato sauce), and a particular favourite fantasy – Yeo Valley organic raspberry yoghurt: from feeling the weight of the cold dewy tub new out of the fridge. The sound of the lid creaking off, peeling back the tin foil on top, licking off the dried glob of yoghurt on it and then sticking a big spoon into the thick creamy stuff. Hoiking a dollop out with a quiet but distinct ‘slurp’, the satisfying sense of yoghurt and spoon suction resistance. Thick and solid on the spoon. And then the taste as it reaches my mouth… mmmm…
At near-land we off-load Cory and Patti and their two kids. They’re sick and have had enough.
At one point in the trip, David had accused Cory of being sexually repressed, and that David wasn’t going to give up pressing this issue until Cory declared that he was cool about David having sex with Patti. Meanwhile Patti is suffering from hormonal weirdness and seasickness whilst trying to breast-feed a young baby and deal with a toddler in a tiny and easily dangerous space all at the same time. Cory is doing his best to be with his family and keep up with the fabulous Floating Neutrinos both at once. I really like Cory. He is a science teacher in Phoenix with what seems to me a level and enquiring mind. At the end of my night watch I enjoy sitting talking with him as he takes the helm for the start of each new day. He is usually calm, thoughtful and sensitively insightful. He is good to have around (as far as I am concerned at least).
Cory and Patti and their kids are rescued by ‘Charlie’ an English professor acting as translator (a rotund balding chap with a huge grin), Oscar who drives the coast-guard’s motor boat is a worried looking minion from the governmental machine bedecked in military green. They take away Cory and Patti and their two youngsters and swap them for gas, water, fried chicken (yummy!) mangoes (huge) long green beans, tinned tuna, fabulous Cuban rice, maize flour and cucumbers. We feast for a few days.
Next day, we tack back out to sea and head up coast for Habana (Havana). It’s been two days now, and we should get there either tonight or tomorrow (winds willing).
Then I suppose we can expect more weird immigration obligations. I guess actually on the whole I mostly like the people I am travelling with. I feel like I’ve had some challenging but interesting insights into how I deal with various situations. (Like how I deal with criticism for example.)
I’ve been finding it difficult to make up my mind about which route to take once I get to Cuba: do l get a boat back to the States and get a plane ticket to New Zealand? Stay with the AA to Panama? (They are considering maybe heading from there across the Pacific to Australia.)
I have been waking up in the mornings and consciously deciding to have a good day. This seems to make a difference.
This afternoon we drop sails so that we can drift towards Habana. We do not want to arrive in the middle of Sunday night.
Return to Comtents Page.
CUBA:
Coming into Hemingway Marina is very exciting for three reasons. The first one is a mysterious explosion in some part of a town which we can see about a mile from where we are, as we are drawing in towards the marina. This is a few weeks after Castro has had a hundred or so dissidents shot.
The other two reasons; land proper at last and all it implies, and thirdly because I have to do most of the steering up to the large rusting metal buoys outside the marina. It’s like playing a video game.
Habana just gets closer and closer. Adrenalin rush. Old man Dave takes over after my initial guiding in and is responsible for the really tricky bits (and us subsequently crashing into a concrete post thing whilst trying to get round a really tight bend).
There is much contradictory screaming of instructions between David (the pilot) and Shawn (the captain) at me about what I should do with anchors and long wooden sticks. Apart from thinking perhaps that I should stick them up their arses, I function fantastically despite their lack of clarity. Apart from falling down the anchor line well and bruising my left leg and yelling back at Shawn that I can’t follow her fucking orders as I have fallen down a fucking hole.
Locals lolling around in rubber tyres, lazily chatting and laughing to see such fun, the decadent imperialist gringos clearly devoid of mojo getting their karmic rewards and trashing their boat… Well actually we only squish it slightly as it’s only thin plywood and has loads of bouncy foam filler inside it. Further up the dock we come past a cruiser about 150 foot long with the deck fifty foot above the water. Either they built it there or they have dug a special channel to motor it into place and filled the channel back in again afterwards or they flew it in suspended underneath a fleet of military helicopters. It’s called ‘Lady Jenn’. it’s secret name is the ‘I’m Absolutely Unhygenically Stinking Rich, And I’ve Got An Enormous Dick Too’, but you can’t write that on the side of a vessel. It wouldn’t all fit on for one thing. It’s somewhat of a small mercy that our boat doesn’t offend the local peasant sensibility visually. (I.e. it looks like a floating shanty.)
July 22nd
Feeling very distant and weird, like I’m leaving a girlfriend that I’m not sure about; wondering about colourful missed opportunities and such-like. In some ways it’s an easy way to plan to be with guys in an on-going way but it’s also so slow-moving to hang with these guys, and not at all straight-forward in almost every other sense. I feel a bit awkward around them in a half-in half-out kind of way.
Last night on the marina we met a Belgian chap who has delivered a boat here down from New York. He gives us beer (Budweiser!) and assorted cake things – he’s flying back to France tonight. By some strange quirk of fate he’s met these chaps before in New York. I guess the sailing community must be a relatively small world. He’s another oldie doing the eternal travel thing. It’s amazing that someone can do something so exotic and different for a living.
Me and Galen go and get pizza via a hotel swimming pool. (The first chance to get a free bath essentially.) It’s nice to gate-crash for free stuff that other people are daft enough to pay lots of money for. Oh yeah the pool is on the way to the pizzeria; the pizza doesn’t come out of the pool. Obviously.
The next day, I get talking to the crew on the Big Knob boat, enquiring about getting a ride with them to anywhere, and they are actually really nice people. Unfortunately they are already fully-crewed.
Today I loll; completely, solidly, motionless. The eternal clanking of ropes on masts and the continous raspberry-blowing farting of vibrating jib sails above my head – it ends. The tumultuous stomach gurgle of sea rolling past my cabin in the bow point – it ends. No more physically sloshing about. Thank heavens. All that peace AND pizza, beer and cookies on the same day. Not baaad!
Got Billy Bragg’s ‘Milkman of Human Kindness’ in my head. Thinking of Kirsty MacColl.
Welcome to the Sunshine State of Socialism.
No-one’s quite sure what they want to do. June wants to get some breathing space and to look around Habana. Aurelia and Ed want to just hang out and do nothing. Shawn maybe wants to find something to make a video of and Dave wants to meet Fidel Castro to discuss how the Floating Neutrinos might play an integral part in the future of Cuba’s tourist economy.
‘You gotta think big in this world if you wanna get anywhere son!’ he says, a grin on his face and a glint in his eye.
I think the Ernest Hemingway look-a-like thing has gone to his head, or maybe he’s just always like this.
July 22nd
Start the day with various members of the crew getting snotty with me, I think it might be because of my non-communicated ambivalence about staying with them but that’s only a guess.
‘Aurelia’ decides to harangue me which really pisses me off; for asking a question twice about the confusing nature of the Cuban currency.
I go to the chandlery and meet some normal folks. One boat leaving, but I pass it up. Maybe I should have gone for it.
I go wandering around outside the westernised Marina Hemingway into the real life Cuba outside and a guy asks me if I need anything. Having heard that Cuban pesos buy you things more cheaply than American dollars do (on the basis that only tourists have dollars and only Cubans have pesos). I tell him some change would be handy and he leads me off down some side-streets to a small bank. The bank has a long queue so without patience we go to the house of a money-changer where other locals are there exchanging their hard fought pesos for American dollars. It’s a slightly shady experience and just the sort of thing you read about in exciting travel journals.
Afterwards he asks if I would like to buy cigars, (I would not), and then if I need to eat. We go to another persons house which is doubling up as a lunch-time take-away service and I have a very cheap and satisfying meal of rice, beans, beef and vegetables for double the listed price of ten pesos. It still only comes to thirty pence, so I have no quibble with that. Realising that the bloke who is leading me round desperately wants me to buy cigars, a commodity of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever, I give him four dollars and say thank you very much. He goes back to the area he picked me up in, so he can wait for his next tourist.
I then go into Habana on the free hotel bus and get off just as Ole Man Dave is getting onto it.
Almost at the same time I am expressing my surprise at seeing him (and having to hide some degree of dread), I get pounced on by two elderly musicians who ‘Guantanemera’ me into a corner whilst David jumps back off and videos us. These two oldies have literally penned me in with their guitars so that I can’t escape. I’m plain startled by the whole event. He gets back on the bus and I try to duck under the guitars. David then gets back off the bus again yelling at me to ‘Give them some goddamn money!’. Which I do, partly out of confusion and wanting this whole scene to go away and partly in some lame attempt at keeping in this bully’s good books.
Feeling great now (not) I wander off into Habana.. For tourists everything is more expensive than being in the US. A fair retribution for decades of being snubbed by the Americans.
The city is crumbling dramatically.
The expected presence of old American cars with big fins and lots of style. Also there are lots of Skodas and Ladas which is I suppose what you might also expect but it actually hasn’t occurred to me that there would be the Soviet influence too.
Something I really enjoy about Central America is there ingenious approach to transport generally. In Belize and Mexico, old US school buses are quite common and there are a few in Cuba too. The Latino thing is to see how many members of the family you can get on a Honda moped. The most I ever see is five; dad, two kids and mum breast-feeding a baby at thirty miles an hour in traffic in the middle of town in Merida. It all looks so cool and easy too.
Most impressive in Cuba are bicycle rickshaws, which I guess are common in many parts of the world. They are so damned handy for carrying stuff and people; why can’t we have them in Britain?! I love them! Another very surprising transport device I have never seen before are these huge buses which consist of an articulated truck cab with over-sized trailers with automatic doors and absolutely jammed with passengers. The oddest thing is the shape of the trailer which has a big dip in the middle in the area between the front and rear wheels. Very odd looking. How these things get round corners I don’t quite understand. Great lumbering tin dinosaurs.
It’s apparent the Cubans do not have much connection with the rest of the world. Any other capital city you go to would have internationals from all sorts of places, especially in its restaurants. Apart from going to a Turkish-style eatery in the tourist zone, the only apparent international connection is when I come across a bunch of men and boys doing some kind of Chinese martial art and there being a mural on a wall showing a big yin-yang and various Chinese images, notably free of communist images. At a part of town away from the general tourist area is an alley which is the tiniest Chinatown I have ever seen, consisting of about ten buildings huddled together in one street. Unlike London, Vancouver and Victoria whose Chinatown areas are a historical result of immigrants finding their own space, I get the impression this one in Habana exists for a very different reason. It seems to be there in order to say ‘Look! We’ve got political bedfellows!’ The most notable thing about it is the lack of Chinese people. I see two. Maybe they are all in the kitchens. This seems unlikely as they don’t seem to be serving Chinese food. It just looks like normal Caribbean food in pseudo-Chinese surroundings.
Back in the centre of the tourist zone there is a shady green square surrounded by lovely old buildings with lots of grand arches. It is lined with stands selling books. Mostly it’s old propaganda from the fifties and sixties about the revolution, lots of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stuff, mostly in Spanish of course. The occasional novel, Isabel Allende, Dostoyevsky and some books of Cuban painters (revolutionary no doubt), national atlases (no international ones) and the occasional book on acupuncture and Tai-chi. I wonder if the library has a similarly limited range of information. (It’s been closed every time I wanted to have a look.) These book stands are state-owned and it’s obvious they don’t want you to be interested in too many things. I’m not sure whether these books are just for the tourists or whether this is as broad as information gets in Cuba. I do know that if you want to use the internet you have to hand over your passport. My guess is that Cubans don’t have passports as none of them are allowed to go anywhere outside Cuba.
Also in this shady green square is a rather bizarre statue of some conquistador chappie holding a scroll in his right hand. Part of the scroll has broken off adding to the impression that he is actually holding a small stick of a certain size and shape. Looked at from the side it really looks like this otherwise elegant man is gaily standing there having a wank. I wonder whether the person who created this sculpture had some issue with the people who commissioned it or he didn’t like the person he was sculpting?
Every time I come to this square it seems to attract really violent thunderstorms with the lightening sounding like it is crashing down barely a street or two away. It is rainy season so I don’t think it’s just me. With tomorrow being the eve of the forty second anniversary of the revolution, it seems to invoke for me a replay of the actual event. (I’ve no idea how it actually happened but presumably there were explosions; they always seem to be a main feature of revolutionary activity.)
The book stalls hastily cover all the stands and everyone hides under the eaves of the grand buildings, waiting for the rain to stop. People wander in and out selling tightly wrapped cones of peanuts; strange but tasty deep-fried batter things, peanut brittle and something else which amounts to being peanut halva (which is really good).
I wander out of the tourist area and buy cheap bananas and a mango which I sit and messily eat (no knife) whilst watching kids playing football in a residential square. Two kids start throwing cake at each other. Unfathomable but funny… Kids eh?!
I am discovering Cuban pesos are not so easy for a tourist to spend – why accept crappy pesos from a tourist when you can have their lovely dollars? Fair enough, I don’t have a problem with that. (Well I do at first, and now I don’t.)
I get picked up by a couple of young Rasta chaps who then take me back to their room to smoke weed (bought with my tourist dollars). Inevitably, it’s a strange encounter.
After having had Dave shout at me for not giving money to the Guantanemera duo in the morning, I’ve been wondering about how and when I say ‘no’ to people who are asking for money in the street. Back home in England sometimes I’ll say yes and sometimes I’ll say no, depending on whether they look like the kind of people who are in genuine difficulty or are busking for it, it also depends on whether I’m feeling generous or harassed or whatever. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
Maybe being a gringo in Cuba there’s no question about what I should do. I haven’t thought about it. A couple of times I have had people I’ve walked past try to call me over and chat me up, presumably in the attempt to ultimately squeeze me for money.
I think I feel like it’s a bit of an insult to my intelligence to go through some charade of friendship in order to undermine it all by involving money. It has happened a couple of times today and it is starting to do my head in, especially when this deflected ‘friendship’ is instantly responded with calls of ‘Fuck you asshole!’ A bit unpleasant really, and makes me feel quite awkward. An old guy is very sweet when I ask him for directions and he quietly holds out his hand and plainly asks me for a dollar which I give him. There is something in the way he approaches me. It has a certain decorum about it and that feels honest.
Anyway, I am wondering at some point in the evening about all these encounters and how they are influenced by my sense of trust and faith in other people and how it is also influenced by my willingness or otherwise to interact with and meet complete strangers. I wonder what would happen if I just stayed with saying ‘yes’ to situations and just go with whatever happens.
So anyway, I meet these two Rasta guys at this point, and instead of maybe registering distrust and sticking with that, I think ‘Okay, where does this take me?’ They do the usual chatting me up thing, this time by finding out whether I like reggae music and what I do and whether I like to smoke weed. They invite me to come and smoke with them, which involves meeting up with a friend of theirs in the plaza and then following all concerned down some obscure set of back-alleys. It’s a situation I guess could have gone in any direction really, but they seem like safe enough people to be with. ‘Ras Ta Fari, love and peace’ as they often repeat.
We come to a shady place for making a deal with some guy, and I am asked to hand over ten dollars to pay for it. This is obviously how these guys finance their religious experiences. Having previously decided to go with it, I semi-reluctantly agree, with the guy doing the scoring handing over his ID card to me as security for my ten dollars. We wander off discreetly in a separate direction and we meet up again minutes later. Next we all disappear into a warren of tiny rooms being let out as apartments behind one of the crumbly building facades.
In a tiny room where it looks like these six guys live, we skin up and smoke. Our communication is moderately good and is aided by a Spanish ‘High Times’ cannabis enthusiasts magazine as a vehicle for connection. I think I must have relaxed by this point and feel like these guys are pretty cool really.
After hanging out for about half an hour, we all stumble off back into the city; me having no idea where I am going and becoming increasing unable to speak. My inability to speak is bothering me but is accepted with a ‘Love and peace, Ras Ta Fari’. At some point we end up at a reggae music bar, the only place in the city that plays reggae so they tell me.
I should have realised it, but obviously I am expected to fund the entire evening. I can’t quite decide whether I am having a good time or whether I am just being fleeced; whether I am just being an uptight gringo or just a bit of an easy touch. Utterly unable to converse.
Finally I decide that actually I need to get the last bus back to Marina Hemingway, which works as a handy get-out option. Trying to find my way to the bus stop is very confusing; everywhere looking pretty much the same, and being a bit stoned just adds to my confusion. Asking some friendly looking chap for directions, he insists on accompanying me and then asks for a drink because he is thirsty. He tells me if I give him the money, he will get a better deal than I would in the shop that he suggests buying it from – otherwise I will just get ripped off as a tourist. This seems like a halfway reasonable suggestion, though my sense of trust and goodwill is rapidly getting burnt out. I hand over the dollar but he doesn’t go in the shop… He is walking away briskly and I follow him for some distance, him being far away enough to just run off round a corner without me being able to do anything about it. He hides round a corner but I find him. Next thing he does is to just walk away, my money in his hand with me calling after him in a futile way. I need to change my attitude to all this, I know that much.
On top of that I seem to have missed the bus and then end up paying seventeen dollars for a ten dollar taxi ride back to the marina. (Guess what, no, he doesn’t have ten dollars change for a twenty dollar bill, only these three dollar bills here.) I end up spending forty two dollars, but I guess I’m due some giving away money karma. Maybe I’m due some not-getting-screwed karma and also some not-being-a-muppet karma too.
I don’t feel good at all. I feel socially useless and I don’t want to be in Cuba, and don’t know how to get out. Today I will look at possible ways out by plane etc. I bust my expensive mp3 player. (It gets water in it.)
I spend the day in Habana buying books for Helen, eating in a fancy restaurant and basically giving money away. I go with the flow. I meet a nice Jehovah’s Witness called Luis who cheers me up and helps me feel good about people. He tells me his version of the Cuban situation, which makes the whole JW thing seem utterly sensible. I give him ten dollars cos I like him. It also helps put the AA bullshit into perspective.
After dismantling and leaving it in the sun, my stereo is now working. Relief.
Shawn decides to kick me off the boat. Drugs not allowed. Nothing personal. And I’m the king of China.
There is no malice or act of defiance in the ‘mistake’ I have made, which seems to be what she thinks. Now I am in a very vulnerable situation. I do not have enough money for airfare and hotels in Habana. Nor do I really want to sleep on the streets, especially when carrying valuables.
Now that I am officially off the boat, I have to buy some sort of exit ticket to satisfy customs and AA loonies. (My passage out having previously been assured by my being a round-the-world crew member.) Two weeks of indecision crams into three hours and I buy a’safe route’ air ticket back to England – I can guarantee getting into the country and being able to work once I am back in England.
Shawn is an absolute freak. I don’t think I’ve disliked anyone as much as I can’t stand her. Since being captain I think she has spoken to me like a normal human being probably twice in a month. (I.e. not barking or screaming orders or trying to psychoanalyse me.)
This morning whilst me, her and David are sitting in a small rowing boat, she starts doing her ice cold captain thing at me on our way to the customs check out people and I finally flip at her, shouting at her to stop being such a cold bitch.
This afternoon she offers to have a ‘conversation’ which she imagines consists her telling me in a one-way fashion that ‘I’m fucked up and I should look at why it’s all my own fault.’
I try to say something to the effect that I think she’s arrogant. She responds with ‘Your opinion isn’t worth anything to me, I didn’t ask for your opinion’.
She goes off on some wide-of-the-mark accusations about drugs and then refuses to hear anything I have to say about the matter. Quite how any of this bullshit constitutes a conversation I’ve no idea.
I’m certainly not perfect but she’s crazy. She refuses to listen to me. June is a touchy old bag who insists on pedantically picking holes in whatever I say and do half the time, randomly.
David likes declaring how he’s just got a couple of things to figure before he gets completely enlightened (then the rest fawn over him).
AAARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!!
I like Ed, he seems to be more heartfelt and saner. It’s probably because he’s Canadian.
I say goodbye to him and to Galen. Galen finds Shawn too much as well, which is helpful and reassuring to know.
Galen’s a lot more down to earth thank god. I am really glad he’s part of the crew and I tell him so.
I guess my rough time with the Fabulous Floating Neutrinos has been largely down to me having an extreme dose of sour grapes at having the promise of sex suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn. I can’t help wondering if Shawn only shagged me to get me on the crew. She’s a bit ‘Hookers for Jesus’ somehow.
I spend the next day sitting on the grass in the car park of Habana Airport and have a really mentally productive day, I am having some realisations of forgiveness of others, and of feeling like I really do have the capacity to make the most of situations if I choose to see it. Actually feel pro-active and happy about going back to England.
Read more about Papa Neutrino hete.
Flight back to Gatwick;
then back to Norwich.
So – now what?
Being back is delicious.
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P A R T T W O:
E U R O P E A N I N T E R L U D E
ENGLAND:
My time back in England, specifically Norwich is mostly lovely; enjoying the familiarity of the culture and the place itself, having an instant network of people to hang out with is very much appreciated. Catching what I imagined would be the tail-end of summer seems to drawing itself out for ages. A gardener friend Kathy looks out of her window worrying about the lack of the wet stuff and hopes that it will rain heavy for an hour and then drizzle constantly for a day so the soil will get a nice even supply of moisture it can deal with.
Well that’s exactly what we get for a day; something I’ve been fantasising about for months whilst in Central America.
Actually after a morning of hurrying around Norwich doing the busy busy whilst getting all sticky with wet and cold, the novelty soon wears off.
First week back from Havana, I hang out at Helen B’s which is lovely; quintessential English country garden, a caravan – hurrah for caravans! Dinner from the garden, apples on the tree, blackberries in the hedges. Re-acquaint myself with Mr. Perkins, Helen’s Welsh Cob pony; he pulls a cart for fun. He’s very friendly, especially if you bring him a carrot or even better a piece of chocolate. Scratch his neck and he’ll go all floppy lipped and soppy on you, grinning his pony grin at you. Daft bugger.
Hanging out here is lovely. It’s good to have Andy and Becky around here for extra company.
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THE LOW COUNTRY:
SINGING WITH SOFIE
After a week and a half, I borrow a racer from Kevin the gamekeeper next door and set off for Belgium (our next door neighbouring country almost) to go and see Sofie, Roel and Floor. I get halfway to Ipswich and get a puncture. That’s my quick journey screwed then, especially as I haven’t packed any pump or puncture repair kit. I am pushing the bike into the next village where there is a bike shop, when a van going the other way stops and offers me a lift to Ipswich and he takes me directly to a bike shop. Bonus! A snotty kid in the shop won’t lend me the tools to repair the puncture but an old lady outside gives me her old pump cos she’s just bought a new one…
I cycle to Felixstowe, and somehow find the ferry to Harwich. Typically English… no signs or information anywhere telling you where and when it crosses. Lots of lumpy middle-aged Essex people sit by the shingle next to the dockyard cranes eating ice cream. Very old fashioned, it reminds me of my grandma and a particularly English ‘It’s windy and there’s no sand, but I’m on holiday so I’ll have an ice cream with me chips, ta’ kind of thing.
Sleep not far from Hoek Van Holland.
After the ferry at Maasluis I eventually get the hang of the signs on the cycle path and zip my way through the Polders into Belgium at Vlissingen and then from there down towards Ghent.
The racer is lighter and faster than any bike I have ever ridden. I’m very fit and light myself, I’m not carrying much stuff, it’s flat and I’ve got the wind behind me slightly. By 3 pm I am not far from Ghent. I can’t believe how quickly I’ve got here – it’s about 110 kms.
I don’t know where Sofie or Roel are staying, and I don’t get how the phones work here. I pop into a cop shop for assistance and the nice policeman obligingly tells me all the phone numbers and addresses I need to know. ‘I am not really supposed to give out this kind of information, but you don’t look like a criminal to me’ he tells me. God bless big brother for once.
Seeing Sofie is lovely lovely lovely.
Sofie’s brother takes me off to join him in the delights of lift repairing. Surreal, and interesting (for a bit anyway).
One minute I’m sailing a home-made boat to Cuba by moonlight, then the next thing I’m mending lifts in Belgium. Fantastic.
Me and Sofie go to the woods and she plays guitar and we both sing. I’ve never sung so wholeheartedly with someone else before – it’s truly amazing and liberating! Hooray for Sofie!
We visit Brugge (Sofie has an appointment with a therapy-type woman there) and then we go to Ghent. I never realised that Belgium has such beautiful towns. Really really old houses in a very medieval fairytale stylie.
I go visit Roel and Floor and we sample Belgian beers (there are more than 500 to try but we settle for three) and more local culture and the art museum. Inside the art museum is a painting of the street outside; amazingly I can still recognise the view taken by the painter, as the area has not changed that much in 400 years. Incredible.
Cycling back is tougher – the wind is against me, and I get the train from Harwich to Diss, I am too knackered and can’t be arsed to cycle the rest of the way.
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ENGLAND
Spend time in Norwich hanging out with old mates and working with a cowboy builder from Wales called Brett. No, he doesn’t specialise in building cowboys…
Richard Lewis (my old house-mate) is the only person I’ve ever met whose poo spontaneously combusts. He’s come back from queer pagan camp all inspired to go and be a high class whore in Brighton. I tell him he could go to California where they’ll pay him extra just for being English. Richard Lewis is spectacularly English. I do know some prize quirky people.
I’d ended up living in Richard’s garden after coming back from the international school in Norway and the Mozambique disaster. (My own personal disaster as well as theirs. Disaster all round in fact.)
I’d come to visit Helen B at her cottage and a friend of hers, also called Richard was visiting too.
Helen had gone out, Richard turned up, we get on well and gacked out on ice cream. We ended up stoned in the bender in the garden. He said if I built him a summerhouse in his garden I could live in it for free. This seemed like a good deal. I went back to Norwich and between us we designed the Summer House. It was seven sided, made of found stuff; old floor joists mostly, with a roof made of sycamore stems attached at the centre to an old bicycle wheel with white blankets and then a cheapo tarpaulin slung across the top. It cost fifty quid in materials to build and I lived in it for a year and a half. It was my funky little garden shack. Fuck nose what I was doing living in suburbia though. Like John Cleese’s Dead Parrot, I spent a lot of time pining for the fjords.
Richard was lots of things I’m not. He was very intellectually articulate, he was a student, and therefore he knew everything and was always right. He was gay (still is I expect) and was a completely untidy bastard to live with. (I’m glad my bedroom was outside.) We also had lots in common – we are both good at being miserable for example, and we did like lots of the same things.
Over time, we grew to understand how to deal with each other better. He taught me how to talk through problems with him instead of me just stomping off in a sulk. He taught me to appreciate the art of cooking and the beauty in simple vegetables.
He’s been a great person to know. One time the badly designed toilet system broke down completely. The ‘shit mincer’ which carried macerated poo horizontally across the waste pipe upstairs to the down-flow pipe outside had given up its gravitationally difficult job. This pipe connected directly to the waste pipe on the kitchen sink, so every time the toilet was flushed, the kitchen would stink of shit (laaarvely). When it finally broke down completely we made a box with a toilet seat on it equipped it with a bucket lined with newspaper underneath for poo and straw/sawdust (to absorb smellyness) and a large container for piss. It got dubbed ‘The Fabulous Toilet Of Joy’ which we wrote on the lid with sparkly silver Fablon.
It worked very well; the piss was diluted and fed the garden plants and the poo was stored in a large broken ex-deep freezer. The insulation works very well in keeping everything warm so that it breaks down and turns back into good dirt. This is what people have done for centuries, possibly millennia all over the world. Without the aid of broken freezers of course.
It’s only our rat-racing world today that makes us think that chucking it into the sea and our drinking water system and then blasting the water with chlorine is a better idea. Wrong.
Richard went away for a week in the Summer and it was particularly hot – the whole lot went critical; a nasty mess of burning plastic smoke and flaming poo. Oops. I feel sorry for whichever poor neighbour made the discovery.
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ITALY
Written in Chisinau,Italy 13th September 2003
So now, for reasons I am not at liberty to divulge (no! really!), I find myself in the middle of Italy for a week. I flew by Ryanair to Trieste (Venice), I get a bus to Padova and then bunk a train to Rome: Not an intentional stop, circumstances force me off the train just as I am about to get caught in a pincer movement from two rotund ticket collectors approaching from opposite ends of the train. I have already got off and back on again at a different point on the train twice already, and I don’t think I am going to get away with it a third time.
I jump off at some place called Chiusi. Apart from that, I have no idea where I am. It seems I am about 100 kms from Rome. In total skinflint mode I decide to do a little shoplifting. It does seem a little rude to do this in someone else’s country I must confess. I am to get my just desserts though (or not, depending on how you look at it). After wandering into a small supermarket and checking it for security cameras and suchlike, I wander out and come back in again ten minutes later. I stuff a lump of cheese in my pocket and walk out. Realising that some bread might be a good idea, I stash the cheese under a fence and go back to actually buy some bread (not wanting to push my luck). When I come back to get the cheese, it is gone. Sitting there instead are two happy Alsatians licking their lips. Bits of cheese on their muzzles and the plastic wrapper in tatters. It makes me laugh in a way. Serves me right.
I sleep out, first shopping at Lidl’s (very cheap pan-European supermarket) and dining out on cheap ciabatta and tomato paste; a cheap vegan taste of Italia.
In the morning I walk up the windiest back-road ever through vineyards and orchards of slightly crunchy nectarines and lush olive groves (more free nosh) until I reach a spectacular medieval town that towers up on the ridge of hill. It has crazily high angled walls and mysterious steps that scramble about all over the place. It’s like being in a Breugal painting and the mediaevalness of the place hangs in the air. I walk on down to the nearest town some twenty kilometres away and buy the train fare to Roma.
The city is magnificent.
It’s quite amazing to be at what was at one point the ancient hub of the world. I give myself a couple of days to go see the Colosseum and meander about the streets and sit in the park. The park is a great place to people watch; couples doing the smoochy smoochy, an art class sitting beneath tall sculpturesque trees in dappled Mediterranean sunlight painting the scene of various peoples fit and otherwise huffing and puffing their way round a running track in the middle of the park. I can’t help but imagine that people might have been using this track since the days of the empire. Cor. That’s well old.
I’m on a strictly on-the-cheap outing. I find my accommodation by picking one of the metro train routes at random, getting on it to the end of the line and assuming that there will be somewhere likely to doss down for the night. Much more sensible than being in a big noisy city. Reaching the end of one of the train lines, after a little time I find a field full of tall grass where lights from nearby housing estates and a shopping centre don’t quite reach. This becomes my temporary accommodation. The train doesn’t get ticket checks, so that’s not an issue either. Another free grass motel.
Having nothing better to do, I resign myself to wasting ten euros for the entrance fee to The Vatican Museum. In I trudge, along with a thousand other tourists, all shuffling in like sweaty penguins.
I’m no fan of the Catholic church, and I am expecting golden pompous swank to come learing at me from all directions. What a surprise I get though once I am inside…
The first thing I see is a huge faded tapestry from the sixteenth century. It is a depiction of Christ carrying his cross on the way to his crucifiction. Into the old weaves I find the eyes of Christ and all his onlookers, all bearing expressions of sadness to Christ’s own resignation. I am astonished and really quite moved that somebody, 500 years ago, managed to convey such an emotional scene merely by weaving different coloured threads together. And now here we all are, tourists from all over the world taking in that image and taking it home with us. It is even more incredible in that the tapestry is simply enormous – fifteen foot high and forty foot long. Wonderful.
There are golden rotating globes, quantifying known worlds and guessing at new ones.
There is a calf vellum map here dating from 1510. It is about four foot wide and three foot high. On it is a remarkable inked line, more-or-less mapping the east coast of north America all the way to the tip of Terra Del Fuego and then back up the west coast as far as north as Peru. By this map, the Spanish have yet to encounter the Central Americans and their chocolate, let alone California.
Just this one inked line with its Latin annotations and names alongside it, such a simple mark, is the net result of untold efforts and risks.
Mighty Spanish and Italian trees hewn down and cut and formed into ocean-going ships. Rigged with hemp ropes and sailcloth; small fleets of supply ships loaded with cattle, dry foods, kept women. Crewed by the willing and the hard-pressed. Captained by the ambitious, the vainglorious, the godly and the ungodly, driven by the promise of riches and fame.
Once again I am in awe of what must have been monumental adventures, explorers putting their lives into the hands of wild seas and the deep unknown.
They would land, do whatever they did for however long, and then do it all over again, returning home to Europe loaded to the gunnels with booty and great stories to tell, and most signifcantly, this map that I am looking at right now: the proof and the promise to those that would follow after them.
These maps are part of what made The Americas what they currently are.
All that in a line of ink.
Back outside again…
In a park in Rome, mysterious middle-aged gentlemen walk past in pairs. Wearing swanky suits and dark sunglasses and often carrying briefcases. Probably full of money or drugs or severed donkey’s heads or something.
A matronly looking woman in a pizza parlour gives me two pieces of pizza for the price of one. I must have ‘penniless’ written all over me.
You are probably by now wondering why I have come to Italy. Well. I would tell you, but it’s personal. So there.
Okay. Here’s the censored version:
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!
And then I come back home again.
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ENGLAND
Attention Span
Anywhere I look, I see things that excite my senses, trees, plants, buildings, sunlight. Small events present themselves, wink at me and give me a little kiss to warm my soul. Yesterday, whilst sitting in the back of a car I saw a flock of about 200 blackbirds feeding in a circle on a playing field. As the feeding on worms finishes on the right hand side of the circle, the birds in that spot would flap out their wings and do a low-fly to the other side of the circle and start on new worm pickings. This is a non-stop rolling Mexican Wave of blackbirds. I wonder what would happen when the black circular flock of dots reaches the brown beech hedge at the end of the field. Would they all fly off and find a new field to repeat this unlikely performance in or would they bounce off the edge and head in a different direction across the grass?
As the car rushes past I only have the briefest of glimpses and never get to find out what they all do next. The unfinished image lodges in my imagination and stays with me all day.
I have been alive for thirty-five years, seen thousands upon thousands of miles of geography, thousands upon thousands of people. I have never seen this before, and I suppose that is a large part of its poetry.
To walk through a wood and sit under a tree or admire the symmetry of a plant is somehow always a unique event.
Even if we are to find ourselves in the most alien of landscapes we can still find something to pin the comfort of familiarity on, even if it’s only a rock.
Even if everything else has gone to hell in a handcart, we still have simple things that offer us no challenge, only that we listen.
Distance.
What compels us to act out our little hobbies? The ones that engage and engross us?
What compels us to watch TV? If you treat TV as a special occasion, it either comes when there is something worth setting aside an otherwise busy life for, or as a gap-filler in a moment of dullness. So what’s going on when a kid watches seven to ten hours of TV every day?
What is the compulsion with computers and computer games, that even when I can feel my eyes bulging out of my head, my back is complaining and my legs want to saw themselves off and go for a good long walk in the woods without the rest of me, what is it that compels me to stay right there stuck in that little room that has become my world?
What is it that compels me to abandon a known world to skim across the surface superficials of another unknown one and call it adventure because that’s what so many others seem to do?
The Gospel According to St. Elsewhere.
About time I did some writing. After getting back from Cuba, I rode the travel trip inside my head some more for about a month, but I have stopped writing, and this is causing a backlog of crap. I’ve done a little bit of work, but not much; I got back from Italy and haven’t done much at all. I’ve got nothing to focus me, and not much to ground me.
Holding onto the notion of New Zealand seems hard to do when I can’t see much truth or reason in it. Funds are down, the air is sweet with Autumn and laden with memory and familiarity. Senses are strong and I am here. My senses are fired-up and fly in the face of my unchannelled and currently confused mind. I’ve got bullshit going on and I know it. So what do I let go of? What do I want to do? What do I need to do? What pulls me the strongest?
Scotland, the States, two countries I’ve never seen, taking some responsibility, putting something back in, being more real.
I spent years wandering, sitting under trees, begging for connection, and now I’ve got it, I feel love in it; people know me and I’m understood and the other way too. I have a fantasy about being in a more beautiful place with an exotic girlfriend. Whatever happened to wanting world peace?
I go to Scotland for an anti-GM demo, and I let my anti-girlfriend guard down. There seems to be a response immediately. I get the feeling there is an interest from an activist called Jenn. Unhugged for a long time, feeling dry as dust in my bubble. Someone to touch please. She’s not the woman I fantasise of, but she’s into travel and she’s very intelligent. She even seems to get my sense of humour, which is a bit blinking unusual (and she’s on a lifestyle wavelength). Maybe there’s some crossover between perfection-fantasy-dreams and ‘doing the right thing’.
Let’s name names here:
The fantasy; a gorgeous girlfriend, maybe Scottish to go to New Zealand with, then New Zealand being too far from my roots, to settle in Scotland and do (whatever – settle down get creative); stay in contact with Norfolk.
There are other fantasies; meet a yummy Scandinavian woman, West Coast US/Canadian.
I can’t say about settling in New Zealand/Australia; I haven’t been there yet, so how can I possibly know (except that it seems too far away).
For some reason I feel fairly set on not settling in Norfolk. I keep telling myself it’s because of the countryside being rubbish, but now (maybe because it’s Autumn) I’m enjoying it. It’s a subtle beauty, very different from the magnificence of Scottish mountains and moorland.
Full Moon Richard Lewis’s house Norwich October 13th 2003
This time one year ago I was in Stephenville hitch-hiking across Newfoundland. Now I’m back at square one in Richard’s house; representing so many things. Untidiness, his bickering, an air of unhealthy inertia. I don’t want to be here for a wide variety of reasons. I love him to bits, but I’m cheese and he’s a grater. Or the other way round.
I buy a plane ticket for Malmo with a view to getting work in Oslo, but freak out about it and decide not to go; too many things pulling me about. I’ve mentally been feeling pretty awful the last two or three weeks. Not doing any writing either, which is usually good medicine. I have been sleeping badly, been feeling run down, not doing any work and getting very muddled whilst waiting for Brett to put some work my way. That’s not working out (only one or two days, not solid employment) and continued sofa-surfing has meant I’m ending up doing WAY too much thinking. It feels like I’m back-tracking heavily emotionally.
In lieu of anything constructive going on, I’m been thinking about Canada, Norwich, Scotland, Sofie, the Belgians generally, Sophie in Victoria all round and round in circles. I miss them all. I’m well aware I have a very un-down to earth outlook on life, which is driving me a little bit crazy. Missing Norwich folks when I was in the jungle paradise of Belize was one thing, but Norwich is somewhere I’m wary of emotionally engaging in too much, and the pulls for elsewhere are huge. At the same time though, I find my senses lapping up the atmosphere of Autumn; the colours, the smells and the sights of nature and old English buildings. It’s as if I’m looking around my world knowing that I might never see it again. There’s a mixture of a deep beauty and a kind of death. There’s something really quite weird about that.
So all that done with; take a deep breath out-of-step with everyone else and make something happen. Helen yesterday said she admires my bravery. I’m never quite sure what the difference between bravery, foolishness and necessity are. State of mind I guess.
For all the emotional anchors of the familiar, I sometimes manage to remember that there’s a whole load of warm funny people ahead of me too. I wonder how I’ll read this when I’m stuck somewhere strange and alien that I want to escape from. Actually I don’t know why I should think that – it never happened on the Canada to Mexico trip. Oh yeah, the Floating Neutrinos…
At some point I have to stop all this and just be where I am; I think I might need a five year plan so that I can decide where the buck stops. So far, my buck stops at New Zealand (it being the centre of all current mental geography chaos). I have to be watchful of that being replaced by some other equally disruptive set of mind-junk when that time comes. It will probably have something to do with relationships.
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SWEDEN:
CHEESECAKE AND MOOSE STEAK
Well, it looks like this must be part two of the ‘Going to New Zealand Saga’. Even though I am STILL nowhere near the place. This time last year I was in St. John’s NF, so my timing has synchronised sort of.
Maybe this has something to do with me feeling so depressed the last week before I came away. It’s uncanny how a sudden memory of where I was at the same time in a previous year can bring to light some parallel bearing to what is going on now, a bit like when a song comes into your head and you’ve no idea why. You go through the lyrics of the song and it tells you something you need to know, a little like a dream too. Something slightly less than conscious.
Anyway. It’s hard to keep an intention of travel when loads of your mates are all very settled. So here I am now. I sleep next to a very drunk and pretty woman from Donegal at Stanstead Airport. She being cold and me having a huge cosy-looking sleeping bag, we share it with a cold Austrian chap. Us being gentlemen, we restrain ourselves. It’s against my religion to see someone sleeping in the cold. I chat with the Austrian chap who’s come to see his new English girlfriend that he’s met in Nicaragua.
The plane lands at Skurup near Malmo at 9.30 am and I am very tickled to be in Sweden again. I think I have some sort of addiction to being in foreign countries. Maybe its because it gives me a legitimate reason to feel like an outsider.
Hitching looks tricky from the airport, so I get a bus to Lund and hitch from there. Seeing things Swedish is like stepping back in time, almost looping back to a time two years ago. I was in Scandinavia deciding back then that I would check out New Zealand and then decide which country I would then choose to settle in. Well here I am again, and a lot has happened in between.
I get a lift to a crap place; the E6 between Malmo and Goteborg (Gothenburg) is slow for hitching anyway. I start walking and then get picked up by the ‘Polis’ who take me to the next available junction, which is worse than the one I’ve just walked from. ‘Oh crap, now I’m really screwed!’ thinks me.
The first car that comes past picks me up and takes me 130 kms, even though he says he’s only going ten. I guess he wants to check that I am not an axe murderer before he makes any commitment. He tells me that there’s guaranteed work in Tromso in northern Norway where they are building a gas pipeline. They are building a town there. Enough work for eleven thousand people for ten years. Or something. I think the money would be good too, as it would mean working in darkness at this time of year. And it would be bloody cold. I was idly thinking of going up there again, so now I have a ‘valid’ reason. I will see what I can make of Oslo first.
I get dropped at a truck stop and then get approached by someone asking me if I can drive to Goteborg. I say ‘Yes of course I can!’ And show him my driving license and off we go. It’s fun to be driving here again. He seems to be a bit of a scamster; screwing the social security with his pretend gammy leg and such-like. So he tells me, his girlfriend is a ballet dancer and used to go out with the singer from Metallica. Hmm. Yeah, right. Whatever.
Being back again in Goteborg (pronounced ‘Yotta-boora’ if you want to be really clever) is slightly weird, for reasons which will become apparent further on.
I go to see the bleeping pyramid sculpture outside the National theatre. Presumably, this many-sided steel cone construction has been emitting its differently pitched bleeps continuously for the last three years since I was last here. That’s a very long piece of ambiently noodling noises.
I then walk to the mall area where I used to sell UFF magazines. (UFF – Ulands-hjalp fra Folk til Folk, Land help from People to People/Humana/Tvind.)
Humana is an International charity of dubious reputation that has ‘schools’ that ‘prepare’ young volunteers to go out to African countries as ‘solidarity workers’. A large part of this ‘preparation’ involves selling magazines on the streets.
I’m so glad I’m not selling magazines any more; there was always a feeling of being trapped in an endless tide of shopping humanity. It was horrible. The only way out of it was to tackle it head on; sometimes very difficult. Anyhow that was then, this is now, and much easier for it. Somehow it all feels like some sort of therapy, returning to the scene of the crime and all that:
It was during my stint here a couple of years earlier that I’d decided to steal myself some extra food rations; three bars of chocolate – and got myself in the caca over it. The protocol is that all the school had been sent off to different towns around Norway and Sweden, a group of five to six each in various towns. Most of us hitch-hiked to get where we were going with only sleeping bags and a big box of magazines each and an ‘official’ ID card that was run off the school photocopier.
It was up to us to find somewhere to stay for the two weeks we would be away, and to supplement our daily twenty kronor (two quid) food ration however we could. Twenty kronor being approximately the price of a cup of coffee. This entailed an art form known as ‘klunsing’; the Scandinavian word for ‘blagging’. We’d flash our ID, a magazine and a cheesy grin and in lots of places in affluent trusting Scandinavia we could talk ourselves into free accommodation, free meals (of varying quality) and into people’s hearts. In Bergen we’d eaten in a fantastic Indian restaurant and a wholefood veggie place. Sometimes we had to live off yesterdays cakes and sandwiches from bakeries. One time that was all we ate for a week and it gave us all laryngitis. I yearned with all my being to eat something other than small triangular curly dried-up ham sandwiches.
I was banned from dumpster-diving on ‘health grounds’, despite my objections that I had been in the habit of doing it for years, and that I wasn’t dead yet. Indeed, I was most definitely enhancing our nutrition.
As it was, in Goteborg on this particular occasion, the food supplies were running low; two slices of bread and a shared pot of potato salad between five of us. We would buy potato salad because it was the cheapest thing there was. We’d had it every day for a week. I hated it. It’s what we always bought. I had come across the tactic of hovering around the area of a McDonalds in order to do my fund-raising. This afforded me a number of opportunities;
1) a guaranteed flow of people
2) music on the MTV screen inside every time I went for a piss or to count my money in the loo or got bored or fed up.
