I’m back in “civilisation” though I’m not so sure that’s an appropriate term, even in a city as comparatively civilised as Melbourne. I’d say the rainbow was more civilised. Melbourne is bursting with wild summer energy and crazy Aussiness; the Australian Open (tennis) is on and Australia Day is tomorrow and I’m in the middle of it all with a thousand Aussies in Federation Square where Fed is beating Hew 2-0, 4-4 and 40-40, which presumably means that Federer is two sets up against Hewitt, and, judging from peoples’ oohs and aahs, Hewitt is an Aussie. It’s all happening on the big screen in front of us, but the real action is taking place in a stadium only a riverbend away. I don’t care all that much about tennis but the atmosphere is good, there’s a guy playing the ukulele on a stage and there’s free internet here. I still have 70 emails to respond to.

(I hate the word “Aussie”, by the way. It’s supposed to be pronounced “ozzy” but a double s in the English language is always pronounced s and never z. Bloody Australians don’t know how to spell, obviously, yet they blame others, especially Americans, when they pronounce it “ossy”. It is not uncommon to hear the patriotic drinking chant “aussie – aussie – aussie, oi – oi – oi” around pub tables.)

A five minute walk away across the river, through the Arts Centre with the “Eiffel Tower” on top of it, out the back through the underground parking, into a tower block and a ride in the elevator to the 22nd floor is Tina’s oasis of a flat, spotless in its Taiwaneseness, seemingly vaccinated against mess except for the scruffy Norwegian sleeping on the sofa. Olga the Russian, Tina’s new flatmate, moved in a week ago and probably didn’t have much of a choice when it came to the Norwegian part of the inventory. But they only have to put up with me for a few more days – I’ve had no less than four offers of places to stay and I will be joining Cassie in the squat – still running well with no trouble – for a couple of days before crashing at my Mexican friend Jennifer’s place. That’s too good to be true... what are my new year’s resolutions again? Feeding myself chocolate every day is not such a big challenge but finding a competent Spanish teacher is another matter. Jennifer is a literary editor in Spanish and her English is beyond perfect...

Oops. Hewitt lost, people are leaving and the ukulele is playing Waltzing Mathilda in a rather depressed manner. It’s actually getting a bit chilly, surprisingly, so I think I’ll go on that five minute walk, have some dinner and continue writing on the 22nd floor. The flat and the view remind me a lot of Dmitry and Gulnura’s in Singapore. I live right next to the tallest building in Melbourne.

_____

I left New Zealand last Thursday after virtually no sleep at the airport. I anticipated lots of problems crossing from NZ to Oz and my first obstacle was getting through the very first passport control – there’s a 25 dollar airport departure tax when leaving Christchurch! I had no idea about that and I had carefully planned and spent my very last NZ dollars and cents. I refused to pay and got away with it. I just had to give them some permanent home address and a photocopy of the passport I’m never going to return to NZ on anyway (it’ll soon be out of pages) and give a promise to pay the bill when it turns up in the post. Or what? They’re going to send NZ Secret Service after me? Good luck. The second NZ affront was the theft of my beloved honey by airport security. You’re not allowed to bring a liquid onto a plane and all that jazz... which begs the question, exactly when is a liquid a liquid? Is honey a liquid? Everything is potentially a liquid if the temperature is right. I’d say my honey was rather solid for a liquid in the cold NZ weather...

I still had my powder milk and oats and chocolate in my food bag, and all my clothes and mattress and tent were filthy and full of NZ soil so I anticipated another calamity as I arrived back in Melbourne. But no. I just had to unpack my tent and show that my tent pegs were reasonably clean... and that was it, I was let back in to Australia with no further questions asked! Let it once and for all be said that the commonly held belief that you’re not allowed to bring food into Australia is exaggerated.

I popped into the car rental place at the airport to grab a piece of scrap paper and a marker to make a sign to help me to hitchhike to Melbourne CBD. The girls at the car rental place got really into it and passed me all sorts of coloured markers, resulting in a multi-coloured happy-sign that got me a lift almost immediately. Just like Peter in his Bentley in Christchurch, managing director of a big Australian telcom John is not the person you would expect to give you a lift. But he did. All the way to Lygon Street.
I shuffled down to the library in Swanston Street and slept for an hour or two on the lawn outside and eventually made it down to Flinders Street to hook up with Tina. And suddenly I was enjoying Tina’s red curry with her and Olga, in the 22nd floor oasis. I slept incredibly well on the sofa but woke at sunrise and couldn’t go back to sleep. So I got to work on my laptop, doing research into plane tickets, hard drives and TEFL courses, and the appropriate money transfers to actually realise those plans. With only days to go before my old one was due to expire I even picked up my new credit card at the post office, which arrived perfectly timed and wrapped thanks to the best ex-girlfriend in the world – Corinne. With an expiry date in 2014, surely this new Nationwide card will last until the end of my journey...?

Apart from the trip to the post office I spent the day in my oasis. I attempted to go busking late in the evening (it was Friday, a good busking day) but I fell asleep in the sofa again, fully dressed. And again I woke at sunrise but fell back asleep and woke at 2pm! There was obviously something strange going on with my sleeping pattern. It was as if I couldn’t readjust to sleeping in a house in a city. Tina and Olga would find me in the morning sleeping in a sitting position in the sofa on more than one occasion...

Saturday was my first serious outing in Melbourne; I caught the end of a free jazz concert in Fitzroy Gardens followed by an aimless stroll. It hit me like lightning. I was invisible. No one smiled at me. No one greeted me. I was no one’s brother. I was as valuable as a lamp post. Welcome back to the modern, western world. Melbourne wouldn’t care if I lived or died. It would make no difference to western society. It was rather awful and I decided to head back to Tina’s but got distracted for a couple of hours by the AC/DC exhibition in the Arts Centre. By god they’re getting old. Angus Young doesn’t have any hair left. It’s interesting how “Australia’s crown jewels” is a band made up of three Scots and an Aussie. And, when the singer died, he was replaced with a Brit.

Here's a clip of AC/DC playing It's a Long Way to the Top on the back of a truck driving down Melbourne's Swanston Street in 1975!

