Trouble in Paradise
There is trouble in paradise; it may end in a gunfight at the OK Corral and if it does, there is no doubt whose side we’ll be on. Our friend Tanacha, or Kid, pronounced Kit, is currently embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over the ownership of a bar which her Canadian “boyfriend” brought for her in January this year, and she is sad, very sad indeed.
The problem is that, while Kid (on the left of the picture) was preoccupied setting up the bar, the boyfriend was just as preoccupied setting up a new Thai girlfriend, and if that wasn't bad enough, he then tried to replace Kid with the new girlfriend to run the bar. Kid was having none of it, having done the hard yards establishing the place and using her very wide circle of Facebook friends to draw in the punters.
Without doubt, at 29 years of age, Kid is a canny operator and was not prepared to stand by and watch her hard work go unrewarded, despite the Canadian boyfriend wanting to retain all of his investment, and this unfortunate stand-off has begun. Fortunately the bar is in Kid’s name.
The usually effervescent Kid was visible depressed when I caught up with her, and it saddened me that it could not be resolved short of litigation; she has spent 30,000 Baht so far on legal fees and heads to court early next month for a hearing, and although I am one, I cannot stand what some of the farang, or foreigners, do here.
This is a common problem in Thailand. There are countless stories where foreigners, lust-struck ones in particular, buy businesses for their Thai girlfriends or with a group of unknown locals and then things turn sour. Unless companies are properly set up, farang cannot have the majority ownership of businesses, and so these curious arrangements are entered into which, unless very carefully managed, have the potential to turn to disaster. In this case it has.
We met Kid on our first visit to Phuket when she worked at the Kiwi Bar, and back at that bar on this visit I enjoyed listening while another of the staff, Pons (on the right of the picture), told me of her dreams, and I wondered how she will achieve them on 9,000 Baht or nearly $NZ390 a month. It is a good wage for a local here, but she has a twelve year old daughter in the north being cared for by her parents and every week sends money for her care and welfare. She is frugal and, instead of partying like many of the other young women, Pons has brought land in a village where her uncle lives and knows that every Baht she pays off the land will mean she no longer has to struggle or rely on anyone else when she is older. She has an Australian boyfriend and, although he wants to marry and support her, she maintains her independence and doesn’t want to be reliant on others for money. She is proud, intelligent and optimistic, and has a great wish in life to see “seernow” which I eventually figure is that white powdery stuff that settles in the mountains, and so I tell her that Mama, as Kaelene is affectionately known to them, would be delighted to have Pons come and stay so she can have a once in a lifetime chance to try skiing.
With Pons and Na, we took a late night down trip the infamous and colourful Bangla Road in Patong; we drank at a club and while there I was approached repeatedly by two women asking me to buy them drinks. I declined politely saying my companions, drinking water and Coke respectively, were more than sufficient company. They persisted but had no luck, and it wasn’t until the next evening I twigged as Pons and Na regaled Kiwi Bar owner Tiggy with the story. My intended companions were, in fact, Kathoy, or ladyboys; all I thought at the time was that they were not to most attractive looking women I had seen.
Earlier, on leaving Perth airport for this short sojourn to Phuket I was stopped, taken aside and swabbed all over for explosives. Just a random thing they assured me and it was as well I turned out to be clear of harmful substance, but it was the first time in all of our travels that this has occurred.
It is quite late in our travels for firsts, but returning to Perth flying on Tiger Airlines was another first and it certainly passed the test for a budget carrier. The flight from Phuket to Singapore was on time and the same from Singapore to Perth, the seats were comfortable, service good and the red wine effective.
But there may be one challenge, however, and that is to unionise Tiger Airlines; its staff clearly need something to get the balance right, an attendant returned to my seat en-route as they had wrongly calculated the conversion cost from Australian to Singapore dollars for my can, yes can, of wine. The attendant explained that, unless I coughed up the extra dollar I had been undercharged, his colleague would have it deducted from her wages. What else was I to do but pay up but as I did I pondered on the nature of employers who deduct the cost of genuine mistakes from the wages of staff, and wonder what would have been the effect had the same rule been applied to chief executives and investment bankers as their recklessness plunged the world into the last global recession?
