It starts like this. A guy called Haesh comes over from Korea (the South, of course!) to visit that great brown land known as Australia – with his sights set on a whirlwind tour of the country. He meets a crazy Japanese fellow who goes by the name of Yoshi at a language school in Brisbane. They become friends and eventually live in the same share house.
Haesh works by day at salad bar in the city, washing their dishes, earning good money. He meets a young chap named Joshua here – a local – and they become buddies too. Haesh breaks down his plan to the other guys – let’s tackle the country in a 4WD, let’s live with our spirit high, while we still can, before we have to succumb to the routine workaday life of a suit wearer. Basically, let’s throw ourselves into the madness and hope by the end of it that nothing comes back broken besides the drought of adventure. The lads agree and the trip makes itself. This blog captures through writing, pictures and videos [videos, pending] the assortment of shenanigans endured by we three as we rolled around the continent.
We intend to set off on the grand date of May 20 for no reason beyond the fact that Yoshi needs to come back from the farm at Mildura, and he wants to coincide it with a heartfelt farewell to his girl, Ayaka, who will go TO the farms to work. He went there after we decided to go on the trip together, to earn some dollars, and to see a bit of the country in a different way than the trip itself will allow.
Pink highlight: our intended route
Meanwhile Haesh and Joshua plan the elementary route out, deciding on various places to visit through the suggestions of a couple of different friends of Joshua’s (John, Dirk and Des – thanks guys!) and their own inclinations based upon famous spots and mere interest (why NOT go to Coober Pedy?), as well as make arrangements to purchase a vehicle (which we called Redcliff – to me, a bit confusing), determine the necessary gear and get the whole thing on its way. Yoshi accepted and trusted our capability to make decisions for him. Too easy.
One of the decisions we all made together, though, became the inclusion of the two guys girlfriends (Ayaka with Yoshi, and Semi with Haesh) once we got to Melbourne. We three would rumble with the brown states, and the girls could join us for a Great Ocean Road gallavant and meander from the south up towards home. I set myself the honourable goal of attempting my first ever beard-growing on the trip, and having to take daily photographs, of which I collected in the segment entitled “The Daily Beard”. (View the horror here!)
Something we needed to do before going (of course!) remained to have a big kicking party where all of the people we knew could come along and wish us the best of times on the road. So the Saturday before leaving we held our own departure party. And we had a dandy old night, with my father on fire duty (sausages?), us lot on rum duty, and tha girls and tha boys on, mmm mmm, dance duty. Yea? My house became the home of the boys before we set off, with guitar practice, packing it all together and getting ready. With the date set to “go” and our hearts in our mouths, we looked forward to the leaving, not knowing what sort of mischief we’d get up to along the way, but knowing full well we would. Tomorrow, then?
May 20, 2009
Aaahhaah. Oh dear. We meant to leave today but the weather has killed that idea.
Floods, yes, ridiculous amounts of water, have stopped us in our tracks. Basically we spent the morning swearing and moving my belongings upstairs. After some food (rice + ramen with Gochujang (a hot ass sauce)) Haesh and Yoshi got into playing their guitars. Haesh, who wants to get called ‘Cool J’ from now on played “Yeohaengeul Ddeonayeo” (pretty much Korean for “alright here we go!”). Quite a shame that we won’t leave until tomorrow at the earliest. Late enough.
In the evening I decided we needed to get a roofrack tonight, and that relying on hope wouldn’t cut it, so we just had to move. I have a friend from my work at the salad bar, and he has a van with the bar parts of said racks. Dilemma though: he needed to drive the car to the coast and catch a plane to Rockhampton the next day, and he didn’t have any tools to get it off.
We needed some allen keys, so we shot off to Coles and grabbed a set. When driving back I dropped the keys and couldn’t find them on the floor of the car. I thought that maybe I’d knocked them onto the ground outside in opening the door. Pity that by this time the world had started to shit itself with water. While looking on the wet grass and the dry floor Haesh asked me to move the car seat. When I did it smacked my face (clumsy enough!) and sent my glasses down. My frigging vision! Next thing I know Tomos (the van’s owner and all round great guy) has come over and I scream to him that I’ve dropped my glasses in this surging gutter of storm. He hightailed it, tearing down the street to the drain at the end and plunging both hands into the mess, pulling out nothing. I freaked out. I can’t see a damn thing without them. What to do? Tomos ran back to the car and we looked on the ground again. He pulled them out from under the front wheel, submerged and rushing with water. Hurrah! So I hugged him, of course. And what a guy – lending us the rack for a pack of six, getting soaked with us as we then tried to get them off with the allen keys, restoring my sight from the water. Yet after all this mixed mayhem we discovered that we couldn’t move the rusted bolts. Tom just gave us the keys to his van, his blessings and asked that we didn’t crash the thing. He even offered me some marshmallow chocolate but I declined (rude vegan). We left for home, thankful for the good man, glad to see the end of the insane Brisbane weather.
In the evening we got together and discussed our itinerary, making last minute amendments, booking our skydiving near Cairns. Administration and stuff. A bit of a calm down after the mad rain / roof rack shemozzle. Let’s hope we can get this sorted and leave.
We finally left! At 8:47PM. Egads. After yesterday’s debacle which became a romantic interlude, with our spirits still high and not too dampened by the flood, we managed to get it all together. It took some effort though. We needed to get the racks off of Tomos’s van, find a tray before we left the city, and pack the lot of it into ‘Redcliff’ and piss off for two months. We also found that we couldn’t get the spare seats out of our car. Another bunch of good dudes helped us just across the road from my house at a Bridgestone. I keep thinking we will run into many good people as we go along, and we have proof enough thus far.
We made it to Tom’s house and hopped into the van. Yoshi saw this strange looking man peering at us from a distance. “Tomos?” he asks. No Yosh, just some surly neighbour. “Sure?” Inevitably Yoshi continued to call this stranger Tomos, so now we have two of them. We thought we could go to Supercheap and take off the racks but we ended up heading to a mechanics called Chequered Flags or something like that. My old school bud Andrew had tried to help us at the SC but it didn’t work out. Thanks anyway man! The blokes at CF gave it a good going over, yet yet again we managed to screw about with the bars having too much distance and not knowing until we got the rack, such that we had to take a bit of time back at the Zillmere house sorting it out. On the first night we intended to stay at my father’s in Redcliffe (which explains my original confusion about Haesh’s naming the vehicle. “but my Dad lives there!” “but it sounds so tough. It’s red, and cliff shaped…”) and we still went there. Unfortunately my old man works night, meaning we didn’t get to see him. Hopefully we do tomorrow. I’d hate to leave without saying goodbye. My sweet sister Brodie greeted us, showed us to the food and we tucked in. Delicious! Even though Day 2 hasn’t had much difference to Day 1, in terms of screwing about, we made it through, and we have actually departed. Let’s see how we go!
