10 things I have learnt while travelling for your own use, amusement or disgust.

1. Travel with people.

People, eh? Aren’t they marvellous? They’re always saying something or doing something or thinking something or thinking the opposite of what they’re saying or looking at you strangely. And they’re always there too, which is wonderful. They fill time with their beautiful making jokes and having ideas and pointing out wildlife and keeping you company.

I loved travelling with a gang of people in America, a tribe full of in jokes and sitting too close to each other on a small bus, merrily thigh rubbing and thigh slapping our way across the states. Nothing beats sentences that start ‘remember when…’and end with a life changing anecdote that only you and a few others remember, thus alienating everyone else around you. The greatest memories are shared.

 Additionally of course, having a friend means never having to say ‘I’m sorry- would you mind taking a picture of me in front of this?’

2. Don’t travel with people.

Oh, God, people, eh? Aren’t they tedious? They have the same irritating verbal tics, the temerity to retain the same face EVERY SINGLE BLOODY DAY and on top of all that, they never have the same threshold of amusement as you when wandering aimlessly round a maritime museum.

That’s the trouble with people. They’re just not similar enough to you-by which I mean they’re just not similar enough to me.  They never have the same amount of money, or sense of adventure as you. They’ll always be THAT conversation where you say you ‘honestly don’t mind’ a lot to each other in a clever ruse to cover the fact there’s an awful lot of minding going on.

On your own, you’re a free agent. You’re James Bond. Even if your Martini is neither shaken nor stirred and in fact contains no alcohol because it’s past 9:30 and you can’t be too careful. It’s O.K. Be a loser. There’s no one there to say the actual word to you. No one to take evidence.

Sure, if you’re with a friend you’ll never have to kill time. But you’ll also never have to kill them.

3. Do things that scare you

I was just a bit scared coming out here. What with all the things that can kill you and the having to find a job in a strange city and not knowing anyone and all. I don’t want to call it brave, what I’ve done, but I’ll call it ballsy, mainly because it’s a phrase that needs to be liberated from being used solely in the descriptions of female TV presenters. I am ballsy. Ballsy and proud! I’ll stop now.

The truth is, that most of the things that scared me were merely administrative and organisational nightmares disguised as monsters. There’s few new scary, exciting things I’ve had to do as part of this trip that haven’t ultimately been solved by me filling in a form or making a phonecall, or looking up something, or reading a map, or being on time. If you imagine most of your travelling alone fears can be reduced to bureaucracy, your only excuse for not confronting them is laziness.

Or not having a pen.

4. Nutella, when mixed into milk, does not make a cool milkshake.

I’m sorry about this one. It doesn’t work. But by all means try it for yourself if you want to experience acute disappointment in real time.

5. Ignore other people’s advice (Unless you agree with it)

There’s a lot of choice with travelling, but luckily there’s also an equal number of people wanting to foist their own version of events on you. A wise girl called Fiona once told me that people don’t actually want advice about anything; they just want to hear what they already think repeated back to them. You might think this renders all advice useless, but it doesn’t. What you’re looking for is that little stab of annoyance or self satisfied smugness after someone says ‘make sure you go to X’ or ‘you must see y’ or ‘you should probably try and be there for AT LEAST 4 DAYS if you want to see the REAL Z’

Ask yourself, are you ultimately pissed off at the person for upsetting your plans, or grateful that their suggestion fits in with what you’ve already surmised and thought out for yourself? If it’s the former, don’t bother doing what they say, you don’t really want to. If it’s the latter, you’re fine, you clever bastard you.

There is third version where the person uses sincerity and rhetoric to actually influence your decision, but it happens so rarely, I wouldn’t worry about it. Instead, advise said person to go and be a political speech writer, where the skills of rhetoric and sincerity will seem both new and alarming.

6. Be a tourist and a traveller.

TOURIST: (def) Someone who sees what he wants to see on a strict itinerary. Wears cargo shorts. Maybe socks and sandals.  Traveller (def): a bit more drifty. Likely to wear stupid baggy trousers and beaded jewellery.

