Tag: australia

I think I have gotten the hang of why the Australians use the word awesome so much, it’s because so many things are called great that they need a word that is greater than great. The awesome ocean road perhaps, well it lives up to it’s name. Australia is awesome, the word doesn’t feel out of place here, it would feel out of place in the considered and ancient rambling hills of Sussex, not in the vastness down under.

The road was built as a living monument to the returning soldiers from the first world war and was constructed when blokes still used picks and shovels and went home for big cow pies. It is a great construction that would be great to ride on a motorbike as it clings in serpent fashion to the side of plunging hills, but for me I am cruising it in a hired Nissan and it’s still a lot of fun.

I drove through the heat of the day with the windows open and found myself a beach to run along, when I was hot enough I doused myself in the ocean surf and found a coffee shop to kick back in. At the moment I am in one of the comfy Ozzy YHA’s using the internet connection as I have told a friend I will help him out with some work, the only thing that is missing at the moment is him.

There are lovely little secluded beaches around here that you have to hike to and this is where I spent the sunset, in a tiny bay that you could only get to by descending through a gulley that would have been home to Aboriginal people over 10,000 years ago, they don’t spend much time here now so it seems which is a shame.

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Tomorrow I will head towards the Grampian mountains, but at what speed depends on what I find on the way. Time goes slowly here and will do when we’re gone.

Fireworks, a gig in Melbourne town centre themed around ‘a cow jumping over the moon’ for some reason that remains beyond me – although one of the performances was by a cabaret group that sang about ‘cash cows’, a metaphor for the greed destroying our little planet etc etc, so maybe that had something to do with it.  It was all good fun, but it’s just the way cities promote themselves these days and most large cities seem to have the same script to read from.

What was a far nicer experience for me was cycling around a very sunny Melbourne in the early evening light on a public holiday. The city was virtually deserted so I had the whole place to myself, the often surprising architecture of melbourne University, the gorgeous bright clean light reflecting off of the cluster of tall buildings making up the centre of Melbourne. I had my little moment communing with Australia and whatever that is meant to be as I peddled slowly around it’s deserted streets. We like each other, I’m glad.

St Kilda is a beach resort near Melbourne that reminded me of Brighton in a modest way. I think it’s esplanade is called Brighton so I don’t think it that unfounded. There is a salt water pool here that I popped in to get some ozygen into my brain -the pool was so salty that I found myself wretching after even a little water crept into my mouth, you really needed googles as well as the water felt toxic as it obviously had products in it that the sea did not have. This was supposed to be a ‘spa’ pool and I did feel envigorated after a swim.

My daughter Isis and I were having a chat about possible film plots about unlikely pastimes becoming fashionable – I mean if Boules can be a game for youngsters in France why not Bowls, instead of it being the bastion of old age why not make it a game for the hip and trendy.

We went to a few pubs Friday night then spent a few days being lazy, so here is a piccy of Melbourne in all of it’s glory..

I dropped my lady off at the international airport as she was flying back to the UK and sat watching the plane take off in the early evening light from the domestic terminal where my flight was due. It’s a strange sensation departing to different parts of the globe as I set off to Melbourne on the evening Virgin Blue flight.

Australia famously discovered a more varied cuisine well before the British Isles, which leads me to suspect that it was partly the Ozzy influx into London that turned the mother country on to progressive cuisine, but then again it might have been the endless parade of foody TV.