They Are a Weird Mob

Okay,nobody will get this subtle allusion : "They Are a Weird Mob" is the title of an australian film of the 1970s that is famous within Australia; it was promoted in accordance with the tourist industry (for whatever reason; the title song is literally "It's a man's world baby" but maybe they only wanted men to come..). The post-movie talkers pointed out that exactly the same thing is happening with the current "Australia" (again, for whatever reason, it's an awful movie).
where was I ? OH yes, the weirdness of things. Firstly, in New Zealand they shut down cafes and espresso machines (only those!) around 4pm on a regular basis! - they made me drink tea instead!
Then, the sushi here - my daily treat, especially auckland is full of Japanese places - does not come in the handy sausage-style rolls like in Australia, but in thick-slices pieces which are inedible without creating a mess. A bit the same concept as in the giant burgers / sandwiches: apparently, the idea is the customers should dislocate their jaws; otherwise it's just not enough.
Then, I bought conditioner and got free condoms with it, handily hidden. (I was gonna go back and check whether or not they come only the conditioner for curly hair...)
Also, the Kiwis do actually say things like "Ta!" on a fairly regular basis and in all earnesty.
I am a bit frightened about the scale of things. Auckland, biggest city and hyped as busy metropolis, is a cozy and clearly arranged, if not to say small, town. B
Now I'm in smelly rotorua, looking at sulphur lakes, washing powder-ignited geysirs, and volcano craters and mudbaths... Merry Christmas everyone!

little chandler is on holiday...

the last days in australia were sweetened by seeing the half-and-half Oz-Kraut couple katrin and kate, and spending days on Coogie and Bronte Beach (don't you love the names.. I do...) as well as dining like all the royals of the world at a private house party : every guest seemed to show up with their best dinner recipe; except me, admittedly, but I brought wine. (As a former lover once said, everybody does what he does best (don't ask no questions). Surrounded by these beautiful, charismatic, intelligent women, who were moreover sweet and charming towards each other, I felt like in an episode of The L Word...

Now, here, in Auckland, my powers of observation - or my vindictive/spiteful strain - are weakened by the Kiwi's amazing friendliness. People here actually THANK THE BUS DRIVER! repeatedly!!
Considering that the shuttle bus to Sydney airport had first forgotten about me and then rode Thai-style in frenzied speed to the airport, upkeeping his sullen mood, and me having just reignited a loose religious alliance, I am enthralled - the simplicity (every fare is a cheap NZ$1.60, disregarding length of journey, age, gender or status of passenger, leap year etc).

Another example of New Zealander's frightening friendliness: For those of you who didn't know, I'm quite superstitious and a great lover of "signs" (or names). Thus, the fact that my current lovely accomodation is on Franklin Avenue, name sibling of my Brooklyn sanctuary after the rocky beginnings in NYC, is a Great Plus. Secondly, this accomodation was recommended to me by a Scot (good sign), in a French bakery (!), a Scot who looks, moreover, like one of the Beatles (can God be more explicit?!). Climbing up one of Auckland's volcanoes (or so it felt) to reach the place (the Scot wasn't too precise), I asked a young woman about the way. Not a backpacker, not a tourist, not an old lady, not somebody with ulterior motives, just anybody, on a regular Thursday afternoon. And she, apologetically about not knowing for sure, OFERED TO WALK WITH ME! Just a random person!! would you ever, EVER, do that? Well, maybe it's me, but I fear I will soon feel with the NY-Wall Street guy on the sailing trip who told me he found the Japanese politeness "getting to him" during his vacation there, probably because he was just rude. Yes yes, word. (have you all watched "The Wackness" now? Do it!)
Or maybe it's the Christmas spirit. The whole of Franklin Ave is plastered with lights and sleights and other tacky trash, the sidewalks are full of families (apologizing to each other I guess), eating icecream instead of moulded wine. I'm drinking Shiraz in the garden, calming down after the frenzy of Australia. Love to you, my fellow gnomes, elfs and fairies (your choice... )

the one with all the pictures

okay, I know I'm going overboard with the Uluru pictures. but think of it this way: all the pictures you are looking at now, you don't have to look at later ;)




and the crowning event, our puncture...

great ocean road, london bridge and the 12 Apostels (actually it's 8 or something, depending on your tour guide..)


jump! jump! (I'm an abysmal jumper)in front of a lighthouse that is famous in some british soap...

This is Melbourne
...)



