Transitions Part 2

Tonight I’m boarding a plane to Sydney. This is not unusual. In fact I’ve done this once a month or so for the past year, give or take. A long distance relationship will do that. What makes this trip special is this:

It’s the last time.

I’m headed for Sydney to pack up Kim’s room, clean some stuff and then bring her back to Darwin with me. This I undoubtedly the most positive development my life has taken since I convinced her to marry me back in January. It’s going to be a crazy four days over Easter, but by Tuesday hopefully everything will make sense again. Or at least be a greatly improved version of nonsense. I don’t know.

I can’t wait.



Garry with 2 Rs

Christmas Part Two - Unchangeable

I love Tassie for some very confused reasons. Originally my love for the Apple Isle had much more to do with visiting my grandmother than with appreciation for rolling scenery and fresh fruit. My best memories are of having morning tea in Nanna’s tiny flat before racing off down the streets of Ulverstone to play in the space park, which was a rotary park nearby with play equipment all done up like spaceships.

Nanna passed away in 2007, and for quite a while after the funeral I was happy never to go to Tassie again. But we have been back a few times for Christmases and weddings and I seem to be growing into a greater appreciation for what a nice place it is independent of my family.

The day we got into Launceston was horrible.

It was clear and sunny enough while Kim and I walked down the main street to find some food, but by lunch time our early departure from Sydney had caught up with us and we needed nap. We took one, aiming to check out Cataract Gorge when we woke up, by we woke to discover that it had come over all rainy, cold and rubbish. This once again was Tassie’s idea of a heat wave.

We did manage to get to the gorge the next day before driving over to Devonport to meet my parents and my sister and her husband and checking into a delightfully quaint cabin on the coast. Normally quaint is a good adjective, but it doesn’t go well with ‘room for six people,’ and with good reason. There really wasn’t.

We had a lovely dinner that night in a park in Ulverstone just around the corner from where my Grandmother used to live. Well… it was Ulverstone. Everywhere is just around the corner. There’s really only two corners. I was distressed to see that most of the space park had been taken down and replaced with injury proof vanilla climbing frames. I’m sure there’s a really potent metaphor for my perspectives on life there, but I’m not quite sure I like where this line of thought takes me.

It was only for a couple of nights, which we were able to pass by playing mental card games and watching the Muppet and Lady Gaga Christmas special. It was great being able to watch Lady Gaga being accompanied by Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and not being able to figure out which one was the most funny-looking. My favourite is still Animal, but I’m not really in favour of any human performer who manages to make him look positively normal.

After a couple of days on the North coast, we headed once again for Scamander for Christmas with my uncle and aunt, but not without visiting the chocolate shop, the cheese shop, the bakery, the cherry shop and two different raspberry farms on the way. The weather remained resolutely horrible, but we got by with the help of my sister’s barbershop Christmas album.

And then we had Christmas day in Scamander. I’ve written about Scamander before and I won’t bother to do it again. I don’t think much has changed there in the last twelve months. Or the last twelve years. Or ever. And that’s not a bad thing.

We spent Christmas Eve night in a lovely little chapel in St. Helens. We were a little worried that we would be the only ones there when we arrived at ten past eleven for a quarter-past service, but the locals all rolled in the door at fourteen minutes past and we took off into a determined rendition of Once in Royal David’s City. The service was nice, with the usual carols and readings. And then I managed to leave my hat behind, meaning I had to go back for it early the next morning. Well… I always do like to get to church on Christmas morning, even if I didn’t stick around this time. We opened presents and had a traditionally huge lunch at my uncle’s house before spending the afternoon at the beach. After another couple of days of driving around and taking lots of photos of white beaches with orange rocks, we packed up and were on our way back to the mainland. It was a lovely week, but a strangely introspective one. Every time I go back to Tassie, I end up leaving with the sure knowledge that Tassie never changes.

But I sure do.




Garry with 2 Rs

Bound for Bangkok

So no sooner had Kim and I touched down in Sydney than I was rearranging luggage and gearing up to take off again, this time bound for Bangkok. I was meeting some of my friends from Takraw Australia ahead of the King’s Cup sepak takraw world championships in Udon Thani, another city in Thailand.

Strangely enough, due to the mysterious ways that govern Jetstar, the cheapest way to get to Bangkok from Sydney was via Melbourne. It meant another long haul flight, but after the sixteen hour marathon from Dallas to Sydney, a nine hour jump from Melbourne to Bangkok was practically a walk in the park. Well… perhaps a long sit down on an uncomfortable bench with a book in the park, but the point is… I got there eventually.

As a student of world languages, I often take for granted my ability to walk into a foreign country and start picking up bits and pieces of the completely foreign language that nonetheless make a bit of sense to me. I had neglected to consider that this ability probably wouldn’t extend to languages in a different alphabet. Bangkok made me feel more like a tourist than I have for a very long time, and I hadn’t even made it out of the airport yet.

Fortunately for this idiot falang, the taxi booth operators all spoke and read English, so I was able to get a taxi out to my friends’ apartment. I didn’t get in until about ten o’clock at night after a long day of travelling, so after plonking my stuff down, we headed straight out to grab some street food and then called it a night.

The few days in Bangkok ahead of the tournament all looked remarkably similar. We would get up sometime half way through the morning and wander down to our preferred local restaurant for “muesli”. Thai style muesli comes with cornflakes, fresh fruit and condensed milk, but it’s not a terrible way to start the day. We’d generally spend what was left of the morning shopping and running any errands that needed running or sleeping a bit more and then head out towards Chula University sometime in the mid afternoon.

We’d stop by the food court of the local freaking huge shopping centre on the way for lunch and then train for a few hours with one of the local teams. It was nice to pit ourselves against some guys who really know how to play, both to appreciate how far we’ve come, and also how much more we still have to learn.

It was a handy routine to follow, particularly in a country where everything you think you know about day to day living has basically gone out the window with the alphabet. The one diversion we did take was to spend a morning being all touristy at the grand palace in Bangkok. Those guys really know how to decorate.

After four days, we’d successfully bonded as a team, avoided food poisoning (broadly) and we were ready for the trip to Udon Thani. Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Ocean's Eleven

After the madness of New York City, we were ready for a break, so we joined Kim’s family for a few days at her grandparents’ beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey. BY the time we got there, the house already had Kim’s grandparents, her parents, her two brothers and her one sister-in-law, so the addition of two extra bodies to the two bedroom, one bathroom house was of course just what the doctor ordered.

