"The computer has just killed the engine..."

This is the strangest internet cafe I have ever been in. It is dark and the lighting is restricted to a few dim uplighters and the sign behind the desk that says 'STARZONE'. The computers are very large and the chairs are those red leather monsters that adjust at every possible junction and swing wildly when you sit down. There is raised bank of monitors on the far wall and the sum effect is that of the base for an underground spy ring. The keyboard is illuminated only by the light of the computer screen. It is cool down here, off the street and away from the crowds. Too hot today, and sunny again after two days of overcast rainclouds that threatened but never broke. I miss the rain and the fog and the wind.

This, then, is Sydney, by route of the worst Greyhound so far. We were only about twenty minutes out of Coffs Harbour when it broke down, cruising at 90kmph when the engine cut out and the driver coasted into the side of the road. "Not to worry!" he called into the back, "the computer has just killed the engine." Not to worry?! Quite frankly, I'm not sure I've ever been as worried as I was after this statement. Had he just made a sweeping precis of technological progress for all of Western society? The Matrix? Self-awareness? A microchip assassin, by means of a foreign hacker? HAL 2000? It turns out the onboard computer has some mechanical cut-off switch. If the computer goes, so does the engine and this is a regular occurrence. No-one else seemed very worried. Being broken down for a few hours means being stationery and therefore actually getting some sleep. Sleeping in the bus seats is all but impossible. A yoga master would struggle. Looking back along the aisle, a series of heads, hands and legs spill across the armrests at strange and distorted angles. No-one gets much rest. I curled across both seats with my head on the armrest and my legs wedged under the chair in front. It did little good. Arriving into Sydney Central the next morning in fug of grey confusion, I collected my rucksack and simply walked for a little while. When the cobwebs were gone, I got out the map in Lonely Planet, growled, turned around and walked directly back to Central.

After the spaghetti map of the London Underground the Sydney system is a cinch. I took the doubledecker tube to Kings Cross (I know!) and started my week at Eva's Backpackers. It is expensive and four-fifths full of hearty Germans who all seem to know each other but breakfast is free and the showers are hot. In the last two days I have been climbing, badly, wandered around Paddy's Markets where porters try to hit you in the ankles with their blue trolleys, gone to the opera house, the botanical gardens, the art gallery, the gallery of contemporary art, Taronga zoo and the movies. At the opera house they were frantically preparing for the Australian Idol final. Strolling casually through the outdoor-media-event-mayhem that I know so well, I spotted a Jimmy Jib and felt some peculiar twinges. It took me a nervous moment to work out that this was from familiarity rather than nostalgia.


Taken while walking in the Rocks.

The zoo was generally quite good. They have an extensive breeding program of endangered animals which is the only justification for zoos, ever: they have two of the last thirty Sumatran Tigers in the world. On the other hand, the newly acquired sun bears were pacing back and forward in miserable laps. It's always a weird one. The echidnas seemed happy enough, and I'm always pleased to come across a new animal - the fishing cat is a large cat that catches fish. They also had the marsupial carnivore, the aptly-named spotted-tailed quoll, and bored chimpanzees chasing a lizard into the concrete moat. There is a pen full of kangaroos who were sitting around in the manner of dejected winos outside national banks. Broken. But then the turtles with cracked and damaged shells, repaired with fibreglass until they heal. Zoos always leave me feeling mixed up. Taronga also had one of the few undrugged koala bears in the country. It's a little known fact that koalas are actually omniverous - that the vast majority eat gum leaves and become stoned only adds to their appeal for the tourist market. When the toxins have been flushed from the gut, a koala can become extremely vicious. If there is no eucalyptus available they crave meat and in desperate times have been known to attack bushrangers and tourists. Like I say, this is not at all common, and the Australian media keep it quiet when these attacks do happen; in Taronga this adult female was perfectly disguised within the bamboo enclosure. You could see the bloody carcass of some small rodent spread out against the back corner of the cage. Only when a small child got too close to the window did it drop from the mesh ceiling and slam against the plateglass with a peculiar yowling noise. Flecks of saliva sprayed against the window. The child screamed and spun away while the koala continued to snarl and scratch. Yelling, the father dragged his daughter away and just as quickly the bear dropped back down and disappeared into the long grass.


Does anyone find this as depressing as I do?