Perhaps the world would be a better place.

Phuket life
Some places capture your heart while others don’t quite make it, and it is often hard to tell exactly why. I tried to explain this to a colleague in Australia who asked why he should travel to Phuket, and as I rolled into Patong on Saturday afternoon I thought I may have made a grave error of judgment in recommending it to him. Is this the place for a meticulous man, one who knows nothing other than a sense of order?
Patong is tawdry but appealing, an edgy, dusty beachside town on this Thai island, filled for most of the year by Australian, European and Scandinavian holidaymakers and men looking for a short term wife. The infrastructure is third-world, ramshackle, the authorities’ questionable and everything seems quite chaotic, so there is every good reason not to like it, but it is not quite that simple. There is a charm, Thais are delightful, their Buddhist way of life peaceful, the weather is warm, the scenery spectacular, and among the chaos there are the little quirks of amusing logic.
As in New Zealand, driving is on the left hand side of the road, except that is for the cross roads joining the one way Beach and Ratu Thitt roads where the opposite applies. Driving on these streets is done on the right hand side as saves right-turning vehicles from cross-crossing each other when coming on and off the one way roads, which is all quite sensible really.
The locals can also be also wonderfully hapless; there are signs up around town advertising a comedy night featuring Arj Barker, better known as Dave from Flight of the Conchords. Trouble is that none of them say where the show is on, neither does the ad in the Phuket Gazette, and it took an internet search to find the venue, the local Mercure Hotel.
A fact that cannot be escaped is that Thailand is still a poor south Asian country and Phuket has made its way selling its soul to tourists rather than continuing to mine tin from its rich, red soils. Being poor means there are two quite defined economies and the two rarely meet; the high-end multinational tourist corporations and property developers are all here but there’s not too much evidence of a decent trickle-down. A taxi driver’s salary is about $6,500 Baht or $NZ280 a month, the girls at the Kiwi Bar between 6,000 and 8,000 Baht; all work at least 12 hours a day and get only one or two days off a month.
The standard price of an hour-long massage is between 250 and 300 baht, no more than $13, and it would be fair to assume that the masseuse gets only a small portion of that. Each day, down at The Mango Tree, each staff averages just one massage in the off-season, on some days none. For the remainder of the time they just sit around waiting.
Then there are the vendors who supply the locals. Mostly weary looking, older people, they trudge the back streets lugging baskets supported by cane poles, or pushing hand carts with food and drink. Some squat on the sides of the roads cooking from primitive looking burners, and it’s hard to imagine how they make a living selling bits of chicken to locals at about 10 Baht, or forty cents, a pop.
This may be holiday island, but for those who work here it is a tough life.
One change from the last visit is the long-awaited re-opening of the Hard Rock Café and, while it might be passé, an inspection was warranted. The same menu, the same memorabilia and the same type of chatty, up-beat staff as every other Hard Rock Café, but what is here is a fine collection of The Beatles Monthly, the fan club magazine of the Liverpool foursome, dating from 1963. Now that is rare.
Another very clear favourite is Phuketwan, an internet news journal edited by ex-pat Alan Morison who we met on our last visit. Alan is not one to back away from expressing strong views and takes no prisoners, local or tourist, when the inclination takes him. Many of his stories arouse heated blog discussion, this week one about the funeral of a “Scamdinavian” vagrant. Alan’s clear view is that the authorities, both Swedish and Thai, should have stopped her repeated visits during which time “she begged from Thais who could not necessarily afford to give, she borrowed from others with no intention of paying back the money, and she quite deliberately did not pay her bills”. In response to being called hypocritical by one reader Alan responded: “It's such a shame that neither you nor the Thai or Swedish authorities reacted appropriately to our accurate and pointed headings between Christmas 2009 and Ms Strand's death. Now, you find a voice. Now, you shoot the messenger. Well done, Simon”.
