Month: May 2022

50-Year-Old Jovencito con mochilla, la Historia de Juanito’s Travels. Gotta get outta London BlogPt5

Have you ever had lettuce soup? I had it in Dublin. My friend Agatha Julia, from Barcelona, made it. I might get back to that at another time.

1995

I was still in London. April may have started by then. It was certainly getting close to Easter.

I hadn’t slept in a bed for more than 3 hours since Bangkok, three or four nights ago now by my sleep deprived calculations. Last night I’d roughed it like a homeless person on the front lawn of my, well I was about to write friends but in the end they were just some people I knew in Australia who I thought might be home in London and whom I thought might have put me up for the night under a roof. In a bed. Not on the lawn in front of their flat on a freezing cold spring night in London.

Well, screw them. I now at least had $250 and my sister was going to put a further $500 AUD into my account some time today. You could pretty much halve that and get the value in British pounds. So maybe £375 give or take. That wasn’t going to get me far if I was going to stay in the UK.

It certainly wasn’t going to get me as far as Switzerland, where I imagine a hamburger cost $25 or something. It could possibly get me as far as Ireland though. I could find a job there. I had one contact I could try there whole lived on a farm in County Wexford.

I had just been back to the Irish embassy in London and was sitting again in Hyde Park, not far from Buckingham Palace. I’m pretty sure the Queen and Prince Phillip didn’t have to try and work out how to make £375 stretch 12 months, which was the original time I intended to spend in Ireland, or elsewhere in Europe. The whole being ripped off in Bangkok through a sapphire scam had kind of thrown a spanner in the works. Long term planning was off the cards at the moment. It was like I only had 32 cards anyway. Which might be enough for certain versions of euchre I think. Metaphors aside, and the reality of only having £375 meant I could only think of the immediate days ahead.

Before I finished this day though, I wanted a proper fucking bed, and a shower. I made my way to the backpacking area of Earls Court and used some of my £375 to get a room. A little room. But a room all to myself. Not in a dorm, I wasn’t sharing with other smelly hippies tonight.

It cost a bit extra. I was extremely low on cash. But fuck it, I’d spent the last night sleeping on a lawn in from of Newcastle Chick and British Guy’s flat – the same British Guy who’d fucking slept on my cozy floor, with my cozy extra bedding, eating my cozy rolled outs and vegetarian food in Fitzroy, Melbourne.

I’d spent the night before that sleeping on the floor of Heathrow Airport – for all of 3 hours after almost getting deported, and the night before that I managed just 3 hours sleep at a hotel in Bangkok after getting off a plane which engines had blown up, not once, but twice, up in the sky, where I could literally die.

So tonight I was going to have a room to my fucking self. I checked in, chucked my backpack on the ground, got out some fresh clothes, went and had a quick shower, pulling bits of grass and twigs from my hair due to my previous night of homelessness. I hadn’t had the opportunity for a shower for the last 3 days. What a simple indulgent pleasure to feel warm water running down your naked body. I hung my towel to dry outside the Earls Court window. I got out one of my Thai cigarettes and puffed out the window while I contemplated my next move. And reviewing what had gone wrong so far.

It’s all started to go pear shaped when I bought those fucking sapphires in Bangkok, so number 1 things was to get rid of them. They were bad luck. If I couldn’t sell them I’d just give them away. I was starting afresh so the sapphires had to go. Number 2, I had to get to Ireland, Ireland was the only place I couldn’t possibly survive for more than a few days at the moment. But my Irish passport was still in transit from Australia to the London Embassy so I needed to wait a few more days to collect it.

I couldn’t stay in this backpackers in Earls Court, especially in my fancy single room, that I thoroughly deserved after my ordeal, waiting for my passport though, especially in a private room, so I had to find somewhere that wasn’t going to cost me anything. I ruled out further attempts to contact Newcastle Chick and British Guy. I ran through my other options. Then it popped into my head. A Vipassana Meditation centre! Vipassana centres were run on donations. While I really liked to pay I could always do that later when I had more money.

I could try and go to the Vipassana Meditation centre and wait in the UK until my Irish passport arrived. After that I had Irish woman’s address. Her name was Nora. I’d never met her but she did used to live down the road from Christophe’s mum’s place in Tugun and that was a close enough link at this stage. I’m not sure why I had the meditation centre’s address, I think I’d planned to do a course somewhere along the way, perhaps in India. But, they also had a centre in the UK, in Herefordshire.

So I finished my fag, grabbed my sapphires and went out the door to find a pay phone. On the way I saw a church. I’m catholic – well more a catholic buddhist are thinking hippy – and I suspect this one was one of those protestant types where Anglicans go. It didn’t matter anyway, a protestant in hand is worth two Catholic Buddhists in the bush. I found whatever protestants called priests and I handed him a bunch of sapphires and I said: ‘Look these sapphires are real, they are just not worth that much, maybe you could sell them and give it to poor people or something.’ Or words to that effect. The protestant priest guy looked at the gems, looked at me with the stunned look of someone who’s just been handed 5 sapphires, and before he could say much more than a muttered ‘thanks’ I’d made my way out of the church and into a pay phone booth.

I called the UK Vipassana Centre’s number.

‘Hello’, I said, ‘I would like to do a course, I really need to do a course as soon as possible’. It was a meditation emergency!

‘Well, we have a 3-day course starting the day after tomorrow, but we usually only use that as an introductory course. Old students like yourself, who have done a course before would be better off doing a full 10 day course. We have a 10-day course starting in a week’.

‘Can I do the 3-day course and then the next 10-day course and volunteer in between time?’ The more meditation I did the better I thought, plus I’d never volunteered at a centre and that was kind of like paying them while I couldn’t afford to donate anything else.

They agreed to that and gave me some basic details on how to get there from London and said they’d see me there the day after tomorrow. So at least I had the next few weeks sorted out. I went back to the backpackers. As I entered the building one of the backpackers staff asked me whether I was the one who’d hung his towel out the window. I said yes. They said I couldn’t do that anymore. I said fine, whatever. I went up to my room, took my towel in and just sat on the bed and read a book for a while before going out and finding some cheap vegetarian food to eat, which I can’t recall at all and then going to sleep. It was one of the top ten sleeps I’d ever had in my life. A new level of deepness.

The next day I rose and had breakfast. There was an abundance of toast, tea, coffee, and bits of fruit. It was like paradise. My journey had kind of begun, a born again journey to replace the one I’d started a week or so ago which I now wanted to relegate to history. I guess Nietzsche said whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I preferred Buddha to Nietzsche nowadays, he’d said the source of all our misery is attachment. It was time to detach. It reminds me of a quote from cartoonist Michael Leunig : Let it go. Let it out. Let it all unravel. Let it free and it can be a path on which to travel. Leunig had been there at my first Vipassana meditation course about a year earlier.

I felt stronger after my fill of toast, Jam, margarine, more toast, tea, a few cups of tea, fruit and the such. I went into London again and did some touristy things, walking a bit along the Thames, looking at a few pigeons on statues and things, then it was back to my very own room again and more delightful sleep, in a bed and not in the garden outside of some supposed ‘friends’ flat who were now ghosting me.

The very own room bit really invigorated me. I should have been budgeting more and going for a dorm room but the spiritual lift it gave me was worth every extra penny or pounds. And I was still hardly spending much on anything else as you could find a bit of vegetarian pizza pretty cheap.

The next day I made my way to Herefordshire to begin meditating again. I took the train, it felt like going off to Hogwarts before I knew what Hogwarts was. We passed Oxford and I got to chatting a little with a professor who asked whether I was a student. No, just an Aussie on the way to a Buddhist retreat in Herefordshire.

The little pockets of forest along the way looked like the type Robin Hood might frequent. I went to school with someone who claimed to be related to Robin Hood. They might have been told the story by some Thai gem dealer as it turns out that even if Robin Hood existed (which he didn’t) he wasn’t exactly the sort of person one could relate their lineage to. I’m related to the Surtees family, they have some claim to the Tees river up in Durham. Here I was, just a few days in the United Kingdom and I was already being sucked in by their class wars, trying to prove I had some connection to a river I’d never been to to make myself think I’m all posh and fancy. I say the French Revolution didn’t go far enough and should have jumped the channel. But not to be. We do have the Queen’s bodiless head on our Australian coins though. And to be honest, if someone offered me a free castle on the Tees River at this stage it would be hard to refuse it.

