On The Road Again.

I crossed the Nullabor by coach this time, it took 39 hours from Kalgoorlie to Adelaide. My bum was mince and my nerves frayed by the assortment of humanity that took the trip with me. My last few days in Kal were spent with the rest of the townsfolk nervously waiting to see if a huge tropical cyclone would turn inland enough to reach us. It caused huge damage at Exmouth on the coast, but all Kal got was a bit of flooding and a few days cut off from the rest of the world. The railway line was also damaged. They had evacuated the mine anyway, so I had come back into town with everyone else. It was a strange way to leave - vaguely surreal with the closed roads and shops and the busy pubs and threatening sky and powerful winds.

I didn't hang around in Adelaide, I had seen and enjoyed so much there with Claudia that It felt wrong to be there without her and so I sneaked out and made my way the long way round to Melbourne. The East coast of Australia had it's cute and quiet little towns and roads, but it lacked the rough and ready feel of Western Australia. Out west, travelling felt more daring, more adventurous. You wouldn't round a corner and find a homely place that sold Devonshire teas or a chance to fish for trout.
Melbourne failed to impress me on that first visit and did little to redeem itself on future visits I was to make. It was as if it pretended to be grander than it was, somehow. The city centre had it's share of blue chip-type companies and the buildings along some streets were grand, but I could never shake the sense that there was a lot of old money around that was not going as far as it used to in terms of making the place as sophisticated as it wanted to be. In Scotland they would describe it as being 'Fur Coat and Nay Knickers'. (Know-what-I-mean? I will think about this some more and come back and edit this post when I can find a better way of putting this.)

I flew to Tasmania because it cost the same as the ferry and I would get there quicker. I thought that I wasn't in a rush, but I did feel the need to keep moving. In Tasmania I met a Canadian who seemed a decent type. We decided to hire a car for a fortnight and drive around the island as this was going to be the best way to see all the quiet little corners that make Tasmania so special. What a gorgeous state. What a pleasure to buy fruit and veg from farm stalls that had honesty boxes for you to drop your money in. I think that was perhaps one thing that summed up the cleanliness and the innocent ways of the place.

Before I left Perth, I had posted off my laptop to Claudia. It was the single most valuable asset in my life and I had not ever used it on the mine and I thought it was pointless carrying it around any more. In Hobart I had to send a fax off to explain to German Exise that it was mine and it was not going to be sold. That 2-page fax cost 22 bucks to send!

I loved Tassie and it is high on my list of Most Desireable Places to Live. I still imagine it as the one place where Claudia and I could happily settle. It was the sort of place where education and law-and-order are not besieged by budget cuts and bad personal discipline. I flew back to grotty Melbourne and headed up to Canberra. There I spent two days taking in the War Museum and Memorial alone. I then went to Parliament and I sat in the public gallery and heard democracy in action - a couple of days debating and voting on an Internet bill. Bloody hell! If we all did that sat in on a circus like that, I think we would be more inclined to look for benevolent dictator, a sort of Daddy-Knows-Best type. And that for a parliament as open and progressive as the Australian one. I shudder to think what you would get in the UK or Germany for instance; or for that matter, the European Parliament!

It was off to Sydney next. Not my kind of place. You will perhaps have gathered that cities don't grab me much, not sure why really, I don't think that I am that much of a country bumpkin. Perhaps it is when the weather is crap, a big city just seems to hold so much sadness in streets that locals stride through without ever pausing to think - and the weather in Melbourne and Sydney has always been crap when I have visited. London has bits like that too. I went through the Basic To Do list for the place and headed north. By now I was sick of the type of UK traveller that one meets on the East coast. Finished uni, out for a year, away from the wrinklies and attracted to Melbourne, Sydney, Byron Bay or Airlie Beach like flies to shite. Dreadful sorts, not backpackers at all. OK, it was not only the Poms, but they were the majority and the other nationalities that did the same sort of thing at least seemed to have dreads and a weed habit already. For that reason I skipped Byron Bay and went straight to Brisbane. My finances were also running low and it was time to find more work.