Colour

I’m done. Finished. Finito.

The two boxes I needed ticked are well and truly tickéd.

I entered Australia with the sole intention of trying my hand at sheep shearing and mining. Wool and minerals. Australia’s two main exports The twin backbones of this great nation, true blue Australia (I also worked in services which actually is the largest export ahead of wool and minerals but fuck services, boring, homogenous).

Andamooka, I’ll need to write another post just to paint a picture of the place (put it on the list with Bruny and Young and Sydney and the rest), just let me say the Wild West and you’ll have to imagine it as such until that post comes. A town where the flag gets lowered to half mast whenever someone dies. Where dingos and blue tongues lizards scrap in the desert sands.

I don’t need to rush around every state to try and see it all. I personally prefer to know one place real intimate than to have been to five and remember none… And boy do I know Andamooka well. Like the back of my scarred and dusty hand.

Its open cuts, its shafts. Every inch of this fucking town I’ve scoured for opals; the backyards of abandoned shacks, under discarded washing machines, under discarded cars, along the sides of roads, underground and above.
And have I been rewarded?
No. Is the simple answer.

I have not made my fortune. I cannot buy myself a silky sleeping bag liner to hold me at night let alone a yacht full of strippers… That’s not to say I haven’t made money, I have. It’s just more along the lines of a cold beer every day as opposed to shouting a round for the whole town and washing my filthy self down in Dom Perignon. No. Though I’ve had a taste of Daniel Plainview’s life it’s been the part before he finds any oil and drinks people’s milkshakes.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

what is it?

“opal is a form of silica, chemically similar to quartz, but containing water within the mineral structure. Precious opal generally contains 3-10% water which acts as prisms, refracting the light and producing the characteristic “colour””

This opal is found at a level between 3 and 10 metres down, a former seabed a couple of million years ago. Though that’s horse as there are often two levels in one place and hills make finding the level a good deal more difficult than “between 3 and 10”. The water is trapped in cracked rocks, fossils, dead plants and clay, left for a few million years and the trapped water reflects light in all the Richard Of York beauty.
In the rocks it forms normal standard opal, crack it open with the pick and you’re rewarded either with beautiful crystal opal ($$$) or potch, potch is opal, just not pretty or copious enough to sell, it consists of mainly one colour instead of the spectrum and is often in thin veins in the rock. This is the majority of what I find.

However Andamooka is unique in that the opal is not only in the rock, but has leeched into clay as well. This is called matrix and is a different kettle of fish.

The matrix is clay containing opal, when dry it looks exactly the same as clay, white and porous, making it pretty difficult to identify, especially when it’s hidden inside a mountain of white porous clay. When wet however… When wet it also looks just like clay, until the sun hits it at THE perfect angle then you see the teensiest tinyiest play of colour, the smallest glint of green or red flashing as the sun shines over your shoulder. Always over the shoulder. “You can’t see a rainbow by stating at the sun” as my partner often informed me.

Take your clay and boil it in sugar water or cola then boil it in pure (98%) sulphuric acid. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
This turns the sugar into.. Carbon? I think, not sure. It makes it black anyway. The colour now stands out like nothing you have ever seen. I prefer it to crystal, the pure stuff, by a long shot.
This particular trick is unique to Andamooka and was slyly employed in the 80s to fool buyers into thinking they were purchasing the rare black crystal opal from NSW. Someone found out, people got in big trouble, but the process remains as a way to highlight the colour play.
I found the matrix but getting the acid is proving more difficult as shitty biscuits state government requires to jump through all sorts of loops to buy an transport it. Also 20 litres weighs what felt like genuinely at least 100kg and I’m not in the mood for carrying that in my backpack. Boiling it requires both incredible stupidity and the ability to replace anything the fumes touch… Tent, clothes, skin, lips, the lot.

Red colours in opal are the least commonly seen and command the highest prices, blue vice versa.

how do I get it?

There at two, no three ways to get opal: buy it, mine it or noodle. I’ve done the latter two (though I’ve been tempted to chuck everything in and just pay for it often enough).