I got off somewhere and got off and took a bus to a place which seemed to have a lot of constants in its name, which was surrounded by juicy pink pigs in muddy paddocks, where I was picked up in the vipassana minibus by one of the meditation centre’s volunteers.

The meditation phase of my journey had begun. The rest could wait. I needed to be in the moment now. To realise the impermanence of things. Both good things and bad things.

 

50-Year-Old Backpacker, A Juanito’s Travels BLOGnicle. Bangkok to London Detention BlogPt4

1995

Flying from Bangkok to London. Hurrying to pick up the sapphires I bought from a gem store in Bangkok so I could recover some of  my travel savings. Crazy.

Fuck. I was nervous. This is crazy. Gems, Bangkok, London. How did I find myself in this situation?

Too late. It was done now.

I got on the plane leaving Bangkok. We take off and are on our way. 15 or 20 minutes into the flight there’s an announcement in Thai. A Thai couple next to me look at each and are obviously worried. I look at them and wonder what the fuck’s going on. Then the announcement in English.

Ladies and gentlemen. There is an issue with one of the plane’s engines. We will return to Bangkok to inspect this. It is nothing to be concerned about, it is just a precautionary measure or words to that effect.

Fuck.

We put our seat belts back on. I look at the Thai couple nervously, they look at me nervously as the plane turns back to Bangkok. I start to meditate, if I’m going to die, I’d like to die calmly.

But we make it back safely. We land and head back to the terminal and wait maybe 3 hours or more. Then we’re ushered back onto the plane. We strap ourselves in again but I think how could they possibly fix a faulty engine in just 3 hours? It didn’t seem possible.

We take off. 15 or 20 minutes later an announcement in Thai. I look at the Thai couple again and they confirm with a nod and another worried look. They didn’t fix the engine in 3 hours. I resign myself to the fact I might die again (not that I actually died the first time, just to be clear), I was pretty calm about it to be honest. Up there in the sky, what else are you going to do, there’s no point panicking, you can’t go anywhere, if you’re going to die you’re going to die. I just started meditating again.

We head back to Bangkok for a second time, we land safely a second time. This time it’s late in the evening. We wait a few hours and it’s clear to all us weary passengers the plane’s not going to be fixed quickly. When you’re fixing engines, – and I’m not an expert aircraft engineer or anything – but when you’re fixing engines, I think, take your time! After another few hours they tell us we won’t be flying until the morning so they put us up at a hotel.

I get to the hotel, put my head down on the pillow and start sleeping. I feel like I’ve only slept for a few minutes when the phone rings again. The plane’s ready. Apparently. We’re going back out to the airport.

So we’re all put back on the plane. It’s a different one, they must have given up on the one with the broken engine which I think’s a good choice. for a third time, they send us on our way. 15-20 minutes into the flight, nothing happens. 30 minutes in nothing again. After a couple of hours I look out the window and we’re crossing the Himalayas. It’s sunrise I think, and the peaks are that early morning pinky orange. Feels like we’re not too far above the biggest peaks in the world and I can look down into the valley trying to spot some animal or something. It’s amazing that us humans can just pay for a ticket and then get into one of these things that fly over mountains. I feel like I might take it a bit too much for granted nowadays, even post COVID travel restrictions.

I think about my sapphires. I had to be able to sell them in London otherwise I’d run out of money in a day or two in London. Actually I hardly even had enough for a night in London. It wasn’t 40 baht a night there, you had to pay real prices in British Pounds!

When my friends Christoph and Tanya had flown over to London they were in a similar position, they barely had a couple of hundred pounds between them. Luckily Christophe was the chatty type and he got to talking to a British couple on the plane. When the  British couple found out how little money the couple had they were like, you’re not going to last more than a week in London on that.

The British couple then offered the lucky bastards to put them up for a week at their house so they might have time to find a job. I was praying for something like that at the moment thinking my sapphire plan was rubbery at best, non-existent at worst.

I manage to get a bit of sleep and do a bit of meditating to calm my racing thoughts. We fly over Pakistan or Iran or Iraq or somewhere and then over Europe. Eventually, in the early morning – another morning, I was losing track, we had a sunset when we crossed the Himalayas, morning, night, who knows –  we arrived in London.

I get out and line up for immigration. The immigration officer looks at my passport and looks at me.

“How much money do you have?” she asks. Christophe and Tanya had been asked the same question so I knew it might be on the cards. Seemed like Australians often rocked up on a wing and a prayer.

“60 pounds I think, maybe 65. I have some more money in my bank account”. I think I had about $10 or $15 Australian in my bank account.

“60?”

“Yes”.

“Is that all?”

“I have some sapphires I bought in Bangkok waiting for me at the post office.”

“Sapphires?”

“Yes”. I was starting to feel very stupid. Well stupider than I really was. “I can take them to sell them on Bond Street.” I showed her a bit of paper that the dodgy Thai guy gave me. She looks at it with the scepticism it deserves.

“And you have no work permit?”

“No”, although Christophe and Tanya had very little money they did, at least, have work permits, so they were reluctantly let in despite their small amount of cash. I suppose they also, by luck, had a place to stay. I had no work permit.  Mainly because I was an Irish citizen so I didn’t need one, so I didn’t bother with it. But I didn’t have my Irish passport, or any proof of Irish citizenship apart from my red hair. And, since I was travelling on my Australian passport I was being treated as a broke Aussie instead of a broke Irishman.

“I think you’ve been duped on the sapphires”, she says.

My heart sinks, I know she’s likely to be right. “But I am Irish.” I say.

She goes and chats to her colleagues. She tells her colleague something like, ‘he says he’s Irish’, and they mumble and the like.The rest of the plane have now mostly made it through immigration.

“You say you’re Irish. Have you got proof of that?”

“Well, no, not on me. I was waiting for my Irish passport in Australia but they didn’t have it ready so I had to leave without it. I had to send them my foreign births registry papers as well, so I don’t have anything at the moment.”

“Well, I’m afraid without a valid work permit we are going to have to refuse you entry into the UK”.

My heart sinks, after this long journey I was just going to be sent straight back. The immigration officers chat. All the other passengers have gone, I’m the last one standing there. The airport seems almost deserted. I’m alone, I’m tired, but I’m kind of calm. After a while the officers get back to me.

“Apparently Thai airways don’t have another seat until tomorrow afternoon. We are going to issue you a 24 hour permit so you can leave the airport but you need to return for the flight tomorrow afternoon. Had they had a seat on the next plane you’d be going straight back. But they’ve cancelled that flight.”

“What if I can prove I’m Irish in that time?”

“If you can provide proof of your Irish citizenship in that time we can give you an entry visa.”

They hand me back my passport with the 24 hour visa. They tell me I have to be back at the airport by 2 PM or something the next day in order to be deported.

I walk out and try and find my backpack. Everyone else has long gone so they think it’s abandoned and I have to go to a special spot to get it. At least I’d gotten this far, I’m kind of free and I am in the UK, for now.  And I can at least get out of the airport. Thankfully Thai airways only had that one plane operating between Bangkok and London due to the other one having a bung engine, which allowed for this little reprieve. I can do it! I can make it into the UK! I just had to prove I was Irish and use my Irish luck! Don’t know how I’m going to work out the rest, but something will work out, just got to stay positive.

I feel like I’m in a Hollywood film, 24 hours, and maybe 60 British pounds, plus whatever I could withdraw from my Australian bank account, to sort out the gems and my Irish citizenship. The clock starts its countdown.

It’s 3 or 4 am, the tube trains don’t start until 5.30 or 6.00 am or something. I’m dead tired so I find a bunch of passengers who are sleeping by the departure gates. I crawl under some chairs, desperate to get an hour or so sleep. Not having had a decent sleep for about two days now.

5.50 am, I’m at the tube gate buying a ticket and waiting for the train into London.  I get on a train and head into London. The city is just waking up once we’re out in the open I can see over the houses, with their chimneys wafting steam and smoke. The sun is just coming up and there’s a similar hue to that which I saw over the Himalayas the previous night or morning, it was all a bit disorientating now.

7.15 am. I get into London. I have the Irish embassy’s address, but they don’t open until 9.30 am. So once I’ve identified where it is I just loiter in the general vicinity.

I’m hungry but super short on cash so I decide to get a piece of fruit.