It didn’t matter too much, as we tended only to all be inside when we were either eating or sleeping. The rest of the time was spent enjoying the coastline of the Atlantic Ocean. Strangely enough the Ocean City Municipal government seems to think it’s okay to make people pay to go to the beach. As an Australian I was outraged at the very notion, but the locals assured me it was a completely normal practice. In any case, we largely ignored it as we only had three beach permits (the very cheek) between the lot of us and it didn’t stop us for a second. Viva la revolution!

We tried out boardwalks in a number of locations, including the vastly over-rated Atlantic City boardwalk. It was basically identical to the Ocean City boardwalk, but with less shops where you could buy hermit crabs.

On our last day in Ocean City we were visited by Kim’s great aunt Ruthie, who came to teach us a few things about card games. Actually, based on her success rate, I suspect she may have been making it up as she went along. Who calls a card game Pea Knuckle in the first place?

Aunt Ruthie makes ten. Ten oughta do it, don’t you think? You think we need one more? You think we need one more. Alright, we’ll get one more.

Um… after Aunt Ruthie departed we were visited by a Bulgarian aristocrat named Miroslav who had been on a pilgrimage from Stara Zagora to Barcelona and had got a bit lost. Well… very lost. We pointed him in the right direction and he… swam off into the distance. Kim and I jumped in the car instead and headed back towards Cincinnati.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

The City That Doesn't Sleep

It seems like such a cliché to write  a post about New York City. Everyone who’s ever gone there has written a story, or a song, or a poem, or something about hustle, bustle, never sleeping and being completely nuts. Yeah, well… I went there and I had a great time, so I guess I’m adding to the cliché. Deal with it.

Kim and I were there about four days all up, and we managed to cram a fair bit into those four days. Day one was mainly taken up with just getting there from Ohio and finding the people we were staying with, but we found some time late in the day to get out and find a dodgy underground comedy club. That was really fun, and really encouraging because it turns out that dodgy comedy clubs in New York City run their nights almost the same way we run our dodgy comedy club back home. We must be doing something right.

The next day started with church with our billets. I wasn’t sure how I was going to go in American churches, but this one was a traditional Methodist congregation, so this Darwin Uniting boy was right at home. They even had a digital organ and a guy who knew how to handle it.

After church we took the train into town to visit the Ground Zero memorial. The museum was still under construction, but the memorial pools that sit in the ground on the site of the original two buildings are open and quite moving. They’re inscribed with the names of all the victims of the 11^th of September attacks, and they sit in the shadow of the buildings that have been redesigned and rebuilt.

There was a lot of talk about renaming the new towers things like “Freedom Tower” and “Liberty Tower”,” which each have their merits, I guess. But I really love the new tower names. The old towers were called World Trade Centre 1 and World Trade Centre 2. So what are the new ones called? World Trade Centre 1 and World Trade Centre 2. Suck it terrorists.

To make our contemplative morning complete, we had lunch in a pub across the road run by firefighters. As luck would have it, the firefighter serving drinks that afternoon had been one of the first responders on the ground on the morning of the attacks. He had a scrapbook full of photos and clippings of stuff that was going on that day, but it was just fascinating to hear a story from a guy who found himself buried alive under tower 2, and against all the odds survived, only to have to dig himself out. Then he went back for the others. Crazy heroic stuff.

After Ground Zero we headed for Broadway for our first show of the trip: The Lion King. I hadn’t seen the stage version before, although I loved the movie when I was a kid. I enjoyed remembering all the old songs, but more impressive than the music (apart from old Rafiki, who was sensational) were the sets. The elephant graveyard, Pride Rock and the stampede in the gorge were all very cleverly designed, particularly the way they would appear and then disappear into the floor.

It was a matinee show, so we had some time to kill in town that night. We grabbed some dinner and then caught another comedy show in town. It was a slightly more professional set up this time, but at the same time the comedians were not as good. We still had fun.

The next day was a New York icons day. We started out with a trip up the Empire State Building. That was pretty cool, and we stayed up the top for about forty minutes before riding the lift back down again. Then we caught a subway down to the Statton Island Ferry to get a look at the Statue of Liberty. We would have had to have booked months in advance to actually go over onto Ellis Island, but the ferry ride passed close enough to the statue to get a good look.

We had lunch on Statton Island and then rode the ferry back to Manhattan and walked along the High Line, which is a raised walkway with plants all along it constructed up above the streets. It was really nice walking along there, particularly at sunset.

That night we saw an off-Broadway show called Sleep No More. We were quite excited about the concept of the show, which was based on Macbeth. It was set in an old abandoned hotel, with different scenes of the play being played out in different orders in different rooms of the hotel. Or so we thought. The different levels were all there, the random order was all there, but someone had neglected to let us know that there was no Shakespearean text being done; it was the Macbeth story presented through interpretive dance. I’m sure it was all very modern, cutting edge and symbolic, but it didn’t really impress either of us, so we headed home and got ready for our last day in the Big Apple.

We spent that day strolling through the Museum of Modern Art and Central Park. We hadn’t really been finding time to eat properly with all the sightseeing and show taking-in we were doing, and having had ice cream for lunch we were feeling a bit zonked, so we had a nice dinner at a favourite restaurant of Kim’s before we saw our final show for the trip.

This was probably the highlight of the whole trip: We saw Pippin, which has been revived from its 1970s form and brought back at the Music Box Theatre. I hadn't realised it was a Stephen Schwartz show before we went in, but in hindsight that does explain why the songs were so catchy, original and fun. But the music wasn't the whole event, the show was a combination of cabaret, acrobatics and magic, like a blend of a circus and a Broadway musical. There was always something different happening and some of the acrobatics were astonishing. You can always tell when a show has impressed me, because the first thing I do is look for the music score, which I found in the Broadway souvenir shop. Nice.

And then before we knew it the whirlwind had blown itself out and it was time to head for the beach. But I'm pleased to announce that New York City really was one of those rare places in the world that can live up to its own hype.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Cross Cultural Cuisine

I like food.

Often one of the most interesting parts of traveling to other countries is sampling exotic flavours and different ways of cooking and serving stuff. But to be honest, I hadn’t expected my culinary adventures in the United States to be quite as educational as they were. For a country with so much in common with ours, they have some crazy ideas of how to eat.