I went back out at night and up to my usual busking spot in Brunswick Street, now occupied by a girl with a guitar. She was rather nice, though, so we just sat there chatting. I was about to just give up the idea of busking and chill with the girl when it suddenly struck me how desperate I am for money so I walked 50 metres up the street and it suddenly became the best night of busking in Brunswick Street ever - from 2.30am to 4am I made 45 dollars! Later I jammed with a busking-band and met the best xylophone player I’ve ever met... could be a potential for the GMC there. As usual, the people who give money tend to be drunk men who are probably inclined to think a viola is a flower and that Tom Waits is a description of what my mate is doing at the tram stop, though there’s an occasional glimmer of hope. “You sound just like John Williamson!” a folk music enthusiast exclaimed and started dancing to my rapid-fire mouth harping. No, I don’t, actually. That’s the conclusion I draw after looking up this famous Australian folk singer and harper and listening to him on the internet. Well, yes, we sound the same because we play vaguely similar instruments. But no, our techniques are different. I still haven’t found another mouth harp player in this world that plays the mouth harp the way I do. It’s perhaps a bit sad but that’s actually quite exciting to me...

Sunday was a scorcher. I know, I know; I don’t see what pancakes and chai have in common either, but Sunday for some reason became Pancakes & Chai Day, and Tina, Olga and I invited Tina’s friends Ling and Ying and my Mexican friend Jennifer over. My enthusiasm for food is seemingly never-ending, especially after New Zealand. I started late in life but I am rapidly catching up. I just have to watch myself so that I don’t go completely over the top in the kitchen, attempting to make things that would be better unmade or mixing things that really don’t go together. Such as when I made a sweet and sour sauce with rice for Tina. Following the logic that you can mix savoury cheese with sweet jam or honey on a sandwich, why can’t I make a really cheesy sweet and sour? Well, I could! And, according to me, it worked really well. Tina wasn’t quite convinced but she has to be forgiven for that as she’s Taiwanese. She finished her plate like a good girl. In any case, I’m pretty sure it was a completely new invention.

Anyway, Pancakes & Chai. I wanted to make a big dinner and I still had a lot of flour left at Tina’s. Hence – pancakes. Then I really wanted to try making the super-spicy masala chai (spicy Indian milky tea) that I learnt how to make at the rainbow. So there. Pancakes & Chai, why not.

I had Tina’s massive kitchen all to myself and I was feeling quite small behind the mountain of ingredients that I was going to try to mix together to create something edible in a timely fashion for about six people. At first I thought I would take the easy way out and simply fry up a load of pancakes and plonk them in the middle of the table with various ingredients like a smorgasbord. But no, I luckily decided on individually made gourmet pancakes.

The magic ingredient of the night was coconut cream. It was supposed to tie the various dishes together but I unfortunately didn’t have enough coconut cream compared to the mountain of other ingredients so the coconut never became as prominent as I wanted it to be.

The chai was straight-forward enough. Using a huge, thick pot, I chucked in water and tea bags and cinnamon, cloves, cardamon, black pepper, star anise, bay leaves and ginger and boiled the lot before taking it off and adding so much milk / coconut cream (and sugar / honey) that it made up a third of the total amount of liquids, then putting it back on the stove but taking it off just before it boiled a second time. It was so spicy and good that you wanted to rub your tongue after drinking it.

I wanted to make a series of three pancakes for each person; the first two savoury, the last sweet. To make life a bit easier, I decided to only make one load of batter with 0.6-0.7kg of flour, 7 eggs, 1.2-1.3 litres of milk and a bit of oil and salt. I made the first two rounds and then I simply converted the savoury batter to sweet batter by adding a few spoonfuls of melted butter, a few drops of vanilla extract, another couple of eggs and a few spoonfuls of sugar! Ingenious, worked a treat.

It was a bit of an organisational nightmare but I insisted on doing everything myself in order to tackle the challenge head on. Round one was quite simple with melted cheese and a fried egg on each pancake. Round two got a bit more exciting and spicy with fried garlic and onions, zucchinis, sweetcorn and chilli, sour cream and coconut cream. It almost turned a bit Mexican. Round three was the big sweet over-the- top finale with fruit salad, coconut cream, whipped cream and chocolate sauce. Yummy. I think I was the only one who could stomach a round four with jam...

So Sunday was a big success. But the problem with cooking Martin-style is that you can never be quite sure of the outcome. Tuesday was Australia Day or Invasion Day as the more politically correct Aussies might call it, celebrating the anniversary of the first landing of the British invaders / colonisers / prisoners in 1788 in Sydney Cove. A huge couchsurfing gathering / picnic / piss-up had been planned in the big park on the south bank near Tina’s and I decided to use the last bit of flour to make chapattis. Using too much oil, baking powder and heat and not enough yeast, they came out as hard as crisps. I still brought them along and passed them around to the crowd of maybe as much as fifty CSers – when soaked in oil or some kind of dip they were nevertheless just about edible. But my skills as a baker are desperately lacking and I obviously need more practise.

But who needs chapattis when you have a litre of Bacardi, thanks to Jennifer!? The Bacardi disappeared worryingly quickly, there was plenty of shenanigans, there was frolicking in the grass, there was an air-show above our heads, there were frisbees and Australian “footballs”, there was an exciting excursion 15 metres into the air to dislodge the stupid oval “football” from the very top of a tree, there was even tightrope-walking and juggling. The day after there were numerous unidentified cuts and bruises that testified to the awesomeness of the previous day. There was also the near-heart-attack-moment when my mouth harp, last seen hanging around my neck, was nowhere to be found. I went back to the park, searched for an hour with no luck, decided to give up, stumbled into a bush and by some miraculous twist of fate actually found it right there!

I laughed a lot that day. The rainbow has changed me quite a lot and, bizarrely, I discovered that unintentionally even my laugh has changed. Was it because of the laughter yoga? It hit me like a slap in the face when I realised that my laugh has begun to resemble the laugh of the rainbow brother who took ten tabs of LSD in one go...

Tina wouldn’t let me leave until she had challenged my position as the Prince of the Pancake or the King of the Crepe. On Wednesday she rose to the challenge and cooked up one of the most flavoursome meals I’ve ever tasted; a kind of Japanese pancake with all sorts of veggies, mayo, fish sauce, ginger, soy, something sweet... it just seemed to stimulate every corner of the mouth simultaneously.

Thursday January 28th

I’m still at Tina’s. I just have to shower, eat and pack and I’ll be off to the squat for two or three nights to say hi before moving to Jennifer’s place. I am so incredibly lucky to have people looking after me so well. I am totally broke yet I am convinced I could stay in Melbourne for months hardly lifting a finger yet living fairly comfortably. Jennifer told me I could stay for as long as I want. I might spend a week, easily. To search more on the internet for work and send out more CVs, to learn Spanish, to teach her to play the guitar, to learn to dance salsa, to write, to busk... oh and we are going to the cinema on Sunday to see Avatar in 3D – many people from the rainbow family are talking highly of it as a kind of “rainbow vision”.