“Excuse me, do you know where I can buy some fruit?” I ask a gentleman in a light trench coat.

He laughs his jolly English laugh, I think it’s like a nervous tick English have when they are uncomfortable talking to hippy backpackers on their way to work (obviously he was on his way to work – the hippy, being a hippy, can just roam around freerange during office hours). An Australian talking must sound quite quaint. He points me in the direction of a fruit stall without pausing much. I find the place and I think I decide on an apple, or perhaps some stone fruit were in season which sounds more like my cup of tea as I’m not that fond of apples. I’m happy I’m getting to  see a little bit of London now, if they kick me out of the country, which I’m still hopeful they won’t, at least I’ve got to look around a little bit.

I take a stroll and find a place on some roundabout and watch the traffic go by. Eating my piece of fruit. I think I may have taken some bread rolls, and a little plastic packet of butter and jam from the plane so I munched on that as well. Or maybe I bought a bread roll. I must have had some water or fluids as well. Though unlikely very much as I was still thirsty.

9.30am comes around and I head straight into the embassy. I explain my situation. I got to London, no money and the stupid English want to kick me out if I can’t prove I’m Irish and they have my passport ready at the Irish embassy in Canberra and my proof of citizenship papers and all that, I’m seriously legit Irish.

They are rather friendly. Of course, they’re Irish. But they don’t think they can do anything for me at the moment as it’s night time in Australia. They’d have to fax through some request and have the Australian embassy fax something back, and I’d probably have to come back the next morning to see if they were able to do something. But I could try in the afternoon just to see if they’d heard anything.

I thank them and head back out into London.

I have all my luggage with me. Thankfully that was just the backpack which wasn’t super heavy. So I decide I might as well explore a bit and maybe go and check if my sapphires had arrived. If they were going to kick me out of the country I at least wanted to pick up my sapphires first.

So I walk down to the GPO. Probably more of a hike than a walk, Google maps tells me it’s an hour’s walk from the embassy which I could do relatively easily in those days, even though my back was feeling it along the way.

I’m able to go through Hyde park, and I sit for a bit and watch the swans and then check out Buckingham palace, and then onto the GPO. Without Google maps I’m not sure how I managed it. I must have had an analogue Google map.

Having acquired the sapphires in such a dodgy manner, I’m half, or even 4/5ths expecting they wouldn’t have even sent me anything.

But, somehow they are there waiting for me!

Because it still seems very shady – still I say now, back then I was hoping through my idiocy I may have just got lucky and I could actually sell those stones. After I collect the package I take it to an inconspicuous corner of the place and pour out its contents. Yes indeed, the gems are there. Well, maybe I can sell them? I think.

I make my way to Bond Street – perhaps using my great knowledge of the Monopoly board, as I had no GPS, figuring it must be around Regent Street and the other green one. The address the Thai gives me is of course not able to be found (although Bond Street itself exists, why else would they put it on the Monopoly board!). I wander around a bit more and I find a Christie’s auction house. At least they might be able to tell me if the sapphires are worth anything.

I walk in and ask if a valuer can take a look at my sapphires. They have me wait, there with my backpack in their fancy shiny wood lined corridors. Soon a polite English gentleman comes out and greets me. We go into a room and he has a look at the sapphires.

“What did you pay for them?’ He asks. I tell him the amount and he grimaces. “They are not worth that. But, at least they’re real, I’ve seen plenty bought for similar amounts which turned out to be pastes” – I later found out pastes are just a fancy term for fake gems, or more precisely where you have a slither of real gem pasted onto some glass or something like that.

“So I can’t sell them here?”

“Well no-one will want to buy them, they are very dark, and not the type anyone here in England wants. We prefer the lighter colour ones.”

My heart sinks to a further level. The titanic level. Where only James Cameron would be able to find it.

I head back to the embassy, just in case they’d heard anything. The embassy hasn’t heard back from Australia. I’d have to try again the next day.

I go to Hyde Park and sit under a tree. I’m more depressed and despondent than I have ever been in my life. I assess the situation, little money, enough to last a day or two max, but not even that if I have to pay for accommodation. I have no Irish passport, so I’ll have to come back to the embassy tomorrow.  After internally crying and despairing and swearing, I think. Think John, think. I was going to have to find a place to stay the night at least and get some cash.

Firstly I get onto. the cash situation. I needed cash if I was to stay in the UK, otherwise I might as well just go back home.  So I find a public phone. Luckily my dad had bought me a phone card so I could call home. I rang my mum. It was sometime in the middle of the night over there (In Australia), but I couldn’t work out exactly what time it was exactly. It didn’t seem to matter really, she was just kind of just glad I wasn’t killed or had my kidneys taken out yet.

I explained the whole situation as best I could. Somehow bought sapphires off a dodgy bloke in Bangkok, they were real but not worth much, so can’t get money back. So could I borrow some money in case the Irish organise proof of me being Irish in time for them to stop the deportation process. Kind of sounds funny now, but believe me at the time it wasn’t!

Luckily my dad had also told me that I could withdraw money using my Australian bank card in England as I had no idea you could do such modern things and had mostly planned to rely on travellers cheques and just leave my useless bank card in Australia. My mum says she’ll work something out but she’ll have to wait another nine hours or something  before the bank opened. I thanked her and got off the phone, relieved to have crossed one worry off of my list. Well it was at least in progress.

It was already around midday in London, even if they could get the money straight into the bank when it opened I still wouldn’t see any more money until the early hours of the morning. So the few pounds I had left would have to last the night at least. And I didn’t really even have enough to stay at the worst hostel for a night. Or not enough to do that and eat as well.

Next thing then was to try and find a place to stay, for free. Ah, ha! I had the address and phone number of Newcastle Chick and British Guy (see previous blog posts if you don’t know who they are). I’d written to them before I’d left and said I was coming over to Europe, so they would not be too surprised if I rocked up. I think they’d even written back and said they looked forward to catching up or something like that.

Surely they’d let me stay with them. British guy had stayed with me a few nights in Melbourne the year before after all (again, see previous blogs if you’re lost). He’d be right to return the favour, it was just what people did. Anyway, I didn’t have much fucking choice (pardon my French, but I was tired and upset at the time).

So I get out British Guy’s and Newcastle Chick’s number and I ring and ring, and ring, no answer.  I think, fuck it, I’ll just make my way out to their flat. I had their address. But first I walk around a bit more, catching a few sites like Nelson’s Column, Trafalgar Square (maybe that’s in the same place, who knows) and other third reich empire style stuff that showed how great the British empire was compared to say, the third reich, as they treated all their natives in India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other places nice, unlike the Nazis who were plain nasty. No, no the British were a benevolent lot and only interested in making sure everyone could enjoy a nice cup of tea picked by their subjugated subjects sweetened with tea grown by slaves in the West Indies, on doilies made from wool grown on stolen Aboriginal land down in Australia. I also get a slice of vegetarian pizza for £1.50, and some sort of drink. Then I head out on the tube.  

Newcastle Chick and British Guy  lived on the outskirts of London. I can’t remember exactly where, but there was a museum which had a Picasso exhibition on, and it took a fair while to get there. It cost another few pounds to get on the train. I was watching every precious pound trying to make sure I could get through the night at least.

By the time I got out to the place it was getting dark, around 6 or 7 pm, the banks in Australia would still not be open for a while. I checked my account anyway. There was enough in there to get £5 out. That was still a precious amount when I was so close to completely running out of money so far from Australia. Probably still didn’t have enough overall to get a place to stay though.

I tried ringing Newcastle chick and British guy’s flat again, again no answer. It was starting to get very late now so I just made my way to their house and rang their doorbell several times. Again, no answer. I found a pay phone and tried ringing again a few times. Desperate, I decided to try a different tact.

For some reason I had Newcastle Chick’s mother’s phone number with me in my little address and phone book. Possibly because in those days nobody had emails or social media, or mobile phones, so one of the only ways to keep in touch with people when you travelled about was to hand out your parents’ address and phone number.

I still didn’t know what time it was in Australia but I called Newcastle Chick’s mum anyway. Unlike her daughter and British Guy she actually answered! I explained my situation and that I really wanted to get in touch with her daughter and partner, I read out their phone number, and yes, it was correct. I read out the address and yes it was correct. Supposedly as well they were meant to be home as far as she knew. I thanked her and went back to their flat and tried ringing the doorbell a few more times. I assumed they were out and would be back at some stage, so I just waited by the front fence, a low brick wall, for what seemed like hours and hours.