It’s fine to be either: in fact, you’ve got to be have a bit of both in you. You need to be able to have the heart of a Brownie back leader on some days, dragging yourself to the top of the hill because the view’s just marvellous and on others, the ability to move so little you may as well just be part of the scenery due to your sedentary nature. Or instead you might just drift down odd roads in new towns and see slightly remarkable things or nothing at all. Any of these are good. By the end of my trip, I found drifty hippy often won the day because she was so much less likely to make me walk 2km to a lighthouse.

7. Remember the crap bits too.

I wrote in my first blog on here about how much I hate travellers. I still do, out of context. They’re fine when you’re doing travelling too, but other than that they’re like the worst kind of Facebook user, where you just get the new jobs and relationships and not the suspicious idea that they too are lost and scared and ultimately alone in the world.

So as much as I’m going to remember the blissful times, I’m going to try and hold on the duller, less transformative more frustrating moments: the lack of remote control control, the sitting, the waiting, the organising, the printing. Which of course still goes on at home, but usually, in my experience, with biscuits within easy reach.

8. You have more time than you realise.

Days are long. When you take out the time blocks that aren’t available to you when travelling-staring at various screens, talking on the phone, seeing friends, seeing films, sometimes even going to work, I realise quite how much time I could’ve spent in the past learning the piano rather than watching Friends repeats. However, I am not naive enough to think I will change much when returning to reality. Spend 9 and a half weeks in mainly your company with none of life’s distractions which squeeze like cotton wool to fill up the gaps and you’re left with an empty wastleand. You too will realise wasted time is rarely wasted. It’s time off from yourself.

And I doubt I’ll get round to leaning the piano. Don’t have one.

9. I am brilliant at map reading.

I have only got lost once in this entire trip and on this occasion, was trying to remember the map from Google maps. If anyone ever says to me in the future that we’ve got lost and it’s my fault I will disagree. Maybe YOU should get lost, I will rejoinder, wittily. Which will ultimately be pointless because we’ll already be lost. But there’s one thing for sure: it won’t have been my fault.

10. Write a blog.

 Finally, I’d like to say I’ve really enjoyed writing this- so I’d like to thank you for the reading it. Particularly if you’ve got in contact to tell me so I can put a face to the generous pedant overlooking my grammar mistakes in order to get some hot gossip about my occasional 10:30 bedtimes (the rest were earlier, obviously). Even to those who read it occasionally in big glutinous globs. And even to those who are secretly reading it because you’re my Facebook friend but we haven’t spoken in ages so you think it would be odd to say something. Maybe I’ll blog about something or somewhere else sometime. In the meantime, to quote cool Americans, I’ll catch you on the flipside.

A hastily typed blogette to record the dying days of my trip. (and you’ll see why it’s mini when you see the behemoth I’m about to post under it. Or above it)

I went from Coff’s Harbor to Port Macquarie- a small, recently rejuvenated historical town which feels quite Swiss, as it is very fresh and green and surrounded by tall fir trees. It is a home to a Koala hospital, which I went and toured and a delightfully friendly YHA hostel. As charming as many of the small towns I’ve stopped off at are, I’ve often pitied the young inhabitants-particularly those, like me, who are challenged in the surfing department. I imagine a lot of these places feel very claustrophobic the minute you hit about 14, but not so in Port Macquarie. Despite being small, it doesn’t feel too cut off and they’ve recently built a socking great theatre and arts venue in the middle of the town, which has quite a few big names passing through. It struck quite a nice balance in my trip and I spent a great deal of time basking in the sun on the river bank, like a big decadent otter for hours at a time, or else shamefully mopping up the last of my money in the retail centre, like a big shamefaced otter who shouldn’t be spending so much of her money on clothes.

My final stop was Newcastle (Australia), which, like Newcastle (UK), used to be a big manufacturing and steel producing town. Recently however, they’ve packed everything thing in bar the coal and turned it into a lovely sized lifestyle city where the only remnants of its past are the massive coal ships that come into the dock all horns blazing at 5 AM in the morning. They might want to stop that if they really want to attract the yuppies.