I’m down to my last hundred dollars or so. But am I worried? Not in the slightest. The universe looks after me. I might be a bit hungry for a while but hunger doesn’t scare me quite as much anymore. I am not worried about my capacity to live in Australia, but I guess I am more worried about my capacity to live in South America. That’s something I know nothing about but I hear busking is virtually impossible. So I unfortunately have to not only get by but save money. So there is no choice, I have to work.

Right now anything is possible. I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next week. I could end up anywhere from Perth to Cairns, I could be doing anything. An email in my inbox could change everything. Somebody saying “hey Martin, let’s do this and that” could change everything. I’m so in the moment that anything is possible. And I love it.

I was going to hitchhike north up to the Yarra Valley, then Shepparton, then the Murray River, then Mildura and so on through the agricultural heartlands of Victoria until I find a good job but I received some rather bad news in the park on Tuesday. A bunch of people had come the other way, south from New South Wales, and decided to go to Melbourne because there was no work! That’s the problem with Australia... there are too many people trying to do the same thing. My problem is that the moment I leave Melbourne I am cutting myself off from friends and from opportunities to busk – so perhaps it would be better to find a job before leaving. At least in Melbourne I can more or less support myself even without a job.

Some employers are really taking advantage of kids in Australia on their one year working holiday visas, there are plenty of scams going around. Because there are so many of us desperate job-seekers who are unfamiliar with how things work, we can be easy prey for dodgy people. Some hostels, for example, promise to find travellers work if they stay at the hostel but only end up with a shift a week. I could find work tomorrow if I really wanted to, doing anything, but I need a well paid full time job with lots of hours and semi-decent working conditions, ideally in a place where I can live for free in my tent. That narrows my options considerably. I am looking for fruit-picking work through the excellent online “harvest trail” website or for roadhouse work through an agency or directly. A roadhouse would be pretty perfect because they often include accommodation and food, they pay you well because no one wants to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing to do but to work and there’s nothing to spend your money on so that you can save everything you earn... Sounds perfect to me. In addition I would have the peace of mind to work on my brother’s film in my spare time.

I said I wasn’t going to go to Western Australia and I said I wasn’t going to go to the Australian rainbow gathering in WA in March... but now I’m thinking I might just end up there, who knows?

Oh – I have landed one job! An update of the satellite navigation system, the voice-over job that brought me back to London on two occasions on this journey. This time it’s a very small update, just a half an hour job, so I am looking for a suitable studio here in Melbourne. I will only make GBP 150, nothing to get too excited about.

Next up – back to the squat to say hello and goodbye to Cassie and a whole bunch of other squatters and couchsurfers!

Saturday January 30th

I’m enjoying the free internet at the North Melbourne library after a couple of nights at the squat. Cassie and Tim are still there but now there’s a whole bunch of others, some “permanent residents”, some visiting couchsurfers. A Dane, a Swede, lots of Spanish, a couple of Irish and a French girl, a Brit, an Aussie, an American... There’s a good vibe, there’s community spirit, there’s free dumpster-dived food, there’s still hot water, it’s still the perfect squat. Can’t believe no one has tried to kick them out. There’s been plenty of changes, though – now there’s a fridge, there are more mattresses, there’s lots of notes hanging on walls instructing people how to behave which is slightly annoying and definitely not the anarchist way (I’m beginning to wonder if hippies are better anarchists than anarchists), the garden is looking miles better and they’ve started growing stuff in it, such as zucchinis. The living room floor is crowded full of people sleeping next to each other every night. That’s where I sleep too. Not very well, it should be said. Which has nothing to do with the squat, it’s just that I keep waking up early even when I go to bed very late. Which makes me more and more tired. Last night I wanted to go busking at night but I just fell asleep on the floor at midnight as if someone had shot me dead. I’ll try again tonight.

About eight of us went for a real “Melbourne experience” after I turned up on Thursday. In the middle of the night we drove to a special spot along the Yarra River, walked a few hundred metres into a mostly dry storm drain overflow, basically a big round concrete tunnel with a flat floor like something out of an urban horror flick. Guided by our torches we moved deeper into the tunnel, the graffiti on the walls got more and more elaborate and sinister, small side-tunnels in the walls probably hid thousands of rats and cockroaches. Grafitti-versions of the South Park gang exclaimed “Oh my god, they drowned Kenny!” I would have been scared shitless if I’d been walking there on my own. The tunnel opened into something more akin to a chamber and the graffiti welcomed us to the home of the “Cave Clan”. A guy was sleeping on a ledge, we woke him up and invited him to the party, he lit his pipe and it was all sweet as pie. The squatters lit their fire-pois (balls attached to strings) and twirled them in fiery orbits around the darkened tunnel to the reverberating sounds of a mouth harp, a clarinet and a guitar. It works best with music, most fire-poi jugglers will tell you!

Yesterday was a pretty productive day... until I fell asleep, that is! I strolled around Melbourne researching the imminent purchase of an external hard drive that will soon contain all my brother’s tapes (that have just arrived in the post at Tina’s), I strolled up Smith Street and bumped into Thai (whose room I was renting before Christmas) who bought me a cider at a cafe, and then I dropped into my former home to hook up with Leo, make arrangements for the Wednesday barbecue and to pick up some stuff that I’d left behind. I also paid for my online TEFL course and booked all my plane tickets for the next year... from Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur and from Kuala Lumpur to London (arriving on June 13th!) with the ridiculously cheap Air Asia, from London to Oslo and back to London with Norwegian and from London via Lisbon to Salvador in Brazil on August 31st with the Portuguese airline TAP. I thought about hitchhiking from London to Lisbon to make it cheaper (Brazil being an ex-Portuguese colony) but – get this – it’s much more expensive to fly Lisbon – Salvador than London – Lisbon – Salvador with the same airline! Thank you, opodo.co.uk! So that’s it, it’s done, it’s unchangeable. I’m not going back to East Timor to sail to Darwin, I’m not sailing across the Pacific. It’s official – I’m no longer travelling around the world without flying.

About TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) – I’ve booked an online course with i-to-i via their website www.onlinetefl.com. I’ve booked the standard 60 hour course + the 20 hour grammar course + five extra modules of 5 hours each, making it a total of 105 hours. With lesson plans and classroom videos and toolkits, I’m paying a total of 629 Australian dollars. English teaching abroad is very unregulated and it is highly questionable whether the online certificate is worth the paper it is printed on. The alternative is the one month intensive face-to-face CELTA course which has a lot more street cred but is much more expensive, inflexible and time-consuming. You could argue that the online TEFL is not going to get you work in stricter places (such as Europe) and that all you need to get work as an English teacher in the less strict places (the Far East) is blond hair. I’ve nevertheless borrowed the money from my parents and I am going ahead with it. With my experience as a supply teacher in London, my BA in Acting and some kind of TEFL certificate I reckon I can land a good teaching job in South America and, later in my life, in the Far East.