Here I am in a coffee place, binging away at tiny glasses with citron mousse and a hint of mint and strawberry or Nut-fudge vanilla chocolate cakes, when I see... Ian!To prove this, I took pictures of unknown men in public places. here!


signs signs

more signs...female toilet? really??


Alice Springs and Christmas. It's not really doing it for me but it's sweet anyhow.


hand


usually I don't take pictures of random people but after the "experience", I just went along with it. Are the Eighties here or what? Actually I loved that dress on her..



flowers in the desert:


This is King's Canyon and the "beehives"




animal show. everybody's here to see animals. me too, of course. or I go along. anyway, it's fun - as long as it does not involve tracking and daylong "suspension" to see, maybe, eventually, if you looked really sharp but it's already gone, the tail of a half-bird who used to be eaten by the crocodiles who don't live here anymore..
camels

birds


more birds



crocs




cangaroo

an emu

binging

melbourne - what's not to love?? seriously, if this city didn't exist, it needed to be invented: loads of cosy cute cafes, cake and CHOCOLATE shops, terrific restaurants, bakeries and coffeeshops - both French AND German AND Italian, i.e. all the good nations: those that appreciate bread and coffee! -, cheap sushi everywhere;
at every corner there are cutest Victorian houses (to add something not food related..). The atmosphere is like Berlin back in the days (yes, I feel entitled to say stuff like that) or how london seemed to me when I was fourteen: like a fairy tale come alive
AND there are great cinemas and art related festivals, design shops - I could stay here forever!
- oh yes, moreover, they have seasons, sometimes all four in a day! and you do start to miss a bit of cold after sometime.. yes yes I can see your eyebrows raising all the way up to the sky, but what I MEAN is if it's hot all the time, you need to stay and be in shape all the time.. how exhausting! there's no cover for the belly after all that chocolate...
AND there are wineries all around - I'm going to get bloody wasted in a posh way tomorrow; it's called yarra valley winery tour ;)
--
ah that was one of the best days EVER! getting properly hammered by drinking wine at 10.30 in the morning, that is my thing! I definitely need to repeat this! I didn't mind any stupid people in the group, and finally I understood what all the deal was about with the slurping and the spitting... and I loved the whites, contrary to my drinking habits - so I did learn something! I even bought a bottle of chardonnay that had not been oaked or something (that was at the second to last winery we visited, so things got a bit blurry, but I know it tasted great!)..
then I went to the movies. since I arrived in melbourne I have watched about a movie a day, which greatly improves my mood...
and I'm glad to take the train outta here on saturday, otherwise I'd have to roll myself out, I'm in culinary and olfactory overdrive...

shine on

yeah; as I said, a place must be New York to keep me if it's hot AND humid -- thus after cap trib's rainforest, arriving in Alice Springs, a hot baking oven, was pretty magic. Pink-bellied clouds greeted me at the airport, reflecting the red earth *I'm not making this up
also, in this sun I could immediately feel the skin cancer growing. (like every THIRD australian!)true outback..
Yet the land was suprisingly green: apparently there had been half the year's average of rainfall shortly before.
The next day the 3-day Uluru full-out adventure outback tour began - and adventure it was...
First things first: I was going to complain thoroughly about the state of the art in music in this post because up till the trip, I had felt trapped in an 80s time loop of American pop I didn't listen to when it was new. Our guide, Ben, changed this however and presented some seriously good stuff. the sunrise over Uluru accompanied by Pink Floyd's The Wall and Harrison's Here Comes the Sun; some heavy opera after the more daunting aspects of the tour - sudden heavy rainfall, night rain and a puncture on the way back -; Jazz and the ALF jingle ! :)) there was also some ecclectic stuff amongst his compilations, like Australian sketches and a fusion of
"is she worth it" song (don't ask me no names and I tell you no lies)and the "land from down under" thingy (same same). weird. I am definitely not a fan of fusion in music.
The rock: red, brown, banale and sublime, sometimes stunning, mind-blowing, its holes like parts of a brain, scarred and wondrous; sometimes, on accord of the rainfall, the landscape was very different from what I had expected - There were flowers, and a rejoicing of colors: red earth, grey-black burnt bush, yellow dried intermediary and achingly fresh plastic-looking green grass on top. King's Canyon was glittering in silver because of the rain, tropical trees growing beside desert trees in the Garden of Eden: It was beautiful.

