June 2022 – Juanito's Travels

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker 1995 Dublin, Temple Bar, the Chaparrita girls, Wicklow Pirates of the Penzance, and more Inisglas community Wexford 1995 BlogPt10

The Spanish girls nicknamed the house, in Blackpitts Dublin, La Chaparrita. I think it was mainly Agatha’s idea, she seemed the most enthusiastic when it came to zany ideas, and less zany ideas. She just liked ideas in general I think. Chaparrita means short woman. Indeed Agatha and Ines were both short statured people. I can’t recall the name of the Basque woman, I didn’t chat to her very much, but she was a bit taller.

The La Chaparrita household wasn’t entirely Spanish. Even out of the 3 Spanish girls (women) living there, Ines was the only one who truly considered herself Spanish. She was from Madrid. Agatha was from Barcelona and vehemently committed to being referred to as Catalan. She could have been a character out of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which was one of my favourite reads. She wouldn’t teach me any Spanish, preferring I try and pick up the Catalan language. The Basque woman was more ambivalent about her nationality but definitely considered herself Basque first and Spanish second. There was a German, I’ve also forgotten her name. My memory of her was that she was more of an average height and had no obvious link to Spain. And there was Irish Guy, also can’t recall his name but I think he was the one who created the connection with the Inisglas biodynamic community as his mate regularly travelled between Inisglas and Dublin. He was a little taller than me I think, quite a gentle fella, and the only fella of the house.

So while La Chaparrita wasn’t entirely Spanish, 3 out of the 5 inhabitants held Spanish passports and could speak Spanish even though 2 of the 3 strongly preferred their mother tongues and cultural identities.

The household wasn’t that far from Temple Bar, a bar and restaurant district of Dublin. They were near some big church or cathedral. When I used to get into Dublin I’d just walk to their house, which took me maybe 20 minutes or half an hour. I never took much notice of the times or distance back then. But it wasn’t far from the bus or train station. Looking at Google maps around 27 years later, I see it was St Patrick’s Cathedral, a few blocks from the house, that I used to use as a landmark to find their place. You used to have to resort to just techniques before smartphones.

I became a regular visitor to their house, popping up from Wexford every few weeks. Sometimes I’d wait for the Inisglas community van to go up to the markets on Saturdays and get a lift with them, see some bread and then head to their house. Sometimes I’d just hitch a lift. People were pretty up to giving people lifts in those days so I usually didn’t have to wait too long. I think a couple of times I forked out the money to take the train back as it wasn’t as easy to get a lift the other way.

The girls mostly worked at the Elephant & Castle in Temple Bar. They get much for working there. Around £40 a week plus tips, from memory. I think the tips pretty much doubled their wage though most weeks. They were flush with cash and were appreciative of their mothers’ food packages that appeared every now and again from Barcelona, the Basque Country or Madrid. I think the Basque woman had a bit more money and may have had her own room. I think she may have also had a boyfriend. Agatha, Ines and the German shared a room. I’d sleep on the couch when I visited most times.

I usually didn’t make pre-arrangements to come up to Dublin. I tried to call a few times but they’d always say, just come up! So I’d just be bored at Inisglas one day and then get up and go to Dublin for a night or 2. Mostly mid-week when I didn’t have any bakery chores. I never really stopped doing my bread making activities while at Inisglas but I did neglect the vegetable gardening part a bit and became more of a casual labourer supporting Frankie to pick veggies and spread compost as required. I also helped Stuart with the cow milking many evenings. Though there were only 2 cows to milk so sometimes he’d just do that himself, especially when he was grumpy and wanted to be alone. Which was not too uncommon, him being a poet and all.

If I couldn’t find anyone at La Chaparrita house I knew I could go off to the Elephant & Castle where they’d usually be working and just get a drink while waiting for them to finish a shift, or just walking around Temple Bar for a while until they finished. Sometimes Irish Guy would be there by himself and he’d let me in and I could dump the small backpack I usually brought with me, which just contained some underwear, a new shirt and whatever bread, yoghurt and farm produce I had at hand at the time. It would usually be enough to contribute to cooking up something for the household during my visit, which was appreciated due to their poverty. It certainly wasn’t a spiritual poverty and they mostly displayed a bubbly zest for life. It reminded me of another of my favourite books by George Orwell, Down and Out and Paris and London, except maybe a We’re Poor but Don’t Care, We’re Still Up for a Party in Dublin version. One day finances were so bad that Agatha made lettuce soup. I’m pretty sure that’s not even a real thing, but we didn’t care.

I mainly hung out with Ines and Agatha. We’d hang out in St Stephen’s Green park when it was sunny, which was increasing in frequency once summer set in, just smoking and chatting, and maybe reading for hours on end. Or we’d just walk around exploring the place. I loved my time with Agatha, we felt like real soulmates. She told me she’d come to Dublin because the conditions in Barcelona were so bad and that her family just expected her to get married and have babies. It seemed like she lived in a high rise building complex there and that you were never far from a neighbours argument.

One day I took a walk around with Irish guy who showed me some Dublin street markets and gave me a bit of a potted history of the Irish rebellion which included showing me bullet marks at the main Post Office, which I’d still on occasions visit to see if my bloody Irish passport had shown up from the Irish embassy in London, after being sent from Canberra, Australia. It’d been missing for around 3 months at that stage.

When everyone was at work I’d sometimes wander around by myself, trying to find a decent coffee. Back in 1995 that was not that easy. And, having lived in Melbourne with access to some of the great cafes like Pelligrinis on Bourke Street and Tiamo’s on Lygon Street, I had high standards, even as a poor backpacker type. I tried Bewley’s coffee house on Grafton Street. It was the worst coffee I’d had at a place that claimed to make good coffee that I’d ever had in the world. They had a suggestion box and I suggested they learn to make coffee. I’m sure they’ve improved by now. Well, they still exist at least.

I found a second hand bookstore, that was in an old building that was on the River Liffey, which did better coffee, plus I could browse books. I don’t know if I ever bought a book, I feel like I was probably too stingy. Perhaps I bought Homage to Catalonia there. I’d like to think so. Perhaps I even bought Agatha one, if I didn’t I wish I had.

In the evenings, and days when the girls weren’t working, we’d party at the house. There was a fair amount of alcohol to be had and almost always some weed. I liked the weed the most and didn’t partake much of the alcohol. We did go out to a pub or two here and there, but I don’t think we stayed long. On one occasion we were in a pub and I saw on the TV that Prince Charles was visiting, which was the end of May. It was a pretty big deal as Lord Mountbatten, Charles’ great uncle, was assassinated by the I.R.A in the late 70s. I think that could have been a Friday – the day I saw that Charlie was visiting, it must have been before I took on the baking duties at Inisglas, which took up all my Fridays. I remember there being an awful lot of vomit on the streets of Dublin on the way back to La Chaparrita that evening.

At other times, when Charles wasn’t visiting, we’d just go have something to eat at the Elephant & Castle as the girls got some free food or discounts. Once we went to an illegal bar up on the top floor of some two-storey building. Because it was illegal they couldn’t open the windows so it was probably the smokiest, most disgusting place I’d ever been on earth. Yes, they smoked indoors back then, and I was probably exposed to the equivalent of 300 cigarettes in the space of 2 hours. But because it was illegal we could at least pass a joint around. I think I got sick from the smoke and asked if we could bail.

My visits became a cycle of smoking, drinking, chatting, and eating and then eventually crashing on the couch for me, and the girls in their bedrooms. Sometimes we’d go hire some videos. I always wanted to see Pulp Fiction, but the girls had all seen it several times so it wasn’t until upon my return to Australia sometime the following year, or even perhaps the year after that, that I got to see it. Apart from videos we’d also listen to hours of music, singing, dancing and shooting the shit. They were a ball.

I think I usually only stayed a couple of nights and then headed back to Inisglas in the morning so I could be back before dark.

On one occasion it took longer than usual to hitchhike from Wexford to Dublin and I arrived around 6 PM. I went to La Chaparrita and found Ines, hurriedly packing her mochilla (backpack).

‘Juanito!’ she said and kissed me on both cheeks in the Spanish way. ‘I’m going to Wicklow to see a musical. Do you want to go? We have to leave now.’

‘Sure!’, I said. And we literally left that moment. Somehow made our way to a country house in the nearby county Wicklow where Ines knew a few people. Turns out the people Ines knew were putting on the Pirates of the Penzance, the Gilbert and Sullivan show, out on a farm in County Wicklow.

They had a stage set up in front of a pond. It’s possible Ines and I got stoned before the show behind some bushes, who knows. Sounds like something we used to do. We managed to get there just before the show started, as the sun set. It was the craic as the Irish say, though I felt a bit like a dirty hippy surrounded by slightly more refined musical going Irish gentry type people.

