LEAH LUGS CRAP AROUND THE WORLD

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

Weeks 44- 52- Prehistoric Birds and Drunk Oy Gevolts in Australia; Gigantic Ice Cubes and Drunk Irish Paddling Pools in New Zealand; Howling Winds and George Dubya Bush Drunk on Kava in the remote Fijian Islands; and Dealing With Big Intrusive Jewish Families While Incredibly Jet Lagged aka Complete and Utter Disorientation in the USA.

Why hello there friends, compadres, amigos and friendidicos, and welcome to weeks 44-52 of LEAH LUGS CRAP AROUND THE WORLD: The FINAL installment. Yes, you read that correctly, more than a year has passed since I left our fair country’s oases of wheat fields, skipping, singing, smiling children, and dangerously incompetent presidents who shall go unnamed (but you know who you are ahem Mr. GWB ahem) for the first rainier and then drier and then rainier and then drier pastures of foreign lands. Indeed, bizarrely enough, I now sit at the dusty white desk in my bedroom, typing away on my powerbook and surrounded by the relics of my childhood- scruffy old stuffed animals; dusty figurines of puppies, bears and angels; old photos of me as a kid, my brother, my cousins, my beautiful and long gone border collie puppy; books that represent all my developmental stages, from Roald Dahl and Anne of Green Gables to the extensive Star Wars series to the depressing “One Last Wish” cancer series when I decided my childhood was too happy for that of a writer and I needed to learn of life’s harsh realities to Legs McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s history of the punk movement, Please Kill Me, to Everything is Illuminated. It’s all there, and here I am, in the middle of it, observing my old, familiar environment as if it were a new country altogether, different from any other I’ve seen on this year in that everything here is familiar, attached to some distant landscape of individual memories so distant re-discovering them through different eyes is nearly like finding something new. New treasures in a vault that’s been open for years.

But hold on, we’ll get to all that yet. The last time I left off, I was somewhere in the middle of China, fighting the damn commies for my choice of hair conditioner and failing miserably. It was an uphill battle, this one was, fighting for my choice in hair products, but little did I know the war that loomed on the Australian horizon. Yes, the bizarre war that historians are already dubbing, The War of Re-Integration into Western Society. To use technical historian jargon- “Oh man, it was a doozie.” So let’s just jump into it, shall we?

Chapter 1- Australia: Night night, don’t let the hostels bite

After two and a half months of travel in the land mine of cultural differences that was the Far East, and a thirteen hour flight with a cute English guy passed out and drooling on my shoulder, my plane plunged through Australia’s non-existent cloud layer, skidded its wheels along the scorching runway, and BOOM! deposited me in the sunny outskirts of Sydney. Thus began my Australian travels, which, in the end, would be more about the rediscovery of my western identity than about chasing after pissed off kangaroos or beating crazed kookaburras away from my meals (though, that would happen too). Indeed, my time in Australia was a strange adventure of rediscovery, one that oddly seemed to mirror the various stages of my life that have already passed by- my childhood, my nervous pre-teens, my teenage angst years, my confused college years, and the “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” study abroad years. Sounds odd, hm? Well, let’s put this in perspective. After two and a half months in Asia, in many ways I was the same Leah as always, and in many ways, I was irreversibly altered. The ways in which I had stayed the same and the ways in which I had changed were both innumerable and impossible to list. Sure, I could say all the obvious and cliché stuff:

1) Seeing real suffering and poverty made me appreciate what I had.
2) Witnessing survival and even happiness and enlightenment amongst so much destitution gave me perspective on my own life, on my own troubles, made me want to wear color and celebrate life (if they could do it in such adverse conditions, why couldn’t I?).
3) When every sense was bombarded with foreign stimuli, I was forced to open my mind, plunge eagerly into new things, into life in all its many difficulties, complexities and surprises, to let go of my fear of both life and death and start taking real risks.
4) Traveling on my own in such adverse conditions required organizational and communication skills, patience, a fair amount of strength, independence, the ability to let go of ruined plans and quickly adapt to a new situation.

Etc. The list goes on, but, as real and as important as these things are, they are of the nature of resumes and cover letters, pulled from my Top Ten List of What to Emphasize in a Job Interview. What I really learned in Asia, more than any of those four important but dry points, was a feeling. I just felt different, and in a very crucial way. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was that had changed or how that would affect me as a person in the future. I had just changed, I had grown, I looked at life in an entirely different way, but not in a way that I could articulate. If I were some over-hyped celebrity and a crowd of story hungry reporters had been awaiting my arrival in the Sydney airport and they had accosted me, shoved ten mics in my face and shouted, “So, two and a half months in Asia! How does it feel?” the only answer I would have been able to give would have been,

“Well it’s kind of like… and you know then I, like…. But it also feels like…. You know?”

“Uh-huh!” the reporters would have smiled and then whispered to each other, “This girl’s meant to be a writer?”

In short, Asia had given me anything and everything, and I couldn’t tell you what any of those things were. I was new, I was changed, I was 100% My Asian Self. And now I had to take that new Asian Self and fuse it with my Western Self, a self that I had all but forgotten about. Near the end of my travels, people would ask me, “Will it be hard to readjust to American culture after so much time?” and all I could say was, yes, but I got most of that done in Australia. And it’s proved true. Of all the placed I traveled, Australia was the most like the States. If anything, it was somewhere in between the States and Britain, two cultures I had been well-acquainted with in another life. So adjusting should have been a breeze, right?

No. A big fat definite no. Australia was incredibly difficult for me. When people ask me, “Was there any part of your trip where you felt homesick?” I say Australia. When people ask me, “Was there any part of your trip when you felt lonely” I say Australia. When people ask me, “Was there any part of your trip where you wished you weren’t traveling alone?” I say Australia. This has everything to do with me, everything to do with the backpacking culture, and only partially to do with Australia. It all comes back to this whole rediscovery thing. After two and a half months of changing and reaching outside of myself, I had to step back in to both a lifestyle and a personality that I no longer identified with or recognized. And it was hard. Really, really, really hard. But it’s not something you can understand until I bring you through my adjustment stages, which, for whatever reason, mirrored the already passed stages of my life. So let’s go through them.

Stage One: Childhood (A whole lot of happiness and a whole lot of confusion)

I arrived at Sydney airport midday, and immediately began alternating between feelings of shell-shock and complete and utter elation. “Honey,” I wanted to say to the guy working border security. “I’m hooooooome.” I was back. Back in western culture. Back in my territory, a place where I didn’t have to learn the rules because I already knew them. I knew how to cross the street, how to pick the best bunk in a hostel, how to eat, how to cook, how to talk, and mostly, where to buy cheese. Oh, yes, the cheese! Just think of it! So abundant it nearly grew off trees! In supermarkets, in restaurants, in convenience stores! Cheese, cheese, on trees! Oh, the joy, the sheer joy of it! I had to get to a supermarket, and I had to get to one NOW!

I grabbed my bags, cleared both customs and the incredibly long quarantine queue (“Do you have wood? Have you been near wood? Have you looked at wood? Have you thought of wood? Quarantine her!”), and bounced straight up to the nearest Travelex to exchange some money. That’s when it hit me. Not only what I re-entering western culture, I was stepping into an environment filled with characters very similar to those at home. Why, oh why, did I feel this? Because the guy smiling pleasantly at me from behind the money exchange desk was sporting an interesting haircut we call in the backwaters of America, a “mullet”. And we’re not just talking about any sort of mullet here, not faux-stylish Spanish or half-assed rocker. We’re talking 1980s backwoods hick rat tail down to the ass mullet. The only difference between this semi-toothed Australian hick and an American redneck was the accent and the greeting. Rather than saying, “How y’all doin’ t’day?” like a proper Mississippian, this guy licked his lips, nodded his head slightly and grinned, “G’day.” Ah, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore (nope, just the Australian version of it).

After making my exchange I stepped out into a pleasant “winter” sun (only about 35 degrees Celsius, some winter!) and was immediately blinded by the light. No, not the light from the sun itself, the light from the sun as it reflected off all the white skin of the people passing by. That’s right, all of a sudden, everybody was white. And speaking English. And when they weren’t white, they were Asian, but speaking in Australian accents. Australian accents, speaking English. As in, English English, not English as a second or third or fourth language English, not broken taxi driver how much money can I get out of the westerner English, but English English.

Where the hell was I?

I spent so much time wandering around blissfully in the airport that I missed my airport transfer. But did it matter? No. Of course not. This was “no worries” friendly Australia. Within minutes a guy who worked for the airport had arranged transport for me by running up to a transfer van that was just pulling out of the parking lot, explaining my situation and saying, “So would ten dollars do the trick?” The driver shrugged and said, “No worries,” and just like that I was sprawled in the very back seat of a huge van, speeding down a busy highway to Sydney city center.

And oh man, that feeling. I’ll never forget it, the sheer unadulterated joy as my first glimpses of Australia streamed past the window. The sun here was so different than that in Asia. Sure it was hot, but it wasn’t oppressive, it wasn’t filled with smog and it didn’t illuminate dirt and abject poverty. The sun here seemed clean, pure, as did the city itself. The cleanliness, more than anything, made my heart skip a beat. Look! Look at that! A building! Not covered in grime! Pollution! Dirt! Where are the beggars? Why aren’t there any street vendors calling out at us? Look! Look at how clean and orderly and well… familiar it all is! Familiar, in a very distant and remote way, familiar in a way looking at an old family photograph gives an amnesic a shot of déjà vu.

I was home. Or at least a step closer to it.

When I say I’ll never forget that moment, I don’t mean it in the way of a melodramatic romance or an overdramatic teen movie. Rather, I mean that the memory is permanently etched into the deepest folds of my brain, and I’m so confident of its depth that I’d bet you a fine sixpence that if you opened my brain and cut it in half, you’d see this memory right there in the center, staring you defiantly in the face, saying, “See?” The light, the scenery, but more than anything, the song that played from the radio. It wasn’t bad 80s pop butchered by overeager non-English speaking karaoke enthusiasts, nor was it a stupid melodramatic Asian pop song sung by teary eyed boy bands sunk to their knees with pain and anguish and crooning in a language I couldn’t even begin to understand. This was alternative rock. Sung in perfectly articulated voices. Nothing heavy, nothing ground shaking, nothing that was going to change the face of modern rock music. Just regular, decent, cheery, catchy pop.

I sat in the back of the transfer van, watching beautiful, western society Australia fly past my window, I felt the warm but gentle winter sun on my face, I let the music envelop me and I had myself a Moment. The type of Moment where my heart gave a little cry and elbowed my voice box over for some breathing room, where my eyes brimmed with happy tears, where my ears began to ring and my lips to moisten. Where time stood still for a brief moment, no more than a few seconds, and I lost my earthly attachment to gravity. I was floating, in the sun, in the music, in my own joy, the world streaming by, and all I could do was choke back my tears, all I could do was smile weakly.

Elation. Truly, madly, and you guessed it, deeply.

For my first week and a half in Australia, that’s truly what Australia was. First elation, then a simple sigh of relief.

The elation was complete and a feeling I fully welcomed, but it didn’t travel alone. Rather, the elation was paired with another feeling powerful in an entirely different way- shock. Along with shock came confusion. I loved this place, with all that was both new and familiar about it. But it also seemed that the more I thought I understood about it, the less I really did. I wandered the city streets in a daze. I mean, look at that place. Sydney literally sparkled. It was the cleanest city I’ve ever seen. When I looked down into the water, I could actually see the bottom. In what big cities in this world can you say the same thing? When I walked down the streets, most people looked like me. I was attracted to everyone. It just didn’t make any sense, and with every new seemingly normal every day task that I attempted, the more confused I got.