The situation: the flies unbearably annoying and I invented a couple of devices of sadistically killing them. I mentioned the sun. The first day was really really hot with 42 degrees and somebody told me they measure the temperature in the shadowy parts which they found somewhere apparently.. that meant suicidal stinky beetles on the toilets and deadly exhaustion.
we got up at 3.45am on the second day to watch the sunrise. only there was no really a lot of sunrise to be seen, as the weather remained fickle and difficult: the god's of the desert didn't heed Ben's - our tour guide - brave make-belief that it probaly wouldn't rain as it shouldn't and so it won't, in all likelihood and so on... - I've never met anyone who talked in such a roundabout way, including myself. Ben's assertion that the swags were waterproof also wasn't really true.

About half the about group consisted of German girls - the annoying kind: just after high school, blonde, alike-looking, narcissistic and dependent, constantly and unfairly complaining small-town girls. one of the girls in particularly bloodless, bored-sounding and monotonously speaking whiteblonde stick of size 4, I would have happily strangled. she wanted to wash her "hardly dirty" dishes in the pot I was just cleaning (when she eats, things don't get dirty, I guess.. transcendent princess..) and was a constant buzz in my ear (they were sitting behind me in the bus) with comments mainly revolving around food: "we eat so mudh here" "shall we eat now and not have dinner, deli?" " I have to get tanned.. nobody will believe me that I was in Australia..." "It's awful I just can't look at myself in the mirror today.." (day 3)
The other half of the group was roughly made up of Japanese girl who were idiots in their own way (but I didn't understand their gossip so they didn't get to me as badly): There were brilliant moments like one girl climbing back in the bus while our guide was trying to jack it up; another one smoking a cigarette next to the petrol statin, and the Japanese guy Ken (no he didn't understand jokes about his name), one of the three token males of the group, smashing about 1500 kg of noodles and water on the grill despite Patient Ben's fourth admonition of "no, I don't want the water ken.. ken, without the water..."... How he managed to dress and feed himself all alone every day ...

anyway, our "sleep in" of 5am on the third day wasn't really enough of a boost. Ben's increasingly bootcamp style of giving orders didn't really help to smooth things and by the end of the second day, the girls were close to mutiny.

The puncture almost tipped things and I stayed close to the British couple and a sole English man, moreover a cineaste, to be rescued with or perish with them if anything happened *desert thoughts...* you know, if you die of too much auditive pollution in your ears, at least you'd be in good company...

upon leaving tropical north queensland.. (tiny update)

I'm not too sad about it. as the beautiful french girl in my hostel put it, the nature is great but it's stress stress stress. to begin with, cairns was all about tourism and young people, positively teeming with this teenage discontent and hormone overload. "there's a crack in your chest" was the joke-on-repeat by one of the local guys (and definitely one of the funnier moments); the whole male section of the table seemed to agree that it would be ok for him to "stick his finger in," seeing that he was gay...

On to sail to the Barrier Reef! This trip was discounted by more than half, so I went; but then we didn't sail for lack of wind. that was a downer somehow... There was an odd melange of people on the boat. The crew consisted of uber-ego skipper Tony was reminiscing his days on Wall Street where he would fire people all year round, the Canadian chubby divemaster tried to make everybody go diving all the time (every spot was her "favorite", kind of lame after the second time), and the cook, who was definitely lowest on the food chain and tony was keeping in shape with her...

Then I was swinging in the ecologically correct "Skyrail" over the tropical, world-heritage protected rainforest around cairns, all the way up to a tiny ex-hippie town called Kurunda. I went there mainly because I liked the name, but the place was disappointing, full of markets with rubbish, rien que de touristes..

Trying to make peace with the incredible expenses adding up. Birds, farns on trees, lush green, a Crocodile Dundee character giving a tour, showing the parasitic fig tree, the smart climbing vines with sticky thorns, the evil heart-shaped stingy plant that will cause you pain for a year. Apparently, when in doubt, "pee on it" is a good guess and advisable more often than not. Undulating hills, birds' and the cabin noises evoked skiing memories which mingled bizarrely with the hot humidity of the rainforest. during the last section of the trip, thunder set in and the cabines stopped moving and in a pleasantly spine-tingling moment, I dangled over an allegedly crocodile-infested coffeebrown river.

