Tag: ireland

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – Tubbercurry (tobercurry) Sligo, Derry Girls, Netflix, Bruges, and Sustainable Travel – 1995 (and 2022) BlogPt15

The organic farm in Tubbercurry (aka Tobercurry) Sligo was much better run than the biodynamic one in Inisglas, Wexford.

It was run by a German family, Volkmar, Claudia. I guess the German part is always a clue that efficiency may be on the cards. Besides, unlike Inisglas, these guys actually lived off the money they got from the farm so less time for poet yoghurt makers, like Stuart and ex-drug dealing chicken farmers on the run from the UK police.

Volkmar and Claudia had a very blonde boy and a girl. How this German family ended up in Tubbercurry, in the west of Ireland, I’m not sure. I think they said they saw an opportunity to buy a farm and went for it. I admire people like that, sometimes it seems we’re overwhelmed by choices to the point we are frozen with choice.

Which takes me to Derry Girls. It’s a TV series on Netflix if you haven’t heard of it. There are many choices of shows and movies to watch, most of which you really get the sense you’ve wasted part of the precious life you have after watching them, seems like we just have to fill our lives up with stuff, whatever that stuff is. I include myself in that and I find it difficult nowadays to just listen to a crow crow, or look at a flower, to be quiet and mindful of what is going on around me. But back to the tele, Derry Girls is set in Derry in Northern Ireland, which is also the setting for one of my previous blogs. I mean Northern Ireland, not Derry, which I have never visited.  It’s about these young Irish catholic women (Derry Girls, not my previous blog), and a wee English lad, growing up in the 1990s in Derry – or Londonderry as it’s also known as. I watched the show and cacked myself silly (cack is a way of saying poop). Which is pretty much irrelevant to this travel tale, except that after watching the show I decided I should try and visit Derry when my wife and I do our round-the-world trip in 2023 to celebrate my 50th birthday (hence the title of this blog if you hadn’t yet cottoned on).

I have already planned out our trip on a Google Sheet. After visiting South East Asia, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia (which has its own Google Sheet) we are flying off to Vienna, down through Italy, including Sicily, and then, according to the Sheet (which is the 2nd Sheet in the 3 Sheet series covering our whole trip, the third being Mexico/ Latin America), we were going go fly from Palermo to Athens and then across to Turkey via the Greek Islands. There are many Greek Islands, so I’ll be a bit more specific. We were going to go to the island of Tinos then across to Ikaria and Samos before heading to Turkey to visit the Ancient Roman site of Ephesus. Ephesus gets a shout out in the bible, as Paul or John or someone writes letters to a church there or something. I’m not a regular church goer but my father-in-law passed away in Mexico last weekend so we went to church and there they mentioned Ephesus. It was a sad weekend, but I’ve taken a few days off of work and thought I’d write another blog post rather than watching more Netflix.

Back to the 50th birthday year travel plans, the Greek Islands were set, until I saw the crazy antics of those young women on Derry Girls – Orla, Erin, Michelle, Clare and James. I consulted my wife about my thoughts on changing plans to include a quick trip to Derry. She said, ‘if we’re going to Derry we have to also go to Bruges’. Bruges is in Belgium and was also the name of a Netflix movie which had a few Irish lads in it. By the way neither Netflix, nor the Irish tourism board, give me any money for promoting Irish-related viewing on my blog. I don’t even put ads on my blog. It seems inauthentic to me. And as a young person who was in his 20s for most of the 1990s, and who once even attended a Nirvana concert at Fisherman’s Wharf in 1992 on the Gold Coast, and who smoked so much hash on the way to the concert that I ended up lying down in a mud puddle the whole time and barely remembering more than one song, I was, and am all about authenticity – which sounds like something Rick from the Young Ones might say, sans le hash. I think you should only write for yourself and write as though nobody is reading this. Which, in this case could quite literally be true. Let’s face it, I’m no Patrick Leigh Fermor – author of a travel trilogy, of actual books with pages in them, rather than a trilogy of Google Sheets, or blogs – accounting for his walking trip across Europe and onto Constantinople in the early 1930s. Come to think of it, there’s still a bit at the end of the third book where he goes to Greece that I haven’t read. Well, he does go on a bit to be honest.