Mining involves either working with a partner, as I have, or going alone and buying a lease. The lease lasts for a year and consists of four white posts in the ground, 100ft by 100ft, I think. Nobody else can use this ground, however keep your damn mouth shut boy or else the whole town will buy leases surrounding yours. Not because they think you’re onto something and want to snoop around, oh no. Overburden is the ten metres or so of dirt you have to remove to get to the opal, no matter I it’s tunnels or open cut the dirt has to go somewhere. If you have leases surrounding yours, you have nowhere to put the overburden without it falling onto other leases. This means you can’t dig. People sit around each other’s claims for years without digging, in a stalemate, however you have to be at your mine for a certain number of days a month to keep your lease, all this means is that the men drive out to the lease (or normally get someone else to) and then drive back, as all that the wardens look for is tire marks.

I should really say now that nobody seemed to want anyone else to succeed, in fact quite the opposite. If any one asks if you’ve found any opal, the clever thing to say is “what’s opal?” It’s a pretty dangerous atmosphere, to not get sidetracked Andamooka is a lawless community, self governed, that consists of East Europeans with vast amounts of Gelignite; it has a history of murder and sabotage more colourful than the opal. Though nothing is more colourful than opal. It doesn’t help that the town is essentially dry, nothing more is coming out the ground, the heyday is over, gone, no more good times.

The “level” is the line of seabed where the opal is hidden. You can dig shafts down to the level and then tunnel along when you find it, alternatively you can mine open cut, where you excavate down to the level with bulldozers and work along it with picks. These are the two options for the miner. Open cut is easier and safer, if more costly in terms of machinery; bobcat parts, diesel, picks etc… Tunnels are more fun.

It’s also worth saying that unlike most mining, opal mining is individual, a sole undertaking by only one or two people. For example the BHP mine next to Andamooka (2 hours away) is run by one of the larger companies on earth. They use planes and sonar to sound the ground and identify gold and uranium and whatever else they’ve got under there. With opals the only way to find it is dig, and digging with no real hope of finding anything is a job nobody would ever take a wage for. The people of Andamooka find the opal, cut it polish it and sell it, or try to sell it.

Noodling is pretty much just walking around and looking for opal on the ground. It’s both easier and harder than it sounds. Some of Andamooka’s most beautiful finds were from tourists walking down the high street and seeing a flash of colour on the red dirt road. I did… Okay with it but not laughing naked in a bed of plastic Australian dollars okay.

The whole town is a mine, houses are built ontop of, and often in, the honeycomb of tunnels and cuts. The great piles of earth removed by the bulldozers to make land for dwellings contain most of the actual level, leaving finding opal merely a matter of walking across the right mountain of sandstone or through the right back garden and the sun catching the colour. The matrix in particular is a common find within the town as opposed to the mines as before 20 years ago, miners had no idea what to do with it, so they simply threw it away. I found this mostly outside the windows of old miner’s houses.

But noodling isn’t mining, it’s a tourist thing and I was determined not to be a tourist. So I waited for Lance. I met Lance in Bruny Island. Just south of Tasmania. He had made a 2 metre tall flouting buoy with a ladder on one side and a trampoline on top, anchored maybe 100 metres out at sea it was the perfect instrument to turn my bellyflop into a dive. I used then went to thank the man who made it. The house was identified by the makeshift wind vanes, slides, parts of aeroplane on the roof and just general Dickensian Australiana beauty of the place. I met Lance, we talked about opals and he invited me to Andamooka when the weather was bearable (below 50C).

5 or 6 month later, true to our words we meet and talk for an hour before donning hardhats, boiler suits and fetching the rope ladder. Lance has a white Range Rover from the 80s, he’s cut the back off it and turned it into the longest ute you have ever seen. He had a friend who bought the extra extended long wheelbase Range Rover from UAE, the longest Range Rover you can buy; Lance’s was more than a metre longer. It’s the car of my dreams.

If I start to write about the tunnels I won’t stop, but, I need to write about them.

We go down old tunnels looking for pillars the old miners left for roof support, we destroy the pillars to see if they’ve missed any opal. Going down old tunnels also helps when looking for slips in the earth, faults. These faults can be followed onto imminent ground for Lance to buy his lease when I leave.

