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Adelaide to Melbourne on The Overland

Feb 10th, 2012
by Rees.
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The Overland train from the platfrom of Adelaide Parklands station

The Overland train from the platfrom of Adelaide Parklands station

Interstate train travel in Australia isn’t undertaken for convenience or because it is the cheap option. It is by no means either. Australia’s geography means that train trips are too long to appeal to most and a trip on the Ghan or Indian-Pacific is ten times what it would cost to fly. No, train travel in Australia is undertaken because that is the manner in which one prefers to travel.

The traveling demographic is confined to backpackers and the elderly with the occasional pteromerhanophobe thrown in for good measure. Elderly men with well-groomed moustaches, high cut pants or dress shorts and knee-high socks, gold rimmed glasses and comfortable shoes. Women in matching travel ensemble. Scarf, cardie and slacks. Not a natural fibre in sight. Grumpy stooped back farmers who smoke rollies, stay at The Vic and don’t drive in the big smoke. Long-term migrants: refugees from Northumberland, Newfoundland or Napels. for whom stepping onto the platform brings back to memories of constant drizzle and warm beer. The occasional Probus group.

I arrived the Adelaide Parklands Rail Terminal in the pre-dawn gloom. I was a full two hours early – when one travels by rail one must ensure one is adequately fed and watered prior to departure. I had a big day ahead of me traveling from Adelaide to Melbourne on The Overland so a Full English breakfast and an Earl Grey from Choo Choo’s Café was in order.

With my proper colonial breakfast sorted I sat, read the morning paper and observed. Adelaide is the epicentre of Australian interstate train travel. It is mid point of the Indian-Pacific (Sydney to Perth), the beginning of the Ghan (Adelaide to Darwin) and the end of the Great Southern (Brisbane to Adelaide via Melbourne).

The station has all the hallmarks of an airport: a sales and enquiries counter, luggage and check-in counter and copious seating but the atmosphere in the departure lounge is far more congenital. Maybe it’s the floral carpets or the elderly demographic but stranglers interact, trade advice on blood pressure medication and reminisce about train journeys past.

As we got closer to departure preparations for the journey ahead began in earnest. A visit to the Train Shop is inevitable with a copy of the The Australian or Woman’s Day and a book of crossword puzzles standard issue.

The Overland departs Adelaide for Melbourne at 7:40am every other day – has been doing so since 1887. The original train is long gone but stepping onto the platform I was quite taken by our silver bullet with its Emu insignia, purple roof and blue racing stripe.

Once we had found our seats Rebecca from Great Southern Rail delivered an enthusiastic induction covering the blanket smoking ban, the drinks cart schedule, manual toilet operation (an electrical fault meant you had to snib the door or risk exposure) and the bountiful fare available in the buffet car – the Matilda Café.

The PA went silent as the train jolted to life. The slow rolling start elicited surprised excitement and collective calls of, “And we’re off”. A flurry of chatter about the joy of train travel followed, “This is all about the experience. You know…  chug-a-chug-a-chug!”

Under a blue morning sky we rolled out of Adelaide. The gentle shores of Glenelg receded from view as we slowly climbed into the bush of the Adelaide hills. Relaxing to the gentle rocking and rhythmic thud, squeak and grind it wasn’t long before I had a decent snooze going.

It was the arrival of the morning tea trolley that woke me. With white coffee in high demand I glanced out the window. The terrain had flattened out. The dry, rocky earth was interrupted only by the occasional tree or detention centre.

We rattled on to Murray Bridge. The town, imaginatively named after the first bridge built over the Murray River, hugs the river. Although it’s not the one we cross the original bridge still stands today.

Mid-morning we moved into a more densely wooded landscape. Gums, eucalyptus, stockyards and silos rolled by. Keith came and went. Anywhere else it would be your uncle or a bloke from down the pub but in the South Australian bush Keith is a town like all the others – pub, servo, shop, school, church and oval.

The railway line, road and power line ran parallel, a trifecta of straight lines, as we rushed pass an endless series of farms into the wheat belt. I stood staring out the window trying to imagine what it would be like live in sheep country beholden to the whims of nature.

The passage from South Australia to Victoria at Bordertown wiped off 30 minutes of our lives to bring us in line with Eastern Standard Time. Fellow travelers passed time with a crossword, book or sleep. Others just watched the dry fields and blue skies of southern Australia rush by.