Take, for instance, my first entrance into a western store. It was a pharmacy, and I was just looking to buy some sunblock. I stepped into the store and was about to look around when I heard something strange- a cheery, female Australian accent:

“Can I help you with something today?” she chirped. I looked up. In front of me stood a well put together beautiful young Australian woman. Where had she come from? She certainly hadn’t been there when I entered. I hesitated for a moment, taken aback and unsure how to respond. Could she help me with something? Where had I heard these words before? Surely not anywhere in Europe, where the clerks either ignore or glare at you for daring to enter their premises and actually attemptin to hand them money (you fascist pig, you!). Certainly not in Asia, where thin, prim, proper Asian women hovered in masses around the door, giggling shyly at the prospect of having to speak English to a white person and preparing themselves for the long task of whining en mass until you, oh crazy westerner you, finally give in and buy the entire store (Pwweeeease? Only fifteen baht! Alright, if it’ll stop the whining!).

“Hi, can I help you with something today?” I couldn’t believe it. It truly was like being in America. Weird, very weird. After a few moments of awkwardness, I finally managed to call up my standard American response from somewhere deep within the most remote region of my memory and stammer, “No…. um… thanks. I’m uh… just looking.”

Her response was still American and eager, though distinctly Australian in formulation. “No worries!” she cooed, and just like that, she had breezed off, without me having to repeat myself like a broken record. “No, no, no, I don’t want it, no, no, no, I don’t need it no, no, no, it’s not gonna happen, no, no, no, it’s not you, it’s me, no, no, no NO NO NO!” She just left me without even pushing! How bizarre, how very, very bizarre.

That was just the pharmacy. I still had to go to the supermarket. My first real supermarket since London, a supermarket that truly was super. My god, it was phenomenal, just to go into that place and look. To breathe. To smell. To feel the superficial cold of mass freezers and environmentally un-friendly air conditioning units. Oh, the sheer beauty of it all! I stumbled around the supermarket, my little basket dangling from my arm, tottering into display shelves, making unnecessary and hick-ish comments to locals (“Capsicums? Why, shucks, back in ‘merica, we just call ‘em peppers!”). But by far the biggest shock of all came at the checkout line.

“How are you?” the checkout girl asked me.

“I’m fine, thanks, how are you?” I asked back. I was getting the hang of this already.

“I’m great!” Then she did something I just couldn’t handle. You ready for this? She began to bag my groceries. I didn’t even have to ask. She just swiped a product, swiveled her hips, opened a bag, and put the product in. I shit you not. I was overcome with emotion. I wanted to cry, but was too shocked to do so. Such a thing I hadn’t seen in what felt like a lifetime. Not in continental Europe, and most definitely not in the UK, where they let the groceries pile up while you frantically try to open up those stubborn plastic bags and customers shoot you dirty rays of hatred for holding up the queue. Not in Asia, where I once waited half an hour in the queue to buy a bag of apples, only to be told in broken English that I had to weigh them first, and doing so meant waiting in another half hour queue for someone to weigh them for me, thus causing me to throw the apples back on the pile from which I had scooped them and stomp angrily back to my group with frustrated tears in my eyes. That’s right, not since America. I wanted to hug her, my sweet, perfect little grocery bagging angel. Before I could restrain myself, I tilted my head and let loose an involuntary, “Awwwww!”

The checkout girl smiled and said, “Sorry?”

I smiled, beaming joy, choking back tears. “You’re bagging my groceries!”

She smiled, a little confused and laughed. “Yes, I am.” I clutched my hand to my heart.

“Thank you.”

This was only the beginning. As my time in Australia progressed, the number of similarities between our two cultures began to pile up. The political layout- a conservative in power that no one in any of the cities liked. The redneck hicks who somehow managed to vote that guy in. The expansive, beautiful and incredibly varied terrain. The sheer distance from place to place. The bigger is better and better is money mentality. And mostly, the used car commercials.

“That’s right Daryl, I traded mine for four thousand dollars!”
“FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS?!?!?!?!?!?!
“FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Four THOUSAND dollars????!!!!”
“Four thousand DOLLARS!!!!!!
(Altogether now): “FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!!”
“I’ve got to get myself down to Dave’s Car Warehouse TODAY!”
“FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS!”

Indeed, it was all a shock, and a vaguely familiar shock at that, which in many ways made things more difficult. Fortunately, though, a friend of mine from the China trip, Sally, had kindly invited me to stay at her house, which gave me a nice and much needed grounding. For a week I took it all in from the comfort of a home- a real home!- including a big TV, a squishy couch, and a huge fluffy bed…. with PILLOWS! Oodles and oodles of PILLOWS! Soft, fluffy, clean, non-hostel-germed PILLOWS! Indeed, I quickly became the kind of house guest everyone dreads having. I slept eleven hours a day, I hogged their computer to write my blog, I tried not to eat their food but often did, and in a week, I think I left the house about twice (both times to replace the food I had eaten). But Sally, her partner Joel, and their two lovely pets were very accommodating and gave me just the rest I needed. (So thanks again, Sally and Joel, if you’re reading this!).

This, in essence, was the childhood of my time in Australia, a time when I was filled with joy at life’s smallest things, yet could always run back to Sally’s place for shelter when I needed it. Unfortunately, all childhoods must eventually come to an end, and after my lovely week it was time- time to move on and into the much dreaded teenage years. However, I could not fully move into my teenaged period without a proper pre-adolescence, that odd limbo period between ten and thirteen where your body starts sprouting weird growths (from hairs to pimples to these weird balloon-like things from your chest), where every night you twist and turn in your bed with growing bones and twisted muscles, where your brain begins the long process of teenaged reorganization and your hormones start to dip and spike in ways you never thought possible or humane. And where, more than anything, you are filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, the conviction that something is coming. Yes, it was truly here.

Stage Two: Pre-adolescence (The Great Fear)

My first (and real life, non-Australian) pre-adolescent period was one of conflicted allegiances. I wanted to stay a kid, to spend the rest of my life rolling around in the grass and playing with Barbies, yet I also wanted to move on to the next phase, to rid myself of constantly nagging and babying teachers. At the same time, I was filled with an overwhelming fear of things to come, of the way my body would change, of the ways I would change. Such concerns were only worsened when my mom took me to me to a strange Polish doctor for my first acne treatment. He took one look at me and declared in a harsh accent, “In one year she will have full breasts and start with the bleeding! Soon, THE GIRL SHALL BLEED!” I left the office in a fit of tears, my mother assuring me, “Oh Leah, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You have several years before you’re going to bleed!” Thus my pre-adolescence existence was forever stalked by a cloud of fear.

During my final days at Sally’s house, the pre-adolescent period had already hit. Sure, like any well-adjusted kid, I wanted to be independent, go out into the world, see what life had to offer me, but, well, all that required so much energy. Couldn’t I just sleep fifteen hours a day and eat all the food in the house? After all, something was out there. I didn’t know what it was, but I was filled with the overwhelming and uncomfortable feeling that I wouldn’t like it.

Alas, the fateful day finally came. I bid Sally and the gang goodbye, snuck out of the house in the wee hours o’ the morn in a very pre-teen running away from home kind of way, and boarded the first of many Greyhound buses up the East coast of Australia.

So, the Greyhound bus. Yeah, I know what all you Americans are thinking: “Greyhound? But isn’t that only for old people, incredibly impoverished people and people who generally can’t keep from crapping in their pants?” To that I would say, “Yes, in America. But didn’t you read that part where I said, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore?’” The Greyhounds in America and the Greyhounds in Australia are two totally different things. Sure, they’re related, but one is the screwed up drug addicted sister who can’t make one run from New York to LA without stopping every hour to shoot up or birth yet another unwanted baby and dump it in the trash can, and the other is the overcompensating straight A student, who can’t make one run from Sydney to Cairns without stopping every hour to deliver a homemade basket of fresh Tim Tams to sick homeless limbless eyeless war vets. Two sisters, same family, nearly identical genes, same messed up parenting, two totally different outcomes. Let’s just say, if push comes to shove and American Greyhound steals Australian Greyhound’s TV for drug money, I’m siding with Australian Greyhound.

I’d like to say Australian Greyhound was a pleasant surprise, but while it was pleasant, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Keep in mind, I’d been traveling for more than ten months, and if there’s one nationality you’re likely to meet in Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and generally every place in the world, it’s Australian. Whenever I met an Australian who had traveled through the states, the conversation always went the same way.

Me: “So how did you get around while you were there?”
Australian: “I used the Greyhounds.”
Me: “Oh? And how was that?”
Australian: “It was… Well…”
Me: “Honey, did the guy next to you pee all over his pants?”
Australian (through tears): “Greyhounds in the States aren’t like Greyhounds in Australia!”

True ‘dat, my Australian compadres, true ‘dat. Thus, my interaction with traveling Australians fully prepared me for the much improved conditions of the Australian Greyhounds (though, at the end of the day, bus travel will always be bus travel, no matter how well potty trained the populace becomes). The seats provided a bit more leg room, the buses were relatively clean, and the entire bus was filled with backpackers going up the East Coast. Indeed, the Greyhounds were something of a social event. The most popular and easiest section of Australia to explore is the East Coast, and as a result, the entire transport line is filled with zillions of young backpackers. Many, like me, buy cheap package deals for the various stops along the way, so everyone is essentially doing the same thing and on pretty similar schedules. You might separate from a group of people and not see them for awhile, only to see them several weeks later and find out you’ve been just a day behind each other the entire way up. As a result, every bus trip was a reunion of sorts. Who would you run into this time? That group of English guys who nearly drank themselves to death on the Whitsundays trip? Those girls from the hostel in Byron Bay? That weird cowboy from the Sydney to Coffs Harbor leg? Who would show up was always a guessing game, both wonderful and horrible, depending on who I wanted to see and who I hoped I’d left behind back in Noosa.

With all these backpackers on board, there was little room for non-backpacking weirdos (that doesn’t mean that everyone was potty trained, keep in mind how much backpackers drink). This is mostly because it’s actually become cheaper to fly in Australia than it has to take the buses, so for people who don’t want to see everything the East Coast has to offer, buses just don’t make any sense. For the most part, the droolers and weak-bladdered have moved to the air.

But the biggest difference between Greyhound Australia and Greyhound America has less to do with the size or cleanliness of the seats or the caliber of clientele than it does with something distinctly at the front of the bus- the bus drivers. In the States, Greyhound bus drivers (for that matter, any public transport operators) are just there to do the job. Get in, get out, and communicate as few words, and as little emotion as possible. Drive the bus and get this sucker done with.

Not so, in Australia. Rather, Australian bus drivers (or at least, the ones that drive the Greyhound buses) would like to welcome you, the guy next to you, the girl in front of you, the girl next to her, the guy across from her, the girl next to him, and generally, every single human soul onto the bus. Then, much like an old man from Mississippi, sitting on his porch, playing the harmonica and rambling about life’s finer mysteries, the Australian Greyhound drivers would like to have a very long, very one sided discussion with you about a large variety of many different things. About the seat belt safety laws, which you can choose to follow or not, just as long as you know that if an inspector unexpectedly boards the bus, it’s you who will be fined, not the driver, but, that said, the bus driver does not have eyes in the back of his head so you can feel free to do whatever you like, just as long as you can pay up; about the upcoming schedule, which should go pretty smoothly if all things go well, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, and hey, perhaps they’ll go faster than expected if no one is there for the airport pick up, why, the driver could radio base right now and see if anyone’s scheduled for that stop anyway, and if there isn’t anybody, then we can continue on to the next stop, and the next stop, and then the next, before our absurdly early lunch break at 11, which will be half an hour so make sure to get back to the bus on time and so on and so on until we’ve rambled up to Cairns at which point our fearless bus driver finally gets to go home!; about the workings of the toilet in the back of the bus, which generally operates quite smoothly, though sometimes the flusher can be a bit stubborn, so if you really drop the “heavy artillery” (yes a driver actually used this phrase), you’ve got to push that flusher in and really hold it; and about ten million other subjects, which varied from driver to driver.