So we drive up to either lunatic or tea tree (some of the opal fields) lift the rusted tin sheets off the hole and look down, the way you look down off the top of a cliff, pursed lips and pulse thumping. After we were down Lance says he’s surprised I did it in the first place, most would of chickened, I didn’t tell him how I close I was to not going down, or how scared I was looking down the shaft, or how my first attempt to get onto the steel pole placed across the hole which holds the rope ladder nearly made physically sick. It’s a long way down. On a 10 year old homemade rope ladder that swings and flexes with every step, in a tunnel that had been left for 40 years, down into dust and darkness. Past the zone where the air turns from fresh to stale. It’s been five minutes, you’re still climbing. You pass nests full of dead birds, Lance shouts up that sometimes you’ll find a pissed off snake at the bottom that fell down and hasn’t eaten for days. You’re still climbing down, take a break and rest your back against the crumbling wall of the tunnel. You can’t see shit. Keep climbing down. It’s maybe 10 degrees higher than the above ground temperature if the tunnel doesn’t hit another tunnel with an open shaft, if the tunnel is a nice tunnel it meets another shaft and the air flows through, these are 20 degrees below above ground temperature, fly free and gorgeous. You hit the ground, the underground. It is. The best.

I can’t describe the vibe I get 15 metres below. The pitch, true darkness that only gets lighter when you close your eyes. The silence, not just absence of noise but sheer denial of it, it’s crude to talk, the atmosphere of an empty church still lit by candle but carved by pickaxe. The smell of dust and damp and weight and fear. Something beyond sense. The feeling I get when I’m underwater, lying on my back and blowing bubble rings at the surface, surrounded and confined and unable to breath properly, like drinking or dreaming going underground is a true loss of control. When you stand in your garden there is the one single assurance that the sky will not fall down and crush you before you realise what’s happening. Lance comforted me by saying “there’s no quicker death”… Thanks Lance.

The first thing you do is check the walls for cracks, these mean the tunnels is unstable, the tons of sand above are a shifting away and wanting nothing more than to slump and crush and bury. To Lance it means hit the crack with the pick as that’s where the opal hides. I don’t argue with Lance. The next thing is to light a candle, though a head torch is brighter it can’t tell you if the air is running out, or where the exit is when you get lost; and you will get lost. Oh you’ll get lost.

Your body will keep you breathing automatically, the candle will go out if the air gets used up, all that remains is to find the level and chip away, all day all night. Lying on your back in a two foot high tunnel, packed so tight you’re only reminder that you are looking up is the dust and rock drifting down onto your straining eyes. Nothing exists aside from that line of rock that may possibly hold your fortune. In itself opal mining is dissociative, meditive, transient kinda work: coupled with the atmosphere of beneath ground and you quickly forget planet earth. Forget food or friends or day or night or politics or sun or sex or iPhones or humans or life. You forget yourself…. It’s bliss.

It’s too hot for overalls but you emerge from the shaft to find the sparks from the pick have burnt holes in your shorts and fragments of flying rocks have cut you to ribbons. You can be wiping your sticky blood off the rock time and time again without realising you’ve been cut because the red blood isn’t red crystal opal. So I t doesn’t exist.

Nothing matters and nobody cares. It’s not escapism it’s oblivion. It’s what I like about camping and lifts and hiding in car boots and good books.

Then you see colour and your. Brain. Just. Goes.

what the FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUIUUIIIIARGHWHAT

for 4 hours or years or months or forever you’ve seen white and only white, constantly seeking for the tiniest flash of blue or yellow. Then a rainbow jumps out and kicks in your fucking head.

Before the air or dust gets to it the opal is at the hight of its beauty, the zenith of natural magnificence and splendour. Polished and cut under jewellery shop lights it will look like rusty dog food in comparison to the first time it’s exposed under shaking torchlight. Blues and greens and reds. That’s the one I found. Tiny, near worthless. But if I have a kid they will never match the beauty of that one tiny stone.

then what?

You try and sell it.

Nobody wants to know. Even if it’s the nicest piece they’ve ever seen. Supply is rich and demand is scarce. All the miners are sitting on rings and necklaces and boulders and pendants and buckets of matrix. Nobody wants to buy it. No tourists go to Andamooka, it doesn’t matter if you can set it your self and polish it an cut it yourself if you have nobody to sell it to.

I sold some and then kept the nicest bit I found to turn into a ring for myself, in Adelaide I had the stone cut in half and the half of it paid for the stone to be cut polished and “tripleted” (placing the stone on a black glass backing with a glass some on top to magnify the colours. It’s green and blue, slightly like my eyes I noticed as I examined it nightly in my tent, but turn it just slightly and red will… It’s nice.

Getting the stone set into a ring is the next ripoff but what can you do?

OPAL MINING: TEN OUT OF TEN

But leaving town was the most difficult thing I’ve done in a good while.