In today’s wire feed, Alan is on the rampage against corruption. “The crookedness …handicaps virtually every aspect of honest governance and justice, leaving Phuket's hopes of even competing with other international destinations permanently crippled.
“Rip-offs also abound. As fast as the beautiful beaches and coral reefs turn on the tourists, the extortionate prices and everyday deceits turn them off.
“This is not a purely Thai problem: the expats who exploit the graft are even more evil, perhaps, because they know there are workable alternatives."
“How long has it been since someone on Phuket was charged with corruption? We don't know the answer, but we doubt that there has been a memorable instance this century.
This is typical of Phuket and Phuketwan and we love it, but I have emailed my colleague suggesting the safety of a resort hotel. Patong might just be a bit wild for him.

The age of enlightenment
We found the archetypal Australian this week and he’s an absolute cracker, much too good not to share. Speaking at a charity dinner on Wednesday night marking fifteen years of Aussie Rules footy legends, former AFL star Mal Brown complained about the lighting in the early era of night matches. “We were at a disadvantage,” he told the audience, “we couldn’t pick any of the cannibals”, adding that, because they didn’t have any white shirts, his Aboriginal team mates weren't selected because they couldn’t be seen in the dark.
This came in the same week as New South Wales Assistant Rugby League coach and former star Andrew Johns was in hot water over describing a Queensland player as a black c....t in the built up to the second state of origin match. And not long after current AFL player Jason Akermanis advised gays in the league to remain in the closet because “footy is not ready” for them to come out. It would break the fabric of a club and be unsafe, the now former HeraldSun columnist wrote.
But back to the enlightened Mr Brown, on his way out of the dinner he told journalists not “to go writing what I said about those Abos” and later told media that his use of terms like “cannibal” and “little black buggers” were terms of endearment. To illustrate the extent to which he isn’t racist he went on to say that he’d helped Aboriginal boys and grown up with them all my life; thankfully he stopped short of claiming them as some of his best friends.
A true dinosaur, Brown told the HeraldSun that, while not sorry for making the comments, some “sensitive” people had told him he’d made a dickhead of himself and he accepted that. He agreed his comments were inappropriate in 2010, but added that he had made those sorts of comments probably 5,000 times in the last five years and, not to be restrained, he thought that the attention paid to his comments was unwarranted in light of the fact that “we are being led by a dickhead of a prime minister”.
This man is a true gem and, as if had not dug a considerable enough hole for himself, when asked if he had learned anything from the furore, he responded that if asked do another charity lunch he would just tell them to go and get stuffed.
Don’t you just love Australians?
Charity fundraising must be all the go this week, in an EBay charity auction the winning bid for breakfast and a surfing lesson with Liberal leader Tony Abbott came from a group called “GetUp” which campaigns on social issues. It paid $16,500 for former Afghani refugee Riz Wakil to get the chance to bend Abbott’s ear about the plight of refugees. Wakil, who spent nine months in an Australian detention centre, intends to tell Abbott that his hard-line policies on immigration and detention arrangements for refugees are inhuman. He quipped that he was more qualified to talk about people smugglers than Abbott’s now infamous budgie smugglers.
Wakil hopes Abbot will listen, but it is difficult to imagine he’ll get a word in edgeways.
Incidentally, the winner of a date with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was television Channel 10’s Seven O’Clock Project starring the very, very funny Dave Hughes.
Not quite so funny was news that our friends, the Andersons of the trucking-across-the-Nullabor-story, were truckless and walking back to West Australia from somewhere near the New South Wales and Victoria border. A wayward, on-coming, four wheel drive wagon attached to a mobile home, sideswiped their brand-spanking new Kenworth (with only 6,700 kilometers on the clock), rendering vehicles and trailers in need of surgery, the mobile home strewn up the highway, the other driver injured and all others shaken.
By anyone’s standards, that an extreme way to get a few weeks off work.

The match
This was like watching an emerging Crusaders rugby side, the same daring, scintillating back pay, familiar defensive patterns and the same heart-in-mouth mistakes. But these charges were decked out in the green and gold of the Australian Wallabies and not the black and red of home. And it was a positively dangerous sign for New Zealand’s Rugby World Cup hopes.
