Resting, leaving, travelling, finding something and then that great feeling that returns to being just beyond reach.

On then, from Nimbin, we drove to Byron bay. We had breakfast in Lismore on the way, surveying yet more of the damage and getting out quick from that unpleasant little berg. We planned to stay in Byron bay, in a nice little hotel, but couldn't find a one when we arrived and logged on the Internet to look them all up. So we were slightly defeated, and I decided fuck it, lets just drive to Brisbane. So we drove the three odd hours to Brisbane looking for a hotel. We stopped at the airport, thinking cheap accommodation would proliferate, but none was obvious.

I drove into Brisbane, right into the city from the mad 5 lane freeways, highways and byways. We parked on Anne st. in an underground car park in the City centre, right outside the Museum of Brisbane and walked around for an hour, staring at skyscrapers and looking for hotels.

We asked in a Holiday inn, and they told us that from Monday to Thursday there are no beds to be had in Brisbane. So we got back in the car and drove weary to Surfer's paradise.

By this stage it was hitting half six and already pitch black outside .So somehow, without getting lost once after getting directions from a brisbanian, we found ourselves on the right road out of Brisbane back to the Gold Coast and Surfer's paradise which I had passed at 140km/h on the same freeway not three hours before.

We got to Surfer's paradise and I was shocked by the vista, the smoky silhouette of cityscape lit up so high the lights rivalled the stars. They have skyscrapers! It’s like a tiny wonderful city for stoners fresh from Nimbin, surfers and other random fun seekers devoid of pretension. None of your soy milk here.

We pulled in at a Marriott, a huge and feminine skyscraper some 40 storeys tall, flirting and teasing the skyline. It was a happy accident that we went there, as it was the only thing we could definitely navigate ourselves towards, with weary eyes on large and ever changing multi laned roads. We were doing all of the driving without streetmaps, relying on signs and intuition and petrol station wisdom to steer us right, and it always did.

So we pulled up, I parked illegally outside the Marriott. With fatigue setting in, the joy I felt at being free of the car made it feel like arriving in Makkah, and I prayed that they had a free room.

I spied the restaurant next door with a glare of hunger. I noted the bottle shop on its bottom floor for later. I was desperate to begin this night and the celebration. They had a room, incredibly, prayer answered! And more incredibly, it was super cheap, on the 12th floor, with a great view, TV, right in the centre of a town flanked by other huge sky scrapers, and we could see the whole ocean vista of the sleepy, grumpy pacific from our balcony. What a place and what a night!

We smoked and drank and drank and smoked, giggled at TV and had a great hotel night of it, with Chinese takeaways and mini bar chocolate, champagne and red wine called Promised Land, the same red my boss bought me as a goodbye before I quit my job to come here.

And it did feel like the Promised Land.

I had wine and more wine downstairs, and was sequestered with the most beautiful girl in the world in a great hotel that cost no money in a place with Paradise appropriately in the title. How could anyone not have fun in that situation?

So we had the night of nights, the best night of this whole shindig since we started, and I got hammered, we watched scarface, and digital TV, we stared in awe at the view. We went stoned shopping around the bright wide streets and overheard a drunken English couple arguing about infidelity. The girl promised that she wouldn't ever sleep with another man, that if she did stray it would only be with women. The man accepted this and they loudly declared their love for each other. Then slurping noises, then they disappeared.

We went back to the hotel and more drugs.

I fell asleep, or passed out, I don’t remember, early and elated.

I woke up well rested at eight am, somehow someway, flying in the face of the sweet abuse of smoke. I found a local post office to get stamps and envelopes before Sarah woke up. I came back and brewed up that sickly sweet single serving of hotel room coffee. I smoked a spliff and drank in the caffeine on our balcony. The rolling coast was so close I thought I could touch it, or jump in from our balcony.

In awe of the view yet again.

I woke Sarah up with coffee, and another wee smoke, and we went to breakfast, I posted off our weed and we drove back to Brisbane airport, arriving fresh some hour late and having to pay an extra 25 dollars on the car (big fucking deal).

I dropped it back, and they told me I drove 2225km in 4 days and 2 hours! How delightful to know! The entire east coast in 4 days somehow. I think we are the first to do it, and may well be the only ones ever to enjoy it, but I will beat my road miles record again before I finish this trip. It's an ambition.