Far North Tropical Queensland

I’m writing this to distract myself from the storm. Last time a cyclone hit North Queensland, it nearly crushed my tent and I was camping in New Zealand. This is true but it’s not going to get me to sleep, the winds also make the already stupid candlelight reading an impossibility, though the howling gusts have stopped the Mosquitos from coming through the holes in my tent, ill stuffed with socks, and it should also be praised for blowing away the stenches of piss and French onion soup that are the last camp followers present after I drink alone.

I will say that though it seems I’ve fallen for camping in a big way, Queensland’s not the state for it. The humidity has begun to rot the outer shell after one week. After braving the snow off the southern alps, having to scrape the salt off the walls after gales from the Tasman sea, the time I left it on a radiator and it caught afire or even the simple fact it was only about £20; I fear the wet air of the sunshine state will murder my sweet tent… If we survive this storm.

Just to allay your fears mother by now I may have run from or been told to leave the local park and gone to camp ground. I have a cash in hand job potwashing until the man from Adelaide sends me my opal. So by now I’ve probably grown tired and bloody of all the pests below and gone to some $20 a night dorm. Also I think the candle wax in my phone is working its way through the innards. Email is down, the charger won’t go into walls anymore the headphones don’t work, home button’s long dead and the wax is under the screen in different patterns everytime it gets warm and cool again: I had the brainwave of standing it upright and leaving it in the sun so now I can see most of the top half of the screen. Sorry Rhian, it survived jetski storm, waterfall, toilets, vomit and snow but I fear a candle is crippling it. I’ll try and find a “cyber bar” to skype with you next week. It seems to be playing silly buggers. In lieu of skype.

“Hey mum, how are you and dad and Rhian and the cats, my fish? Still dead?! Norwich look nice? England faring well? What’s all this UKIP shit I keep hearing about, the Australians are laughing at you guys… Can’t wIt to see you all again, I’m eating well and am happy and my skin has yet to peel an reveal the English boy beneath. I want nothing for my birthday save for cake when I return in August… Icing AND the cheesecake biscuity base you know I love? Is that possible? If not then shop bought hungry caterpillar will more than suffice. MUCH LOVE”

Camping in the park: I’d camp in the jungle but the water ain’t so good, the park is essentially just a section of rainforest left uncleared anyway, true rainforest at that, not the temperate forests of Taz or New Zealand. There are no winters or summers here, only wet and dry, currently it’s wet season, very wet season.

foes

The ants are not much company. The small black ones with a red head are standard fare garden biting ants. The lime green electric ants are something else, they want to get under my skin, watching one on my shin it was biting and then trying to slide into the bite, pulling herself down and along with the legs, failing, then biting again.

In the outback the ants were more than an inch long and the millipedes at least 10, but they were visible. I had both in my tent and during the pre-read check with the torch you can weedle them out of the corners and smash the fucking carapaces to dust with Game of Thrones. I can’t see the smaller ants, so I rise most nights in sharp pain to punch and slap the darkness and return to troubled sleep.

There are… Spiders. They look like spiders, almost. Maybe more like a prawn, small and see through, maybe an inch or two long but only a cm wide. They scare me the least… Since the huntsmen of Liffey no spider can scare me. That’s not to say they are friends as if they bite me I will die. However my longest and deepest phobia has been usurped by others.

Principally crocodiles. Not fun ticking crocodiles or crocodiles that hunt mice on the bayou or crocodiles that guard mad lion kings from foxes in green doublets. Not Disney crocodiles. Crocodiles that will bite me and break my back as I try to unzip my tent. 7 metre long crocodiles that will drag my tent with me inside it down to the ever present mangrove swamps to drown me. I have seen a crocodile in the wild and it was was nothing like a bird or a reptile or a snake or a lizard. It was just teeth. The first night of camping here I had a near panic attack and fled my tent to the nearest hostel wearing only my PJ bottoms, white knuckles clutching my wallet. I may have been reading too much Game of Thrones or maybe had too much time on my hands waiting for these shyster opal jewellers or mayhaps it was the price of that night in the hostel… But the day after I returned to my abandoned camp and set to work fencing and staking, using the Bowie knife to fashion countless stakes to ring my perimeter. I started ditching as well but my blisters and calluses from mining have reopened and they really hate the salt water swim that is my shower. I can sleep with a staked enclosure. Not soundly. But I can sleep.

Silverfish, my sworn foes. I don’t know much about them but I think they’ve been drinking blood from my neck, because there are no Mozzy bites. We shall see.