It turns out Ines was keen on one of the Irish blokes whose family owned the farm where the Pirates of the Penzance was performed. He was one of the pirates I think. Or perhaps even a very model of a modern Major-General with information vegetable, animal, and mineral (he wasn’t as that fella was old and this guy was young). It became apparent I was Ines’ wingman and I stepped back and let them have their dalliance. I’d grown fond of Ines so I was a bit disappointed she’d got together with Wicklow Pirate man, but at least I got to see a musical, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay for, and they put me up at the country house overnight before Ines and I headed back to Dublin the next day. We’ll at least I think we headed back together, she may have stayed on and ditched me like Tom Cruise did with Goose in Top Gun. Tragic. It wasn’t just a weekend hookup though, Ines and the Wicklow Pirate kept together at least for the time I was in Ireland. The bridesmaid role was set to continue the rest of my trip, but I didn’t know that then.

I was growing fonder of Agatha, and she seemed to be growing fonder of me. We’d often just hang out by ourselves, especially after Ines started spending more time with the Wicklow Pirate. We had similar philosophies on life, Agatha and I, and would often stay up to the early hours chatting. Sometimes we’d go to someone else’s house and hang out a bit, I don’t remember much of that, but I think we’d go to another Spanish person’s house near some canals. Her name may have been Bee, or something similar. We used to call my Irish granny from County Sligo Bee as well, it was short for Bridget.

Agatha and I went to see a Lesbian violent travel film called Butterfly Kiss at some point. It was some sort of arthouse film, which premiered at some film festival in Dublin. I think we may have seen at least one other film together, maybe even at the same festival. We were all into the independent alternative scene. I’m not sure if she even ended up visiting Inisglas again one time. I’d like to think so, perhaps for our Inisglas festival we hosted towards the end of summer, but thinking it doesn’t mean it actually happened.

At one point towards the end of summer I picked up a fair amount of weed in Wexford that someone had been growing. I walked into the kitchen at Inisglas one day and there were a couple of very giggly residents there. They offered me some of the cause of their gigglyness, giving me a decent sized takeaway bag. It was good shit and the next time I visited La Chaparrita we had a really big party time, courtesy of that biodynamic magic. I’m sure Steiner wouldn’t approve unless the shit was first buried in cow horns under the full moon and left for a few months so it would pick up all the cosmic vibes.

I felt free and alive during those months. I had good friends, good times. I never really needed to spend much money either. It was the way life should be.

Meanwhile my life at Inisglas continued. I started doing a bit of writing, with the help of Master Poet Stuart, and I think I actually improved a little, though I don’t think I’ve saved any of that work. I think I may have sent the occasional letter to Agatha, or at least some notes about her in a diary I’ve long forgotten, and back to the family in Australia. I’d call my mum every month or so courtesy of the special phone card my dad had given me before leaving, just to say I was alive and kicking. I also sent a roll of film back to them to be processed. It was like posting pics on Instagram before it existed, only much less instantaneous and with more chemicals involved.

As the summer went on I started to get itchy feet and thoughts increased of moving on from Inisglas. I mean, I was still enjoying the place and we had some craic to be sure – which wasn’t, as I originally thought, the crack cocaine – but the Irish term for fun. I’m sure that’s a common confusion.

On a few occasions, when it was warm, we took the kids down to the beach and spent a few hours there. I remember chatting with Nora on the Wexford beach for a while, drinking homemade cordial and then going for a bit of a swim in the cold Irish Sea.

On one occasion most of the guys from Inisglas took the community row boat down the River Slaney to the pub where I’d stopped on my first full day in Wexford on the way to Inisglas. We had a few joints on the way, perhaps courtesy of Ross, who’d somewhat warmed to me and who had some secret weed grow plot about that I never came across despite my frequent walks into the forest. It could have been beyond the nettle forest, or close to the border of the rubbish dump that was adjacent to the property and which was the cause of a massive fly outbreak that meant we resorted to putting sticky fly traps in the kitchen for a few months that would be covered in a few hours.

But back to Ross, he had warmed to me to the point where he offered me some great advice that I’ll always remember.

‘John’, he said, ‘never drive a truck with drugs in it between Amsterdam and Britain. When we were importing from Amsterdam we’d occasionally set up a young dopey hippy like you to get busted by the cops.’

He went on to explain that they’d put a small amount in the dopey hippy’s truck and contact the customs people. ‘While they were busy busting the poor cunt for the small amount of drugs another truck would drive through with heaps in it, unchecked.’

It seemed Ross may have had some remorses around setting up naive hippies, and took me for the type who might fall for such a thing. But after my Bangkok Gem scam incident I was much less trusting of people anyway. And, even without being ripped off, that sounded like a seriously dodgy proposition anyway so I would certainly have avoided it. I’m quite confident in that. But I still appreciated Ross looking out for me. You didn’t want to get on the bad side of Ross. One day one of Michael’s Danish friends from the nearby disabled support community tried to get Inisglas to put money in to support their activities and Ross, smelling a rat, fairly violently reacted to the guy. He didn’t do anything physical, but the guy I’m sure shat himself, after getting a verbal serve from Ross, figuratively speaking, if not actually.

Anyway on the way to the pub in the row boat we saw a seal. On the way back up the Slaney River (which sounds like the title of an Irish folk drinking song) we were more stoned and more drunk and it was dark, and we were singing and then I looked out to the bank and I said: ‘Hey it seems like we’re not moving’.

Frankie, Stuart, Michael, Jay, and perhaps even Ross, looked over and there was some discussion on whether we were moving or not. I mean we were rowing so we should be going forward, but yes indeed it did seem like our efforts weren’t getting us anywhere. So Jay put the oar down and he said, ‘I think we’re on some sand bank’. And then he put his foot over and said, ‘yes, we are on some sand bank’. So we got all out and pushed ourselves off and continued rowing and singing all the way back to Inisglas.

On another occasion we’d all gone to a pub in Wexford and Stuart and I walked the few kilometres home in the dark ourselves, maybe leaving the others there for a bit longer. We had some deep and meaningful discussion that night I feel, by the light of the moon as we traversed the lanes between Wexford town and The Deeps.

Michael and I hitched down to Rosslare Harbour one night just because we were bored after doing a day’s baking, which Michale was now helping out with. We ended up inviting ourselves to some party at someone’s house and then trying to see if anyone would let us crash at their place. When it became apparent no such offerings were afoot I took my sleeping bag and headed to the beach leaving Michael behind to party some more. He joined me an hour or so later having had no success to convince neither man nor woman to give him a bed for the night. We had one of those cold and uncomfortable beach sleeps for a few hours and then got up and hitched back to Inisglas the next morning. I think Michael had wanted to get away as he’d recently been back to Denmark with his girlfriend, who worked at the same nearby disabled support community that the other Danish guy who had managed to piss off Ross worked at. He was meant to be staying at his girlfriend’s house but they somehow managed to break up on the flight over, so he just ended up sleeping on the street for 3 nights and then heading back to Ireland.

He wasn’t the only one getting rejected. But, perhaps more of that after. For there were a few other changes afoot at Inisglas.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Zen Cleaning Robot, fiestas, mas drama y thinking of moving to County Sligo 1995/2022 BlogPt11

2022

I haven’t focussed on why I started this blog for a while, that is planning for my 50th birthday world trip. It turns out planning a 50th trip is a lot more complicated than planning a 22 year-old trip. When I was 22, in 1995 – for most of the year at least, I turned 23 in December – I didn’t think about jobs, kids, any wives, retirement savings or anything like that. I was like a bird that could just fly off and sit in a tree for a while when the desire took me. A simple life. I could just pack my blue backpack with a few things and hit the road.

Now, I research guidebooks, try and find the best time to travel to fit in with plans to move back to my hometown of the Gold Coast in Queensland, while maintaining a job here in Canberra where I’ve worked for various departments of the Australian government for the last 15 1/2 years. Thinking, should I quit my job, get a payout, travel around the world and then return and try and find another job, or should I try and keep my Canberra job, use up all my Long Service Leave and Annual leave, travel the world, visiting my wife’s family in Mexico, and having a 50th birthday party, on the way, then return to the Gold Coast and find another job, hopefully with enough savings to live off until I do.

Life was much simpler in 1995 when I was 22 and 2022 was some freakishly high number I could hardly fathom, where the Zen Cleaning Robots had taken over all the mundane jobs of the world leaving us humans to just run around having fun in free houses, rather than post-pandemic fears, rising housing prices, and, just to keep it interesting, part II of the 1850s Crimean War where Russia fought the West (and Turkey) for control of Sevastopol and other such strategic places on the Black Sea, which has also managed to drive up the price of lettuces here in Australia to $10 a head.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, people need to learn history, how often seemingly forgotten events from hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago can affect us and influence the current era.

But back to 1995.