So, after consulting my wife, I consulted the appropriate Google Sheet for Europe and tried to work out how I could swap the Greek Island section for a trip to Derry, Ireland and Bruges, Belgium. But the thing is, if I go over to that part of Europe, I feel obliged to go try and visit my friend Elina in Paris. Obliged is the wrong term, I mean, there’s no way I would visit Paris without at least seeing if she was free for a coffee, as she was the only dhamma vipassana buddy from the mid-90s I still kept in contact with. We’re both doing what vipassana people do though – even though I have strayed from the path a bit – and we are growing old, constantly changing, and sooner or later going to simply pass away. Yes, coffee in Paris, when we’re in our 70s or 80s, could be the go.

Elina is an actress whom I met in 1995 at a Vipassana meditation centre in France (spoiler alert for a later blog post). She lives in Paris. Last time I visited Paris (you can read my account of that trip here) she was off filming something with her husband so I was unable to catch up, but I feel I’d be rude if I didn’t at least try and visit her if I was going to Bruges. She makes very weird films which I’m occasionally in the mood for once I realise most stuff on Netflix is a load of shit. Elina and I had been penpals (were we actually sent real letters and cards to each other) for some time in the 90s and early 2000s, when she lived mostly in New York, and we’ve kept in touch on and off since then. To be honest, my efforts are more than hers – though she always writes back when I write to her. I’ll see a film Elina’s in on SBS television and then I’ll send her a message and then we chat again for a few days. It’s always lovely and, for me, brings me back to those days in Ireland and Europe in the 90s, just as Derry Girls has. I always thought of her like some sort of past life soulmate. Though I don’t think I ever expressed that to her.

So, a trip to Derry would have to involve both Bruges and Paris. It’d also mean we’d need to spend at least a night or two in Dublin, on the way to Derry, as most planes tend to fly from Palermo to Dublin rather than Derry. And even if we didn’t travel by plane I haven’t been to Dublin since 1995 so I couldn’t go all that way without a visit to Temple Bar and a pint of Guinness. In the movie Bruges yer man says, ‘I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin’ and, ‘I’m still in fuckin’ Bruges’, and ‘Bruges is a shithole’. His words, not mine. But the things you do for love and a chance to visit Derry and Ireland again. The movie might actually be called In Bruges, but that’s not that important at the moment. The important thing is I had allocated 8-9 days on my Google Sheet to go from Palermo, Sicily, over to Athens and then across the above-mentioned Greek Islands, and then over to Selçuk, Turkey where we could visit the ancient city of Ephesus, the Roman Empire’s capital in Asia Minor, before heading up to Istanbul as our last European destination. They’re in Eurovision, so I’m going to say they’re European. Let’s park the debate on whether Australia can be considered part of Europe due to their inclusion in the song contest for now.

I’m committed to sustainability and wanted to limit our travels by air as much as possible, trying to instead use trains and boats. I know, until we have electric boats and 100% renewable energy powering the grid, it is a difficult calculation to make as to what form of transport wins out in terms of carbon emissions. Planes are definitely not the best though. And besides it’s much nicer spending time on a train than a plane. To get from Palermo to Paris by train takes the best part of 2 days, assuming you may want a stopover in somewhere like Milan on the way. Then we’d need at least 2 nights in Paris in the hope that Elina may be there to catch up for a coffee with my wife and I. To get from Paris to Bruges is not that bad, a couple of hours, easy enough. Then you need at least two nights in Bruges in order to ‘see things’.

So we’re up to 6 nights already. Then we could either spend another 2 days travelling from Bruges to Dublin across the UK – I did something similar back in 1995 from Dublin to Paris, which I’ll come to in a later blog – or you could fly from Bruges to Dublin, then spend the night there before taking a train and bus up to Derry where you’d also want to spend at least 2 nights, enough time at least to do some sort of Derry Girls tour of the place, before then flying back over to Selçuk, probably via Istanbul. What’s more is that all the accommodation in these places is like double the cost of those I’d found on the Greek Islands.

In many ways it’d just be easier just to do a Patrick Leigh Fermor and walk around for years not worrying about all these schedules or the impact on the environment. I’d be tempted but for the fact I can only take 3 months off of work at the moment, and my wife has no interest in walking around Europe for years, even if it did include Bruges.

So, in the end, we’re going back to Plan A. No Derry, no Bruges, no Paris and just  flying from Palermo to Athens and then flying from Athens to Ikaria – skipping Tinos as I get very seasick and I couldn’t work out the ferry schedules – and onto Samos then over to Selçuk.

