Back In Australia: Part Two

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I gave up hitching the Princes Highway. I waited more than an hour and was offered one ride to the next service station. I ran across to the opposite side and hitched back to the turn off to the Hume Highway, the direct inland highway between Melbourne and Sydney. A Taiwanese guy took me all the way to the outskirts of Canberra. We stopped off for breakfast and coffee along the way. He told me about his life before he came to Australia in Taiwan where he'd been part of a gang, carried a gun and fought people. He'd travelled to South Africa for a few weeks and realised he wanted to change. He was friendly and polite but he had a very confident air unlike a lot of Asians abroad. His English was good and he talked about the girls he'd slept with. He wanted to try as many nationalities as possible. He was working in a factory in a small town off the highway and we parted ways just before the Canberra turn off, he left me with a firm handshake and a pack of smokes. It wasn't long before my next ride. I had planned on getting straight to Melbourne but when a backpacker van pulled up and offered me the chance to spend a few days and nights driving along the coastal road I jumped at the chance. It would take maybe three days longer but a lot more would be seen and I would fulfill the ambition I'd held for a while to see that road. The car was rented by a married couple in their late twenties; Saskia, a German psychologist, and Seb, an American from Portland studying medicine in Germany. In the back they were joined by a twenty-one year old German girl. I got on very well with Seb and Saskia and have kept in contact with them since then but the German girl is about one of the dullest people I have ever spoken to. It was honestly painful to listen to her. I sat in the back with her the whole way and Saskia said it was great entertainment watching me try to listen to her as she spoke about pointless things in her monotone drawl (for example – five minutes about the rubber duck sound she had for a ring tone and the story behind why she had it). We had a good time over the four day drive however. In the evenings we sat and talked, cooking up dinner and drinking beers. One night we had a little beach on a river to ourselves. We set up camp and cooked our food then got drunk. I rolled a couple of joints with a a little weed I'd been given by a pot dealer that had picked me up a few days earlier and we sat around smoking. In the darkness we spent hours in fits of giggles and seeing shapes of people and dinosaurs in the silhouettes of the trees.

I left our little convoy early because they wanted to go penguin watching on an overpriced island not far out of Melbourne, which I didn't have the money or motivation for. They dropped me off on the highway and we agreed to meet up for a drink the next day when they arrived in the city. I barely waited and I was on my way, with two rides I got myself into Richmond, the area my Kiwi friend, Dan, lives in. I hopped on the tram to his house and stayed the night. We went to the cinema to watch 'Drive', the Ryan Gosling film I'd been desperate to see then went back and slept. I was exhausted. The next evening Seb and Saskia arrived, the German girl was elsewhere, and we went to a Vietnamese restaurant before drinking a few beers at the pub. The next morning they were going on their way again to drive down the Great Ocean Road and see the famous Twelve Apostles. I had planned to start job hunting that day but caught up in the mad road buzz again I decided I would go with them and hitch back the next morning. So the following morning they picked me up and went. Slowly we meandered from coastal town to coastal town and made it to the Twelve Apostles in time to see the sun set. We stayed in a campsite that morning and carried on the road early the next morning. They drove me to the next big town and I hitched from there along a more direct road to Melbourne. I'd lost my shoes and my flip-flops had broken over the last two days which left me barefoot. I walked maybe half a kilometre before a car pulled up and ended up driving me the whole way into the city. I still had to make it to Dan's house so I walked half an hour through the city to his house, through the swanky streets, past the suited businessmen and well dressed ladies, with nothing on my feet, a small bag on my back and my sleeping bag slung across my shoulder.

I stayed with Dan in Melbourne for a few nights and called my old boss in Griffith to see if I could get on one of the upcoming harvest jobs. I wanted to stay in Melbourne but I knew three months in Griffith could be lucrative enough to pay for half a year of travelling. He told me to come down and he'd put my name down for interviews at Casella, a huge winery about to enter it's vintage season. I said goodbye to Dan and hitched my way there. My first ride was with a crazy Turk who was on his way home after working the night in the docks. He drove a beat up old yellow Toyota and tore it apart. He drove as fast as the car would take him and when we arrived at the back of a traffic jam, he pulled into the service lane and roared past every car. When he got to the roadworks he sped up and pulled sharply back out into the road under the nose of a big two trailer truck. I held on tightly. He dropped me on the turn-off towards Shepparton and eventually Griffith, then turned back to Melbourne to sleep. A couple more rides got me deep into the dry desolate country of inland New South Wales. A twenty-year-old girl dropped me off in the middle of nowhere at my turn-off. I stood there maybe an hour with nothing going past. Then eventually a truck came by and stopped. “Can't leave you standing out there kid”, he said as I clambered in. He was going all the way to Griffith, so I buckled in and relaxed. I'd made it again. He dropped me off right outside the hostel door. A few people I knew were standing around talking as I dropped down from the passenger seat of this monster truck. He threw my bags down to me, waved and was off. I turned and looked at the building I'd lived in for three months already that year. It felt familiar, as much like home as any place I knew now. I caught up with some friends and then found the boss and dropped my bags where I'd be staying. I had a few drinks with some people I knew and some I didn't.

I was happy to be in Griffith. It wasn't my favourite place but there's good people here and the community feel among the backpackers is homely and welcoming. I've been here for six weeks now, with a week off in Sydney for New Years, and I've reconnected with old friends and made a lot of new ones. I feel good here. I work most days and in the evenings a group of us between ten and twenty head down to the park and play football for hours and hours until it gets dark. The first time I played I was awful, but I've steadily improved as I've gone along. There's a couple of guys who are stand outs, a French guy who played for the Marseille youth teams and a German who played for the Dortmund U17's. I love playing with them, trying to keep up with their level, finding their runs or getting on the end of their passes. Every Saturday we all go out together to the two clubs in town and get as drunk as we can. Most evenings there is always somewhere to sit and have a beer and play a card game. Already I know it will be tough to leave this place and these people but the road is always calling and in April I'm sure it will be screaming at me.

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