We saw the rusted corrugated iron roofs and frontages of Nhill before we stopped at Dimboola. A two-minute pause allowed a driver change people to flood off the train for half a smoke. There isn’t too many more obvious expressions of relief than a pack-a-day smoker drawing back on their first cigarette in five hours.

We left the sweet reek of stale smoke in our wake and headed deeper into the wheat belt. Flat brown patterned fields of wheat, oats or barely, a lone tree and the occasional paddock of spiky black fallow.

Lunchtime triggered a constant stream of travelers to and from the buffet car but plenty of packed lunches also emerged. Cheese and pickle sandwiches with the crusts cut off wrapped in baking paper, ripe bananas, Yo-Yos, Anzacs and thermos full of steaming black tea.

In a post food slumber we rattled through the gold field towns of Horsham, Stawell and Arrat passing the stunning forested peaks of the Grampians along the way. The country then opened back out into wide plains with undulating gum and eucalyptus bush. The vastness of it all constantly reminds you of the magnitude of this land of ours.

The Grampians from a window of The Overland

The Grampians from a window of The Overland

The late afternoon breeze carried the first whispers of saltwater and it wasn’t long before first signs of the urban sprawl began to appear. Victoria’s second largest city is a big enough town to justify two stops. We pass the factories and industry on Geelong’s North Shore. Just after Newport we glimpse the Westgate and pass a Met train. A heartbeat later we rolled into the hustle and bustle of Melbourne.

After 10.5 hours and 828km we stepped off the Overland onto Southern Cross Station. Adelaide was just a distant memory but only an amazing train ride away.

A carriage of The Overland

A carriage of The Overland

The Victorian wheat belt from The Overland

The Victorian wheat belt from a window of The Overland

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One last splash at Hawthorn

Jan 9th, 2012
by Rees.
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Hawthorn Pool

My last swim was swum in the Hawthorn pool last Sunday afternoon. The pond has been my local swimming hole for more than a decade but has closed its doors for a $27 million facelift. The place holds a lot of memories so we went down for one last splash.

I took a moment to look around before heading in. Mundane is a word that comes to mind when describing the reception so it is amazing to consider how much time I have spent in that room patiently waiting for the boss. Over the years it has become like a second home, a place to pass time while Amy does whatever it is that takes half an hour longer than is reasonable for the post swim shower and change. It hadn’t been a bad place to pass time: comfortable couch, the major dailies, a flatscreen and a view of the Michael Tuck stand. All that had been removed though, all that remained was a feeling of imminent change and neglect.

It was one adult swim for me. In bored tones the girl on the desk made it clear we only had a couple of minutes before close. In actual fact we had 45 but she was obviously in a hurry. Don’t blame her; nobody wants to linger in building just one forceful fart way from collapse.

I ducked into the change rooms for the standard transition and thirty-seconds later was back poolside in my budgie smugglers and rampant back hair.

I always take my time getting wet, irrespective of the situation you have to work yourself up to a dive into an outdoor pool. I stood and surveyed the scene. The final dig had fallen on one of those 40-degree summer stinkers, coming off the back of a four-day heat wave. Melbourne’s outdoor pools provide tiny oases tucked in amongst the sea of suburbia. Hawthorn is no different and the punters had turned out for some late-afternoon relief from the heat. The pool looked a picture. Fifty metres, eight lanes, deep at one end shallow at the other. A spin room infested with the stink a thousand hours of exercise bike toil, squash and basketball courts, sauna, change rooms and the most over crowded sweat box gym in Melbourne huddle around three sides while shade cloth sails provide relief to a thin strip of grass on the car park side.

People lounged, frolicked, baked, read and paddled under the eye of the disinterested lifeguards in their bum bags and surf lifesaver attire. I noticed a few familiar faces, nostalgists like me turning out for one last splash around.

As I have done countless times before I stepped up and dived in. Having had countless speedo welding, screen lathered heat evaders pass though in the previous couple of days the water was never going to be at its finest. I broke through the tepid surface down into the milky bath water of a hundred strangers.

I found rhythm in my stroke but quickly felt this swim was different to the others. After a few laps I felt the need to pause and reflect.

