Travel Dispatch - Week Five

DATELINE: SANUR, BALI, INDONESIA - 11.08.2014

My hoodie & me

My hoodie’s starting to struggle.

It’s winter in Australia. When I told people I would be starting my trip with a month there, many people were quick to remind me, “You know it’s winter there, don’t you? You know it’s cold there, right?”

To which I’d respond, “Yes. I’ve been cognizant of the whole Northern Hemisphere/Southern Hemisphere paradigm since that ‘Simpsons’ episode where Bart almost got the boot in his ass,” and “I’ve been living with the ridiculously oppressive heat of the San Fernando Valley for years and years. I’m not averse to a month of temperatures in the 60s and high 50s, thank you very much.”

No, I wasn’t worried that it would be somewhat cold. In fact, I was excited to know that every time I heard the temperature, my sticker shock (“Fifteen degrees?!”) would always be followed with relief (“Oh, yeah. Celsius.”) and amused frustration (“What’s the equation to transfer to Fahrenheit? Forget it, I’m not doing math; I’m traveling!”). I grew up in the Northeast. Being a little cold would be going back to my comfort zone. Besides, I was bringing my hoodie.

My hoodie would be enough. Bought last year, black with the simple logo of the Los Angeles Kings, uh, I beg your pardon, the Stanley Cup Champion Los Angeles Kings (and NO-body thinks it's a coincidence the team won after I bought it), the sweatshirt was going to get me through the month of chilly but not unbearable winter climate of Australia.

And it did. I’ve worn it pretty much every day for the last five weeks, and aside from a couple of nights in Adelaide where it didn’t feel like quite enough (though my mental state may have sliced two or three degrees off the thermometer, Celsius degrees - and those are big degrees), the hoodie has served me well.

But not without cost, Dear Reader. Hey, look - first time I’m calling you “Dear Reader.” Hope that’s cool with you. 

The Kings logo is starting to pill a little bit. The hood string is frayed from (in ascending order): the wind, me pulling on it, and me chewing on it. Finally, although I have washed it, twice, man, it’s starting to smell just a touch (it is legal to smoke in bars in Australia). So I was getting worried about it.

Outside of Alice Springs, Ghan Train from Adelaide to Darwin, 07.08.2014

Not to mention, I almost lost it in a train station in Katherine on Friday morning. Interestingly enough, in Australia anyway, when a train is about to leave a station, no one says anything. There’s no conductor shouting “All aboard!” to make certain no one, say, a guy listening to Mos Def while charging his iPhone in the enclosed air conditioned waiting room, will miss the train’s departure. The passengers are told when the train is leaving and are expected to be on it when it leaves. Normally I’m all for personal responsibility, but it almost cost me my sweatshirt when, panicked I had seen the train start to leave from my vantage point in said waiting room, I sprinted to board it. Only to realize I had left my sweatshirt in the waiting room. After clarifying with the conductor that the train was NOT on the verge of leaving (they were merely switching locomotives or some such bullshit), I was able to go back and retrieve it and it’s surrounding odor of cigarettes.

When one travels, one becomes particularly obsessed with never leaving anything behind. Whenever I stand up to leave a bar or coffee shop, I unzip my bag and do an inventory, then re-zip my bag when I’m satisfied. Whenever I’m moving from one accommodation to another, I spend ten minutes re-enacting THE SURE THING, scouring my room over and over to make certain I don’t walk out with my laptop sitting on the bed, or my toiletries lingering in the bathroom. My competitive nature hoped to go through the entire ten months without losing anything. It’s becoming instinctive. Growing up, and even as an adult, I would just toss things anywhere and the shock of losing something wore off by the time I graduated college. Cost of doing business, right? Now, the thought of losing any item and having to go without it is a somber one. Flying out of Australia two days ago, I left about $1.80 in Australian coins in a bin for the x-ray machine and when I realized it at the gate, it took a good ten seconds for me to say, “Let it go, Billy. Let it go.” 

This week was my final one in Australia and I spent most of it on the train, so it wasn’t the most eventful week. It took two days to get from Perth to Adelaide, then two more to get from Adelaide to Darwin, so most of the memories created were either looking out the train window, or enjoying conversations with train mates. Please do not underestimate the memories that can be created, however, they’re somewhat internal. My final day in Adelaide was a pleasant one, with the exception of worrying I had lost my hosts’ cat (see a previous post for that story), and I finally tried Vegemite for the first time.