The park rangers. They grow more suspicious every day. I know they’ve found all my baked bean tins in the bins and gone out looking for my camp, I doubt they’ll find it. I should put a warning up about the stakes but then that’s proof. Maybe they’ll let me stay in appreciation of my fortifications, instead of the more likely hefty fine I have avoided thus far. I leave no trace, I only cut an burn dead wood. Why they so mad?

The town of Port Douglas is itself my enemy. A tourist trap of cheap jewellery and digery… Didgereedoos? Dijere, didgeridoos. I have yet to met anyone who lives here, there are hotels and empty holiday homes and why go to the beach when the palm resort had the second largest pool in the Southern Hemisphere and why look at the parrots when you can buy plush toys of them for your mewling chubby children.

The Mosquitos you can’t imagine. I bleed. I swear in the mornings I feel faint from loss of blood. Yet the toe curling pleasure of scratching them raw has been denied me by those I met in Sydney who had been bitten in Queensland and scratched them. Permanent scars. I already have some on my ankle from jack jumpers in Tasmania (really shitty ants), I don’t need any more scars.
dengue fever is also imminent unless I slink back to a hostel. Though at this terminus of most traveller’s journey from Sydney up North through 4000km of East coast party hostels and nightclubs I’m more likely to catch something in a dorm room.

my friends

The bats, AKA the flying fox all stars. I’ve seen bats to make me stand awestruck in Sydney, as they obscure the setting Sydney sun on their way back to roost in the botanic gardens, but it was the scale, the multitude rather than the size that impressed. These tropical ones are… I’m not even sure they’re even bats. The locals call them flying foxes and they must be bigger than the biggest fruit bats. I thought they were just really large bats flying curiously low; Then one actually flew low.
I can’t describe.
I could say the wingspan must be at least a metre and a half, that they bend palm trees when they roost in them. That they could easily kill me on my long walk across the fields behind the beach to tree-line where I camp. That when they walk on the ground on winged arm and hairy feet the leather bound elbows rise above their heads like hinges of some nightmare clockwork spider.
But they just watch.
At night they warn me of people coming near, drunks in the park or rangers maybe, they climb down the trunks of the palms, tiny hands clasping the bark like a monkeys, brown fingers with tiny peanut knuckles. The bats won’t take my bread but they appreciate the offer, well they have yet to drag me screaming out of my tent so I like them.

The parrots are my friends only in that I have as many foes that I need to court the favour of these preening fools. They squawk and scream all damn night but are constantly beautiful and have a pleasing habit of causing you to look up when normally you wouldn’t. Parrots let you notice rainbows and sunsets and other things that most miss for their shoes, papers and phones.

uncertain allegiance

The Jelly fish have yet to make an appearance. Foreshadowed all along the coast with bottles of vinegar hanging from every warning sign I do not know how to complacent to be now the nets are down. Some locals still won’t swim in water.

The crabs. Tomorrow I will catch one of the monster black crabs that hide in the rocks on the headland and cook it. Then we will see if I’m still scared of them or if they’re more scared of me.

Review: Jetboil Zip

I’ve done some other reviews, one for an emotional Spanish language film about Columbian drug mules called Maria full of grace (don’t swallow grapes kids) and one for the new Robocop (which I enjoyed far too much). But I didn’t post them and they got deleted to leave space on my sister’s phone to take photos of rainforests. Oooooooh, so lush and green.

The rain that must come along with the forest has confined me to my tent for the second day. I took a funny picture of me in said tent but have nobody to show it to.

But to the JETBOIL. JETBOIL. I’ve tried to use my shmexy little black camp-stove in the tent before and though I slept well I suspect the fumes to be detrimental to my health. So due to the rains it was cold beans for breakfast and two tins of cold rice pudding for dinner with not much to do betwixt them, aside from penning this review for my jetboil. But first; who is this fabled ser Jet of Boil I speak of?

technical specifications

It’s like a stove… But more like a little kettle, that runs on butane… No that’s not it.
He boils the water. He is my little water boiler. The “jet” prefix relates to the time it takes to heat up your cuppa, the speed being: pretty nifty. Like a jet. Imagine a jet engine; fire, turbines, hot chocolate, exactly. Maybe one minute, if that. But now we musk ask ourselves, is the mythical sub-minute boil… Too short?

