Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 400 - Sydney My list of favorite cities reads like the signage above an international fashion store or perfumery - London, Paris, New York...um...Sydney. So the latter is somewhat incongruous but here I was carried back across the country on the wings of fond remembrance and affection. I was on a high, in my mind (a fertile, febrile place) returning like a conquering hero. Flushed with western success life seemed a simpler game or if not simpler then one at which I was now more adept. I'd taken a room in Coogee for a couple of weeks and its streets (street) and bars (bar) held happy memories. Amy and Laura were my temporary flatmates, Jeanette, being away for Christmas, was the other resident whose room I had taken. I went directly from the airport to Coogee Bay Hotel not even stopping to dump my bags. Amy and Jayne were back from their tomato farming and familiar faces were there in force. Christmas is an understated affair in Australia, they don't go in for the cold, dar...

Day 380 - Margaret River It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. It was a Tuesday, it was like any other. Me and the Cornish lads had slogged through another day on the vineyard and were driving home. I switched on my phone to check messages, my housemate Emily had text. All our stuff's on the street. Martina showdown. It had been building to this but with 3 days left before we left Margaret River she'd actually done it. Perhaps I should recap? The housing situation at Tunbridge Street had been deteriorating since, well, since I moved in really. I'd have to say that this was in spite of rather than because of my presence. I hadn't met the landlady before I took the room so my first contact with Martina was after wo...

Day 365 - Margaret River A couple of notable milestones had passed. The first was the completion of my 88 days of regional work. This was a cause for relief and elation given the slender margins of time I had to get it done. Despite the sheer monotony of each working day the weeks had zipped by at an acceptable pace. Despite the specified three months seeming to stretch endlessly into the distance on that frigid first morning in the vineyard I could now thumb my nose at Labour Solution's exploitative employment and return to the cosmopolitan splendor of Sydney. Except I couldn't. Whilst I would consider it an appropriate gesture for the Australian government to buy you a plane ticket back to civilisation at the completion of your regional work this doesn't appear to be official policy. So, though I calculated that I had pruned, wrapped, pulled, thinned, constrained and otherwise manhandled in excess of 21,000 vines up to this point I would need a few more to return east. T...

Day 333 - Margaret River Despite the inestimable pleasure of sleeping in a bunk bed, sharing your toilet cubicle with wildlife, bare concrete floors and Gwendal, it was time to leave the hostel. And yet I did so with an amount of reluctance. I'd become used to the place, a part of the worn furniture, institutionalised you could say. So when the offer of a room in a house came I clung fiercely to what I knew and shied away from a new place and new people. I'm not sure that fear will ever entirely desert me, my nature is my nature, but at least in my age and my wisdom I can push through it with a modicum of sense. The house was familiar, I'd been there before after a night in the pub. As had most of the other patrons once word got around of a party at 46 Tunbridge Street. The 100 or so unexpected guests were soon surreptitiously pointed in the direction of another, 'better' house party at an unsuspecting and unfortunate address down the road. Poor Frodo didn't k...

Day 282 - Margaret River Saturday night tears at the thin fabric of human culture, exposing the beast beneath. -- Margaret River Lodge motto The hostel was quite unlike any I had stayed in before. Monday to Friday its residents dutifully rose early to toil in the vineyards surrounding the little town. To endure biting wind and stinging rain while working on grape vines that produced wines that they couldn't afford. Come the weekend though there was full-scale rebellion against this government-ordained monotony. A cauldron brought out and placed in the centre of the kitchen, goon and evil spirits cast into it for unholy concoction and ungodly intoxication. We whooped, we caroused. We painted our faces and shaved our heads. We steeped ourselves in wine, (lack of) women and song. We played topical drinking games like 'wine waterboarding' (not me) and entered the swimming pool via the shopping trolley delivery method (me). In short we were frothing. I had swiftly (well it ma...