I thought back on some of the time I had spent in that water. I thought back to the mid-winter Saturday swims when the biting cold meant you had the entire pool to yourself. I would crouch in the shallow end share at steel blue skies and enjoy the relative warmth of the water. Wind, drizzle and blue feet would soon follow but finding a moment of peaceful isolation not a hundred metres off an inner-suburban shopping strip is an amazing thing. I had trained for three tilts at the Underwater Hockey World Championships in this pool, done so many laps my brain almost imploded from boredom. I had watched Big Ted Baillieu smashing out pushups in his smugglers on the side of the pool after an early morning swim. In the winter of 1998 I had competed with other gas hot water service owning punters for a warm shower after the Esso Longford explosion left my sharehouse with three weeks of freezing showers.

The place was showing its age. The writing had been on the wall for a while. A broken boiler this winter meant weeks of blue shiver swims. The mould on the bottom had become so deeply engrained you can write your name. It was definitely time for a refurb.

After a few more lazy laps it was time. Stumps were announced over the loud speaker and people began to leave in dips and drabs. I got changed then paused for a last look before wandering out. They locked the doors behind me. They will stay closed for the better part of two years but I look forward to taking a paddle in a brand new pool in the summer of 2013/14.

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One dollar. One spin.

Oct 15th, 2011
by Rees.
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Pokies screenWith Andrew Wilkie fighting the good fight on mandatory pre-commitment and the Greens bobbing up this week with a proposal for a $1 bet limit, Pokie reform is firmly on the Australian political agenda. I’m sure both these policies have merit but it’s worth remembering that neither are breaking new ground.

Having visited a pub-TAB or two in my time I know how destructive the punt can be. More than a decade ago when cash was being pretty short, a few mates and I developed a rule of thumb for betting on the pokies. It’s not really a solution to problem gambling but it does provide a pretty solid framework for good times.

Pub pokies statue 1A
When at the pub with mates, if the change from a given round includes a dollar coin, that dollar should be invested in the nearest $1 machine. One dollar. One spin. No one leaves until all winnings are spent.

It’s a policy platform that arose out of necessity (or poverty, if truth be known) during an afternoon session at the ‘Riv. It was our first year out of home, our first year at uni. A little community of kids from the country had ended up living in a couple of share houses within spitting distance of one another in Hawthorn. The ‘Riv was our local.

It was typical student living at Elmie Street. I was in the sunroom – squeezing a forth person into the house made rent a little more doable – and whether it was Youth Allowance, part-time jobs or cash from our parents, we all lived week to week.

Rent week meant that I had ten bucks left to last the next ten days. We had enough bread, mince, potatoes and 2-minute noodles to survive but even back then ten bucks didn’t go far in the entertainment stakes. Entry to the footy, a movie ticket or a round of beers. Faced with those choices, Toddy (my housemate) and I wandered down to the ‘Riv. We met up with Joz and Shacks. Beers it was. Now this was back in a time when you could get four pots for less then ten bucks so we settled in at the bar for some shits and giggles.

The barman put my change on the bar. I was about to pocket it but got distracted. The pokies will do that. When you have a dollar in your hand, flashing lights, bells and whistles are pretty hard to top. I figured if ten dollars wasn’t going to get me far then a buck sixty was pretty much worthless so I wandered across.

Everybody knows that playing the pokies is a fucking miserable way to pass your time so I didn’t want to waste too much time in there. The dollar machine provided the perfect solution to my problem. It allows you to lose bulk money in minimum time. But when you only have one dollar to lose, that isn’t too big a deal.

I dropped my buck in the slot and pressed go. One dollar. One spin. The screen flashed and the dials span. The first heart dropped and was quickly followed by a second. When the third and final heart dropped the screen lit up and I was treated to my own personal sound and light display.

I got that little rush of elation and the stupid grin that goes with it. In hindsight it was one of those tipping points. It could have been the start of the chase for me. One where every dollar earned, begged, borrowed or stolen is spent in pursuit of the next big collect. Instead, I grabbed a plastic cup and pushed COLLECT. The gold coins flowed one after the other, a hundred and forty of the little bastards. I strutted back into the bar with my crappy blue bucket overflowing with coins. My measly dollar had delivered a $140 collect.

My windfall was met with laughs and high-fives but what followed formed the basis for our subsequent gambling policy. I had walked into the pub with ten dollars expecting to leave with nothing. Already resigned to ten days of poverty I figured there was no point in changing that now. So I ordered a round. Then another. It was quickly followed by a third. A couple of hours later we had spent the lot. It was a cracking afternoon.