3) most importantly, I could keep an eye out through the window for anyone that had abandoned their delicious nutritious McHappy meal. Then I could go in and grab myself uneaten still-warm fries and usually half a drink before the counter staff came and threw it away. Believe me, when you’ve been eating as much random crap as we’d been eating, a half-eaten McDonald’s really does suddenly seem like real food.
One day, fancying a change from my usual exciting diet, I decided to get myself some chocolate from the five-fingered discount store. This had worked fine on the two preceding days, but the third time I got the hand on the shoulder treatment as I was walking out. (Never re-visit the scene of the crime.)
This was potentially a bigger disaster than it might otherwise have been. I was counting on the tendency of police in foreign countries to often be lenient on its guests. This time if I got into trouble I would have the school to answer to. It would probably completely knacker my chances of going to Mozambique. I got sent to the police station. Oh shit. I racked my brains and tried not to panic. How can I work this? I knew the school had a quite bad reputation amongst the Scandinavians for ‘mind control’ and various alleged abuses of funds and its participants trust. This, I decided, might be my way out of trouble. I told the police that we were given almost no money for food (true) and that I had to eat somehow. There was a difficulty in that I had no proper ID, i.e. my passport, to prove that I was not a wanted criminal in seven countries or something. The only people who could identify me was the school. I pleaded with the cops not to contact the school, implying that if my crime was found out, I would be flogged within inches of my life. Or something. Miraculously, the nice police people did the honourable thing and turfed me out on my ear, making me first promise most solemnly that I would never ever be a naughty boy ever again. I made some sort of remorseful apology and went on my way, very bloody grateful in that ‘hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck, blimey, I-really-did-almost-cop-it-then-didn’t-I?’ kind of way. Immediately after that, I became mostly concerned with how I was going to explain my absence from my duties. As it turned out, no-one seemed to notice that I hadn’t been around and my terrible secret was safe…
Afterwards on the long journey back to the school, I klunsed a van full of eleven people a super fantastic Happy meal each at some McDonalds place somewhere on a long empty Swedish road surrounded by pine trees. It wasn’t the best food in the world, but I was quite pleased with my ability to sort out everyone’s dinner with no money in a matter of seconds. All by the power of Blah…
Upon leaving Goteborg after my trip down memory lane, the bus driver lets me get on the bus going to Surte even though I don’t have enough money. He says I can give him the rest tomorrow.
Surte seems to be a village. It’s 7 pm, dark and cold, I have no money to spend, so I head out of the village and lay out my sleeping bag. I sleep pretty well except for sliding down a very slight incline. I wake up with frost and ice on my sleeping bag. I shall have to get a tent type device. This Canadian minus fifteen centrigrade bag does its job fabulously.
Thursday 16th October.
I wake up in a hazel and Bjork (birch) wood cosy in my bag with my head looking up watching leaves slowly falling in some gravitational ballet whilst the early morning sun lights up the golden canopy against a brilliant blue sky.
Yesterday hitching was easy enough. Today it takes four hours to get my first lift, but I don’t mind. I am busy enjoying being in Sweden and learning Norwegian from a phrasebook (een, to, tre, feer, fem, sex).
I get stopped by police again and they want to see my passport and they are friendly enough. I get a ride with a black African woman from Uganda, she came here in the seventies. She’s great – she oozes happiness. She leaves me by the road at Torp with a big smile on my face! Aah! Here I find a carbon fibre bicycle frame which I think might be worth a few bob so I’m going to see if I can sell it in Oslo. Hopefully border control won’t give me too much hassle over it. For dinner last night I had skipped steak cooked over a fire in the woods where I slept. I get caught raking through the bin behind the ICA (‘eeka’) supermarket and was told ‘You should not be here!’. So I waited for an hour lurking about the place and went back again when I saw the manager come out and drive away.
Steak and cheesecake mix. Not the best skipping experience ever but okay. So it’s the Atkins diet for me then for a while.
Skipping (dumpster-diving) is the great yardstick that separates one way of being in the world from another. On the one hand we live in a world driven by consumption. For the most part, we live to consume, and we consume to live. We work to pay for what we have. We often relax by ingesting TV and food. On the other, there are those of us that are more resourceful, who have realised that by letting go of certain assumed social mores, have found other easier ways of achieving similar useful satisfying ends. Skipping to me has always been a mixed blessing. There have been occasions when having hit the ‘jackpot’ of a really decent skipload of food, one part of me is elated, another part is distressed that we live in a world that will just throw so much food, clothing, furniture, building materials, whatever other gems, into a big metal container and then just throw it away, digging up some poor hillside in the process of supposedly ‘disposing’ of it. Skipping is a dirty genius. It’s like being the rat that survives after the shit hits the fan. If you can be resourceful, you will survive.
There’s a certain type of culture where everyone has their favourite drugs, dreams, football, travel, whatever story. There’s a certain type of person that has a ‘best skipping experience’ story.
I once lived on a traveller’s site in my home town of Reading, Berkshire. It was a mere scrap of woodland hemmed in by dreary industrial development on one side and the beautiful River Thames on the other. (The woods were later cleared to build yet another Tescos supermarket.) We were next to King’s Meadow, not far from where the WOMAD World Of Music And Dance festival used to happen every year.
It was on this site that I was shown how to steal a tarpaulin and build my own bender (like a yurt but much simpler to construct). The guy who helped me construct it said ‘You have just built your own house. You have no mortgage and no rent to pay. You are now officially free!’ This at the time was somewhat of a revelation. You don’t have to do things the way everyone else does. (Though these days I’m certainly not big on nicking stuff.)
Here it was we lived under the winter frost, kept warm with wood burners made out of old propane gas bottles, with bits of found flue pipe for chimneys. Insalubrious as our surroundings were, we were ideally placed for free food. We had the basics necessary to living covered. Free shelter, free warmth (wood from around us and skips), reasonably good company and free food.
We were next to a wholesale cash ‘n’ carry warehouse – that was where we got all our fruit and vegetables. Literally just down the road was the old Huntley and Palmers factory, famous throughout the British colonies for its biscuits and was now owned by the Jacobs biscuit empire. One day someone raided their skip and came back with two rucksacks full of Jacob’s Club bars. You’d have to get very stoned to deal with that much chocolate. So we did.
We had another skip, right in town. December 20th, the day that the shop closed for the Christmas holidays, and wouldn’t open again until the sixth of January, was a mad day for us. By the quirks of European legalities, every food product has a date stamped on it saying when a food should be sold or eaten by. It then gets thrown away if nobody buys it. It will get taken off the supermarket shelves a day or two before that date too. Supposedly people don’t like to buy food when it’s ‘just about to go BAAD’.
The reality is that the date stamped is deliberately over-cautious, making certain that there is as little chance as possible that someone might get dodgy food, give themselves food poisoning and sue the company that made it. A perhaps shrewd economic and public relations move, but it does mean that an enormous quantity of good food gets destroyed. (Approxiamately thirty percent of all manufactured food gets thrown away at some point.)
A LOT of good food. Balance this against something like the poverty of Guatemalan peasant farmers who can’t afford to eat their own cash crops because they have to sell them to export to the US, leaving themselves the dregs.
It a strange scenario being in the position of re-dressing a little of that imbalance.
Anyway it was December 19th and the supermarket had an awful lot of food that technically was ‘no good’. It was more food than I had ever seen. A skipfull. It was all kinds of stuff, including some Christmassy things like Christmas pudding and mince pies. We didn’t know what to do with it all. Fortunately we knew someone who had a lot of visitors to his house. This guy we knew dealt weed and he graciously helped us empty the skip. We filled his car three and a half times. Just to give you an idea of how much food we shifted, we had 142 litres of orange juice and grapefruit juice. About forty kilos of cheese. Literally a ton of other stuff. All good. We stacked the cartons and everything else up in this guy’s front room, and everyone who came to score in the run up to Christmas got a free hamper. How’s that for a community service?!
Another go at the same skip once bestowed us with fifty-three tins of beer. They were four-packs that had lost a tin each by damage in the warehouse or someone had shoplifted one tin from the pack in the shop. They were thrown away because the computer system dictates that the beer may only be sold in packs of four, and not individually, so the other three would get chucked. We got very drunk.
Technically it’s illegal. When I first came across the noble art it wasn’t, but I guess there are some people out there who just don’t like the idea of someone getting something for nothing and so it was outlawed. There have been a couple of times when an apoplectic manager will come out from the back of his supermarket to throw out more food and will find me raking through his skip. Conversation will go something like ‘Get out of that bin! It’s private property, that’s theft, that’s not yours if you don’t leave I shall call the police, I’ve had enough of your sort etc etc blah blah blah…’
To which I will point out to him ‘What? I know technically I’m stealing food from going into a mighty big hole in the ground. I need to eat. There are lots of people out there who can’t make ends meet, and you’d rather they had to come in your shop wouldn’t you? It’s not like the money the shop makes even goes to you does it? Some of this food has come halfway round the planet just so you can throw it away. Some people would call that disrespectful. I don’t care about your stupid law; call the police if you like. What we are doing is morally right.’
Usually knowing that we were right and he was wrong, the usual response would be that the shop manager would bluster something along the lines of ‘Well don’t make a mess’ and stomp back inside muttering to himself. It was actually quite unlikely that the manager would ever come out, most times you would have the place to yourself.
I once stayed for a night in a homeless hostel in Dublin where all the food there had been supplied by a local Marks and Spencers. So there I was with all these old boys eating posh salmon sandwiches and swanky instant meals for breakfast. Classy.
Very often whilst in the habit of skipping, you will find yourself eating better and more than you would if you got your groceries at the front of the shop.
Sometimes you find yourself inadvertently at the hands of fate and at the forefront of avante garde nouvelle cuisine. Like Moose Steak a la Cheesecake Mix roasted teasingly over an open fire. It can be exhilarating. Maybe you have to be stoned. I’m not; I just get off on it anyway.
I dream of a baby seal following a leaf in a stream and then of its mother coming to see after its baby. Then a gun muzzle comes to the mother’s snout and it is shot. The mother seal looks at me as its eyes filled red wondering ‘Why?’ and then falls onto her back and floats downstream. It is a very quiet dream but it’s still disturbing.
I was wondering the night before what I was cooking, and have been wondering if the animal had had a natural existence. I think I am eating moose and pork. Maybe the pork is actually seal. (The Skandinavians do eat some different meats than we Brits do.) Maybe I shouldn’t eat meat, even if it is skipped. I have also been thinking how eating skipped meat is a way of rescuing some respect for the animal that has died.
This morning I wake up with my mind not in contradiction with my surroundings. After several weeks in Norwich of headaches and bad sleeping – battling the vision in my head against the reality around me, I’m glad to be back in motion with myself. Yeah I guess I’m a bit of a loner, but right now I feel comfortable with that.
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NORWAY:
Friday 17th October Oslo.
This time last year I was hitch-hiking to the first white settlement of North America; L’anse Aux Meadows, settled by the Vikings.
I had a feeling it would take two or three days to get to Oslo, and that’s how long it eventually takes.
I wait by the side of the E6 at Dingle (Din-glay) all morning, which is beautiful; rocky outcrops and birch, oak and poplar all doing their Autumn thing in the morning mist and sunshine. Eventually I get a ride all the way to Oslo with a Dutch chap who has driven up to research geology. We get on quite well which is good, and he introduces me to some new music; Apocalyptica from Finland who are cello quartet who do Metallica covers (I can’t stand them) and ‘Spinvis’ (Spinfish) from Holland who I like very much; similar atmos as Royksopp.
Upon arrival in Oslo at 3 pm, I make for the spot I’d stayed in when I worked in Oslo two years ago; in a clump of woodland trapped between the motorway and a tram line. No-one goes there; it’s all slopes and noisy. No-one would sensibly think to go there to hang out. The platform I had built last time is still there (made of two pallets) and the charcoal and bags I had left are still there. It looks like no-one has been there since I left. A good sign. I quickly build a camouflaged shelter over the platform, stash valuables (rucksack, mp3 player, camera and bits) in a black bin-liner, find a nook by a tree to put them in and cover them with leaves not too far away from the platform. That way, if someone comes along and decides to ransack the place, all they’ll get is my sleeping bag, my guitar and various bits of food and washing tat.
Looking out over a fondly remembered view, across the harbour, the docks and a whole span of the city tucked into the mountains is a satisfying feeling; after an hour of settling, I think about what I need to do next. I need to figure out how to go about getting work and money. I set off down the thirty degree slope to the highway and walk into the city centre about half a mile away to check out the haunts of my fund-raising days on Karl Johans Gata opposite the train station. I go to see if the UFF shop is still there, and it is; I go in and Mattius who I knew from before is still working there, so that is a very nice surprise. Bizarrely (he’s quite a shy chap), he’s got married to a Peruvian woman he’d met on the internet. He offers me a genuine Russian fur hat for twenty Norwegian Kroner (about a quid) as I have managed to lose my other hat.
With earplugs in, I sleep well and wake up for what I think is 5 am so that I would get to Losang employment agency in time for 6 am. Actually I get there at ten to seven because I’ve forgotten to change the time on my clock. Anyway I go there, introduce myself and find out what I need to do; so the next step from here is to get a work permission stamp from the police station in Groenland and a tax code from the city Kommun in Toyen.
In the meantime, I meet a chap called Erik who shows me where I can get free food every morning at a place called BlaKors (Blue Cross), a Salvation Army style food kitchen. Strangely, ‘Blue Cross’ in England is an animal rescue charity! I have coffee (good), pizza (crap but warm and filling) and rice and sweet and sour Thai vegetable goo (dire). I’ve only ever come across one nation that ruins food more than the English and that the Nogs. Anyway that’s one less thing I have to figure out anyway, so I am still grateful for these good people making my life possible.
I meet there the chap who I’d met earlier on at Losang who recommends holding up a bank as a way to make money. He hasn’t worked for a while and is quite frustrated. He is really quite negative about most things, but I know what it’s like when you go into the Losang office day after day and no work comes. You just want to get on but you can end up just waiting and waiting. I’m keeping this in mind for myself, but I don’t mind so much because there’s still other things I have to do before heading for Down Under.
I have a nice warm library space to write in, some squats I can go visit if I feel like it (not really that bothered – I’m on a mission and I’m kind of sticking to it) and things I can do if there’s no work for the day; photos of Vigeland Park and writing. Maybe I shall call up Esther. Found a nice warm winter coat this morning. Bonus. Now all I need is another hat. The one Mattius sold me is too small and gives me a weird headache.
Whilst in the library I meet a woman who is an ex-air stewardess from Hollywood USA and owns two properties in the States (one in Colorado and one in Florida) and three in Norway. We chat outside on the steps of the library and then she invites me back to hers for coffee, which turns into an invitation to help her clean up one of her apartments in exchange for food and a bed. (A very cosy bed it is too – a real boat-builders style box.)
This time last year I was in L’anse Aux Meadows discovering Viking long houses made of peat. I wonder where I will be one year from now.
October 26th? (Saturday)
Ohmigod. The last few days I’ve been very very very stressed; to the point where it seems like everything I try to do seems destined to fail. This has manifested in my brain the irritating and recurring phrase ‘Please fry my brains in butter’. Now there’s a really dumb-arsed thing to put out to the cosmos.
No-one seems to want an English-man to work for them, there doesn’t seem to be any work anyway; three thousand postal workers are about to be laid off just in time for Christmas, the zip on my coat and on my top have both broken (so now I can’t get my top off!), my camera broke again. I am stinky and I need a bath. And it’s cold. Of course.
I’m walking around with ‘stressed eyebrows’ as Gill used to call it; worrying so much it messes up my sleeping pattern and I feel like I’ve been drinking coffee all night and my eyes are popping out of my head. I still feel like that now even though things are turning back up again. Dribble dribble. Next, I visit the Student Travel shop and aquire myself an ISIC card (International Students Identity Card). I type up a made-up letter from University of East Anglia saying I’m a student (nice blue letterhead and everything) and print it out in the library. I present it as evidence of me being a student and get the card for 7.50 Nok. It may end up saving me on a bus or even a plane fare. The fact that I’m thirty-five, beardy and look like a greasy bum doesn’t seem to bother the woman issuing the card. Perhaps she thinks I’m a philosophy student. I go to a couple of travel agents to check out how much a ticket to Australia is going to cost me. It’s starting to look like it’s going to happen now. I’m feeling a lot more purposeful.
The Hollywood air stewardess, Leigh has offered me one of her properties to stay in if I promise to tidy it up; an abandoned Turkish delicatessen. She bought it six years ago, and has clearly done nothing whatsoever with it.
I spend the evening emptying the shop of useless trash, crates and old Turkish newspapers. I sell two crates of unopenned beer to the first pair of guys to walk past. Even though the shop has been empty for over five years, the beer is still good. Now I have a bus fare to the airport – which is a godsend considering how much free food I’m going to be carrying out of here when I leave.
Leigh is off to work, so after a few days I move out of the shop and move in to care-take her empty flat which is warm, light and cosy. I do a bit of DIY and tidying up. Living off food in the shop dated from 1996, which amazingly is (mostly) completely perfect. I have been eating Italian sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, pasta, salad vegetables also in oil, tuna, sardines, tinned pineapple, pears and mandarins in fruit juice. I buy posh bread. (Almost the only money I’ve spent on food in two weeks here.) A brief taste of some kind of luxury. No wonder I feel like doing nothing today; I think I want to enjoy this! Played guitar well last night. I am getting better at it. Mended camera, hurrah!, so I can take Vigeland pictures today too at some point.
I buy a ticket back to England, which I’m sort of dreading; I am quite keen to pull up anchor and get out of Norwich, but now I’m going back, and I’ve got Christmas and Helen’s birth to fit in (or not). That’s making me anxious – I always feel so familiar in Norfolk that I fight to keep myself from just staying there.
I joined the Oslo library yesterday and get out two books on Australia to give my stressed imagination something more directed to focus on.
I spend the day taking hundreds of photos of Vigeland Park. Even though the work thing hasn’t happened, at least I’m satisfying a very long-standing urge to capture this place in pictures. Very satisfying indeed. Whenever the subject of sculpture arises in conversation, I inevitably ask the person I’m talking with if they have ever heard of Gustav Vigeland. I’ve never met anyone outside of Norway who has ever heard of him. This really amazes me. Vigeland is a world-class sculptor who deserves as much recognition as Rodin or Maillol.
Gustav Vigeland was commissioned by the Oslo Kommun (city council) to make sculptures for the city. He had made a sculpture for someone and the Kommun were so impressed by it that they offered him a deal: They would give him a nice big house with workshop space all placed beautifully in a large park in the city. All they asked was that the sculptures he made were to be placed around the park for the people of Oslo to come and enjoy. And to this end he laboured the rest of his life recreating all the stages of life and family interaction that exist, from mother and babies, fathers and sons to elderly people pondering their fragility. I can’t describe this guy’s work adequately. I go and find some images on the internet, and then go and see them for real. There’s over two hundred of them and they are so full of humanity. Ace.
After finishing doing the photography, I tidy up at Leigh’s. I manage slightly painfully to carry my rucksack mountain to the bus depot. No way I’m hitching with this little lot. I get bus to airport. Talk to nice Norwegian chap. Watch landscape roll by. Feel like maybe I’ve got Norway out of my system.
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ENGLAND
Hassle at airport; too much weight with all that extra food; I have to pay a surcharge. Get to Stanstead; It’s raining, there’s no train because of the weather. The epitome of crap Englishness. Bus to Cambridge, train to Norwich. Back to Nautia in Eade Rd. Research Australia plane tickets, no dole, ask Mike who I am going to do some decorating for if he’ll put 200 quid in my bank account to keep me temporarily afloat, hitch to his, do DIY, get unexpectedly well-paid, buy Australia ticket, go back to Norwich.
I walk around the woods behind Helen’s house as if I am saying goodbye to them forever. I am entertaining the very real possibility that I might decide to settle in New Zealand (possibly illegally) and might very well never come back to England. I am mourning this beautiful place. I have not told anybody of my re-settling notion. I would just get talked out of it and never leave.
I feel REALLY shitty. Every bone in my body wants to stay right where I am at Helen’s in Wood Green. I sob my eyes out the day before leaving.
Helen drops me off on the A11. I am left with no time to think about anything: Three minutes later I get a ride to Heathrow Terminal 4 with a mathematician called Alan. He says ‘Is that any good to you?’ I joke to him that actually I am going to Terminal 3, but never mind.
How close can you get? This is auspicious I guess. I have anticipated it taking all day to get to the airport, so I am left with plenty of spare time. I use the unexpected free time as an opportunity to hop on a bus down to Reading and I go visit my dad, which we have a good connection this time. (It’s always a bit hit-and-miss.) I phone Glynis and Jeanette my two sisters to say goodbye and then head back to the airport with an hour to spare.
On the plane I talk to Lorraine a domestic servant housemaid type person who works for a ‘Lady’ in Northumberland. Another one of those snapshots into another persons completely different world.
Looking out the window, we must be flying over Turkey, Syria and Iran. I am surprised by how grey and cold it looks. We must be flying over mountain regions. Fascinating shapes of river valleys, artificial land boundaries and roads. I fantasise what it must be like to be down there amongst it all.
We arrive at Abu Dhabi airport where we transfer. This is my first time on Middle Eastern soil. Well Middle Eastern marble flooring anyway. Look! Nobody is trying to blow me up! Maybe I’ll use the hour I’ve got to go and buy some swanky gold jewellery…
Flying onwards again, we fly over India by night. The sky is very clear, and it’s possible to see clusters of fires marking where villages are. It all seems so tantalisingly close – I can almost reach out and touch it (except that the plane will implode if I open the window).
After something you might laughably describe as ‘sleep’ we arrive at Bandar Seri Begawan, a place I will bet my battered hat on that you have never heard of. It’s the capital of Brunei, in the heart of South East Asia. The Rivers are very very brown. The houses look wealthy colourful and large. I can’t tell you any more than that about the place. The Bruneian airport officials have this air of personal service and attention you get when you go to Very Tiny Places that want to be acknowledged as being real live countries. If only the west was like this.
Another plane and three and a half hours later (about twenty blur in total) and I’m in Darwin.
I am welcomed to the great red land by a cute customs official who looks about nineteen and who proceeds to search absolutely everything about my person at least twice. The drugs dog seems to like my guitar, and so do the customs men when they discover that the end comes off so that you can put things in. Some other poor bastard gets the unenviable task of having to examine my gooey boots. Bloody hell I’ve never had such a thorough turning over as they are giving me here.
The pretty young customs official asks me ‘Do you like to party?’ which is a bit ambiguous as I always thought that was an invitation more than a question.
‘Do you use any recreational drugs sir?’
I tell her that, well yes I do occasionally as it happens but I’d be a bloody fool to bring any with me now as I would risk completely ruining my holiday and wasting the price of my plane ticket. So no, I don’t have any recreationals about my person.
Which astonishingly, I think she approves of my honesty. I clearly don’t look like a ‘straight’ person and it would be an insult to her intelligence to lie anyway.
I am met properly in the arrivals lounge by the glorious Leona who is all smiles and hugs.
Driving back to hers is very exciting; all hot and humid and tropical and lovely. It’s like being in Belize except with money. ‘You’ll probably be wanting to get some sleep?!’
No Way! It’s four-thirty in the afternoon, broad sunlight and really exciting!
Getting back to hers, I get a bite to eat and then get together with some serious JETLAG.
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P A R T T H R E E :
A U S T R A L A S I A
AUSTRALIA:
PRESTIDIGITACITY IN THE NETHER REGIONS.
Imagine that the Great Creator was a supercomputer. Imagine Europe with its numerical logistics all muddled up. You’d get Australia.
The outback makes everything seem spacially distorted and strange, having a kind of fantastical Alice in Wonderland ‘Drink Me’ effect on the senses. It’s people and creatures are other-worldly, living in a science fiction climate.
I recently discovered that the female kangaroo has three vaginas. Two for having Joeys out of, and one for spare that nobody knows exactly what it’s there for. How does Mr. kangaroo rise to the occasion? He has two penises. Penii, whatever. I guess he rises twice. Presumably, he can’t work out what fanny number three is for either. Now there’s a creature I really would be curious to watch having sex.
Darwin is the smallest city in Australia, up here on its own at the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territories. First it was home to the Larrakia people, who travelled and traded widely; as far as Western Australia and South East Asia.
On 9th sept 1839 HMS Beagle landed here as part of a surveyance mission and the captain of the ship named the area after the ships former notable shipmate.
A tiny colony at first, its population grew to 300 when a minor gold rush occurred in the 1870s.
The city has changed its name twice – from ‘Palmerston’ and back again – it has been flattened twice; once by Japanese air raids during World War Two (the same bombers that bombed Pearl Harbour) and once by Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Three quarters of the 40,000 people living here had to be airlifted out of the area.
Its tropical here and during ‘The Wet’ it has thousands of lightning storms; over 40,000 throughout year!
It is one of most lightning prone places in the world and on one day once had over 5000 lightning strikes. (Did some silly sod sit there and count them all? The mind boggles. I bet his did too.)
Here endeth the lesson.
November 19th
I’ve been in Darwin at Leona’s for six days now. It’s been a bit of a weird time really; the following day after landing I feel like my head is on backwards and I have an horrendous headache. I try eating and am sick. And I thought jet-lag was just an executive wimp-out.
Thursday (next day November 20th)
The headache’s gone, but still can’t decide when to be asleep and when to be awake. Doze halfway through the day, go out for an exploratory bike ride at 10 pm. Whilst looking out over mangroves I notice lots of little hermit crabs scuttling about through the grass next to the cycle path. I throw them a few chicken bones into the grass and they home in on them. They seem to like chicken. Leona lives in the suburbs of Casuarina, which to my senses seems like a fairly middle-class kind of area plonked in the middle of a tropical safari park. People go out for evening strolls, jogging, snogging, drinking and cycling. Not neccesarily in that order.
Fruit bats the size of pigeons fly overhead in a flock. Tree frogs croak the night away. A whole variety of small lizards and geckos wriggle and slither about.
Leona is doing a fantastic job of keeping me fed and watered. This is great as it’s taking time to acclimatise to the tropical stickiness. Landing straight into suburbia and not really doing much moving about is a bit disconcerting. I am a man without a plan.
Over the last few days Leona has taken me off down the Stuart Highway to Adelaide River where together we check out the local flora and fauna (ghost gums, wallabies, small kangas, star fruit, coconuts, cyclids (prehistoric), parrakeets, white cockatoos, bamboo and a range of trees I don’t really recognise by name, but a lot of it looks familiar – things I recognise from being in Central America. There are some absolutely amazing looking palms around that look like they’ve been designed by mathematicians.
So far the landscape has really pleasantly defied my expectations; instead of a searing barren desert we’re travelling through bush of varying beauty and density, sometimes scrub, sometimes like jungle. Every day has something new to marvel at.
If I’m learning anything about travel it’s that the reasons I find for not going somewhere are usually utterly unfounded. (Next year I think I’ll go on holiday to Iran…)
Saturday evening (22 November)
We go to Leona’s brother’s house, Dean + Maureens and watch England narrowly beat Australia in the rugby World Cup. The others had started the evening by scoffing jovially about the English team’s chances of conquering the all-mighty Aussies.
Jonny Wilkinson saves the day for the English by doing his game-saving, amazing but peculiar looking long-shot drop-kicks. He can kick a ball and score from the other end of the pitch, but in order to do this, he psyches himself up by first doing a weird squatting thing that makes him look like he’s been hit by an unexpected dose of the runs.
Now my Aussie hosts are all swearing at the unlikeliness of it all. Now I don’t do sport – it’s all lost on me, though I do manage a quiet smirk to myself.
I try oysters for the first time. I expect it will be the last time too. A bit like eating someone else’s snot.
Sunday is market day and we buy mango + papaya from the South-East Asian stalls.
Darwin has people from over eighty countries living here. Not bad for a population of only 130 thousand. So far most of the non-European people seem to be Orientals and aboriginals though I’m told there are lots of Greeks here too.
After the fruit market we visit the craft market where Leona sells her pottery sometimes.
Sunday night I go out for another quick bike ride up the sea-front. I stop to watch lightning dance all over the northern end of the sky, partly out to sea.
The lightning strikes are frequent, and unlike anything I have ever seen before; many of the lightning bolts are leaping between between the clouds and not striking at the sky-line. Patches of night clouds burst into light randomly as lightning bursts within them. Lightning that does earth mostly seems to be shattering into inverted neon tree-shapes.
What a stunning show.
I’m here. I am actually HERE. I got to this end of the world; New Zealand not so hard to get to when the time comes. I can let go now; I’m free.
I’m starting to wake up a bit more now, starting to feel my drive coming back. I arrived here with no plan whatsoever other than to actually get on the plane from England in the first place.
The last couple of days before leaving England I felt like crap; loads of fears rising to the surface – I am running out on a sensible stable life in England, I don’t have any financial security, planes trash the planet…
Now I must decide roughly where I’m going and what I’m going to do. I feel slightly constrained by a shortage of funds and currently by the tropical heat. I’m sure I will the hang of both.
Monday 24th.
We go to the ‘dry dump’ where you can rake through stuff that’s been pulled out of landfill. I get most of a silver tent for three bucks that looks like its already been to the moon and back.
Leona says Darwinians have a keen sense of re-using old stuff and making the most of the things they have; being so distant and isolated from the main population of the country, consumer goods and food can be expensive even now.
After the dry dump, we drive out down an unmade road to Leona’s favourite beach where we collect fossilised crayfish and beautiful shells. I meet a twitchy stranded jellyfish and three purple sea-slugs. On the way back the rain decides to hit and the corrugations of the road combined with the mud and rain make steering the car an effort. The rain is so hard we have to really slow down cos Leona can barely see where we are going through the seemingly melting windscreen.
Thursday November 27th. Leona’s Darwin
I’m finding getting out of the house tricky. I think it’s either the heat making moving in the first place seem a bit laborious or the lack of a plan. I hang around testing my tiny new tent and doing a few household chores. I read up on Australian places and formulate a rough plan; to see a few things round Darwin, get brain and tat together, go to Tasmania. There, now I have a motivating force.
I go for a bike ride keeping as close to the sea as I can whilst staying on roads. Darwin has got to have the most beautiful suburbs I’ve ever seen; fantastic palms and brightly coloured bushes everywhere. More plant life than I’ve ever seen in any built-up area anywhere. There’s possibly as much greenery going on here as there is in the wild.
Not knowing where I’m going, I arrive at Lee Point, descend off-road through bush down to the sea. I head back along the sand towards Casuarina but get blocked by a small river inlet. I investigate hermit crabs some more and meet a mud hopper which is a three-inch mermaid with the head of Jar-Jar Binks. It’s very tame and is very happy for me to look at it very closely for as long as I like.
It’s either blind, stupid or very chilled out. The latter I like to think, though the boggly eyes on stalks don’t help.
I cycle back near sundown through an amazing coastal bush trail used by joggers. It’s dawning on me just what an amazingly beautiful place Darwin is. It really is quite spectacular.
Friday 28th.
I wander round Darwin, get some camera batteries, go to a very good art museum full of aboriginal dot paintings and other contempory white fella stuff. I buy oil pastels to make Leona a painting as a thank you for my stay. I wander through my new normality, acclimatising, back to Leona’s house. Good day today.
Saturday 29th.
I am feeling lots of doubts about what I’m doing; am I being dumb and just following some head-trip mission to New Zealand? In my burning need to ‘Do The Right Thing’, I feel certain I am following a delusion. Just because I know that, it doesn’t make it any less deluded does it? Is this how I kill a wandering monkey? Not feeling sad, just open and willing enough to write this. And stuck in my head.
On Thursday afternoon in Nightcliff library I am eyeing up a young woman and to my alarm she responds and flirts with me. This really shakes me up. a completely unhealthy response on my part. I mutter hello back and leave.
How much I am frightened of not ‘achieving New Zealand’ is bizarre in its side-effects and I feel like I’m selling myself short. Two women have been into me so far. Sexual frustration is getting to me. Don’t want to start a situation that I know I’ll feel conflict about. If I start another reason for avoiding potential relationships when I get to New Zealand then I shall know that I’m being a numpty. What if I meet someone fantastic before New Zealand? This is crazy!? Is upside-down Down Under the right way up?
No. It probably isn’t.
I seem to be turning this trip into some sort of martyrdom exercise and less of an enjoyable experience. That’s dumb. Change it so it’s fun you twit! Okay, so what do I need to change?
Burble burble burble…
Friday December 6th (or 5th)
Either heat, post-jetlag and/or a sense of disappointment or pointlessness hangs over me. I guess it’s also kind of weird to jump from one side of the world to the other and to just stick right where you land. A bit like throwing a ball that doesn’t then bounce onwards when it first hits the ground. Maybe why that’s why I feel I ought to be bouncing off down the road. Maybe I’m going ‘Troppo’ (Australian version of ‘Doolally’).
Monday, me and Leona drive to Litchfield National Park. Magnetic termite mounds rise up and spread themselves erratically, reminding me of the lines of Neolithic standing stones at Carnac in Brittany.
Leona’s talking twenty to the dozen about something or other. Me, I’m rudely listening to the gaps in-between, the breeze of exotic birds calling brightly to each other. I’m listening to the outback version of space and vastness, trying to find the silent hum of ancient winds.
Litchfield National Park is a range of differing habitats placed together in an oasis of super-vitality.
As usual it’s enormous (it only looks small on the map)… God nose what possesses me to think I’d be able to walk round it in a couple of days…
I am so utterly wrong and Leona easily convinces to immediately abandon any such notion. It would probably kill little unwise pommie tourist me.
The trail road rises up about a hundred metres which is height enough to be able to view the expanse of bush that rolls on forever all around. It’s a wide wide tree-filled place. The grey promise of a thunderstorm looms way off bringing ponderous movement to the apparent stillness.
We pull into a picnic car park and unload lunch by a beautiful drinkable stream. Hundreds of two-inch fish look interested in us. We jump in for a swim. It’s warm! Not the British ‘Come on in it’s lovely’ kind of warm which actually only means ‘Oh wow my nerve endings have packed in it’s so cold, now I can’t feel anything!’ no not that, but actually warm.
More exotic unidentified birds tootle about idly overhead. The little fish discover my peeling sunburned skin makes a tasty snack and as I stand still in the water I can feel the strange bubbly sensation of hundreds of fish nibbling away at my dead flesh. My legs are strangely back in Belize again. Whilst this is happening, spiders skate like water boatmen across the rippling surface and a water monitor lizard has come by, presumably to keep an eye on things.
He finds a nice flattish rock to lie on and basks. I’m waiting for him to get freaked by us and run off, but it doesn’t happen. We get out of the water slowly, so as not to scare our new companion. I take photos. He still doesn’t seem bothered. Eating a bit of lunch he lifts his head high and does that tongue waggling thing that reptiles do. He wanders over closer and closer to us to see what we’ve got. He seems the most interested when I drop some fruit on the ground and he makes a dive for it. It’s amazing to see such an ancient species of creature so close up and friendly. This critter has been here from the year dot, maybe for about eighty million years. That’s quite an evolutionary achievement. He can afford to move slowly if he wants – he really does ‘have all the time in the world.’
We go visit some pools and waterfalls, all a bit Shangri-La and lovely.
Another big lake before we go home, comfortably hemmed in by jungly bush all round. There are two one hundred foot waterfalls on the far side. A notice confidently informs us that all the crocodiles have been removed. Hopefully it’s up to date. How does it know that some new ones haven’t craftily snuck in whilst it wasn’t looking?
A good healthy uneaten swim and a redundant shower under the waterfall later and it’s time to go home. The rocks under the waterfall have the same coppery look like the rocks at Tofino.
I exclaim to Leona that now I feel like I’ve arrived, like I’m really in Australia, and not so caught up in the head-tangles I brought over with me on the plane from England.
I have got ‘The Dreaming’ a Kate Bush tune in my head; ‘There goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van-a’. I’m driving, which gives me even more of a sense of ‘being here’. Three minutes later a wallaby bounces across the road ahead so I slow down. So focussed on it are we that we both fail to notice another slightly smaller one tagging along behind it. I get a heavy sick feeling as I hit it just before it manages to cross completely. We stop and Leona tries to find it, to put it out of it’s suffering if necessary. She can’t find it. Hopefully it’s okay or not badly hurt. I drive the 150 kms home as night descends onto an unlit highway back to Darwin.
Over the next few days, sluggishness and procrastination reign supreme. I tape Goon Shows, read M. Scott Peck’s ‘The Road Less Travelled And Beyond’, eat, fart, shower, watch TV and sleep.
So far I feel like I’m on ‘The Road Not Travelled At All.’
I think I’m building up my ‘inertia before the leap’ quotient; mustering sufficient boredom points to focus me for further new adventures (or something). Oh the power of the mind to justify absolutely anything is quite astonishing.
Leona drives the next day up to Berrimah Truck Stop where I enquire about how to hitch-hike to Queensland. With utter bluntness the guy behind the counter tells me: ‘Oh, get a plane. You don’t want to hitch-hike. Everyone that goes down that road gets murdered. That’s the road the everyone gets killed on. Nah mate, don’t do it.’
An exaggeration of the typical attitude way too many people have about hitching.
If more people were less paranoid, the world would be a happier place and I’d also get my rides quicker. Even in Europe, it’s the one definite incident of danger that people can tell you about regarding hitching. The one murder that happened several years ago in Australia. Why don’t people rant and rave about all the really interesting people they meet that really brighten up their day?
I lump this guys opinion into the ‘forget’ part of my brain. I reckon as long as I’ve got enough food and water, and I don’t lose my hat, I’ll be alright. Though the prospect of hundreds and hundreds of miles of deserty bush is a little scary.
Me and Leona keep finding excuses to visit the dry dump. I get myself a wide-brimmed Aussie outback hat for two bucks. Bargain. Leona finds furniture for her new garden.
I like Darwin. It reminds me of a sweaty 50s America. Podgy white folk having ice-creams and picnics amid the swaying palms. Sunsets, drinkies and comfortable podgie lower middle-class affluence.
It’s nearly time to go; my new Oz bank card comes in the post.
Today I sit writing at a green concrete picnic table enjoying a cooling breeze and the gentle lapping of the Timor Sea. A pair of brightly coloured parrot-things gabble and squawk in a nearby tree looking for a lunch of tree seeds. It’s good to see them out of their cages.
Later on that same evening…
All hail to the Great Provider known as ‘The Dumpster’. Verily I do go a-diving; get my arm covered in slightly festering goo (a traditional part of the practice) and come up with bread, cake, fruit and veg. Bizarrely, I have a bit of competition with a busy string of green-bum ants but I don’t think they mind sharing really. Luckily Leona has a food drier, so I can take dehydrated everything with me. Reduced weight and space, and it won’t go off. Hurrah!
Saturday night. The sky is full of thunder, lightning and heavy rain. The gardens are full of grunting frogs and occasional barking dogs. Rain bounces off the ground and smashes back into itself.
When it relents, I cautiously head out to Drue’s and do odd-jobs; painting a car porch and fiddling with guitar strings and computers. The change of company is good, though I’m still in a silly shy mode a little bit.
I come back to Leona’s and go out again to take lots of photos of suburbia and then sit and watch an amazing sunset by the sea-front. I watch a distant thunder storm come rolling into town off the water. Beautiful.
I talk to the sky and sing some.
My last but one day on the north Coast of Australia.
Instead of regret or sadness, I am feeling at last the familiar optimistism that can come from the energy of making a move into the unknown, to getting back on the roller-coaster.
It’s the comfortable perspective of hitching; instant short-lived companions, not much danger of messing things up too much; someone new and intriguing will be along soon enough if anything doesn’t sit right anyway.
The north Coast of Australia is just a smallish part of it all, Darwin soon to be another fondly remembered signpost in my mind.
Bliss;
Tonight it is raining. The air feels clear cool and fresh, the tropical heat having been temporarily washed away. Instead of earplugs to block out the sound of Leona’s electric fan I can fall asleep to the sound of the rain soaking the garden greenery and newly-lubricated sex-mad frogs croaking away merrily in the yard outside.
December 9th 2003. Hayes Creek, Stuart Highway NT.
Leona drops me off on the outskirts of Darwin, laden with dry fruit and a pressie not to be opened til Christmas.
I get a ride with Lee who a few days ago had found himself unable to resuscitate a friend, his old school teacher, dying from diabetes.
I wish Lee well. It’s a short ride, but it drives home a wedge of separation from Darwin and Leona and between me and my neuroses.
It’s bloody hot. That I don’t mind so much. What I do mind is the flies. They are on a mission from the Devil himself to drive me insane. I am trying to eat bread. Through a piece of mosquito net that I am wearing over my head. This I discover involves a tactic of hastily lifting the net slightly enough to sneak the bread under whilst waving my head around like a head-banger in order to confuse the flies. What a hassle.
At Humpty Doo (where’s Scooby?) I get a ride with Kasey an old guy previously from Arkansas who’s seen a lot of the world on the way to being here. He’s a gold miner. I bask in the fabulous otherness of his life-story as we hurtle forwards across the endless scrubby outback.
Kasey drops me off at some little roadhouse in the middle of nowhere, then I get a ride with a chap driving all the way down from a camp near Litchfield to Gove up on the north-eastern end of Kakadu on the coast. He is in a hurry to get to his girlfriend up there who is having a baby in two days. He needs to get up there before the roads flood and block access.
All these stories move me along, creating degrees of separation from what has gone before. There are moments when all that is left is just about being where I am.
And that is the magic of hitch-hiking.
I Sleep at Katherine by the roadside behind a large rock. Almost full moon. In the morning a hawk circles overhead to check if I’m carrion. (I’m not yet.)
A ride with a guy driving from Gove back home to Adelaide. Nice chap, drops me a whopping six hours later at Three ways. He offers me a ride straight through to Adelaide.
Australia is of course dauntingly huge to the new visitor. Conversely, it seems to have the potential to provide me with equally enormous rides. I could be in Hobart at my ultimate Australian destination before I have ever really got the hang of the place.
I decline the offer.
I bake in the sun for three hours at an emptyish T-junction. A rather deja-vu place, reminding me of my first almond-shelling experience of the desert emptiness of Keeler, Death Valley.
Its weirdly blank here. Just breeze and dust.
I begin to wish I’d stayed with the Adelaide ride. Curiously, the road I’m aiming to head down is Route 66; the road that stretches through the Barkley Tablelands.
Rob and John pick me up next, driving a big blue bus with ‘Murray River Passenger Service’ written on the side. They are towing a Toyota jeep with Rob driving a car behind all that. They look like gypsy traveller types.
Rob has just left his missus and three kids. They are both mineworkers. Rob does explosives. Great job for an angry pyromaniac-type person. We drive across the Tablelands into the night. There’s lots of lightning and rain. To the north we see bushfire far away on the horizon, turning the sky dark grey with billowing smoke. A distant repercussion of the Darwin skies.
We stop to have supper and sleep in the middle of nowhere after the bus develops engine weirdness. ‘You know anything about engines?’
‘Nope’
‘Bugger!’
I sleep next to the car. I have Coco-pops for breakfast. For me this is a memorable food event. The bus looks great against the desert backdrop; the best meals are more about the setting than what might happen to be in my food bowl. Which is as well considering some of the things that have to pass for food.
Eat up the scenery.
Fortunately I am also a moderate fan of Coco-pops.
John has got the bus going again and we drive all morning to Mount Isa (‘The Isa’), Rob is talking racist shite so I stare out the window at the ever-rolling sand, rocks and scrub; practicing a well-exercised hitch-hiker’s zone-out technique.
We stop on the way to see a memorial to the building of the highway from Queensland to Northern Territory. It was built by American troops as part of the Second World War effort. Horrible Back-breaking work. The kind of work you’d give to a prison chain gang. The photo shows smiling brave white soldiers on bulldozers. The small print says the work was carried out by black American soldiers. What a surprise.
Mount Isa is a weird and ugly mining town. It gets a bit hilly round here. A welcome relief after the seemingly endless flat flat flat flat flat emptiness of the bush.
I clean my malfunctioning camera at Dick Smiths Electronics Shop and walk out near the edge of town, ready for whatever is to happen next. I pass an extremely pink tattooed/pierced woman. She looks like someone that would stand up to the old adage; ‘Australia, where men are men and so are the women’.
I stand at the edge of town for five hours. I get hassled by three bleary wobbling aborigines demanding money. They seem to be a mother and father and their son.
The son:’Give me five dollar! Give me ten dollar! Friend we share one blood, give me your name and bank account number!’.