I’ve also booked a stupidly expensive studio for my voice-over job for Tuesday next week. It’s a huge recording facility, something that will definitely make the client happy even if it’s a waste of their money. I don’t care too much as long as I get the job done and everyone is happy... I’m getting the equipment and the microphone I need and a good engineer to work with, I will obviously both voice and produce and quality control the recordings myself... so everything will have to be bloody perfect. The studio will cost the client 500 dollars for an hour of studio time, including getting the files ftp’ed. I luckily won’t have to worry about paying for the studio, this particular voice agency in London is so well known that the studio on the other side of the world agreed to take payment from the agency after the session. For me it’s a bit strange to book one of the most expensive studios in Melbourne but at the same time ask them to print out the scripts for me because I can’t afford printing... Luckily both the client and the agency trust me to sort it all out for them. I used to work a lot through this agency back in the day in London, they know me. I’ve already smoothed out a few translation issues in the script with the agency (I’ll be voicing in Norwegian) and I’m good to go.

The library closed, I’m back at the squat. Everybody is drifting back home from another squat around the corner that was “opened” today – they’ve spent the day clearing up the garden and cleaning and painting the rooms. Our squat-empire is spreading! We’re too many people here at the moment so some will move to the other one. And it’s always good to have backup-squats in case you’re suddenly evicted from your home! It’s a beautiful day, warm and sunny, we’re on the backyard porch, I’m entertaining us with random music playing out of my laptop. The Danish guy just requested the Norwegian band Madrugada and of course I obliged. A Spanish guy just taught me that “madrugada” means “dawn” in Spanish. Another Spanish guy who is writing a book about relationships and positive thinking and about ending indecisiveness (we had an hour-long discussion about it over breakfast this morning) has made tuna pasta in a decidedly positive way and I feel that I am positive about my immediate decision about having some.

Friday February 6th

I did manage to stay awake and went busking last Saturday but it was a mediocre evening, I made only 36 dollars in two hours and a half. However, I also made a Quote of the Day from a random, drunk passer-by. When travelling, the question “so... where are you from?” can get a bit tedious after having answered it on average ten times per day in the last four years. So I’ll have to admit that

- Are you from IKEA?

was a refreshing way to put it. My Scandinavian looks are indeed a bit of a give-away.
On Sunday Jennifer the Mexican dropped by the squat to pick me up and take me to the cinema. I quickly knocked up a typical squat-meal for all of us, the type where you mix together whatever can find in the kitchen. My garlic-zucchini-tuna in tomato sauce-sour cream-mayonnaise-milk-herbs-pasta was a success.

So was the film. Avatar has taken the world by storm and broken all box office records. Trams in Melbourne are irregular, especially on a Sunday. So Jen and I had to walk through the rain from North Melbourne to the IMAX in Carlton Gardens, the third biggest screen in the world, and sat down with our 3D glasses on just as the spaceship floated on its way to Planet Pandora. We were on the front row, totally immersed in this entirely new experience unfolding in front of our eyes. We dodged robots racing in our direction and tried to touch plants that seemed only an arm’s length away. Despite the love-story-aerial-battle-Hollywood-bullshit, it’s very hard not to like this groundbreaking film. It’s the beginning of a new chapter in filmmaking and it questions the very nature of reality.

The humanoid inhabitants of Pandora are a generalised mixture and a simplified representation of all indigenous cultures on earth – I recognised Maori / Polynesian, Australian aboriginal and African elements – and their invented language was obviously (to my ears) inspired by Maori and (West?) African languages, and with the typically SE Asian (and Polynesian) “ng” sound at the beginning of words. The flora of this supposedly alien planet is also very earth-like, with ferns and vines and glowing mosses and “umbrella-corals” that disappear when you get too close to them. The fauna included alien-like dogs, cats, apes and dinosaurs. It is very obviously a film about earth and the continued rape of its indigenous peoples. The humanoids of Pandora, and specifically their connection to the world around them, are close to how some members of the rainbow family would like to see themselves. I’ve never seen such anti-capitalist / anti-(neo-)colonialist / anti-American-imperialist themes explored so blatantly and unapologetically in a mainstream piece of Hollywood entertainment, there is potentially a lot of power here. The whole story behind the corporation, mining, the interaction with and exploitation of the locals and the military intervention are of course simplified and futuristic but it is in no way exaggerated, I see it in some ways a fairly accurate (ongoing) history of planet earth. I luckily knew this already but I am not surprised at the reports that some cinema-goers (who presumably realise these things for the first time?) emerge from the cinemas in states of anger, sadness or despair. Avatar taps directly into and reawakens the feeling, normally anesthetised by comfort and propaganda, that something is very wrong with the way we live our lives. Being out of touch with the nature of Mother Earth means that we are out of touch with our own nature. Realising this but being unable to change it brings on the depression that many have described. This film could change things in the world but more likely we’re all going to get our fill of entertainment and then get back in our cars and drive back to our homes and go back to our jobs exactly as powerless, unfulfilled and disconnected as before. But we can change things. It feels extremely odd and almost embarrassing to use a piece of Hollywood entertainment to make a point like this... but life really can be as beautiful as on Pandora, we can live like the indigenous people on Pandora. This is part of what I realised on December 6th 2008 and it has become the main drive in my life.

Jen and I rushed back to the North Melbourne squat to pick up my stuff which seems to have doubled in size. I promised myself not to start accumulating things when I got to Melbourne but I’ve obviously failed. We made it down to Flinders Street Station, ran up the escalator, I tripped and fell and scraped off a big chunk of skin off one of my knuckles... and bleeding, panting, sweating and loaded up like pack-animals we burst onto the last train to Malvern that evening, just before it was about to leave. Malvern is on the opposite side of town to North Melbourne, it’s out past St. Kilda, far away from everything. And it’s rather posh, it’s as different to Smith Street as it can possibly get. I settled nicely into Jen’s tiny one-bed apartment. Tiny but scarily, spotlessly clean. I’m obviously going to have to mess it up just a bit!

“You can stay for as long as you like,” Jen said in her perfect American accent – she went to an international school in Mexico City as a child and learnt English from a very early age. That’s of course a great piece of news for me, on the one hand... but on the other I’m not sure I wanted to hear that because it removes some of my motivation to find a job and get on with my life. I could easily end up getting stuck here...