My final Hostel was a large oak panelled wonder, the origin of which I never found too much out about as my curiosity was running at all-time low. I was just out for nice coffee and gentle strolls, by that point. Then I saw the advert for a wine tour. Now, I don’t drink loads of wine and I certainly consider myself no expert, but there’s very few opportunities to learn while getting pissed in the world. Except, you know- university. So it may as well go on the record that for a while in early April 2012 I did feel I knew quite a lot about wine. Funnily enough, the feeling passed. I can’t remember much. I think all I was required to learn however, is that Australian wine is bloody good. Straight A.  Top of the glass. I mean class.   

So now am back in Sydney, whiling away the last few days in a mixture of excitement and nostalgia and worry (I call it exostary) Sydney fights to keep me, by putting on better weather than I had for the whole time I was living here. I went for a walk last night and a man was playing haunting melodies on a harmonica from a boat in the harbour. Come on, I wanted to say, I feel like enough of an idiot for not staying in this glorious place, I don’t need a soundtrack.

 So I return in 5 days time to God knows what and God knows who and maybe in the not so distant future, God knows where. But I have a few stories and I’ve been a few places. You’ve heard about most of them. Let’s just see what happens.

Apparently, other there, up on what is literally if not temperamentally the upside of the world, spring is happening. I have worked this out from readable evidence about people being outside on Facebook and the fact that here, where is upside down and backwards, it is definitely autumn. I always thought Australia just stayed sunny all year round. It doesn’t. There has, infact been few days in this entire trip-throughout what has supposedly been summer, when I have not gone out without a jumper and a raincoat just in case. And more often than not, there is a case.

 Still, now the calendar is officially telling me it’s autumn, New South Wales has taken on a certain off-peak season air, exacerbated by the hostel I’m currently staying at, which is eerily empty and surrounded by brooding clouds. It’s uninspiring, biscuit buying weather, that makes me imagine  if someone flying into Sydney today wouldn’t find a sign that just said ‘Sorry- closed Wednesday afternoons- best, Australia.’

Anyway, back to our main narrative, and our brave (well, tired) heroine (well, person) has this week left the buzzing city of Brisbane and headed back out into the countryside. Now, there’s a popular saying about travel: If someone advises you to go somewhere that’s in the crater of a volcano and serves free ice cream-you go. I took that advice very literally when I decided to stop off at Murwillumbah, a town that is equally hardy in aspects of spelling and in inhabitants. The hostel I was staying at has a reputation for attracting friendly folk from all around the world, which is probably why fate tossed me in the way of a couple from Norwich. This was actually pretty great, as is the joy of shared local knowledge. Still, I doubt many people have sat round that table and swapped tales that include the words-‘you know-the one near the Tesco roundabout.’

The town itself appeared depressingly uninspiring on arrival, as I have discovered most places do after a good lugging of bags and riding of bus. But the next morning proved it to be beautiful. Although it did lack the distinct volcano-ness I was sorely hoping for, as I had been imagining a villainous, gothic stony outcrop. A rather pedestrian town itself, it is ringed (that’s the volcano for you) by misty green mountains, a lazy river and a good line in transformative sunsets. It was ideal for a two day stopover. It also came to life after a couple of ciders in a proper Australian pub, where the locals looked and acted like they’d been performing the same slightly gritty, joyful community soap opera for about the last fifty years.

My next move was to Byron, which a lot of travellers had told me was brilliant. And lo and behold, it was. You’ll have to excuse me for using the word vibe-but it has a really good vibe. This was helped by the fact I found a friend I made up in Noosa and she had made other friends. A few glasses of white wine and a few friends will make anywhere feel like it has a good vibe. (Oh yeah. Sorry.) It also is filled with not particularly pressing things to do, that nonetheless take up time, which are ultimately, my favourite kind of things to do (or in some cases, not). So I trudged to the famous white lighthouse and browsed in bookshops (after working in one, they are now liberated territory for me- also, I can silently criticise their visual merchandising) and other boutiques and watched the sunset over the beach.

Now I find myself in Coff’s Harbour- a stopover I expected to uninspiring and it rather has been. But I’ve spent too long on buses and in hostels now. The everyday tasks have a got a bit repetitive-the not having milk for tea, the going to buy milk for tea, the having too much milk for tea. I’m permanently tired and swing violently between excited optimism and a very black pessimism about coming home.