First of all, of course, were the famous American portion sizes. A small size of anything in America is likely to be slightly bigger than the equivalent medium size in Australia. So when you couple that with the sort of masculine insecurity that won’t allow me to order a small of anything, anytime we went out for ice cream (we seemed to do that a lot) I ended up eating enough of it to float a small frigate. Or at least submerge some insanely large chocolate chips. Chocolate nuggets would be closer to the truth.

That was awesome.

Americans are famous for consuming too much sugar, but I don’t think it’s just because they eat desserts the size of basketballs. They also haven’t quite got the same sense of savoury and sweet that we do in Australia. Asking for sweet pancakes for breakfast smothered in maple syrup is no guarantee that those sweet pancakes won’t have bacon in them. There's a chance your basket of dinner rolls at a restaurant might also have blueberry muffins in it. And any land that has such thing as a jello salad (which is exactly what it sounds like – fruit suspended in green jelly and masquerading as a salad alongside your coleslaw and hotdogs) has obviously let the line between lunch and dessert get a bit wibbly. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Even the steak sauce over there can’t make up its mind. They have a sauce called A1, which would best be described as sweet and sour gravy. Give it a go, but maybe order it on the side for your first attempt.

And finally while on a beach trip to Ocean City, I was introduced to a product called salt water taffy. Quite naturally, I expected it to be salty, or at least tangy. Not in the least. Taffy is basically edible blue-tac with flavours and sugar added. Apparently it’s called salt water taffy because it is generally associated with the beach, but rather like its close relative the salt water crocodile, it can show up in just about any environment, saline or otherwise. At least if it doesn’t turn out to be as delicious as it’s supposed to be, you can use it to stick your postcards to your bedroom wall.

I'm not really sold on the whole root beer thing either. It's sweet and fizzy, which are usually a good start, but it has an after taste that makes me think of cough medicine for some reason. But without the health benefits, I suspect.

I had a hot dog at the baseball stadium. Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Stateside

If you had told me two years ago that one day I’d be excited about a trip to the United States of America, you might have got a multi-faceted reaction from me. One facet would have been scoffing at your obvious miscalculation of my enthusiasm of the US. Another facet would have been wondering by what authority you purported to be bringing information from the future. Weirdo.

However, here I am in 2013 and I’ve been dating an American for over a year now. And next week I’m off to meet her family in Ohio. It’s likely the blog will take a brief hiatus in the meantime, but rest assured I’ll be back with tales of trans-Pacific adventures sometime in September.

Wish me luck.

Garry with 2 Rs

On the Road Again

Last year I got involved with a couple of shows with the Darwin Chorale. One of them was a fantastic program of greatest hits from Broadway, with the Symphony Orchestra and a whole host of great (and some ordinary) solo performances. The other one was a slightly less salubrious but still reasonably charming review of Australian folk music. So you can guess straight away which one got funding from the government for a regional tour.

Yep.

Australian Horizons made its grand return to the NT circuit last weekend, with a troupe of about a dozen of us trekking off down to such well renowned concert venues as the Adelaide River Show Society (ARSS for short) and the Pine Creek Community Centre. And a weekend away with minibus load of sopranos was just what the doctor ordered.

My doctor has some unresolved issues. We’re working on it.

Adelaide River was a bit of a laugh. We all booked in to our accommodation and set up behind the stage at the Show Society platform. A few of the locals rocked up, but it wasn’t really clear whether they were there for the concert or the bar. I guess they got both either way.

The next morning we set out for Pine Creek. It was only an hour away, but by the time we got there:

-          One of the basses had sprained his wrist packing up the set

-          One of the altos had given herself a hernia carrying heavy boxes around

-          One of the sopranos had face planted the driveway at Adelaide river and cut her face to pieces

And it wasn’t even lunch time yet.

Meanwhile, Pine Creek surprised me by being a surprisingly good venue. The community centre there has a ranged stage, lights and even a back stage area, although it was full of … something and we couldn’t use it. Also: the accommodation out there blew me away. Someone obviously decided that a tropical resort would be a good idea in the middle of nowhere. We weren’t complaining, but I can’t imagine it will make enough money to keep it running long.

And tragically I couldn’t take full advantage of it, as I was needed on Sunday morning in Darwin, and had to drive back Saturday night. But now I get to say I’ve done a show in Pine Creek and Adelaide River, and next weekend we’re off to Jabiru.

I can’t wait.

Garry with 2 Rs

PS Jill's face was fine.

A Perfect Weekend

It’s been a little over five weeks since my last trip to Sydney for Easter, so I was very excited to have Kim coming up for the May Day long weekend. I spent a bit of time planning out the weekend and making all the bookings: we were off to Kakadu for three days and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. There was fuel in the car, food in the bags (!) and plenty of time to take things easy.

We made pretty good time and arrived in Jabiru with enough time in hand to check in and relax before heading out for a Yellow Waters cruise. I was quite excited for this, because although I’ve spent plenty of time floating on wetlands and looking at birds in the past, this time in addition to the sunset cruise we were booked on a night cruise, which was aimed at star gazing and sharing some of the Dreaming stories of the local people about the stars and how they came to be where they were.

Unfortunately the arrangements for cruises had changed a bit since the last time I was out there. The car park for the boat dock was still slightly underwater from the wet season which we are rumoured to have had (I saw very little evidence of this), so the idea was to arrive at the resort just around the corner and get ferried over by someone with a large bus. So you need to get there twenty minutes before the departure time.

I did not realise this.

We arrived about fifteen minutes before and were summarily dismissed and told to come back the next day. It was a bit of a nuisance, but after rearranging our bookings, we jumped back in the car and headed for Ubirr. I’d planned to do Yellow Waters on Saturday and Ubirr on Sunday, but there was no reason why we couldn’t do it backwards, right?

Well, the traffic on the road out to Ubirr is a little bit steadier than you might normally encounter on a road out to the middle of nowhere, and not every car out there is as awesome as my Focus, the GSS Unity. Some prefer to take the road at something a little closer to what I might be able to manage on a golf cart. By the time we made it to the Ubirr car park, the sun was very low in the sky and we were in serious danger of missing the sunset altogether. Fortunately Kim was wearing the sneakers she had assured me she wouldn’t need, so we were able to manage a quick sprint up to the lookout.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to run straight up a rock face. In my experience it’s not really conducive to the kind of contemplative/romantic serenity I’d had in mind when I planned the trip. Nonetheless, we made it up in time for me to watch the sunset and for Kim to take about sixty identical photos of it.