Jen’s grandfather, by the way, was very high up in the leadership of the authoritarian regime in Nicaragua until they were thrown out by the Communists in 1979. Jen’s grandfather then ditched his wife and daughter (Jen’s granny and mother) and ran away to Paraguay with his secretary...

I was happily sleeping in Malvern on Monday morning when the owner of the squatted house in North Melbourne put his head in through a living-room window and gave all the sleeping squatters a rude awakening with a shouted “get out of my house now!” He then left but later sent over two of his minions to negotiate. Cassie and the rest of the crew showed them around and actually impressed them so much with the state of the house and garden that they gave the squatters a whole week to clear out. I think that was very reasonable of them. As there’s no longer any need to “lie low”, the squatters immediately invited lots of people for dinner on Thursday and a party on Saturday in order to say goodbye properly. The search for a new squat is on... and who knows, I may end up there myself. Someone mentioned that a big mansion in Malvern has just been squatted by friends of the North Melbourne squat... what a coincidence!

Rest In Peace, beautiful squat. I guess we shouldn’t complain – four months is a long time in such a great place. Now our job is to hand the house over to the owner in pristine condition; it is important to change prejudiced public opinion about what squatting is and who squatters are. It’s not “squatting”, it’s “house-sitting”, a service some people on holiday or whatever sometimes pay others to do for them. Squatters aren’t heroin-addicted vandalising punks. We’re socially considerate, ethically aware, environmentally friendly community-minded ordinary people. And if you, Mr. and Mrs. House-owner, yes you, if you one day lose your house and your life and everything turns to shit, who do you think is going to help you pick up the pieces if you don’t have any family to help you out? Do you think all the other Mr. and Mrs. House-owners are going to give you a place to stay? No... but I’m sure you’d be welcome in a squat if you feel that you have something to contribute towards a community.

On Tuesday I got up before 7am and silently chuckled as I took a train to town with a lot of very serious rush-hour commuters, a world now very alien to me. I found the overpriced but very professional Risk Sound somewhere in Port Melbourne, was immediately comfortable in front of the U87 microphone even if it had been almost two years since I’d seen one and knocked down the 23 update prompts as if they were bowling pins. One of the lines was “Welcome to the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia”; we thought it best to do an alternate version saying just “Welcome to Macedonia” as Greece and Macedonia are currently fighting in the UN over what Macedonia should be called. In the end I did alternate, more energetic and projected versions of every line to give the client better value for money and more to choose from. Anything to keep them happy. And I’m quite sure they are.

I then bought a fast and huge external hard drive (sponsored by my brother) to capture my brother’s 20 hours of footage from his North to South Cape of Norway trip that I will try to edit into a TV-worthy documentary in my spare time in Australia. He posted all his tapes to me – now I not only have to carry my own 30 hours of film around for the next 6 months, I also have to carry his tapes... I will unload them all when I get to London in June!

In a desperate bid to save money I made the mistake of trying to walk from Fitzroy back to Malvern. It’s very, very far. I made it as far as South Yarra before getting some help from a passing tram... But the exercise of the day was far from over; Jen had got me a guest pass to her gym and kidnapped me in the evening to her yoga-tai chi-pilates-exercise session with an uber-gay instructor. Unsurprisingly, I was the only man there. Old Indian yogis must be turning in their graves at what they call yoga in gyms in big western modern cities these day.

Still, it was quite good exercise. And badly needed, too. My stomach is ballooning again as I engage in another Melbourne eating-frenzy. It’s just too good to be true to be in a flat with a real kitchen. I planned meals for more than a week and brought Jen along to the supermarket after the gym to help me carry it all back to her flat, mostly vegetables and with the three all-important magical creams that can transform any mediocre mixture of food-like substances to a sublime dish: Thickened, sour and coconut!

And thus started the biggest cooking showdown the world has ever seen – Mexico vs. Norway! Jen keeps on impressing with quesadilla (cheese tortilla) and scrambled egg brunches and bean-sour cream-feta cheese-salsa-tortilla dinners. Oh I’m going to love Latin America... And let’s not forget her toasted bread – olive oil – balsamic vinegar – lettuce – tomatoes – mayo – pepper – burger – mustard - BBQ sauce – chilli flakes – fried egg – salt – toasted bread veggie burgers. In exactly that order.

And just now as I’m sitting at Jen’s dinner table typing on my laptop, the Latin domestic goddess brought over pretzels and hommous and tzatziki dips... I live in food heaven.
I went all out for a kind of coconut-vegetable-stew vaguely reminiscent of ratatouille with onions, garlic, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, lots of tomatoes and coconut cream served on couscous. I’ve done Middle Eastern-Mediterranean-inspired tortilla wraps with tomatoes, eggs, mozzarella, cheddar, hommous, olive oil and herbs, I’ve done an omelette and tuna salad. There’s a green vegetable curry coming up, along with a Lithuanian stir-fry and pancakes. Oh and poor Jen still hasn’t tasted my award-winning creamy calorie-bomb pasta. That’ll be the finale. She’ll never let me leave. I might not be able to, in any case... perhaps I won’t be able to squeeze through the doorframe.

The big Thursday night dinner at the North Melbourne squat was another gastronomic success of epic proportions – the squatters had brought back such an abundance of dumpster-dived food that we could make pretty much anything we wanted. There was pumpkin soup, mushroom soup, fried mushrooms, vegetarian pizza, filled cucumbers, salads and what-nots. With a mix of stuff brought along and stuff I found at the squat I made the best mashed potatoes ever from...

• About 8 or 10 big potatoes
• 4 eggs
• Maybe 20cl of full cream milk
• 3 spoons of sour cream
• 3 spoons of butter
• A lot of thinly sliced tasty cheddar
• A spoonful or two of cream cheese
• Half a tub of ricotta cheese
• Lots of finely chopped chives
• Lots of salt and pepper and random herbs

...while, perhaps ironically, giving a lecture about non-attachment to everything including our own body (the extreme example being Buddhist monks setting fire to themselves) to a squatter who was feeling lost because he could no longer do sports because of a hernia and who had since gained a lot of weight before losing it again, leaving him with a lot of flabby skin that he can’t get rid of. So he has a unique opportunity to truly deal with issues of vanity and bodily attachments that a lot of us can pretend don’t exist because we can cruise through life on our “normal” looks. The rule of thumb, as always, is:

If something bothers you, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude towards it. Or live in misery for the rest of your life. It really is that simple.