He tries to get me to write this information on his arm so that after he recovers from getting drunk, he will know which bank account to put the money he owes me into. (Yeah, right.)
These people are drunk and rude.
I walk out further to the edge of town upon the advice of another more together aborigine chap. Better to be further away from the town and the bars he says.
I get no ride so I look about for a decent bush to sleep under. I find a good spot. There’s barbed wire on the ground but it’s still okay, I find a clear spot in between it.
Dinner today is an incredibly out-of-date and odd-tasting packet of carrot and coriander soup (about three years old from England), seaweed, water and dried bread, followed by a small amount of dried fruit and small piece of dried apple cake.
The cake is from a dumpster in Darwin, the fruit from Leona and the strange soup is from Helen in England, who is about to have her baby.
Under the deeply dark night sky I listen to Indigo Girls (Come on Social), Neil Young (After the Gold Rush) and a bit of Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited). New music to me, just trying it out. It’s what hippy travellers are supposed to listen to isn’t it?
Beautiful full moon, very cloudy. Good stars. Sleep quite well.
Thursday December 14th.
I wake early and pack my gear. I stand on the other side of the road, sit down to hitch and start to shave. It’s 7 am. Very quickly and halfway through my shave I get a ride with a very interesting, friendly and helpful cattle rancher. His family have been cattle ranchers for three generation in Northern Queensland. I guess that’s practically Ozzie aristocracy. He has a Geordie chap working for him. He hates the aborigines (‘abos’). He says the Tasmanians had the right idea when they wiped them all out. Says they should all be strung up (etc etc). He drops me 130 km further on at Cloncurry.
Its so weird when I meet someone I like and get on with… only to find them drive a stake of hatred through the middle of everything.
Cloncurry Northern Queensland. (Hottest place in Australia; 53 C, 125 F.)
Half an hour later, I am picked up by Sean who’s going all the way to Townsville on the Eastern Coast, just south of Cairns. His dad is from London and his mum is from Geordieland. Not racist. Very nice chap. Very handsome and charming; God’s gift to women I imagine. He has lots of unopened Coke-Cola bottles all over the back seat of his car which he invites me to help myself to. He sells industrial pipe fittings. I spend pretty much the whole day with him. We pass through the White Mountain National Park. Quite nice. It’s very good to see hills and mountains again after so much flat (ish) bush.
On Route 66 I’ve seen plenty of dead roos and cows, dried up like grotesquely battered giant leather handbags with legs and heads. Hundreds of eagles scour the road for carrion. I have never seen so many eagles in my life. (Previous eagle sightings: one golden eagle, Scotland.)
As prevalent as flocks of crows back home. I know, they’re called murders, stop being pedantic.
I don’t see any live roos; they hide under trees all day and only come out at night to feed by the roadside. Because of the extra water run-off from the tarmac, the grass is greener here. I guess maybe I’m like a kangaroo, on the road where the grass is greener. As long as I don’t end up as a handbag…
According to the interesting but racist cattle rancher, the grass here is called ‘Buffel Grass’. It was introduced by the Afghans who used to run camel-trains in the mining country to move mineral ore about. The Afghans used to run the camels up from Alice Springs to Darwin, this track then became known as ‘The Ghan’, became the main highway and then a railroad.
This route is about to open as a freight rail track after years of dis-use. The locals have known it all this time as ‘The Ghan’ but the government want to call it ‘The Steve Irwin’ (ridiculous Crocodile Dundee-style nature program presenter). This is clearly a name to serve the tourists and it’s crap (speaking as a backpacking tourist myself). It would be like building a new parliament in Canberra and calling it Rolf Harris Towers.
Aside from all this, I haven’t seen any camels either though they are known to ‘have gone feral’ and have proliferated in parts of the outback.
Buffel grass makes cattle-ranching possible; very little other grass will grow on this ground. It’s nearly all clay that’s been baked to one vast crumbly brick. Spilled water and rain evaporates immediately. So the Aussies have the Afghans to thank for there being a cattle economy at all.
Finally reach the coast.
Townsville reminds me of Southern California.
Sunny. Sea. Lush.
Saturday December 15th.
I ‘sleep’ badly at Townsville, lots of little bitey ants trying to share my sleeping bag and I have one of those mornings where I take ages to pack and get my head together. I get washed in the nearby BP ‘servo’ (service station). Some days, like today, I just can’t be arsed to hitch; feeling tired or anti-social or both. I just get on with it anyway.
I wait for a worker in a baseball cap to finish putting up a road sign in the spot where I want to stand and hitch from. While I am waiting a truck pulls in round the corner and the driver, a chap called Matt, gives me a ride south to Bowen.
He’s from Melbourne and lives in Cairns and drives back and forth picking up fish (today it’s coral trout). He takes back to Cairns where they sell them to Japanese fish-traders for very high prices; The Japs have fished their own to extinction, so now they want everyone else’s stocks.
Matt likes to go swimming with the fish in the holding tanks and actually wishes the fish weren’t going to end up as sushi.
‘Oh well, a jobs a job eh?’ he says ruefully.
At Bowen I hitch next to a curious place where salt is extracted from sea-water and forage myself some lunch from a couple of wild trees: five mangoes (desperately unripe) and six youngish coconuts (blinkin’ delicious!)
Coconuts are very refreshing for the juice and the flesh bit is like jelly and very tasty and filling.
I get a ride with a guy who drives very fast and juggles this with baby care duties at the same time. Alternating between trying to reason with the crying baby on the back seat, and when this doesn’t work, putting him on his lap with a bottle whilst trying to steer.
At Mackay I get picked up by Brett, large and pierced all over. He says he has one request before we go anywhere. ‘What’s that?’ says I, nervously anticipating that he’s going to ask me for a blow job.
‘You have to put up with me listening to loud music’. Phew. thirty-five kilometres of banging techno and country later I get to Serina which is ‘beaut’. (Notice the clever use of the vernacular lingo there.)
Drunken people request I play them country on my guitar. I tell I’m only a beginner and I can’t play a single tune. They lumber off, swearing at me for being a cheapskate and a fraud.
This is a bit baffling but I don’t really mind as I have just scrumped a load of fabulous ripe mangoes from a tree by the town library.
I get a ride in a Jeep into the night with a friendly mine-worker off from work for a day and a half. (It’s his first break in two months.) We stop at a free ‘driver reviver’; a stall in a car park gives tea and biscuits and idle conversation to drivers to keep them going on all these long distances. This wonderful bit of social aid is sponsored by the government and local charities. It’s a kind of cross between the AA roadside breakdown service, the Women’s Institute and possibly the Samaritans.
I sleep ten kilometres short of ‘Rocky’ (Rockhampton). I put up my tent cos it’s raining (successfully this time) and sleep wonderfully. I wake up warm and very wet and not especially willing. It never occurred to me that the reason this tent is silver is to keep the sun out. It’s not in the slightest bit waterproof. How weird is that? It’s an outback tent. Oh.
Bored of the sound of my own head going round.
Apres-New Zealand lifestyle fantasy for today: Go do Scottish Conservation Volunteering. Have Girlfriend, work in the mountains, meet people, have motorbike, trike or van. Have nice cosy woodland dwelling to live in. Possibilities to fine-tune Scots lifestyle later, travel through U.S later. Still easy to contact Don, Glyn, dad, Norfolk, Esther, Sofie, Blah blah blah…
From north of Rocky, I get a ride with a couple doing garage sale bargain hunting; driving aimlessly arounnd the area until they encounter a likely looking front-garden vendor.
They drop me on the edge of town, conveniently deposited so I can purchase a bacon cheese and beef meat pie. The stall-holder asks me if I like it. I underplay it and say ‘Yeah, it’s alright I suppose’ with half a grin. He smiles back with a wave of his arm ‘Yah Go on! Piss off!’ I think I’m getting the hang of Ozzie humour.
I walk up to the nearby roundabout and get picked up briefly by a naturalised Irishman and he puts me back on the Bruce Highway for Brisbane on the junction nearby. This must be the shortest lift I’ve ever had clocking in at about 300 metres.
Boogie in the side of the road to ‘Papua New Guinea’ by Future Sounds of London, played three times over.
I get a ride with a nice young guy who’s a school teacher, twenty-five, and wants advice on travelling cheap. He’s a self-declared ‘free-thinker’ which is a real breath of fresh air. It’s one of the first times that I feel I don’t have to guard what I say. He’s going to the beach; Agnes Waters next to a place called ‘1770’. I’ve never been to a number before;
1770 was originally called Round Hill. In 1970 the village in celebration of the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s second Australian landing there re-enacted the whole event and renamed the village with its now unique and peculiar tag. Presumably the re-eanctment of the landing must have been lots of fun, as they have decided to stage it every year since. I suspect it may involve large quantities of beer.
My new school teacher friend persuades me to actually stop hitching and get away from the road. I spend a lovely afternoon on a rocky/sandy beach. The water is warm but not as warm as the Caribbean (like I care). The next day I slob about some, take some photos, do the usual ‘wonder where I’m going to end up’ thing (this times it’s Scotland again). Pack up and leave.
I get a ride to Bundaberg with a nice couple, then a ride with Rob and Darren, two drunk guys that I like. After unsuccessfully trying to score weed and telling me about various backpacker murders and other traveller disasters in the area, they buy me a beer (laarvely!) and drop me off at Childers.
Sleep the night here. It’s cooler here. Thank you thank you thank you.
Now – To the south!
Monday December 15th
I wake up happy to be in Childers – it looks like Hereford with palm trees. It’s cool, and I am very grateful to the hundreds of ants that are scrambling all over the place for not biting me. They are my friends. Hurrah!
I think I’m spending too much time alone.
Idly I pack up and walk over to the other side of the road and promptly break the head stock on my guitar as I put it down. This is not so much of a disaster as it had been broken previously coming off the plane from Cuba; it just needs re-gluing. I get a ride after an hour with a nice low-level Christian chap with a super swanky padded leather upholstered cab that a British truckie would give his right arm for if it wasn’t such a necessary implement for driving a truck. The driver politely advises me to get cleaned up cos evidently I stink. I’m actually very grateful for this advice – being on the road it’s really easy to lose my sense of just how filthy I’m getting, and what I think of as clean is probably not someone else’s version of clean at all.
He drops me at a servo in Maryborough and I narrowly miss getting severely pissed on by the rain. I have to do some smart moving with the rain now – if I got wet previously it didn’t matter; I’d dry out almost instantly. (Conversely I’d sweat like a pig.) Now I’ll get wet and stay wet for ages. This alters the way I carry me and my stuff and could be a potentially mouldy-smelling soggy nightmare. I use the shower and hand-wash the tatty clothes I’ve been sweating furiously into for the last couple of weeks. The water goes BLACK and it really does stink. Thank you Mr. Nice Driver, I never noticed.
Otherwise, this servo is crap; no-one stops and all I get is a marked increase in would-be jokers giving me the finger and yelling ‘BLEEEUR!’ at me out of their passenger window as they speed past. In eighteen years of hitch-hiking, I still haven’t figured out what this means. Maybe it’s some kind of Neanderthal greeting. They should stop or at least slow down and do it properly, then I might stand a chance of understanding whatever it is that they are trying to convey. Some people are just in too much of a hurry I guess.
After some helpful advice from a friendly driver who stops to tell me to stand in a better place I go and stand about a hundred yards down the road. If the guy is of a mind to be helpful why doesn’t he just give me a ride instead? Sometimes people really do baffle me.
Half an hour later I get a ride with a quietly humbling, very peaceable old bloke who drives me into the town of Maryborough itself and drops me off at what he tells me is ‘A Good Spot’.
Another previously unwritten law of hitching is that old blokes who know ‘A Good Spot’ are probably remembering their army hitching days from when they were young and are forgetting all the extra new roads that have been built since then that render the old roads defunkt. This is the only explanation I can think of for why they always seem to drop me off somewhere really crap.
I walk two kilometres down to the Bruce Highway again, which with sunburned shoulders and back and a rough heavy pack makes me a bit sore.
Finding a suitable spot, I play the waiting game some more. I remove my hot heavy boots to give my feet a breather. Whilst examining my wrinkly toes, shrivelled from wearing newly cleaned wet socks (I thought it would dry them out quicker – it doesn’t work at all), guess who should pick me up but Rob and Darren again. I am very glad to see them. They’ve had a kip (they weren’t drunk as I previously thought, they are just mind-zapped from over-work), and now their brains are now refreshed and working which is good to see. Rob offers me a bowl of SWEETS which is bloody amazing. I’ve had nothing but dried fruit and dried bread and stale instant soup since I left Leona’s. Sweets are FAB. There’s even a chocolate. Wow!
There was a time in Belize when I’d been eating nothing but bush food for two months. One day Chris came home from work and gave us all an extra strong mint each and it was the most amazing taste sensation ever; an everyday thing back home had, in these utterly different surroundings, become a superbly rarefied treat and became the highlight of my week.
At the end of my ride with Rob and Darren they drop me off at another servo and give me enough money to get a burger at McDonalds. I briefly contemplate saving the 5.96 dollars they’ve given me but decide that as it is meant for a meal that’s how I’ll use it. I’ve got enough for a Big Mac, a chocolate milkshake and fries. It’s great. I eat it all as slow as I can. Lots of thank yous to Rob and Darren!
Another ride with two young brothers who are also knackered from long distance driving takes me to the southern side of Brisbane and to a fork in the motorway where I pitch up on the top of an embankment in the company of some very large spiders. Listen to Goon Show ‘The International Christmas Pudding’ on my mp3 player. Sleep.
Australia has a bit of a thing about long distance driving. So many drivers I’ve been picked up by either are tired to the point of a kind of drunken incoherence, are fascinated by fast cars (understandably) or drink tons of coke, coffee or booze.
It’s much slower hitching now it seems; towns are closer together, so people are less likely to be going very far in one go. This suits me fine.
Lots of the Northern Territory and Queensland is unbearably hot and the outback mostly pretty bleak and inhospitable looking. New South Wales is – hey guess what – rather like Old South Wales, except it’s much much much larger and they’ve turned the heating up. Instead of sheep it’s European-style cattle and the occasional stand of bananas in amongst all the other tropical greenery. It’s only when you look closely you see that that it’s gums and bananas and not oak and ash.
Wed December 17th.
Tomorrow I will have been here a month. Today is a very odd day. I get checked out in the morning by a friendly land-owner who comes to see that I am not some runaway kid or something. He mentions the English winning the rugby and grins ‘If I’d a known you was a bloody pom I would a bought me bloody shotgun out!’
The Australian way of saying ‘Nice to meet you’… I love it.
I’m standing in a crap spot with hardly any traffic; one of those nowhere places that doesn’t really justify a motorway junction. I can either go inland to Toowoomba or down the Gold Coast road. I stand at the Toowoomba fork. Most of the cars seem to be going down the other road, so I tell myself I’m going to stand by the road that the next car goes down. It goes down the Gold Coast road; on the way to the world-famous hippy enclave Byron Bay.
Half an hour later an English guy stops. He’s just got off the plane from London and is on his way to surprise his Ozzie girlfriend on her birthday with champagne and strawberries. He requires my services to roll a large spliff, which to my surprise turns out most successfully. ‘I think the dope has lost it’s smell now’. I think it smells very good.
‘I bought it in up my arse’ he adds ‘in cling film, of course’. He’s also bought in about six thousand pounds worth of liquid LSD as well.
‘Did you stick that up your arse too? You must have been clanking about like somebody coming back from an off-license with a carrier bag.’
‘No, that came in disguised as a bottle of after-shave.’
He’s an ex-crustie* ‘made good’; *crustie – very debauched new-age traveller, ruined by ‘Special Brew’ a chemically-constructed ‘beer’ that gets its drinker utterly shit-faced for almost no money, and habitually leaves the drinker covered in unmentionable filth; hence the name ‘crustie’.
No longer covered in shit and dried sick, he comes from Daventry and runs his own window cleaning business. He’s going to Nimbin (hippy central), near Byron Bay and he drops me off at a junction even more useless than the one he picked me up from.
I’m too stoned to give a monkeys about this. I just hang out for a bit here eating far too much of my food stash whilst enjoying the whole sense of just essentially ‘being’ where I am. Then I crash out for a couple of hours. I wander down to the main part of the motorway, which confusingly has a cycle path marked on it instead of a hard shoulder. I figure it must be okay to hitch then. Not that I’m bothered about that particular kind of law, I just don’t want to have to say hello to any coppers in my current state.
My next ride takes me right into the Bay by a guy who lives there. I don’t remember anything about him at all. (There’s a surprise…)
Byron Bay is very nice; lots of English people. It’s not the brash clubby kind of place I thought it was going to be so that’s a bonus. I get drunk and more stoned with some blokes who are curious about my guitar.
I borrow the guitar of one of their number, an aboriginal fella called Andrew who then plays me a few tunes. We meet a confused-looking Canadian from Toronto and chat with him about the joys of Canada. He’s not in the mood though for idle chat. He has broken his collarbone and is pissed off cos it’s ruining his work and fun plan.
Later on I dump my stuff in some bushes where I later sleep and wander round town in search of free food. I watch ‘Wild Marmalade’ a busking trio – two drummers with drum kits and a bloke playing techno bleeps on a didgeridoo. Crap name but very good for a bit of a bop.
Next day: Wednesday December 17th.
Still here, chilling out. Getting stoned got me into ‘Here’-ness and less in my head. Good; I needed that. Now I’m off to see if I can get my gee-tar mended. Strange birds here that look like pigeons with mohicans.
I go to Woolworth’s and get myself some super-glue to mend the headstock on my gee-tar. That works, good-oh.
I try for ages to hitch out of this place. I am really surprised how rubbish it is. It makes me think of all those times in England when all those ‘love and peace’ hippies in their ‘loved-up’-looking VW camper-vans would never ever ever stop and give me a ride. What’s that about?
I get a very short ride about a mile then another with a middle-aged English woman and her Rasta chap. They drop me off at Suffolk Park a couple more miles up the road. At least it’s a real change of scenery. At this point I feel I should write, and it’s been a long long time since the last one; Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooh! The plant life here is wonderful. Lots of blue convovulus type climbers and funky looking climbers. It’s still a bit too bloody hot though. I see a green and yellow snake. Wow! Wildlife! Fab!
Another short lift with a woman and a baby, then another short one with a young chap to a really lovely spot with the road sweeping up into a headland. It’s a cross between coastal West Wales and Cornwall. Ooooooooooh!
(Yeah ok, calm down…)
I quickly get another ride with another woman who is laaaarvely and is into making furniture and did loads of hitching until she got a car. We go to Ballina. She goes home, and I remain on my mission.
Last ride of the day is with a quirky young bloke whose first name I forget but his last name is Sinjun (as in St. John). As I get in I tell him that he has the untidiest car of the day and has won 500 bucks. He is very interesting to talk to, we talk about family history, Ireland, Tassie, logging, the origin of the name Sinjun (from the French pronunciation of St. John), growing food, the Lord of the Rings and we also get a cane of sugar from the side of the road for me to munch on later. He also lives in a tent. Very good.
He drops me 128 km away at Grafton, which is a dirge of concrete in paradise; motels, KFC, and hundreds of lorries. I can’t be arsed to hitch, the sun’s about to go down anyway.
I find a spot by the road to hide my tat, I play geetar to an interested horse until it gets dark then go and hunt for free food. All I manage is a few fries somebody has left at McDonalds and seven reasonable-looking chicken McNuggets in a box found in the top of a dumpster. (Oh and some sweet and sour sauce.)
Slowly eating these, I ponder what human beings do and have done throughout the world in order to survive. I watch the traffic passing through the space in front of me, full of plastic advertising hoardings, direction signs and orange fizzing lamp-posts, people going wherever they are going, why-ever they are going there. I imagine what else must have occupied this cubic mile of space. Forest. Hunters, recent and ancient. Dinosaurs. The sea maybe. All chasing a rolling wheel of life and death.
Wandering back to my stuff feeling mostly fed, I am enjoying all the exotic plants, flowers, bushes and pods here and think of my mum. She would have loved all these exciting plants.
The town redeems itself by being in possession of the only strange sign I have seen in Australia so far. At the edge of town outside a house it reads:
‘For sale: rabbits and dwarf babys’.
I try playing guitar to the horses again, but they are all too freaked-out by me moving around in the dark and the continuous disorientating rumble and roar and clashing glaring headlights of passing lorries. It must be like a bad trip to them. They’re all highly strung.
December 18th. Thursday.
I don’t sleep very well. I get a ride for about three and a half hours to somewhere I don’t remember, then a short ride to Kew with a builder who I somehow knew was going to stop for me. This has happened before occasionally so it isn’t too much of a shock. Another short ride with Wes and F18 and F1-11 his two pet budgies who go everywhere with him; he was discharged from the RAAF on medical grounds and now he goes camping a lot and takes the budgies with him on his shoulder. He also delivers pizza for a living. (I think the birds stay at home for that one probably.)
After Wes, I get picked up by Dave who is from Surfer’s Paradise and driving home to stay at his folks in Forster. He decides to show me the sights of the town which is in a very beautiful setting, the north of ‘The Great Lakes’, an absolutely stunning area with lakes, freshwater fishing, the sea, beaches, sea fishing, hill, pasture-land, mountains and rich tropical forest. We see dolphins, take a lookout from a tower on a hilltop and then go and sit by a lake and drink Tooheys stubbies. Being with this guy is great fun and I feel like I’m feeling more confident about being in Australia now.
I sleep fantastically in bush outside Forster that night.
Next morning I find a dead snake (road-kill), which could become breakfast and possibly a daring pair of shoes if I am feeling adventurous but I’m not and it doesn’t.
I get picked up by three young babbling women fresh out of school and off to spend their hols hanging out on the beach. What a friendly bunch they are.
Another short ride with a gruff guy trying to convince me that I should stay in his hostel. Poor sod’s obviously desperate for custom but it’s wasted on me. He tells me not to steal his groceries when I get my bag out of the back of his car. Cheek.
I wait for ages in the beautiful but hideously named ‘Bungwahl’. It’s wonderfully different from a lot of the places I have seen down the East Coast so far; here there is lots of forest and lakes right down by the sea, a complex mixture that the road manages to wend a wigglesome way through.
Another ride with Dan a musician and ‘ex-hippie’ (like me?) who buys me a beer again. It’s true, people in New South Wales do seem to be noticeably different from Queenslanders; the southerners are noticably more civilised. I put it down to the weather.
From Karuah I get a ride with a young chap from Surfers who has travelled the US, thumped a bus driver, shags a lot, is a lifeguard and is mates with some character off the TV soap ‘Home and Away’. He drops me in Turramurra, a suburb of Sydney.
I bunk the double-decker train into the city and wander down to the opera house, cos that’s the only reason I came here; to do the cheesy tourist thing. I sit by a dockside and do people-watching and eat the crackers that Dan gave me.
I walk around to the Opera House and have a closer look. It really is quite a work of architectural wonder in a crazy lines going everywhere abstract kind of way. I discover it looks better and better the closer I get to it.
This part of Sydney is very chilled out, housey tunes and people partying nearby.
I sleep in the park right next to the Opera House very adequately. (I am later informed that this was a supremely dumb place to sleep rough, but I had no problems.)
Next morning: I have just discovered the herb garden in amongst the rest of Sydney Botanical Gardens which is next to the Opera House. Hoorah! I catch up on two weeks of malnutrition and munch my way through a delicious breakfast salad that I find growing in the flower-beds.
I meet a Brummie couple on a Christmas sea cruise to New Zealand. Nice to meet some homies again.
ADVERT: Situation Vacant for symbiotic relationship with hungry bird or frog. All the flies you can eat. Tiny little peace-destroying bastards.
In Search of the Chocolate Pudding Tree.
A few years ago, a friend of Gill (an ex-girlfriend) was telling us of the existence of the ‘Chocolate Pudding Tree’. A tree which has gourd fruit with a chocolatey goo inside it. This seems quite plausible to me. Sugar comes from plants, cocoa comes from plants. I don’t see any reason why there should not be a plant that has both in them. I asked my friends. They thought I’d been tricked. I asked Kew Gardens. They’d not heard of it, though they do have a chocolate daisy. I asked at Hampton Court Flower Show. They just thought I must be on some stoned hippy munchies fantasy. Then a long time later I mention it to Dawn on the farm in Belize and she confirmed its existence; It’s called a Black Zapote (Diospyros digyna) and is related to the Mama Zapote that they eat in some parts of Central America. Leona says it exists; they have it here in Australia. Now I am about to go into the Sydney Botanical Gardens Tropical Glasshouse. Surely they must be able to come up trumps? (Sound effect of drumroll mingled with me scurrying about in undergrowth)
Doh. No can do, but I do discover a little bit more information about it; it is also sometimes referred to as a Black Persimmon (that’s like a Sharon fruit isn’t it?) or Chocolate Persimmon.
They can get to about the size of a large grapefruit and when properly ripe, have a smooth creamy flesh inside that is the texture of papaya.
So if you’re ever wondering what I’d like for Christmas (apart from my two front teeth); well now you know…
More successfully, I hunt down Harry’s Cafe de Wheels down on the wonderfully named Wooloomooloo Bay, and have beef pie with mash potato on top, then mushy peas pressed into the top of that with the back of the ladle, then onions squished into the top of that, all served up like a savoury version of an ice cream sundae. So impressed I am that I have it twice.
Afterwards I head back to Townhall train station and jump a ride to Liverpool, a half hour ride out of the city to find a decent hitching spot. Some way along the journey four scary looking ticket inspectors come by. Oh shit – no way can I dodge four of them.
An Asian guy asks to see my ticket.
‘Err. I don’t have one’
‘Any special reason why not?’
‘Nope.’
‘You are British? If you show me your passport there is no problem.’
Fumble fumble. He points to a small badge on his uniform. ‘I was fighting for Britain in the Falklands conflict in eighty-three.’
‘You are a Gurkha?!’
‘Yes. Thank you for your passport, everything is okay. Enjoy your stay in Australia!’
Now there’s loyalty to the Brits, even down to an anti-monarchist like me. Maybe with my short hair, huge pack and scabby boots he thinks I’m ex-services or something. Whatever. (A couple of days later when retelling this incident I am to discover that that day, the ticket collectors in Sydney are on strike and are not collecting fares. Whatever their issue is, it seems now that they’d won their argument.)
Many stops later; Liverpool takes a long time to arrive. Lots of Arabic. I walk a long way out and check out a supermarket dumpster. I get two tomatoes, two onions, an avocado, half a melon and a pineapple. I walk on a bit, eating the avocado and the melon. No point putting those in my rucksack, it would automatically all turn into lubricated vegetable squish.
I Walk some more and stick my thumb out. It’s the arse end of the day. I get a ride with a family in a camper van. They drop me at a servo about 100 km down the road. I sleep in the bush, very lovely with lots of birds. I can’t get away from the traffic noise though. I sleep good.
I hitch a ride in the morning with a Ukranian bloke with water in his petrol tank. He’s a bit of a disaster area but he seems harmless. He seems to think everything that goes wrong is possessed by the devil.
He drops me off by the Canberra turn-off on Hume Highway. I eat my lunch of the usual dehydrated nastiness of soup powder and dried bread that I’ve been carrying since Leona’s house.
I get picked up by a seemingly crazy-looking middle-aged woman listening to hip hop and wearing dark sunglasses. She’s Barbara and I like her a lot, she’s ‘a bit of a gypsy’, grows oysters and makes jewellery for a living. She’s into runes and living right. Off to visit her bloke in prison in on traffic offences. She drops me in Canberra, gives me her address and I accidentally leave a load of my stuff in her car.
I decide to go to the National Museum, I walk in through the entrance straight into a dining hall. I go into food mode and eye up the tables for abandoned meals. I score, and sit myself down to a free lunch. Anyone who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch just isn’t trying.
The museum is monumental. It’s a very colourful and rather an in-yer-face architectural explosion. It’s quite avante garde architecturally in a sort-of 1980s big hair and bad trousers kind of way. I think in a place like Canberra with so little history anyway they can get away with it.
I then walk to Parliament Building and then to the war memorial to hopefully see kangaroos (Barbara said they like to hang out here) and then to sleep. I don’t sleep too well, as the wind has picked up.
In the morning I look round the war museum, very interesting. Then I go to the National Gallery which I’m rather impressed by the quality of the art they’ve got. As I am walking out into the sculpture garden I am idly wandering how nice it would be to see a Maillol sculpture, and hey presto there in front of me there one is; ‘La Montagne’ – ‘The Mountain’; a lovely chunky lady in repose. Made in 1937. This is a really nice surprise, this is the first piece of his I’ve ever seen for real.
Canberra is a bit of an oddity, as everyone says it is. It all looks like it fell out of the sky last week in one big lump, like an alien Milton Keynes. (Infamous dodgy English ‘New Town’ experiment which is festooned with concrete cows to make it seem more rural. Possibly the distant sound of town planners going ‘cuckoo’ emanating from loudspeakers carefully hidden in trees would be more effective…)
Anyhow, despite its artificial sheen I somehow manage to like Canberra. Maybe it’s the old tourist-tinted sunglasses at work again. Here for five minutes, admire the superficialities then bugger off. No doubt if I had to live here, then maybe I’d be thinking of doing myself in.
I get directions out of town, pick lots of plum cherries on the way (an orchard is built into the town plan – now that IS impressive), I go shopping and buy a huge kilo of cheese for five bucks and some powdered mash potato and a bar of chocolate and a pizza. Eat pizza, blag pen after failing to find one lying about on the pavement then I get a short ride to the far side of Queenbeyan. Sleep in bush, very kushty.
December 23rd 2003
In the morning I get a ride with Jens from Sweden but who has been in Australia for thirty-three years. Aha! That explains his distinctly northern European looks. He’s just been to Canberra to tell them he has found giant dragonflies on his new property. It seems there are only six known pairs in Australia, so he’s very excited. He used to be in tree genetics until they asked him to do genetic engineering and he religiously told them where they could stick their research.
The flies are TERRIBLE. I get a ride with very nice landfill site manager to Braidwood. Now here’s a man who knows a thing or two about flies I bet.
‘Yes’ he tells me. ‘They are indeed bloody horrible.’
I wait ages for another ride. The flies are still terrible. I have my net over head and I am starting to flail about like a man drowning, which in an unfunny kind of way, I sort of am. Despite looking like a demented bee-keeper, I get a ride with a surfy bloke to Moruya. I hitch with two German and Malaysian students from Canberra to Bumbo Rd.
I get a ride with a young guy called Brad. We stop by the sea at Merimbula for the night, talk lots and seem to get on okay. He loses his credit card so I sub him fifty bucks which he says he can pay me back when we get to Melbourne. We leave next morning and drive about three hours down the coast to the big southern city.
Christmas eve is the weirdest ever. A total lack of any signs of familiarity. No old friends, completely wrong weather. Wrong traditional habits. We spend all day driving round Laverton, Werribee trying to find somebody that Brad knows that might actually be in. We loop round in suburb-shaped circles all day. Very odd. I am getting a little anxious. I remind Brad that maybe he could get my fifty bucks from a bank whilst we are doing all this aimless driving around. When Brad does check out a bank he suddenly realises that they are all closed for Christmas. He’ll do it the day after Boxing Day.
Eventually we arrive at the house of a guy called Alan.
Alan is a bit heavy metal, has long black hair and doesn’t look like he gets much exercise. It’s a messy smokey bachelor pad with all the curtains drawn and a drum kit taking up half the living room. We smoke, drink and talk and afterwards me and Brad leave to go to sleep by the bay-side on the edge of the suburbs.
Next morning is Christmas day and Brad needs to go and arrange Family Duty with his ex and their kids. I spend my time left to my own devices in a launderette washing my skanky clothes properly for the first time in about three weeks. Its very good to be clean. This is my first full day in Melbourne.
Boxing Day.
Brad arranges to see his kids. I go to Melbourne and watch the third Lord of the Rings film ‘The Return of the King’ which is very good. Last year ‘The Two Towers’ was my Boxing Day treat on Vancouver Island.
Afterwards I meet a hammered dulcimer player in the nearby park and I get to have a little tinkle, I like the feel of Melbourne very much. I love the trams, the trees and the diverse peoples and buildings. I wait for Brad to come to Flinders St. station. He doesn’t come, so I head back on the train back towards Alan’s place.
Teenage girls on the train are being crap about their passed out mate next to them. One of them is being loudly racist. I tell her to mind what she says on a train so full of people. I get off the train and I am trying to remember where Alan lives. Being suburbia, the houses all look pretty similar. Eventually I find his house. I get wrecked until Brad gets back. Brad is getting increasingly embroiled in family friction. His ex-missus Steph in is some domestic mess with her man ‘Jay’ and her daughters ‘Talia’ and ‘Ber-jean’.
On Sunday I am left again in a lovely park all day reading the biography of Billy Connolly ‘Bravemouth’ whilst Brad sorts out his life. Brad swears and threatens a lot but is essentially a good bloke.
I’m looking forward to going to Tas; I feel ready for it. Australia is what it is. The country is vast and spectacularly beautiful. Its racial tension palpable and evidence of male chauvinism is the ugly side of an otherwise endearingly matter-of-fact approach to things.
Altona Beach Monday December 28th.
I spent a lot of time on my own yesterday, and notice a distinct quietness in my mind. A total absence of anxiety.
People watching; Eastern Europeans, origin unknown, having presumably escaped from the wrath of some twisted dictator or other. Slav-ish tongues sound like a delicatessen of language. Two African girls. Aussie Aussies in beanies and revealing tops. Big Muslim women in head scarves. Fig trees give birth all over the park to almost-but-not-quite edible fruit.
Picnics and knee-deep forays into the sea. Post Christmas, good natured.
Brad has left me here because Steph has been hit and needs sixteen stitches. He is very upset, wants to kill Jay, but decides dealing with it through the police is wiser. I am impressed by his resolve. He comes back about 7 pm. He has been at Alan’s since 2 pm getting stoned. I feel put out that he has left me hanging around for so long. We go back to Alan’s and they watch some horrendous porn flick. Brad and me sleep out in open parkland.
December 29th Tuesday.
Brad goes to talk with Steph and her family whilst I am left to hang out by Werribee River. It’s a very beautiful spot for a suburb, really. Brad comes back much later at 7 pm. He tells me that Steph’s family have decided to go to Painsville (up the coast) to change the locks on the house. Her parents opinion of Brad has changed dramatically, and they realise actually what a good guy he is after all. They want him around to protect Steph and Steph wants him back. This all gets discussed at Alan’s. There ensues a strange conversation started by Alan about the nature of evil. Alan puts on another revolting porn flick. Afterwards me and Brad leave and park up by Laverton School for the night.
December 30th.
Brad drives me back to riverside spot. Brad is going to say goodbye to the kids just around the corner from where he drops me. He says he will only be an hour, two at the most. I wait by the river, bored out of my wits. When two hours is up, I go to find the house or van where he said he’d be. He’s not there. Brad has all my stuff, even my boots. I strongly suspect that he’s done a runner. I am confused by the fact that he could have done it several times already by now. Weird.
Back at Alans gaff, Alan says he might be back later. He isn’t. Alan is stand-offish, he obviously doesn’t want me to be there. Maybe I’m just not heavy metal enough for him. He seems alarmed at the idea of me sleeping in the garden. I suspect he might be keeping me occupied whilst Brad makes his getaway. When Alan goes to bed, I look in Alan’s wallet to find out his full name. It’s not his wallet, there’s an ID card of some innocent ordinary unknown bloke, who doesn’t look like he might be a friend of either Alan or Brad. no money in the wallet. Suspicious.
Sleepless night on the couch. In the morning I make a reverse charge call to my bank in England and close my account. Alan makes breakfast. I go to the Salvation Army shop in Werribee and get shoes, clothes and food. I go to the cop shop and talk to the duty sergeant. He knows of this Brad fella, says he wouldn’t trust him an inch. He is a sympathetic sort and offers me the address of the house Brad used to live in. He tells me he’s not supposed to, but he can see I am in a bit of a tough situation. I go and check out the house and talk to Dan the current occupant. Hear the truth about Brad; Dan confirms what the policeman has told me. I have this weird mix of feelings of realisation. The inevitable loss of my stuff, of disgust that I’ve been hanging out with conmen and the thought that my whole trip has just been blown sky-high.
I feel disgusted, strangely excited by the drama and spun out from all the adrenalin.
Dan gives me Steph’s address and I go and visit her to piece together what is really happening. She’s not injured. I meet Jay, who is nice friendly guy. I go back to Alan’s. Brad hasn’t returned.
I go to the cop shop 5 pm. Break down after being dealt with by heavy handed young cop (idiot) This copper is unimpressed that I met Brad whilst hitch-hiking. He smarmily points out that its bound to happen doing something so stupid as hitch-hiking.
I flatly tell him that I’ve been hitching for eighteen years and that nearly all the people I have ever met are good kind people… When he asks where I am going to sleep, I think about my usual response, which would be to hunker down on some empty scrap of land out of the way. But then it occurs to me that it is New Years Eve, and some deep down level of resilience determines that I am not going to be beaten; Partying on New Years Eve is better than sleeping in a ditch in the suburbs.
I bunk a ride on the train and I feel a glimmer of hope. I realise that I still have the future! I decide to enjoy the evening and really make the most of it. I have a spark of internal power. I dance my socks off to a great jazzy swing band, chat with a nice South African woman and afterwards go and sleep in the park, not before first coming face to face with a possum staring at me in a tree – I think it is a cat at first. It seems to be very timid and certainly is very cutesy looking. Protected in Australia, highly persecutable in New Zealand, I later find out.
New Years Day.
I form a plan to get my act together.
In the city I realise how thankful I am to meet good people and help others where I can. I am feeling ‘helpful’. I feel very pleased with myself that I can turn this into a good situation; re-affirming my resilience. Chumbawumba song ‘Tub-thumping’ in my head; ‘I get knocked down but I get up again, they’re never gonna bring me down’. It reminds me of ‘Priorities’ a prayer; this is a Christianised version I found… I’ve put it in cos I like it);
‘I asked God to grant me patience. God said no.
Patience is a by-product of tribulations; it isn’t granted, it is earned.
I asked God to give me happiness. God said no. I give you blessings. Happiness is up to you.
I asked God to spare me pain. God said no. Suffering draws you apart from worldly cares and brings you closer to me.
I asked God to make my spirit grow. God said no. You must grow on your own, but I will prune you to make you fruitful.
I asked for all things so that I might enjoy life. God said no. I will give you life so that you may enjoy all things.
I asked God to help me love others, as much as God loves me. God said… Ahh, finally you have the idea.
Stop telling God how big your storm is. Instead tell your storm how big your God is.’
Coff. Where was I? Oh yeah – Karma: All the way across Australia I have been telling people that I don’t have much money. I really ought to take more care with what I put out into the universe. What some would call the law of universal attraction.
It’s lovely for New Years Day to be sunny. Melbourne trams skate between rows of sunlit-dappled plane trees, their branches reach up like cupped hands. Tourists and locals enjoying the holiday, looking at art. The entrance to the National Museum of Art (yes there seems to be two) faced off with an enormous wall of glass thirty foot high and a hundred foot long with water cascading thinly down its face making the whole thing look liquid.
I discover an 18th century painting of Dolbabarn Castle on Llyn Peris next to Llanberis where I once used to live in 1990 in North Wales. I blew the minds of three young Aussies who happen to be looking at it when I tell them I used to live next to where the painting is set and how we and my mates would go and do full moon and magic mushroom looning about in the castle. It was weird to be able to put my finger up to the painting and show them where it all happened. We get on very well until they ask me what I am up to. As soon as I tell my story about being robbed, its as if the shutters have suddenly come down and they don’t want to know me and my story about Wales suddenly seems like an elaborate lie to them, as if really all I ever wanted to do was tap them for money.
The thought had never occurred to me. Baffling and sad.
At the end of the day in the Botanical Gardens I sit and wonder about everything that’s passed over the last few days. I feel like evil is seeping into my reality. I am feeling paranoid. I question how can I deal with this? I realise I’ve had quite a traumatic time, have done tons of talking, walking, stressing and must be extremely tired. I meditate. Take control of my mind. The spot I have found here is surrounded by beautiful bushes and trees. I am next to a tranquil lake with ducks and swans. The gardens get locked in the evening, so I have a feeling of security here. I go to sleep. I feel lots better in the morning.
January 2nd.
I go to the British High Commission at 9 am feeling on an even keel and good about that. When I go in and start to tell them my story, then the emotion kicks in again and I’m crying again. The woman behind the counter brings me a cup of tea and settles me down. Then an official chap called Phil from the north of England talks to me and tells me to deal with just one thing at a time, and after another breakdown and another cup of tea, we agree on a plan of action;
I am to go to Alan’s to check if my stuff has been returned to him, go to Werribee Police Station to file a robbery charge, stop my other bank account and inform WWOOF Australia to be on their guard from Brad and his white van.
Phil tells me to make a deal with Alan – if he gets Brad to get my stuff back I won’t file a report. I am really freaked by the idea of having to go to Alan’s. Phil gives me fifty bucks for food and internet and off I go back to Alan’s.
Alan says ‘Brad just left, he went to drop your stuff at Laverton Police station and then he’s going to see Steph.’
I tell him I don’t believe it. Alan says ‘Who knows what to believe’. Alan is too weird. I reckon he’s working with Brad. I go to Laverton Police station. Stuff not there as I expected. I go to Werribee, cancel bank account (ANZ), go to library and discover I’ve got 230 pounds (500 dollars). No joy at Cash Converters, where I thought I might find my MP3 player.
I go to Werribee police station and as I am being dealt with, a cop tells me a rucksack has been handed into Laverton police station. I’ve been distressed and emotional, my nerves jangling. This feels unbelievable in an emotionally burnt out weird and miraculous believe-it-when-I-see-it kind of way. I tell the woman in the Salvo shop that my rucksack might have been returned. Good feeling. I get to Laverton. There it is. Amazing. Stereo’s there. Passport’s there. Cards are there. Camera’s there. Plane ticket’s there. Now I can get to New Zealand!
No money returned, nor guitar, waterproofs or WWOOF list or Barabra’s address. It looks like he might use these addresses either to try to find me or con other people. I tell the cops this, they help me make a note for Alan to give to Brad. Maybe he can get me the rest of my stuff. D-day is Monday noon. I’m not counting on a result. At least I know I’m safe for New Zealand; anything else is a bonus.
I go back to Melbourne and sit by the Yarra feeling enormous relief and I am wondering what to do next. Lots of children nearby are marvelling at the hundreds of fruit-bats/flying foxes flying across the River Yarra. Possums scrabble about in trees like cat-sized squirrels. Rats take their chances where they can, sliding almost invisibly through islands of shadow. A woman comes and chats and gives me ten dollars and a drink. God Bless Kindness!
I realise I have to contact everyone I know and warn them about Brad. I go and Email everyone possible – he’s seen lots of email addresses. German bloke sitting next to me gives me the remaining half an hour of internet credit he has to me for free as he’s leaving Melbourne tomorrow. Without me even asking him.
January 3rd
I write an email to my cousin Jackie in New Zealand that I am hoping to visit and Barbara the ‘gypsy woman’ I met just before Canberra. Right; that’s everyone’s security dealt with as far as I can go (except WWOOF).
I go and buy wash gloves, go to a disabled toilet, wash my clothes in real soap powder (this seems to work loads better than shampoo) and give myself a damn good scrub all over. Re-check what I need to do. Confirm with Melbourne police station that my remaining 450 dollars is safe. More than enough for one way ticket to New Zealand.
I can relax a bit now.
I go to ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) and see a giant talking interactive head on a screen twenty foot high, a rather nonsensical affair. ‘Erotic’ robot Bjork video and other curiosities. Watch ‘body code’ – eight minutes of mind blowing CGI about DNA. You can see it on the internet at http://www.wehi.edu.au/education/wehi-tv/dna/animator.html
The human body has a hundred trillion cells in it. Only ten trillion are human. (The rest are bacteria.) Each of the body’s ten trillion cells (that’s 10,000,000,000,000) has a string of DNA 1.8 metres long in it. Hang on, let’s work this out. One thousand metres is a kilometre, so…. That’s…. 18,000,000,000 – eighteen billion kilometres of DNA in your body. This is a string twisted into a helix about seven or eight times over. (‘Very curly wurly indeed’ I believe is the technical mathematical name for this form.) Each DNA has the ability to replicate itself and has recipes for 30,000 different body functions and components (proteins and blood bits etc). Sit back and imagine all this is going on inside you right now. Truly truly mind-blowing. Now next time somebody asks you what you do for a living you can tell them.