1995

I returned to Wexford one summer’s afternoon, after visiting Agatha, Ines and the girls in Dublin. I think for once I got the train back to Wexford, as I’d managed to save a small amount of money over the last months and I couldn’t be bothered trying to hitch. When I arrived back in Wexford I had to walk from Wexford town out to Inisglas, in The Deeps, around 14-15 kms.

About halfway back the blackest of black clouds covered the sky which, moments earlier, had been clear blue and sunny. It was a most ominous sight. It came out of nowhere. Maybe not nowhere, it seemed to be from the direction of the Irish Sea. The elements erupted. A gale started blowing. Rain started pouring from the sky. The world turned black. Black as the night’s sky. Then the lightning started. Lighting strikes came down every 3-4 steps. 1,2,3 then a thunderous thunder clap. 1,2,3 and the ground shook like an electric bomb, and then another, and then some more. So loud. Whipping down from the heavens with a crack so intense it made my spine shiver, my hands shake. So terrified. I didn’t dare look up to see where the lighting was landing. It was close. Metres away close. No gap between the light and sound. No time to count to 1. How close to death I was, any step now I thought. I walked closer to the trees hoping they might take the brunt of any lighting strike, pulling my chin to keep the rain from my chest. No escaping it though. I kept walking. 20 terrifying minutes or so later, looking at my feet, drenched with rain. It was gone. Quiet. Just for the sounds of the water dropping from the leaves of the trees.

I can’t remember many times I felt so close to death than those 20 minutes. Apart from the time the Thai Airways’s plane’s engines had failed – twice – after coming out of Bangkok a few months earlier. Or that time Luke had boiled up a whole bag of magic mushrooms that Matt had picked on his birthday and put in the freezer in the house we shared in Newcastle and given me a whole glass without alerting me to the phenomenal mind-fucking strength he’d made it. I mean most people just put in 3 or 4 mushrooms. That’s more than enough! What psycho puts a whole fucking kilo or something in? I ended up at a pizza shop that night asking a waiter to call an ambulance because I’d OD on mushies. But as I waited I saw a dog and started feeling better and decided to follow the dog to Sydney or somewhere.

Inisglas was also changing. The Buddha went on about change all the time. I would hear it everyday in my Vipassana mediation courses. Change, change. Everything’s always changing. If you get attached to things without recognising they will sooner or later change, you will be miserable.

I wasn’t feeling that miserable at the time, so perhaps I wasn’t that attached. But there were certainly changes afoot.

Nora and Stuart hooked up. Because Nora and Stuart hooked up, Frankie and I were now sharing the little space above or near the flour mill near Anthony and Eve’s house as Nora had moved to the main house. Frankie wasn’t too happy about the whole thing but he accepted it with sad dignity and continued to tend to the vegetable garden, even though most of the community, including myself, weren’t pulling their weight in that respect. Mind you I did continue to help Frankie out, picking veggies, mounding up potatoes, but it was more like a part time thing.

I also kept helping Stuart with the cow milking and yoghurt and quark making from time to time. Frankie helped me once when I drank a bunch of fresh unpasteurised milk straight from the milk bucket and ended up throwing up. He was a really nice guy. I think I’d discovered that day I might have also been intolerant to milk and asked Eve whether we could buy some soy milk during the weekly shopping run. Anthony, already upset that we had a freezer full of a dead cow that nobody was eating as we always made vegetarian meals, rolled his eyes in regards to the idea of milk intolerances. He also said Plato was dead set against people eating beans because it ruined their philosophical capacity or some crap like that. Sorry, but if the Buddha and Plato were in a fight the Buddha would shit on Plato and his beans any day, even when he was in his unhealthy self-deprivation period before he found the middle path.

Nora’s hooking up with Stuart meant Stuart’s son was getting more attention and being slightly less feral and pooing on the front lawn much less. But it meant Nora’s son getting a bit upset as he obviously as less attention was being given to him.

The kids in general were like community farm kids, roaming about like free range chickens most of the day and occasionally getting into trouble. One morning they all came in screaming and yelling and us adults all sprung into action wondering what the heck was going on. After more screaming it transpired that apparently they’d all been down to the beehives and decided to whack the sides of the beehives with sticks, which the bees objected to. They were covered in bee stings. I think the homoeopathic vet had some lotion to put on the hundreds of stings. They all survived.

The homoeopathic vet also gave a cow that had eaten too much clover, and was thus getting bloated, some plain old dishwashing detergent. She held her nostrils and poured it down her throat. You’d probably charge someone £50 for that.

Then there was Jay. Jay had bought himself a donkey, and a cart, and was making plans with Anushka, or whatever the quiet German girl’s name was, to travel around Ireland picking winkles and smoking grass, while kipping on the cart. He was going to leave in a few weeks. Just at the start of Autumn. Not that I had any idea at the time as I hadn’t read or seen Lord of the Rings, but it sounded a bit like something a hobbit would do.

Michael from Denmark was getting tired of Ireland. He was planning to go back to Denmark I think, or perhaps go work with the other Danish people at the disabled home, where, I think, his ex-girlfriend was still working, but where he’d also get a real wage, which was not forthcoming at Inisglas due to its philosophy of not really making money from the farm despite it’s great potential.

Tron was looking into some biodynamic program somewhere else in Ireland or Scotland or Norway or something, so was soon leaving the place.

Ross, being on the run from the UK police, was happy to keep low and remain in place with his chickens, baconers and porkers.

And I, well I had saved a little money, but I wanted to save more, so I started looking into WWOOFing opportunities elsewhere in Ireland where all my food and board was included, so I could save all my dole. I had found a place in my granny’s home County Sligo, in fact around the area of her home town Tubbercurry, also spelt Tobercurry on occasions. I was going there in a few weeks so I was getting ready for that.

But there would be one big event before that move happened.

Inisglas’ main manor house was in disrepair, and since the farm barely made any money, there was no way to fix it. So Stuart had the idea of organising a music festival where we could sell tickets and put the proceeds towards fixing the place.

He turned out to be quite the organiser and got a few local bands to play at the event for free. He even managed to get his friends from a band called Elephant Walk, or some name like that, a folk/ world music outfit who’d played at Glastonbury. So we had a pretty good line up. To add to that, the guys at Inisglas decide to perform a few songs ourselves. We decided on Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, and two other songs I can’t remember. I was only singing choruses in those so I didn’t pay as much attention to them.

We decided for our performance we’d dress up like women. There was Frankie, Michael, Stuart and I, plus some googley-eyed German who’d recently arrived on the farm as a part of some farm stay thing he’d organised to learn biodynamic techniques. Tron was happy as he finally had someone on the biodynamic farm, besides Anthony and Eve who started the community, who was actually interested in biodynamics.

I liked Googly-eyed Person, but wasn’t there long enough to remember his name. He seemed like a good person.

We practised our songs for weeks and learnt all the words to Tears in Heaven which are still in my head somewhere today I’m sure. We did up posters, and put them up around town. Stuart got a spot on the local radio station to promote the event and after a few weeks, concert day was here.

It was a beautiful sunny day, though another summer storm threatened in the evening.

We decided that they Inisglas crew would start the event, so we donned our dresses like brides on a wedding day and made our way out for our big performance. Stuart had a nice slim dress which was in 1920s’ style. He even had a bit of lippy from Nora. Frankie, Michael and Googly-eyed German guy also had nice dresses. I was very happy with my dress, it was a lilac number, kind of thing you might see a Mexican woman wear on her sweet 15. I had really long hair, and the face of my great-grandmother from Sligo, so I think many in the crowd were thinking I might be the real deal, if it wasn’t for the obviously hairy legged men besides me. After Tears we had a more upbeat number and I went wild swinging my hair about. We had a ball.

The crowd was good and I think in the end we had a few hundred come along. We’d tried to get a liquor licence but were refused because we were holding the event on a Sunday, which was a harder day to get official permission to serve drinks given it was the Lord’s day. We got around the ‘law’ by having a game where you threw darts at a dart board, and if you hit a particular number we’d give you a free beer. It cost £3 to enter. After some confusion people realised the special number was any number, and even if you couldn’t hit the board we’d still give you a beer to console you. We kept making people throw the darts though as it was funny.

I’m sure if the liquor licensing people had come our whole scheme would have quickly fallen apart.

We also had sandwiches made with bread Michael and I had baked, some cheesy buns, also made at Inisglas, and home made cordial. Michael and I were the main bread makers at the time as Jay had moved more into beekeeping at that point and was prepping for his donkey-cart tour.

The rest of the real bands played throughout the evening and much craic was had by all. It did rain for a bit in the late afternoon and many of the families with young kids went off, leaving the harder core revellers. We ended up finishing up late into the evening smoking weed and drinking beers and wine by a big bonfire. It was like one of those wistful scenes at the end of some coming of age movie.