I have seen more films at the cinema since being in Australia than in recent times in London. I saw Children Of Man in Brisbane, and the ending was a cheat. It's otherwise pretty good, though it has been classed in totally the wrong genre... you can't show armed police openly beating Asians on the streets on London and claim to have made a dystopian sci-fi. In Coffs Harbour I saw The Prestige, which is so obviously riddled with twists that it's hard not to see them coming - young Chris Nolan, already hoist by his own petard... I don't actually know what that phrase means, and hopefully I'll never find out. And last night I saw the second Jackass film and cried with laughter.

All these films have made a welcome respite from the cricket... I settled down, bated breath, to watch the first ball on the first day. Big Steve Harmison, tracing his run-up like he's about to rob a bank, ball in hand, nervous Australians, racing in and pow! Wide. So wide that it ends up not with a scrambling keeper but safely in Flintoff's hands in second slip. Second slip. Not first slip, but second. Martin Jenkins wrote that it was probably for the best that Flintoff got the ball as soon as possible, but that wasn't really what I had in mind. I watched the entire first day. I watched most of the second day. I watched Strauss top-edge and Cookie caught at slip. I couldn't watch the hatrick ball. I had to go back out to Muttonbird Island and listen to the first Weezer album. Couldn't take it any more. I invest so much faith in them and every time they let me down. No more cricket for me this winter - even in the unlikely event that we start to win a session or take a wicket. I should have known better. Fortunately,there have been no Australians around to gloat; the Germans asked me to explain the rules but I've fallen into that trap too many times and I bluntly refused. They started to get shirty with me, argumentative and resentful; I had to escape through an open window before things got out of hand.

I'm now at a loose end in Sydney. I've walked dozens of kilometres in the last two days doing touristy things and there is little left to do for free. My hostel is always full but never busy, and the rooftop terrace is the only safe place.

The view from the hostel roof

I'm writing quite a lot. In the dusk, fat furry bats scud between the highrise towers. Kings Cross is quite seedy and smells like Soho. I saw a woman carrying a little dog wrapped up in tartan. An old man was walking slowly because he deliberately, precisely placed his stick on the grimy cross between the paving slabs before taking his next step. There are sullen Chinese girls in baseball caps. Later, I see the woman again in a cafe by the road. Her tiny dog is trying to look dignified while sitting on his tartan blanket, laid out neatly on the pavement.

...and a quick postscript: I went to the Qantas office to work out precisely what I can do with my return ticket, and everything they told me in Brisbane was a horrible lie. I dealt with an absolute monster called Mandy. I didn't get a smile out of her until I left, and then, looking back over my shoulder, I realised that she had filed her teeth into points. One of the few maxims I have any time for is 'necessity is the mother of invention' (just look what happened to Red Dwarf when they could afford computer graphics), and having my options restricted by Mandy Khan actually brought me to realise that is both cheaper and easier for me to go to New Zealand first, in the New Year, then come back to Australia to impose on Jem and Joan on the west coast, and finally fly out from Perth...

I also swapped Bruce Chatwin's 'What Am I Doing Here' and a collection of Christopher Landon's novels - 'Ice Cold In Alex' was excellent stuff; 'Dead Men Rise Up Never' and 'Shadow Of Time' much more pedestrian - for 'Underworld' by Don DeLillo. It's a behemoth of a book which I've started three times and always given up on with the excuse that I had better things to do with my life. Now, however, I don't.

Tomorrow I book my NZ flights...

...and a second postscript: no, I don't. It is too close to Christmas and I have left it all too late. The return ticket costs a fortune that I can't afford to spend. I will do some rapid thinking over much coffee.

Check out the new links - rediscovered when sweeping out my inbox. Baker supplied Death Clock - Bob Porter discovered Disappointment.com, which is the blog Steph has waited her whole life for. The new explorers, the conquistadors pre-space exploration will all stake their claims on the internet. Archaeology is dying, a finite science - the internet is all that is left. We make our own archaeology from here on down.

Tom Waits for no man

The Southern Pacific Ocean is alive with white horses. A ferocious wind is storming from the East across the sea and tearing into Muttonbird Island. Huge waves topped with foam are hammering at the rocks, throwing up white explosions of spray, the wind so vicious that all you can hear is a ROOOAAARR in your ears. The heathers and scrubs wave like an audience. You can lean forward into the wind without falling and be young again. I like this place. Huge waves, implacable, ancient, the big swell of thousands of miles. The next thing to happen across the horizon is New Zealand. Despite the spray and haze I can just about make out the most Easterly lighthouse in Australia and the hooks of white shearwaters that fly in the troughs of the waves. I thought a lot about time and erosion and stayed out long enough to hurt my ears before turning back to Coff's Harbour. It's a gentle stroll through the marina back to the hostel. Lots of blue boats are for sale, and on Jetty Beach the wind has sculpted peculiar craters from the day's footprints. The Fisherman's Co-op serves the best fish'n'chips I've ever eaten for less than the price of a pint.



