Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – 1995 New Delhi India without a visa but with a little scam Pt18 (not pt IX of Star Wars)

New Delhi India Street 1995

March 2023

There’s risks with nostalgia. Stuart, from the biodynamic farm, Inisglas, I first stayed on when I visited Wexford, Ireland, told me: “never look back”. I perhaps interpret that as never hold onto the past. Anyway Stuart said lots of things and was against floppy discs and technology in general so I will ignore Stuart and go back to reflecting on a trip from 27, now 28 years ago. Though Stuart did have a point of the need to move forward. Sometimes I want to try and recapture the spirit I had back then in 1995 rather than move on. But I also like to remember.

Patrick Leigh Fermor looked back on his trip walking from Holland to Constantinople in the early 30s in a trilogy starting with A Time of Gifts. That was a nice reflection, not trying to change the past, just remembering. It’s a nice slow read with some interesting details of the past. A Time of Gifts wasn’t published until 1977. That was the year Star Wars IV: A New Hope was first released in cinemas.

Star Wars IV: A New Hope is a very good film. One of the best of all times. It has a very simple story, lots of action. It had the character of Hammerhead, the best supporting character ever to appear in a film. I wrote a fan fiction featuring him in a story I wrote: Cuba: with Hammerhead the star of Star Wars: A New Hope.  I bought an action figure of Hammerhead in the late seventies when I went to Toombul shopping centre in Brisbane with my grandfather. My cousin Alistair told me I should be getting all the main figures before I started getting the more obscure ones. But Alistair’s family was rich, I had to choose more carefully, and I couldn’t go past a dude with a head like a hammerhead.

 Star Wars IV brings back wonderful childhood memories that I love to reflect on. I still have a Hammerhead action figure (even with the original weapon), along with a Jawa and Greedo. Now in 2023, I am faced with the nightmare of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, one of the most disappointing films I’ve ever seen. EP VII was okayish, EP VIII got worse and was a waste of however long it took to watch it, maybe 2 hours or something. Then came Ep. IX: a confusing nostalgic homage to a great trilogy that began in 1977, and has still, yet to be surpassed. A New Hope brought so much hope. Then the hopes were slowly destroyed. Years later the originally released trilogy was followed by a prequel trilogy which did have their moments, they were ok, even looked like they were going to be good, but then Annikan just walked around being grumpy and frumpy all the time like some petulant child and in the end it just got shitter and shitter. And then came the abyss of the trilogy sequel, where the only stars were those from the 1977 film, including two non-human, non-droid stars, the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon. Those began the era where the writers couldn’t get away from their nostalgia for what was once good, where not one new idea was created, where they created another Death Star, like they had been stuck in the tractor beam of that original Death Star since 1977, which meant the best they could do was now create a new Death Star which was now the size of a planet.

The sequel is full of characters who die and then come back to life and save lightsabers from being chucked into fires and having chats with their sons. Where Palpatine comes back to life and wants to take over the universe again and the character Stoke or Snoke or something was really Palpatine. Where all the actors can do is keep yelling out “Poe!” or whatever. They’re always yelling! When Luke yelled it sounded like he was yelling for a reason. When the new ones yell I’m left asking: What the feck are they yelling about? And they just keep flying around to places to find some triangle thing which will show them how to get to some other place they need to go to to destroy a new star fleet filled with star cruisers which, like the Death Star, can destroy whole planets, but like there’s heaps of them, thousands or something – must be cheaper in CGI to just make one and then copy it hundreds of times.  I couldn’t tell you how Ep. IX ends, I’ve struggled to get halfway through it and not sure I can bear the pain any more.

But enough of the horrific side of nostalgia and back to my own reflections of adventures past, in the lead up to my new adventures in a few weeks.

1995: Maybe November

After the 20 odd days in France at the Vipassana meditation centre, and hitchhiking from Paris to London with Beth,  it was time to try and make my way back to Australia.

My Thai Airways ticket had options to stop in India and Thailand on the way. I had to stop in Bangkok, even just to change planes. India was an optional stop. All I wanted to do was go home, but when I booked my ticket in Paris, at a travel agent, before the time of online bookings, before leaving for London, they only had a seat available to New Delhi, India, where I’d have to wait at least a week before getting another seat from India to Bangkok, then Bangkok to Melbourne. I’d at least only have to spend one night in London before heading off.