Rugby is not viewed at its best when played in an AFL stadium, a rugby field is 80 metres shorter than its Aussie Rule’s counterpart, everything is seen long distance, but from high in Block 415 at Subiaco Oval, the stadium equivalent of being in the Gods, we had a commanding oversight of the entire field.
It is not often that a rugby test is played in AFL-mad Perth and so the opportunity to see Australia play England was a test match not to be missed. And while it is not in the nature of most New Zealanders to support an Australian side, it is even less palatable to show any liking for the English. Of course it is easier to support the Australians with its Canterbury coach, Robbie Deans, and it must have been an omen, for as we arrived at the ground the team bus pulled in with Deans in command up front.
Overcome with the moment, I almost brought a Wallabies jacket for grandson Jack, but was saved from such folly by my friend Rod who rightly suggested the poor lad might be scarred for life turning up to day-care or visiting friends in Christchurch wearing such a rivaled outfit.
But to the rugby and we witnessed sides of such contrasting styles. The Wallabies were expansive and attacking, taking risks and exciting the home crowd. The English were big and dour and without imagination, and they typified the very reason that English test rugby has such a poor reputation. If there was a game plan it wasn’t evident and they were just, simply, dull and brutish. Had the Wallabies front row not repeatedly collapsed, handing the English an unprecedented two penalty tries, the English would have been thrashed. In any event, the Australian’s 27 to 17 winning margin flattered the English, but in the meantime, take note of these names; Quade Cooper, Will Genia, Berrick Barnes and James O’Connor; these are stars of the future.
The lesson from this is that the Australians have an exciting young squad and the Rugby World Cup is still more than a year away. Time enough to get the front row ills to be sorted and, once done, this team will be an imposing force.
If there is blight on the modern game, that is aside from its corporatisation, it is the number of handlers and trainers who appear on the field during the game; at one breakdown alone on Saturday night we counted eleven, that’s almost another full team, and it is plainly ridiculous.
There was some relief though; après match we retired to colleague Rod’s home and watched a recorded version of the All Blacks versus Ireland test played in New Plymouth earlier in the evening. Just as the Australian backs were young and dazzling, so too were the new All Blacks, with Cory Jane and Israel Dagg having cracking games. Even the front row looked good, although these are not the imposing men of past eras, and the worry is that coach Graham Henry has the year ahead to knock every shred of of that flair and brilliance from their systems.
Despite the win at Subi, Australia was in mourning by Monday. Their team, the Socceroos, was hammered by Germany four nil in the Football World Cup and it was worse in Western Australia. Both local AFL teams lost their weekend matches, the hapless West Coast Eagles by a whopping 49 points. “At least”, said the radio newsreader, “we won the rugby”. Not in the least consoled, the announcer responded, “Yeah, but who cares about Rugby.”
On another note entirely, we were amused to learn that the fast food chain, Red Rooster has brought out new signage, a single illuminated panel to replace the separate, stand-alone lettering of the current branding. A spokesperson for the company says the appearance of the new panels has nothing to do with the frequency with which the “S” keeps getting stolen from the current signs. Yean right.

Losing our marbles: a research project
It may be cold in New Zealand, so too it is here. Three hours south, Bridgetown recorded an overnight low of minus three degrees on Thursday, or so the television weather report said, and the days in Perth have struggled to make it to twenty. It’s hard to think back to those languid days of summer, when the mercury hovered around forty and our lazing on Swanbourne Beach was interrupted only by the occasional dip into the Indian Ocean. It all seems a very long time ago.
We did a blog entry back then on the Swanbourne Beach Olympics, the one where team uniform was described as immaterial and Marty an unsuccessful competitor in the egg and spoon race. A reworked version of the story made its way into the pages of gonatural, a New Zealand nudist magazine, and this is where the story take an interesting turn. A family friend, a nudist for more than four decades, spotted the article and reported to the editor that he was unfamiliar with any previous penchant on our part to enjoy the sun, all over.
