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.