Between (and often, within) subjects, the driver would pause and breathe heavily into the mic but not shut the system off, which at first I found very confusing. Was I free to go back to my music and commence my many moody hours of contemplative window staring or was he going to keep blabbing in militaristic bowel terms? Every time I’d think enough time of heavy breathing sans conversation had elapsed and pushed play on my iPod (Contemplative/Moody Mix), that would be the moment the driver would strike up the conversation again, going on anywhere from a minimum of ten to a maximum of thirty minutes longer. It took several more rides before I realized when the drivers really were finished, they’d turn off the mic completely and switch to blaring pop music or a stupid and inescapably loud DVD, and even then it might not be over, the threat of a sudden remembrance and an instantaneous switch back to the mic system was always a dark and very real possibility. It truly was never over until the fat guy stopped singing. Even the sign off took a very regular but unnecessarily long pattern.

“Well,” the bus drivers would muse. “I’ll let you all be for awhile now. But say, before I go, does anyone know how we get to Byron Bay? Because I’ve never done this before and don’t know where I’m going. Hey, did I tell you all, this is the first time I’ve driven a bus? Doing quite well don’t you think? ‘Cept I’m not so sure where the brake is… Young lady in the first seat, could you help me? Have you ever driven one of these things before?”

On and on they’d go in an admirable display of Lesson 1: the things that Australians find funny.

These were just few of the many differences between American and Australian Greyhounds, but one thing remained the same: techniques for hogging two seats. Everyone on Greyhound buses has the same goal: to obtain and maintain two seats, even though you only paid for one. This way you can stretch out, relax, and not have to make small talk with anyone. Over the years, many different people have tried out many different methods for seat hogging, but only one is consistently successful- the fake bag fall asleep. Everyone on buses does this, partly for its ease, partly for its simple effectiveness. To do this skill, all you need to do is put your bag on the free seat next to you and fall asleep on it. If you’re not tired, then pretend (most people are anyway). No one searching for a free seat will want to rouse you so unless the bus gets too full, that seat will be yours until trip’s end. There are only two problems with this technique:

1) Frequent stops. These are incredibly annoying because you have to pretend your asleep and fall over your bag, wait until all newcomers are seated, sit up, and then repeat the whole charade again at the next stop so that when stops are frequent, you can’t get a moment’s peace.

2) When you’re on the other side of it. I can’t even count the number of times when I’d board a bus full of backpackers in Australia and the entire bus would be full of people “collapsed” on their bags “sleeping.” C’mon, guys, I know you’re facking!

By the end of the trip, when I had lived through more hours on a bus than any human being should ever have to withstand, when I was lonely, sick of traveling and hated everyone around me, when I just wanted to be left alone to stare out the window and be miserable, I didn’t find the Greyhounds so amusing- not the drivers, not the people, not the seat hogging techniques. But when I boarded that first bus in Sydney, in the last fleeting moments of my pre-teen innocence, the bus driver was a comfort. “Hey,” I thought. “You may be tired, sick of traveling and just want mom and dad’s flat screen TV, but this is going to be alright.” So I sat back, relaxed, tried to tune out the bus driver’s half-hour monologue, and made my way up to my first stop on the Eastern Australian coast, Coffs Harbor: Give us your poor, your tired, and your squished bananas.

The ride itself was extremely beautiful and was, once again, extremely reminiscent of the States. In particular, this first section of Australia looked like the midwest- long flat green hills; big, fat, distinctly non-Asias cows chewing cud; big fluffy clouds traveling independently rather than in packs and visible from miles away; colors so beautiful sometimes I couldn’t believe I wasn’t looking at a painting. Ah, ‘twas a beautiful and familiar sigh of relief. The only big difference between this American and Australian road was the warning signs on the side of the road. In Australia, it’s not deer that are the major killer, it’s kamikaze kangaroos, leaping out in front of vehicles and causing major accidents. As a result, the roads were littered with warnings about kangaroo crossings. But for now, at least, the giant rodents were content to sit by the side of the road, calm, serene, and incongruously foreign in a scene so overwhelmingly familiar.

After the beautiful but long (nine hour) ride, I finally arrived in Coffs and was promptly greeted by a stocky, friendly Maori (for those of you who don’t know, Maoris are pseudo-native New Zealanders, meaning they were there before the Europeans, but they too are settlers) guy, who ushered me and several other Greyhounders into a van and began giving us a break down of activities available both through the hostel and in Coffs Harbor. Such activities included kayaking, petting dolphins, bike riding and most importantly, attending our first Australian “barbie” and learning how to drink the Australia way.

Okay, once again, I could handle this, right? Any young traveler would be hard pressed to backpack around Europe without acquiring a higher alcohol tolerance and developing a slight tendency towards over indulgence. I knew just what to do. I’d meet some people in the hostel, hop the van back into town, together we could go in on the cheapest, most horrible bottles of wine we could possibly find and a good, raucous night would be had by all. That’s how we did it in college, that’s how we did it backpacking in Europe, and I assumed that’s how we would do it in Australia. That, of course, was before I was introduced to the backpackers best friend, a little drink called “Goon”.

Never heard of it? Neither had I. “Goon” is an affectionate nickname for Australian boxed wine. Describing goon is like making a series of “yo mama” jokes. “Yo goon is so rank, it ain’t got grapes in it, it’s got fish, nuts, milk and egg!” (Yeah dawg, but it sure does taste good!). “Yo broke ass is so cheap, when you finished with your goon, you use the lining as a pillow!” (Beats paying for one!). Ah, goon. The penultimate backpacker drink. It’s so cheap, it has to be labeled with food allergy warnings because the ingredients barely include grapes and mostly include things that should never, ever be put with so-called “wine”. For broke backpackers, constantly trying to out-cheap one another (“I bought this ramen pack for a dollar fifty!” “Oh yeah? I bought a TWELVE PACK of ramen for a dollar fifty!”), goon is the perfect invention. When the goon is finished, the silver box lining can be blown back up and used as a pillow. One box, very little money, and a whole lot of value. Goon is so popular amongst backpackers and poor people, it even comes with its own saying. When one wants to indulge in a goon binge, one doesn’t drink the goon, nor does one pour the goon or otherwise consume the goon, one “slaps the goon”. “Are we slapping the goon tonight?” “What night don’t we slap it?”

Backpackers in Australia are very attached to their goon. By the time 10 o’clock hits, the kitchens, patios and rec rooms in all hostels across Australia are lined with drunk young people, cradling a box of goon underneath one arm and gripping a messy mug in the other. Goon isn’t a drink, it’s an entire culture.

My first night in this culture was a shock, to say the least. If I was a pre-teen, there were suddenly big bad rebellious teenagers all around me, and I didn’t know quite what to do. I thought I could just go about my business, drink my cheap (but not the cheapest) wine, get buzzed, chat to everyone in the room and be a part of it all, and for awhile, that was true. The English girls with whom I had split the wine were very sweet and the Canadian guys I started chatting to were a bunch of fun. I could keep up with these kids, I could have fun with this. But then, without any warning, the English and Irish guys arrived, red faced, staggering and clutching boxes of goon.

Now, to understand these characters, you have to know a little more about the tradition of the English/Irish gap year. Either before or after attending university (so, at either eighteen or twenty-two years old), many English and Irish kids buy the cheapest round the world ticket they can get and just go. The standard ticket starts somewhere in the UK, and then goes to Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Los Angeles, New York, and then back to the UK. For typical (most) backpackers, this means full moon party in Thailand (a party on the beach under the full moon with lots of trance music and plenty of ecstasy), working holiday visa Australia, the Kiwi Experience party bus in New Zealand, the Feejee Experience party bus in Fiji, shopping and spotting stars in LA and New York, and then home. Should the Pacific Ocean ever mysteriously dry up, the amount of alcohol consumed in these backpackers’ gap years could probably re-fill it, and sink California as well. For the eighteen year olds, the prevailing mentality is, “Woohooo! We’re away from hooooome! Partaaaaay!” For the twenty-two year olds, the prevailing mentality is, “Wooohoooo! Our last moments of freeeeedom before we get a job and settle down and our lives are ooooover! Partaaaaaay!” Everyone is motivated to drink as if the goon apocalypse is nigh, and so everyone drinks as if, well, the goon apocalypse is nigh.

Now, before the English and Irish get all out of sorts about me characterizing them as being booze hounds, let me make clear that I’m blaming this mentality on age, not nationality. It’s just that the English and the Irish comprise most of the backpackers on this route, so that’s what I saw. When there were Canadians, they did the same thing, and hell, the few times I actually managed to spot the rare and endangered species that is the traveling American, they, too, were all about the goon. In Australia, goon happened.

What I can say, though, is that when those drunk English and Irish guys came stumbling onto the hostel patio that first night in Coffs Harbor, man, were they a sight, and having just come from change your life cultural experience Asia, man, were they a shock. Within moments they spotted us girls and literally came sliding into us, producing a pack of cards and initiating the drinking games. And man. Man. Was it a sight! All the guys were pretty bad that night, but there was one guy in particular who was beyond all hope. His face was as red as a beet, he could barely hold his body up, and the only two things he could talk about were:

a) Playing more drinking games.
And
b) His sunglasses. When they were down, he looked sober. When they were up, he looked pissed. Do you see that amazing transformation? “Look!” he cried, utterly astounded by his genius. “Pissed! Not pissed! Pissed! Not pissed!”

Even the incredibly pissed friends were fed up with Incredibly Pissed English Guy. He was so far gone, he’d initiate drinking games, and then drink everyone else’s goon when it was their turn to drink. I watched him, the shocked pre-teen, and asked one of his less drunk and actually quite nice friends, “How long has this guy been drinking?” His friend shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Since Thailand, and I’ve had to take care of him the entire way.” I thought he was joking, but the next morning when I went into the kitchen in the morning to get breakfast, the Incredibly Pissed English Guy and his new Irish buddies came stumbling in, laughing and clearly still drunk off their asses.

“Hey guys,” I said, only mildly amused. “Still drunk from last night?”

Incredibly Pissed English Guy smiled lazily at me, his head tipped back and his body loose, clearly on the brink of hospitalization. One of the Irish guys shook his head and slurred, “Still drunk? We never stopped! Been up all night!”

Let me just make clear that he wasn’t telling me this at, oh, I don’t know, four or five in the morning, he was saying this at ten AM. They’d been drinking for over fourteen-hours, and from further discussion I learned that the rest of the day’s plan included:
1) Taking a nap
2) Waking up and…
3) Drinking until the bar opened

Hey, if you’re never sober, you’re never hungover, right? I suppose you have to give them credit for stamina. After all, Incredibly Pissed English Guy really had been drinking since Thailand. If that’s not staying in the game, I don’t know what is (ten bucks he’s dead by thirty, anybody in?).