Then I went up to Cape Tribulations, a incredibly beautiful scenery in a World Heritage area (again..yawn.. ;)) of the oldest continually growing rainforests on earth (120 million years of uninterrupted growth; they love their superlatives here). The great thing is that the rainforest grows right to the beach, which is stunning and deserted, as it is off-season and you can't swim in the sea where box-jellyfish, crocodiles are awaiting.
there are mad pigs and giant spiders in the jungle, and all kinds of creepy creatures but half of it was probably a lie. The guides love to tell tall tales(and are probably paid for it), they are doing their best to keep up the image of the crazy aussie. All of them were characters in demeanour and appearance.

meeting three great girls up at cape trib much improved the short, humid and overheated stay: after cooling off in the pool we had the most random conversation. my proud input was my sketchy knowledge of porn studies.
The girls had at least seen about a snake and a crocodile each, I only saw a frog. It was a big one, yes, but still...

anyhow. guided tours make you feel Japanese and/or old, and in my case, grumpy. there was a sticky swiss guy in my group who insisted not only on waffling during the driver's (more or less informative) talks but his utterances went along the line of "all-inclusive is just the best." I mean, I did open my mouth (at first. then I just stopped and tried to shake him off and even chose a solitary single seat on the way back). the way up offered beautiful vastness, a drive through sugar cane and banana trees, with mountains all around hugging the horizon and the cloudy sky. entering rainforest territory of the Daintree, the road started to explore all dimensions which resulted in my feeling quite dodgy (or it was the swiss guy). on the way back, there was "croc-spotting" and daintree ice cream (banana is not a good idea, even sugary one makes a a crappy ice cream in my opinion. by the way, my other culinary conviction formed here concerns pies: e3even the contest-winning pies in cairns couldn't convince me; I think steak and gravy and savory stuff has nothing to do with pies).

Apart from the general stress thru too many options (I realized that I am mainly reading commercials) and different and comparatively complicated ways of conducting things, I had moreover troubles with my credit card and the ridiculously low limit as well as a weird charging cycle. They got really nervous and called and I had to call them back from up there - from the wilderness of Cape Trib, where cell phones don't work anymore, where the police didn't go until the 1990s and where "the shop" was 4.5 km away from where I was staying... The latter information is definitely true - I made the stupid mistake of turning my back on the 28AU$ deal of lunch at my flashbacker hostel and instead walked to the shop: when I got back, I was not only exhausted but had eaten all the food I'd bought, probably the equivalent of a whole bread...

more soon, on music, climate, people and too many germans...

they shoot horses (emus) don't they?

my mouth is dry, either from the dry heat here or from chatting nonstop with the amazing french girl I met here.
There are waaay too many Germans in Sydney, and they are too young; the girls in particular have the habit of crying homesick tears in public payphones. Yesterday it was freezing. waiting to have a drink with the English couple I'd met in Thailand, Chiang Mai, and again here at the local supermarket, I was sitting at "Pie face" (not the only name that reminds you forcibly of the UK and that is simply lovely, what about "hog's breath"?!). this was in the King's Cross area - a formerly sleazy area, now between the Meatpacking district and Camden, sort of. Thus I had time to marvel at Australian girls' resistance to coldness (why isn't it coldity? or coldth? or colth, if you must?). must be a British gene, or the girls were imports for it was truly freezing with a nasty wind, not only in comparison to Thailand.

anyway, the gorgeous and smart French lady and myself enjoyed sydney by treating ourselves to terrific scones and tea in the chinese garden, shopping at paddington markets and fresh seafood at the fish market. Thanks to her I moved, into an area that reminded me of some great places in brooklyn. the hostel is virtually encircled by bakeries. I feel like thanking god on my knees for hot showers every morning. that's what has happened to my "decadence breeds decadence" credo - no aircon, no need for hot shower"...
My first night at Florence's guesthouse was peaceful and soul-soothing: I lay down in the bed which smelled safe and kind and like when I was a kid at my grandmother, and I dreamed of having a fit of laughter with one of you...
strolling around manly beach on the last day, we got some looks - although I got them for my eccentric half-backpacker outfit I think.
now I'm in Cairns, this unprouncable,in-enunciable city and we're back to hot, which my irrational, I-love-to-be-tortured body rejoices in...
to be continued

emus and cangaroos can't walk backwards, they say, that's why..

sydney today. I'm wandering around with big eyes like a starved orphan - pies!muffins!supermarkets! empty streets, empty sidewalks, GIANT sidewalks, no motorbikes, people walk so fast! They are arrogant and busy!! The heat is so dry I keep putting creme on my skin. It is almost unbelievably CLEAN!
Arrived at 5.30am and am dead tired. I got the plane's prime seat, next to two transsexuals - the one next to me, Bianca, was a sweet person and quite a character. her make-up was the most impeccable I'd ever seen (hello there wedding!), her hair fake blonde curls, fake blue lenses, pumps, and a pink very hole-filled sort of dress from which protruded her fairly large belly. She was impractical and a bit dumb and apparently very warm-hearted and eager to tell me all about her family, boyfriends, operations, when, where, price and degree of pain and sensitivity of the area; nose job, boob job, and now the big change... I was torn between breathless interest and being overwhelmed with all the details... and of course, I didn't get any sleep.