Fast forward ten years. Uni is a distant memory but Toddy and I sit in the same bar with another mate, Scooter. It’s Friday arvo and we are catching up for a quiet one. Having proved assurances that I won’t be home late we sit at the bar and get to the thirsty work, shit gags and laughs.

A couple of hours in, Scooter leaves Toddy and I at the bar for an adventure to the little boys room. It wasn’t five minutes before the calls started. Yelling into the phone, he told us to come in to the room next door. His request is forgotten in heartbeat but the persistent fucker kept calling until we switched our phones off. Ten minutes later, Scoot walked in wearing that same stupid grin I had ten years earlier. He was carrying three buckets full of $1 coins. The gaming policy had delivered another $340.

Now, common sense says that Scooter should have shouted a couple of rounds, thank his lucky stars then pocket the rest. But common sense is always going to be overruled by the phrase “you know the rules”. Instead, Scooter ducked out to the bottle shop and returned with a slab of Red Bull, which he handed over the bar along with the remainder of his winnings (about $250).

Things deteriorated quickly from there. 2am, Todd had disappeared into the night and I had never drunk more Red Bull in my life. 3am forced the move to vodka soda and I was palming cans of Red Bull off to toothless punters. Around 4:30am the “Get the fuck out of my pub!” call was made. The fifteen-minute stagger home took me 45 minutes.

I tried to sneak into bed but The Boss was not impressed at all. I tried throwing the leg across but she was having none of it. Excess Red Bull makes sleep tough and the world’s worst hangover greeted me the next day. But that was a short-lived pain.

Our “One dollar. One spin.” policy had delivered again. It has many similarities with what Andrew Wilkie and Bobby Brown have on offer. It’s just a little less responsible and a heap more fun. Vote one, Scooter.

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The dilemma of public grooming

Oct 6th, 2011
by Rees.
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A man plucking his nose hairsI was heading home on a packed peak-hour tram. Incredibly I’d managed to snag a seat so can indulge in some quality people watching. One old guy had incredibly high pants. Another woman was wearing glasses without lens. Most people just read or played with their phones. Then I noticed the woman with compact and tweezers in hand. She was fastidiously plucking her upper lip and eyebrows. I couldn’t look away. Once each facial precinct had been picked bare she raised the tweezers to her lips, turned her head and blew the offending hair into the walkway.

Having lived in some dirtiest student hovels to have (dis)graced this fair city has given me a high threshold for skeaze but seeing this lady throw her facial pubes at fellow commuters made my stomach turn.

I glanced again at the other punters. They were completely oblivious. Unbelievable! I may be going out on a limb here but I struggle to fathom how you get to the point that undertaking intimate of personal grooming in public is acceptable. Everybody was just too busy grooming their virtual identities on their phones, checking the Here’s Looking At You section of their free paper or vacantly staring out the window to notice. Maybe it was some weird collective act of self-preservation but everyone kept their eyes firmly averted.

I considered letting her know about the commonly held belief that beauty routines were best left to the bathroom but instead just sat and watched. It got to thinking about personal grooming habits and when, if at all, we a have an obligation to intervene in the routines of others.

You know the situation. The outspoken high-achiever walks into the room with the back of her dress tucked into her undies. A poppy rogue seed is lodged on the front tooth of someone at work. A businessman with a piece of toilet paper stuck to his immaculately shined shoe pushes past you. Do you intervene? Spare them from potential embarrassment by letting them know? Would your intervention be more embarrassing? You could just avert your eyes, pretend not to notice, and let them go about their day. These are the everyday dilemmas we all grapple with.

My position has always been that if you know the person’s name then you have an unequivocal responsibility to tell them. Not doing so is the same as going to a friend’s house and shitting in their bathroom sink when the toilet is right next to you. If you don’t know the person then it’s a judgment call. But eye contact or having talked to them at some point in the past tilts the scales.

Intervention does have its dangers. I once pointed out the toilet paper stuck to the shoe of an elderly woman in Sydney and was chased down the street. If you do intercede you must be tactful. Viciously brushing the dandruff off the shoulder of a work colleague isn’t a good look. I’m not trying to convince people one way or the other but do nothing, say nothing, and you will be saddled with the guilt of inaction until the day you die. But that is just my stance.

