Pro Backpacking

BYRON BAY, NEW SOUTH WALES - 3rd January 2010

"Feral" is a word that is not commonly used in the day-to-day vocabulary of an Englishman. In contrast, the Aussies love the word and talk of "feral shoppers" in malls on Boxing Day, "feral traffic" around Melbourne at rush hour, and "feral people" in the scummier suburbs of the city. After my experiences of the last 20 hours or so, I'd offer the following additions:

• Feral like Greyhound coach queues. My Greyhound from Melbourne to Sydney left half an hour late due to incompetent organisation (they decided to swap buses and bays for no reason), but as we arrived on time I figured it was a one off and ignored it. However, a quite remarkable feat was achieved outside Sydney's Central Station last night, as I arrived at 6.30pm for my 7pm coach to Byron Bay to find the best part of 300 backpackers sprawled around in every direction around 3 waiting Greyhound coaches. There were no signs on any coach (or indeed anywhere whatsoever), no announcements, and certainly no order to the queuing system. I've heard rumours that the word "queue" doesn't actually exist in Australia*, but what I faced here was, organisationally, more akin to a baggage reclaim in Bombay circa 1992 than the supposedly "highly developed" tourist industry of an economically advanced country. The Greyhound Method was to queuing for the first coach (no one told us about this - we figured it out by asking around), and once at the front of the queue checking if our name was on the driver's passenger manifest. If not, queue for the second bus. If not again, the third. And if you weren't on there (which was the case for several) you were, apparently, going to be on one of the 2 buses that were arriving at 7.30pm. Absolute shitshow.
  


• Feral like tourism in Byron Bay. The way Byron, right, is described by some travellers and even by the LPG ("congratulations, you've reached the promised land") leaves you wanting to place a tidy wager on it being the location of the Second Coming... and if size of audience is Jesus' criteria, it wouldn't be a bad shout. Early yesterday evening I had a quick browse around to try and book some accomodation overnight here, and soon discovered that there is, quite literally, not a single free bed in the town. At any price (bar one at $240). With absolutely no hope of a Sydney-style last minute accomodation get-out clause, I just booked myself a night Greyhound to Brisbane with accomodation less of an issue up there. But not everyone did the same, and arrival in Byron early this morning revealed wandering clumps of backpackers ambling from hostel to hostel desperately searching for a bed. Further walking revealed streets full of cars with passed out peeps in the back, and even the odd corpse kotching on a bench. I have no idea what the offical population of this place is supposed to be, but at this moment in time - with another 3 Greyhounds full arriving first thing tomorrow, I'd say that figure is off the mark by a factor of 10.
  


• Feral like the Cape Byron Walking Trail. The last 3 months has involved some pretty serious walking - the jungle-clad ascent to Matheran, 10km tour of Singapore with Billy, and rain-soaked mission around Albert Park being just a few. I always thought it'd take something special to top Kuala Lumpur though - non-stop walking for 10 hours on the back of no sleep is not ideal preparation for the cross-country gradients and sapping humidity of the Bukit Ninas Rainforest in the middle of the city. Then came this morning...
  
  
  About 20 minutes walk out of the main Byron Bay town centre begins a 4km trail through the Cape Byron Coastal Rainforest (see above) to the historic lighthouse at the summit, and back round via the Easternmost Point of Mainland Australia and the beaches on the northern shore of the cape. All well and good, except that as I set off on my way I was (almost inevitably) greeted by a phenomenal rainstorm and was dripping wet within about 2 minutes. Bags and clothes stored in a locker, the only option was to lose the t-shirt and pretend I was in the sea. All well and good, except that being in the sea doesn't involve stomping in soaking boots through soaking mulchy footpaths and up hundreds of muddy, mucky steps though the dense forest. Even a highly trained athlete like yours truly felt pretty shattered by the time I reached the top, but the Sun came out just as I came across a couple of chicas enjoying a spectacular lookout (see right). All well and good, but the emergence of the blazing Australian summer Sun, on the back of torrential rain, when you're surrounded by rainforest, produces thermal humidity like nothing I've experienced in India, Malaysia or anywhere. Between gorgeous relief from a periodic coastal breeze, your body is engulfed in an all-encompassing heat that is much like the wall of heat that used to greet passengers disembarking their aeroplanes in India before airconditioned walkways... but more potent. Oh, and I got bitten my a leech (for the second time on my travels - I forgot to mention it happening with Kyemala on the ascent to the summit of Anigundi Coffee Estate).

Feral as times may have been, taking the rough with the smooth is all part of the fun, and the latter in particular was a top class experience - and the soaking state of my clothing was rectified with half an hour of blazing beach sunshine. Things are gonna get a whole lot more feral for the next 10 days though - 5 more overnight bus trips are needed to cram in 3 days safari around Fraser Island and 3 days on a catamaran over the Great Barrier Reef. Photos are unlikely to appear for ages... sit tight!

* apparently they just call them "lines of people"

A big omission

KING'S CROSS, SYDNEY - 2nd January 2010

January 2010 looks set to be the most hectic month of my life - 9 days into it I've slept on a bed for a total of 2 nights thanks to a combination of an insane number of overnight bus journeys and my unfortunate tendency to turn up in places that are rammed beyond belief without any sort of bookings. One of the many side effects of this style of travelling is that certain things are forgotten in the old blog - not a problem in general, but definitely something that needs correcting (in the form of a backdated entry) when it involves one of the most amazing experiences of one's life.