To explain. With a kettle you know you have a good two three minutes to think about Dolly Parton and tree snakes and who makes trains and what blind people fear before the water’s a bubblin. You start to drift away with the jetboil however and dark in incestuous warlock magic that powers the fire means that the mug is boiling over already, spurting boiling hot chocolate over your fingers as you attempt to kill the beast, scalding your delicate crotch as pink and purple gas flares singe your eyebrows (true story). So after that you watch it like hawk, and if there’s one saying that has a semblance of truth in this crazy world it’s that a watched kettle takes fucking years to boil.

But what does it look like?

It resembles a small black mug with a plastic lid. Take off the lid and inside the tripod, burner, pan stand, matches and butane tank are stored. Take em all out, put em back together and you have a little camp stove. Lego fun for the child in you, the ability to cook noodles for the big strong manly man. Fill the mug with water or beans or stew or don’t use the mug and fry some bacon or cheese or whatever the hell is on the turn at the supermarket. I’ve turned it from a hard boiled Easter egg machine, cracking one out every two minutes to a coca cola burner to try and carbonise some opal; it’s uses are many and varied. MANIFOLD. It boils things, quickly. The little lid has tiny holes in it so after your pasta is ready you can simply tip the whole thing upside down which will either drain out the water OR make the lid fly off and vomit all your penne and sauce into a steaming basil scented mud-puddle around your trembling sorry feet. STILL GOOD!

But what does it really look like?

Sexual. If the batmobile was a gas cooker full of steaming rolled oats. It’s the closest thing to Michelle Pfeiffer that most of my generation have ever seen. LEATHER. It’s all black and metallic and assembling it kinda feels like you’re putting together the pieces of something manly, like a gun, to murder someone with.

But will it get me girls?

I’m not saying the all powerful jetboil zip has seduced a girl into to sleeping with me… But that is essentially what I am saying. That did actually happen.
This is maybe more to do with a four day power cut meaning me and my mighty jetboil were the envy and providence of a starving, sallow faced hostel populace, unable to function without wifi or microwaves. But I believe that the dangerously arrogant yet playful aesthetics of the unrivalled jetboil zip had a hand in the union, as did, apparently, the way I peel a hard boiled egg… But no accounting for taste eh?

But what to cook Joe?

Recipe #1

Honeycomb off tree. Rum. Rolled oats. Boil.

Recipe #2

Blackberries from side of busy road. Rainwater. Rolled oats. Boil.

Recipe #3

FUCKING BAKED BEANZ TIME!!!!!
BEANZ BEANZ BEANZ
BEANZ MEANZ MOAR BEANZ
CRABBE AND BOILLLLLL

Recipe #4

Saltwater from the sea. Cous cous. Boil.

Recipe #5

Rolled oats. Boil then lightly burn for varied consistency.

So… With all ‘o’ dem recipes the limit is your imaginations!!! The proof really is in the porridge. Just don’t try to cook anything that burns easily. Kim Jung-boil only really has two temperature settings: jetboil and off…. Cooking meat with the jetboil is possible, if you like your steak either jetboiled or raw…. But better than public BBQs that everyone pisses on eh?

Intersting. Do you have any sad jetboil stories Joe?

Well as it happens… I first saw a jetboil summer (sth hemis) 2014, on the tent strewn shores of Lake St Claire in the great Tasmanian Wilderness (great start, story goes downhill from here). It was being wielded by a young, hippyish chemist grad from Melbourne, cycling round Tasmania with his long red hair, red beard and jetboil in tow. That night he cooked me some pasta in this strange apparatus and then we had oats with rum. He instructed me on the basics of making liquor (something I’ve always wanted to explore since the cider worked so well. Apparently the key is with tomato paste)… Well the next night we ate something different, I’d run out of my own food 3 days previous in the mountains, but this time he let me attempt to tame the Jetboil myself, it overboiled of course, this was in my green days, before I learnt to master the gentle caress of the controls that really set apart the jetboil men from the boys. But I’ll always remember him saying “this instant mash is so good with cheese, I’ll tell my mum” but more importantly, when I apologised for over jetting the jetboil he said “don’t worry… You can’t hurt it”, with a sorrowful glint in his eye. That very same night, whilst being pestered by a possum, I realised that I couldn’t hurt it, we all need camping appliances that can hurt us more than we can hurt them, this is the jetboil. But I saw beyond that too, for all the jetboil’s hardness and tough hide, if it were but more human and loveable, less distant and utilitarian: it would be the greatest friend you’d ever know. This was the reason for the cycling chemist’s sorrow.
The cyclist gave me a book of the most hauntingly beautiful and prescient short stories by… Someone de la… Not sure, shit. He wrote his name in the cover and told me if I ever stayed in Melbourne to live in his beachfront house in St Kilda so I could learn the finer points of moonshine. I gave him the man who was Tuesday… Or Thursday. My memory lapses. Either way he cycled off into the middle distance, I didn’t have any tent pegs so he had weighted the corners of my tent down with rocks and left me a cigarette, I never had a chance to thank him.
Months passed and I eventually found myself in Melbourne and so looked for the young man’s name: to no avail. I had lent the book to some also forgotten girl in Hobart along with the name inside. So it lies to the jetboil I purchased on the cheap, to carry on in perpetuity the memory of Aiden… Something or other.
True story.