We ambled around the airport, ate cardboard airport fast food. We waited around reading, took our flight home, took a cab from Melbourne airport in rush hour and arrived in our apartment, the one I told you I was sorry about never living in and was planning on not living in until some two days before when we booked the flights back to Melbourne for some reason in some internet cafe or other.

We got our keys, paid our cheapo rent, met the lovely Irish girl from Cork who was working for the place, walked to a supermarket to pick up coffee and milk and booze and the whatnots of settling down, and I find myself here.

For what seems like the first time in ages I am settling here indefinitely and have nowhere to drive tomorrow and it all feels great. What a 4 days. What a crazy 4 days. I have finally broken the seal of adventure on this trip and I'm beginning to feel like this is all worth it after all.

Promised Land is sometimes more than a cheap bottle of nice Australian wine, but equally as fleeting.

We had a lovely late breakfast in Post Macquarie and got back, a bit browbeaten, into the car and the familiar rhythm of fifth gear driving on straight lines. It was hard to keep our happiness up. So we decided, fuck it, no matter how long it takes or how hard we have to drive, it's Nimbin time, ASAP.

So we took the main highway on to Sydney, about 180km from our start point. Things got a bit choppy and it was a tense drive through the Sydney streets, at high speed, tight lanes, angry drivers and many shunting stops for traffic, but we got through unscathed, despite anxious glances at the watch whilst stop-starting and low-gearing through. And from Sydney, the roads deteriorated drastically. No more beautiful two lane dual carriageway to overtake the slow coaches, it turned to two way roads where overtaking opportunities were scarce and frustration and too-low-speed driving was getting to me. The beautiful ever-changing verdant scenery was continually amazing, and it was just nice to be out of the mad 6 lane highway and constant lane-merging, picking, choosing and half-panicked half-exhausted orienteering in Sydney. We found another hickish town to pause for hick lunch in. Not much to be said about it, its fading from memory, except that beetroot does not belong in burgers and people around there don't seem to know what chicken soup is.

Nimbin, in my little group of close friends, has it's own lore. It's a sort of stoner beacon that beckons every midnight toking backpacker to it. It's renowned for forgotten nights of thick weed brain fog, strange encounters with the shabby locals when trying to score, and a town that literally stops dead at 6 for all its inhabitants to roll up, toke up and get some downtime. It's like if Amsterdam were moved to my tiny town, Castleconnell, and never expanded further. It seems to exist for locals to grow their own and powered by curiosity tourism and gawking at the very strangeness of its existence.

We were desperate to get there as soon as possible, if only to take a break from the constant driving, and to get there, we had to drive some back-roads through another isolated berg named Lismore. This meant taking a turn off the main highway onto much smaller fare, with plenty of curves, trees and wildlife to distract.

For the entire 122 odd km from the highway to Lismore on that weird little road, we didn’t meet one other car going the same direction as us. We met a few going the other way, and they seemed like flies, buzzing angrily along the road desperate to get somewhere, anywhere other than the nowhere we were on the weird Australian purgatory of that road.

The feeling of total loneliness comes upon you suddenly, but on those roads, it was like a hitchhiker you immediately regretted picking up.

I decided to get on and ignore it, and turned concentration to steering the car hardfast through turn and tail on its slippery feet on dampy forest roads. I was eyeing always the close treescape; weary of deer, koala, kangaroo or whatever else that could threaten the rental car and cost me a fortune in minimum accident excess. But that aside, I was still going very very fast, about 140km/h on a 100km limit road. I swung the back of the car around corners, and gunned it sharp, braking before each and accelerating cold fast and steely into each corner. The aggression of this road stretch gave me some relief, yet again arriving just in time. It seems if I hang in and grin and bear the strangeness of my own thoughts, eventually I can kill it with some sweet relief in the simpler things.

As I was starting this drive, Lismore, our intermediate destination, was hit with the worst hailstones in its or New South Wales' recent history, and was fast on the way to being declared an official disaster zone. When we arrived, there were leaves, torn from the trees, masking every street. New South Welshmen stood puzzling, surveying their cars, and practicing amateur actuary whilst breathing in deep and sighing. Cars were pockmarked with dents, trees were down, windows were broken, the whole place just seemed beat down and wrecked. And this is one of those small Australian hick towns. Its not your common backpacker resort, it's off the beaten and just exists for the locals. A red neck pollop between Sydney and Brisbane connected by shitty roads, with a few tourist concessions to its proximity to much greater towns, but largely an angry buzzing little hubbub of petty masculinity, like fifties Texas. The cognitive dissonance of hating non-locals versus needing the tourists seems to have given everyone in town a headache. So we drove on through the disaster zone, delighted that we decided to take time over breakfast, as if we had left an hour early, the rental car would look like a colander.