Since the tram experience I have debated both sides of the coin, discussed it with friends and people at work. The stances have varied from ambivalence to passionate avocation for overt pastoral care. The one thing everybody seems to agree on is that whatever your stance says a lot about you as a person.

I know that by pointing out spinach on someone’s tooth or toilet paper on their shoe I will sleep easier at night.

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Invasion day

Jan 27th, 2011
by Rees.
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Australia with flagWhen the implications of the scheduling of our trip dawned upon me, I couldn’t imagine anything more unAustralian than flying to New Zealand on Australia Day. We had an appointment with a bbq, beers and the beach at Killy for the sweet tunes of Triple J’s hottest 100. It would have ticked a lot of boxes. Yet we were giving all that up, opting for jandels, chillybins, hobbits and trum in Choicebroland. Sam Kekovitch would be bloody outraged. But the more I thought about it, the more appropriate the timing of the trip seemed. After all, it was  Invasion Day that we were leaving on. The day when the nation pauses to celebrate the arrival of a bunch of criminals, miscreants and misfits from the motherland.

It is apt to indulge in some self-reflection on our national holiday and that is what I did on the flight across the ditch. For mine, there is a lot to love about the Australia but also a fair bit to loathe. On the up side, we have deep-fried dim sims, the black death and incredible beaches. Our haphazard ethic brew has given us great coffee, amazing food and an interesting cultural mix. There is tremendous goodwill, people lend a hand when things go bad. There is a willingness to help friends and strangers when times are tough. Australia has tolerance, understanding and opportunity.

However, in many respects we still have a long way to go. Forgotten amidst all the chest thumping, flag waving celebration about the lucky country we often gloss over a fair bit: since the arrival of Jimmy Cook and his crib many of the locals live in third world conditions in one of the most prosperious nations on earth; there are 1003 children in our detention centres, having never been convicted nor committed any crime. There is racism, bigotry and ‘Two and a Half Men’ rates well. We are too piss-weak to stand on our own two feet and become a republic. What’s more, booze is expensive and the joint is a bit of a nanny state.

There are some pretty glaring black marks but at the end of the day I haven’t been anywhere else that I would rather live. I am proud to be Australian and I am taking that Australianess to New Zealand. For too long those damned kiwis have been crossing the ditch and taking all our unskilled jobs – in construction, hospitality and multimedia. I will strike back. I will buy Australian lamb. I will insist on getting five stars instead of four inked on my Southern Cross tattoo. I will make Sam Kekovitch proud.

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Thumbing a ride

Jan 20th, 2011
by Rees.
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Thumb hitchhikingIt’s not often that I have occasion to hitchhike these days. However, a couple of weeks ago, after a day spent cringing my way through our inept Ashes campaign at the MCG, I had occasion to pull the thumb out and hitch back to Wonthaggi. I got home quite easily, although it got me thinking about how few people you see hitchhiking these days.

Having decided that the beach was a fair more appealing prospect than the cricket, I caught the train from the city out to Pakenham. I then walked past the racetrack, across the bridge and over the freeway overpass. It was there, on the road to Koo Ree Wup, that I stuck my thumb out in an appeal to passing traffic.

I did a lot of hitching when I was a kid; whether it was thumbing a ride out to Cape Paterson after school for a surf, or hitching home on the weekend during my time at Uni. I never used to have trouble getting a lift but standing there in Pakenham with four-days growth and a lot less hair than I once had, I realised that I had become a skeezy old hitchhiking weirdo. Nobody in their right mind would consider inviting me into their car. Or so I thought.  It turned out that I only had to wait about five minutes before a beat up Toyota Hiace full of Romanians pulled over. Ma, Pa, Nanna and the kids, all on a family outing.

“Where you headed?”
“Wonthaggi.”
“I can take you as far as Koo Wee Rup.”
“That would be great, thank you.”

And off we went. I soon discovered that they picked me up because they were Christians; something to do with doing a good deed and converting the heathen masses. Regardless, we had an interesting chat about life in Romania under Soviet rule compared to life as a newly arrived immigrate to Australia in the 1970’s.

