With the excellent trip to Kakadu still reverberating around me along with the beer from last night, I got up and made my way past the deeply helpful Italian lesbian working the desk who had helped me figure out how to get the alarm working on Antony’s phone, as well as lending me a sleeping bag and towel for Kakadu, out onto pre-dawn Darwin’s streets to the Greyhound station where a typically chaotic travel scene slowly bubbled up. A bus for Broome in Western Australia came and went. Airport shuttles came and went. People were gathering. An older lady came out and started innocuously selling something: turned out to be the ticket for the shuttle to the railway station. I got on the shuttle bus ignoring the whole check-your-baggage scene the driver was prattling on about: ... read more

I do like Australia, I must say. No worries mate! I’m buried in the far more sweaty climes of Darwin now, in the far North, as close to Asia as Oz gets. Thinking about it now, I should be going to PNG from here - it’s literally a short flight, or a lengthier boat ride away. So foolish to be doing what I’m actually going to do - flying from Brisbane to Phnom Phen -but it’s one thing to be a boat ride away from a place, another to be in the middle of a school year in Boston thinking about the far-off future. What seemed like a smart idea in March in Boston may not turn out to be quite so prescient in July. In fact, it may ultimately seem downright ridiculous, especially from the ... read more

Huge crowd, great weather, deaf as a post after the roaring beastliness of the primeval cars’ engines exploding with deafening ethanol farts every few seconds. Hours and hours of these roaring cars and ‘Utes’ (pick-up trucks), Formula Ford race cars, Minis, all flashing past in cacophonous thunderous, almost frightening explosions of chaotic noise. Endless parades of ‘Merchandise shops’ - basically giant convoys of trucks that weave from event to event on the V8 circuit. On arrival, they unfold like weird mechanical origami into a dazzling array of shops, bars, cafes, and stages. Endless parades of semi-naked exotic dancers, maniac motor cyclists doing tricks, bearded chaps carrying kangaroo pups under the front of their shirts, fantastically awful fast food, XXXX Gold, ugly team shirts with so many products smeared on them that the designs look like they’ve ... read more

We’re back in Townsville after our four day mini-holiday event up the coast to where the road ends at Cape Tribulation. We had completely poxy-luck with the weather. Unbelievable really. For the first week here in Townsville, the weather had been mostly lovely every day. Antony can’t have much time off work - in fact, these four days are more or less his only chance to take time off until September. So what happens? It’s either as gloomy as a nun’s arse, or its pissing down for each and all of the four days! See if you can predict what the weather was like when we got up this morning back in Townsville and Antony had to head back to work! I’ll let you know before the end of the blog, I promise! We did our ... read more

Night of the Weirdos. Antony got home from work. We walked back across town to meet up with a couple of his mates from work down on the seafront. By the time we got there, one of his friends was already chatting with a woman at the bar. I assumed this was his rather attractive girlfriend. Wrong! It turned out to be a deeply psychotic weirdo, someone he had started talking to at the bar while waiting for us to arrive. Her name was ‘Nelly’ and everything she said, probably including the name, was a ridiculous lie! She was a truly weird and bizarre creature. She was always an expert in every subject that came up and was working in that area, too. One minute she’s an expert on food, then a counselor, then a business ... read more