Shortly after 11.30am on the 2nd January, I stood atop of Sydney Harbour Bridge, 130 metres above the water, basking in the only 5 minutes of sunshine seen by the city that whole day. The photo of me will appear as soon as I can figure out how to download it off their website (UPDATE: see below!)


The Harbour Bridge climb has only been going since 1998, but the day I went up was the busiest day in their 11-year history thanks to a shift to 5-minute spacing between groups going up. Our group of 12 did what is known as the "Discovery Climb", which takes you up to the very top of the top arch of the bridge via in interior arch - giving you a proper perspective of the quite ridiculous architectural feat the bridge represents. Built in the 1930s as, amongst other more practical reasons, a way of injecting a massive fiscal stimulus into an economy that was collapsing under the weight on the Great Depression, the bridge was built for either side simultaneously - two massive structures floating in mid-air over the water held in place by thousands of steel cables buried 25 metres under the ground on land either side. In under 2 years the two sides met in the middle, thus supporting each other's weight, and 75 odd years later the Bridge has been declared fit to stand for eternity (given proper maintenance).

The climb is just awesome. You're walking up the side of a huge chunk of metal, with the crisp blue water of the Harbour getting progressively further away below you every step you take towards the summit. The celebrated view looking down to the Opera House is indeed as fantastic as everyone suggests - equal to the feeling of standing on the tiny little gangway that adjoins the two sides of the bridge right in the middle - you are standing with nothing but an inch of steel mesh separating you from 6 lanes of highway traffic 90 metres below. Awesome.


Before doing the climb, I went for an early morning walk back to the Botanic Gardens to get the cheeky "Back the Bid" photo you see above, and after the walk managed to hop over to Bondi for a quick dip in what is widely (and quite fairly) acclaimed to be the the most over-rated beach in Australia. Overrated maybe, but I can still say I've been for a swim on Bondi Beach!

Floating in the Sky

TOCUMWAL, NEW SOUTH WALES - 13th December 2009

An old family friend of my cousin, John, is a big gliding enthusiast and owns a third share of a glider out at an airfield fairly near to Mooroopna (about 100km is pretty close by Aussie standards). With me being a big fan adrenaline-based activities such as these, it had been arranged as long ago as last June for him to take me for an airborne spin.

SportAviation, John's flying club, is run by a friendly couple at an airstrip in Tocumwal, just over the Murray river that divides Victoria and New South Wales. The airstrip was originally built by the Americans in the Second World War as one of the bases for an assault on the Japanese should they invade northern Australia. Subsequently, it got converted for civil use, and has vastly shortened runways now that B-12 Bombers aren't coming by on a regular basis.

Gliders, obviously, cannot take off by themselves, and so are dragged airborne by a small plane with a line running off the back of it. I took the liberty of videoing our takeoff from the back seat, which you can watch below:



When the glider pilot is happy with the altitude reached, he disconnects the cable and frees the glider into his control - usually at about 2000-3000 feet. The aim of the game is to locate "thermals" - vents of hot air rising the lift the glider higher and higher allowing perpetual flight; a good thermal can send you all the way up to 10,000 feet in a few minutes. Usually they come in vertical cylinders, meaning you have to bank go round and round in a circle in order to sustain the lift for an extended period of time. If you're lucky though, you'll get a "road", where the thermal moves laterally allowing you to continue rising while flying in a straight line.

Unfortunately for us, it was a clear, sunny day without any sort of cloud in the sky. Unlike normal aviation, clear days like these are terrible, as it means thermals are dispersed and hard to find, but the air is still turbulent due to the general heat. Sure enough, we struggled to find a decent bit of lift for a good 10 minutes, before we strayed across a small one that gave us a bit of lift. Its diameter was damn small, meaning we had to back at about 60 degrees to stay in its current... and I can tell you first hand there are few things that'll make your stomach twist more than being strapped into a seat at a few thousand feet with the blazing heat of the Sun beating down on you through the glass, all the while performing incredibly tight circles at banking of 60 degrees, with your gradual circulating ascent punctuated by periodic shudders as the glider drifted in and our of the thermal. If you don't like roller coasters or swinging ships, gliding on a day like this is to be avoided!

We eventually got up to a little shy of 4000 feet before enjoying a nice relaxing cruise over 15 minutes or so back down to land, but I was reliably informed that it had been "really hard work" - something my insides could testify to! But it was still an amazing experience - not just because of spectacular panoramic views of the Australian bush spreading out to infinity in every direction (see below). The thing that really struck me was the phenomenal force existent in simple air. As John described it (slightly paraphrased), "down on the ground we don't really see anything... occasionally we see a tornado go by and think 'wow - that's a bit strong'... but it's only when you floating in a glider that you really understand that that power is everywhere". I just finished reading "Chaos" by James Gleick, and part of its story relates to how smooth flowing air currents can suddenly deteriorate into a state of total chaos with seemingly no pattern or rules to it: turbulence. No one really understands it, but its existence is a small part of an infinitude of reasons why our actual ability to model the atmosphere (and thus forecast weather in any sort of long-term manner) is useless. Going gliding is as good an interactive example of this in practice as you could want.



Anyway once we were all back in the hangar/office and relaxing with a couple of ice cold suds*, the proprietor of SportAviation got us to pose for a photo in front of our machine - "Golf Victor Yankee" - so that it could be recorded on website's blog, and sure enough the entry for the day has John and myself grinning away (see below).



* bottles of beer

The Daily Rod's Top Travel Tips:
#7 - There are always ways to prove the assumption that you're totally immune to motion sickness incorrect.