It was, really, the craic.

I decided to end on this high note, and in the days after, packed my bag and hitched up to Dublin to spend a few days with Agatha before heading to Sligo.

As it happened, Agatha had a friend who was coming to visit from Spain, so they’d organised a little trip through Northern Ireland and Donegal and were happy to drop me off at Tubbercurry, Sligo on the way back. So the universe was once again providing.

But just as change was happening at Inisglas, change was also happening at the Chaparrita in Dublin, and for me, most importantly, a change in my relationship with Agatha.

More of that in the next blog post though, I think finishing up Inisglas after a few months is also a nice spot to finish up this post.

P.s The Zen Cleaning Robot is a concept I came up with Rob Skelton at RMIT later in the nineties. I think it was for a school project on writing for the internet that started with a drunken night of wine and indoor soccer where I ended up sleeping at a house in Saint Kilda with the friend of a classmate who was growing a super awesome little weed plant grown from a seed form Holland.

I would have hoped Zen Cleaning Robots would be being manufactured by now.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Inisglas Biodynamic Community 1995 BlogPt9

The day after arriving Ian drove the community van into Wexford to deliver some veggies and yoghurt to the health food shop. I went into the social services office and started the paperwork to get some unemployment benefits.

They gave me a number and issued me a plastic social services card which I still have today. I’m not sure if I actually got it on the day or whether they sent it to me later. Luckily I had enough documentation even without my Irish passport to prove I was Irish. They explained the unemployment system, similar to Australia in that you had to apply for a certain amount of jobs, but different in that they’d send a cheque to the address, which I could cash at the post office, rather than having money deposited in my bank account which they did in Australia. When I said I was staying at Inisglas they immediately recognised the place as it turned out just about everyone there was on the dole. Wexford wasn’t a huge place so people generally had a notion there was a bunch of hippy going-ons at the place, but that they were mostly harmless.

There were a few at Inisglas who weren’t on the dole. Anthony and Eve, and Ross – who probably didn’t want any official record of himself due to being a British fugitive – and the homoeopathic vet who brought in a basic income with the homoeopathic treatment of cows and the like. I think Wobbie also got most of his income from selling trees from the nursery. The others weren’t on the Irish dole, their respective countries had some sort of arrangement with Ireland so they could collect unemployment benefits from Denmark and the other places they were from. I think they got a bit more than us Irish.

I wasn’t that keen to be collecting the dole, but I really didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to stay in Ireland more than 2 weeks. I soon also found there weren’t many jobs going in the local area so working on a biodynamic farm on the dole was going to be it while I was in Wexford.

I put my qualms about social welfare aside and quickly settled into a routine in the Inisglas community.

My granny from County Sligo had to move to Australia when she was 10, after her mother died. She worked on a farm in central Queensland close to Mt Morgan, near Rockhampton. I was sort of doing the same in reverse, but I think much more comfortable than my poor granny probably had to endure.

Before heading back to Inisglas I stopped off at one of the pubs in town with Jay and Frankie. Jay had a pint, I think I just had an orange juice again. Stuart popped in a bit later for a quick drink.

The day at Inisglas always started with a light breakfast, or at least a cup of tea and a snack, at the wooden table in the kitchen. There was a wood fired AGA oven in there that was always on low. There was always a kettle there and a pot of tea on the go.

Ross was obsessed with having the kettle going 24/7 and used to get pissed when anyone left it empty, or drank the last of the tea without making a fresh batch. As he often had that look in his eye like, ‘I’ll stab the next person who leaves the teapot empty’, it seemed wise to make sure the brew never ran dry. I was suitably scared of Ross, but I was also friendly so I tried chatting to him. He’d often just grunt, but he would also sit occasionally and drink tea at the table with me and smoke rolly cigarettes at the kitchen table. If there were too many people about he’d usually just grab his tea and run off to another part of the manor house.

You could tell this used to be a stately home because the kitchen had places for a bunch of bells which were attached to various rooms to alert the kitchen staff to the desires of the stately home owners. It was a big place with maybe 10 bedrooms, a sizeable living area and space for a fancy table. The fancy table was long gone and we always ate around the solid wooden kitchen table that easily fitted 15-20.

Breakfast would normally be a bit of soda bread baked in the AGA, which Jay or Anthony would make during the week. The community also had a sizeable bakery with professional bread ovens subsidised by the European community. But we only used that when we were doing the baking for the Dublin markets on the weekends as the ovens were only worth firing up if you were making dozens and dozens or loaves. I’d have the bread with jam for breakfast most days. Occasionally I’d go for a porridge or just fry a few eggs, depending on my mood. We have eggs and fruit in regular supply in the pantry as well as some dried and fresh fruit, and as much milk, freshly squeezed from the farm’s cows that you could ever possibly want to drink.

After breaky I’d head out with Frankie for a couple of hours to tend to the vegetables. It wasn’t overly strenuous. Sometimes we’d tend to the huge compost heaps which we’d use to feed the veggies. Sometimes we’d slash nettles and comfort and soak them in water to make fertiliser teas for the plants. Sometimes we’d plant out seedlings of kale – before kale was even popular – or spinach. It was still early in the season when I arrived and there wasn’t a huge variety to harvest, but we dug up a few Jerusalem artichokes which grew in abundance. Jerusalem artichokes are gassy, not super delicious, but highly nutritious and easy to grow root vegetables. Most evening meals made in my first weeks there at Inisglas included at least a few artichokes in them, while we waited for the nicer Mediterranean vegetables – although most of them originated in central America – like the tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants. The other things ready to harvest in those first weeks of me being on the farm were carrots, some peas and a few beets and brassicas – kale and the like. I think we were getting the odd leek as well, so enough variety. Being Ireland we had a lot of potatoes growing, but in spring we could only forage a few little spuds, still plenty to add to meals though.

After a few hours in the garden we’d go back and have some more tea, some home made cordial and some bread and cheese, perhaps with some gherkins from bottles. After lunch we’d go do a bit more gardening, perhaps going to 5 PM, depending on the weather, or whenever it started getting dark, before stopping and heading in for dinner. I was amazed we never had to water much, just the stuff in the poly-tunnels and seedlings in the first few weeks after planting until their roots got down into the wet sublayer. We did regularly add the nettle and comfrey fertiliser teas though which gave the plants a bit of a drink I’m sure. Otherwise the rain was sufficient to keep them all going.

We took turns making dinner using some sort of roster. As mentioned, Tron was the worst cook. The rest of us usually did up a vegetable stew or curry with some sort of pulse like chickpeas, kidney beans, white beans or dried peas in it, as well as a few spuds, carrots, peas, parsnips and whatever veggies we were picking at the time, including the dreaded Jerusalem artichokes. Tron’s focussed on cooking nettles until Nora banned the use of nettles. I was thinking of writing: to be fair on Tron, nettles are nutritious, but I don’t think we should be fair on Tron and he should be rightly condemned for his cooking abominations, especially given the other delicious things we had at hand.

Often we’d add a few tins of tomatoes and tomato paste as well as herbs and spices to add flavour, and serve with rice, or pasta, or some carbs. There was always some bread to go with it if you wanted.

As there were around 20 people all up including kids you had to do up a big pot. As the veggies were fresh and full of biodynamic flavour the meals were pretty good, nothing super fancy but hearty and filling and never too boring apart from Tron’s nettles.

I’m not sure exactly what time of year it was when I started out at Inisglas, but one night soon after arriving I saw Eurovision was on the tele, which is usually in May. According to the Internet, the final was 13 May in 1995 to be precise, and Ireland hosted it that year after winning in 1994. I didn’t have the internet back then so I’ll stick with sometime in May just to be retro.

After initially focussing on helping out Frankie with the vegetables, I branched out a bit and started tagging along with Stuart, who milked the cows in the morning and afternoon. I got to be a regular cow milker and Stuart showed me how to make his Irish championship yoghurt. I had beginner’s luck and my first batch was as good as any Stuart had made. He also showed me how to make quark, a type of soft cheese, which, at least in Stuart’s version, involved putting yoghurt in cheesecloth and hanging it under the big rhododendron tree. It was another good thing to have for lunch with the bread from the AGA oven. I think we also made a type of cheddar cheese, or at least a cottage cheese, as well, which meant separating the milk curds from the whey, just as they did in nursery rhymes. Whey, for those who don’t know, is a watery yellowy buttery milky type of stuff, pretty clear and not white like milk. I’d take most of the whey to Ross who gave it to his pigs to fatten them up to make bacon out of them. Ross explained there were basically 2 types of pigs, porkers, which you used to make pork out of, and bacon’s, which you used for bacon. And thus endeth the pig lesson from Ross.

We would often save some cream from the milk, after we pasteurised it. You could have that on some of the cakes that people like Yvonne and Nora occasionally made. We’d also sometimes use a bit of the whey that Ross’ pigs didn’t eat to add to the vegetable stews. It gave a nice bite to the broth.