There’s lots I’ll miss about Australia, not least actually, writing this blog, which has provided me with all kinds of distractions and fun, believe it or not. But just like when I came out here, I’m now looking forward again to the largely arbitrary excuse to turn over a new leaf. After all, that’s what autumn’s all about.

Or spring.

Look, I’ll work it out on the plane.

*It’s a travesty that Dame Edna has been retired. Bring her back, Barry!

Fraser Island (Garai)

In Noosa, there was a surf festival. As far as I could work out as a person who has to have tennis re- explained so me several times during every Wimbledon final, this works by the 5 or 6 contestants in every heat getting judged on their ability to surf on about three waves and their scores arrogated to get a final result. Rather wonderfully, it is commentated from the beach for both the benefit of the watching crowds and the surfers. So booming across the beach, you get ‘KYLE…WHO’S IN THE YELLOW…. YOUR LAST WAVE WAS A 4.5… SO IF YOU WANT TO MOVE INTO THIRD PLACE, YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A 5.6’ This slightly Mum-nagging style of commentary is probably better than the much bemoaned random comments about crowd members and odd stats you often get with televised big events. Just imagine if you got at Wimbledon ‘ANDY…IF YOU WANT TO WIN THE MEN’ S SINGLES FINAL, YOU’RE GOING TO NEED TO…. PLAY TENNIS BETTER.’ Commentary is wasted on just the crowd.

Despite a day of awful rain, I liked Noosa a lot. It classy and yet relaxed.  Everybody surfs. Everybody. Mums and daughters, dads, octogenarians and typical bleach blonde 18 to 35 year olds can all be seen carrying boards up the rocky coastline to become little pink blobs bobbing in the sea. I briefly entertained a fantasy in which I stayed there and become the first ever female British surf champion, but then remembered how shit I am. Still. It gets to you,that place.

It was also quite a friendly wooded coach house hostel. I got talking to a wide variety of interesting and not so interesting characters. One man (for the sake of argument, we’ll call him Bruce. Or Stevo. It’s largely academic when I’m indulging in such  gross stereotyping) told me he thought Australia and its government was ‘going to the dogs’ and perhaps its my slightly unfair prickly feminist self speaking, but I’m pretty sure if he’d been with Deano and the rest of his mates, he may have added ‘with a woman in charge’-but, like I said, I’m only speculating. It’s my blog and I’ll cry wolf when I want to.

One thing you learn pretty quickly in Australia is that the locals think the place they’re in is perfect.  The basic hierarchy of preference for the Australian resident seems to run: wherever they live, then in distant second some parts of the rest of their state. Drifting slightly behind in third, the rest of Australia-particularly bits talented Australian cricketers come from. Finally, right at the back so it’s barely a speck on the horizon, some of the less crowded bits of the rest of the world.

Not to criticise. If you look at Australia’s geography, this attitude totally both correlates and makes sense. When you live in paradise, where is the need to go and seek out further or slightly adjusted paradise? There would be a chance you’d find somewhere nicer and then what? Do you move again looking for more milk and honey? That’s the problem with such a nice country: it’s pretty much all green grass: you just gotta pick your patch.

Considering my favourite daily ‘you can’t be too cheerful’ trawl through the UK media, I remain bemused when I find an Australian who wants to moan about this country. I don’t really know much about Australian politics, which, I must admit, never stopped me banging on with other country’s politics when I was a student. Still, they have a high minimum wage, plenty of skilled and unskilled work and are so gloriously mineral and land rich they could probably build the same number of houses as they already have again, but this time, made out of semi-precious stones. Like I’ve said before, on paper, I’m stupid to leave.

I’d heard very few positive reviews of Brisbane, where I am now, but it’s really relaxed and navigatable, which is always a plus in a city. It’s got old buildings, good sushi, nice weather, a river, bridges,gardens. You just have to spread your to do list thin, because there’s nothing really specific to see, bar a few museums. But if you’re a wanderer, a wonderer, a ponderer ,an atmosphere soaker and/or a river- side reader, you’ll be fine. Plus my hostel has free internet, so that fills the gaps nicely. As a friend pointed out to me before I left, there’s not many travel experiences you can’t just google these days.