I had about £80 to cover the 16,800 kms from London to Melbourne. I spent around £10-15 staying a night in London. I probably got a slice of pizza for a couple of pounds. I had to get out of London otherwise I’d go broke: Down and Out in Paris and London. London felt that way at the moment, I felt I had a pretty good time in Paris. I always love Paris. My friend Howie wasn’t too impressed with it. He also thought Laos was so-so. I’ll be finding out about Laos at the end of April (2023).

My first leg back to Australia via New Delhi posed another challenge. My visa for India, which I got before leaving Australia, had expired. It was one of those ones that went from the day you stamped it and this one lasted 3 months. The three months were up about 3 months or so ago. I looked at getting another visa but it cost £20 and would take 2 days to get. I couldn’t afford 2 more nights in London or the £20 for the visa. Figuring if they caught me in New Delhi they’d deport me towards Australia I thought I’d just risk it. I wasn’t too worried about deportation at that point having almost been deported the first day arriving in London at the beginning of my trip.

I got up early the next day and was heading into the tube somewhere around Earls Court, perhaps Earls Court station around 5.30am. I think I had to wait a little until the first train to Heathrow. I looked at tickets out to the airport and it cost something ridiculous like £12. Maybe it was only £6, but it felt like a fortune at the time and any amount I spent meant breaking a precious  £ note and getting coins which couldn’t be converted to rupee in India. Even though it would take a big hit from my remaining funds I couldn’t bring myself to jump the gate. Better to get out of the place with a little less money than get arrested on the way to the airport.

They didn’t ask to see my Indian visa when I was checking in to the plane with my blue backpack, and by mid-morning I was heading in the right direction on my final legs. I was out of Europe.

I slept a fair bit on the way to New Delhi and I didn’t feel too bad when I got there. I lined up for immigration when I arrived and a big scary looking man with a big hipster – before hipsters really took off 20 years later – moustache looked at my passport, he looked at me, he looked closely (apparently) at my expired visa then looked at me again, then without a word he stamped my passport and let me enter India. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Whatever’ I thought, if they let me in, that’s on them. Now I’d just have to wait it out in India for a week or so. At least it was a place where my remaining £40 could get me somewhere. But of course it wasn’t going to be that easy and I was about to fall for another small scam, within my first minutes of arriving. This wasn’t a scam of the scale I’d had in Bangkok on the way over to Europe but it still cost me a bit.

I walked out of the terminal and was hit by the heat and the haze of dust glowing with pinks, purples and oranges of an Indian sunset. I was entering what seemed to be the largest, most chaotic car park in the universe. There were thousands and thousands of cars, and even more thousands of people, cooking things, selling things, yelling at each other, yelling at me, trying to get me to take a taxi. I was pretty sure there were a few donkeys and perhaps an elephant in amongst the throng. There were a lot of cows and dogs for sure.

I chose a taxi about 50 metres from the exit. I asked the driver to take me to the backpacker area which I knew was around Connaught Place. We drove along a very long dusty road, there were more cows, many more people, and more dogs around.

“Sir, that area of Connaught Place is dangerous at the present time. We have Hindu/ Muslim troubles. It is not safe. I can take you to a nice safe area, with nice hotel”.

It was before the times of the internet so there was no way to check if there really was Hindu/ Muslim troubles. I kind of doubted it, and felt a bit like a scam was coming on, but figured I could probably cover a hotel for a couple of days while I waited for the $200 to be sent to me from Australia via Western Union, which I’d asked my family to lend me before leaving Europe. So I went where the guy took me.

When I got to the hotel I explained to them that I was waiting on money and could fix them up when that arrived in the next few days. I rang my sister and she even tried to pay for the hotel with a credit card. But it was 1995, and the hotel guys wouldn’t take a credit card, they wanted cold hard cash. There wasn’t even an ATM around to get cash transferred and withdrawn. So I just had to wait. The hotel agreed to put me up for an unspecified amount. I knew I’d be hit with an unrealistically high bill but I had a roof over my head for a few days, until my money got transferred, and it was a pretty good roof, a fairly decent hotel.

I did get out for a walk on my own in the early morning and explored the neighbourhood a bit. There were some guys making yoghurt out in the open street with milk from cows that were wandering around eating marigolds and cardboard from rubbish heaps. There was a guy with a dancing bear trying to get money from people. The kind of scene you see on those animal cruelty ads on TV – if you watch TV anymore. I got a photo of the first street I saw with a lady in a sari walking down it and a dog in the smoggy haze. Like today it’s a very polluted city. They need electric cars. Which I’m sure they’ll have by the next time I visit.