One thing we didn’t make was butter. Back then Ireland and Europe had a butter mountain and when you got your dole check they’d also send a voucher to get a pound of butter each fortnight which Eve would collect together so the community always had good Irish butter in abundance. I hope in some way I contributed to dealing with the butter mountain while I was there.

On Fridays I started helping Jay out in the bakery. After breakfast and tea we started making bread the whole day. We’d work up a sough dough or stoned ground biodynamic yeast bread batch, put it in the tins to rise, work on the next batch, and then chuck batches in the oven every hour or thereabouts. In between bakings, while the dough was rising and the risen ones were cooking in the oven, we’d sit and chat and have tea and cigarettes (me less than Jay who was a self confessed chain smoker), as well as freshly baked bread with some jam, cheese, and quark. We’d usually go from 10 am to 6 pm, then load the van around 7-8 PM ready to take the markets in Dublin the next day. We mostly had sourdoughs and yeast wholemeal breads just with some sesame seeds on top, but we also made a few fancy loaves. We made packets of flat pita style breads, some ones with olives and tomatoes, a sunflower seed loaf and a batch of raisin and nut loaf.

On Saturday mornings I’d hitch a lift up to the Dublin markets and help sell the bread, yoghurt, cheeses, bags of flour and whatever veggies we’d brought up with us. We’d usually sell out of everything by around 11 or 12, except maybe an olive loaf or raisin and nut bread. We alway kept a few loaves back at Inisglas for the community.

The drive to Dublin was nice. It only took an hour and a half to 2 hours. I was still getting used to these little countries after the expanse of Australia. We passed through County Wicklow, and got a nice view of the Wicklow Mountains. I remember a stand of Australian gum trees somewhere on the way and a few picturesque forest edged roads on the way.

Initially I didn’t stay much in Dublin, I just hung out at the markets for a few hours and maybe walked around whatever area that was in. I also took the chance to go check out the Dublin GPO to see if me Irish passport had arrived, which it never did. Later on though I’d come up fairly often to Dublin and stay with friends.

The friends from Dublin were ones I first met at Inisglas. One of the guys who seemed to regularly show up at Inisglas invited a few girls from Dublin to Inisglas one weekend. They were Spanish, well Ines was Spanish, Agatha, she was Catalan, as she would often point out. Stuart encouraged me to hang out with them and they invited me back to Dublin where they shared a house with an Irish guy, a Basque Spanish woman and a German woman, all in their twenties. After a weekend of fun on the farm and showing Ines and Agatha around I was keen to see more of them, so next time I took the bread up to the markets instead of going back to Inisglas, I took a loaf of bread, some cheese and yoghurt and headed off to their house. I started doing that every couple of weeks.

The first time I went to the girls’ house was a few weeks after arriving at Inisglas. By that stage my dole cheques were coming through. After contributing my £40 (yes it was still before Euros) I’d have £20 leftover. I used about £4 buying some duty free tobacco from Nora, who got it duty free on the ferry when she went over to London to study her Steiner education and brought enough back for all the smokers, which was pretty much everyone, except Stuart, who pretended not to smoke, but who ended up having a regular smoke. He was diabetic so he did need to try and at least to pretend to avoid it.

So I had about £16 pounds leftover each week which was enough to hang out in Dublin with. Especially if I could bring some bread, cheese and some veggies with me to cook at the girls house.

This allowed me to explore Dublin a bit over summer and party with the girls who had dubbed their house the Chaparrita. The girls were very short and this does seem to mean ‘shorty’, though sometimes I think it may have had a double meeting by the way they spoke and giggled about it.

More on Dublin next time though, I think it deserves some focus. Especially my relationship with Agatha Julia and Ines.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker Wexford, Ireland & Inisglas Biodynamic Community 1995 BlogPt8

Inisglas biodynamic farm 1995

1995

It was an overcast and miserable day when I made the crossing from Fishguard, Wales to Rosslare Harbour in County Wexford. I spent most of the time hanging out on deck watching the ocean, maybe a seabird or two, with a freezing nose. I wore my green Melbourne tram conductors coat Evan had given me. And my beanie, and a few layers more. I think it was late spring by that stage. The sun was nowhere to be seen.

I was on my way to Ireland for the first time in my life. Somewhere almost equidistant between Wales and Ireland I felt calm. I was nowhere for a few minutes. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was sailing into the unknown. Starting with a blank piece of paper.

I don’t know how I got from Rosslare harbour to the town of Wexford, whether there was a bus, or I hitched a lift, maybe there was a train. Whatever way, I arrived in the town in the afternoon. I found a BnB in the middle of town for £14. It was one of those places that is probably listed on AirBnb now. It had a nice warm bed.

There’s an old ruined church in the middle of Wexford which I explored a bit the next day. It’s St Patrick’s Church and dates back to mediaeval times. I had no idea about that back then, I just thought it was cool and old and something I wouldn’t see in Australia.

The next day my bed and breakfast host served me a proper Irish breakfast. I was vegetarian so the host substituted bacon and sausages for more eggs and beans to make sure I didn’t starve to death with all my no meat nonsense. There was also toast and Jam. I was pretty happy with it all and had it my fill, not knowing when I’d next have such a feast.

The address I had for Nora, the neighbour of my friend’s mother in Tugun Australia, read something like: Inisglas, Crossabeg, The Deeps, Co. Wexford. There was no street number, nor phone number, so I asked around about The Deeps and Crossabeg. Apparently I had to cross over a bridge and go down the road a little bit until pass some viking tower – well back then I thought it was a viking tower, but it seems it’s a memorial to the Crimean War, which is still causing trouble today, both the tower being confused with mediaeval viking monuments and the Crimea featuring in the latest European conflict with Russia. Once past the tower I was to find a road which I would take to the left and would eventually lead me to the general area I was looking for.

So I put on my backpack and started hiking. The sun was out, the grass fresh and damp from yesterday’s rain. I stopped off at a pub on the way where some grannies were having some whiskey. I hadn’t been drinking, and it was still only 10.30 or something, so I got an orange juice, just so I could sit for a minute in one of the booths, and asked for some further directions before heading off again. I could see the Crimea tower from there which was a convenient landmark before the days of Google maps.

I crossed the bridge and passed the tower and found the road I was looking for and started heading towards the left, down some narrow laneways through hedges, green fields, sheep, cows and some river’s edge I think with reeds growing about. After around 1.5/2 hours walking I felt I should be getting close. I asked a local and they said Inisglas might be up further to the left. I kept walking and found a dirt road that looked like it was heading the way I wanted and wandered down, past some sheep and a fruit orchard. I found an old man cutting grass with an old scythe and he said this was indeed Inisglas. It turned out this was the founder of the Inisglas community, Anthony Kaye.

About a kilometre down the road I came to a huge rhododendron tree – I didn’t know it was a rhododendron back then I just thought it was a big tree – which stood before a stately country manor. I looked around for signs of activity. A few kids darted about ignoring me. After a few minutes a curly haired Irishman came up to me.

‘Hello’, he said, offering his hand.

‘Hi’, I said, taking his hand, ‘I’m John from Australia. Is Nora here?’

******

A bit later I got to chatting to Nora, she was surprised to see someone from the Gold Coast all the way out here at Inisglas (or perhaps Inis Glas) in The Deeps, Wexford not far from the mighty Slaney River.

‘What a surprise’, she said.

‘Yes’, I’ve come a long way. Didn’t want to explain the whole journey to date, especially the sapphire incident, just that I was travelling around and wanted to spend some time in Ireland and I was looking for a place to stay and work.

‘Well, they’re a bit wary of people just showing up and wanting to stay here.’ She said. She explained it was a community and that everyone would have to be consulted to see if they would let me stay.

‘Do you have money?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I have a couple of hundred. But I’m an Irish citizen, I should be able to get some unemployment benefits.’

‘Irish?’ She said. She had residency in Australia it turns out. Her son’s father was Australian, so she was kind of used to the whole dual nationality thing. It also turns out the community was used to dealing with the whole unemployment benefits thing as well.

‘We can ask if you can stay. I can’t promise anything. How long would you like to stay?’

‘I’m not sure. It’d be good if I could stay for a little while at least.’

The community was brought together, there were a fair few people, of various ages and nationalities. On first count all up there seemed to be around 15 adults and a bunch of kids. We chatted and discussed whether they’d let me in, I was asked to give a bit of background about myself, kind of like a brief pitch to see whether I’d fit in. I told of my work on a farm in Australia, my desire to travel, my Irish granny who used to live in Sligo before travelling to Australia at age 10 (I may not have given that much detail then, perhaps just my granny was Irish which made me Irish and legible for the dole I’d hope) and my keenest to get involved with community there.