At some point it became obvious that this just wasn’t going to work out. But it was too late to even try to get back into London centre and it was now almost 3 days that I’d been without proper sleep. I could barely keep my eyes open.

It was cold, but I had a few decent clothes, and importantly a green woollen Melbourne tram conductors coat that Evan, who’d done my first vipassana course with me in Victoria, and who used to be a Melbourne tram conductor had given me. So I found a spot in the front yard outside the flats where Newcastle Chick and British Guy  lived, a place behind some bushes, and I just crashed.IT was a big city, people probably just assumed I was homeless and ignored me. I woke around dawn and headed back to the train station again. I didn’t bother to try the buzzer for the guy’s flat again. What was the point? I found a bank and checked my money situation. Still nothing, so I ring my mum and dad again, my dad is awake and super stressed but he’s been up to the bank and my mum tells me that my dad said the bank said that it could take few hours for the money  to show up but in my account but that they’d put $250 in my account. It wouldn’t have possibly been easier if my dad had told me directly, but he never talked to me directly much. $250, It wasn’t much, but I thanked them as it was a life saver. They said my sister Christine said she could lend me a further $500 but she hadn’t been to the bank yet.

I still had a bit of cash so I made my way back to the Irish Embassy to check on the passport situation. When I walked in they immediately recognised me and gave me the good news that the Irish embassy in Canberra had faxed a copy of my passport to the office and that they had put a notary stamp on it to verify it so this would probably be enough to show the immigration officers at Heathrow Airport. They were also sending the passport to the London embassy, so it should be there in a few days’ time. I thanked them profusely.

I checked my bank again, and this time, yes, money was there, things were starting to look up! I went back out to the airport, walking past a bunch of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians waiting to be deported. I went into an office, showed my papers, and they had no choice but to let me stay in the country, giving me a brand new stamp. I felt bad for all the other guys as I walked out a free man. They didn’t have the same Irish luck as me.

I was now officially allowed to stay in the UK. How I could do so for more than a few days, I didn’t quite know, but one step at a time.



50-Year-Old Backpacker; Blog; A Juanito’s Travels Chranicle. Bangkok Sapphires. Buyer Beware. BlogPt3

Bangkok river houses 19951995, March

I don’t recall the details of the plane trip to Bangkok. I doubt I slept, I may have read or watched something. I don’t know how we watched things in those days, there were no screens on the back of seats or devices to watch your own downloaded content. Perhaps someone got a 16mm film projector out and chucked on Jaws, or Flying High.

I don’t recall the details of getting to Khao San Road either, nor how I knew that Khao San Road was the place to go for backpackers like myself to find backpacker friendly accommodation. I think I’d just asked the taxi driver where  backpackers go to stay, in the same way you may ask where flamingos like to congregate, and he said something in that Thai accent I never get tired of listening to. To be honest I probably didn’t understand what he said, I’d never heard of  Khao San Road, I just trusted he’d take me where I needed to go, so I said, ‘that sounds good, take me there’.

Nowadays, I feel the taxi drivers might take you to some flash place where they’d get a big tip from the hotel, assuming anyone just rocks up to places these days and ask taxi drivers their opinion on where they should stay, and haven’t just booked every step of the way online already, which is often tempting, especially in new cities after long flights, though limiting in terms of having a real adventure, or getting bargains on last minute accommodation.

I arrived on Khao San Road at night, or in the early hours of the morning. It was after midnight I’m sure. The taxi driver dropped me off at the end of the street, and I made my way through a few night shift spruikers spruiking their hotels and hostels. I found a place for 40 baht a night (around $1.65 Australian) down an alley off the Main Street. The room had a balsa-strength door you could have kicked in without bruising a toe, or even pushed it in with the strength of two or three fingers. I left my camera in my backpack in the room, figuring no self respecting robber would bother robbing someone who paid 40 baht a night for a room.

I was soon to find that Thais have other ways of fleecing you besides nicking your camera.

thai Mona Lisa Bangkok gem scam 1995

Around 2-3 am, maybe, I went out exploring a bit. I suddenly felt like taking up smoking again after not smoking for almost a year. I bought a packet of Thai cigarettes off a guy manning a little stand with bits and pieces. The cigarettes were perhaps 25 or 30 baht. Maybe sitting in the smoking section on the plane coming from Australia brought on the desire for nicotine again. I had one and it was nice.

It was hot. Even in shorts and a t-shirt and in the early hours of the morning, it was hot. I was sweating.  Some street vendors were still open with their owners sitting about in the cool air, by flaming woks, or knick-knacks and cigarettes, some smoking cigarettes, on plastic stools with sandals planted on the ground, some with alley kittens brushing past their legs, relaxed and wide awake. The smell of fish sauce and stir-fried vegetables hung in the air. The honking of car horns and the puttering of tuk-tuk engines echoed through the alleys.  Little nooks and crannies were taken up by small bars, eateries, and entries to hotels and hostels, dimly lit, like a scene from Blade Runner, some open, some closed.

Bangkok was a 24 hour affair, a big city, the biggest I’d ever been in, an invigorating culture shock after the quiet year I’d spent planting trees and tending to goats on the Brock’s farm in Nutfield where we didn’t even have street lighting and the nearest neighbours were a few kilometres away. Actually Corinne and I had almost got lost one night when we went for a ride and couldn’t remember which road to take to get back to the Brock’s farm. Bev had put all the lights on in their house on the hill like a beacon on a hill which helped us make our way the last few kilometres.

After having my first brief look at Bangkok I went back to the room and slept for a couple of hours, barely a wink though with the excitement of the new city, the first time I’d been overseas on my own, a blank slate and adventure ahead, keeping my mind racing. I got up just before sunrise and headed out exploring the orange haze of the city. This time I brought my camera along, a spritely spring in my Scarpa covered feet.

I walked down the end of the street, past a group of waiting tuk-tuks, spruiking their wares. I think I’d cashed some traveller cheques at the airport, or somewhere so I had a few hundred baht to explore the town. I had no idea of where to go or what to see. I just walked around.

I found  a little place with plastic tablecloths and plastic stools, to have some breakfast. I had an authentic Thai noodley thing. I’d picked up a map from the tourist stall on Khao San Road which I unfolded and studied as I ate my noodles. I saw the King’s Palace was just down the road. After my noodles I headed down that way.

I don’t know the exact moment when it happened. I’m sure it was somewhere near the King’s Palace, maybe just outside its walls. It’s all a blur now as the events to come were both distressing and embarrassing. Very cringe-worthy. Especially for me. But, at some point this very friendly Thai man appeared. He was well dressed and polite, and started a friendly chat. If you’ve read any warnings on scams from Thailand or South-east Asia in guidebooks that description alone should ring scamming alarm bells.

But back then I was a young, trusting man with brand new Italian walking shoes, but without one of those touristy ‘guidebooks’, who was having his first morning by himself overseas, in a big bustling Asian city, far from home. I was excited. Bangkok is an amazing city. I was open to new ideas, to approaches from strangers. This was a Buddhist country after all, and  I am practically a Buddhist now myself I felt, having taken my Vipassana meditation course last year and keeping up regular meditation whilst on the farm in Nutfield. The Buddhist followed a few simple rules, one of which was not to take that which isn’t given to you. I now think they may have found a loophole when it came to just convincing people to hand over shit by their own volition.

Friendly Thai guy asked where I was from and what I did for a living and all those get-to-know-you small talk things that scammers do with a big broad smile.

Travellers note: first day’s in cities are often the time travellers are most fleeced. Like my wife and my first day in Havana, Cuba many years later where my wife was convinced to buy cigars and rum for around $100 USD, where maybe we should have paid $25 or $15. A trippy version of our Cuba trip is available here.

‘I’d like to see some authentic Thai stuff’ I said, or words to that effect. Of course ‘Friendly Man’ could help me out with that.

In a matter of moments we were heading away from the King’s palace. Crossing 8 lanes of traffic. Heading into Chinatown. We sat down at a restaurant. ‘You want something to eat, I pay for you’ he said with a broad grin. How nice I thought, what a gentleman. But I wasn’t hungry that soon after breakfast. I got a drink anyway, just to be polite. The nice man got to talking about how he could organise a good deal for a boat trip to look at Thai temples along the river.