Or, as a third option, escape from having to deal with the whole question by drowning your attention in the butteriest, milkiest, creamiest mashed potatoes ever.

Or perhaps the cake shops along St. Kilda’s Acland Road will be more your kind of thing. Their shop windows can probably hold your attention longer than penguins doing the can-can on an Australian beach can. Jenny and I have been there, done that too... both the cake shops and the penguins, that is! Late one evening we walked to the end of St. Kilda pier and had a very personal and close encounter with half a dozen unafraid penguins and enormous water rats that call the entirely manmade breakwater home.

Food can be a dangerous business, though. One day I was preparing a buttered toast-cheese-baked bean-fried egg-BBQ sauce lunch when the lid on the tinned beans suddenly snapped off as I was trying to open it and I cut my finger deeper than I’ve ever cut any of my own body parts, spraying blood all over the kitchen. Well, except from the time when my friend John in Singapore chopped my knee with an axe. But I guess that doesn’t count as I wasn’t doing it to myself. My finger really should be stitched up but I can also sort it out myself with sterile compresses, tape, tea tree oil and antibiotic cream. It’ll just take longer to heal.

I’m doing well with my first new year’s resolution, to eat chocolate every day, and I’m getting on the way with the second one – to learn Spanish! Jen is the perfect teacher. Or Jenny From the Block as I call her when I want to piss her off. She’s studying media in Melbourne, she wants to be an editor of books (!) and her English is perfect. So she, unlike most native Spanish speakers, can fully explain most hardcore features of Spanish grammar and make them perfectly clear in English. She can explain the difference between Spanish, Mexican and Argentine Spanish. And this is the woman who just happens to be my hostess. Are you beginning to believe me when I say about projection and manifestations and connections? Send the energy out there and it’ll come back to you... It’s as if the infinitely intricate network of universal coincidental actions and reactions can be subtly manipulated on the level of energy to make your path through time and space fit with the paths of what you are trying to manifest in your life (like chocolate or whatever), or make the other paths fit with yours. It’s pure magic.

I’ve started using my 192-page notebook which now has Espanol written on the front cover in big letters. In there is now a chapter called “Basics” with everything from “thank you” via “good luck” to “high five”, another called Basics II with everything from “I am going to Madrid” via “you are beautiful” to “I am single”. And there’s now a third chapter called “The Alphabet / Pronunciation”, the contents of which should in theory enable me to read any Spanish text and write a dictation in Spanish perfectly. And so far so good, I passed my first pronunciation test. The chapter called “Verbs” will be a real bitch (as with any Latin language) but I’m leaving that for last... Other than that, Spanish seems easy compared to French, as anticipated.

I’m continuing to sort out stuff that needs sorting while I’m still in Melbourne. I’ve bought a new piece of tupperware for all the new electronics and tapes, I’ve bought a firewire cable to transfer my brother’s tapes, I’ve bought more miniDV tapes for myself and a new daypack for my laptop. I’ve received my old software from London; my music production stuff such as Nuendo and Wavelab so that I can keep on working on the GMC and Adobe Premiere Pro so that I can edit my brother’s film. It must have been almost a year ago that I tried to sell my sound isolation booth in London – a friend of mine decided to buy it but then he couldn’t fit it through any of the doors or windows of his house, even with a crane. So it’s still in his garage ready to be sold, I’d just forgotten about it.

I’m also trying to replace the (Vietnamese) mouth harp of a friend that I broke when playing it in New Zealand. He told me he got it from the Happy High Herbs shop in Nimbin, Australia. So I called the shop, a couple of thousands kilometres away from where I am in Melbourne, and started telling the girl at the other end about the rainbow gathering and the story of the mouth harp and why I needed her to post me a new one, something they don’t normally do. “You were at the rainbow gathering? Who are you?” she said. “Er... I’m Martin, the Norwegian guy with the long blond hair?” I answered. “Oh my god,” I slept right next to your tent!” she exclaimed! It’s a small world. There she was, my rainbow-sister and rainbow-neighbour, on the phone, promising to go out of her way to send me some harps...

The only thing that’s missing now - apart from my perfect job, obviously – is a fixed LCD-screen on my Sony camera. Or rather, a new cable between the LCD-screen and the mainboard. It’s such a simple thing, it’s happened numerous times before, it’s actually a product flaw on the HVR-A1E and I’m getting a bit sick of it. That particular part is still under warranty as it was replaced in Singapore less than a year ago and I could probably get it fixed for free if I post my camera to Singapore and wait for a month or two to receive it back in Melbourne. But I don’t have the money to post it securely and I don’t have the time to hang around Melbourne to get my camera back... and I need my camera! So I’m suggesting to Sony that they should fix it for free here in Melbourne but trying to talk to anyone higher up in the Sony Corporation is like trying to bang your head through a brick wall. I’m not having much luck and I’m running out of options.

When it comes to finding work, this is what I’m down to... I wasn’t initially looking for work in Melbourne because I thought I wouldn’t be able to pay rent anywhere, instead aiming to live in my tent, but as fruit-picking isn’t as easy as I thought I’m re-evaluating that decision. Here in Melbourne there are possibilities in a North Face store, I could assemble stages and stuff for Harry the Hirer like so many other people on working holiday visas (www.harrythehirer.com.au/contact-us.aspx), there’s fruit-picking through the Harvest Trail website (http://jobsearch.gov.au/harvesttrail/default.aspx), and I’m looking for roadhouse work (or any work at all) through websites such as www.seek.com.au. There’s also the possibility of working in remote Indigenous communities through companies such as Outback Stores (www.outbackstores.com.au). And finally, and perhaps most interestingly, they are doing what’s called “clinical trials” here in Melbourne, which is basically the next step in the evolution of a new medicine after the killing-lots-of-rats-phase. And what’s that? Testing the medicine on humans, of course. Some trials are short and not really worth it. But if you manage to get a long-running trial such as the ones happening right now where you have to live in a hospital for 19 days non-stop and you’re paid per hour, every hour for 19 days! Which should give you about 5500 dollars, tax free because you’re “volunteering” and you can save it all as your food and accommodation is covered. The problem is being accepted for a trial, you need to be healthy, off drugs and tobacco, and there could be numerous other health-requirements depending on the type of trial. I’ve got half a toe inside one such company: www.nucleusnetwork.com.au. And I’m hoping to be a part of a long trial apparently coming up soon. The downside? They’re going to pump you full of medicines that have never been tested on human beings before... For me it would be absolutely perfect as I can use all my time to write on this website and work on my brother’s film and get paid for it!