Back in 1995, life was far less complicated. I got my Willing Workers on Organic Farms guide book (more of a pamphlet than a book) out, I looked up farms in Tubbercurry, Ireland, where my grandmother was born, I rang up a place and arranged a time to come, then I stayed there for around 3 months, more or less. There was no Netflix, I didn’t even watch TV. There was no internet, I wrote a letter, or postcard,  home to my mum and family on occasions or made the occasional phone call. There were no websites to calculate the time you’d spend travelling between places. I just worked picking, planting and pulling out weeds during the day and at night I’d look at the stars, sit around smoking a cigarette chatting to Volkmar, or go out looking for hedgehogs with the very blonde boy. On the weekends I’d explore the countryside, picking mushrooms with a very blond boy, who seemed to know what he was doing to avoid being poisoned, and riding around country roads in between hedges visiting graveyards, abandoned churches and other things you find in the countryside.

I’d still write to Agatha, and she, from memory, wrote back a couple of times, though our letters were still tender and, for me, I was still hopeful that we might develop a romantic relationship through them. At one stage a young German woman who was riding around Ireland with her friends stayed on the farm for about a week. She was a nice woman and I had some attraction to her. She stayed in a separate part of the caravan with me and we’d watch the stars and search for hedgehogs together some night. I was still a horny young man, who hadn’t had sex since I was with Corrine the least year,  and I had thoughts of trying to get together with her, but I somehow still felt too connected to Agatha and felt it would be a betrayal to contemplate another woman. Instead I’d read a letter from Agatha and think of being with her.

I had some funny ideas back then. Looking back I didn’t owe anyone anything. And, as it turned out, my love for Agatha was, for reasons that are still mysterious to me, but which might have been as simple as she just wasn’t that into me, unrequited. Corrine was more straightforward, and even though I sent her a note or two when I was in Ireland, she was married.

So I spent the last warm days of Autumn hard at work on the farm, delivering fresh organic vegetables, like kale, even before it was fashionable, and herbs to hotels with Volkmar. There was one cool one that looked like a castle on a large estate with cute farm animals abounding. We also went to Sligo city on our regular stops. We’d stop for lunch every day on a nice table outside under a tree, to eat freshly made bread from Claudia, with home made cheese, gherkins and tomatoes from the green house and even some homemade chutneys and jam I think, as well as some pretty decent coffee.

It was largely an uneventful time there in Tubbercurry, but I was at peace. I was also, as I am now, committed to the idea of sustainability so I felt my farm labours meant something. I was also being rewarded for them I should say, getting 20 pounds a week extra and being able to save the whole of my dole check each fortnight. I had chosen to work on farms in Australia because I wanted to help mother Earth, or something like that. I mean sustainability has a much greater urgency and imperative now in the 2020s, bordering on desperation, but it’s nothing new, sustainability was big in the 70s, 80s, 90s, hell it dates back to Mayan civilisation, and cities like Palenque, in modern day Chiapas, Mexico which rose, flourished, and then declined and disappeared back into the jungle, due, in part to climate change, droughts, and unsustainable practices back in 226 BC to 799 AD.

Talking of decline, I tried to visit Agatha one more time in Dublin while I was in Sligo. I took the train across the wee country, I went to La Casa Chaparrita, but no-one was there. I tried calling into Agatha’s friend Bear place to find out where she was – at least I remember her name as Bear. Bear said I should have called ahead and that Agatha had visited some family north of Dublin where she’d work as some sort of nanny when she first came to Ireland. My grandmother had also worked as some sort of nanny when she emigrated to Australia when she was ten in the early 1900s. Agatha was on her way back to Barcelona soon. She let me stay at her house overnight. She was kind. I went back to Sligo the next day. I was sad.

The weather was starting to get colder and more miserable. When I got back to the train station closest to the farm in Tubbercurry it was drizzly. I had to wait an hour for Claudia to come and collect me. I must have looked like a sad wet puppy.