And then: our DNA is about ninety-five percent the same as a chimpanzee and sixty-three percent the same as a banana. So we have about ten billion kilometres of banana DNA inside us. No wonder we’re all so goofy.
Outside, the National Theatre on the other side of the road is advertising: ‘The St. Petersburg Poppet Theatre’, which makes me think of sweet little Russian actors who all need to be looked after and treated very gently.
After that I try to find Melbourne’s Salvation Army shop but it is very closed when I get there. I go to the library just as it is closing. I walk up to the university, come back, and decide to celebrate the return of most of my stuff with a double cheeseburger fries and chocolate milkshake at Hungry Jacks. I decide to splash out and buy a pen that actually works and find two dollars hiding in the chocolate counter whilst in the process of buying it. I don’t know why but biros seem to be largely incompatible with Australia. Maybe it’s humidity or something. No gravity jokes please.
I go and sit to munch my happy meal, watching hip-hoppers outside the library doing their break-dance moves. Fancy and neat. Cities can be ace. As much as I love the cosiness of the countryside, so do I enjoy the creative energy and human expression that goes on when you get lots of people together. I sit in the park and watch the possums. I want one. I bet they’d make good pets; they seem so tame. Lots of people partying.
I feel a bit lonely. No sooner thought than two Irish guys from near Sligo and then moments later four of their mates all come over and say ‘hello!’
They’ve just met each other through Danny Wallace in Flinders St, promoting his fake cult ‘Join Me’.
They tell me that there’s no money involved and the only thing you have to do is perform random acts of kindness every Friday (www.join-me.co.uk). Just days before leaving England I had seen his book in a newsagent and had flicked through it, so I was already roughly aware of what it was about.
Lots of synchronicity today. That’s definitely a good sign. I go back to my usual spot in the Botanical Gardens and sleep very soundly. This has got to be the classiest rough sleeping I’ve ever done. (In a city it’s called ‘rough-sleeping’, out in the sticks it’s just plain old camping*. The term ‘rough-sleeping’ is just a cultural put-down really. I think that by living in the park and eating at the free food kitchens, anyone could live in Melbourne for as long as they liked on no money. Curious thought that.
(*Since I originally wrote this, the term ‘wild-camping’ has been invented; it feels like my lifestyle has been commodified for the middle-classes, which I find hugely irritating…You can probably pay someone 160 quid for a weekend workshop to learn how how to do it. Grrrrr….)
January 4th.
Very weird clouds; it pisses down with rain. I go and write in the Clematis Pavilion and feed sparrowy things bits of bread. After the rain has eased off enough, I go and take photos in the National Gallery of Frank Geary’s chair and the Sarah Sze book.
New curious artist Tom Friedman (Phaidon Press); I like his sensibility – a packet of spaghetti boiled and then dried and then each piece of spaghetti glued end to end to form a continuous wobbly loop. Every word in the English language all written down on a large sheet of paper on the floor. Random dots almost all linked together by double-ended arrows. I take photos of the Sarah Sze book without the security guard seeing me. They come out blurry. Oh well.
It’s great to find a new artist I like, a bit like a mental Christmas present. Sarah Sze’s work consists of crazy spacious sculptures made of old bits of wire and plastic junk. They look like day-glo city landscapes made by Heath Robinson on acid.
I like Frank Geary’s ‘Wibbly-sided Chair’ made from laminations of criss-crossed corrugated cardboard (gives me an idea for making a tree.
I take photos of people in the museum. The stark angular concrete and chrome make a very contrasting background.
Outside the rain has stopped. I contemplate the worthwhileness of removing coins from the four foot deep cold water fountain outside the museum. Looks like a few other people are peering in, wondering the same thing.
I go to the police station at Flinders St. Station asking where I can get free food. Most unexpectedly, a very nice PC gives me two veggie wraps, a big salad sandwich, an orange, two doughnuts and a bagel. WOW!
My misfortune has led me to some very decent people.
I go awandering and see Nick Nicholas, an English street performer of wondrous prestidigitacity.
Dressed in Victorian top-hat and tails, he gathers his audience, flinging his arms wide open and shouting ‘Come! Ladies and gentlemen! For your delight and delectation, I will perform for you now right before your very eyes marvellous feats of prestidigitation that will make you gasp in wonder and ashonishment!’
What a fab word;
‘Presto’: speedy/nimble – ‘digit’: finger. Hence the word for the sleight of hand that is conjuring. And, I suppose that’s where ‘Hey Presto!’ comes from.
After him, I go walking further and come across many wonderful pavement paintings. Very very inspiring indeed. Maybe I could make money in New Zealand being creative instead of only doing farm work? I’d get to talk to arty people too… that would be cool (instead of just bored male car drivers). http://www.chalkcircle.com.au.
I’d been wondering about this myself in Victoria Vancouver Island last year. After this little bout of excitement, an escapologist.
I wait for the soup van at Flinders St. train station but it doesn’t look like it is coming. I sleep very well in my usual spot.
Walking into the city next morning a jogging body builder trots past. In the last couple of days I’ve been enormously impressed by the effect on me of encountering people doing all kinds of different things that they want to do, being creative, making beauty, showing kindness, having fun and being surrounded by forms that are all part of the through-flow of inspiration; interesting architecture, paintings. Stuff that makes the world worth living in. People tending beautiful gardens, hip hop graffiti.
My new-found extreme circumstances are obliging me to re-evaluate what is actually good in the world.
Now… let’s see if I’m going to get my 600 dollars and my guitar back…
In the Travellers Advice Service whilst typing I hear ‘Wandering Star’ playing on the radio. It reminds me of when my mum used to sing it to me when we sat on the bus going shopping when I was about five. It always used to bring a tear to my eye for years; It’s the first song I ever knew, and I would hear it reverberating through my mum’s belly as I lay with my head across it. I think I’d like it played at my funeral.
In suburban Altona, at the train station a train stops and a drunk bloke gets off it. I ask him for directions to the library and then, whilst he’s telling me, he flops his knob out and goes for a piss in a handily waist-level rubbish bin. This is not quite what I was expecting; passers-by looks disgusted. I cheerfully remark to one particularly incensed commuter that at least there’s thousands of nice respectable people like us to out-number the dodgy ones. At least the fella has made some kind of connection with ‘proper behaviour’, however inadequate. It’s a bit like a young cat investigating a newfangled cat litter tray, standing in it, sniffing it, then climbing back out before doing a big stinky poo on a nice clean carpet.
(Some time later.)
Well my note doesn’t work, so the wonderful PC Broughton goes round to Alan’s ‘in the wee small hours’ to try and manages to get back my waterproofs and my outback hat and nothing else. Brad spun some story about leaving everything outside the cop shop, and how he’s loaned me money… Well he’s been arrested now; there were two previous warrants out on him anyway, so I’ve been part of some kind of justice being done at least, I hope. Cogitate various ideas of retribution, but can’t put up with the idea of him seeking further revenge or something. WWOOF Australia is issuing a warning to its members.
I finish all my diary typing up at the internet cafe and then go and get loads of sandwiches and rolls at Victoria Market from the free food people and have a chat with one of the volunteers: I haven’t had a proper conversation with somebody for a while. I get my money out of the bank, and after quite some indecision, brought a ticket for Tasmania – that’s where I’d originally intended to go, and I don’t want circumstances to spoil it. I don’t know if there is work there or not. It’s a bit of a gamble.
On the way to the ferry I find two fresh wholemeal rolls sitting on top of a bin, and several good oranges that a fruit seller has thrown out; so that’s me sorted for breakfast.
At the departure lounge there are lots of fat old Greeks, waddling about and gabbling loudly, apparently comparing sandwiches and pointing out of the window postulating on the arrival of the ferry and demonstrating that universal middle-aged disregard for dress sense.
I am approached by a bright and smiley chap from Canada. More specifically, he’s from Calgary, which probably makes him an oil man. Actually he’s a globe-trotting geologist, and currently when he’s not flitting about on holidays or doing dare devil extreme sports, hiking or running marathons, he’s scrutinising the rocks of Algeria. He tells me about his family, how they fled from Armenia to Tehran, to Russia to Slovakia and then to Melbourne and then Canada. We sit on the ferry looking out the back window until we run out of conversation.
I wander off out on deck to revive myself after a bad nights sleep in the park. Sea air does its thing, the ships wake passes below in hypnotic swirls. Gulls fly alongside hopeful of fish or tasty vomit morsels (I can only presume).
I get chatting to a Quebecois woman called Annie, at first I can’t work out where she’s from. She’s very lovely, and excitingly has a very similar outlook on life as me; doesn’t want a career, wants to do things with horses, wants to build her own house. Unfortunately she has a boyfriend. Oh well. I spend most of the rest of the journey with her and the two young Germans from Berlin that she’s with. It’s a nice change for me to get to talk to backpackers. Often I feel bored by being places and only meeting backpackers, but every now and again it’s a welcome reality shift to be with other ‘outsiders’.
I scrabble for leftovers to eat and acquire half a plate of cold lasagne (delicious) and rather bizarrely, an entire cucumber, four carrots and an apple. And then I remember the quarantine laws. I try to eat the veg but it all tastes like it’s been marinated in petrol anyway. I bet this is the reason so many meat-eaters think vegetables are inedible. It’s because so many non-organic vegetables ARE inedible.
I ask some Tassies about work opportunities and I’m told there is lots. I tell them I was trying to find out about work in Tas whilst in Melbourne, but no-one there has any idea. ‘No, no-one on the mainland knows anything about us’ I’m told.
I play with some kids for half and hour, and it’s time to get off the ship; I arrange to meet the backpackers off the ship as I am going to get a ride with them.
We miss each other, which I find disheartening. I wander down the road some and sleep under a bush.
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TAZZIE
Next morning Saturday January 10th(?)
I wake up slow and still I haven’t decided whether to head for Launceston where I’m told there is lots of building work, or whether to head down the West Coast. There is spectacular scenery there and I would end up in Hobart. I figure there must be building work down there too, and I’ll still get to see a bit of the island too. It’s said that in Tassie, if the first car doesn’t stop for you the next one will. Let’s see what happens…
Well actually it is the sixth, which is still pretty good going. Melbourne woman driving with her husband, the ex-governor of some tiny South Pacific island. He has a glorious Glasgow accent. Middle-aged, full of life and very lovely people. We drive through the village of Penguin and they drop me at Ulverston.
Twelve cars later, I get a ride with a sparky to Burnie. Plenty of work on the island. Good – good!
Les, a pig farmer. (That explains the ripe smell in his car.) Thick-set and red in the neck and very friendly. He tells me that he would like to travel the world (but instinct tells me he never will). He has a cousin who is the presenter of the Australian version of ‘Sale of the Century’. He tells me that he has a wealth of knowledge on the nutritional value of pigs feet. How useful. I can see him on ‘Mastermind’ now…
I walk up the road. A woman calls out and tells me my bag looks heavy. (It is.) She tells me she can’t give me a ride cos she’s got to take her son to play golf. No I don’t get it either.
Another example of that friendly-but-ultimately-unhelpful thing that hitch-hikers sometimes encounter.
The view from here looks just like South Wales (more so that New South Wales does), I get a ride with Wes, his daughter Rhianna and Ed the Pitbull/Staffy cross who dangerously and ferociously promptly sits on my lap and demands cuddles. (I am happy to oblige.) We drive to Warrimah, Wes reckons there might be work in a hotel here, but first would I like to go back to his place for a cup of tea? Yeah sure. Two cups of tea later, Wes is talking cars to his mate, smoking bongs and I have this overwhelming feeling come over me that this is a huge waste of my time and that I might get stuck here in his sideways reality forever. I tell Wes I really do have to get on, and leave. I go to the hotel.
The manager is very friendly, but there’s no work going on. ‘Maybe I could come back in the Winter?’ Warrimah is an empty place of small wooden shacks perched at the head of a valley. It looks like the last time anything happened here may have been when someone might have done a particularly loud fart in 1942. It’s quiet and the place has a magical eerie lightness in the air, even though it’s grey and misty at the same time, like you get in the Highlands of Scotland. I am therefore drawn to the place in a ‘retire and die’ kind of way.
Pondering the unlikeliness of ever getting a ride out of here. I resign myself to walking the seven kilometres to the main highway. I am examining a Broom bush and its pods, when I hear someone yelling ‘You wanna lift?’ Tootling over to where the sound comes from, a couple in their sixties offer to get me out of here. She has wisely deduced that my interest in the local flora means that I am probably not an axe-murderer (correct of course). I am with Geoff and Lyn, quite unlike the Geoff and Lyn cartoon that appears in the English Sun newspaper; (He rugged and pointless, she even more pointless but with her jubblies flying about all over the place on account of her always being inexplicably naked by the second frame of the cartoon.)
Anyhow. Lyn is a human dynamo and her jubblies most definitely and thankfully restrained under her clothing. She’s on a mission to do everything. So it really is a good job her jubblies are under wraps.
When we stop for a cup of tea she even buys me a sausage roll. I’ve already bought a chocolate ice cream and a large onion, and almost had her convinced when all deadpan and straight-faced I tell that I like to eat ice cream and raw onion together. I tell Geoff that she reminds me a lot of my friend Leona in Darwin who seizes every opportunity she can after living a repressed life with a crap husband.
At the end of the ride, Lyn asks me if she’s too old for me, with a crafty twinkle in her eye and a huge grin. I ask her if she’s into doing things with horses and going to New Zealand. She says yes and before I can think of a clever response she says ‘Only kidding!’ gives me a peck on the cheek and off they go. Doh! Chances fumbled again!
Being on the road with a backpack and being thirty-five can get a little disconcerting sometimes. Pretty much ninety percent of people I meet either are settled and professional or the back packers are teenagers on a gap year to somehow compensate for their eventual careers as bank managers and settling down. Most of the rest are scumbag blokes roughly my own age who can’t afford to stay in the same place lest they get their heads kicked in. These are not people I wish to identify with either especially. When I meet people like Lyn, who are refusing to follow prescribed roads; it satisfies me immensely. My own parents, apart from working their nuts off for a meagre living, spent their free time asleep in front of the TV mostly. I take heart from people past their forties who take the attitude that life goes on and doesn’t stop until they bury you in a hole in the ground. At every turn, life can be savoured and celebrated and new possibilities explored. Lyn has broken her neck twice, but she is still on a mission to shine like a star and perform death-defying acts of adventure; Lyn has handed me a print-out of a speech she gave at her local Women’s Institute back home. Her pride somehow gives me a shiver that runs down my back. The full word-for-word speech giving an account of her middle-age adventures is listed in APPENDIX ONE *IN* LINK at the end of the book…
Bless you Lyn and all your ripples!
Onwards then with my own delicately yawning stroll….
I wave them goodbye and bumble off into a bush for a piss. Very quickly, I hear a car and turning round sharply I instinctively stick my thumb out whilst rapidly retrieving my dignity and a bright blue rally car screeches to a halt for me. ‘I’ll warn you now, don’t talk to me about cars, I won’t understand any of it!’ says I. The driver is twenty-one, clearly slightly hungover and is called Ben. I mentally register this as probably going to be yet another ride with a redneck only capable of talking about how fast his car goes, how crap women are and crappy sub-fascist politics. Thankfully I am utterly utterly wrong. Ben is going all the way to Hobart, and is a very open-hearted chap and easy to talk to. He tells me how he originally left Tas in desperation, went to work in mining in Calgoolrie Western Australia and learned to grow up fast. He says it feels strange to come back to his old mates who still live at home being looked after by their mums and have miserable stoned and unmotivated lives. I tell him how impressed I am by his sense of determination at such a young age.
When we get to Hobart he drops me by a park that will be good to sleep in and says he’ll see if he can find some labouring work for me. What a fine chap.
Next morning. I’m knackered. I stumble down to the town centre. I stop about four times in the half a mile walk I have to make to get there. I can’t be bothered to think. Feel really blank. Re-capping on what I’ve been up to, it suddenly occurs to me I’ve eaten hardly any hot food, slept out every night for a month and had a very crazy time in Melbourne, all without a day off at any point. No wonder I’ve come to a standstill. In that knowledge, I feel better about my day. Feeling the cold quite acutely. I notice that whilst I am wearing my hat and coat, everyone else is just in shirts and tee shirts. I must get some hot food in me!
I sleep fabulously under a tree in the park. I dream I am talking to Billy Connolly on a plane and then that I am witnessing a giant two foot queen ant move her nest. I wake up with ants scurrying all over the place where my head is resting, but no sign of Billy Connolly though.
I bumbled around Hobart half the day, read ‘Lost Continent’ by Bill Bryson and eat endless cheese and Vegemite sandwiches. I found the book on the ferry across and it’s a welcome find. Someone obviously didn’t want it anymore, so it’s been keeping me occupied in my more horizontal moments.
Marmite vs. Vegemite. I am a turncoat. Vegemite is superior. It tastes of something other than just salt. Not so harsh and altogether a more interesting taste. Oh and it doesn’t drip goopily everywhere and run off the end of the knife throwing Jackson Pollock style sticky messy threads, cacking up my trousers like Marmite does. Marmite is dead; Vive la Vegemite.
There’s a lot of very English-looking buildings in Hobart. I’ve been to a few places outside Britain that emphasise their ‘Englishness’. What this often seems to mean is that there’s one or two government-type buildings over a hundred years old. In Victoria British Columbia, the few buildings look Scottish (big stones and round turrets) and there is another one that looks like the architect had been working off the side of a HP sauce bottle for inspiration. Tokenistic Englishness. Hobart on the other hand is a lost major Cornish town. It’s not a ‘seaside’ town (which you’d think it would be, being on the seashore as it is); it doesn’t have houses seemingly made of ice cream like we have back in England, but apart from that, the whole town is ingloriously uneventfully English-looking in the kind of way that Sir John Betjeman would have something to say about; No grand allusions to the Motherland, just a broad range of dull (but satisfying for all that) Victorian town houses, knackered looking ex-warehouses, quiet brick semis, and ordinary small blocks of flats and buildings that were built by your local council in the 1960s. It’s just so ordinary and convincingly English. It’s rather strange that everyone here should happen to be Australian.
I must admit to being slightly disappointed by the lack of difference in the people here. I want there to be more of a sense of stepping back in time or something or of being in another country (apart from Hobart being built by the English). I want there to be a fierce independence from the mainland apart from just referring to it as ‘The North Island’. What a fussy bugger I am. I think it is the result of having visited so many places that something in me is looking for ‘a bigger thrill’.
I phone Ben to see if he’s found me any work; he hasn’t. I figure something has to turn up between now and February 18th (or I’m stuffed – I need enough to pay for my return ticket out of New Zealand).
I walk up to the beginning of the main road south out of Hobart, and after standing in the wrong place for a while, I get helpfully directed to somewhere better and safer some way down the road.
A very few minutes after sticking my thumb out again, I am picked up by someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to Yul Brynner, even up to the slightly wacky eyebrows. He’s not going very far, and is not even certain whether he should be offering me what he thinks is a useless little ride to just down the road. ‘Every little helps’ says I.
I tell him my tale of woe, and why I am going down to Huonville to look for work. He thinks maybe a couple of mates of his might be able to point me in the right direction doing some landscaping work. As I get out of the car a few minutes after getting into it, he offers me the opportunity to come back to his place to clean up and sleep in a bed for a couple of days. He gives me his business card and points out roughly the direction I should head if I decide to take up his offer.
I figure at first that really it would just be a distraction. I watch Rupert drive off down the road, and I sit by the road wondering which option to take. Just as I am thinking that maybe it might be a good idea to go to Rupert’s, here he comes again walking across from the other side of the highway in a very unexpected fashion, having plainly decided to seize the moment and turn round down the road to come and get me again.
So, after a brief chat further, a decision is made, and off we go back to the house of Rupert.
It’s a nice airy arty house with passive solar heating and chickens. (The chickens live outside.) Very tasteful decor. Obviously thoughtful and intelligent people live here. I breathe a sigh of relief. In the next few days, I am going to feel myself relax. A lot.
After a couple of days noshing and sleeping, Rupert lines me up with a job. Great! I really am soooo grateful for my change of fortune. Beyond words. Fantastic. The next day I’m out in Margate (of all places – I am tickled to be in the namesake town of my mad royally-deluded Auntie Gladys, but the extra weird bonus is that next door is the exotic and important-sounding ‘Australian Antarctica Centre’)
I am pulling up brambles round a dam (reservoir). Phillipa, the woman I am working for has bought me muffins for breakfast too. Pulling brambles is hard work. The next day, I am utterly exhausted, which is awkward and embarrassing. I really need the money and really don’t want to seem to be a slacker.
The day after that I start work at Rupert’s house, cleaning and then re-painting his house. It’s starting to dawn on me that I’m somewhat burnt out. One of the days I only work to lunch-time and then sleep right through the rest of the day. Knackered. I take a week to re-paint the house, and after Rupert’s family (Sue, Rhia and Hamish) all head off to South Bruny Island. I am invited along but stay in Rhia’s tent by myself for two days somewhere else up the road. I am feeling a bit rejected and paranoiac.
A really decent sleep, and dreams that make me realise the paranoia is bollocks; and is the product of a very very tired mind. I spend a day and a half totally enjoying this most wonderful spot; reading ‘Milligan’ a biography of Spike, eating lots of food, hibernating and occasionally looking out of the tent and admiring the sublimely beautiful view.
I am pitched at the edge of a calm lake, with a few mostly sleeping black swans on it. On the other shore is a wide sweep of hills and mountains. It is utterly peaceful. I can hear the waves gently lapping, wind in the tall gums behind me, the occasional car and the sound of the sea hissing it’s waves onto the other shore behind; I am on a spit of land that is joining two larger land masses. There are huge dunes here, and king penguins too! (Though I don’t get to see them as that involved the unwanted effort of having to walk somewhere.)
Rupert has done a wonderful job of looking out for work for me, though nothing much has turned up. At least it’s saved me from wasting my time and effort doing the same thing.
I’ve had a wonderful time recuperating, eating fantastically, reading ‘Billy’ (another Billy Connolly biography), watching films on the telly and hanging out with the chickens. I think I’d rather like to come back as a chicken actually.
Friday January 27?
Today I go to STA travel in Hobart up by the university to find out about ticket options. Scarily, it’s turning out to be a very expensive screw by the air companies (again). Why can’t these bastards behave fairly? It’s so stupid that I have to buy return tickets for everywhere I go. It’s causing me lots of stress, so I go out for a walk in the woods afterwards.
It’s the first time (rather stupidly) I’ve actually gone for a walk in woodland that is not by a roadside since leaving Darwin. The rain that we’ve been enduring over the last two days has left a low cloud haze in the air, which has made the woods look especially ethereal.
Tonight we have sausage and mash for tea and lemon curd and ice cream for afters followed by ‘Finding Nemo’ afterwards (and then I write this).
On Sunday afternoon, Rupert drives me on down further south where he passes me over to a chap called Russel who I am to stay with for a few days until Rupert’s new computer turns up for me to put together. In the meantime, there might just possibly be a little bit of yer actual paid employment down here; Rupert hinting that maybe someone has a bit of building work going on.
We meet Russel at somebody’s birthday do at a boathouse in Dover, a small small ‘town’ which is the local version of the sprawling metropolis. The reality of it is that it is a large village by a cute bay (they are all cute round here) and it has a few shops and the all-important post office – the nearest bank is an hours drive away in Huonville. With the expanses of water and all these tall trees round here and the little villages, I get that Scottishy Small-town Canadiany feeling again.
After a bit of a soul-searching conversation with Rupert on the way down here about what life is about and how to feel secure and good about things, I’m not feeling at all like mingling with new folk, so I say hello to Russel and promptly go and sit by the water and twang the guitar that Rupert has loaned me.
When all have finished doing the social rounds, Rupert scoots off to visit a mate and Russel drives me off to what is to be my new home for a few days. The first thing that strikes me about Russel is the strange gizmos on his dashboard. A blue wooden windmill buggy insect thing and a gyrating plastic Elvis hanging from a string suckered onto the windscreen. I’m feeling a bit quiet but we manage to talk fairly freely about the whys and wherefores of bio-diesel. It’s good to have a bit of common ground so immediately.
Russel’s place is beautiful. I’ve seen quite a lot of idyllic homestead/small-holding kinds of set-ups, and this one looks pretty together. Lots of functioning clever alternative technology, home-built shacks, a stone-built house with beautifully crafted wooden furniture. I never thought I’d ever get enthusiastic about a fitted kitchen until I see this one. It looks like it’s straight out of a ‘House and Home’ style mag.
The quiet here is amazing. The kind of quiet that feels thick and warm and inviting. After dinner I retire to my latest bedroom but have to linger outside first for quite a while whilst cleaning my teeth, craning my neck skywards to the stars and the shoosh of the tall tree tops in silhouette, soaking up the vibes.
Rupert and Sue’s place is the ‘eat, sleep, get cleaned up and get some money together’ place.
This one I think is the ‘chill out and get a good perspective’ part of the roller-coaster that I’m trying not to take quite so seriously.
This is the kind of place that reminds me of the kind of lifestyle I feel suited to. This is a Good Thing.
Over the next few days, I am to do a surprising amount of unwinding; me yawning very deeply, seemingly endlessly. The kind of yawning that transports me back into reality bit by bit. I am behaving in a very off-the-ball manner.
The first few days require me to demonstrate my joist placing and floor building talents. My vagueness-filled head and the fact that there’s not one straight edge amongst thirteen beams of wood doesn’t bode well. Russel has asked me whether I know how to do basic carpentry, and I have told him that I do. He has left me with a bag of six inch nails and some beams to join together and when he comes back all I have done is wreck half the nails. It never occurred to me that the beams would be some fantastically tough hardwood the like of which I have never encountered in my life.
Here’s me on the face of things bullshitting about my abilities, and just plain getting things wrong. Rather a lot. My confidence takes a nose-dive to a point where it seems for a few days that I feel like everything I do is going wrong. I catch myself giving myself a hard time and give myself a break instead. Russel doesn’t seem to be too bothered by my actions, though he does get pissed off quite a lot by other things I can’t quite fathom.
We swap music on his swanky computer, he books me a couple of flight tickets; firstly one from Melbourne to Auckland, and then another from Hobart to Melbourne when he points out to me that it’s cheaper and easier than getting the ferry from Devonport. Wow. I’m on my way. Well, assuming I don’t get hit by a bus or break my leg or something. One doesn’t like to assume.
Russel goes into town one day and leaves me to my own devices here. This is a good sign that he now trusts me.
After he goes off, I spend the morning doing the jobs I’ve been set; strimming the orchard and attempting to repair an upright post on the veranda of his little shack. I strim through a clematis and bugger up the joint on the post…
After that I do a big meditation thing and make the most of the quiet vibes here. Lying on the floor indoors for an hour or so, I manage to mend some physical crankinesses. I manage to get rid of a trapped nerve in my shoulder that has being making my left arm feel almost dead since Christmas. My middle finger on my right hand feels less achey and more like it actually belongs to me too. I’m a firm believer that as we take on the mental and physical stresses that accumulate into illness, so too can we release those stresses so that the body can put itself back how it is meant to be.
The week goes on, Russel’s lady friend Karen comes for the weekend and we go off collecting seaweed for the garden beds and the two of them go hunting for abalone. Someone else at the shore-side has the same seaweed notion as us, and he goes into glorious detail about the biochemical ins and outs of seaweed and why it’s good for the garden. The whole event feels to me like the ultimate in the good life. Down by the sea doing proper physical work so you can make your garden healthier. The new guy asks me how I like being down here in Southport. Within earshot of Russel I tell him: Out of all the many lifestyles and environments I have been in over the years, this is probably one of the best. I want Russel to feel proud.
Lugging the full grain sacks of seaweed is a good way to build an appetite. At home again, we spend an hour taking the shells off the abalone and I get to have a go at cleaning them up (taking the guts off and all that). Russel bashes them with a lump of wood to tenderise them.
We have them for supper. They are deeelishush. Russel tells me the Japs buy abalone a hundred dollars a go for them, and here we are in a little wooden shack with almost no mod cons and dim light eating like kings (and queen) a meal potentially worth a thousand dollars. Yum!
Russel is cheered by Karen’s being here and things are easier all round.
The next few days we fell two really dodgy gums that are threatening to fall on the barn and wreck it.
Russel anticipates me using the log-splitter to chomp up a couple of the trunks into a log pile for the winter. I get all super enthusiastic and I think I surprise him by being very keen to do lots. He has only got the use of the log splitter until the end of the week. I reason with him that we might as well make full use of it. We end up sorting out all the available felled trunks that are cluttering up the place. I make a wood stack about three metres by three metres by two metres. I imagine it being set in resin or ice and placed in the middle of a city square and calling it art. I have this knack of taking a potentially dull job and imagining it into something interesting or beautiful. Sometimes you have to for your sanity, but this I enjoy (even though I nearly bugger my back up again..Doh!)
At the end of my ten days with Russel, I think he has been impressed by my genuine willingness to work, despite my cock-ups. He tells me how he gets too many ‘WWOOFers’ that are keen to eat and take time off but don’t know how to do much.
It’s a good farewell at Dover again where he drops me off whilst he goes and gets his weekly provisions.
Getting a lift proves slower than I am expecting. Russel has informed me that people in logging country are not at all keen on ‘greenie’ upstarts; he has experienced this distrust, being one himself. It stemmed from activists making a nuisance of themselves when there had been an old growth forest getting wrecked some years past. Maybe that and the fact that I have a dodgy beard and a bad hat isn’t helping. I am highly superstitious about beards. I never hitch-hike when I have a beard. I am rather beardy now but I don’t have a razor; It shall come off as soon as I get the chance.
Holding my hand across my hairy chin (no not really), I get a ride with a Rhodesian chap who has been in Australia for thirty years. I anticipate a racially slanted conversation, but actually he tells me how he hitch-hiked around Africa at the age of fourteen. (Certainly beardless I suspect.)
In Huonville he stops for petrol and this is the end of my ride. I dive in to the servo to fuel up on chocolate and a ‘National’ meat pie. There’s a freebie can of Coke on offer as a deal with the pie and a two for one offer on the chocolate. Everything is Cadburys round here, what with the factory being in Hobart.
They have types of choc we don’t get back home. ‘Scuse me banging on about chocolate – I’ve been busting for a serious sugar hit for ages.
Quickly I get my next ride with a young woman who has just arrived back home a week ago after hitch-hiking herself round Europe.
Walking back up to Albion Heights where the MacGregor household live (Rupert and Sue and Rhia and Hamish and Ruby the dog), I have a pleasant feeling of familiarity. It’s the closest I get to the feeling of coming home when I’m on the road. I enjoy the feeling of returning to someone who already knows me at least a bit, and that I already know them some.
Here I am to muck about with Rupert’s new computer. I end up with my head up the backside of the said monster almost the entire weekend but somehow manage not to turn into a bad-tempered zombie. Wonders will never cease.
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NEW ZEALAND:
‘I DROWN MY SORROWS WITH FLAN’
February 18th Auckland Airport.
Rupert, in a high state of lergy (which I hope I haven’t caught off him) drives me off to Hobart Airport Tuesday afternoon, and we say our farewells; another person well met. It’s lovely to have been accepted into their family so readily, especially considering their busy circumstances and their own relationship conundrums.
The flight out to the big city of Melbourne is short and sweet (about an hour). The views of the suburbs are quite unexpectedly amazing; the housing estates all laid out in huge grids intermingling with organically winding shapes of the rivers and the more dominant free-ways. It looks very similar to a printed circuit board. It makes me think of the notion that Douglas Adams picked up on in the ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ of the Earth being a supercomputer. I definitely just flew over one of its circuit boards.
A couple of hours waiting at Melbourne Airport. So this is it – I finally am almost there. As long as the plane doesn’t crash.
I sit next to an English ex-pat discussing the relative merits of guzzling coffee to stay awake vs. just taking it as it comes as regards air travelling. This evening’s in-flight entertainment is ‘School of Rock’ which I like a lot. Just the kind of brain filler I am in the mood for.
It’s midnight (or thereabouts) and we arrive to the blinking and flashing semaphore airport darkness of Auckland in its sleepy night robes.
I’m here. Cor! There’s an imaginary welcoming party in my head, shaking me by the hand and congratulating me for finally having reached my Ultimate Destination.
I am slightly anxious about encountering the immigration officers. I pray they don’t want to see any proof of my affluence (I’ve got 250 dollars) and that I get stamped for six months…
That all works out; good! She doesn’t even ask to see my ticket. I could have saved 200 bucks and not bought a return! Oh well.
Then customs. There are signs up everywhere warning you you’ll be locked away forever if you import so much as a Guatamalan banana fart.
Thinking about the dried seaweed in my bag, I declare it. That’s okay, I can keep that. ‘Anything else?’
Thinks a moment. ‘Nope.’
‘Okay, if you could just go through to the X-ray’
A machine X-ray’s my bag. ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh.. Dunno… oh boot polish probably.’
Stiff-looking man in a peaked cap opens my bag.
It’s an onion.
‘Why didn’t you declare this?’
(Sleepily); ‘Oh… I forgot.’
‘You realise you have infringed on the New Zealand Importation of Alien Substances Law and will now have to pay a fine of 200 dollars.’
‘Oh come on, don’t be daft. I forgot. Just take it. You can have it if you want. I don’t mind. You’re not really going to fine me are you?’ I’m incredulous.
‘Sorry, it’s the law.’ He looks indifferent.
It sinks in. No leeway. Soulless little shits.
Welcome to New Zealand, the land of the famously easy-going. I am later to discover that people who wear uniforms here seem to have a propensity to get upset and pedantic by the pettiest of legal infringements. Presumably because they don’t have any proper crime to worry about. (I am later to come dangerously close to being arrested and deported for scrumping about six scabby-looking apples.)
I join a queue whereby two young Liverpudlian women confess to their wanton and malicious intent to destroy the equilibrium of New Zealand with a loaded peach.
A fine of 200 dollars.
The chap in front of me has been caught with a photo of his girlfriend with her kit off. Now the poor sod will be having to explain to her that her raunchy pose will now be cheering up the wall of the customs men’s staff room.
A fine of 200 dollars.
A suitable amount of insolence ensues; just enough and they might bend and change their minds. Too much and they might decide they don’t want a troublemaker like me in their country at all.
I can’t afford too much probing; After this fine and the cost of the ferry to South Island, I shall be left with the exciting sum of Zero Bucks in my pocket. Hurrah! (Not).
After all that, I can’t sleep, I have fourteen days lee-way in which to splash the cash. To pay or not to pay?
If I don’t pay, I’ll get taken to court, and the blurb they hand me tells me I don’t have a leg to stand on and I can’t appeal and win anyway, and I’ll have to pay the court charges as well when I inevitably lose the case.
Over an onion.
As much as I vehemently resent being criminalised because of an onion, the temptation to just not pay the fine is screwed up by the real possibility of it stupidly escalating into me never being allowed into New Zealand again. They have my passport number, and could conceivably nab me on the way out of the country, blacklisting me forever. Maybe.
I try sleeping in the airport, but it has the electro-static atmosphere of being inside a fluorescently-lit vacuum cleaner.
I go outside to some nice bushes and eventually get to sleep by about 5 am.
I wake up (eventually). Right – which way? North I think, to Whangerai.
I get my very first New Zealandish ride with a minister who I think must have been from a Pacific island somewhere originally. He picks up a couple of Japs on the way and drops me off at the Southern Highway in order that I can go north, so he informs me. Very confusing. He ‘high fives’ me three times and advises me not to abuse the kindness of New Zealanders. Not quite sure what compels him to say that.
Maybe I just look like a complete blagger.
Sitting waiting for my next ride I watch people on the other side of the road dropping off the side of a tall structure, sometimes screaming on the way down. Strange how a country can make jumping off of tall things part of it’s national culture. But then again if you consider the alternatives…
Apart from all the other usual tourist stuff, New Zealand has ‘Sheepworld’ which the free tourist guide at the airport declares is;
‘Fascinating and fun for visitors of all ages, whatever the weather! Open every day, phone for daily shows’
… Bring on the dancing sheep says I. (www.sheepworldfarm.co.nz)
Also I notice there is a tourist steam-boat in Auckland called ‘Te Puke’.
See the sights, in the comfort of a boat made of freeze-dried beverage vomit. Hmm.
My next lift is with Matt who is celebrating a good work day by plying me with rum and coke. We talk about the virtues of doing all the things you want to do and thereby not having a mid-life crisis. He’s off mountain-biking with his mates up the coast. I am getting very drunk and happy.
Next ride is with Arie who is Dutch by birth. He carries on the rum and coke theme, and I’m getting quite sozzled.
It’s a beautiful area of undulating countryside. It’s pleasantly warm but not as hot as Oz. The plant life and trees are lusher and greener, like somewhere familiarly English but more exotic.
He takes me loads further than he needs to which is very decent of him indeed. I flake out on the grass admiring the view of part of the largest harbour in the Southern Hemisphere, Ninety Mile Beach.
How does a beach fifty-five miles long get to be called Ninety Mile Beach? Was it named by a man with wonky glasses? Or by a terminally bragging fisherman? Or by a chap whose willy wasn’t as big as he would like to have you believe?
The theory goes that to ride a horse across the beach would take you three days, and as a genral rule of thumb, a horse could travel roughly thirty miles a day. Hence the name. What hadn’t been taken into account though is that a horse can’t travel thirty miles a day on sand. Have you ever tried walking long distance on sand? It’s an exhausting slow-motion knock-kneed trudge.
After dinner (a tin of tuna donated by Matt) I thumb some more, get a ride with Jerry who’s on an 8 pm curfew imposed by the police and tells me ‘from one white guy to another white guy’ to watch out for the Maoris.
Another ride with an English couple and I sleep the night in a nice quiet spot not too far from the sea.
February 19th.
I sleep soundly and dream I am happily in Norwich, it is so vivid I am surprised when I wake up and find I really am in New Zealand.
I hitch with a Maori guy (Markus MacGregor) who is an engineer in the process of moving a house; not moving the contents – he’s moving the actual building. It’s a big sprawling wooden bungalow that looks like it has been chain-sawed down the middle. When I enquire, it so happens that this is exactly what they have down, loading and moving one half at a time.
I tell him that I had just being staying with another MacGregor in Tasmania; he was a white fella though. Pondering out loud how they might possibly be related I think I have managed my first New Zealand foot-in-mouth incident.
We go past Hundertwasser’s Famous Toilets in Kawakawa which is a nice surprise (more about him later). I don’t stop to look at them, but I will on the way back down.
My next ride is with a nice South African woman who flashes me an unattractive go-thither thigh and more-or-less propositions me on the spot to a long term relationship…
That doesn’t go anywhere on the count that I don’t fancy her and it is all a bit sudden. Well the offer is nice I suppose.
Why is it only ugly mad women and gay men want to have sex with me?
A lady in her sixties and her pet dog give me a ride and she offers me a place to stay in her hostel. (I can’t – I’ve no spare cash.) She drops me off where I pick lots of yummy grapes from a hedge by the road for free.
I get another ride with a guy who takes tourists fishing out at sea for a living (although he says it’s hard to make money). I try hitching the last little bit of road up to the Cape, but the place is empty. I stop, get hassled by flies and start heading back south again.
A mini-lift of half a mile, some camping advice from a bloke from Leeds, and I head off walking along some dunes as the sun goes down. A quiet spot by the road, lush thick grass (something Australia doesn’t have) and I watch seven bush hens find a roost for the night, which is entertaining to watch:
Of the seven, it becomes apparent what each hen’s role is within the group. There’s a distinct leader; the one who is going off and scouting out a good roost, then there’s another that fancies himself as the leader, but the rest are ignoring him, then the rest show various degrees of interest in following the real leader, pecking at nothing or going in completely the wrong direction. Eventually they sort themselves out with a nice tree with a couple of long-enough horizontal-ish branches to cling to for the night, up out of reach of whatever it is that they think might get them at ground level. Their whole rambling manoeuvre takes about twenty minutes and they manage it just as it gets to twilight.
There you are. The basics of human society in a nutshell. Or on a stick maybe.
As it gets dark I listen to plinky Pat Metheny jazz on my mp3 machine whilst lying back in just my sleeping bag and admiring the serenity of the Milky Way. Out here, there is no light pollution and the clarity of the stars is utterly stunning and mesmerising. What a way to end a day. Aah! Bliss!
Several hours later a ferocious gale kicks up and hammers down with horrible hard rain. I try to rig up my flysheet by putting it over a metal farm gate to make a rough instant bivvy and I fail. Underneath the sodden sheet, which is shrink wrapping itself round me in the wind and flapping wildly, everything is getting wet; I’m getting wet. I yell at the weather in frustration to leave me be long enough to allow me to pack my stuff away. At least I get my frustration out of my system. I gather my wits to figure out how to survive the rest of the night. I decide to hastily stuff my wet things into my bags and head back half a mile to where I thought I had seen a shed in a field. I walk back up in the rain. Maybe it’s full of bulls. (The field had been full of them earlier.) Maybe It’s full of junk or cow-pats or something. It isn’t. It’s dry and habitable, although I can’t see a darned thing as I don’t have a torch.
In the morning, there is a glorious view of rolling hillside and distant low mountains. It reminds me of being in Sutherland in Scotland. The wind is still fierce, but dry this time and it’s doing a very good job of pinning all my wet things to a fence whilst drying them out at the same time.
After a breakfast of hedgerow grapes and good scenery, it’s soon time to pack and head back down southwards to go see Mr. Hundertwasser’s famous toilets.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been caught like this by the rain and got myself soaked. It’s the kind of thing that can run me down quickly and make me ill (through heat loss); I’m not in Australia now! I’ve been baptised into New Zealand I suppose.
The sky is brilliant, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing. A lone tree roars in the otherwise empty field I’m recuperating in. A pair of Paradise ducks fly off, squawking. I’m alive! I’ve got bean sprouts to eat and I’ve got a Julian Cope tune in my head (‘Ain’t no getting round getting round’).
I have a lovely day; I get a ride with a chap who worked with Mr. Hundertwasser building the toilets in Kawakawa, hitch with a lovely Swiss woman, two Americans from Connecticut (one of them very grumpy, wax lyrical over Newfoundland with the driver, then get to see Hundertwasser’s toilets.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist whose radical and pioneering vision of environmental ideas fused into painting and architecture; he was Jewish but avoided persecution during the 1930s by posing as a Christian and to remain inconspicuous he joined the Hitler Youth. His name means Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water, though sometimes he has called himself Regentag (Rainy Day) and Dunkelbunt (Darkly Multicoloured); he was something of an original hippie, before the hippies had been thought of.
It’s nice to see his creations for real. I take a photo of my rucksack next to one of his crazy mosaic walls just to prove that I was here. For me it’s almost like being an autograph hunter or something.
Feeling very satisfied, I eat dinner, then hitch with a Kiwi/Californian woman and her young daughter, then with a young giggling Maori couple to Koikohe.
Then last random taxi of the day, I get a ride with a guy called Alec who takes me to his house, and fills me with food, beer and conversation for the next three days. Alec is a retired fisherman who recognises in me something of a kindred spirit. Staying at his house is lovely. It’s very rejuvenating to be made to feel so welcome. He is an old fella who happily recalls stories of his earlier years. Hearing of my almost penniless plight, he determines to fill me with regular doses of fried bacon sandwiches and beer. I get to heal my dodgy foot a bit more. Generally feeling very good about life and I seem to have a cheesy grin plastered across my face a lot of the time.
Enjoying my time now in the sunshine, meeting lovely people, finally ‘living my dream’ I am able to get some perspective on some of the dramas I’d got tangled in and capitalise on them as traveller’s stories to tell.
Alec is keen to commend me for my perceptiveness. Hmm…When things are bad, be hopeful. When things are good, don’t be complacent.
I send lots of emails, saying I’ve arrived and phone my niece Jackie telling her I’m on my way.
Alec drops me off at the junction to the main road south, and we say our farewells. As I am getting out I find a marble half in the mud.
‘Hey Alec, how you doing for marbles?’
‘Well, I think I lost them a few years back’
‘Here you go, maybe this will help’ and I give it to him as a lucky memento. I wave him a fond farewell as he disappears down the road in his battered old red car.
I get a ride with an elderly couple going six miles down the road and then with a young farming lad who is keen not to get picked up by the police, on account of him being incredibly stoned I have to presume.
We reach a small coastal village. I idle by the harbour, eat lunch and mentally untangle a bit, reflecting on what a decent fella Alec is.
Walking on, I chat briefly to two young Maori women; something about the fine weather probably, walk up out of the harbour village and get a ride with two teachers. Another ride south with a Dutch couple takes me to the Visitors Centre of the Waipoua Forest.
Looking around here. I am down to my last bits of food. An interesting situation bearing in mind my inability to buy food. Hmm.