Back on the buses... the ride on the Greyhound from Byron Bay was fairly typical - the second half of a film you wouldn't normally be able to pay me to watch and broken suspension. For some reason every Greyhound in Australia has a dodgy gearbox. Unless I've actually been on the same bus every time, but this seems quite unlikely. You can hear the driver swearing and wrestling with the gearstick, fighting for second in his sunglasses and knee-high socks. Curiously, only Japanese schoolgirls and Australian drivers wear these socks, and I don't know why. We also passed a perplexingly large prawn on the roof of a restaurant, pictures of which shall be posted as soon as I have the facility to do so.



Byron Bay was quite relaxing, though I had the misfortune of having my visit coincide with the start of 'Schoolies' week, when the high school kids finish their term and run riot all over the East Coast, roaming in feral packs with shopping trolleys full of beer. It's a little bit like the annual A-level invasion of Newquay, but a more apt comparison would be all of the dark things from your worst nightmares coming to life and spilling around in the streets outside your house, pawing at the windows and shouting. I swapped my pulp fiction anthology for a book about Aboriginal archaeology and drank buckets of cheap red wine. Four litre boxes that cost about three pounds (dubbed 'Goon') appeal to the wallet of the budget backpacker but I've had some stinking hangovers in the last week. Much like my treasured holiday in Trevone Bay, it's best to clear the head with an early morning dip in the sea. A saltwater enema for the brains. I went bodyboarding with some guys from my dorm quite often, though we seldom had really good waves. I'll save my surfing for Bondi Beach.

Ex-London flatmate Bronwyn is back in Australia with a posse of her pals and a drunken week in Byron. I met up with them a couple of times and drank too much, laughing a great deal when the kids with big hair tried to chat them up. I even wound up in a nightclub last night. There were people much younger than me and they were dancing, and laughing, and having fun. Laugh while you can, you poor fools! Everyone knows you can't have fun in a nightclub, and you have to sit glowering in the corner, nursing a single beer all night long and snarling at any attractive seventeen-year old girls who try to talk to you. I had a cracking barbeque up at Bron's palatial holiday villa and walked home in the evening. It took me slightly over an hour to get back to the hostel, magical in twilight but unnerving in the dark... especially as I had my first encounter with a snake, and at rather closer quarters than I would have preferred. Walking along the pavement in almost pitch black, ducking the trees that fringe the road, a car approached from behind - and caught in the headlamps about three feet away from me was a the twist and coil of a little snake. They come out to take the last of the heat from the tarmac. It was only about a foot or so long, but I was about to tread straight on the bastard. I took a wide detour and walked a little brisker. I was quite shaken until I had some more Goon. The first mug is awful but after that it gets surprisingly easy to drink.

If anyone is feeling generous then go and help out a struggling publication called Smoke: a London peculiar. It's a nice little magazine looking at the weirder sides to our esteemed and spotless capital; and what's more you'll find a short short story by yours truly in the latest edition. It's only about 500 words long but actually having something printed has put some wind in the sails, nonetheless. Thanks to Uncle Rich for the tip. I had a coffee this afternoon in a little place near the beach, and was surprised when they played 'Ol 55 by Tom Waits. I've been listening to him all afternoon. "I suppose I borrowed your unofficial national anthem for this song... but don't worry. I'll give it back when I'm done...

'Waltzing Matilda... you'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me...'"

A good old mooch

Next stop: Byron Bay. I barely made it off the bus in time. Only three hours from Bris Vegas when I was expecting another marathon on the Greyhound. Four nights in Brisbane? Maybe five. There wasn't much to do. I shared a dorm with a Scottish girl called Jo and two Chinese girls who had pushed their beds together and refused to come out. Jo and I wandered the Queensland Museum for a while. Lots of buttons to push. We saw the Ashes urn, but somewhat disappointingly the crocodile feature (a rocking tin boat) was OUT OF ORDER.