Day 257 - a black hole To put it in the common parlance 'shit just got real.' If that phrase has a flippant air then it is unintended and unwelcome, I just don't know how else to put it. Likewise what do you say to your best friend, your constant travelling partner of the past six months, when they call to tell you they are being deported? Do you say "It'll be alright.", 'cause it won't, certainly not now, maybe not ever. What words soften the blow of accusing eyes delivering a fast-track conviction, how do you comfort a person that's become a...criminal in the blink of an eye? You only need have an immigration official cast an eye over your passport to know they are not from an organisation to be crossed, be you on the border of Australia or Zambia. A sullen, unflinching seriousness must either be rigorously instilled in them or else the recruitment process heavily selects against individuals displaying more than a ounce of levity. Withering star...

Day 237 - Margaret River The train cut through an orange land so sparse that not even clouds bloomed in its yawning blue sky. It passed stations so small that the platforms could hold three or four people at most. I saw dwellings here and there, each a battle against nature won though the ongoing war still inevitably lost. From the eastern hubbub to this western desolation I wondered, as I would many times over the coming months, how on earth I ended up here. I carried a knot in my stomach, whether from fear or food deprivation I couldn't be sure. This was new, this was different. Barring a few days in Brazil I had never so boldly struck out on my own. Leaving behind a pleasant Sydney existence, friends, a well-paid job, the comfort of familiarity, to start again on the other side, to create a life over again. Yeah it was probably fear. I changed from train to bus at the end of the line and the landscape softened as we continued south. Wetter and greener, life returned in the form...

Day 201 - Sydney A solitude wraps me as I walk, the ferries blow their funereal horns as if through some foggy dock on the eve of war. I turn up the collar on my favourite (only) winter coat and press on over the swing bridge and past destroyer, submarine and magnificent 3-masted sail ship. Wooden boards give a resonant thud as my smart-shod feet strike them and ibis stalk the grassy swath to my left. The sun traces its shallow arc in the sky as I arrive at the office and day two hundred and one stirs to life. The transience had paused and routine replaced it. Faces and places became familiar and relationships lasted past a day or two of crossed paths. Heck, such was the order of my life I had even taken to eating muesli for breakfast (with soy milk, natch). My job was going well, I worked with Kim and Lorraine auditing the company's Australian contractors and daily impressed my colleagues with technical wizardry and savoir-faire. On the home front myself and Michael had moved in...

Day 181 - Sydney 13 days into this unexpected tangent in the trip and some notable achievements could be listed. We were now regulars at the Coogee Bay Hotel (henceforth CBH), a bar known (to locals at least) as 'the animal pen'. We had taken in the famed Bondi Beach. I had swum on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. I had a job. Once more I had plunged into the masked ball of interviews where every interviewer pretends that they are offering the world's greatest job and every interviewee maintains the fantasy and professes to have dreamed of one day having such a position. I could now add 'senior administrator' to my garlanded résumé. The company? Accenture Plc., a multinational management consultancy firm with 250,000 employees. Well to be accurate 250,001. Not bad in less than a week. With a view from my desk of Sydney CBD 'fallen on my feet' would be an apt phrase to use. Before I started though myself and Mike found the time to catch up with our Irish par...

Day 168 - Sydney Surprising fact about Australia #1: It has seasons Surprising fact about Australia #2: Some of those seasons are cold Surprising fact about Australia #3: I was in it. And cold Everybody likes surprises don't they? Unexpectedly finding two men in your flat when you return from work qualifies as a surprise right? The alarmed screams seemed to indicate so. Scaring Amy and Jayne has proved to be one of life's simple pleasures but traveling nearly 5000 miles to do it could be deemed excessive. Myself and Michael would have to find something else to do in the land of Oz. That something else was the perpetuation of travel by way of the accumulation of capital. Gainful employment in short. Like a bombshell we had exploded back into the girl's ordered existence and with the shrapnel flung wide we settled into catching up over a couple of boxes of goon. Bangkok's sweltering temperatures and dollar beers lay far behind us though we were as culturally,...