‘I get you good deal on boat and temples, very cheap’, he said with nearly all his (fake) smiley teeth showing. I had barely taken a sip of my drink and before I was whisked to a wharf with a boat at the ready – as though they were waiting there for me.

2017 

My daughter and I are taken to a place in Chinatown and they try and convince us to pay hundreds of dollars for a private boat. You can read about that here.

Back in 1995. I coughed up a little money, it wasn’t hundreds of dollars, pretty reasonable actually, maybe $15. We went down some canals and onto the main river. It was all very exciting. I even took a photo of my scammer in front of some riverside houses on stilts on the river. I think I ended up chopping him out of it years later.

I visited a beautiful temple on the river – which my daughter and I also visited years later – for maybe an hour as the man and the boat waited outside for me, and then went to a nice Thai restaurant across the river and the nice man paid for a nice lunch for me. It was all exciting and new, and amazing. Nothing untoward at this stage.

At some point over lunch, the nice man indicated he could get me a good deal on gemstones. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

‘I take you get good deal on gemstone, good quality, you sell them in London on  Bond Street, double your price, easy money’.

Easy money I thought, or did I think, I don’t know. You’re probably guessing by now I was incredibly gullible and stupid, but hey I didn’t have much money and then this guy was letting me in on a deal where I could double my money! Wow, too good to be true. Though even with those thoughts part of me was still sceptical. But I was able to overcome the scepticism. I’d heard of Bond Street, it was on the monopoly board! And it seemed likely gems were cheaper in Thailand as everything else was. I mean I could get a room for 40 baht! Maybe it was true?

We made our way to the gem store. Immediately on walking in the door I was greeted by another smiling Thai guy in on the racket. Seemed like he’d just been there waiting for me. It was a well organised operation. He showed me photocopies of other tourists’ passports who’d bought gems and went to London to double their money. He showed me a range of different sapphires and indicated a few prices. They looked nice and real. I was getting into this idea, as risky as it sounded.

‘What your budget?’ he asked. 

 ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said, maybe $150′.

‘Oh no, you can’t buy $150’, he showed me some gems and clicked some numbers on a calculator and it was all in baht and had a number of zeroes, ‘for this you get 5 sapphires’.

‘I don’t have that much, that’s a lot’, I said.

‘No problem, you sell on Bond Street, trust me, easy money, good quality’.

‘Are you allowed to do this?’

‘Yes, yes, no problem, I take your passport and fill in details, you go get money, no problem. I send to London so no problem with customs.’ He whisked my passport off and got the appropriate paperwork filled out.

I must have had some trepidation, but in the end, I was a naive young backpacker, I lacked sleep, and I was quickly getting reeled in by the slick and persuasive pressure tactics which didn’t leave me much time to think. It wasn’t long until I was in the bank accompanied by original ‘nice’ (bastard) Thai man cashing almost all of my traveller’s cheques. I just remember bits and pieces.

Thinking about it now, it was not like me to be that reckless. But there I was with a bunch of cash in hand getting a supposed deal of a lifetime. I’d somehow lucked upon it, just as I had lucked on getting the job with the Brocks. The universe was providing for me again. I should just go with it. So we went back to the gem store and I handed over the money and the gem store guy said he was going to send the gems registered post to London general post office, post restante, and I even saw him put them in the envelope. Transaction over, I was quickly whisked out of the shop and the nice man dumped me on some corner near Chinatown and with less of a smile, as though dumping a kidnapping victim after their families had paid the ransom.

I came to my senses for a moment. I still had some questions I needed to ask the gem store salesperson. So somehow I found my way back to the gem store, even though they’d driven me around in a circle to try and disorientate me. When I walked through the front door. They looked like they’d seen a ghost. Obviously, in retrospect, they’d hoped they’d confused my sense of direction to the point where I would never find my way back.

They answered my questions, yes the gems would be there in a few days, no problem. Don’t worry. I looked at the shop, it was just like the jewellery stores in Australia. The man assured me the gems would arrive  no later than next Thursday (or something like that) and that they did this all the time, no problem, and then I was quickly pushed out of the shop again. I was left with the promise of 5 sapphires being sent to me in London and just a couple of small note traveller’s cheques left. I looked at my receipt for the gems. Geez, I don’t know I’m sure I wasn’t drugged, but the lack of sleep was as bad as 4-5 joints in terms of affect on my judgement by this stage.

My nervousness rose, I now only had maybe as little as $150. Bangkok was cheap so it would be enough to get me to London to get my cash for my sapphires. So I waited, nervously. I sat at cafes each day on Khao San Road watching videos and eating beautiful vegetarian stir-fries. I walked through the markets and visited the local buddhist temple down the street to help feed the monks. I even went back to the King’s Palace and went inside. I was stressed by my lack of finances but even with that small amount I was still able to comfortably pay for an hour-long massage every day for 20-30 baht. So while in Bangkok, I could still survive. I was fine. For now.

I did need my sapphires though so I decided to bring my flight forward a few days so I could get them as soon as they arrived in London.  Then I could go to Bond Street and double my money, or at least get some of my money back.

I think I was in Bangkok another three or four nights. I was originally going to stop off in Kathmandu on the way to London but there was no time, nor money, for that now, so I arranged to fly straight to London.

In the few days I was still in Bangkok I had another smiley Thai man approach me. I must have looked like a ripe fruit ready for the plucking and screwing over or something. He walked around with me a bit, chatting and asking a few questions. He showed me a nice shopping centre not far from Khao San Road where you could get cheap fake rolexes and other false designers. In casual conversation he brought up the idea of going to a gem store. I said I’d already been and got some so I had no money left. While I had my back turned for a moment he disappeared in the crowd. I was more worried now.

Many years later my beautiful wife and I took a trip to Heron Island, an amazing little island on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia, where turtles nest. It was still turtle nesting season. The little baby turtles hatched under the sand every afternoon and evening and made their way to the ocean in their hundreds. We were lucky enough to see them while we were there.

Most of the little baby turtles, with their cute little flippers and little shells, don’t make it to adulthood as between their beach nesting places and the ocean they’ll spend the years growing to adulthood in they have to run the gauntlet of seagulls picking them off one by one. And even when they make it to the water’s edge sharks and rays wait to snack on more of them.

Looking back I was one of those baby turtles. And the sharks had no problem gobbling me up.

The consequences of my innocence and poor judgement was soon to become apparent, as I boarded the plane for London.

50-Year-Old Backpacker Blog, A Juanito’s Travels Chronicle. Plans & Preparation? BlogPt2

2022

I’ve got this Google Sheets spreadsheet that shows all the places in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Italy, Greece and Turkey, I want to visit with my wife on our next trip – as the title of this blog suggests I’m dubbing it the 50-year-backpacker trip. The Google Sheet’s stored in the ether somewhere. I have a column for place names, one for estimated airfares, one for estimated accommodation costs, one for costs of travelling by train, bus, or boat between cities and one for notes on what we might do on a particular day. Such as ‘visit the Vatican’ or ‘walk around piazzas’. I’ve made allowances for travelling between places, resting and even to try and fit in some laundry which I failed to budget for when my daughter and I travelled back from Italy after her German excursion/ exchange trip which led to me wearing a long-sleeved business shirt in the steamy weather of Bangkok which was the only thing in my bag that was clean. You can read about our last Bangkok adventures here.

I’ve got a fairly well paid government job to cover the costs outlined in my Google Sheet planned trip. Though I don’t have a house or any of those other ‘grown up’ things. I don’t have the money for a house, in Australia at least. Partly because I divorced a few years ago and now I’m a single dad supporting 1.5 kids (my daughter is 0.5 now because she pays me $300 board a fortnight). Partly because I married a Mexican who has had me travelling back and forth to Mexico for a few years – for the record not complaining about that, just in case I get a chancla from my wife, which I may enjoy in the right place. Partly because house prices have gone completely crazy and the little money I had left after selling the house I had with my ex-wife went on private school fees and above mentioned travel. For housing price craziness I suggest reading Robert J. Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance.

So basically I’m on a pretty decent income but also pretty poor, at least by local standards now. Apart from a pretty reasonable superannuation balance. But rather than save more money for a house deposit I’ve decided to go on another trip because, you know, fuck it, it’ll be fun, and you got to do something to mark turning 50 besides getting a pirate earring and a tattoo. And after reading Irrational Exuberance I’m still waiting for a housing market post-COVID crash, which may still be a few years coming.

