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.