One day in Late September/ October I think, the warm weather just stopped. I said to Volkmar and Claudia that I’d move on in another week or two after finishing helping with the end of their summer and autumn cropping before the real cold set in. They thanked me and I made plans for my next journey. This time to France to stay at another Vipassana meditation centre, I thought I might even be able to make it down to Barcelona to try and visit Agatha one more time. But first things first.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – Donegal (the greatest place on earth) in the Carrot Car, swimming in the Atlantic Ocean & Reflection on Gay Abandon – 1995 BlogPt13

donegal postcard 1995

In 2022, I’ve been reading a book called Jungle of Stone by William Carlsen. It’s about John Stephens’ and Frederick Catherwood’s journey into Central America in the 1800s to rediscover the great civilisations of the Maya at places like Copán in Honduras and Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. I have my own stories about my visit to Palenque, on my first visit to Mexico, which you can read here, also one to Calakmul, another grand Mayan site in the jungles of southern Mexico not far from Guatemala. I thought it was a bit of a trek to both these sites, but nothing like in those days. I mean I was watching Mel Gibson dubbed into Spanish in the movie Get the Gringo on an air-conditioned ADO bus on one leg from Merida to Palenque while occasionally chatting to a few young women British backpackers who had seats by the toilet, and a British couple who were sitting just behind me. Meanwhile Stephens and Catherwood were held up by bandits and constantly attacked by nasty disease ridden insects. There are a few bandits about, but comparatively speaking I would say it’s a much safer trip now.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but it has already struck me that adventurers often have this sense of gay abandon. Decades before heading to Central America, Stephens’  tried to buy a house in Greece after visiting the great ancient sites there. He found they wouldn’t lend him money for it, nor were they that keen to sell a bit of their ancient country to an American. He shrugged it off and then jumped on a boat ‘at a whim’ and headed to Turkey. He wanted to visit Egypt but THE Plague was going around (yes THE Plague) and ports like Alexandria displayed red flags to say it was a no go zone. Stephens had to spend months in quarantine at several other ports in lazarettos, where even letters were treated as though they may be carrying plague and were allowed off of ships only by means of extraction with iron tongs, with the letters then placed in an iron box for their own quarantining period.

Nothing as exciting as that awaited us in our carrot car as we left Northern Ireland on the way to Donegal, Republic of Ireland. I just mention the Stephens experience as more of a reflection of the gay abandon I used to have in my twenties and the difficulties I have now to even contemplate such things, what with work, kids, a wife, bills and the like. Though the spread of diseases like COVID and Monkeypox are still ever present. And some years ago I did pop off to Mexico to visit some Mayan ruins in the jungle, plus a few Aztec, the archaeological site of Guachimontones not far from Guadalajara, oh and the ancient Purépecha site of Tzintzuntzan near Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacan, with my wife to be. I also visited the Pyramids of Teotihuacan, another lost civilisation north of Mexico City. So I haven’t done too bad. I also plan to take my wife to Italy and other places. Perhaps even Turkey and Greece on a whim, sometime during my 50th year – oh yeah the purpose of this blog! Even I get sidetracked sometimes as to why I’m writing this!

I can’t say Donegal left a great impression on me. It was nice and all. We went to the ‘smallest pub in Ireland’. But the one we’d been at in Enniskillen in County Fermanagh the night before was, in my opinion, even smaller. I’ve seen smaller ones down alleyways in Melbourne. And added disappointment was Agatha’s Spanish friend who turned out to be a bit annoying. I felt myself more of a traveller, something more like the Patrick Leigh Fermor ilk (Patrick walked from Holland to Constantinople and into Greece in the 1930s –  for those who haven’t read his stories or my earlier blogs), travelling along on less than  £15 a day (Patrick did it for considerably less, but it was the 1930s). My Spanish friend seemed like some wealthy spoilt tourist, whose parents probably supported Franco (I’ve gone too harsh there, she wasn’t that bad!). I abandoned the crew a bit and left them to do the touristy Donegal things while I just walked around by myself. It seemed a bit hilly from memory. You could see the ocean. I think. I just wasn’t that into it. We did get some postcards and wrote ourselves a note and sent it to la chaparrita in Dublin. That was fun. And cheap. It was the only note I now have from Agatha. A memory of  the last days I ever saw her, though I didn’t know that at the time.

On the postcard it said:

postcard from donegal 1995

It was the sort of thing you write in your 20s. Seems like Agatha’s friend was called Olga. She did predict that I would have kids in 15 years. Indeed I had a daughter and son by then, with my daughter having already turned 8 and my son 6.

I’m not sure where we stayed in Donegal. Some sort of backpacker place. I think we managed to get ourselves a room altogether again. Agatha and I might have even shared a bed again. I don’t know. We stayed one more night. Had some drinks, smoked some weed and the next day we were off to County Sligo.

