Australia/Hawaii 2013 - The Finale

In the last edition, I detailed how goofy-looking animals terrorized the Tasmanian countryside. After that stressful and hilarious experience, Rob and I headed down to his "shack" on the water. It's basically either a big cabin or a small house, I'm not sure. But it's pretty nice, and only about 100 feet from prime fishing territory. And that's what we were here to do. Of course though, it's never that easy.

Rob had to back his truck out onto the beach to launch his boat, and we managed to do that successfully even if the sand was pretty soft. An omen of things to come, foreshadowing, whatever you want to call it. The area was beautiful and we managed to catch a few fish - weird looking flat-headed things with big spikes in their mouths. It all went sideways when we tried to get the boat out of the water though.

Rob backed his truck up a little too close to the water, and I guess when you combine the tide coming in with a boat and some wet sand, your truck is going to sink a little bit.

Unfortunately, it sank a LOT.

The back end was pretty much totally submerged right up to the top of the wheel well, with water filling up a lot of the back of the truck. We tried a few different ways to get it unstuck, to no avail.



Finally Rob walked out to the street and found a chick with a truck and a winch that was working at a construction site or something, and she pulled the truck out. Rob's wife Merrin brought some beer up to the shack to give to her as a thanks. Rob wasn't amused - after all, it was his truck - but I thought it was all pretty funny. But then again, I'm an asshole.

After all that, Rob was still nice enough to cook up the fish for us too. And they tasted great!

I wish I had more time to spend in Tasmania because it was great, but the trip home was about to commence with a flight north. I had a great time in Hobart and at the shack though, and I hope to get back there soon. Thanks Rob and Merrin! Tasmania reminds me of the Scottish Highlands, but with more trees and critters.




I only had one day in Brisbane, and I didn't really get time to do much of anything other than walk around and check out a few things. I did drink beer in the hotel bar and bet on rugby that night though. The only reason I mention that is because I was stupid enough to take betting advice from some drunk Aussie next to me and lost 85 bucks. Dammit.

I headed back to Hawaii the next day, and it was one of my favorite flights ever. It was basically half full and there was no one in the last six or seven rows. I had booked an exit row seat in the middle, but she said if I wanted to go to the back I could have a row to myself. On a 10-hour flight, that's a bonus, so I did. But after ringing the call button a couple of times, she wasn't a fan of coming back to fetch me beers.

So she just showed me where the beers were in the back galley and told me to help myself, since all the flight attendants were hanging out up front.

Holy shit.

I think I had like 12 tall cans, at least, in the 10 hours. I watched movies. I drank. I laughed at comedy shows. I drank. I peed a lot. I drank. It was glorious. Hawaiian Airlines is the best!

Waikiki was the usual - fun as hell. I got to live an entire day twice due to the time change, which is always worth it. I got there right in time to watch Houston melt down and blow a 20-3 lead to the Seahawks with a bunch of people from Seattle. After chatting with tons of different people all day, I finally ended up at a bar near my hotel with a New Yorker bartender that was a huge Rangers fan. We bullshitted hockey and laughed at drunk customers for a while until it was pretty late. 1am or so. Closing time.

"Really?" I said. "You guys close this early? I figured bars in Waikiki would be open until 4am or something."

"Sir," he stated. "The only things open at 4am in Honolulu are women's legs and hospitals."

A fitting end to a great trip.

Australia 2013 - Gold Coast and Australia

And we're back. Two blogs in short order? What the hell? Well, I'm still drinking at this bar so I figured I'd just keep writing and get one trip out of the way at least. I'm cool like that.

I left off in Melbourne. Rob and I left that day to go to Gold Coast, which is the resorty beach paradise in Queensland. Ever heard of Surfer's Paradise? Yeah, that's in Gold Coast. It was like five minutes from our flashy upscale hotel.

Unfortunately, I hate beaches.

Rob vacations up there with his family when he can and he's a big fan of the beach and water. I'm more of a fan of bars and well, anything that has nothing to do with sand. While he went swimming or boogie boarding, I either hung out or walked around. It's certainly a nice area, but not really my thing. It did turn out to be entertaining though.

The best places to chill during the day along the coast are beach clubs. But they're the old-fashioned kind of places that you actually have to sign into if you want to get served, which I found very odd. Nonetheless, we stopped at a few and I even won 60 bucks on a pokie. Go Tim. We did hit a few other bars in town at night, mostly featuring drunk old chicks. One bar had a bunch of pool tables at least, which was cool.