So on we went, the short hop from Lismore to Nimbin, running into 5:30 6pmish before we managed it, The road from Lismore to Nimbin got worse again, strange flitty tight turns, roads like yo-yo dieters, widening and thinning rapidly and without warning. Cars sped past in both directions, overtaking devil-may-care on tight corners.

I took it slow, tired from all the exertion, and barely broke the speed limit, though I did barely break it the whole way, encouraged by local driving.

First off, Nimbin is the smallest town you have ever been to. It's just a tie-dyed little street, in the middle of nothing. A peculiarity of nature, a strange mountainshape of three fingers pointing up mark the skyline, flanking you on the left as you drive in. A restaurant, a bar, some shops that close before 6 and some backpacker lodges. During the day it bustles with tourists, and street performers, but at night, the town likes to get down to its main hobby, the intensive abuse of locally sourced and spicy marijuana.

So when we got there, we got there to a town with one shop open, one bar open, and one restaurant open. Tourists ambled wide-eyed, either waiting desperately for the offer of maryjane from some of the scruffier drug-addled locals, or desperately trying to avoid it.

I walked to the shop, bought tobacco. On the way the offer came, loud, one-worded. We accepted quicksharp, delighted. He took us into a little zip-down style tent door on the dark fringe of the tiny town. The front porch marked the waterline where the electric lights of the town went no further, so as the place we were entering was almost entirely obscured in the thick soup of fresh dark.

In through the door, by pulling some string that was rigged to some ingenious pulley system in a way I didn't understand and we arrived in a tent-like habitation that had clearly been there forever. The rope-pulley system ran through the whole 15 feet of shambly tent, and this told the owners whenever anyone was about to walk in. The floor was pebble-clad, and there were sofas lined up, places to chill out and sit down. The only light came from coloured rope lights on the ceiling and flickering TVs showing Mexican cartoons and music videos at low volume. The entire structure was canvas and detachable. There was no back wall that was just a patio onto the backgarden. We didn't go further than the tent-room, but could continually hear cute dogs squabbling and inane chatter from the back as we sat waiting. Some more largely personalized tents sat out there, shabby places where the owners clearly slept. The place reeked of the weed that was being passed around from local to local in the strongest spliffs I have ever toked!

So we were told that this "Musicians club" got into the swing about 7:30pm and that if we wanted our buds, best to come back then. We hung around, digging the vibe of the place and the strange very Australian stoner folk rock one man and his guitar music they were playing.

After about half an hour our stomachs called us back out to streetlit Nimbin centre and the one restaurant, we ate there, and then found a hostel that a local stoner recommended to us. Granny's farm it was called. It sat outside town, well into the darkness of Australian night and away from the town. A tiny dirt road with a sign pointed us there, and after heaving over and steering clear of swimming pool sized craters on the tiny road, we pulled up near a lit patio with 5 or 6 people milling around happily, shooting the breeze.

When we arrived we were greeted by the hostel owner who was drinking wine with his mother (Presumably Granny) in front of an unsmoked spliff and there was a taste of weed in the air.

He gave us a double room key, we were happy with it; we left again with the car.

I drove the maybe 800 feet into town, as it was so dark we couldn’t safely traverse the terrain on foot. I parked in front of the bar. We had a quick drink and a game of pool, while we talked to a trackmarked Layne Staley-abee and an aboriginal drainer who kept trying to sell me weed the whole time I was there. They stank like sweat and pain and dirt. Like Middle Australia. We walked back to the tent, and lo and behold, we heard Irish voices outside!

The Navan accents of two lonely guys called us to companionship, like Nimbin called us for the tokes. We smoked a fag outside with them, and it wasn't long before we were tipped-the-nod, led inside and were feasting and rolling on the prodigal weed, talking shite about everything and setting up an Irish corner in the sitting room cum tent cum coffee shop that we had somehow been thrown into together.

A whim of the gods.

We stayed smoking and rolling till the Irish guys left for their beds, then a little longer again till after the guitarist, who had been playing us sweet weedfolk music all night, disappeared somewhere and we were left alone with the owners. So we left and headed back to the hostel. The weed was hydro-organic, grown probably within stones throw of where we were wobbling, stunk to the heavens, and one of the buds, I shit you not, was the size of a tennis ball.