They dropped me off on the other side of Koo Wee Rup with god’s blessing and having learnt something. Standing on the South Gippsland highway, it wasn’t long before my next ride happened along in the form of Matt and Sars Ingram. The unbridled fear evident in Sars eyes when she realised that Matt was pulling over to pick up a hitch-hiker confirmed my intuition that I was indeed a weirdo.  But during the next 45 minutes spent reveling in the domestic bliss that comes with sitting between two toddlers I got to thinking about the way in which perceptions of hitch-hiking have changed.

I have always been surprised by the range of people that are prepared to pull over and offer you a ride. There was the truck driver with an insatiable speed habit, a mum with four kids in tow, a former AFL player, a young woman driving by herself at 1:30am, a middle aged plumber who picked me up at 7:15am and spent the next twenty minutes driving at 150km/h alternating between slagging off his ex-wife and taking long swigs from the piss-warm long neck sitting between his legs. Then there was the overweight homosexual man who looked to me for love. I guess I was bit more touchupable when I was younger but hitchhiking also seemed far more acceptable back then.

These days it seems that it is a pursuit confined to unemployed, unwashed, middle aged losers who can’t drive because of their third drink-driving conviction. There is an ingrained level of mistrust associated with those standing roadside and a perception that it is dangerous (the Belanglo murders probably have had a fair bit to with this). Those perceptions are not without merit but I have had some wonderful conversations and some noteworthy experiences whilst hitching. On each occasion, I made it safely to my destination courtesy of the kindness of a friend or stranger.

So the next time you are rattling along the highway and see a punter thumbing a ride consider giving them a ride, you might be pleasantly surprised.

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Shanghai’s secret ancient town

Feb 24th, 2010
by Rees.
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An old man fishing the canal by long pole

Timing is everything, so the saying goes. Well the timing of our trip to China saw the continuation of our lucky run. As it happened, we were in Shanghai at the same time as Frank, an old mate from Melbourne. Frank was back in his old hometown to share the New Year festivities with his family.

Frank offered to show us one of Shanghai’s hidden gems. Who could refuse an offer like that? So we jumped on the subway and made our way a short way across town. We exited the subway onto a broad commercial boulevard and the anywhere nature of our surrounds led me to question whether we had got off at the wrong stop, but just ten minutes down the road we found the Qibao Ancient Town.

Qibao is an ancient water town hidden in the heart of a metropolis, just eleven kilometres from downtown Shanghai. Crossing the threshold we left the soulless high-rises, neon signs and broad traffic laden roads of modern Shanghai and walked into the bustling cobbled laneways.  It was like stepping back in time. The street was alive with colour and movement, red lanterns were strung up in every doorway and street corner. Multi tiered wooden pagodas and temples with tiled roofs finishing in a flurry of curved flourishes that draw eye and soul skyward. An old man smoked beneath the quaint stone bridge and fished the freezing canal waters by long pole. Shops and street vendors crowded the lanes with their wild and wonderful wares: foods of every kind, fireworks and rice whiskey.

I kept my eye out for one of Mr Wing’s suppliers so I could pick myself up a wholesale Mogwai but unfortunately we didn’t stumble across one. My disappointment was well and truly tapered by the stinky tofu, beer duck and beggars chicken. For the latter, a whole chicken is seasoned with herbs then wrapped in a lotus leaf then slow baked in a clay coating. The legend goes that the cooking method was discovered by a poor man who stole a chicken. He was preparing to cook it on the fire when the landowner happened along. To conceal his crime, he quickly wrapped it in mud and threw it in the fire, later he discovered the succulent cooked chook inside.

We spent a couple of hours wandering the streets reveling in the atmosphere. Then it was time to go. I got myself a porcelain flask of rice whiskey, a box of dumplings and walked back to the subway feeling thoroughly grateful to Frank for having shown us something we would never have otherwise seen.

Beggars chicken for sale at a street vendor

Chinese temple at Qibao Ancient Town

The lanes of Qibao Ancient Town

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A red-letter stay in Shanghai

Feb 23rd, 2010
by Rees.
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The streets of Shanghai on the eve of the Year of the Tiger

A week in Shanghai was a fitting end to our six-month expedition; we were there to share the New Year festivities with Amy’s cousin Toby, his wife Bonnie and their little boy, Sonny. It was a great time to visit, Shanghai is at its least crowded during that time of year, factories are shut and many of the people are on holiday. That being said, we were still left in awe of the sprawling metropolis, Shanghai is very much the archetype city of the new China.