For years I had heard about Vegemite. I had to try Vegemite, Vegemite was terrible, everyone in Australia swears by Vegemite, you’re going to hate Vegemite. So when I was handed a slice of bread with Vegemite slathered on it, the word had lost all currency. But I tried it anyway.

The verdict: it’s fine. (shrug)

I certainly didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. It tastes vaguely salty, vaguely like fish, and vaguely like peanut butter. I’ve had worse things to eat, to be sure. But I’m not sure I’d be staking my entire nation’s culinary reputation on it, either. And now when someone asks if I’ve had Vegemite, I can say yes and we can all move on with our goddamn lives.

The other main event of the week was arriving into Darwin. On the bus ride from the train station, I learned that on Christmas Eve in 1974, a storm named Cyclone Tracy had blown into the city and destroyed 80% of the buildings there. 80%?! 4 out of 5 buildings destroyed. Wow. Not to be waylaid by the storm, and in inspiring fashion, the city began to rebuild immediately, and this time with construction that was certain to be storm-proof. As you travel through town, you notice the roofs of the buildings are mainly corrugated metal and there are a lot of cinder blocks. Even the bus stops have corrugated metal roofs and cinder blocks. The city of Darwin was not going to let Mother Nature destroy it with a random natural disaster again…

…Instead, they’d leave that job to the multitudes of partying backpackers who would throng the town for years to come.

Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia - 09.08.2014, 10a

Please don’t misunderstand. Darwin is beautiful. Another city by the ocean, with wonderful views of the water and gorgeous beaches, it reinforced my memory of Australia as a donut hole - tasty on the outside. But Darwin is what the famous philosopher Socrates might’ve called “a real fucking party town.” As a city in warm weather (traveling north to get warm was interesting to process) and a departure point for vacation spots such as Bali, teems of young people, backpackers, and other such revelers infest the town with their tank-tops, tribal tattoos, bad beards and attitudes to drink a great deal and have a good time.

Last weekend, by my estimation, 98% of those revelers stayed in the same hostel as I stayed.

Yes, Darwin was my first hostel experience. Did I spell “hostel” correctly? (shrug) Now, I’ve certainly slept in dirty rooms before (ask my mother), and the room I stayed in was fine. It’s simply been a while since I slept with five other strange dudes in bunk beds. Scratch that, four other dudes and one French girl who slept on a top bunk while sniping at her boyfriend on the bottom bunk. In French; that’s no fun. And aside from the dude on another top bunk with a Manson beard who kept peering over his laptop at me, before we all fell asleep, I felt completely comfortable. The poolside bar was raucous and the DJ played ABBA at 7p, so what’s not to love about that? A woman I met on the train and I went to a bar next door and every five minutes there was almost another fight between two twenty-somethings from the European Union, so what’s not to love about that?

Up until this point, I’ve stayed in houses I’ve found on AirBnB, and every single one of those experiences has been lovely. But the prices in Darwin were exorbitant - I think the town knows everyone’s passing through. So it just became another step outside of my comfort zone. It’s good to know you’ve got that comfort zone waiting for you should you need it, but the more you step out of it, the larger the zone gets.

Saturday morning, my French Lovers Argument Alarm Clock woke me earlier than expected, so I took a shower and walked next door to the hostel to get a coffee. In front of the bar I had been to the previous night, there was police tape blocking off the sidewalk, and a (un?)healthy pool of blood straddling the curb/street. Two officers leaned against a van and another sat half-in, half-out of the side door, so I went up to one of them.

ME: (pointing to the tape) What happened here?
OFFICER: (long pause) An incident.
ME: Yeah. I get that. What kind of incident? (joking) A murder?
OFFICER: (longer pause, as he contemplates playing along with me, then decides it’s a waste of his time, annoyed) Neh. Just an incident. (pause) We’re investigating it.
OFFICER #2: (from inside the van) Oi, go watch the news and find it, all right?
ME: (chastened) Got it. Thanks.

That will probably be the lasting image I have of Darwin, just eking out the Aboriginal Art Exhibit at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (in the museum’s defense, it was the third such exhibit I’ve seen in a month). I’m not sure what this has to do with comfort zones or anything like that, but the moral might be: don’t annoy cops with stupid questions. I thought I had that one down already, but I guess I’m relearning all sorts of things.

That night I left Australia and flew to Bali. I’m hoping to be in Southeast Asia for the next two months. My hoodie is stuffed at the bottom of my backpack.