Not before a quick drive north of the town of Donegal though. Now that I remember, if not vaguely. I’m not sure why we drove north of Donegal, or even whether it was north. It may have been Westish, but there doesn’t seem much West of Donegal. Perhaps it was North-Westish, but I’m sure not south.

We drove along one of Ireland’s coast roads. With no GPS we just went with the flow. We saw a farm that faced the Atlantic. It was a nice day. A sunny day. Mild. We drove along the road for a while until we decided we were lost. Not panicky lost. Just not knowing where we were lost. It didn’t matter. It was a nice road. With sheep, green grass, the wind, incomprehensible farmers who you think are speaking Gaelic but who just have that really thick Irish West coast accent. Majestic views of the ocean which stretched to Iceland, if you could see that far.

We stopped for a bit. Perhaps we had a sandwich. I’m amazed I can barely recall eating in Ireland in those days given my obsession with food now, but that was way back then in 1995. I wasn’t much of a foodie then.

I remember the first time I tried carnitas in Mexico though. It was on the way to the archaeological site of Tzintzuntzan near Lake Pátzcuaro. My wife was a vegetarian at the time but she insisted I try tacos carnitas – a slowed cooked pork delicacy. The man who gave me my first one ended up being featured on the Netflix show the Taco Chronicles. I thought I would definitely get food poisoning as the pork had been sitting out in the sun on a wooden bench with ZERO refrigeration for hours. I didn’t. And carnitas have become my second favourite taco type just behind tacos pastor, which is pork cooked with chilies, spices, pineapple, and achiote paste. Que rico!

Back in Donegal. I think we may have had some nice bread and a bit of cheese now that I strain my brain. With the Spanish adding some ham. I was vegetarian at the time, so cheese was my kind of go to protein source. We stopped by a little rocky outcrop which had a narrow path to the sea with Irish green grass lining both sides of it, which led down to a small beach with some fairly safe looking waves coming in.

It was warm for Ireland. I felt like a swim. Spanish woman stayed up by the car eating her jamón because she didn’t want to get sand in her shoes. German carrot car owner (I think I tried naming her in earlier blog posts. I liked her, I wish I was more confident of her name), Agatha and I went down to the beach. They sat on the beach smoking cigarettes. I stripped down and waded into the water. I didn’t go further than waist deep. I grew up by the beach and was always respectful of the ocean’s power, especially if I didn’t know the area. I spent about 15 or 20 minutes in the Atlantic Ocean. I put my head under a few times just to get my body temperature adjusted. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t freezing either. It was almost approaching the Goldilocks zone, though more on the side of slightly invigorating. The Atlantic Ocean felt smooth and clean on my naked body. I felt alone. I wanted to be alone. I came out of the water and sat for a few minutes naked with the girls, smoking a cigarette before dressing and heading back up to the carrot car.

I had the feeling this may be the first and only time I would ever swim in the Atlantic Ocean. It could always be the last time you swim in the Atlantic Ocean. It could always be the last time you do anything.

Later we drove back along the same road, along the coast, then past Donegal and towards Sligo.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – Enniskillen, Northern Ireland in the Carrot Car 1995 BlogPt12

Agatha’s friend from Spain was staying at la Chaparrita. Ines was away with her boyfriend, so there was a spare bed in the girls’ room. The Irish guy was away so I was sleeping in his bed.

In the middle of the night Agatha decided to come down and get into my bed. We hugged and chatted and caressed a little. I ended up with an erection that felt like the size of my forearm, as hard as a stick.

‘Is it ok if I take my pants off?’ I asked Agatha.

‘Sure’ she said.

We played around a bit more, kissing a little.

‘I can’t’, she said.

‘That’s fine’, I said, and we just held each other. We continued to hold each other the rest of the night, my erection pressing into her back until early morning, just before dawn, when Agatha jumped up out of bed.

She said something like, ‘I have to get up for the quiet hour.’ I’m not sure if it was the quiet hour, or the silent hour or something similar. We’d watched some French film set in the French countryside where they were really into the time of the day right at the end of the night, but just before dawn, where the night sounds cease and the morning sounds of birds and the such, has yet to begin. It wasn’t really an hour, more like 5 minutes, but because of the silence it felt like an hour. It was an arty sort of film.

It was meant to be an especially quiet time of day though, this quiet hour or whatever they called it. They may have called it something much cooler than the quiet hour, but for the life of me I can’t remember.