I noticed very early on that the Chinese have a very different idea of the concept of luck. It is obvious that it is fundamentally important in all aspects of everyday life but I also noticed that it seems to be also something that can be influenced. Not content to wait for the winds of chance to blow favourably, Lady Fortune is coerced and courted.

By visiting during the New Year celebrations, we had definitely made our own luck. We saw a different side of the city; the weeklong national holiday had the city moving to a different beat. In a place where a sense of urgency is the norm people seemed to be taking a moment, pausing to reflect. As we ate, shopped and strolled amongst a maze of skyscrapers that just a generation ago would have been town houses and fields there were times when it seemed as if everybody had packed up and gone. Apparently that wasn’t too far from the truth, for many, the New Year holidays provide an opportunity to travel back to the towns and villages of their birth to spend time with family and friends.

With all the factories closed, the air was fresh and clear. The roads, while still chaotic were negotiable. There were times when the streets were largely deserted. In places usually hectic to an inch of your life, not a soul was to be seen. There were also times when a flood of unexpected visitors converged on what would normally be the city’s sanctuaries meaning that they were mercilessly devoured back into the metropolis.

There were a couple of staples of Shanghai life that even the celebration of the New Year couldn’t alter. The malls were full and so were the restaurants. I shudder to think what they are like when the city is in full swing.

Food is one of the fundamental aspects of Chinese culture. Meals are to be enjoyed, a time shared with family and friends. And so it was with us, we spent many hours eating and laughing with Toby and Bonnie. It is those eating experiences that will linger most vividly in my memories of Shanghai.

This isn’t to say that the Shanghai dining experience is a walk in the park. As an uncouth Australian, the language barrier was a very initiating hurdle as was the plethora of delicious looking digestibles. This meant ordering wasn’t a matter of peruse and pick rather a complex series of negotiations. As luck had it Bonnie is fluent in both Shanghaise and Mandarin and a shrewd diner to boot. She asked the hard questions and demanded the best but she always got results. This meant that we sampled a substantial share of Shanghai’s finest fare. So many satisfying meals make it hard to pinpoint the highlight but the crab and egg stew, a mixed mushroom stir-fry, chili beef and the shared hot pot stand out.

The actual New Year celebrations were something to behold. Shanghai was at its eerie best for the start of the Year of the Tiger. Bonnie and Toby live in an apartment on the 12th floor so it provided the ideal spot to sit back and watch the city put on its show. And what a show it was. In the hours leading up to midnight the city was flooded with flash and flare to the point of being reminiscent of a coordinated carpet-bombing campaign. But the lead up proved just a flash in the pan when compared to the New Year extravaganza that followed. Forget the choreographed and coordinated fireworks displays you see at events and milestones in Australia. This was a free for all of epic proportions. Families, friends and individual punters had brought bulk explosives and put on dazzling excessive displays, competing against one another to see who could pull off the biggest bang. The entire skyline was engulfed with colour, light and noise. A million different explosions overwhelmed all senses. Then came the calm after the storm. The city was left shrouded in a haze of smoke and the ground covered in a blanket of red, the shredded remains of the fireworks. Then the snow began to fall.

The following day – New Years day – we again went in pursuit of luck, this time at the Shanghai zoo. We practically had the place to ourselves meaning that all the luck associated with seeing Bengal and Sumatran tigers, on the first day of the year of the tiger was heaped upon us.

That was how we welcomed in the Year of Tiger in Shanghai. We ate, drank, laughed and became creatures of the night. We braved icy winds, smokey jazz clubs, explored the lonely streets and marveled at the spindled grey skyline. Fortuity, providence, chance, serendipity, whatever you call it, landed us in Shanghai. Our time with Toby, Bonnie and Sonny made it great. I count myself lucky to have visited Shanghai.

Sonny Mak: a little tiger living it up in the Year of the Tiger

Amy in the early hours of New Year's day

Amy in the early hours of New Year's day

Toby Mak playing at the Melting Pot

Posted in: An Odyssey in the Orient.
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Getting your toggs off in Thailand

Feb 11th, 2010
by Rees.
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Beach goers get their kit off in Phuket

Beach goers get their kit off in Phuket

Having done a lot of swimming in my time I was very comfortable with my Speedo wearing ability. I was quite confident on my ability to hold my own going into our trip to Thailand. Oh, how wrong I was!