yeah… Great. What do you give it out of ten though?

10 CANZ OF BEANZ

Adelaide

I’m leaving Adelaide on greyhound, drunk on free wine and blushing after Mercedes’ kiss on the cheek. Mercedes is her work name.

What a city.

Everytime I veer slightly from the hashtagged, beer ponged path of the traditional backpacker I’m rewarded. Forget Melbourne. Forget the East Coast. Adelaide is a hidden gem and I hate hate hate that phrase.

After twelve hours in Christchurch airport and nineteen in Melbourne airport I arrive in sunny South Australia. The festival state, though I’ve missed the festivals. It’s Friday and I’ve three days to play with before the ten hour bus to Roxby Downs, then to Andamooka and then, hopefully, to my fortune in the opal fields.

Unfortunately there was a festival in town, tasting Australia, where for a paltry $3 one can buy an empty glass and walk around a field tasting sweet reds and dry whites and fancy roses from the Barossa valley and claret and cider and beer and candied honey from Kangaroo Island and oysters from the Eyre peninsula. I reused my glass every day. This is unfortunate because I can’t remember much of anything this weekend aside from the fact that I love Adelaide.

REASONS

Everybody knows everybody.

I had a greenstone from Hokitika NZ I wanted turned into a pendant. The leather string was free from the girls at spotlight, they recommended me to a jewellers who provided me a free parrot clasp who sent me to the “bodybuilder”. A hulking watchmaker hunched over cogs too small to see, he tied the knot at the back.

The girls at spotlight (haberdashers (I think that’s the right word)) gave me a discount on crochet hooks and yarn, the city wide free wifi let me sit in one of the many secluded parks perfecting my chains.

The library.

As I travel around Australia and New Zealand I’ve been reviewing each and every library I visit. Though I normally love libraries the visits have increased more than usual as the library is the refuge of the stinking backpacker; free wifi, silence, maps and comfy seats.

Now the state library of Victoria takes some beating; Ned Kelly’s tank suit, every scrap of history relating to anything interesting Australia wise, xboxs’ and gamecubes. Launceston library in Tassy had the prettiest librarians, Sydney had the most comics, Christchurch let me pretty much live there for ten days.

But Adelaide library. As libraries go, they don’t get much better. The tech lab contained no less than 3 3D printers and 3D printer guns… A 3D printer, mum, is a printer that forms hot plastic to create an object: kayaks, sculptures, pistols that fire. Anything. I created a ring with Adelaide inscribed on it, the librarian used a calliper to measure my finger, they then printed it and have it to me, gratis.

The high street.

Every day it was another spectacle. African mask making and dance lessons, football training, $3 for as much wine as it takes to make you partake in the African dancing.

The people.

Friendly bordering on the point of too friendly, which is just right. A conversation with a complete stranger is never more than ten meters away wherever you are in Adelaide. I’ve met such an assortment of interesting characters I could write a sequel to Nicholas Nickelby and then some.

I’ve just been kissed and waved onto the bus by Mercedes, a member of the oldest profession who I met half an hour ago while tasting a particularly fine Pinot Grigio for the fiftieth time. She’s from Cambridgeshire originally and a month younger than me… Like all Australians, she’s fantastic. Talkative, friendly, desperately self assured.

When I tell the friendliest people on earth that I’m off to Andamooka, usually in a food court when I’ve drunk too much, they do one of two things.

a. Urge me not to go, or at least go bearing arms or a knife “it’s the Wild West” “you don’t understand” “it’s diferent. Out there.”

b. Laugh at the baby face freckled English boy and ask where I’m really going…. Return to a.