11/02

This is getting ridiculous. There’s food everywhere. There’s more food than we could possibly eat. We’re fighting a losing battle against “use by” dates. There are left-overs of at least two meals in the fridge. Another four meals are waiting to be cooked. And all we did was buying some cream, vegetables and eggs at the supermarket! Plus Jenny’s Mexican stuff. And we went to Lentil as Anything in St. Kilda for dinner yesterday, it’s the famous restaurant where you can pay as much or as little as you like. I had awesome Japanese pancakes and a curry for five dollars. And it looks like it’s going to be a gastronomically interesting weekend. I truly am ballooning, it’s not just my own imagination – Jen told me so too! My stomach has noticeably changed in the last week and a half. So no complaints.

Because it’ll sure be good to have some extra fat to burn as my job hunting is not going well at all. Soon I will leave Melbourne and head out in a general north-westerly direction with nothing but my outstretched thumb and my last fifty dollars in my pocket. I can’t wait around anymore, I have to be proactive and physically seek out the work myself rather than relying on the internet. Early next week I’m off. Away from the east coast. West along the Murray river to check out apple and grape picking and then further west in the direction of Perth to find... a roadhouse, a cattle station, anything. The more remote the better, I guess.

My Spanish is improving, I am taking it very seriously. There are now new chapters in my notebook called things like “time”, questions”, “conjunctions” and “numbers”, and before I leave I want to cover “nouns”, “pronouns”, “prepositions”, “adjectives”, “adverbs” and “verbs”. And then I’ll be good to go. I’m listening a lot to my Learn To Speak Spanish In Your Car – Volume 1 and tonight Jen and I are having a Spanish movie-night with hopefully a couple of Almodovar films that I’ve missed, such as Volver. The sweetheart Jen also brought me an amazing gift the other day – Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude which is her favourite book by her favourite author and, according to Jen, the perfect introduction to South America. How exciting. First I just have to finish the silly thriller The Day After Tomorrow that someone gave me at the rainbow; it luckily has nothing to do with the film by the same name but it’s very silly nevertheless.
Oh, and let it be known in history books around the world that the very first “complex” Spanish sentence that I’ve made up entirely on my own, is:

Esta es mi primera vez en Australia.

Which means “this is my first time in Australia”.

The perfect squat has sadly been closed down after more than four months. Without the need to lie low anymore, lots of people were invited for a big party on Saturday. Not at all a “bring a sledgehammer” type party; we really wanted to hand the house over to its owner in a pristine condition on Monday. But you don’t have to destroy things in order to have a good time. We rocked the whole place, shook the walls with craziness, carved up the living room with our wildest dance-moves, cooked the kitchen to a pulp and stargazed the roof rotten... without as much as blowing a light bulb. Sleep overcame me at 5am, someone spread a blanket over me, I woke a few hours later, cooked some breakfast with the last remaining dumpster-leftovers, helped to tidy up, changed the locks back to the original ones, vacuumed and took part of the squat and dumpster bounty, such as a travel-pot for me and a grater and egg-slicer and spices for Jen.

And that was the end of it. All good things must come to an end. The house was left in a much better condition than when we first turned up. And suddenly we were all scattered. Cassie was going to live in her car for a while. Some travellers were going to couchsurfers. Tim was off to a friend to lie low for a while before finding a new squat. A couple of girls were homeless. A convoy of three cars were going to Alice Springs to find work and some of them were going to continue to the Australian rainbow gathering in Western Australia in March. They invited me along and I was very tempted. But I felt I needed to stay put in Melbourne for a while and try to find work through the internet. A mad dash into the centre of Australia without money could turn into a real nightmare. But now, a while later, that’s exactly what I am considering doing.

A Spanish squatter spoke at length to me of the pain at yet another community break-up. He’d found his home and now it was coming to an end. Which is surprising, coming from a traveller. That’s the kind of thing you just have to get used to. Instead you bring your home with you. You create your space wherever you are. Only by leaving behind the notion of a home will home be everywhere. Only by leaving behind the notion of a home will a true home become a possibility. A home is not a physical space. A home must be created. A home can potentially be created in any physical space, so if you trust in your own ability to create then your need for a home should not make you fearful. Reaching up into the air towards the highest reaches of my idealism, A home cannot be secure, real, true and sustainable if it doesn't include every human being on planet earth! That place which you claim to “own” and which is reserved for those who are genetically similar to you and which is surrounded by walls and locked doors and which falsely alleviates your fears will eventually come crumbling down as the masses of the homeless grow bigger and bigger. I believe it is possible for everyone to step out of their prisons and into their home. The big one. There’s a big home out there waiting for us. I too long for it. I too crave the feeling of home that a community brings. It is on my mind, now, it is one of the most important reasons why I continue travelling.

If it’s too hard to create one on your own, go to the rainbow gatherings. Follow them around and you’ll have a continuous string of temporary homes. The rainbow people are your family, literally, and they will always greet you with a “welcome home” when they see you.

______

Other than that, I register that the winter Olympics are about to start in Vancouver. And that a Norwegian newspaper has not only published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad on its front page, they’ve published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad as a pig on its front page. Whoa. You don’t even have to be moderate Muslim to get infuriated by that; in fact you don’t even have to be a Muslim at all! That’s the most idiotic, destructive, offensive, desperate attempt at selling newspapers I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s going to have serious consequences, mark my words. Well done, fucking morons! Wake up and smell the coffee! The world isn’t Norway! Time to grow up and leave that little bubble of yours!

Other, more exciting news came to me via Facebook from Steph. As you may remember, she left Melbourne a few months ago to go to Europe to study and the Middle East to learn Arabic. She’s made it to Egypt. This is what she posted on my Facebook wall:

“So, I went to a party last night at the house of one of my Italian friends here in Cairo and had the following conversation:

S: Hello

T: Hi! Where are you from?

S: Melbourne

T: Ah, I have a friend in Melbourne.

S: Oh really (Thinking to myself, I’ve sure heard that before)

T: Yes he is a Norwegian (*clue number 1), he is looking
for work there but can’t find anything.

S: What work does he do?

T: He is a musician (*clue number two), he plays the MOUTH-HARP!!!!!
(*clue three eliminates all doubt)

S: No way! His name is Martin Voll isn’t it!!!!!

Correct!

Bang!”

“T” is the initial of my friend Mahyar’s other name. .. It sure is a small world!

