Patrick Leigh Fermor – Juanito's Travels

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – 1995 New Delhi India without a visa but with a little scam Pt18 (not pt IX of Star Wars)

March 2023

There’s risks with nostalgia. Stuart, from the biodynamic farm, Inisglas, I first stayed on when I visited Wexford, Ireland, told me: “never look back”. I perhaps interpret that as never hold onto the past. Anyway Stuart said lots of things and was against floppy discs and technology in general so I will ignore Stuart and go back to reflecting on a trip from 27, now 28 years ago. Though Stuart did have a point of the need to move forward. Sometimes I want to try and recapture the spirit I had back then in 1995 rather than move on. But I also like to remember.

Patrick Leigh Fermor looked back on his trip walking from Holland to Constantinople in the early 30s in a trilogy starting with A Time of Gifts. That was a nice reflection, not trying to change the past, just remembering. It’s a nice slow read with some interesting details of the past. A Time of Gifts wasn’t published until 1977. That was the year Star Wars IV: A New Hope was first released in cinemas.

Star Wars IV: A New Hope is a very good film. One of the best of all times. It has a very simple story, lots of action. It had the character of Hammerhead, the best supporting character ever to appear in a film. I wrote a fan fiction featuring him in a story I wrote: Cuba: with Hammerhead the star of Star Wars: A New Hope. I bought an action figure of Hammerhead in the late seventies when I went to Toombul shopping centre in Brisbane with my grandfather. My cousin Alistair told me I should be getting all the main figures before I started getting the more obscure ones. But Alistair’s family was rich, I had to choose more carefully, and I couldn’t go past a dude with a head like a hammerhead.

Star Wars IV brings back wonderful childhood memories that I love to reflect on. I still have a Hammerhead action figure (even with the original weapon), along with a Jawa and Greedo. Now in 2023, I am faced with the nightmare of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, one of the most disappointing films I’ve ever seen. EP VII was okayish, EP VIII got worse and was a waste of however long it took to watch it, maybe 2 hours or something. Then came Ep. IX: a confusing nostalgic homage to a great trilogy that began in 1977, and has still, yet to be surpassed. A New Hope brought so much hope. Then the hopes were slowly destroyed. Years later the originally released trilogy was followed by a prequel trilogy which did have their moments, they were ok, even looked like they were going to be good, but then Annikan just walked around being grumpy and frumpy all the time like some petulant child and in the end it just got shitter and shitter. And then came the abyss of the trilogy sequel, where the only stars were those from the 1977 film, including two non-human, non-droid stars, the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon. Those began the era where the writers couldn’t get away from their nostalgia for what was once good, where not one new idea was created, where they created another Death Star, like they had been stuck in the tractor beam of that original Death Star since 1977, which meant the best they could do was now create a new Death Star which was now the size of a planet.

The sequel is full of characters who die and then come back to life and save lightsabers from being chucked into fires and having chats with their sons. Where Palpatine comes back to life and wants to take over the universe again and the character Stoke or Snoke or something was really Palpatine. Where all the actors can do is keep yelling out “Poe!” or whatever. They’re always yelling! When Luke yelled it sounded like he was yelling for a reason. When the new ones yell I’m left asking: What the feck are they yelling about? And they just keep flying around to places to find some triangle thing which will show them how to get to some other place they need to go to to destroy a new star fleet filled with star cruisers which, like the Death Star, can destroy whole planets, but like there’s heaps of them, thousands or something – must be cheaper in CGI to just make one and then copy it hundreds of times. I couldn’t tell you how Ep. IX ends, I’ve struggled to get halfway through it and not sure I can bear the pain any more.

But enough of the horrific side of nostalgia and back to my own reflections of adventures past, in the lead up to my new adventures in a few weeks.

1995: Maybe November

After the 20 odd days in France at the Vipassana meditation centre, and hitchhiking from Paris to London with Beth, it was time to try and make my way back to Australia.

My Thai Airways ticket had options to stop in India and Thailand on the way. I had to stop in Bangkok, even just to change planes. India was an optional stop. All I wanted to do was go home, but when I booked my ticket in Paris, at a travel agent, before the time of online bookings, before leaving for London, they only had a seat available to New Delhi, India, where I’d have to wait at least a week before getting another seat from India to Bangkok, then Bangkok to Melbourne. I’d at least only have to spend one night in London before heading off.

I had about £80 to cover the 16,800 kms from London to Melbourne. I spent around £10-15 staying a night in London. I probably got a slice of pizza for a couple of pounds. I had to get out of London otherwise I’d go broke: Down and Out in Paris and London. London felt that way at the moment, I felt I had a pretty good time in Paris. I always love Paris. My friend Howie wasn’t too impressed with it. He also thought Laos was so-so. I’ll be finding out about Laos at the end of April (2023).