The next day we were all set to take another run at the Yellow Waters. We took no chances and I made sure I had us down at the resort a full hour before we were due to depart. Unfortunately this meant we had to sit around in the heat for forty minutes waiting for the guides to show up. My father would have been proud of me.

The sunset cruise itself actually went pretty well. The air over the water wasn’t as hot and the guide was out to practice his upcoming comedy routine on us. We didn’t see any jabirus or brolgas, but we got some great views of some White Breasted Sea Eagles, which are my favourite bird and Kim’s favourite rugby team (Don’t ask me why).

We had some dinner and waited until the night cruise was ready to start. It was cloudy, with a slight chance of rain, so the guides did what they could to talk us out of making them take the boat out. We were really keen to go, so we stuck our heels in and asked for the tour to go ahead. After a few delays, a massive and yet still ineffective dosage of insect repellent and an apology that we weren’t going spotlighting, we got moving and went down to the boat dock again.

The boat had a flat battery. We turned around and came back.

I don’t know what dreaming story they tell about that, but I do know that we drove back through the rain, and that by the time we got back to our hotel the sky was clear as a bell. At least we got our money back.

Monday afternoon we got moving again and headed back to Darwin. I wouldn’t exactly say the Kakadu excursion was a complete disaster, but I certainly hadn’t been everything I had imagined. We had a dinner reservation at Nirvana that night, which was handy because I had a voucher I had won at an open mic night a few weeks previously and had stored carefully in the glove box in my car for just such an occasion.

Naturally, it was nowhere to be found when I needed it. That's not unusual; things go missing in my car all the time. But they usually do show up when i need them. My car is a bit like the Room of Requirement. But not this weekend. And I think that's the second one that's gone missing. I can only assume that at some point in the future I'm going to find myself in dire need of Nirvana vouchers (I have no idea why) and there'll be a stack of six of them waiting on my passenger seat.

We had a lovely dinner anyway, and were contemplating desert when Kim got a text message from Jetstar. With just four hour's notice, her flight home had been cancelled. Not postponed, or rescheduled, just cancelled completely. There was a phone number for her to call so that she could organise her own way home, and a promise to pay for accommodation for the night. So we quickly paid (Full price. Oh well.) for dinner and then wandered off into the night to find Kim somewhere nicer than our living room floor to stay.

I took her to the airport the next day only to find that the entire airport had been dismantled by an army of demonic nuclear powered scarab beetles.

Not really.

There are a number of lessons that can be learned from last weekend.

1) Don't use Jetstar ever. I have yet to meet anyone who has had a positive experience with them.
2) Boat rides in Kakadu at night sound really romantic, but probably aren't
3) It doesn't matter how comprehensively wrong a weekend goes, if you have the right company it still turns out pretty good.

Shut up.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Some Thoughts on Temporal Mechanics. Sort Of.

I spend a lot of my time pondering the great mysteries of the universe. Sometimes I sit and ponder the relationship between causality, free will, divine predestination and chaos. Other times I ponder my persistent inability to get my chicken burgers right.

This week I’ve been considering time travel. I mean, not considering it in terms of whether I should do it or not, but more in terms of which literary expressions of it make the most sense to me. This is largely Kim’s fault. She made me read the Time Traveller’s Wife. I enjoyed bits of it, but as far as plot lines go it was one of the girliest science fiction stories I’ve ever read. I shouldn’t complain too much. It was a lot better than Jane Eyre.

It’s important that you understand that I really do take my devotion to this subject very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that I recently finished editing my second novella on the subject. I wrote it in November for Nanowrimo and I’m planning on doing a third at some stage, just as soon as I can find a spare plot and an extra November lying around.

And I’d hate you to think that this is just some rubbish I made up while I was bored at work because I wanted to get an extra post in for April. No no no. This post is the culmination of weeks of meticulous research. You can find my sources here, here, here, here, and here.

See. I totally know what I’m talking about. I’m planning on having awarded myself an honorary doctorate in the dual fields of temporal mechanics and goofing about on the internet at some point last week. Wish me luck.




Garry with 2 Rs

A Hot Time in Tasmania

Australia has been in the grip of a truly nasty heat wave this week. “Aaaargh,” go the southerners, “Hooray!” go the climate change fanatics and “on holidays” goes Garry.

I was heading to Tassie, which would normally be a location for jumpers, sachets of pre-mix hot chocolate and a good book or two. But this time, in the wake of the hottest day Hobart had ever had, I was pumped and ready for a super southern summer holiday.

It was thirteen degrees when I got off the plane in Launceston. Tasmania can’t even get a bloody heat wave right.

Before my grandmother died, my family used to spend a lot of time on the North coast of Tassie. I remember it fondly as a great place to walk around aimlessly in the cool weather, eat lunch and read books. But this time we weren’t here for Christmas in my grandmother’s unit on the North West coast. We were here for my uncle’s wedding in Scamander on the east side.

Those East side Tasmanians are a different bunch. They come across as the quiet, rural type, but beneath the half asleep exterior lurks the beating heart of an angry Thylacine. That feisty little Tasmanian Tiger is also half asleep, and extinct to go with it, but that’s not the point. The point is…

…

The wedding was at two o’clock in the function room at the Scamander Social Club. At 1:30 in the afternoon they opened the bar, which promised to make for an interesting afternoon. Just after two o’clock my auntie-to-be arrived on a golf cart and walked into the hall to the rousing cheers of the rest of the assembled guests, which was basically everyone in town.

My ordained Anglican priest of a great aunt performed a suitably short ceremony, and then it was back to the drinking and photo taking and drinking and barbequing and drinking and I think there was a band at some point and drinking. In traditional Tassie style we all ate and drank enough to get us through two weeks and took three plates of left overs home each to go with it.

I only had a couple of days in Tassie. The day after the wedding the fine weather gave up and it came over all cloudy and rainy, so we stayed inside and watched the cricket. But overall I was impressed with Scamander. It was everything a sleepy little fishing village should be.

If only I liked fishing.



Garry with 2 Rs

The Happiest Place on Earth

Recently it has been suggested to me that my blog has lost its edge. That for some reason, I’m not conveying that certain je-ne-se-quois (Well actually I know exactly quois. The term is “cranky”) in my posts, and it’s leaving some readers disappointed. I’m sure I can’t for the life of me think what might be going wrong with my brain that I’m suddenly so full of positivity. It’s a bit gross really.

