TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

AUSTRALIA 1 - PART FOUR

With us, essentially, not getting anyway quickly in Poland, it was decided we would make a 3-month visit to Australia as I had been saying I think our project would work better in an English speaking country. We set off in early March 2003 and return on 1 June 2003. The following is some of what happened. I should point out that I had wanted to go to Australia since the ealry nineteen sixties. Now I was there.

This final post takes you back into Sydney and explores the perils of body boarding.

We returned to Sydney and spent the last five or six weeks of our stay based in Bondi. We spent a lot of time on phones, went into Sydney for meetings, one with the British Council there, did a bit of sight-seeing and continued with our recreational activities in and around the sea at Bondi. We also experienced the night-life of Sydney and visited a few markets, particularly the Chinese quarter. On the day we left, someone we had met there, took us to a yum cha restaurant in Sydney. I don’t normally drink tea but I did and the dim sum dishes were rather good.

Like most cities which have only begun their existence in the last two hundred or so years, Sydney is well planned and the streets well laid out. It is hilly, I note I wrote that we walked down Pitt Street toward the harbour area. We may still be there because it doesn’t say we walked back up. We spent some time in the harbour area, from where we could see the two major attractions, the Bridge and the Opera House. I think I was pretty amazed at the number of ferries which sail around the bay. In London, another river-based city, the number of ferries, certainly congregating in one place, is very small. Here, there seemed to be a major ferry station, operating almost like a rail station terminus.

We didn’t have the chance to take a ferry ride, no idea why, and we didn’t do the Bridge climb either. I am, though, well aware as to why I didn’t do this. I hate, abhor and detest, heights. Later on, if you stick with this, you will discover I also hate depths but, at this moment, I didn’t know that. The Bridge looks down on the Opera House, or at least has done since the Opera House was opened in 1973. The Bridge opened in 1932. I much preferred the fact that the Opera House looks up to the Bridge, and it was this view that I enjoyed.

We were lucky enough to go to a performance at the Opera House by Nick Cave. At least my notes say that, but I don’t remember it at all. Sorry Mr Cave. I remember climbing stairs to enter the auditorium, I even remember sitting looking at the stage set, but nothing about any performance. In fact, in my distant memory, I read somewhere a story about Rudolph Nureyev, the famous ballet dancer, being worried about the width of the stage as it was felt if he leapt across it, as was his wont, he might crash into the sides. I think he could have destroyed his entrechat in some way. For the non-linguists among you, entrechat is a combination of words; entre meaning between and chat meaning cat, pussy or feline of some form. Funny that, because I thought Mr Nearenough was male, but I suppose he knew what he might harm.

Ignoring these dangers to Mr Nureyev, I discovered the hidden dangers of bodyboarding or, possibly, body boarding badly or ill-equipped. One morning, at the hostel where we were staying, I was generously doing the breakfast washing up and bent down to put some plates in a low cupboard. When I stood up, the room did three laps of my vision in about 3 seconds. I had never been so dizzy. I managed to go downstairs, by leaning against the wall all the way down, and found my girlfriend, who was in the office talking to the owner. We had stayed a couple of weeks already so knew her quite well. They made me sit down and things got a little better.

Then, it started again and this time there was feeling of nausea. I left the room, ran to the toilet and my food left me. Rapidly. After a while, I returned to the office but the owner insisted on calling an ambulance, she had a lovely carpet, and I was driven off to hospital somewhere. I was examined by a doctor who couldn’t seem to find anything wrong with my vital functions, although whether he and I agreed on what was vital I don’t know, and he then allowed me to lie flat on a bed for four hours and, when necessary, fill small white bags.

By 3.00 pm, I was getting bored and my girlfriend went to ask when I could leave. The doctor said he would be along in 30 minutes and if I could stand and walk in a straight line, he would allow me to leave. He duly arrived and I did walk up and down the room without over balancing. It was one of the hardest things I had ever done. I make a bit of a habit of this desire to leave hospitals. Some years earlier, I had a kidney stone and, after calling out a doctor in the middle of the night to deal with the sudden onset of pain. I found myself in hospital. When I say I found myself, this was probably quite lucky. When he came to my home, he rapidly assessed the situation, and stuck a needle containing an amount of morphine into my thigh. Then he said I needed to go to hospital but there weren’t any ambulances, could I get someone to drive me. I said yes, he left and I drove to the hospital. He didn’t say who should drive me. How long does morphine take to kick in anyway?

