February
22, 2005 - Tim's Australia Extravaganza
Here's looking at the last supper...
At the airport I sat down for my last Japanese meal for awhile. Much to my dismay I found the choices somewhat wanting. I finally settled on a beer and a poor rendition of takoyaki – which is chopped octopus in a batter that is cooked into ball shapes and served with a thick sauce called usuta sosu. It was a horrific meal. Takoyaki, when done well, is a marginal meal (think along the lines of a corndog) and this stuff was almost inedible. I giggled a bit as I ate it.
After landing in Sydney I spent the day walking the downtown harbor area. It was a nice place; the waterfront areas of the city were beautiful and had many parks, public paths, and of course, the Sydney Opera House. It was wonderfully easy navigating around town as everyone, well, everyone but the Japanese tourists, spoke perfect English... I was ecstatic, I can't tell you how great it feels to walk up to someone at a bus stop and say "Excuse me, does this bus go to..." Not to mention being able to understand every single menu item on every single menu – now there’s a welcome change…
The experience of checking into my hostel shook loose a bunch of memories of traveling Europe with my friend Fred in ‘94. Last century.
The lobby area was thick with people in their late teens and early twenties. They were from all over the world and their youthful energy was flooding in and out of the doors threatening to drown me in a bright and terrible whirlpool. Everyone was suffocatingly positive and empowered. Like kings and queens they seemed ennobled dictators of their daily lives, free of doubt, compromise, and above all, invincible - immune to the side effects of failure, free to make mistakes without guilt, paranoia, cynicism, bitterness, or insecurity. I felt week in their presence, unable to swim, unable to keep my head above the surface. As I stood in line, slowly drowning in their presence, I had a moment of mourning over my own past. Had I too once been invincible and failed to realize it? Was it too late for me? Could I find it again? How do they do it? One thing was for sure. If I had ever been invincible I was no longer. I had to get out of there fast. I needed to go to the beach and swim in the ocean. I needed to experience something more eternal and powerful than these goddamned teenagers.
As I greased my pale, almost transparent flesh with a coating of waterproof spf-30 sunscreen (there is a hole in the ozone down here) I contemplated; perhaps the sheer volume of mistakes the hostel crowd makes on an hourly basis requires a healthy level of detachment for self preservation purposes. Perhaps I was mistaking that detachment for invincibility. I had certainly witnessed a spate of questionable choices in my very brief time among them. Maybe they weren’t so different. Perhaps they are asking the same questions of life as I am and the only thing that separates us is that I have lost any hope that answers can be found. I went to the beach feeling very alone but also and very light and free.
The people at Bondi are tan – and I don’t mean tan in a practical sense. They are over the top tan. The entire degenerating age vs. tanness spectrum was available to witness – bronze at 20 tan, muddy brown at 30 tan, dark withered grape at 40 tan, blacker than a raisin at night with skin cancer at 50 tan. The latter were so dark the whites of there eyes practically glowed. Speaking of glowing, I was a pale creature from the deep. I imagined the locals talking about the halo of blinding light that reflected off of me; “Don’t `ook on that one mate, it’ll blind ya, `at tourist is so pale `e must be an architecture student to boot.”
That evening, just before the sun set, I took the first of many swims in the surf. It was dreamy. The water was pleasant, the sun was still warm and the waves were big.
Upon returning to the hostel I met a couple from Seattle. They had been traveling around Australia in a van for the last few months. It was nice sharing stories of familiar places. To make our connection more interesting they had also worked at Big Sky Ski Area, a resort in Montana where I had spent the 1990 ski season bussing tables during my ski bum phase. They gave me some tips on what to see, what to do, and where to find the best beer… We shared a few of the latter with a young couple from Denmark whom the Seattle couple had bumped into many times over the last months. As the night wore on our conversation turned to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It had been a while since I had one of those conversations but once again found myself firmly engaged. After an exhausting couple of hours we gave up and went to bed.