They sent me off and chatted amongst themselves. I must have come across ok because they called me back in and announced that they’d agreed to let me stay for a bit as long as I could work out the dole or some other way to bring in regular cash and help out with the running of the farm.

It turns out they had a mixed operation, with vegetables, some livestock, including sheep, chickens, pigs, and some milking cows, as well as a flour mill. It was all based on biodynamic principles – an esoteric farming method this eccentric Swiss or Austrian guy made up.

Everyone was expected to contribute to the costs of the place, £40 a week I think it was, which Eve Kaye, the kind of matriarch of the place, explained covered food, board and electricity. I said I could pay for 2 weeks up front and then organise some unemployment benefits or perhaps find a job.

Relief fell over me. After weeks of uncertainty I now had a reasonably priced place to stay, assuming they’d let me sign up for the dole. I was shown a little room in the main manor house and settled in. I could sort out the dole thing later, apparently someone drove a van into town fairly regularly and I could get a lift into the social security office the next day.

I’m not sure I can remember every single person who was staying on the community at the time. But here goes.

There was Nora, she was a preschool teacher studying Steiner education in London and travelled there every few weeks to study. Steiner education was based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the same one who came up with the practice of biodynamic farming. It was all pretty esoteric. I wasn’t opposed to a bit of esoteric thinking in those days, the more ‘holistic’ and ‘spiritual’ the better, though I still held a modicum of scientific doubt.

Nora had a kid, I forget his name. He was Aussie-Irish like me. Nora was going out with Frankie, the Irish guy who greeted me by the rhododendron tree. He mainly looked after the vegetable gardens, including, as you might expect in Ireland, quite a few potatoes. Nora, Frankie and the kid shared a loft apartment kind of above the flour mill, from memory, which was behind the main manor house.

The flour mill was run by the community’s founder Anthony Kaye. Anthony lived with his wife Eve in a nice stone house connected to the mill, next to, or below, I can’t remember exactly, where Nora and Frankie and the kid lived.

Then there was Ross, he was on the run from the British cops for importing drugs from Amsterdam. Which I suppose technically made him a ‘criminal’. He’d fled the UK while waiting to go on trial for importing drugs. He spent a few months hiding out in France in tents before making his way to Inisglas. Apparently the French police when they questioned him one day as to why he was camping out on French roundabouts said, ‘you know, the English do not help us, and we do not help the English.’ And that such crimes would only warrant a slap on the wrist in France, but that he had to stop camping on roundabouts. Ross mainly looked after some pigs and chickens, both of which he’d occasionally slaughter and sell. He was rough as guts, I think having spent a short time in prison. He was going out with a homoeopathic vet whom I don’t remember the name of. I think she had a kid whom I also don’t remember the name of.

Then there was Stuart. Stuart was the all-Ireland yoghurt making champion. He mostly milked the cows and made yoghurt and cheese for the community and for sale. He had a room in the main house down the hall from me. Stuart was a poet, he also won poetry contests when he wasn’t making yoghurt. He had a very feral kid who used to just shit on the front lawn. He was from Leeds.

There was a Danish guy (or he could have been Norwegian) called Tron. He was one of the worst cooks at the place (well, let’s face it he was the worst) and Nora complained that when it was his turn to cook the community meals he just boiled up a bunch of nettles. He was committed to biodynamics and liked making one of the main biodynamic farms special esoteric blends called 501 which is made by putting cow manure into cow horns and burying them from months and then digging them up and emptying them in big barrels of water and then stirring the mixture up and then spraying it around the farm to improve soil fertility.

There was Michael. Another Dane (if indeed Tron was Danish), he was mates with a few more Danes who worked on another nearby community which helped out disabled people – he had a Danish girlfriend who worked on that community. Michael had blond curly hair and liked chopping firewood, he chopped a lot of firewood. He also helped Frankie with growing the vegetables.

There was Yvonne and Ian. Yvonne was of a gypsy background. Ian was of north English heritage, spoke with one of those northern English accents that sounds kind of musical. He liked cider and weed. Ian looked after the currant and fruit orchard I’d seen on the way in and lived with Yvonne in a little shack just off the path I’d come into the farm on. Jeff also lived down there in another shack.

There was Jeff, or Jeremy, I’m sure his name started with J. Or maybe he was an Ian. No, actually he was just called Jay! He had dark hair which was shaved to a spiky shot length. He was a British hippy type, perhaps from London, who called the dole the ‘gyro’ who dabbled in beekeeping and ran the bakery.

Jay was going out with a German or Austrian woman called Annika or something like that. Perhaps Anushka. She was very quiet and I barely spoke to her the whole time I was at the community. Her and Jay may not have been going out together when I was first staying at Inisglas but it wasn’t long after that when they started shacking up in one of the shacks down the path from the main manor house.

There was another character called Wobbie, he looked after a tree nursery on part of the farm. I’m note sure where he lived exactly, he wasn’t staying on the farm though, nowhere at least that I knew about, but possibly close by.

That was everyone I could remember who was staying at the place when I first arrived. There was another Irish guy from Dublin who popped in from time to time, but I’ll come to him later.

While there wasn’t any strict division of duties, people were expected to get in and help out with the running of the farm. I ended up helping Frankie with the vegetables most days, mounding up potatoes, planting and maintaining the tomatoes, eggplants, courgettes, cucumbers and pumpkins in the plastic poly-tunnels, weeding the cabbages. leeks, onions, lettuces and the like. We had a large open field, which also housed a couple of plastic poly-tunnels, plus a walled garden.

I helped Jay in the bakery on Fridays where we’d make bread to sell at Dublin markets on Saturday morning. We took Stuart’s yoghurt to sell as well as bags of Anthony’s stoned ground biodynamic flour. We also took a few of these things into Wexford to sell at the health food store.

That was pretty much Inisglas. It was a largish property that included the walled garden, the mill, the fields, some pasture for sheep and cows, some barns for the pigs and a bit of forest. The property went down to the Slaney River, or River Slaney, and there was even a boat we could take out. I’d struck it lucky with having Nora’s contact. I pushed my luck by calling the mighty River Slaney a creek, but as much as that riled her up we were always on good terms.

After the uncertainty of the last few weeks, it was a bit of paradise. I felt comfortable, safe and accepted. If I could organise the dole, or some work, I’d have all the food I needed, a roof over my head and even a small amount leftover. It was all I needed at that stage.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker London Again, Priscilla Queen of the Desert , Cardiff, Wales 1995 BlogPt7

1995

I contacted one of the guys who’d done the 3-day Vipassana course with me a few weeks earlier. He’d agreed to put me up on his couch for a couple of nights in London. I don’t think he was that keen on putting me up, but he agreed, which was good enough.

I’d like to say I think he was an Aussie guy who’d been living in London for a few years. Truth is I can’t remember exactly. He might have been a kiwi. He was tall and I feel kind of blondie and probably from my neck of the woods. Maybe the Gold Coast or somewhere.

Once I got off the train from Herefordshire I got a double decker bus or two to get to his flat. I’d never been on a double decker bus. Even before I’d read the Harry Potter books, or watched the movies, I still found this quintessential London fun new and exciting, just as the train through the English countryside from Hereford had been.

It took me most of the day to get from Hereford to London, so by the time I’d arrived at Aussie/Kiwi guy’s flat it was evening. And because it was still spring, a little cool, much cooler than the equivalent time in Australia would be, but fine for a light jumper, with no need for my green Melbourne tram conductor’s coat, as cool and fashionable that was.

I dumped my backpack by the Aussie/Kiwi guy’s couch and then the guy announced. ‘We’re going off to see a movie if you want to come.’ I can’t recall who the ‘we’ were, perhaps we were meeting someone there, or he had an imaginary friend, or a house else like Dobby from Harry Potter. I don’t remember anyone else at the flat, but there could have been some others lurking.

‘Sure’, I said. It would be a bit weird if I hadn’t agreed, hanging out in the flat by myself, having just met the dude, it would be awkward. House guest protocol dictated that I go.

‘It starts in about an hour’, so we better go.

We got onto a few more double decker buses and made our way to Piccadilly Circus. Another place I usually tried to buy when playing Monopoly as the yellow ones were mid-priced and it was both affordable and achievable to get all 3 of them.

The movie was Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Before the movie started there was a drag show. It was the first drag show I’d ever been to. I liked it more than the movie. I did like the movie. I just liked the drag show a little more.

I was tired and couldn’t remember most of the rest of the night. I think we walked around a bit and grabbed something to eat. I barely remember eating much the whole trip. I wasn’t much of a foodie back then and just ate for sustenance. When I couldn’t cook myself, a bit of vegetarian pizza would usually suffice.

We got back to the flat and I crashed on the couch. I had breakfast with the guy but then he had to go off to work. He trusted me enough to leave me there by myself, but I assume I didn’t have keys so I had to meet up with him later in the day so he could let me in.