Jo disappeared to Melbourne the next morning - I had a mooch around town and bought some new climbing shoes. Did you know 'mooching' used to be a criminal offence in days gone by? The equivalent of 'Loitering with intent'. You could wind up in the Farringdon House Of Detention for having a good old mooch, and quite possibly sent to Australia. Quite right, too. I wandered the games arcade for a while. It was full of mostly Asian young men intent on pixellated violence. Two guys in tandem on a disco-dancing machine, hopping, tapping on the flashing arrows to rack up 144 consecutive correct moves before I get bored and move on. A girl on a drum machine is hammering out a flawless beat to an 80s metal song. Lots of guns, lots of steering wheels, zombies and commandos, aliens, motorcycles.

Walking around the town centre, and I have seen all of these shops before; most before leaving London. I buy a Big Issue from a man with a mullet and short shorts busy harassing the customers outside Borders. The magazine costs $4, which most people pay with a $5 note - his bag full of errant $1 coins has been thoughtfully buried under a pile of clothes and things across the street. He makes a half-hearted gesture at getting my change but we both know I won't push him. I ask him instead for directions, but he denies all knowledge of the second-hand bookstore I've been directed towards by the receptionist. I find it thirty seconds later, heralded by a giant sign that says BOOKS. I am struck later by the thought that the man with the mullet may have been sarcastic.

It turns out that Charles Leakey, the great bookselling brigand of Inverness, has a doppelganger in Brisbane. I got absolutely raped at the book exchange. He only gave me $3 for two books! I should have kept 'The Songlines', but I swapped it for 'What Am I Doing Here', also by Bruce Chatwin. The other exchange was a battered but entertaining book of Australian short stories from the 1970s called 'Taste Of Cockroach', complete with schoolboy annotations in the margins. I've since swapped 'Bonfire of the Vanities' which is amongst the least satisfying books I've ever read for a collection of pulp fiction to match the two I left in a box in a garage in Inverness. The Big Issue is much better here than at home.

I spent Monday night at the Cliffs at Kangaroo Point in the company of the Queensland University of Technology climbing club. After a warm-up and starting to break in the new climbing boots (size 6 - I normally wear 9.5 sneakers...) I only just climbed 'Pterodactyl' at Aussie grade 18. I don't know what that is in British standards, but it was 20 metres high, gritty, greasy and much tougher than it looked. I'm out of shape and fell off the wall several times. Near the top I had to actually look at my hands to make the fingers work properly, to focus on specific instructions: "Hold on to that... let go of this now..." The kids broke me, but I went back on Tuesday to another climbing club where I managed 'Pass the Bosh!' at 16 and 'Vegemite' 17. The instructor reckons that 'Pterodactyl' is actually grade 20, but since I found them all equally difficult I have drawn the conclusions that the Australian grading system is as hopelessly flawed as every other grading system everywhere in the world. On the way back to the hostel I stumbled across an amateur circus group practicing their skills which was good value for a half hour of nursing my scrapes and aches; and then on the high street I came across a horrible, horrible display acted out by perverse animatronic marsupials. It was grim. The essential story, as far as I could ascertain, was that Wombat can't get a role in the nativity, but during the casting process he is first lynched by the stage manager koala and then sacked for the terrible transvestism of his Mary. There were possums fornicating in the wings.



Jo and the Chinese girls were replaced by two burly Irishmen who may have been very interesting people. It's a shame that any scintillating conversation was foiled by the first one being asleep for three days and the second being utterly indecipherable. I just nodded and smiled a lot. Back away slowly... maintain eye contact... that's the important thing... I bought a small map of the world and drank a lot of coffee while looking at it. This may have been a mistake. There are a lot of places I want to see but no easy way of linking them with a multiple stop round-the-world ticket, which is the cheap option. I'm trying to wrangle my existing return ticket via Singapore into something more worthwhile, but Qantas are proving difficult. I blew their tiny minds, man... they were so used to businessmen in business suits seeking business class that they didn't know how to deal with a backpacker in flip-flops and a smile. "A smile?!" I hear you cry. "Surely no?!" Fear not, friends! I didn't mean it. Like I said, too much coffee. I had to grin or my face went numb. The waitresses all know my order and call me 'honey'.

Byron Bay seems quite pleasant, and I'll be staying here for the next few nights.

Songlines

I missed the bus by two minutes. In the taxi from Airlie Beach, there are dust devils in the fields but the air at Proserpine airport is hot and still, no scraps of whirling bark, no dancing cigarette ends. John the barman serves ice beer in polystyrene coolers and thinks England will win the Ashes. The place is almost deserted, just a girl in a red summer dress taking her bags back from the taxi driver. This is the set of an arty short film.