I’m well known for my willingness to let public opinion tell me what to do, so this week I was going to post the most virulent, cynical rant I could come up with, but the truth is I’ve just come back from holidays and I’m feeling pretty damned good. So here’s another happy piece. If you don’t like it – or rather if you do like it but would prefer not to, or if you think it’s too… or not enough…

Look, just shut up and read it okay?

Kakadu is one of those places that all of us Darwin locals claim to know heaps about, but which most have us have only been to once or twice. The last time I can remember going out there we took my now departed grandmother out there to look around. I have some memories of her climbing up Ubirr rock to look over the wetlands and the escarpment. The last time she was fit enough to do that must have been nearly two decades ago.

Anyway, I recently got reacquainted with the most famous part of the Northern Territory. It’s funny how your perspective on things shifts when you look at them at different stages of your life. When I was a kid I used to run past the cave paintings without a second glance; the point of Kakadu was to climb up on top of the rocks as fast as you could. This time I actually stopped to appreciate the presence of artwork which is purportedly older than most parts of the Bible, and to admire the different colours and shapes in the rocks for moment before I went climbing all over them. And I don’t seem to be quite so sure footed as I used to be.

There is no getting past it; it’s still a magnificent part of the world. From the towering rock formations to the sprawling wetlands, it’s no wonder indigenous and migrant people alike consider it one of the most special places on the planet. Unfortunately this time around I was confined a bit to my awesome yet undeniably two-wheel-drive Ford Focus, so the big waterfalls were inaccessible. Next time I’ll have to look into borrowing/hiring a four-wheel-drive and really getting off the main road.

I also spent a bit of time in Litchfield Park, which is probably my favourite place in the world. All the better for the fact that, unlike the last three times I’d been out there, Wangi Falls was open for swimming. I spent a good two hours just hanging out in the swimming hole, remembering all the hours we spent down there on church camps when I was a kid. I challenge anyone to come home from that and write a cranky blog post.

So shut up.




Garry with 2 Rs

An Awesome Weekend - Part Three

I'm not proud of it. I'm not even sure how it happened. As I woke up I felt instinctively that something had gone horribly wrong.

"Sleep well?" asked the not unatrractive complete stranger beside me.

Just kidding.

Somehow I managed to stuff up my alarm two nights in a row. Instead of waking at six, I had woken at half past seven and my flight left at half past eight. Thankfully everything was already packed, so it was just a matter of dashing out the door and calling a taxi instead of walking to the train station. It was going to be tight, but experience told me I had just enough time to reach the airport before boarding closed.

Experience hadn't accounted for the inner city charity bike ride that passed through Corronation Drive and held us up for fifteen minutes, or the road works on the expressway that cost us another ten. Fortunately I only had carry on luggage, so I was hopeful of being able to just check in at the extremely helpful self service machines and then dash through security and onto the plane. Unfortunately the machine threw a tantrum because I was five minutes late and told me where to go (I returned the favour). Unfortunately it told me the wrong thing, and by the time I had been redirected to a different service counter at the other end of the check in lounge my plane had already left.

The Qantas staff were able to rebook me on a flight via Cairns. It meant I had five hours to kill at Brisbane airport and another three in Cairns on top of two two and a half hour flights. But that was alright. That's what airport bookshops are for.

By now my head had managed to completely fill itself with snot. Landing in Cairns, and again in Darwin, I felt like my sinuses were preparing to go critical all over the seat in front me, which is a safety hazard during takeoff and landing.

Finally, just fourteen and a half hours after cursing the births of all recreational cyclists everywhere, I dumped my backpack onto my bed and dumped myself into the shower. Later, as I quietly sneezed myself to sleep, I looked back on 2011's most action packed weekend yet, satisfied in the knowledge that I'm just as awesome as ever.

Make of that what you will.







Garry with 2 Rs

An Awesome Weekend - Part Two

At six fifteen I was awoken by a text message asking me where the hell I was. I had managed to set my alarm for the wrong day. I had developed a tickle in my throat overnight, but I managed to grind out a coherent apology over the phone and my friend graciously agreed to come and pick me up from the motel. In the meantime I stumbled into my suit and threw everything else into my backpack. By the time my lift arrived I was the sharpest dressed zombie in South East Queensland.

I am not well known for my navigational skills. Or, to put it more accurately, I am well known for having a catastrophically poor sense of direction. And that's just in Darwin, which by rights I should know like the back of my hand by now.

Incidently, as a by-product of spending four and a half years typing up these incessant blog posts, my familiarity with the back of my hands is up there with best of them.

The point is that when my friend handed me a print-out of Google's instructions on how to get from Indooroopilly train station in Brisbane to Stanthorpe Presbyterian Church in Stanthorpe it did not bode well for the journey ahead.

Interesting (well...) fact: Despite having a population of just five and a half thousand, Stanthorpe has both a Uniting Church and a continuing Presbyterian church (plus all the others you'd expect in an Australian country town). I don't know what the story is there. And if you don't know why that's intriguing in the first place, don't panic. Within a generation or two it won't matter anymore.

The plain fact is that I'd be utterly incapable of giving you useful directions to either of them without consulting the satnav at least twice. This is one of the reasons I'm so rarely invited to join street evangelism missions.

There are others.

We made it to the wedding with five minutes to spare. The bride and groom had asked me to do one of the scripture readings, which would have been a great honour if not for the fact that the reading was taken from the Song of Songs. If you know your Old Testament then you'll realise that's a magnificently awkward choice for a wedding ceremony. If you don't know your Old Testament, then TURN OR BURN, HEATHEN!

The reception was delightful. As always it was a great chance to catch up with old friends, relive old times and reassure each other that we're still awesome. After spending the previous evening with platinum selling rock stars, taking lunch with assorted doctors, aerospace engineers, international missionaries and federal parliamentary journalists led this particular training officer to the conclusion that some of us needed more reassurance than others.

By the end of the trip back to Brisbane later that afternoon my throat tickle had developed into a dry cough and runny nose. I had planned to spend Saturday night catching up with a few Brisbane friends who hadn't gone to the wedding. I ended up tending to my exasperated sinuses in front of a hastily selected DVD and then turning in at about ten.

But first I took great care to correctly set my alarm for the following morning so I'd make my flight home.

An Awesome Weekend - Part One

"Whenever I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story." - Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother.