I hitch a ride with Ian MacDonald, a Kiwi, and we enthuse about Scotland; it brings a tear to my eye. On the subject of ‘living out your dreams’ he tells me he’s going to build a boat and sail to the place of his roots in the Scottish Highlands with his family. I tell him that blokes love procrastinating over their fantasies and that boats have a nasty habit of never getting completed and he should just go directly to Scotland and then build the boat afterwards. I insist this is what he should do in fact; and I’m not generally one for insisting.
I sleep the night under Te Matua Ngahere (Father of the Forest) the second largest Kauri tree in New Zealand; It’s 5.6 metres wide and somewhere between 2000 to 4000 years old and is under the sacred protection of the Maori.
It rains, and I narrowly avoid getting wet – I sleep in my waterproofs. (You try it, it’s horrible!)
In the morning I am warmly greeted with the company of a yummy German woman. Unfortunately she has some dumbarse bloke dragging along not far behind.
Recovering from a night of mild stickiness, I walk round the forest a bit more and get some air to my knees, and then start hitching again.
I get a ride with a young guy from Cardiff (Wales) who looks a bit like Kurt Cobain, and his two female Swedish friends from Arvika (who thankfully don’t look like the rest of Nirvarna).
He’s about to leave New Zealand and is planning on just getting another ticket back out here as soon as he gets back to Wales. I have to break the bad news to him that he has to spend as much time out of the country as he has spent in it. I feel really sorry for him cos it’s probably completely wrecked his plans.
We stop off at Dargaville where they visit the front entrance of Woolworth’s and I successfully hit the skips (dumpsters) round the back. Lots of yoghurt, bacon and egg flan. There; that’s me in food for a few days.
When the others get back to the car, one of them says
‘Hey, I thought you weren’t going to do any shopping?’
‘I didn’t! I went to the skips round the back of the supermarket.’
‘What! You mean you got all that food for FREE?! Didn’t anybody stop you?! Shit! I just spent forty bucks on food! I’m gonna do what you just did next time.’
These are good people to travel with, nice straight-forward types, but a lot of the journey back down to Auckland is drowned out by loud terrible noise alleging to be music, and on this count, is not my favourite ride of the trip. There’s nothing worse than having to shout over dreadful ‘music’ in order to try and have a conversation. I give up. I drown my sorrows with flan.
Auckland is the ‘largest city in the world’; large only in the sense that it is a sparse population thinly spread over a huge fifty mile-wide area. Actually the city centre itself looks tiny.
But let us let the Kiwis have their dream. They need all the bigness they can get, bless ’em.
I walk for a couple of minutes out of the centre to the motorway and get a ride to Manukua near the airport with a Maori guy who has just come back from a Tangi (funeral) in the north. He has just lost somebody quite dear to him; the Maori’s are more family oriented that most pakeha (incomers) but he is happy to tell me about it.
The sun’s going down, I give up hitching and rig my tent up in a grassy field between two quiet-looking housing estates.
A short walk in the morning, and I’m back on the motorway ramp: The same one I was on almost exactly a week ago, except this time I’m heading the other way. I eventually get a ride with a very laid back (sleepy) chap who’s just been to visit his Canadian girlfriend halfway between here and there; in Hawaii.
He’s not very hopeful about the future of it all as she wants to stay in Canada and he wants to stay in New Zealand.
At a corner of lush grass where the road forks left and right, before deciding on a choice of direction I feast some more on a lunch of the goodies I skipped at Woolworth’s. It’s like an English summer’s day. I could either go to Coromandel, a popular tourist destination with hot springs on the beach or I could go to ‘Thames’, which I see on the sign-post in front of me.
A car screeches to a halt. Lunch ends abruptly and in I jump. The driver decides he’s going to ‘pick my brains’ on good travel advice to Europe, but continually dreams up question after question before I get a chance to answer any of them. He gets very nitty-gritty about the fine details of my tent pole without hearing my super-interesting insights about said object. This bloke is either on speed or just a bit crazy.
We stop and meet his mate a little way on. They are off to do some dodgy deal I can’t quite figure out. I spot someone’s calling card under the accelerator pedal: So-and-So Well-Being and Mental Health Care. This guy’s mate implores him to let him do all the talking when they are about to get to where they are going. They don’t want to have their cars taken from them, cos they are not theirs anyway.
I don’t know what any of this is really about, but following an obvious instinct, I make my excuses and get out of the car and then leave them to it. Whatever it is.
A water stop up at a Caltex servo run by an English Home Counties chap, then I get a ride with a camp Maori called Ray. Ray is I think possibly the most interesting ride I’ve ever had in all my eighteen years.
He is the third youngest out of fourteen; his mum is Pakeha (incomer/white person), his dad comes from a family of twenty siblings, and his grandfather has twenty-six brothers and sisters. He has 154 first cousins and they are a close happy family. I tell him he should be on the telly, and he tells me that they already were two years ago.
Christmas and birthdays are mad. He tells me twins never survive in his family so when one of his brothers announced his wife was three months gone with twins, the family all came together for two days of prayers. When the twins were born healthy there was partying and three van loads of gifts and toys to deal with.
His partner is an estate agent from Melbourne, which is very handy as they they are currently looking for a bigger house to move into as they have just adopted their son. They had had some heart-ache over whether to live here or in Melbourne, but finally, as his partner’s Greek family don’t approve of his sexuality he is not close to them, and Ray’s family are very supportive the obvious choice seems to be to settle here. And anyway, Ray is a country boy at heart.
We pass a town with a giant concrete cow, which causes me to comment about my idea for a book about places with naff giant statues that celebrate whatever the locality is known for (however misguidedly); giant tipis, fruit and veg, animals etc. Proper rural kitsch. I am put in mind again of the fabulously named ‘Dildo’ in Newfoundland.
This then leads me to my other idea about making a book and tribute album/video of Elvis impersonators around the world. I’ve always been taken by the idea of person bearing little or no resemblance to Elvis and/or having little or no talent getting up on stage wearing the standard uniform; the wig, the stick-on sideburns, the sunglasses, the rhinestone suit. Then of course the mannerisms; the clicking fingers and wobbly legs, going ‘uh-huh!’ and looking like they are snogging a window.
When Ray susses that I’m cool about his sexuality he tells me all about his other life as an international drag artist. He hosted a Playboy erotica festival in Auckland, and has won Miss Drag New Zealand several times and Miss Pan-Pacific Islands drag contests. (There, you didn’t know such a thing existed did you?) His/her biggest success was winning Miss Drag San Francisco 2001, which won him/her a six month touring contract round California and also in Las Vegas. He has done lots of charity events and has been photographed with the last three New Zealand prime ministers, but his ultimate accolade was to have met Shirley Bassey (he was dressed as her, but twenty years younger).
He shows me some recent photos. He definitely has a head start; he’s got great legs.
We drive through Mekameka, which is where Peter Jackson put Hobbiton. I want to go and see it, but am later told that all you get to see is some dumpy little hills and some concrete holes where the houses used to be. It all sounds miserably like going to look at giant dental treatment and I’m glad I haven’t wasted thirty-eight bucks on that.
Ray drops me in Rotorua, his home town. I get out of the the car with him and we both head into a shop. Sniffing around inside suspiciously, I stand in front of the check out and raise a take-heed finger. My eyes narrow. ‘I can smell burning. Can you smell burning?’
The check-out looks at me like I’m an idiot, and then I realise my mistake. Of course i can smell burning. I’m in Rotorua you dumbhead. I skulk out, suddenly invisible.
Rays laughing, a good way to say goodbye, and I go and look at some conveniently-placed boiling mud on the other side of the road. Whilst looking at the boiling mud, a young blonde woman with dreads catches my eye and we sit on the grass talking. She (and her mum) are from Bristol, her mum is, bizarrely, an associate director of the Newbury Weekly News, the Tory bilge newspaper of my home town. She does singing workshops at a funky world music festival in my other home town of Reading called WOMAD, which is a much redeeming hobby. We all go off in Amy’s van and look round Rotorua for a bit. We check out a Marae (What amounts to being the Maori equivalent of a village hall) and I talk to a Maori chap about rugby and fishing quotas. Amy tells me about the Treaty of Whatangei and how it ripped off the Maoris (oh, doesn’t that make a change?)
I think Amy and me fancy each other but it is complicated by her mother’s presence and also that Amy’s about to disappear to Australia and I’ve only just got here. We falter at saying goodbye, she gives me a hug and I tell her she’s quite the most lovely person I have met in ages and I promptly walk off down the road as she and her mum go and book into a hostel.
I spend most of the rest of the day in a predictable turmoil, wondering what category of idiot I fall into. Several possibly.
The town of Rotarua is built right on top of the boiling mud it is famed for. Not a very smart move if you ask me, but there’s no accounting for taste. I go and distract myself from my own descending gloom by investigating the steaming pools and weirdly boiling goop. Looking really closely at the fine details, it is one of those micro-landscapes that has all kinds of peculiar miniature features that look like The Grand Canyon in Tiny-vision crossed with the surface of some unknown alien planet. I look for a suitable stream of hot water to wash in and almost scald myself in the process. After a couple of skin-reddening attempts I find a spot where two streams of water are merging; one boiling hot and the other cooler. Hey presto, and the temperature is just right, and I am able to clean myself up a bit and wash my socks of their sticky accumulation of sweat, dead skin and toe jam.
I expect I now merely smell like bad eggs but its probably an improvement.
I end this most remarkable of days feeling confused and a bit miserable watching more flubbering mud and trying to cook my skipped bacon by laying it on a crust of very hot mud but after staring glumly at it for ten minutes I can see that nothing is happening to it. I end up resorting to the normal method and do it over an open-fire so that I can have lunch for tomorrow.
I lay my sleeping bag out on the crust of the boiling mud. The night air is cold. It’s a peculiar sensation to feel that my upper side is rather cold whilst my back is practically sweating with the heat underneath me. Sleeping out on this ultimately isn’t going to work so I move off the crusted mud and sleep nearby on cooler ground.
I am looking up mostly at stars in blackness. From the corner of my eye I can see orange sodium lights and hear cars going past off on night-time social missions.
I sleep near flubbering mud, trying not to feel lonely and failing.
I guess at some point the travel thing might end when I either balls it up financially (Hey I already did that! Twice!) or meet a woman I like who wants to do something sideways from me. In a way, meeting Amy briefly reminds me that my fantasies are of limited use if I want to function emotionally in the real world. It seems like my ‘ideal future’ not only refuses to land in one set idea, but seems like it’s also a manifestation of control freakery.
Another travel book idea: The history of American place names. A journey through the making of modern America and what inspired people to name places as they did.
February 26th.
I am now attempting to hitch to Wai-o-tapu (having a job getting the hang of Maori place names).
I get a ride with a farmer who reckons there’s loads of milking work around. He drops me off, I walk about one kilometre to another mud pool.
What a peculiar sight. Lots more farting splopping mud. Mother Earth has had too much curry for tea last night by the looks of it.
Further down the road I find loads of blackberries. Seems I’ve been eating mostly bacon and blueberries the last few days. This almost feels like a balanced diet. I’ve thrown in quite a few red clover heads and dandelion leaves too. Fresh young red clover heads have got loads of valuable minerals and nutrients. Someone once told me that eating one a day should keep you topped up in that department. I like to eat a whole load, just to make sure.
Whilst on the way to find the multi-coloured Wai-o-tapu sulphur pools I find not far from the place itself a well-worn track through some woods which I imagine might lead me there for free. (It’s an extortionate eighteen dollars to get in.)
I follow this mysterious and faintly Tolkeinesque-looking path (I’m sorry, I did just write that) until I reach a narrow stream. I cross it, carry on down the track and get lost. I then turn back and return to try following the stream. At first it is shallow with a gravel bed, but soon I am up to my knees in warm oozing volcanic goop and abandon the idea as unfeasable.
I return to the part of the stream I first encountered in order to clean the mud off my legs, where it is not oozing mucky splodge.
There I happily find that the water is just the right temperature for taking a bath.
I’m really not very likely to get a chance like this again, so I strip off and lie down in it. It’s amazing! This place looks fairly undiscovered, and I’m happy to leave it that way and not tell anyone where it is. I’m really surprised how ordinary this stream looks – no steam (not that hot) and ordinary plant-life on the banks, so it’s a real hidden treasure.
After a while I make my way back to the main road and head towards the visitors centre where I hide my pack in the bush, and try to get in for free. Following a ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ sign (A-ha! This must be the way!) I make my way in, down to a tricky-to-cross river. After dodging boiling sulphur ponds and crossing over, I struggle through dense bushes and a dodgy looking maze of precipices over-hanging deep steaming sulphur holes. All in full view of anyone in the visitors centre. I’ve screwed up big time. As soon as I reach the trail for members of the paying public, a warden yells at me to stop, and I get thrown out (having seen not very much at all).
The warden is scowling and says he’ll call the police if he ever sees me again, and his mate is smiley and drives me up to the main road going to Taupo.
I’m very apologetic. I used to do conservation volunteering, and I realise how crap it is for people to go wondering about on protected sites. That and the real possibility that I could have just disappeared into the gates of Hell.
The warden’s mate wishes me better luck with my travels and drops me off. I try feeling bad about what I’ve just done but it just makes me laugh. It dawns on me how monumentally stupid I have just been and upon reflection, I’m bloody lucky that I’m still in one piece, and actually still here at all.
I fancy walking down the highway, it looking quite like scenery from The Film That Shall Not Be Mentioned (cos it probably is). The landscape here looks like ancient craters turned into very steep-sided and odd-looking lumpy hills; like nowhere I have ever seen before. It must be great fun to ride an ATV on but a bugger to actually farm on, but it’s very unusual and beautiful terrain.
My last ride of the day is from a trainee beauty therapist who looks about fourteen. She’s driving a very flash black sports car which she says is hers (and I’ve no real reason to disbelieve her).
She drops me a little way later at Reporoa which is a very chilled quiet little nowhere place. After finding no free food there and watching a cat eat semi-mashed fish and chips that is lying abandoned on the pavement, I walk out and sleep on a verdant verge, all nice and flat and spongy and cosy.
Watching the sun going down, it reminds me of Gloucester if I look one way and where I grew up in Berkshire if I look the other way.
It rains in the night, but I sleep well.
I keep seeing Kiwi ‘Adventure Explorer’ type buses all over the place. Is it just me being a cantankerous old git, or am I right to be dismayed by the sight of them? In a world where predominantly white westerners are becoming molly-coddled and numbed by convenience, even the idea of the noble art and experience of travel is being turned into an old age pensioners grockle tour for students.
Where you ‘do’ a country even though true to advertising lies it says ‘experience’ on the packet.
These buses are like laxatives, slipping people like turds through the guts of a place, minimum of contact, minimum of trouble, minimum of time. The only people you’ll meet are other Europeans. I guess that’s alright if that’s where you’re at. It gives me the heeby-jeebys, especially with so little hitch-hiking going on in the world. There’s too much paranoia in the world and not enough interaction and discovery.
Will any of these kids even get to meet any real life ordinary Maoris to talk to, or will they just have them paid to dance for them at some awful contrived motel spectacular? (‘Dance-for-a-dollar’ the Maoris call it.)
I’m probably just envious of the fact that they all have nice warm beds to go to and are probably getting in lots of drinking and shagging.
I once casually picked up what looked like a home-shopping catalogue in someone’s house whilst I was in England, and literally dropped it in horror when I realised what I was actually looking at was a catalogue full of ‘meet the cute natives’ holidays. Go and hang with the Maasai. Watch them do a war dance and then take their photos. Go and meet tribes-people from the Amazonian Basin. Chew coca leaf. Join in a sacred ritual that is their life to them and mere entertainment to you. Take their photos.
I once came across the notion which stated that many Native Americans felt that the camera would steal their souls should they allow their picture to be taken.
Anyway, bile over, on with the day…
My first ride of the day is with a friendly Maori couple on their way to a Tangi (feast).
They drop me in Taupo where I dutifully send off 200 bucks to the Ministry of Agriculture, Sheep and Tourist Fleecing. I then go and pay the local Woolworth’s skips a visit and get myself some more free food: bread rolls, cottage cheese, some very tasty hummus, pumpkin soup in a tub, fresh egg lasagne (also tasty) and a couple of onions.
I later get my photo taken by people on some team challenge kind of thing and they want me to pretend to ask them for directions, and so I dutifully point somewhere random to create visual effect in their photo. They have ten things to do in one hour and I am holding them up slightly as I can’t take them seriously. I am pointing up somebody’s nose and laughing and ruining the picture. (Only briefly though.)
Actually I really do want directions, so they tell me the way to Hastings, which fortunately doesn’t involve travelling via anyone’s nostrils.
I sit by the lake and make a splendid salady lunch and then meet the ‘Evil Eddie’ drag racing crew who pull in for lunch too. From drag queen to drag racing. I am watching them; a whole family in the heavy-rock mould, a bit like ‘The Osbournes’ on wheels. One guy wearing a lurid black tee shirt with a luminous green skeleton design on it sees me looking at him and says ‘What are you doing here?’ in a pseudo-menacing way.
‘Oh, I’m just having lunch. What are you doing?’
‘Anything I damn well please.’
Which we then follow with quite a pleasant little chat about the whys and wherefores of drag racing in New Zealand and how he has a pommie mate called Shamrock (which I point out doesn’t make sense cos if he’s called Shamrock then he must be Irish). Anyway…
They bugger off for lunchtime drinkies, and I head off out of town and then get a lift to Napier, where I then abandon hitching for the day. I have come a reasonable distance and the sky seems to be darkening towards early evening and maybe rain. I pitch my tent some way up away from the main drag on a nice quiet estuary with herons and water birds for company. I get rather damp in the night, but not drastically so. I need to get some silicone sealant for this tent; The tent came from Darwin and is designed for the outback. It is silver to keep off the sun. It doesn’t really know what to do about rain.
Slow hitching again in the morning, and a ride with a couple who enthusiastically share with me a mutual abhorrence of Hugh Grant and Mr. Bean.
I has pissed me off enormously that a number of non-Brits I have met seem to have this idea that the afore-mentioned two represent between them some kind of average Englishman. AAARRGGHHH!!!! For Heaven’s Sake!
At Hastings a ride with a Mormon, then a short ride with a Christian type chap with an irrepressible grin, then another ride with a Tongan couple, who are very amiable despite their lack of English.
We stop for petrol and I go and buy a ‘Whittaker’s Peanut Slab’. I’ve been wet for a while and I deserve chocolate. I am almost within reach of my niece’s place, and this is the first time I have spent any money at all in the three weeks I have have been here in New Zealand. It tastes fabulous.
Another ride to another difficult to remember Maori-named town beginning with a ‘W’. It would help enormously if I actually had a map and got to see the names of places properly rather than just when I am coming whizzing past the signposts upon entering a place.
I get a ride with Jonny who’s going to Feilding to mess with traction engines for the weekend; I am welcome to come along. This is great: I get to dry out, sleep in, eat food, drink beer and join them as they happily fiddle with their steam engines, huffing chuffing and crunching slowly across the gravel.
Many of these lumbering great machines have brass plates declaring their place of manufacture; Sheffield, Bolton, Huddersfield. These beauties of English engineering craftsmanship were imported at the turn of the century to do their bit in helping build this part of the British Empire. Marvellous.
Yes I have spelt the Feilding right, in case you’re wondering. The place is named after some English military general-type geezer.
I spend an evening and morning with these trainspottery types and thoroughly enjoy the down-to-earth grease and dieselness of it all. Mid-morning they roll these great beasts out into a brief interlude of sunshine, rumbling forwards unstoppably and tooting their whistles, off on their way to a rally in the next town up. They may well get there by Christmas.
I wave them goodbye and go back into Feilding town to find out where I might be able to help with the flooding relief work; I figure this might help me out too. Everything is closed, even the police station.
I ask a local chap, and he takes it upon himself to show me round the town showing me where the river burst it’s banks, then he suggests that I go down to the racecourse where flood victims are being housed temporarily.
I go down there and it’s obvious that I’ve totally missed the boat. There’s no-one down here, so I sit in an office porch-way, listen to some music on my gizmo and wonder what the hell to do next.
I am approached by an older guy of about fifty who wants to know what I am doing sitting in a doorway (looking like a bum) and I tell him my story.
He tells me to come with him and look round the racecourse with him. I do this with him and he gets to figure me out a little. He offers to put me up in his caravan which is also on the racecourse. He tells me that he might be able to get me on his team who are doing flood relief work; shovelling silt out of people’s gardens, removing caught debris from fences etc.
I spend about a week staying in Gerry’s caravan with his best friend, his friendly moulting mutt. We drink a few beers in the evening, watch a bit of telly and talk. We are kindred spirits, both quite solitary, and we both enjoy the basics of life. A caravan to call home, a fire at night and some straightforward company every now and again. I spend my days with the clear-up crew, a bunch of ne’er-do-wells with the Work and Income people (the Kiwi equivalent to the dole) pushing sticks in their backs to make them employable. We clear up bits of debris out of people’s gardens. It’s okay. It’s worthy but not actually that interesting. It’s not earning me any money either. I’ve never been very keen on working for free alongside someone getting paid to do the same thing. I need to get to South Island and get on the apple-picking fast.
I tell Gerry my intentions. The next day I bid my farewells to the guys and I get a ride with them out towards the road to Palmy (Palmerston North).
When Gerry and the other guys drop me off I can’t be arsed to hitch. I liked Gerry and I feel a bit sad to be leaving him.
I’m feeling dirty, my back still hurts and my rucksack is starting to disintegrate again. I realise that I need to go and get my head together somewhere before I do anything else. I chill out up away from the road and give myself a bit of a meditational mental cleanse. A couple of hours later I am back on the road again.
I get a ride with a chap and his son who take me into Palmerston North, then I wait ages for a ride until I get picked up by a Philipino woman who’s a beauty therapist and doing a performing arts course. She has a boyfriend in Dubai who’s a bomb disposal expert working occasionally in Iraq. She’s going to join him in Dubai when her course finishes and make shed loads of money pampering the fingernails of rich women. (I could do that surely?)
I love meeting people like her; people who ‘step outside the box’ and do whatever they dream of. All good stuff.
I am standing by the road, idly thinking about how nice it would be to have sex. This is not an unusual thought particularly.
My next ride comes with Sandy, who takes me home for coffee and to ‘meet the tribe’.
They all live on the corner of a quiet housing estate in Paraparaumu (Para-para-oo-moo, or just ‘Para’ as the locals call it). The house is full of fantasy dragon-y stuff, which reminds me of my old friend Don back home. Kids are squirrelling away at something or another on computers and a golden retriever comes and says hello. Sandy explains how this is one of those houses that always has people in it coming and going. I like this place, it has good vibes.
When the kids have finished, I check my emails for the first time in a while.
I get some bad news from friends overseas and it knocks me sideways. Someone I had spent quite some time with and had enjoyed meeting has been knocked down by a truck and has died.
I have to leave the house and gather my thoughts. When I return I tell Sandy what has happened. As consolation she offers to share her bed with me…
I sleep with Sandy which is nice but slightly weird and we spend the next couple of days hanging out and just being cosy and chatting. It’s just what I needed (thank you Sandy). Meeting Dee and her kids and a bunch of their mates helps a lot too. Everyone’s into music; there’s guitars, a bass and a drum kit. The kids are into hip hop, mum’s into rock and everyone is into Karaoke. Mates come round, get pissed and lark about. What good people I meet!
THE RAMBLINGS OF AN INTERNATIONAL BUM
(possible book title as suggested by Sandy)
Sandy drops me off at the train station – she has very kindly given me a ticket into Wellington. The journey is beautiful. I’m sure I recognise some of the mountains from T.F.T.S.N.B.M.
Wellington is small and cosy looking; set in a very spectacularly mountainous bay. Presumably it doesn’t get ‘the most awesome city in the world’ awards because of it’s unfantastic weather in the winter months. It certainly is a more spectacular setting than Vancouver or Melbourne. (The city that looks from above like a printed circuit board.)
I have a brief visit to the National Art Gallery, soak up some fabulous creativity and get out just in time to board the ferry to the South Island.
The ferry journey across Cook Strait is fourteen miles wide at its narrowest and is considered one of the most dangerous and turbulent straits in the world. Well that’s nice to know I’m sure. I hope we don’t sink then.
Actually, I love ferry journeys through rugged places – Fredrikshavn to Oslo, Cartwright to Lewisporte, Twassingen to Swartz Bay, and looking at the map, this one should be pretty good, and sure enough, it is, all speckled islands and crenulated headlands.
I get chatting to an occupational therapist from Alberta, and get gooey for Canada. Maybe when my six months in New Zealand is up, I’ll go back there.
Picton has the most wonderful vibes, very serene. It is set in an almost complete ring of mountains. A great place to wake up to after sleeping in it’s tiny park for the night. It seems as if New Zealand spent its formative years engaged in a lot of volcanic activity. The rings of mountain ridge both here and in Wellington would suggest it.
I breakfast on a cold tin of beans, skipped mature cheddar and mountains. Yum!
That day, I get a ride with a middle-aged English bloke, which has an unexpectedly strange effect of making me feel somehow let down. I guess it must be having my ‘exotic Englishman abroad’ thing knocked into irrelevance. That maybe and a sort of dull reality check; this bloke happens to be the kind of English person abroad that seems to like being unimpressed by everything, like its his favourite hobby. All a bit disconcerting and depressing really.
After a bit of a wait, I am picked up by a Canadian guy who had set up a software company in California with all his best mates, made a million dollars, got bored with it, packed it in, and now he’s writing a screenplay about the hidden evils of science unleashed by an unwitting scientist who invents something supposedly benign that goes wrong. How nice to meet a laid-back Canadian with creativity and thoughtfulness. Some of my favourite qualities. What’s even better, he gives me a lift all the way to the doorstep of my niece’s house.
Hurrah for change!
Staying with Kendal and Jackie doesn’t quite live up to my imagined assumptions. Here I am, expecting to be the star of their family show. (That role turns out to be taken by their demanding two year old son Harvey.) In my terminal poverty I had imagined being fed the vast homecoming feast of the weary and bedraggled but heroic traveller.
And then just my luck, I’ve turned up two days before Jackie’s long unseen best friend from back home is turning up for a week. They spend lots of time going out together which I get excluded from. Only the English could behave like this towards their own family.
Actually they are all on their uppers and can barely afford to feed themselves let alone me, so I end up having to go to a St. Vincent De Paul charity shop where they very kindly give me two carrier bags of food; enough to last me for two weeks.
It’s strange how most of the people I meet are warm and friendly; some of them even invite me into their homes as an honoured guest. I suppose when you’re hitching you automatically filter out the unfriendly people as they drive past. Then being a foreigner seems to have an added interest factor as the host sometimes seems to tangibly become a representative of his/her country. You get the whole cultural exchange thing.
Yet here I am, with people who grew up in the same miserable unfriendly town as I did, Reading (pronounced Redding). It’s an unusual circumstance now for me, and oddly deflating too.
There’s no skipping possibilities round the Nelson area, which is a complete arse.
Small towns are usually pretty good for skipping, and the Woolworth’s in New Zealand had so far been a reliable source of nosh. You tend to find out fairly quickly which supermarket chains are skipping-friendly and which ones are not. Unfortunately Nelson seems to be totally bereft of dumpster-diving opportunities, which is a bit of a bummer as I am expecting to stay here for a while.
Whilst in town, I am wondering how to make progress.
I saw little Harvey flipping out this morning, crying for his mum’s attention whilst she’s on the phone talking to someone else. He won’t accept this. Any kind of distraction made by mum he thinks about for a moment and then he decides to have a tantrum, but what he wants is just his mum. Love and attention.
Today I’m emotional and upset; the odds seem stacked against me. Everything seems difficult, emotional and dramatic. I’m trying to unlearn the drama thing in order to become an adult, responsible for interacting as healthily as possible in the world.
How do I get out of a situation that I don’t like? How do I maintain a sense of objectivity in order to behave with clarity and integrity? Now there’s a question.
Release the frustration. After too much of it, trying to fight it off will just get in the way of finding a calm objective mind and calm feeling in the body.
Cry. Shout. Meditate. Go for a run. Whatever I feel I need to do; to get out of mental and emotional dis-orderedness to somewhere calm, sometimes by just going through it, consciously. The other side of it IS there. I just have to want calmness before whatever else it is I am trying to achieve, because if I don’t have calmness before I start to do anything I won’t be anywhere near as well equipped to get the result I want. (It will be a hollow victory anyway if I manage to get there at all.) Maybe this doesn’t work if you’re a boxer?
So sitting in the library, I see myself like Harvey the two year old kid, not seeing that I am too busy crying to see that my options are wider than I think.
Bottom line is, I have about ninety dollars. (Vincent De Paul gave me an emergency loan.) I can buy a WWOOF list for forty dollars, stay somewhere for four months; eat, have some kind of security and grounding.
Just because I CAN survive out of skips, doesn’t mean I want to all the time. It certainly doesn’t feel like a lifestyle option; it’s a backstop.
I have many options with life. If one door seems jammed, then look closer and I will find that another is open.
The last couple of weeks have been an exercise in learning to be chilled out. Visiting my niece Jackie is a huge non-event; her god-daughter arrived at almost the same time, and because they are close friends and haven’t seen each other for two years, I am kept in the background. I don’t even eat with them; I eat the big load of free food that the St. Vincent de Paul people give me. I have a few beers with them and that is about it.
On my birthday, I go cycling round Nelson which is very lovely. I have it down as being an almost perfect location; by the sea, nestled into the mountains and probably quite a lot of creativity going on too.
I go and buy a WWOOF list in ‘The Green Grocer’ an organic wholefood shop and am served by a very lovely middle-aged Californian woman. I ask her if she fancies going out somewhere and she says yes! And then she tells me it would only be as a friend as she’s married. I look all disappointed, she says sorry and comes and gives me a birthday hug anyway.
It’s a very international kind of area round here – meeting the occasional American has been quite satisfying, though being round English people I always feel strangely like I’m on the receiving end of an anti-climax.
I guess a certain dream-like bubble of otherness is being penetrated or burst. I guess it reconfirms the feeling I have that I don’t really want to go back to England – I enjoy being a foreigner too much. I like the differentness of it. I have a real reason to feel like an outsider.
I am out riding my borrowed bike, looking for work. There is an apple tree by the side of the road. It has already been harvested but there are a few left on it that are a bit scabby looking. Great! Some free nosh! No sooner than I have picked myself six apples, than a cop pulls up in a car, gets out and tells me that I am stealing, that I should throw the apples back over the fence, that I should be on my way immediately, and that if he catches me stealing again that he will arrest me.
HUH?!! What? For scrumping a few apples?
Beware of The New Zealand Fruit and Vegetable Police!
I have almost no money and Jackie and Kendal need to be squeaky clean in order to stand a chance of getting their naturalisation papers, so I don’t want some copper nicking me and finding out I am staying with them.
I am annoyed once again at the pettiness of all this. Clearly there just isn’t any real crime here for him to be chasing. I am left with the feeling that on the one hand, New Zealand is one of the most peaceful and friendly countries I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. And on the other hand the inappropriate use of fruit and veg is likely to incur the wrath of the Food Gestapo.
I ask unsuccessfully at a couple of farms whether they need apple-pickers. Its all looking a bit tricky. I am still feeling like I am living by the skin of my teeth.
I set off on my bike armed with my eleven dollars (three quid) and my new WWOOF book. Buying this book has used up nearly all my money, but I am hoping that it will land me somewhere that I can have a roof over my head, food in my belly and some stability so I can get myself back on track.
Nearby, in Redwood, about three miles from Jackie and Kendal’s house is a WWOOF host. I call her up and she enthusiastically invites me over to meet her.
When I get there she tells me that she is a Christian and that she hopes I am okay with that. Yep; fine. She introduces me to her dog, shows me round the house and then shows me all the jobs she needs doing.
Phew. I’ve landed. Breathe out at last…
I spend about a week at Karen’s, cutting the grass on her lawn, pruning some bushes, painting a window frame, and the best job of all, pruning her over-grown grapevine.
‘Just chuck them all on the compost heap!’ She calls out.
Not likely; some of them may be on the way to being raisins, but grapevines are something of a novelty to me and that combined with the general leanness of the times inclines me to feast greedily on them for about three days. Yummy.
Karen is a busy out-going sort of person; singing in a community choir, helping to organise the ‘Wearable Art’ festival that happens every year, she is also a musician and is generally pretty good company to be around. This is lovely after all the weirdness of being at Jackie and Kendal’s.
One day though, a friend of hers is visiting, and asks Karen who this new guy is doing odd-jobs round the garden. Karen explains to her friend that I am a wwoofer, and then she tells her what WWOOFing is all about.
This is fine at first, and I am in earshot of the conversation. I am left feeling somewhat offended though when her friend, grasping the implications, bursts out with ‘Wow that’s great! I could call our place an organic smallholding and get myself some free labour to do all the shitty jobs that I don’t want to!’
WWOOF when it started in 1971 was very specifically intended to link up enthusiastic volunteers that wanted to learn about organic agriculture with hosts that sorely needed their help in getting the organic movement moving. It has stayed like this for a long time with this core of specific intention. I think it has been since the advent of the internet that its appeal has started to broaden; now a volunteer is just as likely to be a young gap-year student or back-packer more motivated by travelling cheaply than organic farming.
In order to be in the WWOOF list, the host must be organic in some form or other, and now there are hosts who stretch the definition and seem to be little more than a work exchange for bed and board, which is not really what the spirit of WWOOFing is all about.
It is an organisation that is based on friendliness and a spirit of learning and sharing, and it seems that it can sometimes be open to abuse with hosts demanding too much work, sometimes offering little hospitality. Mind you, this is most certainly the exception rather than the rule; WWOOFing is still a great way to learn and get genuinely valuable skills and life experience.
About two days after being at Karen’s I ask at the apple orchard literally on the other side of the road from her house to see if they have any work for me. They do!! I have been warned that the money is not very good; sixty dollars a day (twenty to twenty-five quid). To me, this feels like winning the lottery.
Karen’s place. Redwood 23rd March
So here I am, picking apples, working about nine to ten hours a day, earning as promised about sixty dollars a day. The farmer hasn’t allowed me to stay on his farm, and the WWOOFing woman I am staying with wants me to work sixteen hours a week for my room. He expects me to have one day off a fortnight!
Either his decision can be changed or I’m going to have to go somewhere else. Or I busk it in the bushes until I can’t take it any more. That sounds horrible.
After my second day of apple-picking, I do a big meditation and do a huge amount of bodily untangling. I sleep soundly and have a beautiful dream:
I am in a pastoral wooded place. It’s a bright sunny day. There are people sitting under trees, in trees and by a big river. It’s very happy and peaceful. By the river some very dark skinned Africans are making boats. They are tying themselves to each other and to logs to make themselves into human boats. I float off downstream with them. There are lots of African people, beautiful African women too, all sailing down this river.
I arrive at a town; it is African. I notice I am the only white person. I could be frightened. I decide not to be as I walk further into the town. Here, there are many people, just standing around doing nothing. I notice lots of people looking over a railing down into the sea. Then I realise with a sense of revelation, ‘It’s a big ship!’ and that, dear reader is the end.
Some time later on the road, I am to meet a Maori in a supermarket who takes me home and puts me up for the night. He is a story-teller, and he tells me about one of main Maori myths about New Zealand being a giant boat that gets sailed here from the Pacific. This is the story he tells me:
The legend of Maui and the magic fish-hook:
Maui was a demi-god, who lived in Hawaiiki. Hawaiiki is the ancestral homeland from across the Pacific Ocean. Maui possessed magic powers that not all of his family knew about.
One day when he was very young, he hid in the bottom of his brothers’ boat in order to go out fishing with them. Once out at sea, Maui was discovered by his brothers, but they were not able to take him back to shore as Maui made use of his magic powers, making the shoreline seem much further away than it was in reality.
So the brothers continued rowing, and once they were far out into the ocean Maui dropped his magic fish-hook over the side of the waka. After a while he felt a strong tug on the line. This seemed to be too strong a tug to be any ordinary fish, so Maui called to his brothers for assistance.
After much straining and pulling, up suddenly surfaced Te Ika a Maui (the fish of Maui), known today as the North Island of New Zealand. Maui told his brothers that the Gods might be angry about this, and he asked his brothers to wait while he went to make peace with the Gods.
However, once Maui had gone his brothers began to argue among themselves about the possession of this new land. They took out their weapons and started pounding away at the catch. The blows on the land created the many mountains and valleys of the North Island today.
The South Island is known as Te Waka a Maui (the waka of Maui; a waka being a canoe, and Maui being a mythical god-hero). Stewart Island, which lies at the very bottom of New Zealand, is known as Te Punga a Maui (Maui’s anchor), as it was the anchor holding Maui’s waka as he pulled in the giant fish.
Its curious that my dream might somehow have a parallel image in Maori myth.
The dream I think comes in part from thinking about how privileged I am, just by the fact of being white; It means I can go almost anywhere I like, and almost any ambition that I have is also capable of being a possibility. Something white westerners take for granted.
My current situation of having almost no money is one I can get out of. It does make me wonder though about the millions upon millions of people in the world whose condition are thwarted by the politics of nationality and of being born into seemingly inescapable poverty.
March or April Redwood still.
Bill and Erica are very nice people, I decide; they are going to give me a nice juicy caravan to live in while I’m working for them for five bucks a night. Life now becomes considerably more doable.
April 2nd
I’ve been getting very physically tired (and super-fit in the process), working sometimes ten hours a day for about twenty five quid. I’m starting to find a bit of rhythm with it.
Yesterday I was working next to a grumpy Israeli called Paul who looks just like Bob Dylan. Meanwhile the Czechs I am working and spending my evenings with with are Radek, Peter, George and Michael. That’s the nearest I have ever got to living with an actual pop star.
These guys buy their shopping communally. They buy a big sack of rye flour which they make bread with and a big sack of potatoes and this enables them to feed themselves very very cheaply indeed.
Our evenings usually involve drinking beer, playing chess, watching New Zealand Idol on TV, helping Peter with his English and Radek being drunk and crazy in a very endearing way.
Good Friday
We have a day off from apples, we escape to the big wide world of Motueka, a town full of shops and lovely lovely women.
Easter Monday.
Blaaaaaaahh…. Yet another day off courtesy of Jesus rising from the dead, which funnily enough, is sort of what I feel like I’m doing too after so much hard work apple-picking. Way to go Jesus.
Here in the caravan I am surrounded by a vegetable garden full of flowers. I am nestled into the end corner of a long wind-break line of poplars that shwoosh and rattle in the wind high above me.
When I eventually die, I am going to go to a cosy little slacker’s Valhalla afterlife; living on an allotment tended by ancient Viking warriors that have long since settled down into more placid activities to see them through the eternal summer of the afterlife. they all live in caravans and spend their time enjoying their garden plots, growing vegetables, gathering apples to make scrumpy, brewing wines, making their own woollen clothes and generally just chewing the fat with each other, reminiscing over long-gone glories.
Each still only five foot tall, stout, long ginger and blond bearded and with one of those leather Viking helmets with the horns on them. For old times sake more than anything else. In the assignation of their communal duties, each of them shall be deemed a god of something small but important. There shall be Ulrik the god of home-brew beer, Erik the god of knitting jumpers, Bjarni the god of growing spinach and Sven the god of sofas.
I much prefer the idea of sharing the afterlife with celestial Viking warrior gardeners rather than with Cliff Richard in some fluffy wuffy sleepy-land full of holy lift muzak.
Anyway, here is sublimely beautiful, my little rural idyll set in a landscape which I describe to Helen on the phone and to my dad as being like being in Hereford by the sea with snow capped mountains in the background.
I am still thinking lots on the ‘where next’ theme, flipping between going to Canada, canoeing down the Mississippi, going to India, England, Norwich Scotland or a combination of all of them. AAAARRRGGGHHHH! SSHHHUUUUUTT UUUUUUUUUUUPPPP!!!!
In between moments of excitedness and genuine gratefulness for being alive, mixed with some feelings of homesickness, soul-searching ‘What am I on the planet for?’ kind of stuff and nonsense.
In amongst that I have been listening to Blackadder and Fast Show mp3s and I keep getting random phrases leap up and down in the way of all my important thinking. I seem to have invented a seventeenth century aristocrat called ‘Lady Butter-Crumble’. Whoever she might be.
Johnny came home from a hard day of repeating the word ‘fish’ over and over. His mother asked him what kind of music he would like for tea, she rustled up his favourite – an aromatic symphony with violins, tubas and Jamaican steel drums. Afterwards they all sat down to watch some food. Today they are watching a cucumber and a radish. Later on, they are going to watch a particularly good potato.
Memo to self: don’t try to write when you get stoned after working too hard and you haven’t had your tea yet.
April 10th(ish) Redwood Orchard, Nelson
Feel good today about going back to England – different than I do about the other ideas – reason being that England has all sorts of comfort zone factors – being able to see Don, Glyn (my sister), dad, Sofie, Mike, Ben and Suzanne, Jane (mates) and the rest of the Norwich mob.
I’d like to tie up loose ends – I have been thinking a lot about all the significant events through my life in England – the music I grew up with, going out with Christine my first proper girlfriend, my early twenties and what I was into then.
Then, I was overwhelmed with pretty much the same possibilities that I am now – painting, music, bicycle contraptions, country living and all that. Still into Summerhill (free school) even.
I dream I go to Helen’s house, feel shunned as her eco-activist friends look down on me. Saw a film made of Helen eco-activists lives. Very weird. Rather worthy and dour.
I feel like doing what I want is more compelling than ‘doing the Right Thing’.
May 7th
I’m at Seaton Valley Orchard at Mapua.
Last night was the last for the five of us together; me, Marisa, Bryony, Klara and Honzo. Marisa and Bryony are leaving at 9 am in the morning. It’s been great being with them, Marisa and Bryony especially.
It’s full moon and the middle of the night, I have woken up needing a piss. The sky is beautifully clear and starry. I can hear the continual low roar of the waves breaking on the rugged coastline about one mile away.
I can’t get back to sleep so I am cooking rice and packing all my stuff ready for tomorrow. It’s the end of the picking here and in the morning, Dan and Bob (two Maori guys) will be coming at 7 am to pick me up and drive down to Timaru right down in the south. The apples are still going on down there.
Well morning comes, and Bob and Dan don’t, which is no great bother to me; I’ve still got a heap of things to do this end anyway.
Honzo and Klara finish doing up their van (I help by building a cupboard) and then they leave. Their departure is soured by Honzo finding my stereo and almost driving off with it without telling me he’s found it. He knows it’s mine. Some people are just weird. Some people would call that ‘stealing’. Now they have gone; I am the only person here left.
I discover feijoas – a fruit that looks like a gherkin and tastes, at first like a cross between kiwi fruit, lemon, pineapple and washing up liquid. It is related to the guava and came originally from Brazil but can be grown in England. Hurrah!
I think they are horrible at first, but seeing as how there are dozens and dozens of them dropping off the four bushes here, I am determined to make the most of them. They are definitely an acquired taste, but it doesn’t long to get to like them (hurrah again!)
Somehow these days I seem to be carrying a ton of stuff that I never used to. This baffles me slightly. After this many years practice I ought to know how to keep things to a minimum, but it seems I don’t.
These days I like to carry a tent and experience comforts that ten years ago I would have gone without: I never used to have a sleeping mat or Thermarest, just one thin sleeping bag. I never carried a tent; I would just dive into the nearest vaguely dry-looking shed/outhouse/garage/bush/tree/whatever. I never used to carry food; I’d just live off cheese and onion pasties, milk and chocolate.
I never used to carry any soap, or toothpaste. I’d carry very few spare clothes. I must have been even stinkier back then than I am now that’s for sure.
Now what I really need is an entourage of camels and Sherpas and some diligent African chaps carrying large chests full of pointless frivolous guff. Maybe next year.
Apple-picking is good. It’s the kind of hard work that builds camaraderie (except when some bastard is trying to nick my stereo). The small amount of money I’ve made is enough to give me a bit more flexibility about going to Canada which is good. I went into Nelson yesterday and narrowly avoided spending a load of my hard-earned cash on pointless frivolous guff. Partly cos I don’t really actually need a multi-fuel stove (300 bucks! Yikes!) and partly cos I don’t have an entourage of diligent African camel Sherpas.
I do however have a rusty old bike and two different trailer options. Now I have the place to myself and the hard labour is over; I can fiddle about at my leisure. I have a few days before I am required to leave the worker’s hut completely.