My next stop is back in New South Wales, in a place I can’t spell enough of to even get a search engine to correct my spelling of it. A few more hops, then happily, sadly, home.

But you know. I can’t understand sport, I can’t spell, but I certainly know how to spread a few tasks over a long time. I’m not so worried about finding work.

People sometimes often talk about how a smell will send them reeling backwards into the depths of a childhood memory-which I am not precocious enough to imagine is any sort of lengthy journey for me, but still. Imagine my bemusement when I discovered that my own odour trigger is the smell of the heads on a yacht on a hot day, which immediately place me in my teenage holidays on yachts in the Med. The past, those prone to dewy eyed nostalgia say, is another country .In my case it’s Greece via Australia, although certainly by an inauspicious route.

I discovered this on my trip on a sixty foot catamaran, which calmly sped me and about 30 others round a few of the Whitsunday Islands, constantly supplying us with soft drinks, beer, wine and food.

The trip took us round to Whitehaven Bay, which provides sand in perfect white, the exact texture (and I had to think about this one while I sank into it up to my ankles) of soft brown sugar. Its other property is its use as a cleaner of jewellery, as it has a high silica content (Yeah, I know. No idea.).Like all the best classy galavanters, I was wearing a silver necklace on to which I’d threaded my silver rings. What you could do, of course, is bury the jewellery in the sand and then pretend to rediscover it, like a pirate. I mean, I didn’t do that, obviously. But the potential was there. The results were remarkable, making them gleam like they were fresh from the Argos catalogue. It’s also meant to be a great exfoliator so I rubbed some onto my already sun tanned slicked face. The path to true beauty is certainly a sticky one, but momentary oddness is the price you pay for the softest face in all Oceania.

Our next stop was to do some fringing reef diving. I was sorely tempted to spend $24 on an underwater camera, but glad I didn’t. It was rather disappointing: horrible murky water, scrappy bits of coral and few fish. However, it did serve to remind me of my last trip and how perfect it was, so no harm done. I finished the day, cup of tea and book in hand as the sun set over the approaching Arlie Bay.

I was speaking to one of the receptionists at the hostel in Arlie and was telling her how much I enjoy the coach parts of this trip. She told me she thought I was one of the few people who do. I do love it though. The responsibility of getting me from A to B is deferred from me, hunched over my laptop noting down times and dates-a PA for the world’s most indecisive boss - to the nice man in the beautiful Greyhound bus regulation knee socks. It’s a bit like the unwritten rule my housemates and I had at Uni: if you’ve got a load of clothes washing in, a task is being completed and therefore no guilt should be wasted for that hour or so of doing nothing else. Inaction is also action. The perfect crime.  

This view was challenged a little bit after a 13 hour trip down the coast overnight, which at least served to save me a night’s accommodation and adhered to the Peter family motto ‘ Never spend when you can save, however uncomfortable this makes you’  I wound up in Hervey Bay, just across from Fraser Island. Fraser’s a place that I wasn’t all that fussed about, but every backpacker seems to do it and love it, so I just followed the crowd, albeit with an ever grumpily opened wallet. They say travel is a priceless experience, but no one has yet informed people who run tour companies.

Fraser Island, or Garai as it now should be known as the indigenous people have recently had it returned to its proper name, is the world’s largest sand island. This means even the brown muddy looking stuff and the black rocky looking stuff that doesn’t look like sand is actually sand. But wait, there’s more. It’s also completely inaccessible to anyone who isn’t driving a 4x4. So I went with a company that rips you through the itinerary of the tour day tour in one. The highlights are mainly water based-the frothing Champagne pools, that overflow with the angry waves running over into them, the eerily blue Lake McKenzie and Ely creek, which you can jump into at the top and float all the way down to the mouth. The Island has a large population of Dingoes, so my ‘Aussie animal in the wild’ bingo card is pretty much ticked off. I think I only have to see an Emu. Or Rod Hull. It is also chocka with the classic postcard views of Australia that I have seen quite a few of-not that I’m complaining- my gob was and remains completely smacked at the beauty of this country.  But now perfect skies, beaches and rainforest have become more common to me that they once were, I’m sure it’s going to take leaving to make me appreciate the coast’s casual, make-up less magnificence.