Every now and again I nick off to Queensland for a few days. There's always an official pretext to the trip, but the main point of these south-eastern sojourns is to prove to myself that I'm still every bit as awesome as I was in my uni days. As time passes (and it does, I assure you) it's a claim that's becoming more and more difficult to substantiate.

Recently even the pretext has been becoming increasingly predictable; an old friend will do something silly like get married and I'll trip off to Brisbane to attend the ceremony and concurrently catch some sort of international music act. Last time, I popped east for a wedding and a U2 concert. Last weekend I went for a wedding and found by complete coincidence that New Zealand rock sensation Six60 were playing at The Zoo on Anne st. I'm sure the Six60 boys won't mind me saying it; U2 in Suncorp Stadium is not quite the same thing as Six60 in a converted community hall in Fortitude Valley, but that's not the point. The point is something closer to the incredible coincidence of being in Brisbane for less than twelve hours and yet timing it so perfectly that I got to hang out with Chris for a few hours and finally hear the band live. A coincidence which was further compounded when we discovered that as well as staying in Brisbane at the same time, we were also staying at the same motel.

I've never really imagined myself as the 'I'm with the band' type (That's probably because I rather fancifully imagine myself as the 'I'm in the band' type). Hanging out with Chris backstage after the show I got to experience the crazy collision of worlds that happens when you're chatting with friends like old times but you have your conversation interrupted periodically by fans asking for autographs.

A particularly enthusiastic pair of followers claimed to be Six60's biggest fans ever. They passed a band shirt around and asked us all to sign it. I was confused, but willing enough to oblige her. If she was as big a fan as she claimed, she might have realised she had more signatures on her shirt than Six60 has members, but I guess we'll never know.

In true rock and roll style, after loading the gear into a white mini van (hell yeah!) we continued celebrating a great show into the small hours of the morning. This was another great way for me to demonstrate that I'm still awesome, despite having taken my newly discovered I'm-with-the-bandism to the level of actually impersonating said band to it's own fans.

It was also a really stupid idea because I needed to be up ridiculously early the next morning to meet my lift to the wedding. It was a morning ceremony and lunch time reception in a town several hours' drive from Brisbane. I set my alarm for half past four to make sure I had enough time to get ready and catch a train to rendezvous with my friend at six.

Ten Things That Make Me Happy

My job often takes me out to remote communities for a week at a time. Sometimes this is an uplifting experience; a chance to get away from the bustle of the big smoke and to spend time with people with a fresh and reinvigorating outlook on the world. A chance to live a more straightforward life, if only for a week.

I dutifully arrived at the airport on Monday morning at half past ungodly in the morning, ready for my flight out to Maningrida. I found out I had actually been booked on the afternoon flight, contrary to what I had been told, so I taxied back home and sat around for half a day waiting for my flight. I finally made it to Maningrida at three, just in time for the branch office to close. So much for Monday’s program.

The council workers generously offered to drive me out to my accommodation for the week. Most of the places I have stayed in at remote communities have been simple, but comfortable. I had heard nice things about he guesthouse in Maningrida, so I thought I’d be in for a nice week.

Nope, the guest house was booked out. I was in the temporary accommodation out the other end next to the airstrip. When I say ‘accommodation’, I actually mean plastic box in the sun, reminiscent of the emergency dongers they bought in for my friends at college that time when Edale block burned down. Except not as spacious. And the air conditioner didn’t work properly.

I wandered into the common kitchen area to find a mean looking lady reading a That’s Life magazine as if it were a copy of War and Peace. She told me she was a nurse with an Ear, Nose and Throat team that had come out with the intervention. I told her I was a trainer with the Traditional Credit Union.

ENT Nurse: So what kind of skills do you train them in? Cooking, cleaning, gardening, that kind of thing?
Gw2Rs: … ? … No, we’re a credit union. I train them to operate as tellers in the bank.
ENT Nurse: Are you here with the intervention too?
Gw2Rs: No, I’m here with the credit union.

She sniffed at me and went back to her magazine. I went back to beating the microwave with a saucepan until it turned on.

We had a new starter at Maningrida, so the next morning I took her over to the West Arnhem Shire Council office to get her a letter from the council identifying her, so we could order a copy of her birth certificate, so the police could run a police check, so we could sign her up officially. A lot of people in remote communities don’t have passports or driving licences, so they get ID from the shire councillors.

Gw2Rs: Could we please get a letter of identification for Anita (not her real name)?
WASC lady: Does she have any ID?
Gw2Rs: No, that’s why we’re here. She needs a letter to get some ID.
WASC lady: I’ll need to see some ID before I can issue a letter.
Gw2Rs: …
WASC lady: Otherwise how am I supposed to know who she is?

Eventually we convinced the extremely helpful shire receptionist to issue the letter by producing Anita’s medicare card. For our American friends who might be new to this concept (That’s another thing. My blog has four public followers and, with the emigration of my sister and K.Kim, they’re all women in North America. How did that happen?), a medicare card has neither the owner’s photo, nor address; simply a government issued number. Apparently that did the trick.

Finally that afternoon we sat down to complete the training program. Of course, the computer crashed. I negotiated with our extremely friendly IT staff back in Darwin (370km away) to fix it. So much for Tuesday’s program.

On Wednesday we finally got some work done. My trainee was pretty good at the computer stuff once we finally got the damned thing working and managed to balance up at the end of the day without any trouble. Things were finally looking up.

On Wednesday night I was attacked by a pack of wild dogs.

Yep. For the sake of dramatic emphasis I decided that sentence deserved its own paragraph. Furthermore it’s true. Whilst walking around the block after enjoying a meal of dim sims and chicken … somethings from the delightful local takeaway I was accosted by an unfriendly band of local canines, possibly due to being an unfamiliar person on their territory, or possibly to the lingering aroma of inadequately processed meat. I felt more alive than I have for months as I stared down my aggressors with cold composure reminiscent of Mick Dundee and Charlie the buffalo and then, with all the dignity and masculinity I could muster, turned tail and ran for my life, with the noisy assailants in hot pursuit.

And there’s another thing. What kind of backwards looking takeaway shuts at four in the afternoon? And furthermore, if you’re going to shut at four in the afternoon, and if I come looking for a punnet of fried rice at a quarter to four only to find the front door locked, then … Blegh! That’s right, I said blegh! So much for… pathos.

So by Friday afternoon you can imagine I was more than ready to board my plane, leave this backwards town of nasty dogs and stupid West Arnhem Shire Councils and make my way back to civilisation. And when by ‘civilisation’ I’m referring to Darwin, you might begin to suspect there’s a problem.