I made my way back to the Irish Embassy to see if my Irish passport had finally arrived. I discovered it was still somehow in transit after 2 and a bit weeks. I was not disappointed, I just accepted the news. It was just news, neither good nor bad, just the way it was. I told them I couldn’t wait any longer and they said when the passport arrived they could forward it along to Dublin GPO. I thanked them and left.

I hung out in Hyde Park a bit, I liked seeing British people walking about. I went and took a squiz at Buckingham Palace again, then took another walk along the Thames. I think I found a vegetarian curry somewhere and at that as I looked over the river towards Westminster. I didn’t realise I was looking at Big Ben as well. I was the worst tourist, more of a traveller.

I’d already made my mind up to go to Ireland when I was at the meditation centre, some time after the 3-day course I did. I was walking around looking at pheasants and hawks and hares and I knew I needed to go to Ireland. There was no other option really. I had to keep going, to move forward.

I was still desperately short of cash. I was lucky to have scored a couple of nights with Aussie/Kiwi guy but I couldn’t push it. Every pound spent lessened my chances of staying longer on this side of the world. I was determined to see if I could make a go of it in Ireland at least.

I felt like Patrick Leigh Fermor. He walked from Holland to Constantinople (in his time, recently renamed Istanbul) in the 1930s, saving every precious penny he could, living off cheese, bread, tobacco and booze. He just decided one day to walk across Europe and to the edge of Asia. He pretty much walked the whole way, refusing offers to get trains part of the distance. He occasionally got a lift with someone to visit places, but the rest was on foot. I think people in their twenties should be much more of the Fermor mindset and much less of the worried-about-getting-a-mortgage-and-house-and-job-and-all-that-responsible-stuff mindset.

Then again I’m turning 50 this year – the inspiration for this blog leading up to my planned 50th birthday trip next year – and while I have a good job, the housing market has escaped me. Perhaps all the more reason to just abandon it all and hit the road for a bit and ignore the whole worried-about-getting-a-mortgage-and-house mindset.

As it stood, I probably had enough money to go over to Ireland for a few days, perhaps a week or so, and then make my way back to London where I could still use the return ticket to Australia. I had a super flexible ticket, so as long as there were seats available I could get back home. If it was today I probably wouldn’t risk it. Back in 1995 I figured I could stretch the whole trip to this part of the world if I didn’t have to pay for accommodation for a few weeks, and maybe score a job somewhere straight away.

I decided to try my luck contacting the Irish woman I had the address of in Wexford Ireland that my friend’s mother’s boyfriend had given me – the only contact I had in Ireland besides those in my WWOOFing guide. Unfortunately I didn’t have a phone number for the place so I’d just have to rock up and see how I went.

I booked a train ticket for Cardiff, Wales for the next day. From there I was in striking distance to Ireland.

Had I known my passport was not going to be there in London I could have maybe saved a few quid going across the country and just headed straight down from Herefordshire to Cardiff. I didn’t have Google maps back then though so I hadn’t realised Hereford was only like a 2 hour drive away from Cardiff. I could have probably hitched the distance in a day. Then again it was only 3 hours to London, and I’d only spent a couple of pounds on bus fares, a cinema and drag show ticket and some food. So worth a detour after the couple of weeks of meditation.

It was all such short distances compared to Australia, where you could travel 8-15 hours between big cities. So going back and forth across the country didn’t seem like a big deal.

I had another contact from a dude who did the 3-day Vipassana course with me who lived in Cardiff. I rang him and asked if I could crash a night or 2 on the way to Ireland. He didn’t seem that keen either but he was like, ‘Well, I guess you don’t have anywhere else to stay?’.

‘No’, I said.

The next day I got up, packed my backpack and headed out. I found an ATM and got out a bit of cash. I went back to Aussie/Kiwi guy’s flat and slipped £20 under his door to say thanks, and then went to the station and got on the train for Cardiff.

*****

Cardiff

The guy in Cardiff met me at the train station. He lived with his girlfriend. He apologised for not just immediately saying yes to me staying. He’d been a bit of a street person at times and still found it difficult to trust people due to being burnt a few times in the past. I didn’t judge him, he could of said yes or no, it was up to him.

I was grateful to stay with him and offered to cook him and his girlfriend some dinner to say thanks. We went to a little store and bought some rice, a few spices, some frozen broad beans, and other veggies, and a tin of tomatoes. Then we went to some street stall and bought a few potatoes and carrots, and some garlic. I whipped them up a vegetable curry which was very average but which they seemed to enjoy. I don’t think the Anglo-British were used to using spices despite their love of Indian (which was mostly Bangladeshi) take out.

The guy and his girlfriend were happy that their guest was showing his appreciation for their trust. The guy worked as a cook, but I’m sure he wasn’t into gourmet shit, more your British fried fares and pies I imagined.

The girlfriend was very nice and I chatted with them about the Vipassana course. The guy was keen to do the 10-day course soon. He said he could see that it had a good impact on me and that he wanted to continue his spiritual journey. His girlfriend was also keen to try it out. I think they did a course a few months later.

The guy showed me some of the sights of Cardiff, including a castle that had been built in mediaeval times on the spot the ancient Romans had once had a fort on. I didn’t go inside, it cost money. I couldn’t spare money at the moment.

The guy kept talking about the weather, it was spring he said and he was waiting for some warmer weather. We were getting tops of maybe 17 when I was there, he was hoping that it’d crack the 20s at some point soon.

I remember passing a car at some point which had had the window smashed. I asked whether we should tell the police and the guy said it was best to keep out of it.

The next day he took me to get the bus down to Fishguard, where you get the ferry across to Ireland. At some point during the visit he’d taken me on the bus somewhere out of Cardiff to show me something I can’t even remember seeing now. I remember the bus and also him trying to sell the remaining portion of his ticket to random people once we got back to Cardiff. I think the tickets lasted the whole day so you could get a little back if you sold it on. I think we went somewhere near the beach, or to the country. It obviously didn’t make a huge impact on me.

I remember hearing people speaking Welsh. It was nice. Especially the older ladies, speaking their Welsh.

I think I spent 2-3 nights there. That was the limit for guests and fresh fish before going off.

I didn’t go overboard with my thanks this time and I didn’t give them £20. I think they were happy to have someone cook a meal for them and to leave a few things in the pantry. I kept in contact with them for years but I didn’t quite hit the social media era so once our letters stopped and I forgot their address I lost touch.

He was a nice guy. His girlfriend was also nice. To help a stranger out, it’s a bit of a risk. It’s nice people do it from time to time.

Heading to Fishguard I realised I’d made it another step of the way on the journey. I was on my way to Ireland.

Juanito’s Travels Cincuenta Años viaje – 1995 Vipassana Meditation in Herefordshire near Wales, UK BlogPt6

The first few days of meditation at the Vipassana Centre in Herefordshire didn’t have much impact.

It was like the demons of Bangkok and getting duped of all my money were just trying to rip my skin on their way out of my body while many more demons waited in queue. Rising and passing away.

For those who have never done a Vipassana meditation course, it’s not one of those relaxing visualisation things where you imagine butterflies and hummingbirds in green fields by clear streams. No, Vipassana is about working on your attachment. Attachment to both the things you like and the things you don’t like, recognising the impermanence of everything.

There was no escaping your demons here, you had to acknowledge them, face them, look them squarely in the eyes and let them pass away not through a fight with them, but by observing them, with equanimity (non-attachment). Things came into being for a while, you either like or dislike them and then, sooner or later, they passed away. But they were always changing and we were always forming attachments that made us miserable, at least if we didn’t accept that change.

$1,000,000 comes your way, maybe you’re super happy and spend it on stuff. Perhaps you invest a bunch so the interest it earns means the principal $1 million hangs on for centuries. But then you get attached to your million dollar lifestyle. And maybe you want $2 million, maybe you need to buy a BMW and the colour you want is out of stock and you crack the shits, or the leather interior wasn’t what you were imagining, or it’s going to take 3 months to deliver rather than 3 days.

Maybe you hire a butler and he overcooks the egg yolks for your eggs Florentine – is that the one where you put Hollandaise sauce over the eggs and have a little smoked salmon with it? – and you’re left with disgusting solid yellow lumps rather than delicious runny gooey golden yolks and you have to throw the hard egg yolks at your butler’s face because you’re not happy.

Anyway you can see how any sort of attachment can make you miserable.

The Buddha discovered the best thing was to simply observe with equanimity. Egg yolks are hard, well there’s people dying in the world so I’ll eat them today. Tomorrow I can have my gooey golden delicious runny yolks that runs around the plates so I can soak it up with some lightly toasted sourdough with olive oil.