My first leg back to Australia via New Delhi posed another challenge. My visa for India, which I got before leaving Australia, had expired. It was one of those ones that went from the day you stamped it and this one lasted 3 months. The three months were up about 3 months or so ago. I looked at getting another visa but it cost £20 and would take 2 days to get. I couldn’t afford 2 more nights in London or the £20 for the visa. Figuring if they caught me in New Delhi they’d deport me towards Australia I thought I’d just risk it. I wasn’t too worried about deportation at that point having almost been deported the first day arriving in London at the beginning of my trip.

I got up early the next day and was heading into the tube somewhere around Earls Court, perhaps Earls Court station around 5.30am. I think I had to wait a little until the first train to Heathrow. I looked at tickets out to the airport and it cost something ridiculous like £12. Maybe it was only £6, but it felt like a fortune at the time and any amount I spent meant breaking a precious £ note and getting coins which couldn’t be converted to rupee in India. Even though it would take a big hit from my remaining funds I couldn’t bring myself to jump the gate. Better to get out of the place with a little less money than get arrested on the way to the airport.

They didn’t ask to see my Indian visa when I was checking in to the plane with my blue backpack, and by mid-morning I was heading in the right direction on my final legs. I was out of Europe.

I slept a fair bit on the way to New Delhi and I didn’t feel too bad when I got there. I lined up for immigration when I arrived and a big scary looking man with a big hipster – before hipsters really took off 20 years later – moustache looked at my passport, he looked at me, he looked closely (apparently) at my expired visa then looked at me again, then without a word he stamped my passport and let me enter India. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Whatever’ I thought, if they let me in, that’s on them. Now I’d just have to wait it out in India for a week or so. At least it was a place where my remaining £40 could get me somewhere. But of course it wasn’t going to be that easy and I was about to fall for another small scam, within my first minutes of arriving. This wasn’t a scam of the scale I’d had in Bangkok on the way over to Europe but it still cost me a bit.

I walked out of the terminal and was hit by the heat and the haze of dust glowing with pinks, purples and oranges of an Indian sunset. I was entering what seemed to be the largest, most chaotic car park in the universe. There were thousands and thousands of cars, and even more thousands of people, cooking things, selling things, yelling at each other, yelling at me, trying to get me to take a taxi. I was pretty sure there were a few donkeys and perhaps an elephant in amongst the throng. There were a lot of cows and dogs for sure.

I chose a taxi about 50 metres from the exit. I asked the driver to take me to the backpacker area which I knew was around Connaught Place. We drove along a very long dusty road, there were more cows, many more people, and more dogs around.

“Sir, that area of Connaught Place is dangerous at the present time. We have Hindu/ Muslim troubles. It is not safe. I can take you to a nice safe area, with nice hotel”.

It was before the times of the internet so there was no way to check if there really was Hindu/ Muslim troubles. I kind of doubted it, and felt a bit like a scam was coming on, but figured I could probably cover a hotel for a couple of days while I waited for the $200 to be sent to me from Australia via Western Union, which I’d asked my family to lend me before leaving Europe. So I went where the guy took me.

When I got to the hotel I explained to them that I was waiting on money and could fix them up when that arrived in the next few days. I rang my sister and she even tried to pay for the hotel with a credit card. But it was 1995, and the hotel guys wouldn’t take a credit card, they wanted cold hard cash. There wasn’t even an ATM around to get cash transferred and withdrawn. So I just had to wait. The hotel agreed to put me up for an unspecified amount. I knew I’d be hit with an unrealistically high bill but I had a roof over my head for a few days, until my money got transferred, and it was a pretty good roof, a fairly decent hotel.

I did get out for a walk on my own in the early morning and explored the neighbourhood a bit. There were some guys making yoghurt out in the open street with milk from cows that were wandering around eating marigolds and cardboard from rubbish heaps. There was a guy with a dancing bear trying to get money from people. The kind of scene you see on those animal cruelty ads on TV – if you watch TV anymore. I got a photo of the first street I saw with a lady in a sari walking down it and a dog in the smoggy haze. Like today it’s a very polluted city. They need electric cars. Which I’m sure they’ll have by the next time I visit.

After the first night the hotel must have gotten nervous that maybe this hippy wouldn’t pay up. They kept a minder around for me to make sure I didn’t run off without paying. It was a bit awkward. The hotel took me around to a few highlights of New Delhi. I went to the Red Fort for a bit. There was a sad looking cobra in a little basket and a million people, cows, dogs, and perhaps even a donkey or camel. It was insane. The actual fort provided a little break from the craziness. I looked up and in one of those arched windows typical of Mughal architecture a woman was brushing her long silky hair oblivious to the throng of people and the noise down below.