Our plane broke down.

The air hostess (Is she still an air hostess if she’s standing on the ground looking disgruntled?) informed us that the plane had a flat battery. And apparently that’s not the sort of thing you can fix with jumper cables. They had to fly a replacement out for us from Darwin.

The Centrelink contingent in town, who were keen to return for the weekend, rang up their bosses in Darwin who magnanimously arranged to fly out a charter just for them. We gave them all a clap as they climbed aboard a private plane and took off to beat us home by about an hour. That was the fastest I’ve ever seen Centrelink arrange anything, and I suppose they felt there was a really good reason they couldn’t hire a bigger one to pick up the rest of us. We all got on the regular replacement plane and I finally got home at around ten o’clock that evening to find my housemate had once again fallen asleep in front of the television, which was still at full volume.

And somehow, in my absence, the freaking Labor party got back into government. Like my week wasn’t palm-to-the-face inducing enough as it was.

Oh yes, it’s been a while since I had a really good whinge. It’s somehow depressingly theraputic, whether that makes sense or not. Either way I feel better for it. All I need now is to run into a drunk Englishwoman. Or a communist.

I really don’t look good in watermelon pink business shirts.

...




Garry with 2 Rs

Not Remotely Interesting

Yeah, yeah, I know. I was hoping to slip an extra post in before the end of February to keep up the illusion that I’m not completely neglecting my blog, but … I didn’t. And you know what? I’m okay with that. After the disaster film that was the start to my year, I think I’ve had more than my fair share of events sufficiently noteworthy to warrant their own blog posts. It’s not that nothing at all has happened over the last few weeks, but more that I’ve been bustling about keeping up with a series of completely normal stuff.

Oh, I’ve also been travelling a bit again. It’s not quite been an intercontinental odyssey, but in many ways it has been just as eye opening and in some cases, better accommodated. Work has been sending me out to work with staff at remote branches all over the top end. I’ve just come back from a week in Gunbalanya (Oenpelli) and the week before that I was in Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island). In the past month or so I’ve also visited Numbulwar, Maningrida, Milingimbi and Ngukurr.

If you haven’t heard of any of these places, it’s because they don’t often make the news, and they certainly don’t feature in too many top ten tourist destination lists. They’re all Aboriginal communities located in Arnhem Land and Kakadu National Park, and are among some the most remote settlements on the planet. This time of year, the only way to get out to some of these places is by light aircraft, since the only roads in are all cut off by monsoonal flood waters. Go and Google map them if you don’t believe me.

It’s made for a nice change of pace. Okay, Palmerston might not be a thriving or bustling metropolis, but it’s hard to think of a more peaceful way to end a day of providing the only banking service for several hundred kilometres than by sitting on a rock watching the sunset over the ocean, eating a hamburger and listening to the sound of the local kids playing AFL on the sand behind you somewhere. It sure beats the hell out of sitting at a desk, pretending to type stuff.

I’m back in the office this week and everything’s back to its usual pace. Actually it’s faster than it has been since I’m now re-equipped with a new and improved Ford Focus. The new model’s a step up form the old, Voyager grey instead of TARDIS blue, a hatch instead of a sedan and has fancy wheels and cruise control. I haven’t decided whether or not GSS Tarrdis mk2 is really an appropriate name for a car that isn’t blue. I’m open to suggestions on that, but as usual I fully expect that there will be absolutely no comments on this post.

Shove it




Garry with 2 Rs

Square One

Well then here we are back where it all started. Sitting with my laptop in my parents’ spare bedroom writing a blog entry for no apparent reason. Far From Home has come full circle, and it only took two and a half years. The European adventure has come to an end, and this seems as good a time as any to look back at some of the moments that made the last nine months so unforgettable, and some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Scenic highlights

Fez Medina
Alhambra
The Aar River
The lights of Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Gastronomic highlights

Tapas in general, especially in Granada.
Francesina in Portugal
Traditional Moroccan couscous.
Giant slices of pizza for €1.50 in Rome

Cross-linguistic highlights

Watching Star Trek with Spanish Subtitles. “Para ir a donde ninguno haya ido audazmente” just didn’t have the same ring to it.
Being mistaken for a native Spanish speaker at a restaurant while attempting to order in Italian.
Trying unsuccessfully to convince Spanish children that there is no such sport as ‘footing’ (apparently there is in Espanglish, it’s another word for jogging).

Things to take with me next time

A much better camera
A girl. They're generally fairly bothersome to travel with, but standing on top of the Eiffel Tower at sunset on my own while everyone else was busy making out did feel a little silly.
Vegemite

Things I wanted to do but didn’t

Legoland. It’s in Denmark, and was just too far north to get there and back in the time I had.
Celebrate a successful Ashes campaign.
Walk the Camino de Santiago.

Things I did do but shouldn’t have

Left my hat on a train.
Tried to go to England.

So there you have it, or not as the case may be. A European oddysey in handy to read blog form. The next trick is going to be getting myself back home to Darwin.

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

Homeward Bound

So there I was; stranded alone at a bus stop outside Calais with a suitcase, a rucksack and two euros seventy-five in my pocket. I managed to use the pictograms on the bus stop to figure out which bus would take me back into town. After wandering cluelessly around the city for an hour or so, I managed to find an affordable hotel and some food. I couldn’t get through to Qantas from my hotel phone that night, so I had to wait until the next day to try to straighten the whole mess out.

The following morning I made my way down to the Calais tourism office to begin my quest. I had to walk around the block a few times before I even started, since the office didn’t open until eleven o’clock. Apparently French tourists like to sleep in.

I got directions to an internet/phone café and got busy. The first place I rang was Qantas’ France office. I spoke to a friendly American man there, but unfortunately he told me he wasn’t able to change any bookings for London flights at his office, and he gave me a number for the London office. As you might imagine, at this point I wasn’t particularly optimistic about the possibility of getting any help at all from the English. As it happens I was right, but fortunately the English unhelpfulness extended as far as having their office shut completely. I was automatically patched through to the New Zealand office. It was a pleasant surprise to be asked “how cen Oi hilp you” from the other side of the world.

Thankfully the Kiwis knew exactly what had to happen. I could change my booking from “London to Adelaide” to “Paris to Adelaide” for only a small fee, but they would need a copy of my passport and a copy of the document denying me entry to the UK. Fortunately the internet/phone café was also a fax café. I sent all my papers from Calais to Aukland, and by lunch time the next day I was all sorted out to come home. Thank God for the Kiwis. And thanks for nothing, you stupid useless whinging Pommy bastards.