So we ambled shoddy back to the hostel, to drink our wine and rest weary on hard stranger mattresses. The locals with a sort of red-pupiled polite disdain eyed us. I guess, a form of stoner snobbery.

Man, I turned that key on the little double doors of our hostel, and the first thing that struck was the spiders flanking and gaining advantage on us immediately on all sides. There wasn't a wall that wasn't covered in webs. I immediately set to spider slaughter. And that took about half an hour and the walls were still covered in webs.

I chased muscular fuckers, speedy bastards, evil looking multi coloured spider cunts that you would run a mile from Ireland, and I killed them all to the best of my eyesight and ability. Then we set to the bottle of red and smoking so much weed our eyes turned Chianti.

We passed out late, trying to ignore the insect fear, and woke early, immediately rolling a spliff to dispel any more unknown insect fear. That helped.

Day two, the raggedy-anne-doll feeling of just being.

Well it's day two of the great Australia drive 2007 and we managed to hit another 600km, driving on and off from 9:30 until 6:30. I woke up too early, with red eyes from tiredness and the eternal flap flap of insects getting too much to bear for my changeable mood.

It was just strange, really strange, to wake up and have to wait ten seconds until you remember just where you are. The driving was getting to me a little more than I wanted to let on. A Mc. Donald’s breakfast set us up for the road again, to take on Sydney and on up the coast.

Sleep last night was stunted. Our little queen bed sunk towards the middle, and I guess with the place we were in, we were both jumping, moaning and groaning every time a moth darted at our window or flitted around UFO in our room. So sleep last night didn't top 5 hours, which was fine for me, but Sarah needs more, most people do.

We drove without stopping past Sydney to Gosford, where we stopped for Australian Reptile Park. What a zoo! Alligators and crocodiles and other evil looking reptiles. We watched them safe behind a fence as they hunted us and snarled at each other.

Kangaroos mingled with the crowds. We got to pet them! Can you believe, petting a kangaroo? Their hair is as soft as cotton wool; they are more docile than sleeping kittens. A park ranger "milked" a snake, the 4th deadliest snake in the world, a Black tiger snake or some such. He gingerly let him out of his cloth prison, aggling him out with a 5-foot hook, then grabbed him by the tail and slowly worked up till he had a death grip on his throat. The snake was introduced to a plastic cup, which he bit, and they held up the microphone so we could hear the pop as his fangs broke through the plastic, to inject a huge amount of venom into a sterile cup. The place is apparently the world's largest producer of anti-venom and other such noble causes. We hung around for a few hours, loving the animals and loving that we got to see some or real Australia with it, and bush walks, and talks about how to survive a snake bite (by bandaging up the spot as if it was a broken arm, say, and also to never wash the bitten area as the only way that they can know what kind of snake bit you is by swabbing the skin to test the venom) Australia is home to the ten deadliest snakes in the world.

They had a smattering of evil, truly evil looking and huge spiders that made my skin crawl, birds I had never seen, Tasmanian devils, and my favourite part too. The house that they keep and observe the platypus is called the platypussery. Beautiful!

But too soon the road crawled back up on our backs and again I was gunning the car's uncomplaining engine for another 4 hours of straight driving, until we landed on the coast, just about 6:30pm as the sun was setting, to Port Macquairie, a lovely seaside tourist town, with surfing and other high excitement sports I have limited interest in but am excited to spectate on.

We asked for info in a petrol station, the font of all important hotel hostel motel and directions based information.

As soon as I got out of the car I got worried. The petrol station lights, that light the pumps so you can see how much of your money is being given to an oil company to pollute the earth, even in the dark, was almost entirely obscured. There was yet another swarm of angry insects, buzzing hopping and biting over each other to get closer to the light, like Christians in the Armageddon. This was not what I was looking for, the kind of situation we are used to, or the kind of relaxation you expect from a seaside resort, so yeah, when it came to finding a dingy motel or some sort of god awful hostel, insectwise, it didn't seem a good bet.