I now also know several revoltingly offensive Irish jokes from our true blue Aussie tour guide. These are available on request to anyone who’s not family.

It is now a month till I come home and try as I may it appears I determined to be a pessimist about it. The prospect of a return to reality does not appeal at all, as sunny, optimistic Austrlia is the perfect off kilter Britain to hide from real life. Yet the constant shared hostel rooms and hastily made something-on-toast diet, the living out of a bag and vanity compels me to tell you, my limited wardrobe, is finally beginning to get to me. I guess I’ll never know if I have made the right decision in coming back to the UK when I am. Luckily, I’m going to try and revel in the brilliant decision I made to to come to Australia in the first place.

I successfully caught my first Greyhound bus leg from Cairns to Mission Beach, probably because I turned up at least an hour and quarter before it left. You can’t be too careful, you see and as anyone will tell you about public transport in any country, its main deficiency is its propensity to turn up very early and leave without you. My ability to outsmart it, however, is legendary.

Mission Beach is a cluster of small towns around one long stretch of perfect yellow sand and rainforest . There’s not much to do there except relax and enjoy the view unless you have lots of money to throw yourself out of a plane or go Cassowary spotting.  Luckily for me, after four days of avoiding opening my wallet in Cairns, I decided to go and do a reef trip. I’m not sure I got the best deal in the world, as there’s only one company based in the area, but to be honest, I’m a one option type of girl in most situations. Give me the set menu, or I’ll stick to Lasagne over fear of picking something disappointing. Mission beachers will also tell you that it is the best place to see the reef, as it is far less frequently visited and contains far more varieties of coral. I have no idea if this is true. I just know the experience I had was pretty damn cool.

It is clear that Mr Roget had not seen the Great Barrier Reef before he wrote synonyms for awesome or thesauri would be huge- the reef casually guts the meanings of all those words you might use to describe a place such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’. They are rendered hollow and inadequate.

The only slightly disappointing thing is my inability to remember much of the experience very well. Even when I was out on the reef, every time I came up to the surface to give my legs a rest, I was newly amazed when I went back down. Now with mere days standing between me and the experience, I can unfortunately report that all my memory can reproduce is random snippets, like a stopped and restarted self recorded family holiday. My memory does hold the sufficient capacity to remember something of such detailed beauty and my imagination woefully fails to step up to the plate to fill the gaps. Rest assured though, it is bloody amazing.

Our guide showed us (just me and two others) how giant clams bigger than a human head close their lips when you poke them. He showed how you can run your hands through sponge coral and picked up bright blue starfish for us to have a look at. I was massively impressed by the colours different types of coral. In answer to the question ‘is it a bit like Finding Nemo? My answer would have to be yes, but accurate source of marine biological information though that film is, they were really quite lazy with how many types of fish and coral they could have shown. Although running into a couple of turtles and sharks and large silvery shoals of fish did make my trip very Nemo-esque.  Alright. Enough of my gushing. I’ll shut up now.  Get on a plane, see it for yourself. It’s mind blowing-or any other number of other poor descriptions, for that matter.

I since have caught another bus, another ferry and yet another bus to get me to where I am sitting as I type- a campsite/hostel in the middle of a koala sanctuary on Magnetic Island. If you are not a keen entomologist(that’s the insect one, right? I can never remember.) you probably wouldn’t been too keen on it. There are bugs pretty much everywhere including a stick insect that stayed on the front step for about a day, in bold defiance of his camouflage training. There’s also a cheeky possum that sits on my hut balcony and a crowd of brightly coloured lorikeets who get fed every day by the wildlife park and are generally are as beautiful and tropical as I’m sure an extended visit would make them shrill and annoying. It is very hot up here but I’ve still insisted on dragging myself on a few walks. Yesterday I did the classic Koala cuddle and also held a crocodile and a snake. I’ve yet to decide which to have my souvenir hand bag made from.  Otherwise, it’s pool, book, bliss.

My next stop is the Whitsunday Islands via Airlie Beach, where I will head out sailing for a bit and then, who knows? I am already running ahead of schedule. But as I’ve always said-better early than anything else at all and in this case I wouldn’t want to miss the boat.