So now here I am at an internet point in Changi airport, Singapore. I’m almost two thirds of the way home, and killing time while I wait for my next flight. Buying a whopper meal with a credit card is a really strange sensation.

Far from home




Garry with 2 Rs

Good Old Fashioned British Hospitality

Travelling on mainland Europe was great. It’s land full of culture, history and food, but, as I boarded a bus bound for London Town, I have to confess I was looking forward to getting to England. If for nothing else, for the feeling of heading for a place where I might fit in a bit better. A place that spoke my language (more or less). And a place where saying “I’m from Australia” wasn’t accompanied with an inherent feeling of “what the hell are you doing here?”

They call England the mother land, and while I think of Old Blighty as something more like a great-grandmother land these days, it was strangely comforting to know I was heading back to the Commonwealth, where a weary continental traveller could take his ease among friends before the long journey home.

“Ugh. You haven’t even filled out an immigration form, have you?”

This was my first taste of English hospitality, as I greeted the staff at the border security office in Calais, just before the entrance to the channel tunnel.
“Um… Can I have an immigration form please?” was my slightly aback-taken reply.
“Here. You really need to be better prepared than this. Go away and fill this out, then come back and see me.”
It was a fairly rude sort of introduction, but I knew it was just a long day. Once I could show him my passport and reassure him that I was just a passing traveller and not a threat to national security everything would be alright.

“Right, now let’s see here. You’re Australian?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re seeking entry to the UK for a period of 5 days?”
“That’s right.”
“And where are you staying during that time?”
“With my aunt in Oxford.”
“In Oxford?”

I started to notice the officer’s rather annoying habit of repeating everything I told him as a question, just to make sure I was aware of how unreasonable my responses obviously seemed to him. It was at about this point that I started to suspect things might not be going quite according to plan.

“And what is your aunt’s address in Oxford?”
“I don’t actually know. She’s picking me up form the bus stop.”
“Oh she’s picking you up, is she?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re staying with her until the second of September, are you?”
“That’s right.”
“And do you have your tickets for that flight with you now?”

Of course I didn’t. The people of a more sophisticated country might have realised that no-one uses print-outs of their tickets anymore because it’s unnecessary and it wastes paper and the internet is so much more convenient. But here in England, they did things the old fashioned way, apparently.

“So, then, do you have any proof of your departure date, a booking card or something?”
“Not on paper, but if I can have access to the internet, I can show the booking online, if you like.”

I couldn’t have access to the internet. Either it was against protocol, or they don’t have it in England yet.

“So this flight is booked for Tuesday evening, is it?”
“Yes. About 10 o’clock from memory”
“Which airline is it with?”
“Qantas.”
“And you don’t have any proof of this?”
“… No. …”
“How much money do you have with you?”

Now things really went downhill. My pay from the summer camp was pretty much all gone, so I had been getting rid of as many Euros as I could, so I could withdraw money in Pounds when I got to London, rather than pay a stupid commission getting Euros converted. All told my wallet contained…

“Two Euros and seventy five cents”.
“Two Euros Seventy?” The officer stopped looking at me like I was a potential threat and started looking at me like I was a complete idiot.

“Okay. Do you have any luggage on the bus?”
“Yes. I have a suitcase and a rucksack.”
“A suitcase and a backpack? Alright. They’ll have to come off the bus, I’ll need to detain you for questioning.”

So that’s what we did, and now my day really started to get fun. I’d never been detained by the police before. We went out to the bus and got my stuff off. The bus then left without me, so things were really looking up.

The first thing that happened was that my luggage was all locked away in a big cage, while I was searched for firearms on my person. They didn’t find any, so after asking me to leave my belt with them so I couldn’t hang myself with it, they escorted me to a glass-walled room and locked me in.

I should point out at this point that the staff who looked after the holding cell were much nicer than the officer who sent me there. They made sure I had food and a hot drink, and I was made comfortable. Well… comfortable apart from the fact that I was locked in a glass-walled room somewhere outside Calais.

After a short wait the officer returned and escorted me to an interview room, where he proceeded to ask me all the same questions he had asked me out the front, only this time he wrote my answers down instead of repeating them back to me. After all this, apparently he still didn’t believe me, so he agreed to call my aunt to confirm. I had to leave the room while he spoke to her, presumably so I couldn’t tell her the answers to the officer’s questions before he had a chance to ask them. It was good to know that there was at least a little bit of sanity to be found in the facility; it would all be cleared up soon.

After my aunt confirmed my travel plans, I was taken back to the main office to collect my bags. I was looking forward to getting out of that damn office and getting on with my journey on the next available bus.

But it wasn’t to be. Actually I was collecting my luggage ready for a full bag search. My luggage and I were taken into another small office and locked in, and I was made to take every last thing out of all my baggage and tell the officer what it was and where I got it. I don’t know what they were looking for, but they didn’t find it, so I packed it all back into the bags while the officer stood by and shook his head in annoyance at how long it was taking. Then the luggage went back in the cage, and I went back into the glass room.

Half an hour or so later the officer returned and took me down the hall to another room to be fingerprinted. Yep, fingerprinted. I’m not sure why, but I suppose if I ever try to do something mischievous like ‘catch a bus to London’ again (not bloody likely, I’m here to say), Interpol will be on the case.

So after all the hoops had been jumped through, all the necessary confirmation made and all the ink washed off my fingertips, the officer finally returned with the final paperwork and informed me:

“As I am not satisfied you have the financial means to return to Australia, and as you have not provided sufficient proof of your intention to return to Australia within the required time frame, I am denying you permission to enter the United Kingdom.”

“You’re denying me permission to enter?” I asked disbelievingly, more to give the stuffy clipboard monkey a taste of his own medicine than to request clarification.

And that was that. After incarcerating me for two hours, searching me and my bags and fingerprinting me on suspicion of ‘trying to go to England’, the British Border Patrol rang up their friends at the French Border Patrol who came and collected me in a big white van and then dropped me off at a bus stop just outside Calais at half past five in the evening. I had no accommodation, no real idea where anything was, and no idea how to speak French.

And that was my experience of all that England has to offer. Nothing but a complete load of bollocks.

Far from home (far from home?)




Garry with 2 Rs