We hung out at one bar for a while simply because one of the creepiest dudes ever was there. He went and sat next to these women he didn't know and tried to chat them up, to no avail. They got up and moved. So did he. And repeat. He followed them everywhere. Oh, and he was so drunk that he made no sense when he talked, which made it even more fun. Finally the women came and sat with us, hoping he'd figure it out and move on.

Nope.

He sat next to us and alternated between grunting and staring at Rob and I, apparently wanting us to burst into flames. The only time he made sense is when the bouncer finally hauled him out of there - "Please, no mate! I LOVE HER THOUGH!" Go Aussies.

The bar the next day featured a drunk guy who explained his political views as "reluctant fundamentalism". Sure. Why is everyone so weird?

Finally it was time to head back to Rob's adopted homeland - Tasmania. He had lived in Hobart for a few years now with his wife and two children, and had a cabin (he called it a shack) on the water about 45 minutes away. We spent a couple of days at both, and went to the funniest zoo ever as well.

Rob has turned his basement/man cave into a Vancouver Canucks shrine, which is pretty cool. He also has an old-school bubble hockey machine which was a lot of fun to play and brought back some memories. After a day/night of just hanging out and chilling, the family and I trudged out in the rain to go to the zoo. It's out in the middle of nowhere, but it was incredibly entertaining.

First off, there are real Tasmanian Devils. Lots of them. They look all cute and fuzzy, until the zookeepers fed them. They were tearing whole chickens apart and even eating the bones because they like the marrow. Yikes. No more ideas about Tassie Devils as pets!
The rest of the animals were tamer, sort of. You can walk out into a field full of kangaroos and wallabies with food, and they just hop up to you and eat out of your hand. They don't even mind if you pet them, though one clearly wasn't a fan of me being taller than him and looked like he was on the verge of drop-kicking me to the fucking moon at any second. I quickly found new kanga friends - fuck that tiny-marsupial syndrome shit.

I also found out that deer and meerkats like me, but black swans still hate my ass. They wanted to kill me in New Zealand too. What did I ever do to them?

The most fun part of the whole thing was the bus tour of the different enclosures. You get bags of food and hand them out to the animals. Seemed simple enough. The first stop was kangaroo town where everything was pretty chill. One took a whole bag from Rob's young son, which scared him a bit. No biggie though. Nothing compared to what was coming up.

Stop number two was emus. Holy shit. Emus are scary as fuck even if there's a fence between you and them. Imagine 20 of them running after your bus with murder in their gigantic stupid eyes. Rob's kids were in tears before they even got near us. I was alternating between laughing and trying to quickly write a will on my phone. Once they actually got to the bus, it was bedlam.

The emus swarmed, their goofy heads darting in and out of all of us looking for food. The kids on the bus freaked the fuck out and just threw their food over the side, or worse - on the floor of the bus. This raised things to Emu Defcon 2 - full-scale assault. They ripped bags of food out of the hands of whoever was stupid enough to still be holding onto one (ie. me) and basically hunched over and pecked our feet to shit looking for food on the bus floor. They bodychecked people with their necks, they bit an arm or two. Zero emu fucks were given. It was a good day to die.

Thankfully, the bus driver eventually had enough of the emuvasion and drove out of their enclosure and onto the final stop. The fact that there was another stop after this, after these emus destroyed the childhoods of Tasmania's future, amazed me. But there was. And it was a different kinda vibe. It was all love. Uncomfortable, creepy animal love of the humped variety. Not that kinda hump - get your mind out of the gutter, heathens.

We entered the camel enclosure as a group of broken people. One of the few individuals that seemed relatively upbeat still was a teenage girl next to Rob, probably 14 or so. Now, camels are huge animals. When they popped their monster heads into the bus looking for food, they were less threatening about it. Actually they were almost lazy. They just used their gigantic tongues to sweep up whatever was remaining, and that was that.

Except for the teenager.

One camel sidled up next to her and rubbed his neck on her face and arms. Aww, cute. Camel's being nice. Animal Planet shit. But then he kept doing it. Hard. Rubbing as much of himself (herself? I didn't check) on as much of her as possible. Then another camel started doing it too. They had her surrounded to the point that her own father, who was sitting beside her, couldn't even reach her because there was so much camel in the way. Understandably, she started to cry. I probably would have too if it was me.

It was incredibly funny but incredibly weird at the same time. Finally the bus pulled away and the camels disengaged, but the damage was done. The girl was understandably freaked the fuck out. And her father was very annoyed at me laughing and pointing, but whatever. I'm foreign. It's cool.

So basically, a fun trip to the zoo just ruined the lives of a bunch of children. Go Tasmania!