Flying over Brisbane, the sun is such that I can track the shadow of our plane across the thumbprint of the city suburbs. A cluster of cricket fields, town planner blueprints for successful living. I arrive into the heart of a Saturday night that would sadden Tom Waits and puts Cardiff to shame. The sullen taxi driver hates his job and himself and me. A chatty receptionist at the labyrinthine Palace backpackers points me towards the cliffs at Kangaroo Point. It's a thirty-minute walk but I get in some legitimate climbing for the first time in a month - good, hard traverses, and a 5C-ish problem that I'll go back to tomorrow. The drill holes from the dynamite are still struck through the rock, a hundred years old, thick with chalk and shiny from the polishing weight of hundreds of boulderers.



The cliffs have been made readily available for climbers by the city council, who installed massive floodlights along the entire 500-metre stretch. At the top of the cliff they have rooted concrete pillars for top roping and drainpipes for safe belaying. The above photo - rather good, I think - is of a guy called Nick. He used to manage pubs in London but prefers life in Brisbane. He uses an auto-belay device because he never has any climbing partners on a Saturday night.

I'm not feeling so good. I've just finished Bruce Chatwin's 'The Songlines'. I bought it on a whim from the Airlie Beach book exchange in part-exchange for 'Lullaby'. It had an interesting cover. He is a travel writer. He travels Australia in the company of a first-generation Australian-Russian called Arkady who facilitates his meetings with the Aboriginals, who, in turn, gradually and often reluctantly - often by his own inference - explain about the Songlines, a network of trails that riddle Australia in a mix of creationism, territorial assertion and spiritual belonging. The ancestors walked these lines. As they walked, they sang aloud the things that were around them - and by doing so, called these things into existence.

It's a bit too much to take in. It's not that I believe it so much as I am shaken by the Aboriginal faith in it.

I read the extracts from Chatwin's notebooks drinking beer in the bar under the hostel. His account of the Tower of Babel left me shaking. I sat trembling on my barstool under the weight of thought and could not continue reading for several minutes. He died at the age of 49. I am very tired.

I've added some photos of the Coral Trekker from a couple of blogs ago. Tim, that middle yard arm is not far shy of 20 metres, you shyster.

Lumps of rock

I've finished my second and final week with Barefoot Cruises. They've had good value from me. This afternoon I'm flying out of Airlie Beach for Brisbane where I'll kill a couple of days before meeting Bronwyn in Byron Bay next week. After these last two weeks I have a sudden sense that I need to hurry my travels along. Very strange but very clear, this feeling that I'm on the run from something grim.

This last week at sea has been more of the same - the sailing, when it is actually sailing, is very fine - my favourite job is hanging upside from the mizzen boom to furl the sails and fix the covers. At Nara inlet we moored by old Aboriginal caves. There are eight or nine spots in the inlet but only one is available to the public, a heavy overhang where chrysali dangle between 8,000 year old paintings of turtles and hammerhead sharks. It is massively underwhelming, and the marsh flies are a menace. I cut my feet very badly on the oyster shells at the beach. They are cemented into the rock by some mysterious chemical reaction between salt water and fresh that welds everything together in concrete. I've been limping ever since - Barefoot by name and nature, a bloody smear in my flip-flops.

The passengers are all chumps. I haven't felt this antisocial since the Snow Goose. We had a 'yachtsman' in his Musto sailing cap who couldn't tie knots. A family of wholesome and healthy Canadians... dad Scott would stand and silently watch us at work. It was disquieting, this intense observation during the most innocuous tasks... Amy chopping carrots, me cleaning the heads, Spencer on the brass... just... watching. And there was Dave, a retired factory owner who had political views slightly to the right of Robert Kilroy-Silk and may well be wanted for a quiet chat in Nuremberg. His wife was petrified of East Europe and said at least once every day "Now I'm not a racist but-"... I avoid all of them whenever possible. Very few of them are aware of the wheelhouse roof and this is my refuge, rocking with the tide, cold can of beer, drum beat goes knock-knock-BANG from the halyard block on the mizzen mast. When the lamps are out, the skies are full of light. There are quick moments I could stay here forever.