He was curious, so was the editor who got in touch and invited a contribution on the reaction from family and friends to our baring all (in words that is, not pictures), publicly. We replied, explaining that it was no big deal, we wrote about it just as we did many other new and novel experiences on our travels, and that it appeared no big deal for readers either.
Earlier on our travels, we blogged about stopping in a place called Balatonbereny, a nudist beach in Hungary, where we made a tongue in cheek quip about the fashions du jour in pubic shaving, and we had in mind that this may draw a comment, but not a peep. The same in Croatia and so by the time we reached Swanbourne we were quite blasé about the whole thing. And still not a peep, so we responded to the request for our tell-all-expose with an opinion that family and friends seemed unfazed and probably just dismissed the reports as further evidence that we had, indeed, lost our marbles.
It may be our writing style, but the editor has persisted, repeated the request and, if only to confirm that we have indeed gone quite mad, we might just oblige. That is, if anyone does give a damn.

Little Jack Horner
The very day I became a great uncle, a young man stood up and offered me his seat on the train, and I was shocked. While there may be something to be celebrated in the safe arrival of a new family member, the dark cloud of being treated like a senior citizen on public transport is actually an unwelcome reminder of something else, something that none of us particularly want to acknowledge. Quite frankly, I wish the seat had been occupied by a self-absorbed sullen-faced, gum-chewing young lout; at least I would not have had to be reminded that I am nearer sixty than fifty and that it’s not going to get any better.
Back in the Middle East we were inclined to use reserved seats on public buses because they were set aside for ladies and, fortunately, the husbands of ladies, and we regarded this as something of a perk. But the priority seats on trains and buses in Perth are primarily for the use of the elderly, infirm, pregnant and mothers with small children, and today I looked neither like a mother with small children nor particularly pregnant, and I did not think that I looked infirm. Mind you, I hadn’t for a solitary moment imagined I looked old enough for a young man to get up and relinquish his spot, but there you are, clearly I did, and that is plainly distressing. Not that I hesitated to accept his kind offer, I was pleased enough to be able to travel in comfort.
Transperth, the local public transport operator, clearly wants everyone to travel in comfort; this week they launched a series of nursery rhyme posters aimed at reminding passengers of their obligation to be good citizens. Here’s one:
Mary had her iPod up
as loud as it would go
And every song that Mary played
she thought that we did know
The noise was unrelenting
and it made the people frown
Oh how we wish that Mary
would turn that damn thing down
And another:
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Scratching a window pane
He thinks that its funny, it costs us all money
I wish that Jack would grow half a brain
There are more, Humpty Dumpty got on a bus, Humpty Dumpty made a great fuss, Little Miss Shaw sat on the floor and so on; nine in all, produced by Cooch Creative, billed as humorous, tongue-in-cheek nursery rhymes illustrated in the style of a traditional storybook, all aimed at addressing negative behaviour on the city’s buses and trains.
As well as a rhyme, each poster has a message: Everyone has the right to a comfortable journey, please do not sit in the aisles; Everyone deserves the right to a vandalism-free train, and so on.
I looked at these posters and wondered whether the intended targets, the Jack Horners or Mary with her iPod would take the blindest bit of notice and thought it very unlikely. The verses are dull, they lack rhythm and the rhymes are, at best, laboured. In fact, I concluded that the copywriter hadn’t had a good day at the office.
But then again, maybe I am just getting old.

Envy
I have been unwell all week, at first I thought it was the flu but having reconsidered the symptoms it could be iPhone envy. The onset of a sore throat, headaches and blocked nose coincided with the arrival of an email from friends, Philip and Julie Cheyne, currently holidaying in rural France. It wasn’t the first such message, but this one was something to the effect of; here we are basking in the sun in the village square, eating citron crepes and drinking coffee, just relaxing after touring a local winery. At the bottom of each such message is the tag-line, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Similarly afflicted, we get messages from another friend, an obscure London publisher, who sends the equivalent of literary grunts, “I’m in Cyprus”, “Just landed in Macau” or “It’s 3.00am in Cannes”. Again, these come with that same footer, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Who wouldn’t be envious and there are a couple of observations to be made; these people are rubbing it in that they own iPhones while the rest of us are consigned to last-generation appliances which are restricted to making calls, text messages and taking grainy photos, and which do not have a zillion questionable Apps (techno jargon for applications) which do important things like telling us the time in Beijing, translating phrases into Arabic and providing the latest news about Paris Hilton.