After the first night the hotel must have gotten nervous that maybe this hippy wouldn’t pay up. They kept a minder around for me to make sure I didn’t run off without paying. It was a bit awkward. The hotel took me around to a few highlights of New Delhi. I went to the Red Fort for a bit. There was a sad looking cobra in a little basket and a million people, cows, dogs, and perhaps even a donkey or camel. It was insane. The actual fort provided a little break from the craziness. I looked up and in one of those arched windows typical of Mughal architecture a woman was brushing her long silky hair oblivious to the throng of people and the noise down below.

A couple of young German guys arrived at the hotel and were staying in the room next to me.  I ended up buddying up with them a bit. I find the young Germans can be so enthusiastic and often bound with joy and energy – just like us young Australians (True Blue or otherwise – see previous post if you don’t get that bit).  One of the guys climbed over the balcony which was adjacent to mine and scared the shit out of me when he opened the glass door from the outside. I was ready to stab him with the Swiss Army knife I’d gotten from Corrine the year before, and which I always carried with me, which was even allowed on the planes in those days. He invited me out for some food. They wanted to go to some fancy place, but I still had very little money and had been going to the cheapest places I could find. I took them across the road, somehow slipping away from my minder and took them to a place that sold these vegetable patty things in soft white bread for about 4 rupees each – maybe 10 or 20 cents. I was really making sure the £20 or whatever I had left worth of rupees would last me until the money transfer arrived. I also had one traveller’s cheque left which was a small note, maybe another $20AUD. I don’t know what happened with the German guys, I think they were just there for a night.

The hotel guys kept taking me to the Western Union office to see if my transfer had come through. I didn’t tell them how much I’d asked for. When, on the morning of the third day the money still hadn’t arrived, they kicked me out of my room but said I could stay with the hotel staff workers. That was an interesting experience, they drove me around to an area of New Delhi I’d never have seen as a tourist, I suppose a typical local area. The workers all stayed in one room and we all had dhal and chapatis for dinner, sitting on the floor, just using our hands and the chapatis to scoop up the dhal. I was happy with that. There were about 4-5 hotel workers in the room. I think they didn’t just work at the hotel, they also worked for the hotel’s associated travel agency, but I wasn’t clear about that. I’d seen most of them over the last few days, often they’d be napping in the car they drove me around in, or napping on couches in the small travel agency office which they’d taken me to when they got sick of my money not arriving, to hang around. After dinner they rolled out some mats and the 5-6 of us slept on the floor taking up most of the space in the room. Years later my mum, son and daughter rented an AirBnB in Shinjuku, Tokyo which claimed to be able to sleep as many people in about the same space. Read more about the shonky Shinjuku  AirBnB and our trip to the snow monkeys.

Possibly on the morning of the 4th day when my minders took me to the Western Union office again my money had arrived! And I had my $200! I got some cash and the rest in traveller’s cheques I think. Well I must have ended up with a few more travellers checks – which would again pose a few problems over the next few days, but I’ll come to that.

With my $200 I could finally free myself from my minders. I went back to the travel agent and braced myself for the bill, knowing it would be a lot. The travel agent guy did some sums, adding up trips to the red fort, hotel accommodation etc, I’m pretty sure he was just Putin random numbers into a calculator that would add up to the sum he had in his head, and then he announced, “$200 USD”.

Having mentally prepared myself for this moment I unleashed a tirade of abuse: “You fucking scammers, there is no way that place is worth $200 USD, my father is a diplomat (posing as a semi-retired carpenter driving taxis on the Gold Coast) and you’ll be in big trouble.” I was playing a role I’d rehearsed in my head for days, make as much noise and fuss as possible and keep whatever money I needed to survive the rest of my Indian leg at least. “I don’t have that fucking money, I only have $100 AUD and that is all I will pay which is still probably double what I actually owe you scammers” and blah, blah, blah. I felt kinda bad as I’m not usually like that but I needed to look after myself. The lower level workers who’d shared a floor with last night just gathered around, interested in the entertainment on an Aussie going ballistic.

“Enough with your fuckings this and fuckings that, you are being a very rude person”, said the travel agent guy and he took the $100 AUD, form his lack of protest I could tell I was being well and truly fleeced even at that price, but less fleeced that I would have been so I was ok with that. After the exchange was done and the yelling died down I said, “sorry, I’m just tired and want to get out of here”. He just looked at me. But it wasn’t quite done. I still didn’t have my luggage. The boss guy sent a worker off to get it. I don’t know where it was but it seemed to take a long time to get it. I was starving so I asked if there was any food around. The boss guy signalled to one of the workers to go get me something. He came back with some dhal in a clay pot. I gave him about 5-10 rupees. I was starving so I just ate the dhal with my fingers. The boss guy looked at me and said, “without chapati, what a waste”.