My last night in Adelaide, I spent sitting by the River Torrens at Dusk, listening to the city’s symphony orchestra play the magnificent Star Wars theme which the host had announced by saying ‘And now, in a funny place far, far away!’. Which was probably either George Lucas’ first version of the opening or what he would’ve eventually got round to if he’d only redrafted a few more times. ‘A funny place far far away’ is a great description of Australia, as it goes.

I spent the last bit of my time in South Australia seeing fringe shows: in the festival’s carnival-esque Garden of Unearthly Delights.  I also climbed down Mount Lofty on the outskirts of the city with my friend Eilidh. We fully intended to go both ways, but realised what an insane notion this was about half a kilometre down, despite watching the locals running up the 130 degree slope in the opposite direction in near 40 degree heat.  If you ever want proof that true Australians are made of different stuff to the British, that may be it. It’s not necessarily better stuff, but it is perhaps more durably insane.

I now begin travelling in earnest, which is an expression I’ve used because it sounds slightly dirty.  I flew from Adelaide to Cairns last Sunday, on a delayed flight with plans to do three and four day hops down the coast. North Queensland is in the wet season at the moment, which means it’s very humid and intermittently buckets it down for about 15 minutes and then abruptly stops. I doubt I’d cope as well with this if I hadn’t been to Hong Kong and New Orleans, where it was hard to take pictures as condensation covered my camera lens. Also, if I’d not just come from Adelaide which was 10 degrees hotter and I may always remember fondly as the place where I realised my calves could sweat.

 It is also not the ideal town to decide lay low in and not spend much cash. It pretty much exists to sell reef trips, white water rafting, horse riding or train rides through the jungle. This means you can’t really wander around doing sod all without the pervading notion that you should be attached to something elastic as you are pushed down a hill at 80 miles an hour into a cavern of tropical fish. It’s kind of like the fresher’s week of towns; the pressure to do what’s expected of you sucks out some of the fun of doing it. It isn’t half as bad as it’s sometimes painted- I certainly enjoy the vista of cloud covered mountains that surrounds it and the trees that chatter constantly with tropical animals, but it’s hard just to sit for four days and constantly appreciate nature. You try. I’ll give you to the start of The Archers before you run screaming for the dinner rolls. (The bread world’s valium)

 Luckily, my hostel is lovely. It’s a big wooden tree house painted in terracotta colours with lots of squashy sofas and the occasional gecko popping out around the door frames. So it’s just me, my sweaty face, laptop and my Tupperware of tea bags against spending vast amounts of money on various excursions.

I find it quite hard to do nothing when there so obviously stuff to do. I’m not bad when somewhere is obviously designed for relaxing and soaking up the atmosphere. But as I have this labelled in my mind as ‘travel’ rather than ‘holiday’ -my dalliance with full time paid work having taught me that holidays are something you get paid during-my inner school trip leader is always making me do things like read signs about local bird life and go on guided walks. And I dutifully let her do this, because I’ve never been the sort to bunk off behind the coach and have a smoke. This and the fact one the obscure things I pick up may one day help me be victorious in a pub quiz and my life as a reluctant sign reader is set in stone.

As I write, I have 6 weeks till I fly home. My careful countdown of the days is sort of to do with seeing people, sort of to do with money, sort of to do with counting how many more days I’ve got of avoiding some terrible event that I’m sure is about to befall me. I am waiting to not catch a coach, have not booked a hostel, to run out of money/credit/ temper at an unfortunate point. Fun and incredible and cool as this whole thing has been,(and it has, I just don’t tend to dwell on those bits because, like the celebrity magazine market, I’m aware other people’s joy is tedious)  it’s also a little bit like a tightrope walk where you might fall off at any moment.

The advantage of blogging about it, of course, is that at least people might laugh when you do. I’m also looking forward to be able to wear some clothes other than the ones I’ve with me for the last 5 months and to reorganise my tights draw which for some reason plays on my mind incessantly.

Finally, just a quick note. If you are reading this, please do get in touch and give me some of your news. It hardly seems fair otherwise. I give and I give to you people and….