1995

Leading up to my first trip to Europe, I worked as a farmhand, or Farm Manager according to my resume, planting trees and the like for $10 an hour cash-in-hand. I had a return plane ticket to London and about $2000-something dollars in cash and traveller’s cheques.

I had one contact address in Ireland of an Irish woman who used to live close to the mother and boyfriend of my best friend from high school Christophe, in the Gold Coast suburb of Tugun in the state of Queensland.

On a side note on how times have changed, and the irrational exuberance of the housing market,  Tugun used to be considered a little bit of a shithole – no offence Tugun. Now a former boarder of my mum paid around $700,000 odd for a tiny little flat there under a flight path.

Back in 1995 I wouldn’t have had any interest in what a house cost, it was just a house, who gave a shit what it cost, I was the motherfucker Nirvana generation, a band I’d seen at Fisherman’s Wharf on the Gold Coast in 1992, also with Christophe. In true grunge style, on the way to the concert we’d stopped off at some dude’s house to smoke some hash. I was so wasted I ended up just lying in the mud peering over people’s heads to get a glimpse of Kurt Cobain. Much fun was had by all.

Before my departure for Europe I think I’d been up for a quick visit to the Gold Coast, to say high to my mum, probably argue with my reformed, yet still mentally ill alcoholic father, and probably say hi to a few sisters and my brother, and some friends, including Christophe, from Palm Beach Currumbin High School, who still lived on the Gold Coast. Or was Christophe down Byron Bay at that stage? After being a born again Christian for a while who hated lesbians like KD Lang, he’d turned into a born again pot-smoking hippy type. I also considered myself to be a hippy type in between my grunginess, I even used to not wear shoes in Melbourne for a while. Hippy types tended to head down to Byron in those days. Now you have to be a Hollywood superstar or the like to live there. To all those types: Get Bent ;).

Christophe and his high school sweetheart girlfriend Tanya, whom I’d say was my friend in the end as well, had long ago been over to Scotland and worked in pubs and restaurants on the common young Australians’ former right of passage/ coming of age adventure to the heart of our old imperial masters. Christophe had taken the chance during the adventure to have an adventure with some woman at a backpackers while Tanya was upstairs sleeping. Christophe tended to do such things, he claimed it was because he was half French. Christophe and Tanya stayed together for many years, and at least one more Christophe ‘adventure’ that I knew about, until one day while Christophe and I were away doing a Vipassana meditation course in Queensland, Tanya went off and had sex with their landlord/ neighbour in Coorabell, a Polish guy named Sky. Coorabell is not far from Byron Bay, which is in New South Wales if you don’t know that already. Chris after maybe 4-5 occasions over the years of doing exactly the same thing was completely outraged and broke their relationship off.

Tanya moved next door and had a few kids with Sky. I accidentally caught up with her years later when I booked an AirBnB style thing in the little flat type thing which I didn’t realise was the same flat Tanya and Christophe used to rent just a few metres away from Sky’s house.

But that’s another story. The thing is, us Aussies often looked to go and have a bit of a working holiday/ jaunt in the UK in our twenties and I was no different. Except perhaps that part of my motivation was that I was chasing after the memory of a Swiss woman I had an adventure with for a few weeks myself. You have to catch up on my previous blogs if you’re lost at this point as they’re all connected.

I can’t judge Christophe or Tanya, my wife and I met while I was still married to my first wife. Life’s not always meticulously planned. My ex-wife and I separated almost immediately after my current wife and I met. My current wife and I split up for a bit between meeting and me returning to Mexico a year and a bit later. My ex-wife and I also stayed living together, in separate spaces, for about another year. I went back to Mexico a year and a bit after first meeting my wife-to-be and we got together again. I travelled back and forth to Mexico for a couple of years. We got engaged after I got divorced. Then we got married. Then we navigated the Australian immigration system. Now we’re together. Well not at this very moment as my wife is over in Guadalajara helping look after her terminally ill father. I was over a few weeks ago helping out. It’s tough. You can read more about Guadalajara here.

Again, plans? Life’s often a bit complicated to fit neatly into columns on a Google Sheet with daily rundowns on activities and costs.

So, with my trip to Europe preparations. I didn’t have much. I was still a hippy/grunge type in my early twenties.  I had the address of the Irish woman, who used to live near Christophe’s mum’s house in Tugun, whom I’d never met. I had a copy of my WWOOFing guide. I also had one other contact in Britain of a couple I’d met in Australia.

Now, I forget the name of the couple but that’s also a little tale in itself. I lived briefly in the town of Newcastle in New South Wales, a largish town about two hours’ drive north of Sydney for those who don’t know, in 1993 or 1994, somewhere around then. It was around the time Christophe and Tanya went off to Scotland, and perhaps some other places, I know Christophe went off to Amsterdam at some stage to get wasted after saving for months in London and Scotland. Hippy power, in the weed capital of the world!

I’d gone to Newcastle because I was invited to visit Christophe’s brother Luke, who was living down there and I ended up meeting many of the colourful hippyish type crowd down there and renting a garage at a shared house where we tried very unsuccessfully to grow some hydro weed. We weren’t all peace and love type hippies, that was more the early 70s, we were those born in the early 70s, mainly unemployed or uni-going pot-smoking youth and perhaps something like archaistic , or at least ‘fight the power’ type hippies with a grunge bent.

Whilst in Newcastle, I met this woman whose name I cannot recall at all. She had met this British guy in Newcastle or somewhere, who was over here in Australia backpacking. They had an adventure and decided they wanted to continue having more adventures in life as they’d fell in love and blah, blah, blah all that romantic stuff.

Anyway, British guy whose name I also forgot, ran out of money and had to go back to England. He was flying out from Melbourne and was really skint. Broke as a two-bob watch as my father might have said in one of his senseless ranting where he’d also say things like ‘mad as a cut snake’ and ‘I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire’. Actually he may have used to say ‘mad as a two-bob watch’, which I don’t think makes any sense at all, but whatever, British guy was skint and had nowhere to stay in Melbourne. Newcastle chick was still in contact with me, somehow, I don’t know how we keep in touch before the internet, maybe by carrier pigeon or something. Newcastle chick rang me or wrote to me or something, and asked whether British guy could stay with me like 2 nights, and whether maybe I could feed him some rolled oats or something, as he was part Scottish I think and that’s what Scots love to eat. Unfortunately I had no scotch to offer him as only in later life have I discovered it’s nice, and been able to afford to try it, though I mostly now prefer tequila due in part to my falling in love with a Mexican, from the home state of tequila, and the town of Tequila, Jalisco, during my own adventurous travels.

So British guy comes and stays with me in the room I rented from that chick who went over to Europe or Asia in the Fitzroy share house for three months (see previous blog posts). And he’s all grateful and like, “if you ever come over to Britain, please look me up and you can stay a few nights with me”. I put that in double “quotations” as it will be something I’m very likely to refer to in subsequent posts, so I want it to be a firm quotation for the records. And I say to British guy like, ‘that’d be great’, and ‘no worries, have some more rolled oats and chickpea stew’. At that stage I had no job at the Brock’s, nor an adventure with a married Swiss woman, so no plans of really ever going to Britain. But I kept in contact with Newcastle chick, and British guy, when they reunited in  Britain in the months that followed.

So before I set off overseas on my adventure I have a couple of random addresses and a WWOOFing guide, a return ticket to London with a stopover in Bangkok and potentially Kathmandu and New Delhi, and an idea I’d like to try and catch up with Corinne in Switzerland, as mentioned in previous blog posts.

So I was almost set to go. I went down to one of those camping stores in the Melbourne CBD. There used to be like a camping store district there where you could buy camping gear, maps and shit. I’m thinking around Little Collins Street or somewhere. I bought myself a brand new pair of Scarpa Italian leather walking boots, and a nice blue backpack. I’d also already gotten my Australian passport so I could actually get out of the country, and for good measure I’d put in my application for an Irish passport, as a result of my Irish lineage through my grandmother from County Sligo who moved to Australia after her mother died around age 10 to live on farms in central Queensland. I also needed to get some vaccines for India, Nepal and Thailand which were recorded in a little yellow book.