It was an awkward wait around with the travel agency guys. They kept giving me dirty looks because of all my swearing and carrying on. It was worth it to have $100 in my pocket. When the bag arrived I headed straight to Connaught Place to find a cheap backpackers to stay. There weren’t any Muslim/ Hindu problems. At least none that made it unsafe at the moment.



Juanito’s Trables 50-Yr-Backpacker – 1995 Vipassana in Le Boise Planté Pt17

I’ve left this post in draft for a few months now. My wife and I have moved from Canberra to the Gold Coast – where I grew up. We went to my Palm Beach Currumbin high school this morning to buy fruit and veggies at the Farmer’s Market there. It was where I went to year 11 and 12 in 88 & 89, where I met Christophe on my first day – my best friend featured in earlier blog posts – and hung out with Billy, the born-again Christian with an Egyptian background. I think he might have been born in Egypt perhaps, but his family had to flee when his dad read the bible, something frowned upon in the Egyptian Christian tradition he was from. There were arguments in the family and a knife was pulled by his brother, Billy’s uncle. The things people get upset about. Billy’s mum made awesome Egyptian sweets and other food, we were always treated to some nice things when we went over there. I first dislocated my shoulder at Billy’s house when we were playing handball with him, Christophe and I think our Lebanese friend Pascal. I once did a short scene in drama class with Pascal about racism. I managed to be racist against Pascal. Not the first time I was racist. I was a shit in that respect, and not just to Pascal. Hopefully I have learnt my lesson in that respect and certainly try and avoid passing on any lingering racist attitudes.

I was shocked the other day when my ageing aunt came out with some racist musings about how she was a ‘True Blue Aussie’ like Bryan Brown and that my cousin’s child, her grandchild was not, as his mum, her daughter-in-law is Filipino. I was shocked, but can’t say I didn’t hold such attitudes in the past. My love of history has led me to realise though that there are no ‘True Blue Aussies’ (which is a thinly veiled way of saying ‘pure white’ dare I say Ayran Aussies), and that we are  all  multi-cultural. Like my racist Aunt who had a mother who was Irish – who themselves were considered inferior by the English for centuries, and a great grandfather who was Chinese – a fact that only materialised when a few of our family did some DNA testing. Looking back I could see my great uncle Cyril looked a lot like a Chinese front the Guangzhou region. Sadly our family were so racist nobody ever admitted that we had that Chinese ancestry. Anyway, I own my own historical racism and I’m trying my best to rectify it. I realise now I don’t think any of us are born racist, we’re taught to be racist as we go. Not that I want to pick on Bryan Brown, but I’m guessing his connection to Australia doesn’t date back 60-80,000 years like the First Nation’s people who were dispossessed by the racist, and anything but benign British Empire.

Moving on though.

Planning for my 50th year backpacker trip continues. I bought an actual backpack at Pacific Fair a few weekends ago, it’s yellow, not blue like the original I had from 1995. I’ve booked a train trip from Vienna to Venice and paid for a train ticket between Salerno and Palermo, Sicily which we’re going to do in a day, around eight hours or sleeping, playing cards and watching the Italian and Sicilian landscape from the window. I know they’re both in Italy but I like the sound of keeping Sicily separately.

Back in 1995, I was still in France at the Vipassana meditation centre.

What more can I say about Vipassana Meditation?  It changed my life and led to deeper insight into the nature of my existence, and of all existence which is no mean feat. Vipassana in the ancient Pali language literally means ‘insight’, or close enough to use the word ‘literally’ literally (not sure where to put the quotation marks on that one – could have gone for the 2nd literally actually). I don’t meditate anymore. I’m sure I’d benefit from it. I feel the next sentence I write should contain the words ‘I should get back into meditating’. Let’s see.

It’s been many years since I last did a Vipassana meditation course. I did it in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I’ve also written of my 10-day course in Herefordshire, England, which I did at the start of my trip in 1995, in a previous 50-Yr-Backpacker blog post, and another time when I went to meditate with Kosio and my RMIT uni friend Evan Karayanidis, gets itself a chapter of my ‘book’ The Adventures of Kosio and Juanito (and Corinne). So you can get details from there if you like.