But before I get too negative and disillusioned, let us recall that at that point, I was still in my pre-teen phase, fully cognizant of the storm that lay in the very near future, but still clinging to the happiness of my youth. Just because in Asia, every day had been a life changing and once in a lifetime experience, just because every day I saw something that blew my mind, that changed how I viewed both the world and my own role within it, just because every day I saw something that flooded me with emotion, whether it was sorrow or astonishment from beauty or death or poverty or wealth or FOOD, didn’t mean that backpacking in Australia with alcoholics couldn’t be a great experience too. All I had to do was keep a positive attitude, and realize that if I wanted to have amazing experiences, I’d have to go out and find them, that such experiences were no longer going to grab my arm on the street, beg me for money and make me cry. No, if I wanted great experiences, I’d have to be the one to find them and bring them to me.

So that first full day in Coffs Harbor, I decided to get proactive. A bunch of relatively sober guys in the hostel were going for a bike ride out to a banana farm and since that sounded kind of lame and uninteresting but like something to do, I grabbed a bike and went out with them. And you know what? It was a lot of fun. We chatted the whole way, took our pictures in front of a huge banana (the boys loved that, a huge yellow phallic symbol), gulped down delicious banana smoothies, and even learned how to design cute clothing out of garbage bags when a minor gale swept through the banana farm and left us soaked. For a moment, it seemed as if my carefree childhood could stay.

Then night hit, and all illusions were lost. Once again, everyone was trashed off their asses, sitting around talking about how trashed off their asses they really were. And about boobies. And clothing, depending on whether they were male or female. Yes, I had gone from a life changing experience to:

“Hey, Matt? Remember that time when you were so drunk you passed out in that random German guy’s bed and woke up without your pants on?”
“Oh man! I forgot about that!”
“Dude that was HILARIOUS! You were all like, where are my pants? And I was all like, I don’t know!”

Or, if they were English:
“Oi, Chris? Remember that night when you were so pissed you were sick all over that fit girl’s blouse? And then he still tried to pull her! A bloody good laugh that was, innit mate!”

Or, if they were any nationality of girls:
“OMG Sarah! I LOVE your shirt!”
“Do you really? It doesn’t make me look fat?”
“OMG are you kidding? If I were a guy, I’d toooootally make out with you tonight.”
“Awwww, Ashley! You are like my TOTAL best friend!”

Etc.

So I sat there, willfully sober, listening, watching, waiting for the least pathetic bedtime hour to arrive, and transitioned into my next developmental stage.

Stage Three: Teenaged Angst/Woe is Me/I hate everyone in this room so please keep me away from any available weapons

Ah, the wonderful, cheery teenaged years. A place where I am entirely uncomfortable in my own skin, where I don’t really like the people around me regardless of how nice they actually are, where my entire life is a quest to fill the emptiness, to find meaning in life, and where I don’t know fully what I want but I know it’s not this.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea about me. It’s not that I don’t drink, it’s not that I don’t party, it’s not that, from the relatively late age of nineteen to well, now, you couldn’t spot me stumbling drunkenly around town on a Friday or Saturday night screaming, “Wooooo! I LOVE THIS SONG!!!!!” That’s what any young person worth his or her salt does on a weekend, and let me tell ya, I’m definitely worth my salt. I just don’t do it every night of the week, twenty-four hours of the day. Because that’s alcoholism, and the last time I checked, I wasn’t an alcoholic.

Being immersed in this alcoholic backpacker culture after coming from Asia was like being a freshman in high school and thrown into the popular crowd, a clique that for some reason I couldn’t understand accepted me, but a clique that for many reasons I just couldn’t understand. It was bewildering, it was disorienting, and it was not where I wanted to be.

So I reacted in the only way I knew how: I became an elitist. My travel experiences and relative intelligence (it doesn’t take that much to feel intelligent when everyone around you is constantly drunk) became scapegoats. I curled my upper lip, I stuck up my nose, and I sneered.

Sure, I’ll sit here and have a beer with you, but just so you know, I’m soooooo much better than this.

Suddenly, the old topics of conversation that used to satisfy my desire for intellectual discussion were hackneyed. I needed something deeper. The war in Iraq wasn’t good enough anymore. I wanted Sartre, existentialism, a Kurosawa film, a detailed analysis of The Sound and the Fury. All other topics of conversation need not apply (you drunken plebian horde!).

Still, just like in high school, a part of me tried to keep optimistic, and for the most part, I kept on a face that was pleasant enough so that no one could really tell what I was going through. I left Coffs Harbor and moved up the coast to the absolutely gorgeous Byron Bay, where I rediscovered my love of running, or rather, my love of using running as a means of escape and release (Byron Bay made running incredibly easy, every turn revealed more beautiful ocean and beach, an amazing reward for hard work). I met four very fun and nice girls in the hostel, two Canadian and two Dutch, and together we discovered beautiful hikes and lay out in the sun.

But I was still miserable. Food became my only comfort, which is not to say that I ate a lot, just that I really, really, really looked forward to dinner, the only meal I was ever hungry for or could really afford. My life began to pathetically revolve around dinner, or even a mid-afternoon “linner”. I was starting to do that very annoying low confidence thing that happens every time I make a major adjustment in my life: freshman year of college, the first months of junior year study abroad, and now, traveling up the Eastern Australian coast. When this “low confidence thing” hits, I am nearly paralyzed by what I like to call my Three Major Lifetime Insecurities (lifetime, because I’ve realized they’ll always be with me whenever I have a low in my life, and there will always be lows):

1) I’m fat. Like a cow. A whale, on really low days.
2) I’m lonely. I’ll never be loved. I’m ugly and annoying, therefore no one will ever date me, let alone fall in love with me. Thus why I haven’t been in any sort of relationship in over two years, and I haven’t been in a good relationship since I was seventeen.
3) I really, really can’t write.

This is my triumvirate of low self-confidence. It didn’t matter that, after penniless backpacking in Europe and two and a half months in Asia, I was the skinniest I’d been since high school, nor that I hadn’t been in one place for more than six months in the past two years or that, let’s face it, 99% of guys at my college were idiots or gay, nor that I had just gotten into pretty much all the best creative writing and journalism schools in the nation. I was fat, I was ugly, I was entirely un-dateable, and I really, really couldn’t write.

Like I said, this wasn’t the first time the Triumvirate attacked, and it most definitely won’t be the last. I could be an anorexic ninety-pound Nobel Laureate with Pam Anderson boobs, and still, those Low Days would hit where I’d feel like the mom from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and as illiterate as our current president.

I should have known these feelings would hit, since they’ve called, “Present” at every single major adjustment since high school. I’ve certainly been around them enough. I’ve seen them in me, and I’ve seen them in the people around me, struggling with adjustment too. They’re very universal feelings. We step out of our comfort zone, into something new and foreign, and suddenly loneliness hits. I deal with that by feeling miserable, fat and alone, by developing a huge case of low self-confidence-itis and being jealous of all the beautiful, seemingly well-adjusted people around me. While I become more solitary, trying to find some way to hold myself up, most people desperately try to grab on to somebody else. Thus why freshman year of college so many people very quickly (often within a week) wind up in relationships that sort of work, but not really. We need someone, anyone, and that person down the dorm hall kind of fits the order. I’ve always watched this sudden hook up process with complete bewilderment, feeling alienated and out of the loop. There I am, just trying to deal with my own adjustment issues, and before I know it, everyone around me is in a relationship of sorts, or at least dressing up nicely and getting a lot of attention from guys. Then, in the catch-22 that is my Triumvirate, I see everyone else getting attention and think, “It’s because they’re skinnier, more beautiful, more loveable, and hell, I bet they can write better than me too.” (It wasn’t until my senior year of college that I realized if I wanted the same sort of attentions, all I had to do was wear a mini-skirt and straighten my hair).

So, if I had dealt with these issues before, and if I had grown since study abroad and traveling, I could sort myself in a much more mature manner this time around, right? Well, yes, but not quite yet. First, I had to recognize what I was going through, and I wasn’t quite there yet. In Byron Bay, all I really knew was that I was miserable, that, after two and a half months in Asia and not being attracted to anyone, I wanted every boy that walked own the street, and that I was alone. Completely and utterly aloooooone.

(See, did I tell you this was the teenaged angst period or what?)

No, in Byron Bay my relatively more mature side hadn’t yet come to the rescue, so I was relying on my other standard Quick Fix for Instant Absolution: projection. I took all my fears and insecurities, my exhaustion and my Triumvirate, and I channeled them into one very unfortunate sandwich. No, not a metaphorical sandwich, a real tuna fish sandwich.

Here’s what happened.

After a fun day hiking with the Canadian and Dutch girls, I had a hunkering for a good sandwich, and not just any sandwich, a big, fresh sub with lots of ingredients and lots of mayo. In China, this would have been (and was) a major problem, since outside of Beijing, gluten didn’t really exist. In Byron Bay, where the sandwich shops lined up like army troops up and down the small city streets, this sandwich and mayo goal would be very much achievable. I told the girls of my plans, got the Dutch girls to come along with me, ordered my sandwich- tuna with lettuce, tomatoes, black olives and mayo, oh the sweet mayo- sat down and conveniently neglected the fact that I had told the Canadian girls we would get the sandwiches to go and meet them across the street for our walk home. They could wait. The sandwich came first.

I took a bite and… and! And!.... complete and utter disappointment. Not only was the bread kind of stale, the mayo was, well, lacking. There just wasn’t enough of it, and what was there, wasn’t mixed into the tuna. Normally, I could deal with disappointment of this caliber. After all, it was only a sandwich, right? No. An emphatic no, not in this situation. This was not an ordinary sandwich. This was the first tuna sandwich I’d gotten to eat since Asia, the tuna sandwich that had to live up to two and a half months of sandwich daydreaming. This was a sandwich that, in a day full of self-induced misery and adjustment issues, I looked to for my only happiness.

This sandwich had big shoes to fill, and this sandwich didn’t fill them.

With much effort, I choked down my first bite and took a very pained sip of diet Coke.

“How’s the sandwich?” one of the Dutch girls asked. I nodded a bit too quickly and took another bite to prove my enthusiasm. I didn’t dare to speak lest I start sobbing.

“Mmmmhmmm! Mmmmm mmm mmmmm!” I moaned through my next dry, stale bite. I was extremely hungry so I gulped the rest of the sandwich down as quickly as I could and sulked the entire walk home.

(The sandwich bit doesn’t end here, so please keep it in mind for the next page).

That night we planned to go out to a bar called Cheeky Monkeys, where we could dance on tables. We’d look good, we’d dance, we’d drink too much, and we’d have a great time. Somehow I had managed not to drink for a couple of nights, and these girls had become friends, so I figured a night out on the town was definitely something I could handle. Back at the hostel, we scurried around doing our girl stuff, putting on makeup, trying on clothes, doing our hair. All of this was, once again, another sort of culture shock, since I hadn’t made myself pretty for the going out scene since London (in Europe I stopped caring within a week and went out in dirty backpacker jeans and a pony tail). At first, I was overcome with excitement. One of the girls had a hair straightener, meaning I could actually do my hair! I whizzed around the room in a state of euphoria, straightening a little here, straightening a little there and proclaiming, “A straightener! She has a straightener!”

But then I quickly felt alienated from the group again when I struggled to fit back into this very Western scene, a scene that I was still struggling to understand and to find (remember) my role in. One of the Dutch girls finished dressing and I told her she looked really good (because she did). She gave a little pout and said that she would look good if she wasn’t so fat. I had a moment of déjà vu. I had heard this before, many times before in fact, from myself and from every girl I’ve ever met in the moments before we go out. There was something good to say in response to this, something that few guys could ever think of to tell their girlfriends, something that I mastered back in middle school as a tool for survival. But what was it?

