Well it's been probably the best two and a half years of my life but all good things and so forth, and so I'm being deported out of Australia back to Sweden. I don't want to go, I've been very happy here. And miserable, that's true, but mostly happy and I've made some great friends I will sorely miss.
In fact, and I probably shouldn't even say this because it goes very much against the whole Aussie bloke thing, but here it is anyway: sitting in Melbourne airport I received a voice mail from a friend saying goodbye and all the best, and it suddenly hit me that this is it, it's really over, I'm actually going and I won't be back, and I shed a bitter tear.
So yes, I cried when I left Australia.
Looking forward, though, I've got three weeks in New Zealand on the way. That's gonna be a ton of fun, even though I'll have to go through it with an increasing growth of beard since they took my shaving cream off me in airport security.
And let's just get this straight boys and girls: the whole creams-and-sprays-and-liquids thing does nothing for airline security. Nothing. No, not a tiny teenie weenie bit - nothing. Sorry if that unsettles you, but the brutal and ugly truth is that if someone wants to do something nasty to a plane, they'll find a way. The rest is just a false sense of security and a damned nuisance.
But on to things more positive.
I will roughly be following the Billy Connolly Drives New Zealand route (http://www.newzealand.com/travel/getting-to-around-nz/driving-routes/billy-connolly-drives-new-zealand.cfm). Billy Connolly's World Tour of New Zealand recently aired here in Oz so when I started the planning for this trip (oh, 'bout three days back) I thought that'd be a good reference.
I was a little disappointed to find he doesn't actually go through Napier (North Island, east coast), art deco capital of NZ (love the stuff and would like to live in New York in the thirties if I could), but that's a simple addition.
Except I then went all over Adelaide trying to find the DVD of aforesaid programme only to find the route he follows in the series bears but the most fleeting resemblance the one on the web site and indeed he does go through Napier. So that's alright.
I ended up having to get the box set of mr Connolly's world tours (Scotland, Australia, England / Ireland / Wales, and NZ), so I've been exceeding my doctor's recommended daily maximum intake of Glasgow comedians. But hey, it's the year of living dangerously.
I don't have a truckload of firm plans (you know how I feel about plans), but I at least have all my accommodation in place. And a great big overflowing slithering-down-the-sides heap of thanks to Amber at Escape Travel in Glenelg for sorting me out.
I'll be using a Kruse system (http://www.krusenz.com), which I think looks like a fantexcellent invention. Basically it's a GPS-based audio travel guide, so it sits in the car and talks at you whenever you drive past something interesting. Great for me, since a) I'm driving and b) I'm travelling alone so there's no one to converse with. Now I just hope I'll be able to use my iPod at the same time so I get music while I drive (they've both got FM transmitters so I'm planning to tune them to the same frequency).
...
The Qantas Club lounge bathrooms at Tullamarine get my stamp of approval, but the coffee does not. And of course, the other tends to lead to a visit to the one. Still, it's better than the other way around. Only reason I'm getting the opportunity to sample both is that the flight to Auckland has been held up with a mechanical problem. Current best estimate says a three-hour delay but I've been there before.
I got overnighted in Frankfurt AM once, during the soccer World Cup I recall, not that I could get tickets for anything. Then on the flight the next day I noticed as we were boarding that my seat number was written down on a piece of paper in the galley. As it turned out this was because the screen for the entertainment system had lost its blue smoke so I had to sit there and entertain myself. Oh the humanity.
As compensation they gave me a set of Sennheiser noise-cancellation headphones - totally worth it. They're great, especially with uniform background noise, like you get on a plane or the old tram cars on the Glenelg - City route. I often use them on their own, without any music on, just to cut the ambient noise down. Get a pair.
Ahm, uhm, nope, that's it. Run out of creative juice. Will post more when I've run another creat through the blender. Oh, except to say that I stayed the night at the Adelaide Airport Motel and a really nasty place it is, complete with seventies decor, frightfully rude staff and everything. But that's not the point, the point is that as I was checking out the guy asked where I was off to and I said back to Sweden and he said so are you from there and I said yes and he said
... wait for it...
"Well you've got an Aussie accent."
To which my reply was Yes, so my pommie brother-in-law tells me. But anyway, I was very very proud to be told that. Australia is a wonderful country full of wonderful people and if some tiny bit of it has rubbed off on me I could not be more honoured.
Because I may be moving back to my top-floor apartment with its unrivalled view of the entire city of Stockholm. I may me going back to a job where project managers go at each other with pistols at dawn to get me on their team. And I may be going to where my family and my oldest friends are.
But I still call Australia home.
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