But I’m on the bus now, it drops me off at one in the morning at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere, irradiated desert from nuclear tests on one side and not much else on the other. Riches ahead and underground. I hope.

Generalised Zealand

Kia Ora.
I tried to cover the Land of the Long White Cloud as a diary, made it halfway fore it blew away in a cyclone (the power was out for four days, I write this blog on my sister’s phone and after I lost momentum n gave right up). I also met a succsession of pretty girls and even prettier mountains that served to sidetrack me. I’m not even sure the purpose of the blog, nor the interests of the reader, are geared towards personal details of what I’m doing and thinking… Generalised observations of faraway places are instead what’s on offer.

New Zealand. Atearoa. (all spellings are guessed at (pronounce every vowel when speaking Maori))

I’m not going to say “10 out 10” or “top banana” or even “11 out of 10”; rather to fair NZ I say… 9:1 in exchange of 1:9.

Simply put, I’d rather of spent 9 months in New Zealand and 1 in Australia. I don’t regret that it’s the other way round, I don’t regret much in fact I’d go as far as saying I don’t regret anything. But it would’ve made life so much easier.

In defense of Australia there is far far more to see here than in New Zealand, it’s just the distances between the experiences that’s the humdinger.

From where I am now in Oz (Andamooka) it’s a 5 hour, $150, coach journey to leave the desert, another 5 hours will take you to the nearest city. Fair dinkum, to Australians that’s a short drive. But in New Zealand Every 30 minutes would reward you with another spectacle of nature (not that red dust isn’t interesting it just loses its interest and quickly). A 5 hour drive in New Zealand would take you through; alps, glaciers, volcanoes, grass-plains, lakes, sounds, stony beaches, sandy beaches, dolphins and more. One day the sun will blind but the next you’ll be fighting hard to keep the snow out of your tent.

New Zealand is god’s gift to travellers. Small, compact yet varied, with postcard photo opportunities at every turn. Hitchhiking is second nature and half the time you won’t even have to bother raising that thumb and painting on that smile before someone stops. Every village has a hostel and a log fire. National Park car parks with Nissan Sunnys packed full of German blondes are a guaranteed sight and camping is pretty much allowed wherever there is no private property, though the DOC huts are so cheap and well located there’s no reason anyone who visits the country shouldn’t frequent them. I recommend Brewster for the views and White Horse for the walks.

It’s not perfect. There are, like Australia, a shize ton of Germans, but that’s okay after you get used to the fact English is the second language of every hostel and campground. They cook good apple cake; more importantly they share said apple cake.

The cities, though all “funky” and distinct, are often small and lack the beauty of Sydney or the pull of European cities.

Culturally sure the Maoris have come out of colonisation infinately better than the Aboriginals, infinitley (it seems auto-correct spelling has given up today), but the culture/tourism seems tacky at best. Gives perhaps a shadow of the beauty of what their culture must’ve been. It’s clear there are also real problems with alcholism and the terror raid debacle still seemed to really REALLY cause grievances with Maoris I spoke to. On an unrelated note Maori TV is the best station in New Zealand.

Wildlife in New Zealand is comically absent compared to the Zoo across the “ditch” that is Australia. Though on the other hand, not much can kill you while you’re swimming, or asleep, or gardening; which always a positive.

So if it’s not the animals or the Ayrans or the hangis or the fauna that attract… What makes New Zealand so magical?

The Geology. The land the earth the… y’know. The place. Not what’s on it or in it or what the cafe culture’s like in Wellington or where you can rent a jet-ski on a sunday in March.
It’s the hills. The thermal pools and gently smoking calderas, puffing bouts of yellow sulphur smoke into the azure sky. I never really liked geography at school but I appreciate a good vista as much as the next human being. The snow capped Southern Alps left me breathless. Genuinely. I spent one month in a state of constant awe.

Sudden downpours, lightning storms, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and my first cyclone (Ita she were named). The smell of sulphur and the taste of glacier water. These things are all present and correct in Australia, probably, but within a half hour drive? Perhaps in Australia the beauty is increased by the distance between great sights, so far though the inaccessability of places in Oz like the Flinders ranges means the average backpacker will never get to see them.

I’m happy that in my month in NZ that I saw everything I wanted to and more, the country redifined my conception of natural beauty but also the power of nature.

Fuck it.

NEW ZEALAND 10 OUT 10!