When you go on a big trip it often gets to the point where you need to take a holiday from your holiday. That is what we headed to Thailand for and that is what the Thai tourism industry is banking on. Tourism certainly is big business there: according to the yellow bible (South East Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet) Thailand received 13 million foreign visitors in 2006.

From my experience, all of them like wearing Speedos. In the two weeks we spent lazing on Thai beaches (Koh Tao, Koh Phi Phi and Phuket) I was inequitably found out as a tin-pot dick-togg wearing pretender incapable of smuggling a budgie with any semblance of dignity.

Maybe, the lack of coconut and baby oil on my skin contributed to my incompetence. Maybe it was that I was loath to spend entire days frying myself in the sun.

Either way I just couldn’t compete with a dizzying multitude of European men wearing skimpy, high-cut, multi-coloured slug huggers all with clapt-out bog-catcher arses.

Not to be outdone, the women get amongst the skimpfest as well. It seems Thailand is the place to get your boosies out. And age is no obstacle, in fact it seems the older, more saggy and wrinkly they are the more likely they are to have their bits out. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great. I’m just too prudish to get amongst it.

With tourism being such a massive industry many of Thailand’s beach areas are super developed and westernised but it is still a great place to unwind from the rigors of Asian travel. It also provides the ideal setting to put your sun and skimp skills to the test against some really stiff competition.

Posted in: An Odyssey in the Orient.
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Self-reflection from the top

Feb 2nd, 2010
by Rees.
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Sunrise from the summit of Mount Kinabalu

Sunrise from the summit of Mount Kinabalu

What is this overwhelming urge that drives us to climb big stuff? When did it first start? Where did come from? Most likely a group of caveman were sitting around their cave fire, they had finished gnawing on the roasted mammoth they speared earlier in the day and had exhausted their conversation about the advantages of bronze over stone. One sits back contentedly then notices the snowcapped peak rising above their campsite. Suddenly his blood begins to boil with envy and quiet rage. Before going to sleep he thinks, “Look at you sitting there, so high and mighty. I’ll show you!”

The next morning he and his mates are lugging their hairy arses up some monstrously dangerous mountain.

I guess it has something to do with ego, the need to challenge yourself and, in doing so, learn more about your self and your limits. Irrespective, you have to admit that is quite odd that people choose to traipse up and down a big hill in the freezing cold in pursuit of some elusive glimpse of self-enlightenment. Why not just climb up and down some stairs in the comfort (and warmth) of your own home?

Not that I can talk, Amy and I were overcome by the same irrational impulse while in Borneo. Somehow, we convinced ourselves that it was a good idea to climb up and down Mount Kinabalu.

At 4150m, it is the highest mountain in South East Asia.  On a clear day you can see the Philippines from its summit, and we climbed up and down it.

I use the word ‘climb’ liberally as while we found the going quite tough (coming as we did off an intensive six month preseason of pissing on and sitting around) the route is very well established, meaning that ‘walking up a steep track’ is probably a more apt description.

While there are various permutations, to climb to the summit you have to buy a package. We caught a mini-bus from Kota Kinabalu at 7:30am. Arriving at the mountain about two hours later, we checked in our packs, collected our climbing permits and a packed lunch then met our guide. We jumped on another bus which took us up to the park entrance and the beginning of the climb. We spent the next four and a half hours alternating between walking up a really steep track and catching our breath at the rest hunts. We reached the lodge at about 3pm.

We ate, showered and watched the most amazing sunset from above the cloud line before heading to bed at about 8pm.

The next morning saw us rise at 2:30am, scoff down some breakfast before embarking on a two-and-a-half hour trek up to the summit. Negotiating the steep but smooth granite slopes in the dark was interesting but it was the biting cold that consumed us once we reached the summit, which was the most challenging part of the experience. It was well worth it to watch the ever-changing dawn light illuminate the stunning vista that stretched off in every direction.

From that point there was no other way but down. We reached the lodge at 8am, had breakfast number two before completing the four hour trek back down to the park entrance.

I am not sure that our walk up and down Mount Kinabalu taught me anything new about myself or my ego. What I did get was sore legs and a memorable sunrise.

Posted in: An Odyssey in the Orient, Malaysia.
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