I think it was right then that we decided, enough is enough, we are putting ourselves through a lot, so it's beautiful hotel time! Why not? We booked into the Observatory, Port Macquarie, parked our car in the lush private lot, took the carpeted elevator upstairs and tucked in to two bottles of cheap fizzy. We booked into a suite, that's some top-end hotel accommodation, which exceeded all possible expectations. It has everything! Washers, dryers, walk in showers, clean new ovens, TV, DVD, the hugest bed in history, a suede, yes suede sofa.

For me though, the real sign of lush comfort, as well as wine glasses it had champagne flutes! And coasters. I insist on the coasters for some reason. It just seems like more comfort, and for the price (under 70 euro each) it seems just plush and delightful and worthwhile after our last few weeks or whatever it is here, time seems to zip by and it also seems ages since I left everything behind. And so we must sit here tonight, and decide how to continue. Is it back to Melbourne for jobs and the old apartment hunt, or on to Asia, or maybe to Eastern Europe for some cheap fun, on to Amsterdam for a few weeks of chill out, and then back to our lives in the dull as dishwater. I just don't know.

I will be sickened to check out tomorrow. And that says a lot.

But what a night we had. Of externalised internal contemplation, chalkboard ideas being rubbed out and re-writ continually as our opinions got eroded and refreshed. Drunken discussion, argument and consultation, on just what and where we are.

And its all just seeming too much, and then all too little, and its time to go home, but its time to stay and man up.

So I sat out on the balcony for a final smoke before the sleep of the weary traveller, jerking off the stars like any stupid poet in silent awe, as midges swarmed around me looking for nick-tid-bits and finding a face full of fag-fumes.

day one. On the road. (Guess where I got that title from)

Another crazy day in Australia passes into inky dark night.

I write this from room 27, on 93 Auburn st., in a place called Goulburn in New South Wales, another new state to add to my collection, town population 20,000 odd of died-in-the wool Aussies and not a backpacker, tourist, traveller or Irish bar in sight.

We are in a motel room, about 25 euro each for the night, on the good side of tipsy with 4 cans of Amsterdam's finest to go and the lights off, tv blasting in the background.

My little Yaris sits outside, centrally locked and resting after the abuse I gave it today, which, to its eternal credit, it took like a masochist. I drained a full tank from it, and what use I got out of that tank!

The sun sets here at about 7pm. It's still on the chilly side of spring, but of course, as we drive further east, the temperature literally rises a degree with every 100km we gain north-easterly.

I spent the sunset driving away from the horizon and towards Sydney, on the glorious 888km of Freeway that some poor fool had to build to link Sydney with Melbourne, flanked with innumerable gory Kangaroo carcasses, and the inverdible interlinking and ever changing knuckle scenery of hills, dales, farms, trees, mountains, cows, solid rock, and a million other glorious things you will just have to come here to see.

I spent the morning, and the hangover from last night's Melbourne swansong, driving from Melbourne, trying to find a freeway, any freeway that takes us east, and stop-starting and shaking with nerves in an unknown car in a huge city the likes of which I have never seen, let alone navigated amidst 5 lanes of crazy, u-turns, undertaking, and the Melbourne Marathon notwithstanding.

A sense of power, regained from the ashes of my swift depression slowly returned as the car and I got to know each other and begun to flirt. I gunned it softly, making the engine hum and purr that just right mix between power and refinement. The noise like a small concerto, and re-igniting my love of driving that had been lost to me for the three weeks I had spent without my little Clio.

My average speed for the trip today, some short 8 hours of driving (Including countless breaks in those awful service stops that big freeways always have) between ten thirty and six thirty, broke the highest speed limit by about 4km.

I am immensely proud!

I think that's only the 2nd law I have broke since I came here, so it was nice to achieve something while I was stuck sweating and smoking behind the wheel hitting 140km/h in my 1.0 litre whore of a car.

The 3rd law to be broken, I hoped, was to be drug smuggling some herb across state lines. Nothing like weed to settle you into a new kind of strange.

We travelled something like 850km today.

Can you imagine!

In 8 short hours on a beautiful straight line, with no red lights, no traffic, no stop-start humdrum of daily commuting, just an ever present two lane freeway called something like Hymen (Hume I later remembered, but would still ask Sarah, the navigator and co-pilot, to find the Hymen Highway to get back to driving from adventure)

I stopped plenty, to drink water and treat the sunburn on my right hand that sears through the driverside window, and piss and work out the pain in my stomach from yet more too-rich restaurant food.

But here I am, triumphant!

It's beautiful, to start on something, and to succeed, and to enjoy it in the process. It's another tiny footshuffle forward towards success and achieving, amassing hope and conquering that cursed depression.