random jumble of observations

Arrived today in Bangkok at 5.30 (on the plus side, hardly any pestering Tuk-tuks, even on Khao San), and checked in at the guesthouse from last time whose host is sort of a grown-up ladyboy: even though he is correctly dressed in black, he gives off the impression of constantly waving a feathery boa or a tiara... but his English is swell and he writes down instructions in Thai for safety. His name is Pan. How cool is that - second only to the Burma boy in Ko Tao whose name is "Mojo", and I seriously consider naming my first-born thus (dibs!).

Anyway, here are some random observations

All you can eat: Bht 268 for Ladies, Bht 278 for ladyboys and Bht 298 for Men

every thai cafe ONLY AND WITHOUT EXCEPTION plays sugary thai pop. oh, and here's the current "hymn," the one thai song (reggae) that is either ok-bordering-on-good or one has heard it so often that the soul just gives in... kinda like with fashion sometimes. anyway, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAdZzr0ysxg
(title, as far as I can see: job 2 do doo doo doo.. I think actually that pretty much sums it up...)

Things I'm looking forward to : less noise, especially sugary Thai pop, less stink, even in supermarkets; more f-ing VARIETY in supermarkets, damn 7/11! This feels like back in Eastern Europe (says the old lady)! I want rows and rows of cereals and yoghurt and CHEESE for god's sake, and BREAD, not sugary white rolls, not brown-colored sugary white rolls; they have sugar on the table instead of salt and pepper, doesn't that tell you something?
I want to be understood with more subtle wishes or questions; I want showers and WCs where you can hang stuff - seriously, how do Thais do it? is this only for us Falangs?
I'm looking forward to walking down the street without being stared at, without the constant semi-harrassing calls, Hey you, Miss / Lady, ho! hallo!

backpackers who can speak thai are blond, lean, tanned, and never smile back at me.

Having mostly meet party travellers or India-Zen-style people who didn't give a rat's fart for politics, I had been afraid they wouldn't show the electoral results - but yes, they did! OBAMA BABY! I had goosebumps and was reaalz happy! I had thought they would pull something, somebody would pull something... otherwise I'm starving for news. the bangkok post is not really exactly thorough. But I guess I'd notice if there was a bomb or something...

Thai subtitles are a dish, seriously. Things like "we need being to get it"are of the more harmless nonsense sentences, more disturbing is when Morgan Freeman, in The Dark Knight (OMG!) qualifies something as "unethical and dangerous" and the pothead who guessed the subtitles translates this as "Africa dangerous"... more examples would abound, but then I was watching the movie - again, OMG?!! and I had missed the beginning...

a note on bowel movements and their relation to a traveller's mood. Those precious, longed for signs typically come when you are at the least inviting toilet imaginable. Probably some test on how much you really want it.. And we all want it. The good kind, the proper kind.The happy or grumpy looks on fellow travellers often have less to do with getting some,I am sure, than with "leaving some" or whatever would be an appropriate slang term. As the slow Boat Brit put it, after a bout of traveller's affliction: Have you 'passed a solid one' yet? Best feeling in the world...

Cute: On the map given out by the gueshouse in Trat, there were listed under "Daily needs" both a "herbal sauna" and "lawyer"(this one's for you darling :)you are a daily need!)

unholy: In laos, they gave out papers with the correct bus prices, an explanation for them and the comment:"your book is wrong" on the prices because of inflation and rise in gasoline prices...

harr harr

my stupid camera has a couple of virusses and worms which no-one can help me to get rid of... and now it's making white pictures. like this:

and here in good. the guy is a crazy crazy Dutch who insisted on keeping his raincoat on for dancing
but who's talking

this is the gang of Belgians, Scots and some Dutch

here are some sunsets and rainy pseudo-post tzunami pics from Ko Tao as Ersatz-drumroll






here we go. I know it's pretty underwhelming now.
some of you might actually know the original- it's a mimicking the design of my mom\s favorite necklace, which I lost in New York. Yes these things happen.



(it does look a bit like a nike logo doesn't it?) i was actually more afraid that it looks like the stuff I kept drawing on my arms with any old pencil..
so, back to sunsets!! this one was actually orange in the original..


and now that I'm at it, this is incredible Ko Phi Phi> oh, and no commentaries on my cheesy skin or similar!