“Awww,” I cooed. “Guys like a girl with a little something on them!”

What? This was certainly not the right thing to say. I knew it before the words had even left my mouth, but I couldn’t do anything to stop them. I had been thinking earlier in that day about how beautiful this girl was (yes, in that very jealous, low self-confidence way that characterizes my adjustment period), not despite her minimal extra weight (this girl was definitely not fat, just not thin), but because of it. She certainly wasn’t skinny, but she was full-bodied, curvy, and absolutely beautiful. But how do you say that when most western girls just want to be thin?

The words left my mouth and for a moment the room stood still. The Dutch girl stopped adjusting her clothes and smiled thinly. The other three stopped talking and listened in.

“Um,” I said. “That sounded horrible. I didn’t mean that you have any extra meat, or um, whatever on you. I just meant that you look beautiful and that guys, well, they don’t all like thin girls and…” Dammit. I shut my mouth. The Dutch girl smiled kindly and said,

“I know what you mean.” She was a nice girl and was being generous, but it wasn’t the first time I had stepped into it around these girls, and it wouldn’t be the last (I would see the Canadian girls up and down the coast and constantly trip up with something I said and sound like a complete ass, it still makes me feel uncomfortable just to think about it).

The night was off to a bad start, and I could just feel that it wasn’t going to go well for me. I simply did not understand this young western culture going out thing, and how I was supposed to act in it. When I was finally all dolled up, I joined the girls on the patio where they were having a few pre-bar drinks with a cute Austrian guy who worked at the hostel. When I appeared at the table, he stopped, looked shocked and said, “Wow, you cleaned up well” and, in my low self-confidence, uncomfortable in my own body, sudden inability to interact with boys teenage mode, I responded with a role of my eyes and a sarcastic, “Yeah, well…”

(What did that even mean? God, I was SUCH a teenager!).

That “yeah, well” would characterize the rest of the night. In the complex way of an emotionally torn adolescent, I wanted everything and would only settle for nothing. Meaning that when we got to Cheeky Monkeys, I watched the masses of drunken young people gyrate on table tops, muttering, “Damned proletarian horde!”, yet all I wanted was for some drunk, cute asshole to grab my hand, pull me up onto the table and say, “Hey babe, you’re hot.” But… if that did happen, I’d hate the guy for being such a shallow ass, long for a deeper connection and promptly ruin the interaction by asking him if he’d ever read the book Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and if so what did he think were its most important philosophical implications? (Which, by the way, is pretty close to what I ended up doing). I was lonely enough to throw myself down on the ground sobbing, “I just want someone! Anyone!”, but if just anyone came along, I’d say, “Go away, I’m looking for something deeper than this.”

And of course, when I was in such a state, the next feeling in the progression was jealousy. Pure, insane, unbridled, girly jealous. One by one, I watched my new friends getting hit on and think, “Why does she get hit on? I’m just as hot.” And then, “Why does she get to make out in the corner? I’m just as hot.” And then, “Why does she get to be puked on by that random obese guy in a clown suit? I’m just as hot.” It didn’t matter that I was being hit on, that when I walked across the bar, my ass was grabbed every five steps, because hey, that was just plain degrading and didn’t they know I was looking for a deeper connection?

I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but thus is the logic that goes through my crazy head when I’m dealing with my Triumvirate. Thus why I was thoroughly depressed for most of my teenaged years. It all goes back to that one thing- not fitting in. Wanting to fit in to my own skin, and thus by extension, the people around me. And also not wanting to fit in at all. In high school, it was because I didn’t really know who I was yet; in college, it was because I was still searching; and now, it was because only a couple of weeks ago I was totally found, and now, back in western society, I had no clue. It was a retro act, but without any of the good bands.

So I stood around, felt alienated, moped, and felt sorry for myself. I watched my peers, wheeling about drunkenly, making out with one another. I downed shot after shot, hoping that if I had enough, I’d lose my inhibitions and act like them. Soon enough, the inevitable drama hour came about, that wonderful time of night where half the group has disappeared to make out with a stranger, when old jealousies mix with drunken drama, the sidewalks morph into an amateur Jerry Springer set and the cops roll along saying, “You better watch your mouth, tough guy.”

I was drunk and decided I had had enough. I pulled one of the Dutch girls outside with me and sent one of the Canadian girls off to gather the rest of the group, should they want to leave. We stood outside of the bar, talking candidly in the way of drunks, and the full weight of my present situation hit me. The culture shock, the adjustment Triumvirate, my misery. I tried to keep it together, to not make a scene, but then two stereotypical Aussie blokes stepped up to us and grinned, “How are you fine ladies tonight?” In my drunken state, I wondered, god, how do I answer this question? How can I explain how miserable I am in a short and concise manner? I thought hard, and this is what came me.

“Well,” I said, shaking my head. “Today I had a really bad sandwich.”

“Oh yeah?” the guy said, not really getting it. “That’s too bad.”

“I KNOW!” I shouted, so happy that he understood. “It was just like hey, you know what, I want a tuna sandwich with MAYO, I mean really how hard is that to fucking make, right? Not very hard, right? But then I get the sandwich, and ohmygod it was SO BAD! There was barely ANY mayo and what was there wasn’t even properly mixed in!”

“What’s going on?” the other Dutch girl asked as she and the Canadians spilled out of the club.

“Her sandwich, apparently she didn’t like it,” the first Dutch girl asked.

“OH MY GOD IT WAS SOOOOO BAD!” I shouted again, unable to control the VOLUME OF MY VOICE. “See, all I wanted was mayo, right?” And so I went on, repeating the story three or four times as we walked home, stopping whoever cat called us to let them know about this current tragedy. I took my emotions, and I put them in a bad tuna sandwich. Projection, all the way.

In the end, the only gift that keeps on giving that I contracted in Byron was bed bugs. Lots and lots of bed bugs. Bed bugs that would bite and bite and bite until I finally left Australia. Yes, bed bugs. I honestly thought that bed bugs were something that existed only in that ancient saying and not in real life, kind of like how “ashes, ashes we all fall down” refers to the plague, but even though we still sing it, it’s no longer relevant. I had no idea that “night night, don’t let the bed bugs bite” actually referred to a creature that was still alive, well, and biting the hell out of innocent backpackers. But it is and they do. Oh how they do. And oh how they would continue to. Bite and bite and bite until I found myself on the brink of buying hand grenades to blow up hostel beds before sleeping in the tattered remains (and even then, I’m sure one wily bug would have survived and bitten me).

Bed bug bites intact, I left Byron Bay and moved on up into Queensland, stopping first at Surfers Paradise, a clean modern city that sprawls right up onto an astounding beach that stretches for as far as the eye can see. It reminded me of Oz, ironically enough. Oz in Oz. I wandered down the beach as far as my legs could take me, still feeling teenaged, miserable and hating my existence. The only real happiness in the day came when I used the public toilet at the side of the beach, which was a very high tech fancy schmancy new fangled public toilet, styled in a very Down Under sort of way. To enter the toilet, I had to push a button on the outside to make a silver space age door slide open. Once inside, a friendly pre-recorded Australian male voice greeted me over an incredibly loud speaker system. This man first welcomed me to the public toilet and hoped that I’d have a pleasant stay while I was there. Then he explained to me the various inner workings of the toilet, where all the necessary tools for a pleasant bathroom stay were located, and mostly how to go about flushing the toilet. (I was beginning to wonder if the Greyhound bus drivers also recorded bathroom greetings). Lastly, the nice man explained to me how the locking of the toilet would work. He’d go ahead and lock the toilet for me and I could leave the toilet whenever I so chose just as soon as I pushed the proper button. However, if I were to take more than my allotted time in facilities, at the ten minute mark he would go ahead and open the door, whether or not I was ready for it to be opened. (Can you imagine that scene? “I’m opening the door now.” “But I’m not ready!!!!” And then there you are in full view crapping on a very public Australian street. How very Indian). When he had finally finished with his speech and wished me, once again, a pleasant stay in the toilet, he politely turned on elevator music so I might properly enjoy my pee (though I didn’t get to hear much of it, since I was nearly done peeing by the time he finished his entire speech).

Unfortunately, even the chipper Australian pre-recorded toilet man wasn’t enough to move me out of my teenage years, so I moped around Paradise for the rest of the day, fell asleep early and moved on to Brisbane the next day. By this point my bed bug wounds had begun to fester, making me wonder if perhaps I had contracted leprosy or gonorrhea of the leg.

In Brisbane I stayed a cute little hostel over a pub, full of charm, fun drunk backpackers, and of course, lovely wonderful bed bugs. My first day in good old Brizzy I decided to proactive about my teenaged funk and really throw myself back into the tourist experience. I looked up Brisbane in my trusty Lonely Planet and then spent the day looking at crap I really didn’t care about, namely a museum of Brisbane that showed what it was like to live in the city during the 1950s. Apparently, fifty years ago they had drive in movies and people wearing skirts just barely ABOVE the knees!!!! Yeah yeah, I didn’t give a crap. I spent the entire day walking around in the hot sun and sunk further and further into a bigger, broader, all-inclusive teenaged funk. What I really wanted now more than anything was my own room, my own personal space so I could mope around and bathe myself in beautiful, wonderful self-pity, but designated Depression Rooms tend to be few and far between in most hostels.

The dorm room smelled like rotting dead animals, so my only option was to move my sulk into the common room. Of course, there was nowhere to sit alone and mope, so grabbed a chair in a random group of people and said, “Hi!” pretending I felt much better than I really did. And just like that, with one plop of the butt into one chair, I moved into…

Stage Four: Leah the Pseudo-Punk in the Early College Years

Yeah, I know, I don’t really seem like a punk, mostly because I’m not one, I just like the music and the shows. I’ve never been a very good punk. I don’t do any of the stereotypical “punk” things- I don’t dye my hair, I don’t wear chains or combat boots, and I don’t even have my ears pierced. I didn’t want to be punk, and I certainly wasn’t about to try. Then I went to college and fell in with a group of people who were obsessed with punk and ska and because of them I started attending local concerts. All it took was one concert and I was hooked (well, for the next couple of years). There was just something in the music that I really connected with. At a good punk or ska show, the lead singer screams and wails and laughs and sings and dances and drinks and dives into the crowd, and the guitarists and bassists leap in sync and the drummer beats the life out of his drums and the crowd pushes and shoves and beats and tramples and moshes and the stage becomes the audience and the musicians become the kids and together everyone beats the crap out of one another and SCREAMS.

When I was in my late teens, punk shows sounded like I felt, from the screams to the chords to those frenetic, out of control drums. Punk and ska were (and are) teenaged angst in musical form. It was my hormones, my emotional issues, my frustration, my depression, and my bottled up, repressed joy for life, sung right back at me from a main stage. For two years at college, I couldn’t live without my punk and ska shows. It didn’t matter how freezing cold the upstate winters were, if there was a concert, we were lined up outside in our t-shirts, waiting to sweat. It didn’t matter that one of our favorite bands, The Blackouts, often played at teen centers in the middle of the sticks, we’d drive there and mosh with the twelve year olds.

Finally- finally- I had a release. For the two years that I religiously attended punk and ska shows, they weren’t just a part of life, they were something I relied on as a matter of psychological therapy. I needed these shows, even if they didn’t need me. In Australia, where I was reliving all my former life stages, I needed to have my therapy back. From Sydney up to Brisbane, it was all I could think about. I’d be walking down the street, eating dinner, reading a book and it would just hit me.

“God,” I would think. “I need a show.”