One trailer I make by taking a knackered old bike frame, sticking a back wheel in it and attaching the front forks in to the back-stays of the other bike. After cutting the top bar out of the frame and building a triangular box to go into the hole that’s left, I end up with a three-wheeled tandem built for one. I discover the reason why I’ve never seen anyone do this to a bike is that although it looks like something out of the circus, it’s about as stable as George Bush on acid and just collapses weirdly as soon as I try to turn. It’s because the geometry is all wrong. Be thankful that I just stopped myself from going into technical details.
My other trailer is a wobbly old golfing caddy that I picked up at the scrapyard in Richmond, It works fine until I overload it with all my new found junk. Luckily most of the excess weight is from all the left-over food that the Czech guys gave me, so after about a week, my load should be significantly reduced as I munch my way through it all. (As fast as I possibly can, knowing me.)
Yesterday on the way to Nelson I was picked up by an interesting woman who runs a chip shop in Moutere. That’s ‘interesting’ as in ‘love-interest’. Oh all right then, sex. I go off into fantasies of settling in New Zealand and spending the rest of my days working in a fish and Chip shop. I think I’m going to pop in and see her on my way to Takaka, even though I may be running headlong into a future life of lardiness.
Whilst up in the trees, I had decided to pursue making willow sculptures when the apples had finished. I’ve had three responses from the willow ad that I put in ‘New Zealand Gardener’ during the picking season. One is just curious about what it is, one wants to use my ideas (I’m no longer precious about this, so she’s very welcome to), and the other might actually result in some actual paid work, maybe. We’ll see what transpires…
I am planning to visit the community garden in Takaka, two days bike ride away, and it will be a good chance to find out where I might get a good source of willow from (and not just scrubby old branches out of hedges and ditches).
May (date unknown)
This morning is attempt number two to leave the comforts of Seaton Valley orchard. Gone will be the free apples and feijoas, the kitchen and the TV, and in its place will be something else.
The weather has been bright and sunny but the last couple of days it’s being very misty and drizzly. Anyway enough of the weather forecast; I’m off to see if I can make this trailer thing stay upright and then off I will trundle to Motueka.
I’ve been umming and ahhing about dropping in on the chip shop woman, I cycle to where I think Upper Moutere is – fifteen kilometres from Mapua next to Motueka, only to discover that my map has swapped round ‘ Upper’ and ‘Lower’ Moutere. The place I want to be is actually about ten minutes cycle from where I’ve been staying. Doh! I Feel disheartened by this; and the rain, and my overload of tat… and decide that it’s all too much hassle. That and the sub-conscious knowledge that an initially favourable shagging-to-chips ratio would gradually shift and ultimately turn me into the Pilbury Doughboy.
Instead I continue on my current trajectory, and I rumble and fumble along the road up towards Abel Tasman National Park (a tall mountainous place), stopping off briefly in Riwaka to check out their community garden and willow structure (very nice it is too).
Next day, halfway up Takaka Hill, Abel Tasman National Park:
This morning I am somewhere near heaven. It’s misty and I can see hints of hilltops sliding out from behind the mist. Who knows what else is behind all that white. Hills, valleys, orchards, river? I can hear a rushing waterfall, and the exotic bleeps and chirps of unseen birds. I’m at the roadside where I camped last night. Early morning lorries occasionally grumble past out of nowhere. Some of them are tooting me good luck – they are aware of the hill I’ve just climbed in the pouring rain yesterday.
I must be pretty high up after yesterday’s stop-start slog of dragging the bike and trailer against the gravity of the steeply meandering road that goes from Riwaka to Takaka. It must be about fifteen kilometres uphill. Downhill is going to be something else alright – especially with only a front brake and my boots to slow me down.
I am put in mind of the time me and Gill were cycling through the Pyrenees on our way to Barcelona. (All the way from Newbury no less.) Our own pairs of knees were afforded the most fabulous rest when at the peak of our last mountain road, we coasted downhill to the town of Ripoli, gliding entirely without leg-power for a whopping twenty-seven kilometres.
It took ages, and as a diversion, at one point I decided to see how far I could go without using my brakes. Perhaps not the most intelligent thing to do.
We were both brought to a shuddering standstill anyway two-thirds of the way down by a lost calf standing bemused in our way. We stopped and herded it back up the hill and into a field of other cows that Gill had spotted a few hundred mtres back.
Back in Abel Tasman:
It rained heavily yesterday, and I discover that ‘Nikwax’ is a completely crap product. It doesn’t work. At all. I get completely soaked. Not much fun when I don’t have a nice warm house to return to. Oddly, I don’t feel too concerned about it. I guess these things are only temporary.
The mist has cleared a lot – good views ahead I hope!
The mist comes and go frequently. Actually I think it’s clouds just doing their thing, but the main thing is that it doesn’t rain once all day – very good for the spirit for it to stay clear after the miserable weather of the day before.
Pressing on, I zig-zag in my unwieldy wobbly way up the last stage of the steep climb.
Near the top I stop by a house to ask for water and chat for an hour with a very friendly chap about the unpredictability of weather, his friendly Burmese cat, wild pigs and how they bugger up your garden and drain you of lots of money. He is English, but certainly doesn’t sound it. (I should have guessed by all the weather talk…)
Only five kilometres to go, and I’ll be at the top! Hooray! (I’ve already come nine and a half kilometres up this hill (no flats or downward bits).
I stop off to take photos in a roadside field of weird lumpy-holey sticky-uppy limestone rocks.
About one kilometre further up, I stop for a lunch of pasta and chilli sauce christening my brand new stove.
Various people are pulling in to have lunch too, mostly in motor-homes.
Having a bike is always a talking point, and I get to talk to three Kiwi retirees on their holidays from Auckland, a retired chap in a car from Austin, Texas and a Kiwi woman with her English bloke who’ve also come down from Auckland and are off on a fungus foray. Apparently he’s discovered a new species. We chat about Reading – she lived there for four years as a kid in Caversham of all places (a place I knew as a kid where some of my family lived) – remarking how Reading is always changing. The three oldies also have family in Reading. I don’t know why so many kiwis seem to want to live in Reading; I think it’s a dump. Oh yeah, money that’s it. That and because it’s the first major town the train stops at after London has fried your kiwi countrified sensibilities to a crisp.
The fungal couple give me some ciabatta bread and smoked fish which makes an absolutely wonderful change from my usual basics.
Up the hill, some hippies are having a groovy sounding music session way down in the valley below.
I reach the top!
‘I’ve been up so very damn long, that it looks like down for me de-doww,der der dow dow-dow dow-dow…’ (Jim Morrison, inverted.)
What took me exactly one day to go up takes about forty minutes to go down the other side again. My front wheel gets over-heated through having the front brake on continuously, the rim is covered in melted brake-block goo, I am forced to stop using my boots as a brake as there will soon be nothing of the soles, and halfway down, as I get faster, something goes adrift and I can hear a loud grating sound. I expect it to be some plastic sheet rubbing on a wheel, but when I stop, I discover that the high speed excitement is too much for the tiny old wheels on the golf cart, and both their cracked and perished tyres have come off. I walk back up hill a little way, and discover one tyre on a tree stump and the other halfway way up a bank on the other side of the road.
The view looks like western Norway. I know this cos I’ve been there. Today I can see little patches of farmland way down in the gaps between the clouds. I stop to investigate a waterfall, a workman takes a photo of me as I hurtle, sorry; tootle past him, and then as I gather speed, my tyres fly off again. As I come to a stop, they both come bouncing along and overtake me, one on either side of me.
Oh, the humiliation.
Along the valley bottom, I spy a line of pollarded willow which looks suitable for my uses. (My brain has gone into sculptural mode now.) I pop into a nearby house to check out if I can have some. The chap I talk to is an old guy who is born in Newbury and lived in Overton all his life before he came to New Zealand. Yet another ex-pat from my home turf. How come they all seem to be in this part of the world?
We chat for a bit about how willow shavings left in water overnight makes a good rooting mixture and about the virtues of the good old country skills of hurdle-making and hedge-laying.
I stop a little way down the road for the night in a convenient patch of grass by the roadside.
The next day I cycle off further down the flat-bottomed valley, hemmed in on either side by two high ridges of ancient mountainside.
Wading through the dense morning mist I stop a little way on to have breakfast; three very large and crispy yellow apples left on an otherwise bare tree. Some insect or other has had a go at them already but they are mostly intact. They are doubly well received as I ran out of water last night, so the juice go down well.
An hour later, after the sounds of excited mooing cows waiting for their milkings, I find an enormous quantity of crack willow coppice on the banks of the Takaka river at Paynes’ Ford. I ask at a nearby house and am told it belongs to the council.
May be useful for a possible project at the permaculture community I am about to visit.
After about four miles I arrive at the Takaka community gardens, hang out and have breakfast there. I get the chance to properly dry out my soggy socks and sleeping bag. It’s a very good vibe here, my favourite: hippy/community/purposeful/permaculture type place – I like it.
I encounter an English couple here who when we get chatting we realise we know a lot of the same people in England including my friend Helen, and we are left wondering why we have never met before. How odd is that? And they’re not even from Reading.
The rest of the day involves trying and failing and trying and finally succeeding to do various willow business email internet shtuff; sending pictures of willow and then getting my website on the net. I go to ask the council about the willow and hey – guess what – they aren’t very helpful.
Back at the community gardens my sleeping bag and socks have dried out. It’s a rum old situation when that becomes a high point in my day.
I end the day camping out at the mouth of the Takaka estuary, with various hooting chortling whooping oyster-catchers who are not in the least bit bothered by my presence.
I spend the night in my tent wishing I was out dancing and chatting up women somewhere.
I feel hampered by not having somewhere I can just dump my stuff and go out without it. I can hardly go to a disco with two rucksacks with me. ‘Hi I’m Richard, you’re nice. Can we go back to yours – I’m homeless right now?! Oh, and could I use your shower first?’
I drown my loneliness by walking up the beach listening to ‘Stay Human’ the wonderful Michael Franti album.
This morning I’m sitting reading back on things and writing loads. Early morning black swan cygnets and the oyster-catchers are doing their thing in the estuary. This morning I have a small but definite feeling of self-determination. Just the very fact of my being here tells me I can achieve what I like.
Right now I have few possessions, but still too much to carry. I probably need a bath. I have very little money. My surroundings are beautiful but cold.
I’ve got hot porridge, and possibility.
I spend the day writing this and reading a novel; about the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. I wake up in the night, thirsty and without water. I eventually decide to sneak into the garden of a nearby house which I have the feeling is unoccupied. I hope it’s not just wishful thinking. There’s a garden tap and I fill my bottle. No-one comes. Good. I speak out loud to the dark quiet house. ‘I’m very sorry if I’ve disturbed anybody, please don’t worry. I’ve only come to get some water’. No response. Good. I think.
I lie awake wondering what on earth I’m going to do with my life to make a living.
I tell myself to go back to sleep and save thinking for the daylight.
Some small creature is poking about under my stuff. Probably a lizard of some kind.
In the early morning, the oyster-catchers are all hooting like crazy as usual. Why do they do it? Do they wander about in the night and call to each other in panic when they discover in the morning that they’re not where they thought they were?
Maybe it’s just joy.
Seven black swans swim in the shallows of the estuary mouth.
I sit by the sea
the sea is my friend
I can see by it’s movements
that change never ends.
Do these oyster-catchers share the the same ancestors as the British oyster-catchers today? I can’t imagine them migrating of their own accord all the way to here and they can’t possibly have evolved separately. I think they must have followed in the wake of ships travelling from Europe. The swans I easily imagine being brought here by well-to-do British people keen to populate garden lakes in their newly transposed lives to make them feel more at home.
After my morning ritual of sitting about wondering which way is up, I can hear a car about a hundred yards away having trouble starting. A small sky blue saloon is coughing it’s guts up.
I go over and see if the driver needs help. ‘Hi! My Name’s John, I’m From Queensland!’ He almost yells as he thrusts his hand out to shake mine. He has a very brusque manner, quite in-your-face. I’m am slightly taken aback; the Kiwi’s are generally pretty mellow, and ‘Ockers’ (an Aussie term roughly meaning ‘red-necks from Queensland’) are not noted for their subtlety…
We get chatting and I have breakfast and coffee with this old Ocker. He offers me a ride up to a place that may have interesting rocks that he wants to check out, near the end of the peninsula beyond Takaka. We go there, are bored by it (no interesting rocks), visit a desolate cafe and come back again.
He’s into gem-stones; jade and gold and says he makes his living from it, though a pretty skin-of-the-pants one by the looks of things. He goes to the States and goes to mineral fairs and such-like. We venture round some of the roads in Abel Tasman National Park, just for the ride this time and it’s really really beautiful. John shows me how to get oysters. As much as eating raw oysters is like eating large wet bogies with brains, I am surprised to find that I like ’em. It’s funny what poverty can do for your taste-buds. It’s as well that oysters don’t have mouths so I can’t hear them scream as they go sliding down my throat.
I find lots of feijoas that look like somebody has tried to sell them by the roadside and then given up, just leaving them in a heap. More free food. My favourite meal.
I ditch the bike where somebody can find it for themselves and keep the golf caddy. I still have too much tat. I spend three days with John, just trucking around.
I am waiting to find out whether someone near Auckland has decided to commission me to make a willow seat for his garden. I was rather hoping to head further down South Island but money rules supreme at the moment. I figure that even if he decides against it, it gives me the chance to go and visit Rob in Wellington; the guy I met in the Californian Redwoods.
I hitch back towards Nelson. I don’t know what to do about Chip Shop Woman. (Nothing most likely.)
I get a ride with Dave, a potter, we get onto the subjects of alchemy, spirituality and Zen within pot-making. It’s one of those conversations where each time one of us says something, the other has three or four conversational threads they can pick up and follow.
I get out at Mapua, to-ing and fro-ing about going to Moutere to see Chip Shop Woman.
I stand by the road and get a lift with Edward, who is a gruffly spoken chap. He’s in a male voice choir, and once did a tour to Cardiff singing. He’s a Christian, works in a night shelter in Nelson, gives me half his meat pie and used to be a hard drinking fisherman.
Stand by the road at Nelson listening to ‘Happy Families’ by Blancmange and then a very good Depeche Mode singles collection.
I get a ride from Nelson to thirty kilometres further down the road with an Englishman from Surrey who talks about football, something I neither know nor care about but never mind; he’s anice chap and that’s what counts.
Then a teacher from Denmark who has come here for the lifestyle.
Next, a kiwi who lives and works on a fishing development project in Papua New Guinea and got made a chief. Bizarre story. He’s quirky and I wonder if he’s on speed. Good chap though.
Then, in the dark, thirty kilometres from Picton, a ride with a Maori woman of about fifty; she tells me loads of interesting Maori stories. None of which I can remember.
At Picton I get my ticket for the 9.30 morning sailing to Wellington. I spend ages showering and washing my socks, drying them out under the hand drier over and over for about an hour.
Eventually I emerge from the harbours shower block.
I suspect there may be adventurers out there more inspiring and fun to be with than the flakiness of the Fabulous Furry Floating Neutrinos… Admiring the boats on the quayside, there is one particularly impressive wooden schooner about ninety foot long. All glossy varnished timber, lustrous and golden, white sails folded away whilst docked. It makes me think dreamily of the other world that sailors live in; crossing two thirds of the Earth’s surface, belonging to no government and living by different gods and demons.
A woman appears from nowhere and comes and says hello. She’s French and lives in Motueka. She was hoping to sleep on the big wooden boat but its people aren’t aboard.
We spend half the night bedded down in the nearby children’s park having very cosmic conversation, then we sleep under a playground-style wooden pirate ship being guarded over by a slightly menacing and badly made giant concrete Mickey Mouse.
In the morning I try chatting up a rather buxom Maori gardening woman, which is fun to do even though she’s hitched. She says to come and have coffee when I come back down this way next.
I’m tired. I watch Starsky and Hutch on the ferry. We get to port in Welly. I Phone Rob, whom I had met for all of five minutes at Humboldt National Park in California.
‘When you get to New Zealand, call me up’.
We go drinking for the rest of the day. Rob has to be at work in the morning and is living at someone else’s house so he can’t invite me back to stay over. Fortunately, I carry a spur-of-the-moment Plan-B-for-everything around with me at all times.
I go to sleep in a quiet spot in the city with a beautiful woman with a swanky car (two adverts on a hoarding over my head). I have found a little bare patch of concrete with high walls around it so I am completely protected from city weirdness. Cities aren’t my favourite place to sleep, but fortunately I am very very drunk and this makes the dusty bare concrete bearable.
I spend the next day doing loads of typing, and go for a walk round Wellington. I really like Wellington. It’s tiny, but still manages to cram in it’s very own skyscraper. It has a big museum, is surrounded by mountainous bush and has loads of exotic dramatic coastline. My favourite city, definitely.
At the end of the day I get the train to Redwood and go to Rob’s friend’s house. The house is stark and is decorated completely as if it’s the 1960s. It’s stunningly weird, as is, I am soon to find out, Wayne it’s owner.
I stay with Wayne and Rob. We go out and explore Wellington, have ‘fush and chups’ in nearby Seatoun (settled by Scots of course), get some ‘wikki’ in and me and Rob get astonishingly stoned with his mate Shane who’s very down to earth indeed. Shane is asking me if I have ever heard a Tui singing, and right on cue, one starts to sing in the bushes not far from where we are. What a sound. Very special moment.
The next day we drive out and explore Colonial Knob, a local hill. I find magic mushrooms, so we pick loads. Me and Rob get very very trolleyed indeed. Back at Wayne’s I have to sit in the garden and talk to God. I can’t handle being indoors, especially in a house that’s as weird as Wayne’s. Wayne comes outside and ‘dads’ at me ‘You’ve got to come indoors, the neighbours will talk!’
That must be a measure of how exciting Wayne’s neighbours must be if someone sitting in the garden becomes a talking point.
Maybe I’m behaving like a total monkey without even realising it. Don’t think so.
The next day, Wayne walks me down to Redwood Train Station. I ask a woman standing on the platform when the expected time of the train up to Paraparaumu is. She tells me and after asking me if I wanted some work, she takes me home to do gardening and eating. Her name is Diane and she’s a total chatterbox, She also runs an art gallery – she looks at the photos I took of fabulously multi-coloured walls in Merida; she says they could be presented as a book or an exhibition possibly if I spent money on getting them all framed.
She is an enormously active woman; she’s a climber, a tramper (kiwi for walker), a sailor and a gallery curator. She also lives in a mind-bendingly untidy house with boxes of junk everywhere. (The complete opposite to Wayne’s house which is scarily spartan.) I spend some time looking through loads of old photos of her family history, New Zealand art from the beginning of the settlers. She says she hasn’t been here long and hasn’t had the chance to sort it all out yet. What a mess.
It’s been an amazing few days; I’ve met some really interesting people; it feels like I’ve been having one of those times where every person I meet and every conversation I’m having just all slots together like an easy cosmic continuum jigsaw rollercoaster thing.
By email, the people in Tauranga say yes to having a willow thing in their garden.
I hitch to Palmerston North, meet a Maori chap at the supermarket and he takes me home and reads me stories (amazing!). We have very good conversation about positivity. He’s a Christian, but it’s not an ‘issue’.
He lets me sleep on his floor and I get lift with him to Feilding in the morning.
It’s a beautiful clear day like it’s Spring; everyone seems a bit more cheerful than usual.
I get a ride with a skinhead and a bloke with two black eyes. Not totally convinced I should get in the car, but it ends up being a surprisingly okay ride.
Listening to ‘Stay Human’ by Michael Franti between rides:
‘Every soul is poem written in the palm of God’s hand’
The sun is still shining and the air is crisp.
I ride with a Maori truckie to Wanganui. I re-name the town ‘Wankernui’ on account of it taking four hours to escape its grasp.
A quiet ride, no conversation, with a farmer in his brand new Ute to Stratford. Glorious views of Taranaki (Mt. Egmont), which looks exactly like Mount Fuji.
The film ‘The Last Samurai’ was filmed almost entirely here; with an American film crew and a Japanese cast. Bizarrely, Mount Fuji got CGI’d over the top of Mount Taranaki in the final analysis.
Getting out of the car, it’s particularly cold. There’s a totally clear sky; it’s probably going to be frosty.
It’s getting dark. I stick out my thumb and start walking towards somewhere quieter to put up my tent. I unexpectedly get a ride with a chap to New Plymouth. He’s an oil chap (lots of oil and gas round Taranaki) and he’s been to Calgary.
I sleep by a river down by a water treatment place. I get a very good night’s sleep.
Hopefully today, I will get to Tauranga.
Another days hitching; I get rescued from New Plymouth, a horrible traffic-ridden place by a car already very full – a young Maori family; proving that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. When they stop for me, some of them get out and re-arrange themselves so that we can all cram back in into a non-existent space. I feel like I’m almost family.
After them, I meet a cyclist who tells me all about his own family troubles, then a ride close to Auckland with a truckie; this is the point where I finally tire of expressing wonder at the scenery – New Zealand is so beautiful everywhere you go that I finally realise what a strangely redundant observation it is. Crap – now I will have to find something else to say…
Next, a ride with an ageing ‘hoon’ (hooligan/tearaway) who seems quite fun; a seventy year old with an eighteen year olds attitude to fast cars – a lanky bloke wearing a baseball cap on backwards.
In a field not far from the highway, I sleep out in some long grass which affords me just about enough protection from a cold night wind.
Still not at Tauranga!
The next day I get a ride to Katikati with an old chap doing horse riding with disadvantaged kids.
In Katikati I meet John from North Carolina who when I tell him why I am coming to Tauranga, he gives me some advice on good woods to use with my willow sculpture.
John is a woodworker. He introduces me to his workshop and his international team of carpenters; they all seem to be guys in their late thirties from various parts of the world; South Africa, Canada, Scotland, America, Australia.
John has discovered that the wood used to make shipping pallets from the US are very often made of high-quality hardwoods such as cherry, oak and other more unusual woods.
John being a carpenter saw that the pallets having done the job of transporting goods from one place to another were usually burnt or thrown away. Seeing an opportunity, John now reclaims the wood and builds truly beautiful furniture out of it all; tables, chairs, chests of drawers, wardrobes, beds. You name it.
John shows me how his furniture is made; carefully excluding nail-holed wood, but he also makes some furniture leaving the ‘history’ of the wood in it, which gives his work a wonderful instant-agedness. He tells me people very often want their furniture with the feel-good obviously recycled factor. Nice.
Another ride with a Maori family takes me right into Tauranga, and in the space of two hours I’ve managed to find myself a shed to sleep in at the end of somebody’s garden. It seems like it’s a vocation of mine.
When I first get into town, I decide to do a little research to see if I can find a local source of willow for doing this chair sculpture job. I accidentally find a community volunteer resource shop and this seems like a good place to start. I tell the woman running the place what I am up too, and at her suggestion I telephone the local council.
I call, and the receptionist at the other end tells me that I need to speak to ‘Richard Terry the Willow Development Officer in Rotorua. Unbelievable! Some one with the same name as me! AND he’s into willow! I am amazed at such an incredible coincidence! She tries to put me through to his office extension and the phone just keeps ringing for ages. It is long enough for me to imagine having some excited banter with this person who must surely be some magical Antipodean doppelganger. The phone rings for ages and ages and eventually the receptionist cuts in and suggests maybe I should call again when he is in. In my disappointment I feel forced to conclude that after all it must just be that the woman at the other end is getting her wires crossed.
Another woman in the volunteering shop has over-heard all this, and asks me if I need a place to stay in town. This is brilliant cos as I was coming into town I had been idly wondering how I was going to manage to do a paid job whilst not having a proper base to be in. So now I have a base and it seems much more do-able. How the gods provide; most unexpectedly.
Tauranga is a booming town. Houses going up all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much building going on in one place. I get weirded out by the idea that I could sort out my financial troubles by getting a career in house-building. This troubles me, and I can’t quite pinpoint why exactly.
I have been housed in what amounts to a stable at the end of the paddock. My host Sheila gets me to do a days worth of gardening in exchange for being able to stay there for the time I need to do the willow job. And she is throwing in free hot dinners. It is raining outside and I am feeling cosy but I am feeling a little bit lonely with her family slightly uphill at the other end of the paddock in their nice busy home. I spot the occasional sillouette of movement through a distant kitchen window. I sometimes miss the home comforts of company, electric lights and TV and cupboards full of nice food.
I am sharing part of my current space with two sheep and a llama. I’ve never met a llama before. They are rather like four-legged ostriches with camel’s heads. This one is very curious and friendly. It has a dark patch over it’s eye that makes it look like a daring pirate.
Getting across town to sort out getting wood for the willow job is ridiculous and stressful on account of the extremely infrequent buses. One Saturday evening I end up having to walk about seven kilometres cos I miss the last bus at 4.15 pm. There’s a hundred and one things I’m in love with over New Zealand. Tauranga is not one of them, and neither are New Zealand’s bus services which are the worst in the world. Excepting perhaps Antarctica which I can only presume is marginally worse.
I have a strange dream.
I dream I am in a running race. Everyone is American. One person is gloating ‘I got a game plan! I’m gonna beat yer! You don’t win if you ain’t got a game plan!’
While we are running I become aware that after three miles we are all going to be shot dead. I get some friends together, and we duck off into the woods hoping we are not spotted. We steal a car and bugger off. Sod the stupid race. I kind of get the feeling that with various encouragements out of it, the rat race is not my caper.
I have another dream that I squeeze a huge pus-ey zit and the pus mysteriously turns into a hat. I squeeze another zit and that turns into a hat too.
I can’t work that one out at first… maybe it means my creative juices are more worthwhile than I previously let myself believe.
I’ve been having a bit of a no-girlfriend-where-after-New Zealand direction-less thing (again).
Making the willow seat for Dan and Jasmine has re-lit my confidence in my creative self-worth. I’ve started to have some positive pro-active ideas about the rest of my stay in New Zealand and maybe onto Canada (rather than just having to look forward to more meaningless fruit picking type work).
I move out from Welcome Bay, say goodbye to my llama companion and move into a block of kiwi orchard next to where I’m making the willow seat. The orchard is hemmed in by a shelter belt of dense eighty foot high pines, effectively a hedge about 300 metres down one side and a hundred metres down the other. It’s totally surreal, like something out of a children’s fantasy book. These trees would make an amazing outdoor theatre space if they were arranged in a circle about 150 foot in diameter. Really awesome.
Live your dreams even if you think you can’t. Harm no-one. This is your power.
I finish the willow seat – Dan is ‘rapped’ (same as ‘stoked’ or ‘chuffed’). He pays me two thirds of the money for the job and says he will bank transfer the rest. He gives me a ride out of town, and I hitch eastwards past Whakatane. On the way, I fill my pockets and feast on loads of feijoas I find at the the place where he drops me off.
Later I get dropped near a beautiful cove and spend the night feeling a bit vulnerable. I go to sleep with sounds of the sea under a crisp clear starlit night.
I let myself feel a bit wobbly and kind of cuddle myself. I look forwards to not playing solitaire. It’s moments like this that I entertain the feeling to give up and just go back to England and all it’s familiarities.
In the morning, I wake up still feeling out of sorts. I catch myself and re-focus on being pro-active about being alive instead of wading around in emotional and mental aimlessness. Emotions I figure are good in that in the quiet moments they tell me how safe and good I’m feeling (or not). I don’t think I want to run my life by them any more though. I guess I’m still trying to find a balance.
I stick my head out of the tent to find a glorious sunrise just climbing out of the sea.
This really is a beautiful spot; a good place to start the day, and a good antidote from being in Tauranga.
A fisherman comes and checks his lobster pots. A jogger bounces past, and I chat with an old guy who’s getting his daily exercise whilst he walks home from doing the shopping.
Ahem; I’m about due for an Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhh!
There, that’s better.
This morning I earthed out by doing my favourite thing; watching the forces of gravity working water against stone and sand. It absolutely fascinates me.
It seems like I’m watching a model for the human mind and soul in actual motion, low persistent forces create, mould and break down boundaries to make an ever changing form, but that always is still made up of the same elements.
Ultimately, it’s predictable, but within that it’s all still unique and surprising.
I eat porridge and a found grapefruit. Time to pack up and walk.
I walk high up the cliff face into bush to get round to the little town round the corner, full of the swanky Frank Lloyd Wright and other arty-farty architectural styles the Kiwis do so well. This probably used to be some quiet little fishing village minding it’s own business. It looks like the Tauranga/Auckland overspill has got it’s greedy mits on it already.
Here I am, with just about two months left, and I still haven’t seen round the South Island! Winter’s drawing in and it’s time for me to make plans for the next step – whether I go to Canada, try to meet Sophie, go to Australia for three months or go back to England or what; I need to do some information finding about teacher training in Britain for one thing. It seems that it may be possible to do only one year of teacher training in order to get qualified. It would make a nice change to be able to earn a living from doing something socially useful and not have to strain my back doing brainless spade work so much.
The last ride of my day is with a Maori mother and daughter; I’m now in Gisbourne (‘Gissie’). It’s seventy per cent Maori here; the highest proportion of Maori left in New Zealand.
I wake up the next morning on the rock-studded beach at Ohope, between the sea and a Maori cemetery on a small hill. A shag is perched on a rock keeping a watch out for his breakfast. A blackbird is battering something on a rock. Eleven fantails are performing a twittering aerial circus act with each other about ten foot away from me.
I remember a car sticker I saw the other day and decide to expect a miracle.
I breakfast on porridge and pack up. Leaving the beach I fill my water bottle at a toilet and pass two horses, one of them a brumby (a wild horse), though you can hardly tell the difference. I’ve noticed there seems to be quite a lot of horses down in this part of the world.
Walking off a little way down the road, I am feeling sublimely chilled out – this place is the perfect antidote to Tauranga. There’s almost no traffic, usually a hitcher’s disaster, but in a place like this, I don’t really care. The vibe feels different down here.
Now I am past all the land-grabbing house-building property development spread of Auckland and Tauranga; all the arty seaside houses have dribbled to nothing; now its just long grass and the sound of the wind blowing through it. Fantails doodle their song across the morning sunshine as it sparkles through the trees.
I’m feeling miraculous.
I get a ride with Paul a Paua farmer. He takes me a little way down the road and takes me in to show me his big shed full of white plastic trays growing Paua. (Pronounced pow-a with the ‘w’ like a soft ‘v’. Also known in English as abalone, or ‘abs’ if you’re Australian.) The paua take four years to grow. There’s not much money in it, but he’s doing it for the lifestyle really. We ponder just how exciting for shellfish sex probably isn’t.
With the gift of two chocolate muesli bars later, I wave him goodbye and tootle off down the ever-winding coast road, steep hills towering above and glorious sunshine.
The first vehicle to come past stops and I get a ride with a chap going to a school to fit an internet connection. He spends most of his day just driving along the coast. Now there’s a nice way to earn a crust.
My next ride is with Albert, a Maori chap who ‘introduces’ me to Gissie. He makes his money growing weed (‘the primary industry down here’) and likes to spend his time up in the bush hunting deer and wild pigs on horseback. The hills look very steep and the Manuka (Tea-Tree) bush looks very dense. Horse-riding doesn’t look possible.
We pass two young heffers dropping cautiously down the side of a hill and they look a bit freaked out when they get to the bottom. I’ve never seen cows in such tricky terrain as this. Albert drives up to a high headland with two wide open bays, one on either side. Quite spectacular. One doobie later and we’re off, further down the coast and I get dropped off next to a small motel and camping ground.
Ten seconds later I’m picked up by George, a youngish Maori wearing a Moku, a face tattoo; lines radiating over his eyebrows and swirls over his nose and his ‘third eye’. Some time later, I am to discover exactly what the symbolism of the Moku is all about. According to tradition then, George is a bit of a murdering-type geezer.
George seems very animated and a bit wired. I’m a bit stoned and don’t quite know how to react appropriately to the sight of this guy with the most full-on tattoos I’ve ever been up close and almost personal with, so I’m just blunt about it.
‘Is that a Moku?’
‘Yes, but I’m having it taken off.’
‘Have you been naughty or something?’
He grins ‘Umm… sort of.’
I figure he must be a bad boy from the ‘Mongrel Mob’ in Auckland. Probably caught up in drug-running and gangs and he’s ended up disgracing the iwi elders, either that or he’s a born-again Christian (or both).
‘Are you a Christian?’
‘Yes!’ he beams ‘Would you like to meet some of my Christian friends?’
So here I am with a manic born-again Christian with a scary tattoo inviting me into a culture I know nothing whatsoever about.
‘Er.. no, I’ll just carry on down the road thanks.’
‘Oh! I feel deep in my heart bro, that I’d really like you to meet my friends and I know they’d really like to meet you too.’
Oo-er. What’s this all about? Is this guy for real? Are his mates as full-on and freaky as him? I’m in the middle of nowhere. I might be about to be robbed at gunpoint by dope-heads or happy-clappy’d into some embarrassing Christian casting-out-of-devils or something for all I know.
‘Err.. all right then.’ I can always leave I guess if it looks weird.
As soon as we get to an ordinary old-style wooden house George leaps into a ‘sharing’ session with a middle-aged man that he describes as a pastor. So I guess at least that’s the being held at knife-point factor out of the window.
Not sure how to ‘be’ in this strange situation in a room full of Maoris, being stoned and all (and not used to it these days). One guy beckons me over to him in the corner of the room. What’s he going to do?
He shows me his Whakapapa (family tree).
‘Look at this – I’m as English as you are!’
Showing me his family tree, he’s descended on one side from Henry the Fourth, and in part from a Portuguese sailor from whom he gets his family name; Hovell.
There are a few Portuguese/Maori Hovells on the East Coast. The original Hovell eventually settled in Brazil.
‘So you’ve probably got Amazonian Indian relatives too!’ Pretty surprising stuff.
Don’s wife is part Maori part Ukranian and she looks amazing; with the round face and high cheek-bone of the Ukranians mixed with the fullness of a Maori.
I get invited through to the ‘boys room’ which is the much older original house next door; a slightly dilapidated but characterful hundred year old shepherds house. It’s wooden, cold and draughty. It has pictures of Marilyn Munroe all over one wall; this bold cultural connection I find reassuring.
A smoking session ensues with ‘Pic’ (short for Piccolo); a very large long-haired chap and Francis a young chap. So I am told, Pic could have played for the All-Blacks, but he missed out for some reason I have forgotten (stoned again)… Francis used to be a horse-riding champion. It briefly crosses my mind to wander why these two people haven’t followed through with their sporting abilities. I get the impression that dope has something to do with it.
As I explain to Don, Pic and Francis: I grew up in a very white world and pretty much never had any social interaction with people from other cultures. Nothing significant in England, Canada, Mexico or Belize. It feels like a real privilege to actually be with people of another culture who can speak English so we can talk together, and who I feel are open to me. Back home, with our crap cultural history, usually my encounters with people from other ethnic backgrounds are often uncomfortable. I am at risk of making a complete dickhead of myself (if I haven’t already), but it is the only way I can explain myself.
I have never before had any real conversation with anyone that wasn’t from my own ethnic background. At my age; ridiculous. I never was a city kid and in that respect I’ve had a very sheltered life. It’s a bit mind-blowing, aided by being somewhat stoned no doubt.
One evening I wander outside to get some fresh air and to admire the stars. Some time later Don wanders out to see if I am okay.
‘I just had an amazing thought.’ I say.
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘You see that up there, that’s the Milky Way right?’
‘Yep.’
‘It just occurred to me, that that’s the biggest thing I have ever seen. Like, how big do you think that actually IS, as a single definable object? It must be billions of miles long and here we are, both able to see something so big together. That’s just amazing…’
A very wow moment… and it was quite something to share it with Don. I haven’t smoked so much dope in years.
To add to this, they talk about going fishing off the rocks by the sea, going eeling in the river, hunting pigs and deer in the bush. Kids in the nearest town go joyriding on horseback up and down the middle of the street where the few shops are. Don says to me, you really don’t need any money here on the coast – you can grow and catch all your food.
I have several double-takes and still can barely grasp that here, people are living a life that hippy types back in England for the most part can really only just dream about. And here are people living it as an ordinary old-fashioned way of life. The subject turns inevitably to land rights and the current foreshore issue that’s in the news so much right now; The Maoris are mounting a legal bid to reclaim the beaches and coastland from Queen Elizabeth, the ‘legal’ owner of it.
As I explain to them:
I spent the second half of my growing up living on a private estate with my parents playing second-fiddle to a lord of the manor whose land we lived on. Even from the age of ten I could never understand why one person should have so much land whilst the rest of us had to do his bidding in order to have a roof over our heads. It all seemed to boil down to his ancestor’s beating the crap out of my ancestors and then declaring his will as law. A load of rubbish if you ask me, so in a way, I can relate on some level at least, to the whole Maori feeling of wanting to reclaim stolen land.
The lifestyle here is the kind that I immediately feel comfortable with. No expensive aspirations towards posh furniture or gadgets. The old house is kind of run-down. It could probably do with having sorted out all the holes in the floor and walls where the air blows through. And then I realise that they don’t do winter here, not like I know it anyway. The place doesn’t need a paint job. That would spoil the feel of the place.
One night me and Francis go out the back and try to get some eels out of one the streams (unsuccessful, alas).
Another day, we all head out to the local school to give them a hand removing an old building. When I mention how I like the voluptuousness of some of the Maori women, Don and his sister, say to me ‘If you decide you want to stay, we can find you a nice Maori woman, one with a bit of land and some foreshore’.
One day, Don and me go out to visit some mates of his. I go for a walk up a hill to a lighthouse that marks the most Easterly point in New Zealand.
Don tells me how everyone came out here and partied to welcome in the new millennium of 2000 and that the only people to see it in before them were the Pacific Islanders.
I meet some Pakeha tourists. It’s quite odd meeting white people. They seem to exist in a different reality. One that seems a bit rigid and restrained and dull.
Whilst Don is chatting, I sit out on the back porch admiring the view of the coastline. I had picked up along the way how Maori like to give their landmarks, particularly their hills, a kind of personified mythical significance, so one big hill would be a frozen warrior, others might actually resemble animals and so on. This particular stretch of coastline looks for all the world like a very relaxed reclining naked woman. With one arm behind her head, she lay, wrapping herself round the bay, with the foam breaking over the peninsular of her toes that are dangling in the sea. It isn’t one of those slightly wonky images that requires a bit of imagination to interpret; there she is in all her fully-formed, anatomically sensible glory…
Don is about to leave. ‘Come on, we’re going now’
‘Hey before we go – check her out… Can you see her?’
I don’t know who she is or whether anyone has noticed her before, but she is beautiful.
I think it’s one of those ways of seeing that comes if you are into nature. It seems to open out more if you have ever used dope or mushrooms at all.
Don and his mates had never noticed her lying there before, but when I point her out to them, they are in awe! So now they have a new neighbour to talk to…
Living in Llanberis in 1991 whilst doing conservation volunteer work, there was a waterfall behind our house which we liked to go and visit. On the way to it we would have to walk past a certain rock which, particularly during the full moon, would look like it had a small boy sitting in it, with his arms around his knees. It was quite uncanny, and depending on your frame of mind either somewhat scary or really quite a cosmic comfort… It was visible because of the way the moonlight would draw out just the right shadows and monotone blues and greys. It was completely invisible the rest of the time.
The day comes when I decide to press on with the previously planned mission to go round the South Island. I am really quite reluctant to leave in so many ways. I could stay. I tell myself that it would be great but the dope would drive me insane. These guys are total weed-heads; I’m not.
I get a ride with a Maori engineer who tells me which tribal group is responsible for which area. Don’s bunch are Ngati Porou which is the tribal group for the Gisbourne area.
A little way on I ride with an English chap who turns out to be a social worker called Chris from Manchester. He lives with his missus June who is also a social worker. They thought they would escape the drudgery of English working life but when they got here they were shocked how ‘antiquated and backwards’ the New Zealand social care system is.
I end up staying with them for three days, chewing the fat and snaffling Chris’s mp3 collection. He’s got loads of music that I grew up with and then threw out in an adolescent fit in the name of ‘Growing Up’. A brilliant chance to rectify my teenage cock-up.
Apart from that, it’s very nice for all of us to have an exchange of new Englishness with each other. Me and June go out walking their dog on their own almost completely private beach. (They share it with a thousand sheep.)
It was hard not to notice that there was some tension with Chris and June. When Chris is at work, June finally spills the beans and tells me how she had had an affair with a big muscly Maori sheep-shearer not so long ago.
It’s a strange life. I have met a number of people who have the idea that totally changing the world that is around them will make the internal difficulties go away. And then they make the move and then when shit still happens, they have the shock of realising that it might actually be themselves that they have to change.
Slap bang in the middle of the bay is an island which I am told is actually a rabbit. Looking at the island completely does my head in and spoils what should be a perfectly serene vista. I’ve got it into my head that it’s not a rabbit at all, but a large pork pie hat on the head of a giant Jamaican that is about to surface out of the sea. A kind of Neptune plays Ska thing. It’s like getting an irritating tune stuck in your head that won’t go away…aarrgghh!!!!
Apart from that, it’s very nice to meet them and their dog, in spite of their difficulties.
Further down the road I travel with a very nice chap indeed called Graham who happens to be a geologist and takes great delight in stopping every now and again to show me various bits of strata and formations in rock faces by the road, showing me how this bit of coastline came to be – mostly from earthquakes and accumulated lava flow and lava sediments being brought down in huge molten rivers to the sea.
Kind of like glaciers, but red-hot and faster I imagine.
He invites me home for tea with his family, which I of course happily accept.
Entering his house, I am not sure what to expect. I am immediately met by two very cheerful children who want to know who I am, and then that established, would I like to see their books, toys, drawings and so on. I manage to pat their cat and dog who are also equally enormously pleased to see me. It’s a gloriously chaotic moment of enthusiasm. I manage to surface from it occasionally to offer a brief explanation of who I am again to Graham’s wife and yes I’d absolutely love a cup of tea.
Dinner is served as we are all ushered to the kitchen table. Calm is brought together and Graham says Grace, thanking God for the good things the children have done at school, for the goodness of a whole meal and for bringing me to their table.
Here I am with these lovely people, bringing some thoughtfulness to their day. I am truly touched by this moment.
I tell them how amazing it is that this morning I was travelling down an unknown road, with no idea of where I would end my day, and here I am having this marvellous plate full of good food (it is toad-in-the-hole with mashed potatoes and greens) with such very kind people. This seems to me to be a real miracle, in something so simple as a shared meal.
I think this is one of the best moments of my time in New Zealand, it is giving me a renewed sense of appreciation.
I sleep soundly on the sofa, and in the morning I eat a hearty breakfast and get myself loaded up with sandwiches for the on-going journey.
It’s quite a cold day, and a wind is blowing. Internally I am still glowing. I have been worrying about Dan in Tauranga not paying me 300 dollars as he has promised, I decide that it isn’t worth worrying about.
Upon reaching Napier, I get picked up by a Samoan couple who are only going to Hastings, a mere ten kilometres down the road. When we get to Hastings where they live, they have some unfathomable discussion between themselves in Samoan. Then the guy driving says to me ‘If you don’t mind waiting a bit, I just have to visit my mother, and then we can take you a little way further, would you like to do that?’
Fine with me.
These guys are so eager to help me out it’s kind of over the top. Each time we get some way down the road to the next village or town, the woman looks at me all concerned and apologetic, saying that this is as far as they can go. They stop; and then they start driving again before I can get a chance to get out. This happens three times and once I actually get as far as actually getting out of the car – they then come back down the road again, pick me up again, and take me even further! They eventually let me out for real at Woodville, which is about eighty kilometres further down the road than they were originally going to go. And even then they still seem like they feel they haven’t done enough. Maybe they really just want to take me home and look after me. I feel slightly embarrassed and undeserving of such treatment. Hey ho, best not look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. It’s in strange contrast to the events of some the previous few encounters not so long ago and more than a little perplexing.
It is slowly starting to dawn on me how much difference to my life meeting these particular people is having. Their positive friendly and honest attitude really makes me realise that this is such a beautiful way to be with other people.
Looking around, it’s starting to get dark. I’ve been to Woodville once before and decide to head for the almost abandoned freight-train station. There’s probably a likely nook somewhere there.
There’s a car here for some reason. When I go and say hello I discover it’s a security guard keeping an eye on some rolling stock that’s parked on the rails here.
Talking to the guard, he’s more than happy for me to spend the evening talking with him to keep his and my boredom at bay. At some point late in the night there’s a changing of the guard and I go and find a way into one of the very abandoned waiting rooms and bed down. I’m aware that it’s getting colder each night. We are heading into winter, and I’m heading south, right into it. I’m really glad I’ve got this minus ten sleeping bag. (I bought with some of my willow money.) It seems to do its job very well so far. Good investment.