Someone who I can’t be bothered to Google once said that there are two reasons for reading a book: one is to enjoy reading it and the other is to be able to say that you’ve read it. This idea partially explains my trip to Kangaroo Island, whist also revealing another of my insecure personality traits you have come to know and tolerate. All my immediate family members and a few of my friends have travelled round Australia in the last few years, but none of them, as far as I know, went across to KI (as we locals call it).

 So although I genuinely did want to see it because it came highly recommended by both other travellers and Charlie Brooker (http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/jan/27/australia-diving-sharks-tuna-brooker)  it also meant I would be able to say I’d been somewhere that other people hadn’t and then they’d have to nod and say ‘ Kirsten, you’re really very good at this travelling thing, far better than anyone who’s ever been, in fact’ and I would blush and mumble like a faux-humble Oscar winner but ultimately have to agree that yes, I was indeed the queen of everything.

Hey, I’m just being honest with you here.

Travelling over on the ferry, I probably felt at my most vulnerable. I have several times wondered why coach captains (Yep, they call them that, I’m afraid) hostel owners and the occasional passer by haven’t questioned me travelling on my own by asking where my parents are or by saying ‘Why, Madam! You appear to repel other’s company, have you ever wondered why that might be?’ and thus inspire a drop into a well of existential dread, a condition I can usually reach quite successfully without prompts from members of the public.

Maybe it was crossing the water, I have no idea, I just felt like something was going to go wrong more than I usually feel it.  While on a boat, of corse, this feeling is probably more useful than of-course there-are-plenty-of-lifeboats-and-very-few-icebergs over confidence. I arrived at the port of Penneshaw with my heart in my mouth no idea of how to get to my hostel. However, it turns out it’s a place hard to get lost in. It makes the sleepy village of my upbringing look like a 24/7 metropolis. And it is wonderful.

The island is home to 4,500 people, roughly the given number of people you will find barraging their way through spilled piles of jumpers at any Primark on a Saturday morning, except spread over a sizeable, lush, eucalyptus scented ,colourfully moss-ed, aquamarine water surrounded heaven. On the second day there, I did a succinct highlights tour of the remarkable rocks, the national parks and hell of a load of massive 6 foot kangaroo shaped road kill. I saw an echidna and the fifth deadliest snake in existence (not only very dangerous in his own right, but also potentially bitter he doesn’t make it further up the charts of toxicity) But I think the highlight was definitely all the sitting.

 Just sitting in the little garden of my beautifully located hostel staring dumbly at the mainland in the middle distance with the mild interest of a scientist looking at bacteria through a microscope. ‘Hmmm. That is the mainland. The real world. It is different. People do things and have things and barter and chatter and worry and snipe and bicker. Not here though. All the details of that world seems so insignificant, so different from the island that it may as well not exist at all as soon as you turn to look in the other direction.

The place seemed to pick me up, dust me off, carefully patch up any places in which my temper was beginning to fray and set me on my way again. It was also the perfect heat, with an adjustment factor of sea breeze, except at night it was freezing so you could snuggle up in your bunk and listen to the sea hitting the beach a few hundred meters away. Just knowing a place like it exists makes me feel a bit more relaxed about the world.

I’m now back in Adelaide for the moment, where the Fringe festival is just starting, keenly exploiting the path to my bank account that leads right through the heartland of cultural extravaganzas of this sort. But I’ve decided not to think so much about money. I’m definitely living off my savings now rather than any money I earned out here, but I figure in 5 years time, whether I’m in the arts graduate work house which is surely an inevitability from our current UK government or whether I’m reasonably able to support myself, I will not mourn the loss of £300-ish more or less after my Australia trip. In the former scenario, of course, all money has become obsolete anyway and we’re using a sim card based bartering system and in the latter, I use that sort of money quite casually, to bathe in and throw away chewing gum. I imagine this is what being rich is like. I really have no idea.

Next time write I’ll be In Queensland, where I am reliably informed they have spiders that eat birds. Although I never found out whether the guy that told me this meant the ornithologist kind of bird or if he was just being derogatory about women. If you don’t hear from me by next Thursday, assume it’s the second option. And send help.

It takes three hours for Kate Moss to look this artfully windswept on a beach. Anorak: model’s own.