I was too tired to get up so I just rolled over. I started to think why Agatha ‘couldn’t’. Was she married like Corrine? Or did she have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend? Was she a man? She didn’t feel like a man. Was she not into men? Not into me? Did she have her period? Or was she just not in the mood. I never asked though, so now in 2022, I still wonder why. It was all pretty cool anyway, I was, and still am, just interested. I wanted sex, but I had had a year without it. After Corrine’s visit to the Brock’s farm, and our trip travelling around AustraliaI’d pretty much lived the life of a celibate monk. Working, meditating, working, sleeping.  (Like I mentioned in an earlier post a fictionalised version of this affair is here – one of the main fictions being I didn’t mention we’d met at a train station and we didn’t travel together with my Bulgarian mate Kosio, much of the rest is pretty much true).

Of course I masturbated most nights when I was on the farm having no sex, just as I took the opportunity to do when Agatha had popped out of bed in the early hours of the Dublin morning. But I had no love interest and no sex or girlfriend for over a year.

About 45 minutes later Agatha returned, looking a bit guilty.

‘I wrote something on the wall’ she said.

‘Oh’, I said.

I got up and peeped through the curtain. Across the road on the wall was scrawled in uneven purple spray paint was the words: ‘The Quiet Hour’.

———

The next day we got into the German girls car and headed to Northern Ireland. The car was a light green with stencilled carrots all over it. We therefore called it the carrot car.

When we reached the border with Northern Ireland we had to show our passports to the British army guys there with big deadly looking guns and berets. They made us drive the carrot car into this big thick concrete barrier place in case they needed to blow the car and the 4 occupants up.

After satisfying themselves we were just some beatnik hippy types rather than provisional IRA, they waved us through. They didn’t smile. This was still a time of The Troubles, with sporadic violence still part of their recent history. It seemed to be getting better though, and nothing like the 70s & 80s. The Troubles were on the way to being not so much a trouble with a capital T.

The weather turned depressing as soon as we crossed the border. Dark, cloudy and miserable. Worse than I’d ever seen in Dublin in the few months I’d been visiting there. We drove down streets lined with houses where people displayed their Union Jacks proudly. Then we’d see some IRA inspired art on some walls and Irish flags waving.

Agatha said she knew some place on a lake near the town of Enniskillen that had cheap accommodation. It was in an old nunnery or something.

Part of my best friend from Palm Beach Currumbin High School Christophe’s family came from Enniskillen. They were protestants. His grandfather, whom he lived with growing up, still called Catholics ‘Micks’.  Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh, which borders my Grandmother Bee’s birthplace of County Sligo, which was more of a Catholic place.

We found the place in Enniskillen after a few hours drive through Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is pretty small, especially compared to Australia – you can fit all or Ireland just in Tasmania. It was a creepy, dark manor that we found in Enniskillen. Quiet. Very Quiet. Quiet enough to murder us all and not be noticed all that much as long as you could dispose of the carrot car and our bodies. We entered what seemed to be the main entrance of the manor building. It seemed all but deserted. We tried to find someone but couldn’t see anyone. All of a sudden this guy appears. He looks like Lurch from the Addams family, a creepy loner, even creepier than the creepy manor. The type who might mail bombs to people. He wasn’t much help. We all got the Heebie Jeebies and decided to split, just like Scooby Doo and the gang might do on one of their misadventures, after Velma or one of the gang ‘had a bad feeling about this’.

We instead found a room at a hotel in Enniskillen town itself. It had 2 singles beds and a double.

After dumping our bags we went to a very, very small pub which seemed mainly frequented by locals who didn’t really want a bar of some suspicious looking foreign types.

The German girl – I guess I should name her, let’s call her Hilda – and Agatha’s friend from Spain took the single beds and Agatha and I shared the double. There didn’t seem to be any discussion about it, it just happened. Agatha and I were the mum and dad, and the Hilda and the Spanish woman were the kids they joked.

Agatha and I hugged again most of the night. I loved having her body next to mine.

Nothing much happened in Northern Ireland, it was basically a drive through. I’m sure it’s nice in parts and as we were leaving the weather did improve a bit with a few breaks in the dark clouds and a bit of sunshine. All up our Northern Ireland adventure was not even two whole days. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back, mainly because there’s a million other places to go, but you never know, I might make my way there another day, maybe check out the craic of Belfast or the far north coast.

Northern Ireland out of our system we made our way to Donegal. Which back then seemed like a long way away, but looking at Google maps is just a 48 minute drive.

I might start with Donegal next post though.

 

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.



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.