It was a good thing I invoked God, because in Brisbane, He/She came to my rescue with a wonderfully divine ploy. When I plopped down in that chair in the common room, I somehow serendipitously sat next to two guys, one Australian and one Canadian, who loved punk. And who knew where the shows were.

Okay, God, I’ll believe in you for the duration of my visit to Australia.

We instantly bonded over music and I nearly cried when one of the guys, Dave, took off the crap hip hop that was playing at the time, plugged in his iPod and filled the room with the classics from my early college years. The next evening Dave and I roamed the streets in search of a good show, and while we only managed to find a space-aged experimental teenaged bands, my craving was temporarily satisfied and my position in the Early College Years was firmly cemented.

Now, along with this position came several changes in personality traits, the most important of which included the willingness to go with the flow and try new things out. Life was an adventure, and I might as well treat it as such. Once I went to a live show, I began to feel more comfortable with myself and once my confidence began to return, I could do things that didn’t necessarily feel 100% like me, just because they’d result in some sort of hilarious adventure. Once I’m confident in myself, it doesn’t matter that everyone around me is doing things that are not me. I can watch them and even participate without feeling like I’m violating who I am.

So, the next night in Brisbane, when I met a bunch of girls in my hostel room who wanted to go out and very much get hammered, I thought, why not? It may not be a life changing, deep experience, but hell, I’m in a good mood, for once I’m feeling okay about myself, and hey, I could use a little adventure! So I promised myself I’d go out and have fun, no matter what. Tonight, I would step fully back into western culture, and I’d be happy to do so. I’d do whatever it was there was to do, even if it wasn’t 100% Me, and I’d loosen the hell up.

But before we head out for what would indeed be a very adventurous night, let me introduce you to the cast of characters. First we have…

1) Amanda. Amanda was an extremely skinny girl with big glasses, a Michigan accent, and an obsession with zoo animals. Amanda also had a tendency to go to bed at 7:30 PM. That was the kind of girl Amanda was. But along with innocence comes many surprises. “Yah,” Amanda proclaimed after discussing a young man she had a crush on back home. “He was so cute, I just wanted to butter him up and eat him for dinner!” I absolutely loved both her, and her illuminating explanations of what it’s like to grow up Roman Catholic in Michigan. “I’m Roman Catholic,” she explained. “So we’re all now no sex now, ya hear? No sex no sex no sex no sex- oh you’re married now? IT IS YOUR CATHOLIC DUTY TO HAVE AS MUCH SEX AS POSSIBLY CAN!” Amanda’s insights into her family were just as hilarious. She repeated one conversation with her mother after arriving back from her freshman year of college and it sounded kind of like this:

“Yah donchyaknow Amanda,” her mother intoned. “Gran just wanted me to check that ya still liked boys donchyaknow.” Amanda groaned in humiliation and disbelief.

“Grandma thinks I’m a lesbian?”

“Now donchya overreact now Amanda donchyaknow. Gran just had half a mind to check in on ya since it’s been so long since the last boyfriend donchyaknow Amanda now.”

“I like boys, mom, they just don’t like me.”

2) Laura. Oh, Laura. Laura was the Vicky Pollard of the group. Now, if you don’t know who Vicky Pollard is, you’re missing out. Vicky Pollard is a bit character on the show Little Britain and is what’s called a “chav” in England-speak. Chavs are a thing all of their own. They’re basically the equivalent of American white-trash, but they also throw in their own touches, mostly clothing stolen from American rappers mixed with track suits. Female chavs are also stereotypically teenaged mums, are relatively uneducated and constantly get into scraps. Vicky Pollard is the ultimate chav and starts many of her sentences likes, “Yeah but no but yeah but no but yeah but no.” In one classic episode, Vicky speaks to a class of teenagers about her life experiences, rocking a stroller back and forth as she talks. When the teacher dismisses her, she leaves the baby behind. The teacher calls after her and says, “You left your baby!” and Vicky responds, “It’s awright I’ve got plenty more at home.” That’s a chav. I didn’t know it at first since she was relatively quiet in the hostel room, but Laura was not just a chav, but a Vicky Pollard. You’ll see why in just a moment.

3) Danielle. I have nothing bad or funny to say about Danielle. She was perfect, and had we not been traveling, I definitely could have seen her being a close friend. (Same for Amanda, it was only Vicky Pollard who drove me nuts).

With this cast of characters, I made my way to the pub downstairs, grabbed myself a drink and chatted with the girls. The pub was reminiscent of my days and England, and I immediately felt cheered. Plus, the girls were a stitch, and a great cover band played classic rock hits from the sixties to about a year ago, so I was very much in my happy place.

As the night went on, the pub filled up and we moved to the front to watch the band. As we stood around the edge I noticed a group of fat biker guys in leather jackets rocking out to the music, which I found amusing since it didn’t really seem like their kind of stuff. As I watched them, I accidentally made eye contact with one of their friends, a tall, goofy looking guy with red hair who was clearly having his way with a bottle of liquor. I tried to shift my gaze away before he thought I was making “come over here big papa” eye contact (“eye sex”, if you will), but he was already so drunk, he didn’t notice my aversion. Before I could do anything more to stop it, he stumbled over and started shouting at me over the music. When I still couldn’t hear him, he arched his back and leaned down, placing his mouth about a centimeter from my ear and began spraying spit all over my face as he started up a very one-sided shouting conversation.

Hi, his name was Red Dog. Not surprisingly because of his red hair. Actually, here’s the thing with the name. When he was a kid, he had been quite fat and had the misfortune of being a “ginger kid”, so he was really picked on all the time but now he reacted with positivity when people made fun of his features. Now when people call him Red Dog, he’s not insulted, he likes it because at the end of the day, a lot of other people have it so much worse. After all, there are kids born with heads too large for their body in Africa and hey, was I doing something tonight? Did I want to hang out with him and his tough guy biker friends?

(Yes, yes I was busy. No, no I couldn’t hang out.)

The more he talked, the more spit he sprayed down my face and neck and the further and further I leaned away, until my pony tail was nearly touching the floor. I nodded and put my polite phrases on repeat, “Yeah, mhm. That’s right. Be proud of who you are. Mhm. Good on ya! That’s right. Good for you!”

Somehow I eventually managed to peel away from good old Red Dog, and he occupied himself instead by being That One Guy who stands in front of the cover band and enthusiastically shouts lyrics and pumps his fist in the air, fully “feeling” the music while all the while the musicians stand there with perplexed and slightly bewildered expressions.

Meanwhile, a group of fat drunk Canadian girls stumbled around the miniature dance floor, whirling about and shouting, “WOOOO! WOOOOO!” and then stomping on our feet or otherwise crashing into us and cooing, “Oooh, I’m sorey! I’m sooo soooooorey!”

With this amusing group of ruffians the night passed quickly and before I knew it, the bar was closing. Danielle and Amanda decided to head up to bed, but good old Vicky Pollard was up for a proper night out and in my renewed spirit of adventure, I decided to join her (that, and I figured any night with a Vicky Pollard would be one to remember).

Vicky Pollard and I made our way up Brisbane’s one nightlife street (I walked, Vicky stumbled) and looked for a good bar. I heard one with music playing and was just about to ask Vicky if she wanted to go in when she rushed by me in a chavish streak, pushed past the huge bouncer without showing ID, rushed up to a group of unsuspecting Aussie Blokes and shouted, “Wooooooo buy us ladies driiiiinks!”

“What?” the poor assaulted young Aussie asked.

“We’re laaaaaaaaaaadies buys drrrrinks! WOOOOO! WOOOOOOOOO!”

Oh god, I was really in for it tonight.

Within a matter of seconds a proper Aussie Bloke spotted me from across the table and exclaimed, “Croikey!” He grinned, sidled over and introduced himself. His name was Dave but everyone called him Two B. Two B? I asked. Why Two B? Well, apparently it was pretty logical. When he was a toddler, Dave had been hit in the head with a two by four and the name had just stuck. Ah, I had picked a winner.

“Where ya from?” my brain-dented suitor asked.

“New York.”

“Croikey!” he exclaimed for a second time.

“No, not New York City, New State.”

“Croikey!”

I stopped, studied him and asked, “Do you really say that?”

“No.”

When all is said and done, Two B was actually one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met in a bar, meaning that he actually took the time to talk to me, which I find rather rare. When he asked me about my travels, he really wanted to know details because he was thinking of traveling to Europe for his big Australian right of passage trip. He wanted to see just about everywhere, but before he went, there was one question he needed to have answered. What language do they speak in Switzerland?

“Ah,” I said, eager to talk about the subject since I love how multi-lingual the Swiss are. “I’ll give you a hint. They speak the languages of their neighboring countries.”

“Spanish?” Two B. asked.

“No,” I said.

“German?”

“Yes, they speak Swiss German and people in the region bordering Italy speak Italian. And what’s the other one?”

“English?” he guessed.

“Well, many Swiss people do know English, but it’s not an official language.”

“I don’t know,” he said, defeated.

“Think about a romance language.”

“Italian?”

“Yeah, we got that one, but think of a former colonial power who settled lots of places around the world.”

“America?”

“Well yeah, but… Okay think about a colonial power who settled French Canada.”

“The English?”

“No, French Canada. Who settled French Canada?”

“The Italians?”

“FRENCH Canada.”

“I give up.”

“THE FRENCH! The FRENCH settled FRENCH Canada! In Switzerland they speak German, Italian and FRENCH!”

“Oh,” Two B. said, slightly embarrassed. “That was a trick question.”

Two B.’s friends weren’t much better though, and if I was in it for a laugh, I certainly got it. Later on we were all hanging out on the street and Vicky was flirting with one of Two B.’s larger friends whose outfit was really quite entertaining. His shirt was just a normal polo shirt, but his pants were about ten sizes too small for him, meaning his fly was completely unzipped and his fat, hairy, disgusting belly hung out over the top. I asked Two B. why his pants were so small, and it was apparently because earlier in that very drunken night he had lost his own pair of pants (how you lose your pants in the middle of the night, I’ll never know) and had to borrow a pair of his much smaller friend. Thus the revolting sight. While I asked, the Chubby Guy tried in vain to tug the zipper upwards and Vicky watched with a look of disgust on her face.

“Eeeeew you’re gaaaa-ross!” Vicky proclaimed. At that, the Chubby guy grinned, pulled his shirt over his head to reveal his hairy, revolting chest, shook his mighty stomach in Vicky’s direction and ran after her calling, “You know you like it! YeeeeeaaaAAAHHH!”

(Ah yes, and Australians like to think they’re different from Americans. If that isn’t a painted chest college football scene, I don’t know what is).

Eventually, though, the jokes grew thin and it was time for bed, so I politely declined Two B.’s advances, grabbed Vicky and made my way back to the hostel, hearing all about Vicky’s many lost loves along the way.

Hello, Leah Anne Levine Kaminsky, and welcome back to western culture.

The next day I took my severe hangover and hopped the bus up to Noosa Heads, a beautiful area right on the water with mile after mile of gorgeous everglades. I was meant to go on a canoeing trip while I was there, but I had messed up the dates and had to skip it. I didn’t much mind because a beautiful national park was located just outside of town, and I spent the day walking along more beautiful beaches and looking out at the ever expansive, aqua blue Pacific ocean. It was an idyllic and yacht-clubby sort of place and, though I was still caught up in my discontent early college years, I reveled in the beauty. Around dinner time that night, I sat at a picnic table reading and overheard two Irish guys who were friends from back home coincidentally run into each other at the hostel reception. What they said to each other adequately summed up Noosa’s general feel. One of the guys still had yet to put down his bags but wanted to join up with his friend later, so he asked (in an Irish accent, of course), “ Are ya in a hurry then?” His friend smiled contentedly and gave him a hearty slap on the shoulder.