The next day brings me to just north of Wellington again…
I spend two days with Diana at Paraparaumu and prune her date palm and chop up garden debris. She talks to fill gaps, with no regard to any signs of interest, indifference, murderous intent, suicide attempts or otherwise from me.
Her house is still chock-a-block full of junk. I decide that she is batty but harmless.
I go skipping in town at Woolworths, then go and spend three days at Wayne’s with Rob too. Do lots of computer CD’s for Chris, Leona, Rob and Chris and Dawn. Lose lots of sleep because of it. Computers are bad for my health. Wayne is his normal weird self. He is quite a straight-forward honest kind of chap though and I appreciate him for it. Rob is a rather different kettle of fish, someone who obviously has rather a stressful life and has an awful lot of steam to let off. This in my ordinary humdrum way, I find rather alarming at times. I’m just not party party enough. Or as Rob would put it (with can of beer in hand): ‘WWWOOOOOEEERRRRRGGHHH!!!!!!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!’
Rob and Wayne are really quite opposite. Unnervingly so.
Monday morning at Wayne’s house, Redwood:
I am feeling like I need to grasp my bearings. Lots of factors flying around in an unpinned way.
I give up smoking dope. It’s bad for maintaining good levels of togetherness, motivation and self-esteem though it is good for accepting external situations I suppose. All things considered, I like feeling straight. I don’t really like fuggyness. I wasn’t born fuggy, I didn’t grow up fuggy. I meditate. Meditation is good. I phone Sofie in Belgium, and have a short but lovely chat. I love her; she’s a soul mate. Right now I’m tired and jangly.
I have one and a half months left before I have to leave New Zealand. I have lost focus and haven’t figured what I really want.
Girlfriend; settle down somewhere not English. Work focus. In a shop. More with people, less physical on my back.
Teaching? Would be a good solid focus, though I’m concerned it would be more mentally challenging than I could cope with. Would like to get stuck into a place where I have rights of employment and can stay for longer lengths of time, though I am aware of people that make a lifestyle of swapping between countries for a long time. (Wayne’s Canadian friend who’s been doing it for fifteen years; six months in Canada, six months in New Zealand.)
Go and see Chip Shop Woman? No.
Just go to the south of South Island. I can always come back. Wibble wibble wibble….
I am with Rob and am considering how lucky I am that I don’t have the kinds of stresses that he does with dealing with the abstract world of business obligations and deadlines and people pressures. Why do people give themselves lives like that? MONEY!!!
After meeting such beautiful and kind people like I have been recently, I’m starting to find Rob and Wayne’s combined weirdness a bit too much to bear.
A hop and a skip on the ferry and I’m back on South Island again:
At night in Picton under the wooden ship again. No sign of the earthy buxom Maori gardener.
I hitch a ride with ‘Doodle’ in her van. Thinking my luck is in with this yummy voluptuous blonde Aussie woman, I go down the East Coast with her to Kaikora instead of west as I had planned. I soon discover it’s no go with her; she tells me she’s just met the man of her dreams two weeks ago. Just my luck. I later discover she has no idea what ‘The Holocaust’ was, and is generally all round not such a smart bunny. Lucky escape then maybe. She drops me off at a road leaving Kaikora.
An hour later I discover I’m trying to hitch down a road that only goes for another one mile. It ends in a car park just round a headland from where I am. Well that’s 1-1 draw in the ‘unsmartness of bunnies’ stakes then.
I bump into Doodle on the way back into town, and we say goodbye (again).
Very occasionally, certain types of people that pick me up think they are rescuing me from some kind of imminent danger that only they seem to be aware of; presumably the car-driving ride-giving axe-murderer that must be following them about and would have picked me up if they didn’t.
I hitch a ride with an interesting middle-aged couple driving a swanky car. This is really cool, cos they look just like the kind of people who would never ever give me a ride. They take me all the way into Christchurch, where they recommend a good graveyard to sleep in. What fantastically unusual people. They are well-travelled people who are refreshingly free of the usual ‘Ooh err, isn’t it dangerous’ cobblers.
I am doubly impressed by the matter-of-fact suggestion that a graveyard in the town centre is a good place to sleep. Obviously they are astute judges of character. More people like them please!
The graveyard becomes home for the next three nights. An inch of groundedness.
Scraps…
Reading in Christchurch library about ‘Supersilent’ a Norwegian improvisational jazz/computer types. Hmm. Mildly inspiring.
Travelling with barely enough money for food is like riding a bicycle with no tyres up a beautiful mountain.
Fruit picking is not my first choice of financial occupation. It does have the advantage of me meeting other travellers, but the money is slow to accumulate. It would be nice to earn my money a bit more intelligently.
Scooby dooby doo
Cock a doodle doo
Dooby dooby doo
Didgerydoo.
(So there you go.)
I charge up my stereo at the bus depot, and get the west-wards bound 84 bus to Russley out of town.
After getting off the bus at the wrong place, and accidentally trying to hitch back to Picton, I realise my mistake and head for the 73 that goes across the famous Arthur’s Pass over to Greymouth and the West Coast.
I ride with a young electrical engineer keen to get home to the West Coast and who doesn’t have too much to say.
He drives at breakneck speed and I have to listen to ear-trembling miserable heavy rock for the entire journey. I’m not sure whether I’ve got mountain overload, or it’s my method of carriage that renders the journey quite so discomforting. He’s riding the road like it’s a roaring tarmac roller-coaster.
Having some teenage git on the stereo screaming ‘If you ain’t got a woman, you ain’t got nuthin nuthin nuthin’ over and over again at me certainly doesn’t do much for my sense of occasion.
I’ve had an arduous day already and I feel old and tired. This is the last thing I want.
I watch the bold mountains slowly sliding silently past. I retreat into my imagination, and I know that outside the glass, it’s peaceful and magnificent. I feel strangely cheated.
At the end, I sleep in a dreary bus shelter on the corner of a T-junction. What an insalubrious place to finish an insalubrious day.
Later, I am to become very glad of my dreary shelter as it pisses down with rain rather heavily most of the night. Welcome to the West Coast.
In the morning, I get a ride with a dairy farmer who’d once been on a cricket tour in England and had played a game within the walls of Windsor Castle. He remembers seeing Prince William riding past on a bicycle, and remembers what fine cows the queen had. (Well of course! – they are Royal Cows.) He was surprised to find a farm within the castle walls. (Me too.)
Greymouth or ‘Grey’ as it’s excitingly known by locals, feels I’m alarmed to say, like being in Canada. It’s the low cloud over the mountains, clapboard houses, doom-laden skies and the threat of impending rain that does it. As soon as I write this in my diary it starts raining, threatening to splodge what I’ve written into oblivion and disarm my pen.
I get picked up by a young German woman Lena and Johans her Swiss chap. We drive down to Fox Glacier. (A place uncuriously devoid of mints. Very crap English joke. Sorry.)
On the way we have a ‘What’s your favourite music?’ conversation and I get them to listen to ‘Carolyn’s Fingers’ a Cocteau Twins tune and one of the most wonderful pieces of pop music ever. When I was in a loony bin years ago, I remember this being the tune I played on a day we shared our favourite music. Strange how times change but my tastes haven’t.
Find some good sayings on the wall in the hostel the two Germanic types decide to stay at:
Challenge: Winners must have two things: Definite goals and burning desire to achieve them.
Goals: Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
Team Work: You can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.
Success: There is no trying, only doing and not doing.
Neck Ache: What you get from reading too many highly elevated signs on walls.
Okay, I made the last one up.
Feeling better about life today.
I walk about one kilometre down the road, and reach the turning for the Glacier access road. I stash most of my stuff under a bush and start walking up a road that passes alongside a broad shallow river. Each of it’s myriad stoney tumblings culminating in a relentless sparkling and echoing roar that passes along the valley bottom. I camp out halfway up the road just as it’s getting dark.
I’m in a huge wide bottomed-valley. Miles away in the distance, huge mountains covered in trees with snow on top. This really does feel like Lord Of The Rings country. I can just imagine an army of ferocious warriors marching over the wide flat river bed or Gandalf standing arms outstretched on top of a mountain pretending to be Jesus.
It’s full moon and I have the place completely to myself.
I can see snow being blown by the wind off the tops of the peaks; it looks like the Northern lights. I see a shooting star. The atmosphere is so clear, for the first time ever I can actually see the individual flames of the shooting star.. How on earth can a bunch of atmospheric gases make a rock burst into flames? If it was made of match heads glued together I could understand it. Nature’s amazing. Amazing enough to stop me worrying for a bit.
It must have been minus eleven last night cos my sleeping bag is only designed for minus ten. I woke up with ice all over the inside of the piece of thin blue poly-propylene tarpaulin I am using as my tent. And I’m only halfway down the country. Blimey.
I feed on hot porridge and kick the ice off the inside of the tarp before I can pack it away.
Today I’m going to see a glacier. Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh!
Fabulousness.
The glacier is pretty neat. I ignore a ‘Don’t come up here it’s naughty’ sign and trek uphill alongside the edge of the glacier’s reach. It’s a muddy dirty spectacle and easy to follow. Clearly very many other people before me have also totally ignored the sign and I can’t hear any distant screams for help so I guess it must be okay.
This pathway is obviously no danger, but trying to walk out over the glacier would just be an invitation to disappear into a frozen netherworld forever.
On the way back out I thumb a ride with two young women that have also walked up to see the glacier. One of whom I have a strong feeling I should hang out with. But don’t, as per bleedin’ usual; they are going north and I am going south. Pre-determined route wins over spontaneous meeting. She’s of a scruffy Gothy inclination and ‘Wants to make the films that Hollywood does not’. Anyway that’s last we see of each other.
My guts yearn as I make the mistake of not going the same way as them. I stick my bottom lip and my thumb out again and get a ride with Alina (kiwi) and Ethan (Canadian), two volunteer mountain hut wardens on holiday. We connect reasonably well, get stoned and then stop and have a bonfire for the night. They sleep in their car and I sleep in my tent. It’s a good job I am pretty wrecked, cos it absolutely hammers down with rain, and the rain does a fairly systematic job of demolishing my tent which in my stonedness I have managed to rig up spectacularly badly anyway.
In the morning I disentangle from the collapsed plastic mess, impressed with myself for having slept so well.
We fuggily travel onwards to Wanaka, down towards snowboarding country.
They have a ‘Friendship Book’ that they offer to new friends they meet along the way, I decide to write in it that ‘the landscape is ‘rugged up to the eyeballs.”
We stop for a poo break at the wonderfully blandly named ‘Pleasant Flat Recreation Area’, which is then more than made up for name-wise just down the road in a yin-yang kind of way;
We find ourselves getting caught up in a minor tailback at a place called ‘The Gates Of Haast’. It’s an old stone bridge crossing a wildy roaring greenish glacial river crashing across huge old granite boulders. Everything has stopped for a road gritting machine. The combination of science fiction name with dull worldly activity intrigues me. Like Gandalf doing the hoovering or something.
We stop later in a cafe for a much needed fry-up and I chat to an Aussie guy with his Hong Kong wife. We chat about the exotic joys of travel. This is another one of those conversations that for me is always life affirming and more than the sum of its parts. To step into a roadside cafe expecting a cup of tea and a bun and to get to meet someone who has chosen to live outside the normal prescribed box always does something good for my self-esteem. It’s always good to be reminded that there are other people who live something like I do too (apart from backpacking students, who usually just bug me slightly for some reason).
We reach Wanaka and go see the instantly forgettable ‘Kill Bill 2’ (not my choice) in the Cinema Paradiso which has sofas and armchairs for seats. The cinema is famous in New Zealand. (Admittedly it doesn’t take that much effort to get famous in New Zealand.) On the left side of the auditorium, half a Morris Minor has been hacked about and turned into a seat. One woman has tried sitting in it, but has clambered out of it again in a fit of self-consciousness.
That night they book into a hostel and I sleep in their car. We are going to go snowboarding, but it rains.
I get the feeling Ethan and Alina are into some sort of three way sex thing or maybe I’m just too stoned. Ethan seems to be a bit defensive and a bit of a know all, though he does have a very interesting life up in Nunuatuktut in Nunavut taking part in a social care scheme for the Inuit up there.
Next day we go our separate ways at Queenstown. It’s still raining and a bit grim. I get a ride with two slightly unpleasant stoned guys who’ve been out on the piss the night before and gone to a prostitute for the first time. They tell the woman they are called ‘Geoff and John’ (who they aren’t). They tell me that the whole experience was crap; ‘Not like having a real woman’. I somehow suspect that this isn’t her fault; them being horrifically pissed probably had something to do with it.
At Glenorchy I discover that I’ve come the wrong way to get to Milford Sound.
The region is very mountainous and to correct my route will involve doing a lot of back-tracking.
It’s still raining. I find a large porch-way in a village hall to sleep in. It’s all too dark and depressing to stay there, so I dump some of my stuff somewhere dark and head for the pub. Sitting next to me at the bar is another English chap called John. We sit and talk inevitably about Good Old England. John had left the Motherland for the adventure of it after he had split with his girlfriend at the time and didn’t know what to do with himself. Now he’s all grown up and is angling for a managerial position with Watties, New Zealand’s baked bean giants. Meeting up with John changes the whole outlook of my evening…
I spend the night sleeping in John’s huge black shiney SUV whilst John enjoys the luxury of a Bed and Breakfast.
We spend the next day in Queenstown booking skiing for him and snowboarding for me. The next day we go up Cardrona ski-slope and have a great day. I am unsure about spending 150 dollars in one day, but it is great fun; it is about as difficult as I had expected it would be. By the end of the day I have almost mastered the beginners slope. I fall over less than I succeed. I get it up to about sixty-five percent control and thirty-five percent luck. I do almost rip off some blokes gonads though – I am dodging a slow moving skier and in the process go straight into some bloke down on his knees. The end of my board goes straight between his legs. Ooh, nasty.
Apart from nearly ruining some poor bloke, It has been a highly satisfying day – I’ve been wanting to try out snowboarding ever since Canada. I’ve been practising in my head a few times too, and I think that must have helped. In the evening we look at each others holiday photos. I’m kind of regretting not having a camera any more since the weather and my rucksack finally killed it.
John is on a five month sabbatical. He’s lived in Napier on the east coast of the North Island for the last twelve years and originally was a goth from Windsor. He’s just split up from his partner and his two and a half year old daughter and is in the process of ‘finding himself’. He’s going through a whole load of processing stuff which he talks about a lot and seems to be enjoying releasing his pent up spring.
He’s pretty easy to be open with. It’s a really nice break for me to spend a bit of time with someone in an easy kind of way and to be able to have a decent conversation.
He asks me what it’s like being on the move all the time, and don’t I get lonely?
I tell him:
I meet hundreds of interesting people and with some I have what I describe as ‘gloriously superficial friendships’; In the brief half an hour that I might spend with a person they will usually share with me all their ‘best’ bits; how they think life works or maybe some dark secret that they can’t tell to anyone that features in their everyday life. These brief encounters can sometimes reveal some gems from the people it’s my privilege to meet.
On the way out of Glenorchy we slide on some ice and come off the road in a fairly gentle but still slightly scary kind of way. We are very lucky; we land at a slight angle with absolutely no damage to the vehicle or us. If we’d come off the other side of the road we would have dropped steeply a few hundred feet and down into an icy lake. We sit there, shocked into uselessness.
A passing Queenslander on holiday comes and offers help; moral support is a great thing at a time like this, but luckily we are able to get out surprisingly easily for a two ton SUV.
We fiddle about in Queenstown then I drive us to Te Anau whilst John focusses on calling Watties to do his job interview over the phone. Ending the day, John books into a hostel whilst I sleep under a huge gum tree by the lake, and nestle into its spreading roots. I wake up with all my usual lifestyle quandaries racing round me nut.
I exchange hellos with a passing early morning photographer. Two Tuis are thrashing about and tootling above me dramatically.
Southern New Zealand has a very small Maori population. Maoris predominantly live on the North Island and historically came to the southern end looking for green-stone (jade). It’s bizarre that whilst at one time the Maoris were here looking for their special rock, the later new Europeans and Chinese incomers were out here looking for theirs; gold. (This was happening in the mid nineteenth century.) One lot’s treasure worthless to the other lot.
Most of the Chinese disappeared back to China when the gold-rush was over; there was a lot of racism. (Oh that makes a change.)
Only about two percent of Otago is of Maori descent. Scots names abound, and you even see place names that are a mixture of Scots and Maori e.g, Gleniti (‘Small Valley’).
I dream I am caught up in a Viking raid. I’m not sure whose side I am on, (a Pictish/Scots lot I think) but the Vikings are coming. I have no weapons, but I pull lots of arrows out from somewhere. There are lots of archers but I have no bow to fight back with, so I just throw them instead.
I have had this dream in various forms quite a few times over the years. Usually I’m in a Native American tribe. We are always under siege and the odds are never on our side. One time we are Celts versus Romans.
I read this sign-board describing a little local history:
Road building up to Milford: ‘It was about 160 miles from Invercargill to the tunnel portal… A Hindu gentleman bought up vegetables and sometimes more profitable cargo. Alcoholic liquor was not permitted and so numerous consignments were addressed to ‘Clark Gable’ and other exotic nom de plumes’. (D.U White, Engineer-in-Chief.)
The road from Te Anau to Milford was built 1929 by workers with only shovels and barrows. They were held up in the winter by avalanches and floods.
Early Maori came here long before Europeans for Pounami (green-stone); original Maori names here are Kotuku (Martins Bay). Piopiotahi (Milford Sound)
We get to Milford and enjoy the spectacular view. I am wishing I had a rifle so that I could shoot the irritating selfish git shitting all over the peace on his stupid pointless jet-ski. God they are such a crap invention. Only to be used in places of restful tranquillity. Wankers.
Knowing what we know after our slip, it’s scary driving back from Milford; we are in avalanche territory too.
After the Homer Tunnel, John and I go our separate ways after an invitation from him to come and visit him in Napier sometime. He drops me off at a hiker’s shelter by the road then I stash a load of my stuff in the bush; I have a mountain to climb nearby, Harris Saddle, and there’s no point in carrying it all if I’m coming back this way anyway.
I hitch a short ride with a German in a hire van – I tell him he has to drive slower – it’s dangerous round here. I walk down the Hollyford track and sleep out by the road. One car goes past all night.
Another short ride in the morning in the swanky bus of a local tour operator. He drops me off at ‘Murray’s’ which he recommends as a good starting point for my ascent. Murray’s is a quirky looking place. Murray quite plainly is a very grumpy old man. I buy some toothpaste and some chocolate digestives that turn out to be three and a half years out of date and very chewy and tasteless and possibly some of the most disheartening things I have ever eaten.
Another one kilometre on, I leave a note at the bottom of the worryingly-named ‘Deadman’s Trail’ in a very obvious spot, saying who I am, when I went up, and when I expect to come down again. I thought this would be a good idea; that maybe I might be about to bite off more than I can chew. Not that I have ever chewed a mountain before.
I am told that it’s a very steep climb and I would need crampons and ice axes to reach the summit of Harris Saddle itself. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere near the snow actually; just above the tree line would be good. (I’m two thirds of the way up as I write.)
For the past few days I’ve been thinking with the ‘Something Amazing Is Coming My Way/Expect a Miracle’ principle.
After a hard bout of walking/climbing/ascending it comes to me that I really love the idea of working in a free school a la Summerhill. I register that I feel very good and peaceful about this idea. At the end of the day I set up camp and almost succeed in lighting a fire. Oh well I get a bit warm, and now at least I smell nice… Exhaustion means that I sleep very well indeed.
In the morning I idle under the trees and eventually haul my motivation together and head further up the mountainside through the bush. As I ascend further, it starts to get snowy underfoot. The going levels out for quite a while through a boggy snowy wooded area. Eventually, going upwards again, I reach a clear area a couple of feet deep with crusted snow, just about solid enough to walk on its surface.
I realise that to go any further would be dangerous. Taking in the view, I attempt to find the poignancy of the moment. Somehow in my mind, climbing up here had come to represent the peak of the whole trip. Climbing mountains isn’t something I generally indulge in, so the moment seems even rarer to me.
I take all day to bounce back down. Large parts of the route pass through a windy muddy track with large stone steps in many places. Coming up it was quite a challenge to some pretty unused leg muscles, but coming back down I have a job keeping up with my own momentum; it requires some keenly aware leaps and bounds.
On the lower part of the descent I am accompanied by a fantail, who is a very welcome companion. My legs have gone like jelly. I am exhilarated at the same time as being rather surprised and very grateful. Coming down so rapidly, it’s a wonder that I didn’t make any wrong moves and hurt myself; it’s as if the subconscious takes charge.
At the bottom I still have another eight kilometres to get to the ‘main road’. Walking is an unpleasantly strange experience, like my trousers are suddenly full of big lead weights. The flatness of the road feels utterly bizarre too; it’s as if my legs have lost all their intelligence.
At twilight, just in time, I hitch a ride with a South African family from Cape Town. I get them to stop off at the place where I’d previously stashed my gear and I manage to find my stuff from inside the bush even though it’s now dark. It took a little explaining to get them to understand why this random hitch-hiker wants them to stop in the middle of nowhere in the dark. Fortunately they are very nice people and we have connected very comfortably.
Some way on they drop me at Knob’s Flat where there is a visitors centre. It’s darned cold but I sleep in the toilet which has an electric heater. (Oh WOW! Luxury!)
In the morning, I am invited to have tea with the warden who finds me when he comes to open the place in the morning. A well-timed cup of tea is very good for the soul.
Back in the Great Outdoors again after a decent scrub-down in the loos, I hitch to Te Anau with two young Spaniards where I go skipping (dumpster-diving) and get chicken sausages and organic yoghurt. The chicken sausages are dodginess central, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I email Booroobin Democratic School (a ‘Free’ school in Australia I am considering volunteering at), mend my broken boots, and hitch nine kilometres out of town with an American and a Kiwi. I camp in some bush overlooking a lovely big bend in a river. I get a good fire going and cook the sausages for tea whilst listening to Lenny Henry on the mp3 machine (English comedian). Staving off an initial loneliness, a fine evening is had by all.
In the morning I hitch to Manapouri with the first car that comes past. I then spend most of the day trying to get out of the bloody place again. I get very pissed off at the sporadic traffic; eventually acting out my worst-case scenario of leaping up and down in the road yelling my nuts off, which strange as it may seem, always fails to get me a ride. But fuck ’em anyway. They’re all a bunch of bastards.
Eventually the Great Norse God ‘Givethepoorsodabreak’ finds me a ride with a scrap metal man on his way to Lumsdon. I have no idea where Lumsden is, but most importantly it’s not HERE. I gibber my thanks at the miracle of there still being decent human beings in the world. It’s quite possible to end up doubting any memory of there ever being decent folk sometimes.
Back on saner ground again.
I travel to Winton with a young couple. We discuss the importance of parents encouraging their kids to do positive things with their lives, especially when they live in quiet rural areas where the easiest things to get excited about are Play Stations and drugs. Its one thing to visit beautiful isolated rural spots and admire the scenery, but I often wonder how the people that live in these places actually fare.
The back-country is a place where it might be possible to thrive in solitude, or if you are unlucky, get bored beyond belief and go spectacularly bonkers with no-one around to keep you on track. The great wildernesses of the world often seems to go hand-in-hand with alcoholism.
Upon arrival in Winton, I dine out on chips and pumpkin soup (brilliant combination!) and then go and sleep in the croquet ground on the other side of the road. What kind of town has a croquet ground in its town centre? A very very dull one quite possibly.
Next day; It’s grey – unusually so – and I have to talk myself up from being a grump; eating almost only skipped chicken sausages for the last two days (eurgh!), having to wait five or six hours to get out of a tight arse little place called Manapouri (no-one should ever try to hitch there, ever), and I have become somewhat kippered from sitting next to camp-fires.
My legs still hurt like hell from all the up and down of Harris Saddle. I work out that since Nelson I’ve been living on an average of ten dollars (three quid) a day, and that’s including buying a swanky sleeping bag and going snowboarding.
I am feeling all ‘travelled out’ and have to have a mental fantasy of what I would do if I could do anything in the world: Stick all my clothes in a washing machine, have a bath for about an hour, sit on a big squishy sofa in front of a TV watching either ‘Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines’ or an old Ealing comedy and be snuggled into a duvet drinking hot chocolate and eating tomato soup and toast and have a nice happy cat on my lap.
In Winton I buy three black bananas and some cheap rice crispies and some other out-of-date stuff for four bucks.
Hitching out of town it’s zero degrees, wet on the ground and in a strange way, pleasantly dour in a way that reminds me of hitching in England in Winter.
After Invercargill, I shall be heading back northwards to the warmth again.
New Zealand memento: sound recordings and pictures of Tuis and fantails. seedlings to grow of Punga, cabbage trees and feijoas. Things to remind me of New Zealand. Actually I quite fancy having a tattoo of a fantail (as well as one of a crow, my other favourite bird).
Having come as far south as you can go without island-hopping, I try hitching out of Invercargill with almost no success. I get a ride back into town and get the bus to Gore and go to see Shrek 2 at the cinema.
At the cinema I get to
A) Not be in my head.
B) Watch a nice escapist film.
C) Warm up and dry out properly.
I come out in a better frame of mind.
I decide that I like Gore. Gore is one of those quiet unassuming little places that exists solely for the purpose of selling gum boots and sheep dip. I am met with a considerable degree of friendliness, which after the non-events of the last couple of days, is very welcome and strangely disarming. I sleep out in a nook by a church.
I spent the morning in the library looking at architectural creations made by idiosyncratic type people. There’s too much possibility out there for me to want to settle down into some unstimulating career.
At Puroroa, the middle of nowhere Southland New Zealand. I am beside an empty road in the middle of the night. I am under a line of old pine trees and hemmed in by huge circular straw bales to keep me slightly warmer. I am in need of a bath and a clothes wash. I have been living off rice crispies and meat pies for the last two days. I go to sleep as soon as it gets dark.
I am alive! Despite whatever might be generally regarded as hardship, right down inside of me, deep in my sleeping bag is the realisation that I am alive and surrounded by the creative force of LIFE.
I’m not going to call it religion, that’s way too narrow. I’ve been reading books about tree-houses, making pottery, about tiles. Some other books about how people live in other parts of the world, different foods, gods, cultures and colours; all alive.
I have my arms and legs, I can see, hear, smell touch, taste and make sounds. I have probably another fifty years in which to explore it all.
I meet some ‘hoons’ who give me a ride in their car to here. What are they doing with their lives? Smoking, drinking and just driving round. What if they decide to explore their creativity and put on an art exhibition, form a band, put on a theatre show or do meals on wheels for old people? They could make their little town just a little bit bigger. It’s easy to become bogged down in the hardships of living, but beyond all that, trees still grow, and flowers will still push up through cracks in the pavement. If I am breathing I still have possibility on my side. I don’t believe in god, I believe in possibility.
I have a fantasy about standing on the streets on London or San Francisco selling ‘Alien Penis Coffee’; wearing a silver alien suit, talking with a silly alien voice and serving hot coffee from out of a silver-painted dildo between my legs. Why? Because for me, it’s life affirming. A chance to make people laugh and to give people something unexpected. Proof of possibility.
I seem to be coming back round full circle to when I was a teenager, but with a little bit more comprehension of ‘the human condition’.
I’ve met an a lot of pretty cool people. I’m amazed by how much variety there is to people.
Having seen so much ‘from the outside’ and having tip-toed down a few ‘edges’, why would I want to go and blow it all by going and narrowing my life down to one type of experience?
If I must, then let it be the kind of living that bubbles over with creative expression, with enthusiasm and dancing and singing and music and beauty and by holding out an open hand to those that need it and are keen to express their aliveness.
I have slept well, safe in a good sleeping bag, ear-plugs in, free from unwanted road traffic noise. Out of sight surrounded by a straw bale wall.
I wake up this morning to a pale insipid pinky blue sky. The field I am in is clods ploughed earth, frozen solid with a rime of frost all over it. Where I am, under the trees, is still cold but frost free.
I try for water at semi-derelict gas station just across the road from where I have been sleeping. The water is either disconnected or it has frozen in the pipes.
After packing up I have to walk. A nights sleep leaves me with a slow metabolism, and very little warm blood passes through my fingers and toes when packing up.
It’s a process I do with a complaining growl in my voice and it leaves me with a knot of tension in my guts afterwards.
Walking out onto the nearby icy road I mentally brace myself. This could potentially be an awful day: the bitter cold combined with an apparent southern disregard for hitchers can seriously wind me up.
Six cars go past and I get a ride with Paul who’s twenty-four and runs sheep with his seven dogs. Boy am I oh so grateful for the ride. This guy saves me from a day of probable hell gone frozen.
He’s off to see his daughter in Dunedin. What is it with blokes in the southern hemisphere being unable to hold a relationship together?
Result! No more hitching for me today.
We stop for breakfast en route – I have Hoki (fish) and Chips. An odd choice but good value. Anyway with my current random lifestyle, breakfast may very well end up being lunch and even possibly dinner too if I really screw up.
At Dunedin Paul gives me a bag full of rump steak and we say our farewells. He tells me I should write a book. (D’you know, I might just do that…)
I wander into town, drooling over consumer goodies that would look good in my rucksack and then head for the nearest hostel. I urgently need to wash everything as I’ve gotten pretty stinky.
The hostel is run by an unhappy Chinese chap called ‘Bruce’ (real name is ‘Moo’) who’s studying western plant medicine when he’s not running the hostel. The Chinese get loads of abuse from the Kiwis, and I suspect this is the root of his misery.
He says he can’t wait to go home and continue his medicine studies. All cleaned up, I cook my steak and spend all evening twanging guitar and chatting with Chris from Perth, Scotland who’s spent the last year in Australia. He’s been in New Zealand three days, and is still dressed for Bondi Beach. It’s great to talk to someone from back home and we empathise on our mutual guitar playing inability, the crapiness of ‘Kiwi Experience’ tours and not having much money. A fine chap. I give him my road map of New Zealand and tell him that instead of using New Zealand’s crappy buses, he should save his money and take up hitching and have an adventure.
I’m in the top bunk of a bed that’s squeakier than a bunch of rats in a punch up. I try sleeping on the sofa in the TV room which works fine until some miserable bastard decides that watching golf at 3 am is somehow very important. Presumably they put golf on at that time of day specifically to send insomniacs back to sleep.
Sadly, it has the reverse effect on me, and I feel that I have been short-changed on at least two counts.
In the morning, Me and Chris are going to go and look at wildlife on the peninsula. The Korean woman in the tourist information building in town says ‘Do you just want albatrosses, or albatrosses with penguins?’ My sleep-deprived head can’t cope with the way this woman is presenting the whole thing as if she’s selling me a Chinese take-away.
‘Um, yes, I think I’ll have the penguins, and the albatrosses as well please. Does the rice come with that or do I have to order that separately?’
Either way sixty bucks each is waaaay too much money. Chris says farewell and goes and phones his brother to plan his next move, and I go and check emails; one from John Hanson the wannabe baked bean manager and a YES from Booroobin free school in Australia. I spend two hours reading about the school. (A ‘free’ school in the UK usually means a school that doesn’t follow state guidelines and where in some schools, children get to choose how, what and when they learn thus giving more focus to a child’s sense of self-determination.)
I walk out of town and hitch a ride from Portobello Rd (absolutely nothing like the one in London) with a half English/half Kiwi chap and his young son, and they take me halfway to Portobello the village.
It’s lovely out here. It’s like I’ve suddenly been transported to a misty Cornish village. Nice vibes.
Two bars of chocolate later, standing in the drizzle I get another ride with a couple who graciously drive me out all the way to the end of the peninsula.
We talk of freedom and confidence (in regard to free schooling). She wants to go to Mexico, so I tell her about WWOOFing. Getting out of the car, another couple see me in my waterproofs, carrying all my stuff.
‘Ooh! That looks miserable!’ says the thoughtless onlooker,
To which I respond ‘Naah! It’s laaarvely!’
Along with a small but dedicated audience (never mind the drizzle or the fading daylight), we watch the penguins come trotting out of the water at dusk. About twelve of them, one foot high. I see them for about fifteen seconds and then they wisely disappear into the shadows away from me and the small bunch of Swiss German tourists gathered here. I am surprised the penguins were so tiny. The Swiss German tourists on the other hand are the same size they usually tend to be.
I rig up my tarp over a picnic bench and settle down for a very cosy evening. The rain is thrashing away on the tarp and being right next a cliff, I hear the sound of the waves making a deep bass ‘wuump’ as they slam into the rocks in a tight little cove below me..
The two sounds together is like poetry. Like the high notes and low notes on a piano.
I wake up feeling satisfied. Right. Now to go see me some albatrosses (no rice).
I’ve never seen an albatross.
Incredibly, they fly all the way round the world landing only at a few points in New Zealand, South America and one or two Pacific Islands. Their huge wings mean that they can just hang in the air and let the wind carry them along like hang-gliders.
By gliding very close to the surface of the sea, they are able to trap the air between their wings and the water below them and this creates an air pressure that they able to glide along on with practically no effort, indefinitely.
One of nature’s greatest bits of evolution I think, and I imagine the albatross would agree with me.
Albatrosses (not albatrii?) have only one mating partner in their whole life and can recognise their partner in amongst a whole squawking flock even if they have been apart for a year or longer. These ones that I am looking at here on the tip of the headland are involved in the very arduous job of being asleep. Fair enough if you’ve just hung-glid round the planet. (hang-glided? Hung-glod? Hong-gludded?)
I hitch a ride back into town with the warden and go window-shopping again.
I bump into one of the blokes from the hostel and he plugs me for Words of Advice about Travelling Round The World. After my Helpful Tips he too suggests that I write a book…
Hitching out of town I end up getting a lift with another pair of English social workers who take me home and feed me. Their home has that certain eighties English student digs feel about it which is kind of satisfying. It’s like stepping into a different and familiar reality for a moment.
Some time later in Temuka…
I pitch my tarp over another picnic table in the middle of a small 1950s housing estate, decide it is a miserable way to spend the evening, and go to look for a suitable pub. I chat with someone called Gill and his missus; they don’t take me home for a warm night in. I feel forlorn about not having a woman in my life, which is only accentuated by my current lack of enthusiasm for sleeping rough in winter.
Back in my temporary den, I listen to Eddie Izzard to take me somewhere else. I sleep well; wake up at daybreak, and it’s very cold and frosty outside the tarp. I wake up feeling lonely and wondering what I can do to make the situation better.
Yesterday I was feeling fed up with having to explain who I am and the ins and outs of travelling over and over and over again; I am bored of answering the same old questions with the same old answers. I have been doing it almost no-stop for about two years. I decide that next time someone asks me what I do for a living I’ll tell them ‘Go places that interest me, meet interesting people and try to find as much self-expression as I can.’
I kick all the frost off the tarp. A Maori chap approaches, and we talk. He too spent last night dossing in a bush just a little way off under some trees. We have a very good conversation. It’s nice to meet someone in my own position. A relief in fact. An elderly chap comes out of his house and over to us to find out what we’re up to (either friendliness or nosiness I’m not sure which) and he invites me in for a cup of tea to warm up after he has come back from going down the shop to get the morning paper. When the old man goes, me and the Maori guy have a smoke. Whilst stoned, the painfulness of having to put away icy gear is registering in a strangely detached way whilst I am doing it, enabling me to pack without having to stop and warm my hands every thirty seconds or so.
I realise afterwards that I’ve had no ‘defences’ up at all with dossing Maori chap, which I realise is a very good thing indeed. He points out to me that it is only me that is being invited into the old man’s house. ‘You know how things are Bro. Don’t worry, I’m used to people like that. Go on, you go and get yourself a nice cup of tea.’ He shrugs his shoulders in a people-can-be-weird sort of way, and I feel quite strange that he’s not coming in with me. I almost don’t go in. I’m not sure what the right thing to do is exactly.
I go in with the old fella and we chat over tea in his house about farming, genetic engineering and such-like. He seems like an all-right sort of a chap. I always find it deeply weird how apparently nice people can at the same time turn out to be racists too.
Feeling mostly good about my morning so far, apart from a mild niggling sense of betraying the Maori guy. I go to the shop to get a bar of chocolate to munch out on, and when I come outside the shop to fiddle with my bags, the bin next to me is full of yesterday’s rolls, sandwiches and wrapped shortbread. Excellent!
After the sandwich find I sit by the road and do nothing but relax. I can’t be arsed to do anything. I’m nearly always on the move. Sitting on the grass spacing out is my equivalent of sitting on the sofa watching TV I guess.
A bloke yesterday suggested I could get residency into New Zealand easily by becoming a policeman. God only knows what kind of policeman I would make. Not really my cup of tea somehow.
Travelling has become practically a profession. I seem to be increasingly regarded as some kind of travel expert to some, a vagabond to be taken in, looked after and filled with food by others, and by a very few to be regarded with open distaste. It’s all becoming increasing strange.
Martha Beck. Found in Christchurch library:
‘The social self (superego) is avoidance-based, conforming and hard-working; the essential self (id) is attraction-based, inventive and playful.
The essential self is incorruptible. Energy levels are it’s navigational tools.
In circumstances that poison your core, all the subtle mechanisms that make for smooth social behaviour get gummed. (Link between interest and energy levels – near coma chatting to in-laws, but up all night reading a murder mystery.)
It’s not what happens to people but between people that matters.
Apply yourself to fulfilment. What is happening in your life when you were last ill?
Why listen to those who do not have your best interests at heart. Which activities cause you to forget time? With whom do you deeply relax?
Self and context are united through empathy and through joy.
Happiness is humanity’s truest ambition, and all else is compensatory.
Due to our basically good inner nature, we can be happy only if we live moral lives, complete with integrity, compassion and sometimes self-sacrifice.
Joyful activity adds real value to the world.
I don’t know what the hell is going on, and that’s okay.
There are no rules, and that’s okay.
Everything is changing, and that’s okay.’
End.
Christchurch onward.
Its a Friday. Back in Christchurch I phone Tamariki free school. I hang out for the weekend putting pockets in my Swan-dri that John Hanson gave me. (‘Swannys’ are thick checked farmers shirts, very popular in New Zealand.) I hang out in the library and put some non hitch-hiking silent relaxed cosy armchair warmth back into my bones. After that I go and apply for teaching English in Japan jobs. The woman at the WINZ (Work and Income New Zealand) is looking at me like I am something thats got stuck to the bottom of her shoe, a very unusual occurrence; this only ever used to happen in the more unfriendly ends of England. Odd that I should encounter it here. Well that’s dole offices for you I suppose.
I am starting to feel like a homeless bum, which is pretty much what I seem to be when I’m hitching around being an international tourist. Summer travelling is fine. The sunshine makes everyone feel that little bit more relaxed, that little bit more open. In winter it becomes a concerted effort to stave off the wearing effects of the cold, to maintain a certain level of warmth and dryness. Psychologically everything is just that little bit harder.
I end up getting stressed about the teaching in Japan thing, feeling like its too much newness. I don’t have the required ‘spring’ of internal resources to get me there from here.
Sunday night I meet some seventeen year old kid who’s full of bullshit bravado, but basically is trying to steer clear of drugs.
I get all paternal over him. He invites me to stay at his place, but all his stories seem to involve trouble as a punch-line, so I make my excuses and tootle off. I find a strange spot, a half constructed shopping mall with quite an old fashioned Victorian style about it. There’s a light coating of concrete dust everywhere. It’s quiet in here and the acoustics are lovely. I sit playing guitar to myself. Occasionally people wander through. A gang of rowdy but friendly teenagers all about thirteen ask me if I am a bum. It’s curious how when I am in the sticks I am a traveller to talk with. In the city I become an almost anonymous statistic.
Earlier on in the day a friendly woman in the Starmart news and chocolate shop is asking me what I am doing with my day and manages to mishear my reply of ‘reading’ as ‘drinking’ which is a bit confusing and humiliating. I guess she’s already decided what I am all about. It puts a knot in my stomach even though I think she is well-meaning. There are certain people in the world that will go out of their way to be nice to you if you look like you are only just scraping by. It’s weird when I’m on the receiving end of that.
Monday morning I visit Tamariki Democratic School. I spend three days in total at the school, spending my evenings between sleeping under some nice cosy bushes in a nearby scrap of park next to a minor river. The first day at the school I spend only talking to the adults mostly, asking all the usual questions that they must get. The second day a few of the kids are coming up to me, asking me who I am, showing me round and getting me to do stuff with them. In the morning I take part in the siege of a castle, after lunch I play guitar with a couple of the older lads and after that I end dressing up as Elvis with a nine year old girl who is also dressed as Elvis. She’s Dude one and I’m Dude two. We swan round the entire school making endless grand entrances. Wot a larf!
I think if I am never to have any children of my own, then being part of a democratic (free) school would be a great way to be around kids. Right now I think I may have found a vocation in life.
Misconceptions about New Zealand
When you think of New Zealand you’ll think of Lord Of The Rings and you’ll think of sheep. New Zealand’s famous for them. There’s ten sheep to every person. You’d be forgiven for thinking that your average kiwi will be obsessed with them, will go starry eyed and knock-kneed over the supposedly prolific woolly maggot.
Actually I think I see more deer; but no-ones going on about them either. I think it must be a southern English thing to write off whole nations as mere sheep stations (i.e. Wales). I think it must be sheep envy.
Dunedin is the Gaelic name for Edinburgh and it looks nothing like it’s namesake. The locals don’t sound Scottish. One or two Victorian Scots terraces and a vague burr to the accent that sounds as much American as Scots.
Christchurch has a narrow river – the Oxford – with weeping willows and one or two humped bridges with twiddly ironwork. Ta da! Oxford England!
I think I’m having a cynical moment.
CHCH (Christchurch) July 21st
Hmm… Okay chaps. A smattering of conflict regarding whether to go for teaching English in Japan. (Then follows a whole ream of mental noodling crud too dreary to type out for this…)
Full moon, Christchurch.
I guess I’ve got numerous ‘reasons’ for feeling down: barely any money, sleeping out every night in sub-zero temperatures, rarely any friends around, being ripped off. (First by Brett in Melbourne and now by Dan in Tauranga.) It feels like I’m getting plenty of practice of being in the shit. Plenty of chances to feel abandoned by life, like a baby when it’s mother walks out the door. Each time it happens, I have to brace myself. Watch for the reactions. What does the reaction achieve in me emotionally and mentally? That’s my bottom line. Anything else is missing the point; leaving me open to victim-hood and closed away from hopefulness and the possibility of change.
This I guess is growing up. I almost put ‘just’ growing up, but I dropped the ‘just’ because it’s a wonderful experience in a weird way. Like straining to give birth maybe.
All that from sitting with myself alone every night from dusk til dawn.
I suppose the feelings of loneliness are being replaced by something more meaningful and useful. Maybe I’m just high cos the moons up. I don’t want to presume having really climbed any particular psychological mountain. That’s usually just asking for trouble.
Thinking a lot this evening about people I know and love in Norfolk; About Paul and Helen and Andy, how much I still feel their warmth; though conversely I still run frown their politics. I’ve always felt there is something childish about devoting so much energy to decrying things. Maybe it’s just my own unwillingness or inability. I’ve never been an ‘ist’ or into ‘isms’. I figure sitting on the fence is an objective place to sit.
Climb down on any side and the first thing that happens is that you automatically shut out half the world. Maybe I’m right maybe I’m wrong.
If anything is important to me now, it’s an ever increasing vigilance over my own tendency to treat myself like a victim.
Climbing out of it is like re-discovering the joy of salad after having spent years of eating cheese and onion pasties and chocolate.
I guess it’s developing an ability to mentally view the emotional distress and choose to do the Right Thing rather than drown in self-indulging pity.
Having said all that, I’m still getting large doses of mental overload I don’t know what to do with regarding ‘Where what and who with’.
I guess that’s the time when the emotional response comes into it’s own. I don’t know; I only just thought of that.
(This is the type of stuff you write when you spend too many evenings outside in Winter in the dark with barely any money to spend on fun things.)
Spotted in Christchurch town centre, van with ‘Schindler Elevators and Escalators Service Team’. Schindler’s Lifts no less.
From Christchurch I get an evening bus and sleep somewhere random and likely looking out at the north of the town. It’s minus five, I sleep lightly and the next morning I wait a dozy three hours for a ride. Eventually an Irish guy who has hitched down the East Coast of Africa gives me a ride. He drops me off halfway to Takaka. I go into a roadside cafe where I talk English things with an English kiwi. The sun is shining, it’s a bit chilly but with a nice cup of tea inside me and an English chat, it’s turning out to be quite a nice day!
I get a ride with Raimond, a German woodworker from Takaka who is very easy to talk to. (We talk about death, including both our mothers.) After him, I wait a whole three minutes and get a ride with a Maori woman, who I have a really interesting conversation with about language and culture (though I’m buggered if I can remember what we said). I get out of the car feeling like we have a mutual respect for each other. Cool.