We pulled off Hymen, weary, into a tiny town, Goulburn that we picked at random from our backpacker book because of the proliferation of cheap motels. It sits snugly inland, about 100 odd km from Sydney.

And why, might you ask, did we not drive on till 8 and make Sydney? Because Sydney, at the moment, is covered in a plague, yes, an honest-to-god plague of moths, (The words of the local news, and not my own) Sarah's most feared of insects, and not something I enjoy spending my night killing and chasing for her security either. Though of course, if she commanded that they all die, I would be on the road to Sydney now with a fly swatter, a grim determination on my face, and some cans of insect repellant to take out those that flew beyond my reach.

But yes, even as I type I can actually, and this is no exaggeration, I can hear them, at least 100 of the flappy flitting fuckers, outside our windows and door, flying about, anxious to make love to the tiny light we have left on in the hotel room.

That's right. Even 100 miles from Sydney, we too are trapped by the plague. Pictures in the news showed postboxes, pillars, cars and street lights literally covered with the evil insects, so as you couldn’t' even see anything but a pukey swarming shape of what they were covering.

I have never seen or experienced anything like it, outside the pages of the bible or a bad horror movie! And yet here I am, throwing myself in the middle of it, and as I drive tomorrow, I know its destined to get worse before it gets better, but it's a fun kind of strange, and I am sated by the freedom of having a car, a direction to drive in, and hopes of a better tomorrow are winning out over regrets from a shitty yesterday.

When we finally arrived here, by god I can say honestly I never wanted to see a car again! And after the obvious first necessity of getting a bottle of wine to chill out the night with and reward myself for my driving, and why not, because dammit, 800km straight! From Limerick to Dublin and back, twice over! In a day!

But yes, I did it. I cut through a good half of our drive, that we have given ourselves 4 days to complete. And it was as if every time I ever got in a car, every lesson, passing my test and all was in preparation for taking drives like this, where you gear change and accelerate, overtake and undertake so much that the climate changes, the scenery changes entirely, and suddenly plagues of insects show up to spoil the party!

So we got our little bottle of vino tinto, Australian Shiraz with a pleasant bite.

The air in the place muted, the Rugby team just lost to the English, or the Poms as they are called here, with a newfound bitter vehemence since last night's result. And it has set in an air of hard drinking and depression, quietude and bitter language that we have little interest in beyond the fact that all our hosts seem bemused by it.

Of course, being Irish, or Canadian Irish or whatever it is I am, I hate the English, (it's not their fault really). I just learned that my far distant relations, some hundreds of years earlier in a rural Wexford town had fought them and survived a bloody massacre at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.

My own name, apparently, harkens back to Brian Boru, though it's hard to chase a lineage that far back, over myth and under half-truth.

From being at home, where I was forced to watch the rugby games with my father, I know because I saw it with my own hazel-browns that England were playing really badly, the Wallabies were on fire, and so how did it transpire that they lost to the old enemy? I don't know, nobody here knows, and the whole thing has upset an entire nation (except for the kangaroos, though you wouldn't know it, considering the amount of them that seem to delight in throwing themselves in front of cars).

So we checked into our motel, as you know. We were planning on getting hostels, but there are no hostels in town, and not wishing to reach the epicentre of the plague and venture further driving unknown roads in the dark, we decided on a super cheap motel. And that's what we got. It's pleasant in a shambly way (rather echoing the entire trip so far). We have a room with a queen bed and it's little dauphin, a TV and a kettle, and a shabby little bathroom, and after haunting the poor car so long with my sweating and bad singing to keep up my interest, I am delighting in it!

The first thing I did, before Sarah could even enter the room, was chase innumerable moths with a large phone book and seal off every open-to-air section. I got to 12 on my mass-murder of those poor winged lunatics before I stopped counting, and collected the carcasses and buried them in the bin marked only with toilet paper for their grave. The final crunch of their tiny bodies is a sick kind of satisfying mixed with the haunting shiver of unnecessary murder. When we first got here, we were delightfully unaware of the plague, so when we opened the door to our winged roommates, I honestly thought that the motel was infested, and not the surrounding world, and was all set to throw my keys back over the reception counter in disgust.

But here we are.