“I was in a hurry once, lad,” he said. “About five years ago.”

When I finished reading, I logged onto the internet and checked my email. Before long a tall skinny, blond, awkward looking white guy and an Israeli plopped down at the kiosk next to me. I instantly knew the awkward guy’s friend was Israeli because he looked exactly like all those ex-army Israelis I saw in Pushkar, searching for spiritual salvation. His hair was poofed into a giant Jew-fro and he wore flip-flops, baggy shorts and of course, a Che Guevera t-shirt. Yup, he was Israeli, and his speech instantly confirmed my hunch. Over the next forty-five minutes, the Israeli and the Awkward Guy sat at the computer and sorted through sweet surfing videos and pictures of Awkward Guy’s incredibly non-awkward ex-girlfriends on myspace. Whether they were watching surfing or analyzing girls, the Israeli Guy had something to say about each of them, and where it might have been offensive or annoying coming out of a native English speaking guy, Israeli Guy’s Hebrew-tinged comments had me gagging on my own repressed laughter.

“Wow wooooowowow!” the Che Guevera wearing Jew-froed Israeli Guy proclaimed in an old Yiddish grandfather accent. “That babe is bee-a-utiful! Sexy! Very, very sexy!” A new girlfriend appeared on the screen. “Vhat? How come you get such sexy goylfriends? Such a thing is not exactly vhat I would call fair! Oy! Look at the tuchas on that one!” Awkward Guy pushed next and a new girl wagged her cute little tushy at the screen. Israeli Guy nodded his head vigorously and shrugged his shoulders once again, in a very old Jewish grandfather way. “Again, very, very nice, buuuut…. Enough with the blondes already! Is it so much to go for a nice brunette every once in awhile?”

When I had tired of eavesdropping, I went to bed and headed out the next morning to Hervey Bay. Hervey Bay itself isn’t much, it just serves as a base for heading out to Fraser Island, which is precisely what I used it for. That night I met a group of people with whom I would explore the largest sand island in the world (yep, that’s a whole lot of sand). That evening, the thirty people who had signed up for the trip gathered in the hostel TV room and were lectured on various safety hazards on the island. Then we were made to sign a bunch of papers containing boring legal mumbo jumbo, and were split up into three groups to fill the 4x4 vehicles we would use to bounce across the island. Because most people were traveling with friends, that meant that two of the groups were filled with large cliques of people who knew each other, and one of the groups was filled with random characters that you would never, ever expect to find in one room together. Naturally, that last group was my group, and I’d never have it any other way. Every single person in our group was a character in his or her own right, and I loved them all for it. So before I go on, let me once again introduce you to our random and completely awesome cast of characters:

1) Caspar. Oh, Caspar. Caspar wasn’t the kind of guy I would normally have the opportunity to interact with. He had been in jail for ten years during his youth and now had about five children by three different women (I think). Now, though, he had cleaned up his act, worked a regular job, and was dating an eighteen year old. For a guy in his late thirties, Caspar found dating an eighteen year old very frustrating. While his friends constantly made “she’s so young” nappy jokes, his girlfriend constantly made “you’re so old” nappy jokes, and with the amount of kids he already had hanging around, nappies were already a sore subject. Caspar was from Coventry, though he sounded like he was Cockney, and every other word out of his mouth was feckin’ this and feckin’ that. On his way to Australia, Caspar had a stopover in Dubai and still hadn’t gotten over hearing all those feckin’ calls to prayer and all that feckin’ Arab praying shi’ite y’knowhatImean? But for all these things (which really made him the fantastic character he was), Caspar had a hard life and now he was trying to make things better. Traveling is about many things, but one of its purposes is change. Change your life, change who you are, change how you behave. In one way or another, everyone on the road is changing and because of that, I (and most people I met) developed a non-judgmental attitude (unless you really didn’t like someone, and then all bets were off). It didn’t matter what you used to do or the person that you were back home. For now, for traveling, who you are in this moment is okay. For the many things that could have made me not want to associate with Caspar (“You have five young kids back home and you’re traveling Australia for three months?”), I was happy to observe and interact with such a different character and listen to his feckin’ rants. After all, this guy was hilarious.

2) Debs. Debs and Caspar would good friends from back home. Debs needed a change in her life and was currently driving a caravan across Australia to find it. She had invited Caspar out to Australia and they’d been traveling together ever since. I first thought that they were a couple, but our first night camping, Debs insisted that she share a tent with me, and Jess and Lee (who had met Debs earlier in their travels and joined up) insisted that Caspar not come near their tent. Apparently Caspar had been keeping them all up in the caravan for weeks with his snoring. Thus, while everyone else shared a tent with one or two people, Caspar was relegated to a single tent for the duration of the trip. All part of his secret plan, I suppose.

3) Jess. Jess was a down to earth English girl with a fabulous fashion sense (even on a sand island) and the ability and willingness to take care of anyone and everyone. Her accent was incredibly endearing, especially when we’d settle down in camp for the night and she’d fiddle around with the pots, saying, “Awright, let’s get tea on then.” Jess felt like home, even though no one at home ever says stuff like that.

4) Lee was very similar to his girlfriend, Jess. Just a down to earth, great English guy.

5) The Italians. The Italian contingent consisted of Stephania, a hard working single mother, Christian, her son, and Jean-Luca, her brother. Christian was the cutest little boy and only spoke Italian (though he understood more English than he let on). His three favorite hobbies were digging holes all over our camp so that when we’d wake up in the morning, we’d all unzip our tents and step out into an ankle-breaking hole; running around with a cape around his neck crying, “Superman-a! Spiderman-a! Bat-a-man-a!”; and mostly, lying on top of his mother while she tried to sunbathe and blowing raspberries in her butt cheeks. His mother, Stephania, was a kind and friendly woman who spoke minimal English and was obsessed with dingoes, the local Australian dog, famous on Fraser Island for attacking children. Every time we spotted a dingo she would cry, “Dingo! Dingo!” and we’d have to stop the car, pile out and take photos. (After about the fifth time doing this, Caspar complained, “It’s a lot of feckin’ trouble for a feckin’ dog, innit? Well that’s all it bloody feckin’ is, innit? Never taken so many feckin’ pictures of a bloody feckin’ dog.”). If Stephania was obsessed with dingoes, her brother Jean-Luca was obsessed with his video camera. When it was his turn to drive, we couldn’t get more than a hundred feet without him stopping and getting Lee to jump out and film him doing some hardcore all-terrain sand driving.

“Get one of me driving over this freshwater stream!” he’d cry, rev the engine and jolt us all forward. “That one was no good!” he’d decided when he had finished. “Let me do it again!”

(In a gesture of good will, Caspar tried his best to converse with the Italians, but started to speak in that slow, over-enunciated manner that many people use when speaking to non-native speaking peoples as if they are complete idiots. Debs gave him the nickname, “Continental Steve” and whenever he would slip into this voice again, our truck full of English people, North Americans, a German guy and the Italians would shout out, “Continental Steeeeeve”).

6) Skeeter. Skeeter was an incredibly tall and skinny Canadian former McDonald’s manager and semi-retired drag queen, so he alternated between phrases like, “Oh honey, I am such a princess” and “You know, you’re gonna have to cook those sausages before you eat them. Here just let me do it.” Skeeter was caravanning up the coast with the next two guys…

7) Niels and Dan. Niels was from Germany and Dan was from man-chesta. They were young, fun to talk to, and like Jess and Lee, good, down to earth normative characters.

And lastly but not least, there was,

8) Me. A skinny super model Nobel Laureate. Just kidding. You know enough about me. At that point, I was still a pseudo-punk in my early college years.

You’ve all taken disastrous family vacations, right? The kind of vacations where dad won’t pull over to ask for directions, where mom’s lost somewhere beneath ten maps and your five year old brother won’t stop screaming the Power Ranger theme song. They’re the stuff of legends. Now, imagine doing that kind of vacation with seven complete strangers, when the vacation isn’t just any sort of ordinary road trip in any sort of ordinary location, but a four wheel drive camp out on a remote sand island with drivers who are only at the wheel because no one else wanted to drive stick on a remote sand island.

If you think that sounds bad, well, then you’re wrong. Something miraculous happens in semi-stressful situations when everyone is a stranger- you can’t yell at each other (or if you do yell, it has to be subdued). Keeping that in mind, imagine what it was like to bounce across this sand island with not only a bunch of strangers, but a bunch of these strangers, these great, strange characters. Most of it was just plain fun. Fraser Island was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. The beaches are untouched, the night sky bursts with stars and the moon, the ocean is an impossible aqua blue, and when the sun comes up in the morning, it’s as if it’s rising just for you.

Other parts- the navigating, the driving, the rush to set up camp before dark- were just plain stressful. Observing the manifestations of this stress in a group like this was entertaining, to say the least. One night we were late getting to camp because the Italians were busy enjoying life and couldn’t be rushed to get back in the truck. Normally, this might not have been an issue, but on Fraser Island, the only light comes from the moon and your headlights, so driving after dark is very dangerous because you can’t see the sudden rock formations and you can’t tell how high the tide has come up onto the beach (so before you know it, you could puncture a tire or drive straight into the ocean). Thus, getting to camp before dark was very important. Maybe it was the language barrier, maybe it was the cultural barrier, but we just couldn’t get this through the Italians’ heads. To make matters worse, Jean-Luca was driving that day and kept stopping so Stephania could take photos of dingoes and, as the sun dipped lower and lower, to take movies of him driving over streams.

Everyone tried to be polite, but the tension was palpable. Skeeter shouted orders from the back, and I nodded in agreement, glad that someone was taking control. But of course, no one listened to him, and Lee, overwhelmed with the sound of everyone yelling at him, snapped at Jess, who immediately drew back, looked hurt and said, “Awright then, there’s no need to yell.” Poor Caspar couldn’t handle the stress and kept shouting out contradictory orders until finally he lost it and jabbered at a million words per minute, “I don’t know about you mate but I’d like to get to the bloody feckin’ camp before feckin’ pitch dark. I don’t wanna be rude mate but enough with the bloody feckin’ photos it’s getting dark and I don’t wanna be stranded on the feckin’ beach awright mate? Enough bloody feckin’ foolin’ around awright mate? Straight! Go straight! Bloody feckin’ hell!”

Niels, Dan and I sat there silent, bewildered and helpless, and even Christian stopped talking about superman-a. Finally through some divine intervention, we finally found the camp and set up our tents. We fell asleep early (partly because there was no artificial lighting, partly because we were so exhausted from the yelling) and were only awakened when the neighboring Israeli camp started teaching their fellow camp mates Hebrew army drinking songs.

All in all, Fraser Island was a great trip. I forgot my various mood swings and fully enjoyed the people around me. That’s not to say that by the time we left the island, I wasn’t ready for a hot shower, and a warm bed, only one of which I would get that night. Yes, for some stupid (stupid STUPID) reason, I decided that after three nights sleeping on sand and dreaming that a dingo had eaten me alive, I should take the thirteen hour night bus from Hervey Bay to Airlie Beach. Thirteen hours. On a bus. At night.

At this point in my travels, I’d taken plenty of night vehicles- night flights, night trains. You name a distance that takes seven to eighteen hours to cross, and I’ve probably slept through or above it. Discussing night vehicles is like playing one of those “which would you rather” games. Would you rather drown or burn alive? Would you rather fight a bunny with a light saber or an unarmed T-rex? Would you rather ride thirteen hours on a train, a plane, or a bus?