As my departure date got closer it became clear my Irish passport wouldn’t be ready, but they said not to worry they could send it to the Irish embassy in London so it’d be waiting for me when I arrived there. Sounded all reasonable, so, of course, now worries.

Scarpa, backpack and at least one passport in hand, I left the Brocks’ farm with kind blessing and many happy returns. They’d met Corinne so they were not too surprised I may want to try and see her again, though she hadn’t written – and I think I may not have written to her either – and I hadn’t mentioned that was partially the reason for going over to Europe. I forget, I also had her address amongst my handful of addresses, but since, as far as I knew, she was still married, I wouldn’t be just rocking up to her door, and, unlike British bloke who got together with Newcastle chick, I wasn’t exactly invited over there, so it was still just a thought bubble.

So I went down to Melbourne for the last couple of nights before I departed and stayed with my sister Louise. Her asking me to find other accommodation really triggered this string of events so it was perhaps poignant or something like that that I was back there to start yet another adventure.

I noticed on Louise’s bench a bit of paper with what looked to be a flight number. As Peter Brock flew around Australia doing a lot of racing and doing appearances I was pretty familiar with the Qantas flight numbers so I immediately thought my mum might be coming down to see me off. The next day I wasn’t too surprised to see her in Melbourne ready to come with me to Melbourne airport to see me off. Apparently my ranty dad forced her to go down to see me off, perhaps an indication that deep down he really loved his oldest boy and wanted someone down there by proxy to see him off in a tearful farewell.

So the next day, my mum came with me to the airport and tearily watched me as I passed through those special gates where non-ticket holders can’t go for security reasons. Though back then I was still able to bring the little Swiss Army knife Corinne had left me when she’d left after our adventure almost a year previously through the special gates and on the plane with me. I mean, it was such a little knife, not as though someone could used it to slit someone’s throat, hijack the plane and then fly it into some building shortly before some other people from the same terrorist organisation did the same thing at a few other locations, including the building right next to it, right?

I miss those days, where we were innocent enough to allow a little Swiss Army knife on the plane with you.

I was seated in the smoking section of the Thai Airways plane. Another historical curiosity now! I hadn’t smoked hardly at all since my first Vipassana meditation course – apart from the very occasional joint – about a year earlier. One of those joints was on the very first day after the course where I was walking around with this guy Evan, this Greek communist type guy, who’d also done the course with me. We were walking near the war memorial, and botanic gardens in Melbourne, chatting incessantly, still catching up on 10 days of silence when I blurted out, ‘I could do with a joint’, and then, I reached down on the ground and somehow someone had dropped a bag of weed right there in the middle of this huge park. True story. Anyway, it was a sign from the gods, or perhaps temptation from the mischievous sprites, so I smoked it. Evan abstained.

With the weed, I guess what comes around goes around. Some years earlier on the Gold Coast we were smoking weed with Christophe and a few random guys who’d moved to the Gold Coast. We were on Burleigh Hill, in Burleigh Heads, at night trying to find some caves or something in the little bit of rainforest that still exists on the headland there, and I freaked out and thought some monsters were going to eat me or something so I ran as fast as I could down the path. In the process, I dropped all my weed! I had a Twisties chip packet in case the cops pulled us over and put me in jail for 25 years, which they used to do in the sunny state of Queensland in those days. The amount I picked up on the ground in Melbourne was about the same. Go explain that rationally!

Enough distractions. That was the planning and preparation for my trip to Europe. Next stop was Bangkok.

50-Year-Old Backpacker Blog: A Juanito’s Travels Chronicle. BlogPt1

The Pre-Planning Phase.

The first time I went backpacking was 27 years ago.

I went to find a girl, a Swiss girl. Or to visit Ireland. It’s unclear now.

I met the Swiss girl in Victoria, Australia. Her name was Corinne.

The Swiss girl was married then. I am married now. To a Wonder Woman. I even bought her, my Wonder Woman wife, a Wonder Woman sweater at Six Flags theme park in Mexico City. It was after we got drenched on one of the water rides which she’d said we were going to get drenched on and which I thought we’d just get a bit wet. We had to get some warm clothes and the Wonder Woman top seemed like a good way to admit she was right!

My wife and I met around the Day of the Dead in Guadalajara, Mexico. You can read more about that here.

I met Corinne decades earlier. She wasn’t so much a Swiss girl as a Swiss woman. She was the first lover I’d had where it felt like I’d found that puzzle piece I’d be looking for for ages. It just fitted.

I bought a pair of Scarpa boots made in Italy for my first trip overseas. They were soft leather, though harsher than Corinne’s skin softened by Nivea. Corinne looked a bit boyish to begin with. I wasn’t even sure she was attractive. Until I saw her naked body under her boyish clothes a few days later.

“Excuse me, do you have the time?” She’d asked.

It was the 90s. There was a clock on the wall behind her at Hurstbridge railway station. At the end of one of the Melbourne lines. Past Greensborough.

I pointed to the clock behind her head, “5.15”. It was April. Or May. Not that long after Easter. It was already getting dark.

And thus began an adventure around Australia which I fictionalised a bit in my online novella: the Adventures of Kosio and Juanito. So enough of her, my Wonder Woman wife might turn her magic lasso and invisible plane to devastating effect if I harp on about a previous love too much.

Suffice to say, back then, this meeting of the Swiss woman contributed to my motivation for my first trip to Europe back then in the early 90s.

I’ve since been back to Europe with my daughter. I also spent a few days in Iceland,  Paris and Germany without my daughter, or my then wife-to-be, who is not the mother of my daughter, and whom I’d left in Mexico after becoming engaged following a trip to Cuba and around Mexico.

For a few days between getting engaged in Mexico and travelling to Munich to pick my daughter up from a school excursion, I was just by myself, as I had been in the 90s. With a backpack, a return ticket to London, no plans and little money.

How could you plan back then? There wasn’t even any internet to speak of! I seriously can’t recall, I guess you got guidebooks and pamphlets and guidance from the travel agency. I used STA Travel back then to help book my plane tickets. I just looked them up, and, during the worst of COVID lockdowns, they went bankrupt.

I wished I’d forked out some money for the Lonely Planet guidebook back then in the 90s. It would have helped with events to come.

Back to now, 2022. Post-COVID(ish). Well I have COVID as I write this so it’s still going, we’re just mostly ignoring now that millions of us in wealthy countries have had two or three a few jabs.

While in the 90s you could do with a guidebook, now we have the wealth of the internet. Which I find a bit distracting but which occasionally is useful.

We have everything at our fingertips but not much it seems that’s really worth looking at. In many ways it’s taken the mystery out of travel.

Back in the 90s I ended up bumming around Ireland for 6 months staying and working on Organic farms and visiting Vipassana meditation centres in France and Herefordshire.

In 2022, I have a Google Sheets spreadsheet with an itinerary and rough costings for each day of my planned trip. Which, at the moment, is Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Italy, Greece and Turkey.

I’ve decided to name my posts the 50-Year-Old Backpacker, A Juanito’s Travels Chronicle for now because, I don’t know, I can’t come up with another idea and I’ve never done a regular blog before and I’m 49 at the moment and started writing for the internet back in 1997 so I still like to keep it simple.

And I told my son he should use full stops rather than keeping writing ‘and’ but he should do what I say and not what I do.

So, planning for a trip. Back to my first trip to Europe in 1994 or 1995, it was sometime in the early 90s I can’t be bothered getting my old passport out of the shoebox to check. Actually it must have been 1995 as my niece was born when I was over there and she just turned 27. Anyway, I was initially travelling to Europe to kind of chase a Swiss girl called Corinne I’d met on a train at Hurstbridge, an outer suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

That can’t have been the only motivating factor as I’d headed to Ireland, where I hold citizenship due to my grandmother Bee born in County Sligo, rather than Switzerland. But plans change. And for that trip in the 90s I didn’t plan much at all.

I’d been working on a farm in Nutfield, Victoria, not far from Hurstbridge. I had met Bev Brock, the partner of a famous Australian racing-car driver called Peter Brock. They weren’t married but Bev had taken on Peter’s surname.

Bev had offered me a job when, unemployed and on the dole, I decided to go out to do some volunteer work on an organic farm in East Gippsland through a scheme called Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF). This still exists, I just googled them and there’s a bunch of happy looking people in shirts picking chilli and talking to cows.