I think the moths, aside from anything else, have finally galvanised us against working in Australia, though that's always subject to change, and here, with everything so new, the plan (if there ever was one to start) changes daily, hourly, by the minute. But what an omen! A biblical omen to match my newfound hodge podge spirituality. Of course, its barely been talked about, and its all in the air with the rest of God's gifts, but what's the point, when travel brings such strange newness to everything, in stopping to work in some job that doesn't match with our lives or wants or hopes at all?

But in any case, its to my sagging mattress in our cheap lovely motel with the moths flapping at the window and a chill in the night air, to sleep off the hangover of staring at straight lines and gunning the car all day, and plan how to get to Nimbin, where the lore surrounding the weed and hipsters has us entranced.

Suffice it to say, I don't want to tell you anything about it, or us, or our state of mind, or the state of our travels, until we get there, and book some downtime with cheap smoke and wine to figure out just what the hell is the state of this trip!

Farewell

Last night, as we stared from our apartment at the courtyard and smoked cigarettes that the signs in the apartment told us not to, Sarah put her arms around me and said something like:

"Imagine all the others that have come before us. Imagine the Irish on the boats, the coffin ships, leaving and knowing they would never come back."
And it's true. I have money, and air travel to return me to the bosom of family, and so there really isn't any problems at all with being here. It's nothing like the brave, pathetic Irish before us.

It's a privilege afforded to few, maybe the few of us who decide to up and backpack for the past 20 odd years. Maybe the tiniest, smallest percentage of people who have ever existed, some 0.000001% of people in the world as lucky as we are. And I sit and complain about no smoking in airports, and adjustment when a new world unfolds itself to me.

It's certainly man-up time!

Today was our last full day in Melbourne, until we possibly return to meet Cian and Sarah, or Glenn, an old friend I would love to get drunk with, but that story should wait for his arrival.

So our reunion with Fed Sq., Swanston, St. Kilda et al will surely be a delightful one. In a month's time, late october or early november, the summer will begin to defeat the changeable spring weather and we should be coming back to sun too, and here the sun is the type that lifts depression, the kind that coats a city in glitter, making your eyes pop with the shimmering beauty of it all.

Tomorrow, we check out at 10am, and collect the car at 11. From then on it's a rollercoaster, with 1600 km to hit in 4 days, no accommodation, just maps and a rough direction to Brisbane. Now that really is travel!
The car cost us maybe 50 euro each, to get all of that way, for the 4 days of abuse I plan to give it. A bus costs the same, with no smoking, and scheduled stops, no music and the tedium of bus journeys multiplied by the ridiculous size of the country and other people to cough, hack, murmur and wrankle under our skin.

I hope that this is the best thing that has happened us so far.

The total freedom of it all, which would normally make me run a mile, is suddenly worth embracing. Worth longing for as I fall asleep in the comfortable hospital white apartment we have stayed in here,

We said goodbye to Fed Square today on what was our best day here yet. Saturday, and thronging streets, metallers, punks, and those teenage goth girls who have taken over the world, replete with ripped fishnets and gargantuan amounts of make-up, blackened the whole square, presumably for some concert I was totally unaware of.

Our stroll only interrupted by a "free Burma" march, with 300 odd yards of a sea of people swanning a beeline through the city centre, holding up traffic that refused to beep, chanting and holding placards for their cause. We had heard of trouble in Myanmar, monks fleeing and military intervention, but without the context of news, I am still muddled as to the actual details. The earnest people and their chanting actually made my skin tingle, and we had to stop as I threw silent respect at them.

We strolled the avenue lining the Yarra, where couples come to fall in love. A path that runs right along side the river so as you can jump on the docks and fall in if you are drunk enough or deep-end inclined.

We stopped for street entertainers after getting tipsy on Jacks and cokes in a cheap bar that played bad Jazz near the Eureka Tower, some sort of 88 storey monster where apartments cost 900 dollars a week, and the one that stands out particularly was a wonderful circus performer who juggled fire whilst balancing himself on a ladder where his feet were 6 feet up, and told jokes while he was doing it. A madman, and it all reminded me of Liam and Eoin and Donal and Roni and the circus we put on for ourselves so many early mornings at 6am after too many drugs and drinks, though who am I to say that, seeing as how I have gone through the heat of my passion for banned substances, and survived as a non-addict. Non-addict, that is, except for my deep love of beer, and of course weed. But the ones who point and claim addiction are those that will never know the true, simple fun of sharing a toke with likeminded friends after a hard day, week, month, year.