In Richmond I go see Jackie and Kendal who are having the wobblies over their immigration process; they are waiting to find out whether they have been granted citizenship and it has taken them two years of jumping through bewildering and nerve-racking legal hoops.
Leaving Jackie and Kendal a couple of days later I wait at the bus stop and meet a couple of young Mormons; ‘Elder’ Goebal (Samoan) and his Californian sidekick. I get talking to them about the excitement of seeing other countries and meeting people and manage to sidestep the whole God thing, which afterwards I think confuses the American guy. Surely all his conversations are about him getting someone else into the God thing?
A grumpy old woman moaning about the lateness of the bus brings home to me just how lovely life is when your head’s in a good place. Clearly this woman’s isn’t, and it’s a comical reminder of how not to be.
Various other people at the bus stop get freaked by the Mormons asking them to take a photo of them and me together. Everyone looks shifty and refuses. They’re only asking for a photo! Who knows where it might lead?! No trust.
I bet it can be a lonely business being a Mormom when you know an extremely large proportion of society actively doesn’t want to know you. Good job you’ve got Jesus in your pocket and a mate to go and drink coffee with.
It’s a lovely day, I’m feeling high. I’ve had some great conversations these last two days and the weather’s been mild.
Boogying in the side of the road, I get a lift with Scots guy who lives here. We chat about British Sunday afternoons, watching Countryfile and the Eastenders omnibus and having roast dinner with the family. Oh England… When I get together with ex-pat Brits, it does seem to be an excuse to wax lyrical about back home and/or slag off the locals. We do like to let off a bit of steam given half a chance, what?!
I pass through Picton again for the fourth and last time. The act of travel has a habit of encouraging my head to pick favourite places, places that encapsulate the best bits of so many other similar places. I think it’s my brain’s attempt to rationalise and cut down on too much input, to produce a more handy summary for the memory.
Picton is one those places. A little village really, but anyone that wants to travel between the North and South Islands must pass through here if they using the roads. Small but busy and therefore alive. It’s hemmed in by mountains giving it a very cosy feeling with wildness immediately on your doorstep (unlike so many ports which have a habit of being industrial and hideous).
Sailing boats nestle in the harbour, promising daring voyages out around the rocky shores of New Zealand or perhaps across the Pacific to Polynesia or maybe even Antarctica.
It’s here that I flirted with a Maori gardener who told me to meet her for coffee next time I am coming back this way.. but even now she still isn’t here.
It’s here that I bumped into a French woman and we pitched camp in a playground under a pirate ship, sitting up half the night talking about cosmic stuff. She gave me her green socks and I still wear them.
I’m supposed to be leaving New Zealand. I cry. I don’t want to go.
Needless to say I’m sad on the ferry back to Wellington. I’m supposed to visit Rob and Wayne but I can’t really face them. I’m too sad for either Rob’s stresshead craziness or the sheer oddness of Wayne’s time-trapped throw-back emotional sterility. When I get into the city I phone one of the WWOOF hosts within the area of Welly. Miraculously, Judith the host that I call offers me a place to stay at her’s right there on the spot; pretty good considering it’s 9.30 in the evening.
She meets me off the train at Petone, two districts out of Welly, and where Peter Jackson is about to do some of the filming for his new King Kong film.
Judith spots my sadness, and is wonderfully maternal towards me. Just the ticket. Judith is a middle-aged music teacher with a sense of adventure and a glint in her eye, a woman still with a sense of joy about life. Needless to say I really like her.
This is quite the most urban WWOOF place I’ve ever stayed; she lives in an ordinary row of bungalows and has the speckiest of gardens. After spending a day sorting that out, she gets me to do handiwork and I build her a cute outdoor table out of bits of junk wood.
I go and visit Rob and Wayne because I don’t seem to be able to wriggle out of it without looking like a git. I’m feeling apprehensive and quiet. Some ‘being real’ would be good. Rob is in his usual state of blowing off steam because of his crazily stressful computer job. We barely meet mentally. This depresses me further. Wayne is altogether more sensible and easier to be with. Actually if Wayne got any more sensible, he’d make Mary Whitehouse seem like an Ozzy Osbourne groupie. What a bloody weird pair.
The next day, I go on a music copying mission in Welly City Library using the stereos that they have in there. Plainly, it’s not allowed. A short-arse white guy librarian sees fit to stop me, order me down to the police station, ban me from the library and give me a load of blah blah blah. He passes me over to the jurisdiction of a very tall Samoan security guard. He in turn looks very smiley and like he wouldn’t harm a fly. Being built like a brick shit-house though I don’t suppose anyone would ever feel inclined to test him on this.
The guard tells me his name, asks me mine and we shake hands. He tells me how he’s been around a bit too and suggests that maybe the other guy needs to get out more. As he walks me to the cop shop conveniently next door, I get the feeling that if I do a runner this Samoan guy wouldn’t pursue me. I might of course be wrong.
Inside the library guard explains to the duty sergeant why I’m there. They both look nonplussed by the apparent need to bring me here. I get seen by another cop who also can’t quite add me up as a criminal. He gets me to sign a piece of paper that effectively bans me from Wellington library for two years. He has to do something just to keep the library happy.
‘No worries, I’m leaving the country in a couple of weeks anyway.’
‘Oh no harm done then!’
Curiously, he has the word ‘FISH’ written on his left hand.
I’ve been nicked a few times, and it’s usually a pretty surreal event, the combination of emotional ‘Oh shit I’ve been caught!’/adrenalin space-out and the hyper-formality of it all. Sometimes there’s a gap for a bit of common friendliness.
Me and a guy known as Potty Phil (full name Potty Phil the Squeezy Geezer with the Ginger Minger) were out one night during the Newbury Bypass anti-roads protest of 1996 and we’d nicked some seventeen foot long scaffolding poles at three in the morning from a building site. The intention was to make them into a tripod for someone else to stop diggers getting through a gateway. (You sit up in the top of the tripod and try not to freeze.)
Anyway, we’d been spotted with our load on top of a knackered Ford pick-up known as ‘The Pig Magnet’ due to it’s widely known arrestable tendencies during the anti-roads campaign. We tried out-running the racey police pursuit car in this hunk of junk and of course failed. The cops flagged us down. Phil says ‘Don’t say anything! Just let me do the talking!’
Up strides a tired copper.
‘All right lads! What are you up to then?’
Phil: ‘Oh, umm, we’re builders and we are just off to work at a farm. We just wanted to get an early start.’
‘What, at three O’clock in the morning?’
‘Umm yes, we’re very keen.’
‘All right then, I think you two had better get in the car with us. I’m nicking you both on suspicion of theft.’
Wow! Good story Phil! That worked! (not)
After being arrested we sat in the back of the police car watching another copper driving the said hunk of junk in front of us.
‘We’re supposed to be in the Pig Magnet. What are we doing in this cop car?’ I said, somewhat deflatedly.
‘I know. Innit?’ replied Phil, grimacing.
It had been a long day, a sleepless week and a crazy campaign. After the midnight adrenalin of nicking scaffold poles, I felt a little delirious. At about five in the morning we reached Andover police station where everyone’s eyes were on stalks from too much coffee. The fleuro lights glared horribly. We were welcomed by three very bored tired cops, one of whom sighed and said
‘You have the right to remain silent but anything you do say will be taken down as evidence and may be used against you in a court of law.’
‘What? Can I say anything?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘Got a pen handy?’
‘Yep.’
‘Okay… It’s a fair cop guv, you’ve got me bang to rights and no mistake. There. I’ve always wanted to say that. Did you write that down?’
‘Nahh, don’t think I will.’
‘Oh go on! You’re supposed to you know! It’s the law!’
I ‘no comment’ed my way through an interview (one story is an alibi, two stories is a crock of shit, so i agreed to let Phil invent another fantastically unlikely tale.
Miraculously they let us go without charging us. We figured either they’d put a tracing bug on the pick-up to make following us in the future more easy, or they were secretly on our side, or they just plain couldn’t be arsed with the paperwork. All three were likely to be true.
I make my way up to Napier to visit John Hanson again; It is lovely to see a proper friend again. He asks me if I am looking for work. Wow! Yes please! And very soon I get a try-out with Des his landlord for a couple of days of shovel-wielding. Once my usefulness is confirmed, Des gets me a place to stay in an empty B&B farmhouse property he has. This then becomes home for the next month or so, out on the coast of Te Awanga just up from Cape Kidnappers.
The location is lush; right next to a vineyard and the sea is about a quarter of a mile from my door. At night all I can hear is the gentle rush of waves on distant pebbles.
Des shows me how to do concrete-related work which is going to stand me in good stead in the future, employment-wise. We put in land drains for the vine yard, and one day Des asks me to drive a flat-bed van with a load tipper on the back and deliver a load of gravel to someone. Make sure I am back before five cos he’s got to give the van back to the guy he borrowed it from. Right okay. Will do. I go to the delivery place. I press the button in the cab, the tipper goes up and the gravel hisses out. I press the button again like Des showed me and… nothing happens. I can’t get the tipper down. Oh. Bugger.
I look all over the vehicle for something that looks like it will let the tipper back down. Nothing works. I try calling Des. His phone’s not on. I have twenty minutes to get back. I try looking all over the van again. Nothing doing. Try phoning Des again. Still no answer. Knowing that I am breaking the law big time, I bite my lip, hold my breath and drive all the way back across town with this bloody stupid van with its tipper still up, feeling like everyone that sees me must be on the phone to the cop shop right now. I get to Des’s. ‘What’s the tipper doing up?!’
‘I couldn’t work out how to get it back down’
‘What you drove all the way here with it UP??’
‘I had no choice’
Des tries sorting it out but it seems that it had broken. Have I broken it? I don’t know. It’s a doubly squirmy-idiot moment for me as a new employee.
Things improve after that and Des is grateful for someone to talk to and to hold the other end of things. Also I have a younger back.
Sometimes we go and hang out with an older guy called Roger who lives next to John in an old bus with no wheels.
Roger is a very relaxed chap who’s always good for a certain style of scruffy tea and biscuits that you’ll get with anyone that lives in a bus with no wheels. There is something enormously satisfying and earthy I like about it, like when I was staying with Gerry in Feilding in his caravan. No airs and graces. No attempts at showiness. No pretensions or aspirations. Just plain old comfortable basic functionality.
His living next to John means that I get to see John fairly frequently too.
Back in Te Awanga, Des rents a chunk of barn space from his mate Kevin next door, and Des has been ordered to tidy it up. After clearing out a load of metal junk that we weigh in at the scrap yard load by load, its time to say goodbye to a pig. Des keeps three, by the end of today there will be two, and rather a lot of bacon.
Des calls up a Maori guy, Andy, who has a mobile pig rendering device which is a trailer with a hot water boiler and a bath-tub mounted onto it. Mercifully me and Des are required to be elsewhere working whilst the deed is done, but we return in time to find the pig hanging upside-down above the tub having his bristles melted off with boiling water whilst the pigs internal bits have all been caught in the bath-tub.
Andy gets some bucks and gets to keep a leg and the deal is done.
Hastings Sept 20th
Judith calls me from Welly and tells me there may be a possible job as a trainee cabinet-maker with a couple she knows over at Seaview, just round the bay from her. Am I into it?
Wow! A chance to stay in New Zealand AND I get to do a proper job I’m into. I go and visit this couple and they strike me as a bit odd. I can’t quite put my finger on it but the vibes are weird. After spending a couple of weekends with them I get it figured.
He’s an over-weight bad-tempered self-confessed Nazi (he tells me that Hitler was right about killing the Jews) with very few people skills and she’s a new-age head-in-the-sand all smiles Jewish gold-digger.
I go for all the bureaucratic form-filling to get temporary residency, but I immediately get it in the neck for admitting that I had been doing apple-picking without a permit. I plead with them that I only did it because I had been robbed in Melbourne. This doesn’t help. I can tell by the way that bureaucratic eyes are glazing over in a monumentally disinterested way.
Hmm. A fat Nazi and a Jewish new-age gold-digger. They were right weirdos anyway.
October 15th
My last day at Te Awanga.
I go fishing with Des. This is our end of working together day off thing. I am anxious that without having work to do, I really don’t know how I am going to be with him. He’s brash and beery, and I’m an intellectual jellyfish. Anyway we eventually end up unintentionally doing the dolphins swimming alongside the boat thing whilst scooting about trying to find a school of fish to catch. When after nearly an hour we do start to get some bites, everything goes a bit crazy with Des shouting at me in his testosterone-driven way and me trying not to cry. I feel like shouting at him and pushing him out of the boat. Great fun. At the end of it, Des’s hormonal excitement has worn off and he’s his usual thick-skinned self. Over beers we have a barbie with Barbara his missus and the day ends much better.
Te Awanga and Beyond
October 16th
Well here I am at the end of my extra two months in New Zealand, and gratefully, I’m feeling much more ready for ‘the next thing’ than I have been in the time I’ve been in Te Awanga. The two months of being here have been real battery re-chargers. From being practically penniless to having enough financial security to buy me a ticket to Canada. From sleeping out every night in winter conditions to having a beautifully situated flat with a lovely garden, a SOFA (!WOW!!), a TV and a kitchen. From being very withdrawn (I didn’t realise how withdrawn I’d become) to a bit less so.
I am packing; moving out and about to be on the move: A mental gear-shift.
I’m sitting in an armchair looking at my half-packed rucksack. It looks burst and deflated, contents spewed all over an Arabian carpet on the living room floor.
It takes me back to all those times in the past when I would spread the current version of my possessions all over my old friend Don’s living room floor.
Don was the father of an old girlfriend and both had become almost something like a new bit of family to me, as I had found my real family to be something of a non-event. Between all my venturings out to different places, I would return to his house and recharge for a few days before going off and trying out some new mission somewhere else. Him and his house are a place of grounding and familiarity, especially welcome as I have a habit of hanging out with some rather oddball characters sometimes. Packing to go always took time;
It has always been something of a ritual. ‘Big Journey’ packing always takes longest.
Cassettes – which ones? The familiar favourite ones or the ones I never play. If I try the one I never play, I can ditch it if it’s not much cop. Which socks? What type and how many? One pair of thick winter socks or three pairs of thin ones worn over each other? Six socks was the maximum; I rarely possessed actual pairs. Gloves if winter; usually found, also not matching. Hat, ditto. Trousers. Coat. Tidy or comfortable, depending on whether I am anticipating having difficulty hitch-hiking or was expecting to be up to my armpits in a Scottish bog at my arrival point.
Book – luxury item, only comes for the ride if I’m feeling strong in the back, bored or decadent.
Hmmm… other maybes… felt tip pens…
Sleeping bag. Actually itemo primo, of course.
I’d sit back and weigh it all up into neat piles.
Picking clothes always took the longest. Trying to anticipate what type; balancing practical weather protection against favourite jumpers stretched full of holes against the shirts that a special friend has given me, the groovy coloured trousers and weird tidy stuff that went in a head-scratcher of a pile called ‘respectable’. This stuff usually only went in if the rest of the garments looked lift-inhibiting for hitching, or if I was starting a new conservation project or trying to impress a new girlfriend.
I’d fill Don’s living room floor, transforming it into organised chaos for an hour. He’d sit back and watch, accompanying the proceedings with one or two pots of tea and either several bowls of shredded wheat or tinned spaghetti on toast to aid concentration. Don would look on and provide pithy remarks and then extra lunch on top (just in case I needed it). If I’d started getting ready to go a bit too late, we would have to stop halfway through in order to watch ‘Neighbours’ on the mid-day TV slot.
At the end of it, Don would marvel at my ability to write high speed high quality sign writing on the backs of old cornflake packets stored in the cupboard especially for my hitching sign use. The sign would have the name of my first destination and would always have ‘PLEASE!’ tagged underneath.
I’d peruse Don’s library and maybe borrow a book on Renoir or somebody. There was often an apple-shaped crevice in the rucksack that I could pack out too. Extra bananas on top would mean not doing the top of the bag up too tight so that I could take them out again and munch them before I’d even reached the end of Queens Road where he lives. Bananas travel badly. The number of times a forgotten banana has squelched its way round everything else on its intrepid journey to the bottom of my bag. Unspoken rule of travel no. 16: Always Eat Bananas Rather Than Trying To Carry Them.
Anyway, back to Te Awanga and my Antipodean living room floor.
The crow-barring myself out of familiar comfortable places leaves me staring blankly at my stuff, remembering the place, feeling sad about what should be and will eventually become happier memories. All part of my usual up-and-down travelling process;
Hitching back and forth to Wellington, Wellington itself, the large mountain-ringed bay with a small cute city planted in one side. Did I say ‘cute’? yeah – I did. Meeting Judith, a very welcoming middle-aged woman, her Chinese lodger Linn who wanted to get into my pants. The Zimbabwean woman and her refugee story, telling of how Mugabe’s Zanu-PF henchmen had killed her husband for being a leader in the Movement for Democratic Change, and so she has left and come here to work as a nurse. She leaves me feeling amazed for two days. A serious reality check.
The landscape and its names: Wellington, Paekakariki, Paraparaumu, Manawatu, Woodville, Norseville, Dannevirk, Te Matea, Haumauana, Te Awanga, Cape Kidnappers.
Another road strung with names that will linger and glitter inside me, maybe for months, maybe for years. It can sit with all the others I have collected from various parts of the world, hidden away from anyone else’s understanding.
For a while at least, I shall wear the names on a necklace of memory. Then there are the rare but sweet occasions when I meet somebody who joyfully shares the memory with me of a place we both know of.
A well-remembered route is like a poem or a good cinema film or a work of art. It has a beginning, a middle, an end and it’s own flavour.
It will sit back and live in me, causing my mind to wander even when the body does not. Sometimes the memory is sweet sometimes it’s just bedevilling.
What on earth is the point of so many collected snippets?
In an analogy that Carl Jung would approve of, my head sometimes feels like it’s a house full of beautiful but wildly mis-matching furniture.
Saturday, Napier – Taupo road.
It’s beautifully sunny and generally I’m feeling liberated. I’ve earned 2200 bucks, which is very bloody handy and I’m in ‘open road’ mode. No lifts so far, but in the hedgerows there’s fresh fennel shoots aplenty to keep me fed. Saying goodbye with Barbara and Rose is good and I feel able to speak freely with them, mostly about Des being a grumpy bugger, and about the fact that I am going to see my dad.
I spoke on the phone last night to my dad, and he sounded awful. I am considering flying back to England to see him. I’ll phone family first to find out what’s up.
Hitching up from Napier is a really enjoyable journey. Roger drops me off on the northern side of town and there I wait two hours for a ride, listening to Manic Street Preachers and munching on more roadside fennel shoots for breakfast.
Glorious sunshine and I’m feeling good to be alive. The kind of feeling of hitching at its best: liberating.
The guy who picks me up is going almost all the way up to Auckland. Recalling the idea I had yesterday, I bang on enthusiastically about how road trips are like songs, especially when you know a route well; each part of the route has its own character and creates a particular feel for that place. I figure that the hills that rise up gradually away from the coast just south of Taupo must be a chorus that descends back down to Taupo’s lake. I’ve always felt place names of a route can reel themselves off like a poem; especially if the names sounds exotic or evokes a story of its possible origins: Haumauana, Cape Kidnappers.
American place names smell of crazy pioneer days: Eureka, Goldrush, Medicine Hat, Truth Or Consequences, La Cidade De Los Angeles; The City Of The Angels.
English place names must be absolutely hilarious to outsiders: Tutt’s Clump – who was Tutt? And why was he so possessive about his Clump? Clump of what? Weird.
Little Snoring, Piddle-On-The-Stoddle. Totally made up by drunken 16th century peasants no doubt. Imaginary conversation in sixteenth century pub:
‘So ol’ Gumble, you’s got you’self a bit o’ laaaaand then?’
‘Arr…’
‘Do it gots itself a naaaame then?’
‘Nope, not yet, I be drinkin’ these forty two pints of goats piss for inspiration on that one.’
‘Arr?’
‘Arr… come to think of it, oi think oi’ll call my new plot of swamp, Grungler’s Splodge.’
‘Grungler’s Splodge? Whys that then?’
‘Oi’ve absolutely no bloody idea.’
‘Tis cos he’s a bloody idiot that’s why.’
‘Roight Lumphead that’s the last time oi let you shag my best cow.’
These days, if there was anything left to name we’d call it places things like ‘Wibbly Bits’ or ‘Snotty Dogs Arse.’
Waiti Beach, Coromandel.
Unless I go hide in the bush or become a brazen over-stayer, this is my last day in New Zealand. It feels like falling off the edge of the world. I have to remind myself that as serene as the sea-shore here is, it’s just as serene a million times over round the world. Same as for the landscape, the peculiarities of building styles and the people. I’ve fumbled over the last couple of days to make sense of things, to find a spiritual connection. I have met one or two Christians recently who have reminded me that I have forgotten.
So too tired last night to talk to God, I sleep: behind a sand dune with a full carpet of yellow lupins and other yellow and purple flowers. For a while, I Feel displaced and homeless on a global scale.
Failing to find God, I write instead. Maybe the fact that I haven’t written in all the two months I am at Te Awanga has been part of me losing the plot. It’s a handy excuse anyway. Writing this now helps detach me from here.
The rides today are great: I get propositioned again by a rather spaced-out new age type who is edging her way out of a disintegrating relationship with a German ‘breath-atarian’ (trying not to eat anything) and is writing a book called ‘The Brighter Side Of Suicide’ which despite the alarming title, actually sounds like a good notion; that the urge to suicide is the misunderstood need to totally start life over again – except some people don’t realise that you don’t necessarily have to physically kill your body off in order to end the life that you’ve currently got. Very sensible actually.
After watching her daughter in a water polo game in Hamilton and getting over-new-aged very quickly, I realise that this is not the gone-bush shag-fest that I had earlier hoped it might turn into.
I get a ride with a really interesting bloke who I connect with really well – we talk of pagan things, archaeology and maps and old stuff that stirs the soul. We have a smoke and we park next to the Maori royal burial ground for the northern iwis (tribes). I didn’t even know that they had a royal family.
I am rather wobbly but happy by now and get a ride all the way to Auckland with a very friendly chap who drives me right up to the airport and expresses an interest in maintaining contact, though I am quite baffled by this; I suspect I am too stoned to make much sense, but there you go.
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AUSTRALIA AGAIN:
Australia – land of abundant weirdness. I love its wildlife; its forests are a bit dry and dusty though. 500 hundred varieties of gum tree is probably about 490 too many. Something other than gums and wattles would be good. Very unexpectedly, I love Aussie humour. So gritty you could lay a road with it. Even respectable middle aged ladies swear. Australia is unpretentious.
Kangaroos. So bizarre I’m going to mention them again. Giant bouncing pear-shaped mice with either three vaginas or two penises. The genitals bit is true. I wouldn’t make it up. Go look on the internet.
Sydney.
There is something gloriously casual about Australia that I love. Every day feels likes it’s a Bank Holiday Monday. A sunny one.
I am sitting outside the airport slowly waking up and waiting for inspiration to strike:
To Canada, England or What exactly?
My dad’s well-being is an issue, so is money and whether going to Victoria Canada is worth doing.
As soon as I got off the plane I have had this uncomfortable feeling of having no idea what to do next. In lieu of anything, I go and sit by the nearby river and crash out, wake up, twang guitar. Marvel at the crazy parrot things and eat two oysters straight out the river.
I am still clueless, I figure I need to pro-activate, so up I jump onto a bus into the city to find out about fares to Canada. On the way to the city centre I talk to a Brahma Kumaris aid worker who has just come back from Rajastan.
I consider wistfully the pros and cons of being somewhat rootless and maybe wanting to be in love… (again)
She’s interesting. Then having got out at the wrong end of George St in the centre of town, I make my way back up the hill to find the shop I’m looking for and on the way I meet a young English woman. We go do our things then meet up and chat in the park all afternoon. She’s so good to talk to: she’s the best conversation I’ve had in ages. We book into hostels and meet up again later, this time with her mate Dave. Very good evening.
The next day I wake up thinking that I still don’t know what to do. I could stay in Sydney, try to find a job and hang out with Sandy and Dave. This immediately struck me as a highly amusing financial self-destruct event.
I change my ticket and decide to go back to Blighty. I am now reconciled with the little voice in my head that’s been telling me to go see my dad and Helen and her new baby daughter.
I plan to hitch-hike back from Sydney to Darwin. It’s a long way but I am up for it.
The next day I feel weird. In a bad way. After a ride to a truck stop in a dry arid place in the middle of nowhere, I find myself doing the old human Catherine wheel trick; everything coming out of me, both ends at once. I really shouldn’t have had those oysters out of the river.
I change my plan again. Actually I can’t be arsed over-landing it all the way to Darwin. I manage to get to Brisbane, in a mood of cutting my loses, and fly from there to Darwin.
In Darwin, Froghopper’s Hostel:
I spend the night surrounded by people partying. I turn down an offer to sit by the pool and end up being on my own. I’m crap at parties.
I usually have some sort of excuse; like not having anywhere to put my gear, being down, too far from town, afraid of meeting a woman and getting tied to the place, not even being legal in the country to be able to settle with the woman I’d meet in the disco. Hows that for thinking my way out of a situation?
I’m fearful of anything ‘complicated’. I come up with all these ‘reasons’, but really, despite everything else I do, I just feel scared. I think there is something about the perpetual motion of my life that makes me unwilling to connect in an emotionally risky way. Bit of a vicious circle really.
I feel like I need to consider things that are going to open my heart and settle into following a ‘real’ flow of things that actually feel like they are doing me some good. I need to not just be following a random series of disconnected compensatory activities as dictated to me by my over-active head. I need to feel more and move with my heart rather than just a ‘To do before I die’ list.
What I need is an environment well tested. It feels like I’ve spent most of the last two years breathing in what’s around me when now I just need to breathe out. Perhaps I don’t need to fear re-connection with Helen B. I never really managed dis-connection fully anyway, even though I’ve tried.
Connecting with Helen in the past has never prevented me from being able to go off again at some point anyway, even if I have often felt stuck there at her place.
Darwin Airport.
Mentally I’m in Norwich.
Life is like taking a ride on a Welsh bus. The journey takes loads longer than I thought it would. I go up loads of hills and up cul-de-sacs for no apparent reason. Sometimes it’ll piss me off but essentially it has a certain kind of beauty even if it’s raining and I can’t see out the windows.
I am sick of wearing stinky boots. I walk barefoot around the airport, hoping my nuclear foot fug will dissipate quickly before anyone spots where it’s emanating from. After a prudent amount of not standing near anyone, I ask if my naked feet will pose any cultural problems on a plane bound for a Muslim country. I am told that footwear is required on all planes. I am therefore directed to a woman in an office who sells me ’emergency jandals’ for five bucks.
Customs pick up potential bomb stuff on their clever machine. Probably my highly explosive anthrax-ridden socks.
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BRUNEI & BORNEO:
BREAD & BUTTER PUDDING AT THE SULTAN’S PALACE.
The plane arrives at Bandar Seri Begawan, the one and only city in this tiny principality at 6.30 am, about a month and a half before this part of South East Asia is hit by a major Tsunami.
After getting off, I stash most of my gear under a bush by the airport. Much cheaper than posting it all back to Britain or putting it in some kind of luggage store. There’s no way I’m spending two weeks carrying all of this stuff about. I could do, but seeing as I know I’ll be back here very soon very definitely and most of my tat is irrelevant to this part of the trip, I may as well do the light load thing. Besides my body deserves a holiday too. It’s very humid. Mozzies all over the shop. Now what? Better make A Plan Of A Tack.
I hitch a ride with a Bangladeshi chap into the city a few miles away.
You could be forgiven for knowing nothing whatsoever about Brunei. I always imagined that it was in the Middle East somewhere, tucked in next to Saudi Arabia perhaps. What it does share with Saudi though is that it is a nation whose wealth is founded on oil. Lots of it.
Brunei, or to give it it’s proper full name, Nation of Brunei, The Abode of Peace, has a GDP of roughly twenty-one billion pounds which is certainly enough money to make your average Joe feel pretty relaxed about things. Having that much money also makes it the fifth richest nation in the world.
It is a tiny tiny country of just under half a million people populating an area of 2,226 square miles. It gained its independence from Britain in 1984.
It is a small and significant part in a slightly confusing bit of geography. It is one of three states that make up Malaysia. One being Malaysia on the mainland of South-East Asia, one being Brunei and the other being the state of Borneo which surrounds Brunei. Meanwhile The island of Borneo is home to Brunei, the state of Borneo and a large chunk of Indonesia (which then goes on to spread itself about a bit on some other islands off to the east).
All clear? No, I thought not. Now, you thought all those arbitrary straight lines across the maps of Africa were daft…
The name Malaysia incidentally is thought to have come from ancient Indian traders for whom the the word ‘Malaiur’ meant ‘Land of Mountains.’
I only write all this because no-one ever knows anything about the place.
Bandar Seri Begawan (or Bandar or BSB):
I arrive in the city centre; actually it is really a small town centre, where you can see the shanties of the masses within easy eyesight of anything grander in the middle.
I take a look round town and inevitably spend nearly all my time investigating the shops. The department store has all the usual things that you would find including western clothes, though not many people seem to wear them very much, some people do. There are some things I notice that I have never seen in a western store, like a whole row of anti-baldness preparations. Maybe we do have those at home and it’s just that now I am looking harder at what’s around me.
It’s very curious walking round a department store in this Muslim country. Lots of brightly be-robed ladies and gents buying much the same sort of stuff us westerners do. In fact, if you turn the heat down a bit and de-Islam-ed the place there wouldn’t be that much to distinguish it from back home. The vibe is comfortable.
On the hunt for a pee break opportunity I visit the department store loos, which are western in style. There lined up are the standard three urinals, except that the middle one is missing, leaving an unpainted oval of bare wall and some holes for fixings. Slap bang in the middle by way of explanation is a sign which reads:
‘This toilet has been removed for repairs. We are sorry for any inconvenience.’
I take a photo, with a view to submitting it to Private Eye when I get back to England.
Looking round at the other less grand and more your normal knick-knacky kinds of shops around town I encounter these other wonderfully scrambled scraps of English:
Cheap computer game:
Gout Chess.
Kentucky Fried Chicken ice cream ad:
‘Scrumptious sides – how could anyone resist?’
Woman in shop full of electrical gizmos, trying to get me to buy something: ‘Very latest everything fashionable now!’
Probably the funniest most to-the-point sales line I ever heard. I might get that printed onto a t-shirt.
There is a mosque here that looks almost new and also a Chinese temple too which is easy to recognise as it has one of those square wooden post gateways outside the front and the style is classically Chinese of course,
This is all very well but I do need a place for later to sleep. Upon entering Bandar I had noticed a small-ish sports stadium like a fourth division football ground which I made a mental note of to investigate later if needs be. When I get there, there is a gate which is unlocked. I get the feeling that nobody does ‘crime’ here, which is a nice feeling in what is technically a city.
The place has a wall about eight foot high surrounding it, but otherwise is very open. There is a terrace embankment of red plastic seats with a simple slanting roof over the top. What do the people watch? I have a suspicion it might be watching the Sultan playing Polo.
There is a groundsman’s shed here which is locked so I get myself bedded down in a corner at the back of the seats. It’s a little bit cramped for space, but as long as I am not planning on wriggling too much in the night it should be fine.
Sitting up, here I am in a sports stadium that I have all to myself. I am watching the sun going down; the sky is turning a darker blue, and the mosque is silhouetted on a back drop of stars. The last birds are finding their roosts. Around the outside of the stadium people are still driving around, like people do in cities, fuelled on that which brings this country it’s wealth. Ear plugs in, and I’m off to dream somewhere else for the night.
The next day I go to visit the city museum, which mostly seems to be full of the relics of the Sultan’s family. There is a history of his and his family’s military career, documented by various items such as uniforms, old hand-guns, even older swords.
There is much pomp about the place and it is made mildly less dull by decorating the place with vast ornate gold and silverware plates and urns and highly decorative carpets hang from the walls. It’s really quite a job to make a museum really engaging, and this one is pretty normal in that respect. I have never seen such a magnificently shiny marble floor though.
I go and get myself a dose of normality and after having looked round all the markets and fed myself on bananas and such things, it is apparent that all the happening tourist things are to be found not in Brunei but Borneo.
I make my way to a hussling bussling bus station, crowded with people keen to be elsewhere and others looking sometimes baffled at which way they ought to be going now.
Using the pages from a guide to South-East Asia that I had photocopied in a library in Darwin in combination from some enthusiastic help – from a man who seems to be directing the people traffic when it gets stuck – I find myself onto the right bus that will take me northwards to Borneo.
I get the bus that will take me up to the ferry that will in turn carry me across the border by water to Lawas. The ferry is like one of those double-width narrow boats you get in England for taking tourists on day trips up the canals. The boat is low in the worryingly chocolate brown of the river. A lot of forest is being ploughed up pretty much wholesale in order to re-plant it with the trees that produce the profitable palm oil as found in many western foods. This is all very well for us, but the orangutans for whom this is/was home are losing habitat to the point of becoming almost totally extinct.
At the border town of Lawas, the border control is a routine process. I rather get the impression that a lot of people are crossing just to do their shopping here in what is the nearest available town.
I get the bus north to to the conspicuously Englishly named Beaufort.
The town owes its name to one Leicester Paul Beaufort, a barrister from Manchester who between 1895 and 1900 was the colonial governor of Labuan (North Borneo).
I go to a covered market place that is completely heaving with people. and have some proper fun buying some very tasty carrots, bean sprouts and rambutan and get into some theatricals with two women sellers all of us using our broken languages together. People are friendly and I feel very comfortable walking through the crowded market and the only person to stare at me is a small kid.
Noshing on my lunch, I have an idea to head up to Mount Kinubalu in the Highland Region of Sabah and at 4095 metres, it is the second highest peak in South-east Asia (the highest being Hakabo Razi (5881 metres) in Myanmar; and I’m not going there cos its too far on the bus and their government is nasty).
I go to the nearby train station and find the ticket office closed. Waiting, I am approached by ‘Lo’, a Chinese man of fifty years with five children. He works at the railway and we have an interesting discussion about agriculture. He takes me for breakfast and buys me the Malaysian version of Milo (which is the New Zealand version of Ovaltine) and a Chinese bread bun with sweet black bean paste in the middle – it is like a healthier version of a doughnut and very tasty. The cafe is just like the Chinese version of an English greasy spoon. It’s full of shopkeepers and market stall holders bracing themselves for the day to come over tea and cigarettes. The food is different. The ambience and formica is the same.
Getting back on the small train, Lo finds me again and we talk some more – he gives me two loquats which have creamy yellow skins and are about an inch long in an ovally/round shape. You squeeze them at one end to burst them open slightly. They have a segmented fruit like an orange but the texture of lychee or rambutan and have a creamy lemony taste. They are very very moreish.
I see my first monkeys! (Ticks another box on imaginary tourist ‘must-see’ list.) From the train I see one in someone’s vegetable patch, guiltily munching a big red watermelon, and two others skanking about…
I am drying loquat seeds, which I intend to send to Dawn and Chris in Belize.
The train takes an hour or so to get to Koto Kinabalu or ‘KK’, the bustling city of Sabah, the northern end of Malaysian Borneo.
I imagine what all those pictures the BBC give us of the Middle East would look like without all the rubble, bomb and bullet holes. It would look like here. I wander aimlessly round another department store and get more lunch. The city here is pretty easy to get round – it’s about as spacious as an ordinary western town and nobody picks me out as being unusual.
The bus from KK wends its way up windy forested roads, interspersed with ramshackle housing. It’s curious to note how some of these houses sometimes have cars parked in driveways that look to be worth more than the house might be. As I found with Belize, there is something I find deeply comforting about a certain level of basic functionality in places like this. I like to think that people living what I imagine to be more natural lives have maybe more time for each other. The warmth and the rich green of the mountain valleys all adds to an air of relaxedness.
On the way to Mount Kinubalu, the bus stops at the sleepy town of Tambunan. To my untrained eye, it looks to me like a major part of the population here is Chinese but they are in fact Dusun, which is the main name for about thirty sub-tribes who live mostly in the mountain regions of Borneo. The Dusun, noted for their peaceable ways, have mostly been assimilated from their animist roots into modern day society.
The journey has been long enough for one day, and I find a nice big river to spend the rest of the day sitting next to. At this end, the river is nice and clean looking, unlike the other end down on the coast where the water has been turned chocolate brown by soil run-off from deforestation.
Later in the evening I go for a bit of a nosey around and walk through a collection of homes that are something between a small English housing estate in stature but with quite nice looking wooden chalets. I notice people sitting inside, talking what seems to be quite loudly in an otherwise silent evening. I don’t hear anybody driving off to go to the pub or anything like that. It is all quiet outside. From some houses come the tell-tale fluctuating blue-grey glare of TV screens, with the excited voices of some Bornean game show host or other.
I walk further on and instead tune in to the crickets burr-burring away in the undergrowth.
This is a very easy place to be. I don’t know if this is just because I have been to a couple of non-western countries before. Maybe because I am carrying almost nothing. Maybe that helps.
The village here has a great peace about it that hangs tangibly in the air like a rain-forest fog.
At day-break I am woken by several chickens that have come to find their breakfast in the sand by the river, completely unbothered by my presence.
So here I am; under a broad wooden bridge where I slept last night, in a mountain village in Highland Borneo, a wide shallow river sliding through scatters of small boulders and sand. Exotic or what. I have brought no sleeping bag or tent with me. I laid on my Thermarest mat wearing my raincoat over my tee shirt, and another two tee shirts upside-down over my legs as a kind of baggy trouser ensemble. Just about passably warm enough which is a fair trade-off for being able to travel now so wonderfully lightly. I can see the appeal for spending a whole trip just in tropically warm places and not needing to account for all sorts of varying climates and having to carry warm coats and extra contingency stuff.
I wander back into town to where the buses come and go from, and consulting an extremely vague tourist map that I picked up for free, conclude that Ranau is where I need to be headed next if I am going to go up Mount Kinabalu.
The journey across country is luxuriant, great green valleys of busy agriculture, ploughed fields where the landscape is calm, and tea plantations. I am in the Highland Tea region. So this is the kind of place my cuppa char comes from. Nice.
Every place has its own feel, and where Tambunan seemed like a sleepy end of the road kind of backwater, Ranau seems to be something of a hub, connecting far flung places. The place is full of colour, of small-time shops selling all kinds of cheap brightly-coloured plastic knick-knacks, a garish bazaar of household tat and bags of crisps and snacks. A compact silver umbrella takes my eye, and I buy it, thinking it might come in handy in this slightly unknown climate.
I go and find an internet cafe above a shop, and ascending the stairs find it full of teenagers doing intergalactic battle with unseen opponents across the web. My usual space of write down and catch-up, of commas and full-stops to whatever has been riding in my head, is littered with the sound of battle scenes across multiple other universes.
Afterwards stepping back out into the glare of the sunshine I am glad of the relative peace of normal town life. Agricultural pick-up trucks and mopeds, mothers doing shopping with wayward snotty-nosed toddlers in tow, teenagers hanging out and old men chatting and watching the world happen.
I need to get another bus again in order to get to Mount Kinabalu and I board the one heading to Kundasang, the village where I need to get off.
Today I am feeling very comfortable about life. The ride up into the mountain is lovely. It could be New Zealand with Malaysians. They even have Punga here. (Tropical man-fern, like a crown of bracken on top of a skinny tree trunk with no other leaves.) It’s like South Wales with tropical; Belize with money.
Kinabalu National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is so with very good cause; it boasts long lists of fabulous biological statistics (information courtesy of Kinabalu National Park)
Mount Kinabalu because of its broadly diverse geological and climatic features, is one of the richest areas of bio-diveristy on the planet;
The most species of orchids in the world (over 800),
600 species of ferns including fifty that are unique (the whole of Africa has 500),
The most and the largest incestivorous pitcher plants (five of the thirteen are unique to the area).
The largest flower in the world, Rafflesia Keithii which grows up to a metre across (and smells like rotten meat).
There are 326 species of birds here and about a hundred types of mammal including one of the four great apes: the orangutan.
There are 5000 – 6000 plant species, more than there are in North America and Europe put together; all found here on this one mountain.
I walk halfway up the track that leads up Mount Kinabalu. This is, broadly speaking, the highest area in South East Asia. The journey up is, in climbing up highest peaks on continents terms, relatively straight-forwards, as the starting point at the village is already fairly well on the way there in terms of altitude. Just getting off the bus at the bottom of the mountain I have to make a point of walking at half my normal speed and taking smaller steps in order to prevent myself from getting out of breath. When I reach a checkpoint halfway, I find that they want to charge me 160 Ringgets (about thirty quid) to climb to the top with a guide. I am somewhat aggrieved by this, but ruefully have to admit to myself that a guide would probably keep me from accidentally mashing myself up in some stupid manner. There is no-one here to take me anywhere now anyway. I decide to stop by the hut for the night and eat peanut brittle for my supper and eventually I fall asleep under my umbrella.
The following morning I go check out the incredible panoramic view that lay spread before me; an ocean of treetops lay all around, early morning cloud hugging the lower hilly peaks.
I take photos of curly ferns, crash out for a bit as the rising suns rays manage to climb out above the clouds. It was a cool night and not the most restful. The morning sun is an invitation to unwind my bones properly and catch up with undone bits of sleep.
After the sun therapy I spend the rest of the day walking back down through one of the parks circuitous tracks to the entrance. This is a wondrous journey of psychedelic explosions of green variety and quite mesmerising. What ordinarily would have been a short journey becomes something quite exhausting; there is a beauty here so continually astonishing that it demands my considerable awe and wonder. Many times I have to stop and let myself get drawn in to the myriad little kingdoms of green. I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of any of it. What must it have felt like to be an early colonial botanist here?
I have dry noodles out of my rucksack for tea and then crash out heavily on one of the other less-used looking tracks nearby until it starts to rain. I have to get me, an umbrella that is marginally too small and won’t stay where I want it, a torch that barely works, a pile of tat and my continuously disintegrating jandals down to somewhere that looks like it might keep the rain off me – the Chinese-style archway entrance to the park next to a hotel.
The arch is lit up all night which means there are birds there catching the light-loving insects all night. The birds squeak frantically all night, but at least the insects don’t get much of a chance to eat me.
I sleep badly, but do manage to have some very odd dreams. In the morning I scrape copious quantities of bird poo off my umbrella, have a good stretch and go and have a good old English breakfast of beans on toast in the cafe on the other side of the road.
Having regained a fair portion of my senses, I take a bus from outside the cafe to Poring, another part of the National Park; where hot springs, giant waterfalls and orangutans are promised.
Upon arrival my travel-grunged body is yearning as usual for an opportunity for a good de-greasing.
I take a bath in the hot springs and promptly get pounced upon by seven Malay kids who want to practice their English on me, so I oblige them. Where am I from?, Their name is, What is my job?, Am I married?, and all that. They are on holiday with their mum and dad and that they’re Christians is as about as much as I can work out. They are clearly very pleased about it all anyhow.
The pools, spruced up for the tourists, are quite luxurious compared to the houses in the village immediately next to the ‘resort’. The locals come in and use the facilities for nothing (as well they ought).
After, I go for a walk across a high-top canopy walkway and the wondrousness of the surroundings steps up to a whole new level, literally. The walkway is horizontal and steps out off the sloping landscape past tree trunks until it hits the canopy. Suddenly, with almost no effort, we all all standing out in the tree crowns with a birds eye view of the whole valley below.
I get chatting to a couple of women from Hong Kong. It’s interesting to me what a western outlook they have. It feels like they could just as easily have come from San Francisco or Sydney. They have that city savvy about them, which for me is a curious combination with our current surroundings; another exotic from another angle.
We go with the guide to meet Jackie, a miserable orangutan. She’s either lonely, sick of playing tricks for tourists or has a sixth sense that the population of her species is utterly screwed. Possibly all three. She grabs her requisite bunch of bananas and buggers off as soon as she gets the opportunity.
After this somewhat distressing episode, I decide to set off for Poring’s big waterfall, with the intention of sleeping by a bat cave en route.
Sleeping next to thousands of bats has the unexpected advantage of it being an insect-free area, so I sleep very well. Next time you’re in some fly-ridden hell hole like the Aussie outback or Scotland, just take a load of pet bats with you. No snakes or monkeys or wildcats attack either. I don’t suppose the bats hunting talents extend quite that far though.
I always believe I am safe when I sleep outside. I am protected by the Goddess of the Rough Sleepers, a close friend and ally of the Goddess of the Dumpster.
Richard Terry 