Secondly, iPhones allow their owners instant bragging rights about the exotic fun they are having, and they do so deliberately while the rest of us are confined to mundane processes of life; cooking and cleaning, working and freezing at the hands of a southern hemisphere winter.
The same goes with Facebook where some postings come “Via Mobile Web”. Down the right hand menu there is often a list of your friends who use their mobile phones to upload postings, and this is also designed to create envy; it means that these people can post to Facebook in an instant and from anywhere in the world while the rest of us have to start up computers, find internet connections and go through a slow and now very uncool process of uploading.
"Sent from my iPhone", is a gratuitous message, calculated for one thing and one thing alone; to remind us have-nots of our inferiority, and every time I get one of these messages I take to my sick bed for another few days.
But it is not just I who suffers. Perth is a city built on envy; a little like that New Zealand thing where South Islanders believe that if it wasn’t for the Cook Strait cable sending power northwards, the entire North Island would collapse and disappear without trace. And many think that would be a good thing. Here it is the minerals; Western Australians believe that they create the continent’s entire wealth and somehow that wealth is sucked to the East with nothing coming back in return. From time to time there are dark muttering of seceding from the rest of Australia and creating an independent state, and probably the Easterners hope they would just get on with it.
But that is not the point here. As the third series of Underbelly, the television drama revealing the dark side of Australia’s organised crime draws a conclusion, Western Australians have only just twigged that they have been overlooked entirely. Melbourne and Sydney have both featured, as has the Kiwi-dominated Mr Asia drug syndicate, Queensland is ear-marked for the next series, but no-one takes the West seriously enough to do anything based on characters here.
Not to be overlooked completely, the local West Australian newspaper has run a ten-part series on organised crime around Perth, the first instalment targeting John Kizon, a self-styled wide boy with plenty of money, a fast lifestyle and, apparently, no visible means of support. The cops have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to catch him red-handed at whatever it is he is supposed to be doing for at least a decade, but in all that time they have been singularly unsuccessful. This suggests either they are completely stupid or Kizon exceptionally clever; and the latest attempt to get him on charges of insider-trading came spectacularly undone.
But what is intriguing about this is that, a few days later after the West Australian exposé, Kizon was featured at length on television’s Channel Seven denying all allegations and putting forward his own version of events. The intriguing thing is that the West Australian and Channel Seven are effectively one and the same; they have the same parent company, which really raises a question about media creating stories out of nothing and then breathing life in to them.
If there is one event which would give rise to the view that the cops here are more Keystone than clever, it would be the events arising from the murder of the owner of the bar across the road from work. The only suspect fled interstate, one step ahead of an arrest warrant; two detectives on the same flight as he while on the run to Adelaide, and who were coincidentally working on the case, recognised him but then failed to tail him once there; when he was eventually arrested in Townsville days later, the WA cops arrived without completed extradition documents and then had to wait a week for the paperwork to be ironed out, it took about three attempts. Once back in WA, these same police realised they had left the crucial charge sheets in Townsville and, at the time of writing, were unable to actually lay the murder charge, the purpose of the original arrest warrant. It is little wonder they’ve never been able to pin anything on Kizon or even stitch him up.
Meanwhile, I think I’ve found a cure for iPhone envy; it’s called Phuket and its less than two weeks away.

Myth buster
It takes just two and three quarter hours to fly from Perth to Adelaide, but more than thirty to complete the return journey by road, that is if you do it in a Kenworth rig hauling three big trailers stuffed to the gunnels with plasma televisions, computers and other electronic goods for cashed or credited-up Western Australians.