I can't stay here forever. My hands are wrinkled with dishwater, slick with bubbles. I clean the tupperware mugs with the same three identical motions. The GPS sytem is directly above the sink, and as I scrub and rinse I stare down the seconds of GMT glowing in the corner of the screen. It is 10.36am at home, and the greasy spoon by Greenwich market will still be recovering from the morning trade, wiping clean the hooked rings of spilt tea and sweeping along the crumbs from bacon rolls. There will be children anxious to sit in the front seat of the DLR, and never mind the chewing gum. People will be drinking coffee and tasteless water fountain water all over Britain, tired from computer screens or phone calls or last night's television or this morning's Metro or meetings where maybe something was achieved after all... The Canadian twins are bickering in high, healthy voices about who will sing melody in their self-appointed country music recital. I'm desperately trying to calculate if I have enough battery power to make it through The Soft Bulletin. If not then sitting on the far end of the bowsprit' should be sufficiently distant to muffle them. Too late!
"Don't sit under the apple tree...
with anyone else but me...
anyone else but me...
anyone else but me...
you're my l-o-v-e..."

It is quiet, and sad. The time at home is 10.41am. Grey suds conjure a map of Africa in the dishwater. Captain Bob is talking about the stars, the Seven Sisters. Orion is upside down so the sword belt is a business tie.

After dinner, Bob is in his cups and cheerful. He makes up his mind, takes a deep breath, and orders the passengers outside. He turns out the lights and unties the boat hook. He carefully dips it in the millpond waters of Nara inlet - and the sea is suddenly alive with bright green phophorescence! Iridescent, luminescent, radical, crazy light! Agitated algae reacting with disapproval to the new tumult in calm waters make a silhouette of everything that rattles them. Fish are bright green as they come to investigate the boat hook. No-one but me wanted to swim but this was too special to miss. I jumped in from the wheelhouse roof in my pants and didn't bother with a stinger suit. Under water, it is white-green and not black. The light is electric, constant and strong to my swimming, a thick halo of phosphorescence, alive to every movement, diving down, treading water, swimming round the boat. The sea is warm but I am scared of crocodiles and after ten minutes I climb up the anchor chain and over the jackstay, back to my shorts and beers.

These crazy skies, these billion stars, all that dead cold life... Over the hill, the moon is starting to rise through thin cloud and the reflected light boils up in an inferno like the Do-Lung Bridge in Apocalypse Now. I know who's in charge here. I see a shooting star almost every night, and almost every night I make the same wish. Lying on the wheelhouse roof, rolling onto my belly to look again at the myriad dots of phosphorescence, I am caught between the two infinities. Just drifting between the tiny things and the big. They are both mindless and impossible, and I am thick with life, but they are perfect and I am humble. The storm is gathering. The radio said so. Thirty miles away, lightning illuminates vast walls of cloud.
"Best to batten down 'em hatches," says Bob over his can of pre-mixed rum'n'coke. "It's gonna be a wet one."
"But," quavers Susan from Nimby-under-Punting, "surely the boat doesn't leak in the rain?"
Captain Bob eyes her, happily. "Yeah, she does," he grins. "Oh, fuck yeah."

I slept on deck anyway. The rain woke me about two and I didn't sleep so much after that. I just got wetter and angrier.
"Come on, Australia! Is this the best you've got?!" I've slept in worse than this, wetter, colder. This is nothing. I woke the passengers, shouting at the sky. The first job of the day is bailing out the dinghy. Shin-deep in rainwater, rain pouring down, standing in a dinghy floating in the sea. Ridiculous. Too slow for breakfast. The yachtsman used the last of the hot water for shaving, so no coffee. Feeling a little hysterical. Making beds and cleaning toilets. Back to Airlie Beach, back to the hostel and the backpackers, classed as a number in a Queensland Tourist Office statistical report.

The lodge next to ours is full of Australian kids on a surfing tour. The are made of sinew and muscle, dreadlocks and first beards. Troy is performing with poi, doused with kerosene and lit from a cigarette. The Swedish guys offered him meths instead of kerosene. Apparently they don't think they can drink any more but they don't want to throw it away.
"It's a bit heavy, it makes your eyes stream. You want some?"
No, son, I don't. Away with you. Troy's girlfriend turns up the John Butler concert on the radio and Troy whirls the fire brands round his head, demonic in the dark, twisting spine and bent at the knee, stamping dancing jumping up and the fire ROAAAAARS in each quick arc. When I see him the next morning his left arm is stuck in a new plastercast.

And what do I wish for, these wasteful wishes with every shooting star, every lump of rock? I'm not telling. The time at home is 2.23am, and you are all asleep or drunk or on drugs.

I'm sick in my guts of this place. I need to flee. This is the first time I've ever wanted to catch a flight. Roll on Brisbane.