A couple of young German guys arrived at the hotel and were staying in the room next to me. I ended up buddying up with them a bit. I find the young Germans can be so enthusiastic and often bound with joy and energy – just like us young Australians (True Blue or otherwise – see previous post if you don’t get that bit). One of the guys climbed over the balcony which was adjacent to mine and scared the shit out of me when he opened the glass door from the outside. I was ready to stab him with the Swiss Army knife I’d gotten from Corrine the year before, and which I always carried with me, which was even allowed on the planes in those days. He invited me out for some food. They wanted to go to some fancy place, but I still had very little money and had been going to the cheapest places I could find. I took them across the road, somehow slipping away from my minder and took them to a place that sold these vegetable patty things in soft white bread for about 4 rupees each – maybe 10 or 20 cents. I was really making sure the £20 or whatever I had left worth of rupees would last me until the money transfer arrived. I also had one traveller’s cheque left which was a small note, maybe another $20AUD. I don’t know what happened with the German guys, I think they were just there for a night.

The hotel guys kept taking me to the Western Union office to see if my transfer had come through. I didn’t tell them how much I’d asked for. When, on the morning of the third day the money still hadn’t arrived, they kicked me out of my room but said I could stay with the hotel staff workers. That was an interesting experience, they drove me around to an area of New Delhi I’d never have seen as a tourist, I suppose a typical local area. The workers all stayed in one room and we all had dhal and chapatis for dinner, sitting on the floor, just using our hands and the chapatis to scoop up the dhal. I was happy with that. There were about 4-5 hotel workers in the room. I think they didn’t just work at the hotel, they also worked for the hotel’s associated travel agency, but I wasn’t clear about that. I’d seen most of them over the last few days, often they’d be napping in the car they drove me around in, or napping on couches in the small travel agency office which they’d taken me to when they got sick of my money not arriving, to hang around. After dinner they rolled out some mats and the 5-6 of us slept on the floor taking up most of the space in the room. Years later my mum, son and daughter rented an AirBnB in Shinjuku, Tokyo which claimed to be able to sleep as many people in about the same space. Read more about the shonky Shinjuku AirBnB and our trip to the snow monkeys.

Possibly on the morning of the 4th day when my minders took me to the Western Union office again my money had arrived! And I had my $200! I got some cash and the rest in traveller’s cheques I think. Well I must have ended up with a few more travellers checks – which would again pose a few problems over the next few days, but I’ll come to that.

With my $200 I could finally free myself from my minders. I went back to the travel agent and braced myself for the bill, knowing it would be a lot. The travel agent guy did some sums, adding up trips to the red fort, hotel accommodation etc, I’m pretty sure he was just Putin random numbers into a calculator that would add up to the sum he had in his head, and then he announced, “$200 USD”.

Having mentally prepared myself for this moment I unleashed a tirade of abuse: “You fucking scammers, there is no way that place is worth $200 USD, my father is a diplomat (posing as a semi-retired carpenter driving taxis on the Gold Coast) and you’ll be in big trouble.” I was playing a role I’d rehearsed in my head for days, make as much noise and fuss as possible and keep whatever money I needed to survive the rest of my Indian leg at least. “I don’t have that fucking money, I only have $100 AUD and that is all I will pay which is still probably double what I actually owe you scammers” and blah, blah, blah. I felt kinda bad as I’m not usually like that but I needed to look after myself. The lower level workers who’d shared a floor with last night just gathered around, interested in the entertainment on an Aussie going ballistic.

“Enough with your fuckings this and fuckings that, you are being a very rude person”, said the travel agent guy and he took the $100 AUD, form his lack of protest I could tell I was being well and truly fleeced even at that price, but less fleeced that I would have been so I was ok with that. After the exchange was done and the yelling died down I said, “sorry, I’m just tired and want to get out of here”. He just looked at me. But it wasn’t quite done. I still didn’t have my luggage. The boss guy sent a worker off to get it. I don’t know where it was but it seemed to take a long time to get it. I was starving so I asked if there was any food around. The boss guy signalled to one of the workers to go get me something. He came back with some dhal in a clay pot. I gave him about 5-10 rupees. I was starving so I just ate the dhal with my fingers. The boss guy looked at me and said, “without chapati, what a waste”.

It was an awkward wait around with the travel agency guys. They kept giving me dirty looks because of all my swearing and carrying on. It was worth it to have $100 in my pocket. When the bag arrived I headed straight to Connaught Place to find a cheap backpackers to stay. There weren’t any Muslim/ Hindu problems. At least none that made it unsafe at the moment.

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 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.