Anyhow I spent the day in the hospital ward. They were short of beds, I was in the ward for elderly women. It was four years to the day since my mother had died in hospital. I wasn’t staying overnight. About 6.00 pm the doctor came round and asked if the pain had stopped. I said yes. She said that I could leave and my son, who had driven down to be with me, said he would drive me home. I asked to take his arm as we walked down the ward and nearly broke it when the pain returned. ‘Keep walking’, I said and, as an obedient son, and one who knew how stubborn his father was, he kept walking.

But let’s catch that Sydney hospital as it comes round again. The doctor prescribed some tablets, which I actually took, for seven days. We took a taxi home to the hostel. The feeling was still around for the next few days, but gradually things got better as long as I didn’t move my head or change position too quickly.

The doctor told me that he thought I may have got too much water in my ears from my constant, daily body-boarding. He suggested wearing ear plugs in future. He also said it might be best not to go in the water for a month or so. I took his advice. I bought ear plugs. Once they were in I couldn’t hear the thing about a month but I do think I stayed out for a week or so.

When I got back to Poland, I found a bill for A$180 for the ambulance. I’m glad we took the $10 taxi ride back. I’ve just remembered that this took place a couple of days before we went to the Opera House so maybe that’s why I don’t remember Mr Cave. I was probably moving my head so slowly I missed him.

My first journey around the coast of Great Britain, made in 1985-86, lasted nine months. It was a leisurely trip, for two and a half days each week my two children, aged 9 and 6 when we started, had lessons but we still saw most of the coast and had time for a few interesting inland visits. Each week was spent in a different location around the coast. We also popped home for two weeks at Christmas. My second trip, in 1994-95, lasted again for nine months, popping back again for a break at Christmas and three weeks in late February, early March, when my mother was taken into hospital and, sadly, died. In 2001 I managed the entire English coastline in 28 days, this being the Reader’s Digest version of earlier trips.

This time I spent eleven weeks in Australia and, despite my marathon driving attempts, didn’t see that much of such a vast country. It would, perhaps, be foolish to suggest that a lifetime in Australia would be long enough and that fact was brought home to me many times while I was there. In my trip I, of course, expected to come across backpackers from many different countries, taking time to see more of their world. And, for sure, these people were all there. But backpacking often seems to mean that you either have to work all day and can only go out at night or, as a result of only going out all night, you have to sleep all day.

What I also found were couples in their late fifties, sixties and even seventies, who had bought a caravan, hitched it up to their car and set off for a year, or two, or more. They had worked all their lives and now was their chance to enjoy. While in Emerald, we met a couple who had done just that. They had locked up their home and told their daughters to expect them back in 2005 (this was in 2003 and they had already been away for nearly a year). According to the guy who was 77, they had so far travelled just over 2,500 kilometres in that year. I, by the way, had just done nearly 2,000 in a week.

But they were having so much fun. One morning they were both so excited as they were going fossicking. Now, to you and me, this really means prospecting for any mineral you can find. If I remember correctly (notes fail me yet again), they had to get a licence to do this but they had a bucket, a spade and a sieve and off they went. Sadly this was the day of our departure so we never found out if they had been lucky, but I get the feeling they felt they were pretty lucky already and I couldn’t disagree.

My girlfriend, coming from Poland, always said that in her homeland, old people tended to just sit at their windows and wait to die so this was a revelation to her. To me, slightly nearer the window seat, it was an inspiration. My own uncle, also a writer, had still been contributing his columns until just before his death at the age of nearly 85. As I had an aunt, on the other side of my family, who nearly made it to 97, you may, if the genes have been carefully planted, have to endure this stuff for some considerable time. The good news, if you don’t want to, is that they both lived a more sedentary and risk-free life. I’m not crazy grandad for nothing; I earned this moniker.

When we took a taxi from our camp-site to catch the ferry to Keppel Island, the taxi driver told us that he had taken a year off in 1988, another in 1993 and then two years at the start of this century and still had so much to see. My concern was if he was suddenly struck with his wanderlust during our brief journey, where might we end up.

It was at this camp-site, which I think was just east of Rockhampton at a place called Yeppon, that we came upon more semi-permanent travellers. This time it was a family; mum, dad and a 12-year-old daughter. They had bought an old coach, converted it into superb living accommodation and left their home in Tasmania two years ago. The daughter did her school lessons by post and radio. At the back of the coach, they towed a small 4X4, which they used as transport. They had been at this site for a couple of months and both mother and father had found some part-time work.

When I first arrived in Australia I had been disappointed, a little, by the scenery but now I was rapidly falling in love again but this time with the people and their attitude to life. I suppose there is so much to see, you just have to go out and see it. Oh, and Australians, or at least one of them, quite liked me. I was told by this guy who befriended us in Bondi, that, despite my being a pom, I was very likeable because I could laugh at myself. On many occasions in my life, there has been little else I could do but I didn’t tell him that.

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