_______

My time in Melbourne ended with a bang. My crazy amiga Mexicana Jenny from the Block brought back no less than four Almodovar films, one Mexican and one Brazillian, City of God, very good. And, incidentally, one of my favourite Norwegian films, Kitchen Stories, which was shot a few kilometres from where I grew up. Jen didn’t know that, she in fact didn’t even know that it was Norwegian. She simply chose it because of my recent attraction to everything gastronomic. So Friday was the big film day, until early in the morning.

The stories coming out of Jen’s kitchen were about cultural clashes and adventurous experimentation. My Lithuanian fry-up - named after my rainbow brother Justas and having a vague Eastern European feel to it because of its down-to-earth main ingredients, potatoes and cabbage – became very multi-cultural when I added zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, onion and garlic, then loads of different spices, soy sauce, sour cream, chilli and a pile of curry powder! This Eastern European-Indian dish then conquered yet another continent when it was served with Mexican green salsa and sour cream on top, wrapped in a tortilla... yummy!

And I think even Tina would have been impressed when I made a really spicy, coconut-creamy green curry...

She wasn’t quite as impressed when I made my creamy pasta signature dish. I invited around some random Melbourne people for a little leaving-do dinner on Tuesday, just to jump ahead a bit. Jen and I sent out a few messages on Monday night thinking no one would turn up because of the short notice and because it was all the way out in Malvern. But then everyone responded in the positive and I panicked wondering how to cook creamy pasta for ten people!? I managed in the end thanks to Jen’s new wok and her Indonesian neighbours’ massive pot. A pile of fried onion, garlic, baby corn, sweet corn, zucchini, half a kilo of mushrooms, chilli, a litre and a half of thickened cream, sour cream, six eggs and close to half a kilo of cheese later and Aussie Cameron exclaimed “oh my god that’s rich” when I asked him to taste the sauce and tell me what’s missing. “Yeah, that’s the point,” I said with the big grin! And Cameron had just returned from India all podgy and well fed! Skinny-as-a-stick Tina, on the other hand, answered slightly disappointedly “mmmmm it was cheesier the last time” when I asked her what it was like. Because of the sheer volume of food I didn’t get the half-melted-cheese-trick quite right this time.

Back to last weekend. The Saturday was astounding. My new year’s resolution to eat chocolate every day is going exceedingly well. On the Melbourne couchsurfing group a German girl announced a chocolate picnic in the Botanical Gardens and invited everyone! That kind of thing only happens in films! It was work-related, she had piles of chocolate that was a bit past the use-by date but still perfectly edible, she just wanted to get rid of it all. What a feast, not just of chocolate, but of wine too! Israeli Shacher and I were the last men standing, and three bottles of wine and innumerable bars of chocolate later we stumbled out of the park in the direction of the house of the daughter of Australia’s ambassador to Mexico. A friend of Jen’s, she invited the two of us to dinner and I invited Shacher. Shacher rode his bike to her house just off Brunswick Street, I took the tram. At the tram stop I bumped into my Italian rainbow brother Alessandro, we sat next to each other up front in the tram and laughed and chatted and loudly recounted our stories of rainbows and love and dancing naked in fields and bumming it around Melbourne and looking for work and dinner invites and chocolate picnics and what it will be like to turn up at an ambassador’s daughter having already drunk a bottle and a half of wine before 7pm and where the hell is tram stop 15 anyway and would Alessandro like to come to an ambassador's daughter's dinner too and should we hand out free chocolate to the whole tram from the box I brought from the picnic?

The tram suddenly ground to a halt and the little window to the tram driver opened up right in front of us. He turned around and looked at me and with a big grin said “I’ve been listening in, this is stop 15, hope you have a great evening!”

I stumbled out before having had the time to hand out any chocolate at all in the tram, there was Shacher and his bike and a couple of girls at a table of a cafe who definitely deserved a free chocolate, and, oh, there’s Mexican girl and ambassador’s daughter too, trying to lead the way across the road, down an alley, up a staircase and into a swanky flat. There was heavenly risotto with chocolate on top (!), there was several more bottles of wine (!), there were four big male feet trying to squeeze into ambassador’s daughter’s 1000-dollar Prada shoes (!) and there was nosing around inside a well-stocked fridge and more chocolate.

We made it over to Bar Open a little bit too late. The concert was about to start, the queue was long and very slow-moving. The Mexican, the Israeli and the ambassador’s daughter bailed but instead brother Alessandro and sister Amber turned up, and then a whole bunch from a Elsternwick party Jen and I had been to a couple of weeks ago, and it felt like I knew all of Melbourne. Right at the end of the concert I was finally let in; inside were more people I knew (including Aram from Mali and New Zealand!!!) and on stage the brass, double bass, drums, percussion, accordion and electric guitar of Barons of Tang, the best band to ever have come out of Australia, were luckily playing another two songs. I mingled with the naked, sweaty bodies near the tiny stage – two songs left to scream myself hoarse, two songs left to go apeshit, two songs left to live. The Barons bounced with gypsiness, the room pulsated with energy, we were alive, no one gave a fuck, this moment is the ultimate, nothing else matters.

Sadly only two songs...

Outside I met Jen and Shacher who took me over to Night Cat for some salsa, and then I cruised back to Brunswick Street for some late night busking, this time with the addition of a cardboard box with “free chocolate” written on it next to me. Just to spread the love, you know. Didn’t help my busking much, though.

I stumbled down to Flinders Street station, slept a couple of hours and caught the first train to Malvern.

And it didn’t end there. Sunday was Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year and the climax of the St. Kilda festival all rolled into one! “The best free festival in Australia” some call it. Others call it “The best free festival in the world”! Phew, what a weekend...

Jen and I trammed it down there and we were obviously not the only ones who’d had that idea – the streets of St. Kilda were absolutely jam-packed full of scantily clad party-goers revelling in the brilliant sunshine. We tracked down couchsurfer after couchsurfer and our group grew bigger and bigger and we went from stage to stage to stage. We caught a band at the newcomer-stage, the Black Jesus Experience with Thai on keyboards at another, later an excellent Senegalese mbalax band, then there was a salsa group and finally a dodgy Rod Stewart-like rocker and a funk band on the main stage on the beach with the gentle waves of Port Phillip Bay as the backdrop, our group rocking away and dancing like crazy and building spontaneous human pyramids and what-not.

Despite all the good music, perhaps the most memorable bit was seeing the upside-down rooftops of St. Kilda rushing past at a hundred miles per hour. Like a kid I was watching the insane fairground ride Shacher was queuing up for in absolute awe, wishing to be on it but not wanting to waste 15 dollars. Behind my back Jen and Shacher got me a ticket to ride...

No wonder it’s taking such a long time to leave this place. A month after arriving from New Zealand and I'm still here...

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