I'll complete the rest in one more separate blog tomorrow, since it's hard to top emus and camels breaking the spirits of the locals.

Australia 2013 - Sydney and Melbourne

It's been over seven months since I wrote a real travel blog, and I'm woefully behind. I apologize for my lack o' writing. I'd like to blame it on something like work or volunteering at the SPCA or some shit, but it wouldn't be true. I'm just lazy. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but still. It is kind of funny that I ended the last blog saying it'll be "six months or some shit" until the next one. I know myself better than I thought, apparently.

Anyway, I'm currently sitting in a plush hotel bar in Panama City, and I'm going to do my best to catch up. By my calculation, I'm only five trips behind. Maybe six? Aw shit, this is gonna take a while. Buckle up shitbirds, let's roll.

The last place I left off was in Hawaii, where I was about to depart for Australia. I explained the wheres and whys in the last post, so I'll just get into it. After a 10 hour flight to Sydney where I hit up the flight attendant for so many beers that she eventually just stopped coming when I hit the call button, I took a shuttle to my hotel...right across the street from the red light district. Okay, sure.

I've never seen rain like I saw in Sydney. I live in Vancouver, a place where it rains a lot, and Sydney blew it away. It came down like a waterfall for 13 hours straight, and it was so windy that umbrellas were useless. I witnessed this from the comfort of the hotel bar of course, because I wasn't fucking with that on day one. I'm not stupid (shut up, I'm not!)

The next few days were dry though, and I got a lot of Sydney exploring done. It's got some quirks - three packs of beer, pubs being called "hotels", lots of loud drunks playing the bar slots (pokies), etc. One drunk guy was being asked to leave a bar and responded by yelling "you're gonna need an ambulance to get me outta here!" Magically it only took a big dude and threats of barring him for life. Go figure.

Another guy on the street confused the hell out of me by yelling that he knew who I was. I was wearing a Ray Lewis jersey and jeans, looking pretty North American. He was pretty Australian. He said he knew who I was about four times before I finally asked how. He yelled "you're number 52!" and walked away. At that point, I was considering the idea that almost everyone in Australia was retarded. I'm still not sure.

That wasn't the only Ray Lewis interaction I had either - I had at least three other people come up to me during my trip and ask if he's "the football player that murdered that guy". Yes, yes he was.

My time in Sydney was pretty entertaining - I saw the sights and spent too much money on nine dollar beers. But it was time to head down to Melbourne to meet up with my high school buddy Rob.

Rob (or Piker, if you prefer) lives in Tasmania (I explained all of this seven months ago in my last blog, duh) but came over so we could  go to an AFL game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, or McG, a world-famous stadium that seats 100,000 people.

He also showed up as sick as a feral dog, but toughed it out.

We went to the game, and it was one of the best sporting experiences of my life. It was a playoff game, which just added to the atmosphere. The Hawthorn Hawks were playing against the Geelong Cats. I knew nothing about the AFL going in, but the atmosphere was amazing. And Geelong usually owned Hawthorn, beating them a bunch of times in a row before this night.

We were sitting in the Hawthorn section, which I didn't really understand at first and it could have potentially got me killed. See, I'm a hockey fan. A Canucks fan, to be specific. And as a Canucks fan, one of the teams I hate the most is the Chicago Blackhawks. In fact, Rob and I were talking hockey, and I loudly blurted out "FUCK THE HAWKS!".  Right away, everyone in the section was staring at me with hate in their hearts. I had no idea why until Piker cleared it up for me.

 "Man, we're in the Hawks section! Don't say that!"

Unintentional near-death experiences at their finest.

I actually decided to become a (Hawthorn) Hawks fan after that because it was funny, and they were the underdogs. They ended up winning a very exciting game, and after Rob explained the rules I really got into it. To the point that I bought a Hawks toque and still follow the AFL at home to this day.

The rest of our time in Melbourne was great - Fitzroy Gardens is super nice, St. Kilda is awesome (we got a gigantic three-foot jug of beer but I forgot to take a picture - Go Tim), and the trams are extremely efficient. I understand why it's constantly listed as one of the most liveable cities in the world.

Our last night there was amusing as well. We could have gone to an NRL (rugby) game, but decided to hit a pub and watch the other AFL semi-final instead. There's a Canadian player on one of the teams and when he scored a try, both of us stood up and started singing O Canada in unison. Loud. Until we were mercilessly booed and someone stole my hat and threw it across the bar. Fucking Aussies, no sense of humor.

In the next edition, I'll get around to me hating sand in Gold Coast and animals stealing the souls of children in Tasmania.