I’ll give you one hint: the answer won’t be bus. Night trains and night flights are bad, but for distinctly different reasons. On night trains, you’re stuck in a smelly, airless berth so small that you can’t even sit and if you get a bad driver, every time you pull into a station, he slams the brakes and you go flying, but at least you get a sheet, can lie down and get to step out into the aisle to stretch your legs. Night flights are awful because you have just as little space as in a tight night train berth, but you have to sit up the whole time. There’s no way to comfortably rest your head so every time you nod off your neck contorts itself into odd positions, the people next to you fall asleep on your shoulder and drool (or, you fall asleep on their shoulders and drool), the person in front of you inevitably immediately pushes their chair all the way back so you have to sit with their head in your lap the entire flight and mostly, there is absolutely no leg room. But, unlike on night trains, the staff serve you adequate meals and if it’s a good airline, the inflight entertainment system is something you definitely want to stay awake for.

Where, then, do night buses rank amongst these two? Far, far, far, far below. Think of all the horrible things I’ve listed about night trains and flights. Now think about all the nice things I’ve said about night trains and flights. Now think about night buses. Night buses have none of the good things and all of the bad. On the night bus, the seats barely reclinethey blare stupid movies and bad music too loudly over the speaker system, everyone smells, there’s no room for your legs in the seat, in the aisle, nor anywhere near you. On the night bus, everyone hates everyone because everyone hates the night bus.

In other words, you’re on a bus. For thirteen hours.

Thirteen hours!

In the hours before boarding the bus, I tried to keep positive. Maybe the bus company would be kind to us and only half book the bus so that we could all get two seats each. After all, it wasn’t like buses were as expensive to run as planes, a bus company could afford to send out half full buses. But of course, the bus was bursting. There wasn’t one empty seat. Worst yet, it was assigned seating and I was not only put in an aisle seat, but also placed right next to an obese woman, so throughout the night I awoke either to her head collapsed and drooling on mine, or my head, wedged inside her stomach, likely drooling as well. As luck would have, the driver was incredibly late, so hour thirteen hit and the bus ride just kept going, and going and going. The thirteen-hour bus ride from hell became the fourteen-hour bus ride from hell, and it was just at the moment where I nearly began throwing things that Airlie Beach finally arrived.

Throughout the entire ride, the only thing that sustained me was the hope of things to come. I’d arrive in Airlie Beach, check into the hostel and go for a long, blissful, cathartic run. Then I’d shower. Then I’d do a laundry. And it’d be amazing. After three nights camping on a dirty sand island, and one long, therapeutic run and shower, it’d be the best laundry I’d ever done.

When the bus finally pulled into Airlie Beach (after fourteen-hours, Julie!), the images of myself running and doing laundry wavered in the near future. I could see them, just out of my reach. I could almost grasp them before they dissipated, a taunting but ever more vivid mirage. The only thing standing in the way between me and my laundry/run were, well, people standing in my way. Oh, how sluggishly people move after a fourteen-hour night bus ride! How long does it really take to find one’s bag, sling it on one’s back and move the hell out? Chip chop, troops! Chip chop! Oh, the incompetence! Everywhere I looked there were backpackers chatting amiably. After a fourteen-hour bus ride. Chat, chat, chat, chat chatchatchatCHATCHAT! How could they CHAT in a world or fourteen-hour bus rides? How could they laugh, and smile and play, in a world where bus rides lasting more than an entire night are allowed to exist without any sort of legislative action? What was WRONG with these people?

After five unnecessary minutes of slothfulness, I couldn’t take it anymore, shoved past a group of idle backpacking vagrants, tossed backpacks off the pile and finally, joyfully (oh, the sweet joy of it!) found my own. I slung my big bag on back, clipped my small bag to my front, and out came good ol’ Big Mama, shoving her way through the crowd and knocking anorexic lightweight Barbie backpackers to the ground (served them right for being so skinny in the first place). Just when I emerged from the crowd I noticed the Canadian girls I had hung out with in Byron Bay. I froze and thought, “Oh crap,” not because I didn’t want to see them, not because I didn’t want to hang out with them at some point, but because I had just endured a FOURTEEN-HOUR NIGHT BUS RIDE. They, too, looked exhausted, but their traveling companions were chipper and wanted to arrange for all of us to stay in a hostel together. Like I said, I couldn’t have given a crap since I had just finished with a FOURTEEN-HOUR NIGHT BUS RIDE, but the friends hemmed and hawed for ages, until finally I snapped and said, “This is the hostel I’m going to, I have to collapse, hope I see you there later, goodbye!” Thus began the theme of me running into the Canadian girls at the most inopportune of moments and sounding like a complete jackass.

But what can I say, I had two simple goals, and I’d knock anyone and everyone out of the way if that meant I was any closer to achieving them. I left the nice Canadian girls in my wake and marched off to Airlie Beach town center, and when I say marched, I mean every single time I lay a foot on the ground, it was with anger, frustration, and fourteen-hours on a bus. I found the hostel in record time, but since it had taken so long for me to gain access to my bag, reception was already packed with backpackers off the bus waiting to check in and since these stupid, stupid, STUPID hostels only ever have one person working at check-in at a time, this meant I had to stand there and wait. And wait. And wait. With all my bags on (there was no space to put them down). After a fourteen-hour night bus ride.

So I did the only thing I could do, the only thing in that moment that could possibly give me any form of comfort. I stood there and I systematically hated everyone I saw. When cute, giggly sorority girls walked by arm in arm, I thought, “Oooooh look at meeee. I’m a giiiiirl, a laughy giiiiirl. I like to laugh. I’m like so happy. Giggle! Giggle giggle! Giggle giggle giggle GIGGLE GIGGLE STUFF IT UP YOUR ASSES GIGGLE BRIGADE! We’re giggly.”

When a fat guy walked by eating an ice cream, I thought, “Ooooh look at me, I’m fat, I like to eeeeeat. I’m so happy eating. I’m the type of guy that would board a night bus, sit behind you and MUNCH IN YOUR EAR. I’m fat.”

When an old guy hobbled by, I thought, “Ooooh look at me, I’m old. I’m going to sit right next to you on a night bus and breathe in your face and smell like an old person. Ooooh I’m old.”

Such was the state of my deteriorated psyche. How could so many people be so happy when we lived in a world of fourteen-hour night bus rides? The bloody fools!

After what seemed like hours of waiting, I finally reached the desk, only to be told I couldn’t check in until later, though I could leave my stuff in storage and wander around until then. Fine, I said, and rushed to the bathroom to change into my running clothes. I changed, dropped my bags off and headed out. I had only meant to go for a jog, but I was so full of pent-up, repressed rage and energy and frustration that all I could do was sprint and sprint and sprint. I sprinted and sprinted until I couldn’t breathe. I walked until I could breathe again and then I sprinted. And sprinted and sprinted and sprinted until I couldn’t breathe. I did this for an hour, all in shoes that aren’t really made for running. By the time I headed back to the hostel for check in, I had thoroughly injured my left ankle, but I didn’t care. Every second of that sprint had been entirely worth it.

The run out of the way, I could now focus on my next two cathartic events- the shower and the laundry. I grabbed my heavy bags, limped back to reception, checked in, limped to my room, slipped the key in the door and (and!)… the handle wouldn’t budge. I tried turning the key first this way, then that way, then every which way, but that sucker wasn’t going to be moving any time soon. So I slung my heavy bags back onto my shoulders, limped back into reception, got a new key, limped back, still couldn’t open the door, limped back to reception and moaned, “I just want to get into my room!” Finally, the reception girl managed to get the door open and I took my wonderful, cathartic shower and let me tell ya, if you’ve never know the joy of a post-fourteen-hour bus ride shower, you’ve never known joy. Oh, the heat, the steam, the water, the soap. It was beautiful. With the shower out of the way, I was free to start my laundry, which I did, only to find that when I returned to my room, the key was once again not working. With all my fresh laundry in my arms, I called for maintenance and waited outside my door for the repairman to show up. And I waited. And I waited. And I goddamn waited, passing the time by absentmindedly itching my festering bed bug wounds. All I wanted now was to fold the laundry and go to sleep. That was it. Not such a lofty dream, right? Not a dream that should take five hours to achieve thanks to a handyman’s annoyance at being interrupted during his late lunch, right?

I snapped. Right then and there in that stinking, filthy, bed bug-infested hostel, something in me broke loose. I threw my laundry bag on the ground, jammed the key back in the lock and twisted. When the lock didn’t budge, I twisted the key the other way. When it still didn’t move, I twisted it back. Then the other way. Then the other way again. I jiggled and forced and I pushed and shoved that lock back and forth and every which way it could go until I was so crazed with desire and longing (oh, that bed! That sweet, wonderful, non-bus seat bed!) that I let loose an Amazonian cry and karate chipped the handle.

The door creaked open. Next to my warlike cries, the room was eerily silent, mocking of my absurd over-exertions. I fell into bed, read, and fell asleep around 9PM.

If you’ve read this blog religiously (thank you again for your loyalty, oh one of you) you know that me falling asleep at an early hour after a sleepless night journey is an extremely dangerous prospect. Every single time I do this, I fall so far into unconsciousness that I’m nearly dead. Then, inevitably, something in my body recognizes midway through the night that I have submerged too low, and thrusts me up from the bottommost layer of unconsciousness, up and up past all the stages that precede it and BOOM! Into the light of consciousness. After traveling such a long distance in such a short amount of time, I am completely disoriented, pumping adrenaline and holding a kung fu stance. (Think of it this way. If you fell into a deep sleep at home and were suddenly awoken by strangers, chances are, you’re probably on the brink of a robbery or a murder. When you’re traveling and have no idea where you are, this assumption only deepens).

Of course, this is indeed what happened. Around 12:30, something startled me awake and I leapt to my knees and drew my body into a defensive kung fu position. My movements startled the German girl on the parallel top bunk across from me so much that she shifted in bed and fixed me with a concerned stare. There were huge spider webs above my bunk that I must have spotted before falling asleep, because my dream had combined nightmares of huge, horrible Australian spiders descending from the ceilings and onto my face (to eat out my BRAINS), while I slept fitfully on Fraser Island. I tried to explain this to the girl across from me, but my brain was still half-unconscious. “THEY’RE COMING!” I whispered urgently, referring to the spiders.

“Who’s coming?” she asked, as disoriented as me. I thought hard about this, but couldn’t come up with an answer. Instead I turned to the subject of Fraser Island.

“IT’S ALL MADE OF SAND!” I whispered again, still urgently. The girl was now more in control of her mental faculties than I was and answered back.

“No, no it’s not.” She rolled over and went back to sleep. I fell back down onto my bed, face first, and slept for ten more hours.

That, my friends, is what happens after fourteen-hours on a bus.

The next morning I woke up late and around midday made my way down to the pier where I met the group of people with whom I would sail on the Whitsundays, a group of islands just off the coast of Queensland. It was mostly grey and rainy for most of the time we sailed but the stunning beauty of the islands shone through the clouds. And over the drunken revelry.

Yeah, that’s right. I’d walked into another drunken claptrap. Another young, backpacker episode of Girls Gone Wild. STD Central. (This is why you should never buy a cheap package deal. The only people that buy them are party minded alcohol-obsessed young backpackers and me. Through that deal, I was placed on this boat, which I found out later was known widely in the tourism community as the crappy party boat. Great.).

Within minutes, It had begun. It with a capital I. The drinking, the flirting, the fast spiral down into young, drunken,