Year - 0 We all, no matter the person, find ourselves at a point. The moment I started writing this - a point. The moment I finish - a point. The moment you start reading this - a point. The moment you finish - you get the idea. And a myriad of events but moreso decisions lead us to these variad points. Our decisions but, again, moreso other people's decisions brought us to this crossroads. A crossroads unlike any we've seen before and, with apologies for being obtuse, unlike any we'll see again. And this laboured point springs to my mind as I walk outside everyday, as I walk out onto the streets of Bangkok and look across to the Khao San Road. It forces me to question my own imagination, I read 'The Beach', I dreamed of the viscerality of this place, I dreamed of the real world no matter how fake it actually was. In a previous life I dreamed of another thing, a world that lay beyond my own that I promised myself I would see, that I would drown in, in the utter bli...

Day 155 - Bangkok If there is one place synonymous or perhaps infamous with the backpacker circuit then surely this is it. If there is one place whose reality so precisely matched my expectation of it, whose sights, sounds and smells mirrored those of an imagination fed by popular media then surely it was here. I woke after the first proper sleep in days and walked out onto the balcony of the Romruen Resort. Beyond the sliding glass door was a wall of heat, thick air enveloped me and mocked sweat glands sprung desperately into action. We had arrived in the world's hottest city or its outskirts at least. Eschewing originality the bags were repacked and the two of us headed for the traveller's rite of passage that is the Khao San Road. It isn't Thailand, it isn't really Bangkok, it is something else. A road constructed from dreams of escape and the unquenchable thirst for the exotic. You could write it off as a parody of travel, a hollow shell of culture that ceased long...

In no particular order other than chronologically. McSorley's Irish Bar ...36 beers stagger us but not as much as the $90 bill... Our first night on our first day in our first country of many to come found us in this Irish bar whose history dates back well over a hundred years. Presidents, poets and paupers drank here and now so had we two peripatetic Englishmen. Conversation was struck up with locals on the timeless and ever novel subject of differing nationalities and backgrounds, a scene to be repeated again and again on this trip. We staggered home happy, drunk and with empty wallets, a scene to be repeated again and again on this trip. Snorkeling in Belize ...I felt as if part of the ocean. I must confess to an apprehension of the water borne of watching a particular film as a child, I believe the medical condition is known as 'Spielbergian scarring'. I didn't realise though that Mike's watery inhibitions put mine to shame. But he did it and he loved it ...

Day 153 - Beijing Our next journey was longer than average. 14,000 miles separated its beginning and end, or rather its end and its beginning for we were leaving this new world and returning to the old. From Rio to São Paulo and a couple of days in Bogota of table-tennis (just to remind you Michael, 82-0, eighty two - nil) and quinoa education before another flight north to Los Angeles via Miami. 24 hours in the city of angels gave enough time for a stroll along Santa Monica Boulevard with its parade of entertainers, freaks and pot-peddlers. Tanned, athletic bodies pumped volleyballs back and forth on Venice Beach. Clean streets, straight lines, faintly familiar conventions. Even my fingernails, usually blackened with transit, were a pristine white through no doing of my own. Skateboarders looped and leapt along the promenade, sharks fought over morsels at the aquarium and the Hollywood sign remained elusive. After a wholesome dawdle there were two happy travellers when a pub was foun...

Day 143 - Rio de Janeiro It was early morning in Rio and Christ peered through the mist. Text messages flew back and forth. I'm here At the hostel? Yeah Are you? Which room? 6, where are you? The girl at reception says you haven't checked in and they don't even have a room 6 Oh. Where am I then? Not at the right hostel as it turned out. Still, I had a welcome little sleep in one of their beds before sheepishly leaving. Little else of blog-worthy note occurred for the rest of the day. Mike and I watched Barcelona cede the La Liga title to some awful team from Madrid and got drunk with a pair of English girls whilst espousing the joys of our jungle tour (moreso me than Mike) as they were headed to Bolivia next. We did manage to find diversions other than football and intoxication (important though they are) in the rest of our time in Rio and spent a peaceful few hours striking around a tropical rainforest within the city limits. Hummingbirds buzzed around us as we ate...