This is big country, theirs a big rig and this was a big journey across the Nullabor Plains over two nights and one day, but if that was a big trip, think on this; our friends and former neighbours, Terry and Barbara Anderson do a return journey from Perth to Sydney every week. Four thousand miles each way leaving Perth on a Tuesday night and getting back late on the Sunday night, or in this case at 2.30am Monday morning. Each drives a four hour shift while the other sleeps, or at least tries to as much as you can while their rig, with its tyre pressure three times that of a car, bounces, kangaroo-like, across a pot-holed continent.
To get some perspective, this rig has eighteen forward and three reverse gears, its four fuel tanks hold 2600 litres of diesel all up and at one stop we took on board $1900 worth. The return journey between Perth and Sydney consumes around $5,000 worth of diesel, their truck has clocked up 1.3 million kilometers but has an expected life of 4 million, the whole shooting box weighs more than seventy tonnes, is almost 40 percent the length of a rugby field and its twelve axles support wheels with tyres worth up to $800 each. This is statistics city and it would be easy to be overwhelmed, but we aren’t and cannot afford to relax; the roads across the Nullabor are so narrow in places that these huge beasts pass each other at 90kph with only 12 inches or more between them.
At more than 4.3 metres tall and with its three trailers this Kenworth is described as a long vehicle in South Australia and a road train in Western Australia. The cab has a small living room, the ceiling is at least 7 foot high, and there are two bunks, a fridge, cupboards and even a little cooker. What a life? Barbara, a superb and generous cook at home, plans this trip with precision. Cornflakes, fruit salad and yoghurt for breakfast, meatballs and lasagna for lunch and mince for dinner, there are chocolate treats to keep driver and passengers alert, and then there is the curious custom, once sated, of watering the wheels; while women use roadhouse toilets, men engage in the selfless art of cooling the tyres.
The Nullabor itself is hard to describe. Never ending with flat, short, scrubby bushes as far as the eye can see, a huge sky, bright stars, straight roads and trucks. Dozens of them, but only a few cars and camper vans, many home built. There are roadside trees decorated with shoes, bras and underpants, there is the occasional farm, more trees, and then the nutters of which there are a few. We passed a man pushing a wheel barrow carrying a life size brown bear, he had been on the road for weeks, a lone cyclist in the middle of nowhere, apparently without water or pannier bags for supplies, and a woman in pink walking across the plains raising money for cancer. Then there were the chaps in a tractor towing a mud-splattered caravan, and cops checking permits, driving licenses and running alcohol tests; it was as well I had banned my hosts from drinking while driving.
From Ceduna at one end of the Nullabor to Norseman at the other is 1,000 kilometers, in between only an occasional roadhouse with petrol pumps, greasy overpriced food and souvenirs the price for which a small mortgage is required. And a golf course. Billed as the longest in the world, the eighteen holes of the Nullabor links stretch 1400 kilometers along the Eyre Highway, from Ceduna to Kalgoorlie, and is billed as par 71 or par 72 course depending on which guide you read.
There were a few myths shattered on this trip, the first being that Kangaroos exist in the wild. No matter what may be claimed to the contrary, they do not. No question about it. We had been told by almost everyone that Kangaroos are plentiful, unavoidable and every day hazards, menacing innocent cars by bounding unexpectedly onto highways and being left as road kill for the eagles, dingoes and crows to devour and complete the eco-cycle.
But that was not our experience; previously when venturing north there were none to be seen and the same south. This time, east to west, day time, night time and dusk, not a single solitary one, except for Mitch, a tame thumb-sucking marsupial and its Joey at the roadhouse it shares with American space junk. Legends that the outback roads are paved with the bones Roos are just that, legends, perhaps even stories from the dreamtime.
But if that was a shattering discovery, what about this? There is no wrestling through eighteen forward and three reverse gears, doubling d' clutch, graunching cogs and fighting a recalcitrant gearstick here, these rigs are automatic with a dinky little push-button box on the dashboard for the manual override. But what's worse, and I saw with my own eyes, is that modern truckers wear slippers while driving. This is without a word of a lie and there was only one question to be asked; where have all the real men gone?