Though tomorrow I could also bite into an egg and bacon roll at a cafe (since I don’t have a butler, because I fired the one who couldn’t cook the eggs properly, I mean that’s like a basic thing butlers should be able to do) and the yolks explode and go all over the sleeves of my jacket and over my hand and the waiter hasn’t even brought enough serviettes to deal with the situation. Which is exactly what happened just two weeks ago when I was in a cafe in Braddon in Canberra (in the year 2022 if you’re getting confused with this time travelling).

You get it, misery can be everywhere, even when you get exactly what you want.

How do you escape from suffering? The Buddha had some suggestions for this and a very simple technique of meditation which really helps. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to sell you meditation here. I’m just describing the Vipassana meditation technique and a bit of the philosophy and practice behind it.

First you have to be in the moment. In Vipassana this starts with observing one’s own breath. Inhaling in and out. Not controlling the breath but simply observing it. This is called mindfulness meditation and is a really useful technique in itself.

The 3-day meditation course I initially did back in 1995 in Herefordshire was just 3 days of mindfulness meditation. We didn’t progress to the Vipassana meditation part.

I sat for three days, observed my breath from around 4.30 am to 9 pm with breaks for breakfast, lunch and a light beverage and fruit for dinner, as well as some time to get up and stretch our legs. We sat for 3 days and then we finished. I said hi to a few people who had done the course, I got a few contact details in case I might hit them up for a place to stay, then I spent a few days volunteering at the centre helping in the garden and in the kitchen, waiting for the full 10-day Vipassana course to commence.

One of the meditation teachers offered to buy me a lolly in the nearby village in between the courses. In Australia offers of lollies are usually associated with paedophiles, but in the UK it apparently means an icy-pole, a zooper dooper type thing, an ice block. I hesitantly agreed, trusting that I’d meditated at least enough to avoid the karma of another poking up the arse (figuratively or literally) by a dodgy stranger. Whilst in the village I saw fruit trees for sale and I bought the centre a plum tree which I planted in their fruit orchard. I figured I didn’t have much money to donate but a fruit tree would keep giving for years to come. Perhaps someone’s eating one of its fruits right now, or whenever the plums ripen there.

They turned the heating off in some of the areas between courses so I almost froze to death trying to have a shower in the main block, but apart from that it was pretty pleasant. A bit of meditation, then a bit of work, then a bit more meditating. I got to chat with some of the fellow servers at lunch and around the place, and plant a few flowers and do some weeding. There were a few of us in our 20s there. A Polish woman, and one from France, and one from Germany, and a geeky bloke from England. There was a rather stern older lady from Austria or somewhere who made sure all us young folks were focussed on meditating and not other shenanigans – the centres, including the main meditation halls, are always divided between men and women’s sections to help with this as well, though the kitchen was a neutral area and we could chat with the opposite sex there. It was all very nice.

The 10-day course started about 3 days after the 3-day course. I think they’ve since dropped having those 3-day mindfulness courses as the Vipassana technique is the main focus and they suggest that takes at least 10-days to (begin to) master. Possibly people didn’t really come back for the 10-day courses after the 3-day course either and it was getting too confusing.

As part of the course you pledge to uphold a few simple rules, known as the 5 Precepts. The first are fairly straightforward to keep: to not steal, not lie or speak falsehoods (well, mostly the course is done in silence, so apart from the day at the end when we start chatting again, that’s achievable), not to kill, and to abstain from intoxicating substances (no drugs or alcohol). The last one is to abstain from sexual misconduct, which for the duration of the course means a vow of complete abstinence. I have never had sex with another person during a course, or even while helping out at a centre, that would be breaking the rules, but occasionally I get a bit desperate and need to masturbate. I’m not alone, I’m sure. During my first Vipassana course, that I’d done a year before, I was chatting to Evan and his girlfriend who I forget the name of. I think Evan resisted having a wank but his girlfriend was like, well you know at some stage I just put my hand down the front of my pants for a bit of a wank.

It’s something I could work on, but I can’t promise it’ll ever stop completely. I find 10 days a super effort to not ejaculate, if I’m not in a coma or something, and feel it may cause some medical issues if I hold it in too long.

I started the mindfulness meditation again for the first 3 and a half days. That’s 3 1/2 days from 4.30 am to 9 pm, some shorter sessions, some longer, just breaking for breakfast, lunch, a bit of lemon tea in the evening and a short talk from the Vipassana master Goenka, which was delivered via video. It’s probably digital now.

On day four the technique changes – rather dramatically led by Vipassana master Goenka, via video – from observation of the breath to the full-blown Vipassana technique, observing sensations through the whole body from head to toe, toe to head, up and down, down and up with equanimity (non-attachment).

Again, we do this technique from 4.30 to 9 pm, same sort of schedule.

Much easier said than done. A small itch becomes unbearable. Some heat in your ear searing. Your attention wanes, wanders, you go back to your breath to get some focus, then go back to observing the sensations over your body (these are physical sensations of your body by the way, nothing imaginary) and then I start thinking about that plum tree and when will it fruit, I should really have packed some more comfortable meditation clothes, and have I been doing this for an hour or 5 minutes, and when’s lunch? A lot of less mundane and more emotional stuff also comes up as well. For me it can be violent confrontations with my now deceased alcoholic father, or longing for a past lover in Switzerland. We have all this baggage from our years on Earth that we’re constantly replaying in our minds, not letting go of. Often making us miserable.

As I’d previously done a Vipassana course, and considered an ‘old student’ they gave me access to special solitary meditation booths. They were big enough to sit down comfortably but not to stretch your legs out too much. They were quiet, and despite the difficulties in remaining focussed and not letting my mind stray too far away, I was sometimes able to meditate for hours (or at least a full hour) on end.

At other times all the students meditated together in the dhamma hall. Men on one side and women on the other with the meditation teacher and those serving on the course at the front of the room. Those serving on the course meditate to the side up at the front.

Some of the non-spiritual highlights of the 10 days was that I saw a pheasant one day, a hare, some snowflakes, and a lot of birds in hedges as I walked around outside during the breaks. Occasionally a hawk would flutter in the sky looking down on some unsuspecting prey.

I ate my meals outside everyday, on a log overlooking the frosty fields in the morning and the wet and lush fields later in the day. Even though the course was 10 days of silence, I still didn’t want to hang around people eating in the hall during the meal breaks. I was often the only person out there looking at the lush green fields and hedges as I ate my porridge in the morning or my vegetarian curry stew for lunch, with a different pulse in it everyday. The food was pretty good actually.

It was day 10 of the course, we were released from our vows of silence around 10.30 and started to make the chatty readjustment to the real world.

It was over a fortnight now since I’d left London. I was ready to go back there, collect my passport and then head to Ireland to see if I could make a go of things.

The day went quickly, we still meditated a few times a day and there was also another evening talk by the guru Goenka. Most people enjoyed his evening video chats, and as the name Vipassana also means insight, so were Goenka’s discourses, just as insightful.

Goenka passed away in 2013.

Sometimes I think Vipassana meditation sounds super passive. But it’s not passive at all. Even though there’s really only 5 rules to commit to, and I regularly stray on the intoxicating substance one, these 5 rules can help you change the world.

If we all vowed to at least not kill other humans, even if we kill animals for meat and the like, we could avoid the misery and suffering of war and not have to spend billions on weapons to deter others. If we vow to avoid lying we could have open and transparent government and avoid having narcissistic psychos like Trump and Putin in power – though those pricks probably won’t follow the rules and abuse our good intentions, which you’re probably right about to a large extent. If we had vowed not to steal centuries ago we could have done away with colonisation, slavery and taking other people’s lands – and there’s still time to try and give compensation for the misdeeds of the past.

These simple things can allow us to live active and effective lives. I know many will want to argue about when it could be right to kill, or to take intoxicating substances, or even to lie. I know the world’s not perfect, but if you’re focussing on all the times these simple things won’t work, or aren’t practical, you’re not even trying and you might as well sit around like a potato rather than spreading love and joy in the world. Sure, we can have defence forces, but we should make every effort to address the reasons for war and to rid the world of the worst of weapons, especially nuclear weapons! We can also make laws, or individual purchasing choices to stop the privileged of the world exploiting the less privileged by making them work for 10 cents a day to make our clothes, or by hogging all of the COVID vaccines for westerners.

But all that aside. Back then in 1995, after 10-days and more meditating, I was ready to go and take control of my life again. To take action, and make plans, but also to protect myself from the ups and downs of life when things didn’t go my way.

It is like one of the slogans my dad had from alcoholic anonymous:

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

By the end of the 10 days I’d done enough to not be too fussed about sapphires, or plans going awry or anything. I just accepted, observed, then went back into the moment.

It was time to go to London to pick up my Irish passport and head over to Ireland.

Time to move on.

On the last morning, I thanked the meditation teacher for the lolly and got a lift to the train station, ready for the next adventure.