Bev was doing a weekend yoga retreat on the farm and we got to chatting and I said something like I wanted to help the planet by growing organic vegetables and she’d given me her number on a piece of paper on which she wrote Bev & Peter Brock. See, even back then some of us wanted to help the planet! Well back a long time before I was born many of us did too, it just seems like now it’s starting to get mainstream appeal as we’re on the precipice of turning the place into Venus where no life will live in the fiery inferno, nuked by UV radiation.

I didn’t know at the time Bev gave me the bit of paper that it was ‘the’ Peter Brock, the famous race-car driver, who, despite my general lack of interest in motorsports even I had heard of as he’d won the most prestigious endurance race in Australia at Mt Panorama Bathurst many times. A bit like Muhammad Ali, I’d never watched a boxing match in my life but all us kids in the 70s knew who he was. And we all knew who Peter Brock was.

I’d gone out WWOOFing, as they call it, following my first 10-day meditation course of Vipassana style meditation. There was another famous person who took that course with me called Michael Leunig, a cartoonist who drew ducks and teapots. He is also an Australian icon. As it was a silent retreat for most of the time (9 of the 10 days) I never chatted to him. I also didn’t recognise him, and being a bit shy I may not have really talked to him anyway. I probably said hi though, and I remember his curly hair and peaceful demeanour. I just like to mention that because I’m intrigued by famous people and where they pop up. I guess it’s not too uncommon to be drawn to fame, testament to this is the rise of Instagram and all those other attention seeking apps.

I’d finished the Vipassana meditation course out somewhere in country Victoria. I think it was at an old scout camp. It was around Easter. I remember as one day the servers on the course had given us all a few of those little chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in shiny foil. It was welcomed as they only gave you breakfast and then a lunch which they served around 11, in keeping with the monk and nun lifestyle of not eating after 12. They did give us a bit of fruit around 4ish but still I was starving. I can still remember the smell of the chocolate.

So I came back to a share house after the meditation course. I’d signed up for 3 months at a place in Fitzroy after my sister, who I’d been living with in Melbourne, ran out of space and asked me to move out. She had 2 kids by then and I’m not sure they wanted some hippy hanging about the place for too long. The shared house in Fitzroy seemed to have about 5-6 people in it. Some who lived there and others who were girlfriends or friends of the rent-paying occupants.  I’d rented the room off some woman who’d gone over to Europe or Asia or somewhere for 3 months.

I came back from the silent retreat all enlightened and all – actually not really, I’d found the course extremely tough and like in those pictures where the Buddha sits cross-legged and all tranquil like! My housemates were all sitting around the TV basking in its warm glow. I looked at their profiles on the couch, said ‘hi’, which was barely acknowledged and then went upstairs to my room. I dropped my bags down.

I’d picked up the number for WWOOF somewhere in Melbourne, maybe on a lamppost or at the organic, anarchistic, hippy organisation, Friends of the Earth food store and coop in Collingwood where I bought rolled oats and beans. I’d got the WWOOF people to send me the printed guidebook so I could contact host farms. It had arrived while I was at the retreat so I started flicking through the pages.  I found the yoga place in East Gippsland which looked interesting. I went out. I got on a public phone. I rang them up. They said I could go out the next day as they were going into Bairnsdale and they could take me out to the farm in Buchan. I went downstairs. I announced to the zombie TV people I was heading to a farm the next morning for a few days to which I got some grunts and what have you.

I went back up to my room. Since it was getting chilly I decided to try and start a little fire in the room’s fireplace. I quickly realised the vent was closed or something so the smoke didn’t go up the chimney, it just went into the room. I panicked and put the fire out before too much damage was done. But the chick’s clothes who’d I rented the room off got all smokey.

So I went out for a week to the yoga farm, planted cabbages and lettuces, tended to goats, picked corn, had cups of tea and went for bush walks in the days I had off. I got the number of Bev while I was there. I came back to Fitzroy to the same zombie glow of the house people, I rang Bev and then went out to the farm in Nutfield where she said I go live there and work on the place. I took the train back to Fitzroy, I announced I was moving out, I think I’d paid up till the end of the 3 months anyway. They grunted again. I never knowingly saw them again.

I’d like to say I’m sure they were nice people. But I’m not confident of that. They seemed like jerks anyway.

After moving out to the farm in Nutfield I’d noticed a few racing trophies and the like, not really in prominent positions but obvious enough for me to put 2 and 2 together. I realised I was working for ‘the’ Peter Brock, famous race-car driver and I rang my mum and said, ‘I think I’m working for ‘the’ Peter Brock’ out on a farm in Nutfield. To which she was maybe not that surprised.

The Brocks had a beautiful pink house on a hill overlooking a gully with a huge gum tree in front where they fed the cockatoos, galahs and a semi-tame kangaroo called Tilley bird seed in the mornings. They also fed the magpies and kookaburras a bit of minced meat which occasionally they’d forget and which we’d discover once it’d gone smelly.

The house was surrounded by ponds, one of which went inside and outside the house so fish could swim in. It was pretty amazing. Bev and Peter had their own part of the house where the kitchen and the inside outside pond were.

A few weeks after starting there I met Corrine, a Swiss architect who’d been studying English in Melbourne. She came to the farm and Bev and Peter welcomed her as well.  Bev showed her pictures of the house in architectural magazines and we had dinner together with the family. After spending a few days on the farm together I announced to Bev that Corinne and I were going to travel north. Winter was coming so there wasn’t much to do on the farm at that point anyway. So we travelled up and down the east coast of Australia as far as Airlie Beach. Somewhere along the way I’d discovered Corinne was married, and my newly found Buddhist values said she should go back to Switzerland to finish that before she started a new relationship with me. Besides I actually had a job – and one I was really passionate about – now so I thought I should go back to it.

You can read a fictionalised version of that in my online novel: The Adventure of Kosio & Juanito (& Corinne) – a novel of sorts about fishing, love and life.

It was an amazing time of my life. I regret pushing her away back to Switzerland. But that happens sometimes in life. I should have also probably called the novella the Adventures (with an ‘s’) of Kosio & Juanito (& Corinne) but I’ve since rectified that with the title of this website and I’m going to keep the original name as well as all the typos I’m sure it still has. It’s not Hemingway’s Fiesta, but it’s worth a read in my opinion.

I’m now married to a beautiful Mexican whom I met on my travels to Mexico, so perhaps I’m learning from my regrets and proving the adage there’s more fish in the ocean. Although I also married her like 20 years or so later (than my days in Nutfield with the Brocks) so perhaps you should also be patient both in fishing and love (both themes of my first ‘book’: http://www.juanitos-travels.com/?page_id=1615).

So back to Bev & Peter Brock’s farm in Melbourne. After pushing away Corinne and only having her Swiss Army knife as a memory – as we didn’t get any photos together due to her being married and not having phones capable of taking photos in that day – I went back to the farm in Nutfield and spent the rest of the year tending to goats, chickens and vegetables, planting thousands of gums, casuarinas, wattles and fruit trees, seeing snakes, wombats and foxes and walking around in nature.

I still had, and still have, Corinne’s Swiss Army knife which she’d sent me by mail from Sydney while she waited to go back to Switzerland. She liked painting and had sent me a water colour of the Sydney harbour bridge with a beautiful note and the knife. I kept the knife, and for years the water colour and note.

I regretted not spending more time with her.

Bev & Peter paid me $10 an hour cash in hand (take it up with the tax office – their accountant made me some sort of director of a trust or something), but since I ate with the family every night, had no bills or rent to pay, and also that $10 was worth more back then, I was able to save up a few thousand dollars by the end of the year. I used to keep it in some books at my sister’s house to avoid the prying eyes of the taxman and the dole office.

So, after saving enough for a ticket to London return I decided I would set off and see if maybe I could find her. I had my WOOFing guide after all which included a few farms in Switzerland.

Early in 1995 I had my ticket, which included stopovers in Bangkok and either Kathmandu or New Delhi. I sent a note to Corinne in Switzerland to say I was keen to see her again. She’d left her address with the Brock’s but not with me. Come to think of it I wasn’t sure if I’d sent the note before I left or perhaps when I was in Europe. It seems more like me to wait until I was closer by. Still I sent her something at some point.

I think the plan was to go to Switzerland, spend some time on farms and maybe see if I could catch up with her again in her town of Elgg, Switzerland.

That was the plan at least.