There are different Vipassana traditions though, the one I did was in the tradition of Goenka, which draws on Burmese traditions. The Vipassana centres around the world are set up in very much the same way. Men and women have separate sleeping, dining and exercise areas. The meditation hall is also divided between men and women. I’m not sure how they deal with people who don’t identify with either sexes or are fluent. I guess they have to pick the side they’re most comfortable with and keep with that for the 10 days. There’s a spot at the back where they could perhaps sit in the middle.

In France, in around October/ November (I’m still not completely sure) 1995, I had agreed to serve on courses rather than sit one. That is, I helped support the running of the courses, by cooking, cleaning etc, rather than sitting silently for 10 days. Serving on a course at some point was part of the meditation technique, putting others before oneself, selfless service. Selflessness does benefit oneself anyway so in some ways it’s a good way to be selfish and benefit others, which is better than selfishness that doesn’t better others I guess.

It was the first time I’d served on a course.

There were a few differences with service on a Vipassana course as opposed to sitting a course. For one, you could talk. You could also mingle with the opposite sex in the kitchen area – you still had separate facilities and sleeping quarters for females and the males, and you couldn’t have sex.

Instead of meditating all day, you meditate 3 hours a day during the whole group meditation sessions where everyone meditated in the meditation hall. You would think nothing much could go wrong with those few little differences, but I managed to get in trouble. More on that in a bit.

They were a cool bunch at the meditation centre. Most had been to India, where Goenka first expanded the Vipassana centres and which was the historical home of the Buddha. Having travelled to India most could also speak quite good English. Good, as my French was bordering on non-existent, but I did end up learning the French names for most vegetables, or des légumes.

There were a couple of guys I’d met at the English centre who showed up in France. Beth, this English tapestry expert and some Polish Woman with a very round, cute face. There were also about 7 French, mostly guys but there was maybe one woman, and a German guy, who complained that the French would always speak French rather than English, and perhaps 1 other person from some other country.

The first few days I was at the centre, before the start of the first course I was to serve on. We mostly did gardening and cleaning, which is also service. We’d meditate at least 3 times a day, in the morning, around midday and in the evening. We all helped prepare our meals. Unlike when you were doing a course as a server you got three meals a day. We had a decent breakfast and lunch that we all ate together and then we had a light evening meal which we often prepared ad hoc.

Des légumes were delivered to the centre, they were amazingly fresh and tasty, completely unlike the veggies we got in Australia. There was a small vegetable garden a bit away from the centre, which was still part of the centre’s property,  but out of bounds to those taking courses who were restricted to the meditation hall, their quarters and a small outdoor area where they could get a little bit of exercise a few times a time. The veggie patch was just a short walk up the road from the main centre, it still had a few courgettes, potatoes and tomatoes going from the summer which we collected and took back to add to dinner, which makes me think I probably arrived some time in October, as by the time November came about there was too much frost about for these type of things to survive.

As it was a fully vegetarian place there was also a large assortment of dry beans, lentils and chickpeas to add some protein to the meals. The milk, le lait, from la vache, was collected in big metal milk containers from a farm down the road. I drove the van down once with one of the French guys who I liked, as he was a very hippy type. I didn’t have a licence and didn’t really know how to drive too well, but I managed. I kept asking the French guy to remind me to drive on the right, rather than the left, as it didn’t come natural to me. We saw a huge owl on the way that night, it swooped down from the trees over the van.

A day or two after I arrived a meditation course started. Our chores were then focussed almost entirely on feeding the 60 or so students and cleaning up after them. So a lot of food prep and dishwashing. I made bread a few times for them and also a kind of mozzarella style cheese I learnt to make in Ireland which I prepared using lemons to curdle the milk and then adding salt and hanging in a cheese cloth overnight to get rid of some of the moisture. I only  did that once as the centre manager said it was too expensive.

As servers, we all had to watch a VHS video of Goenka explaining to us the importance of service and reminding us to also keep the 5 precepts of buddhism. Got to love VHS with its Ring-like magnetic lines running through it, kind of like a link to the Other Side.

Everyone helped prepare the breakfasts, lunch and a light supper. There was this English guy, who showed up to serve on the course who kind of took charge of the meal cooking. He obsessively tried to sort through lentils to find little rocks, which seemed, well, obsessive. The French guy who collected me from the village was the head boss. He did the food ordering and stuff. He used to be some maître d at a hotel. He was nice and well organised.

We had a bit of free time after lunch so we could just walk around and hang out a bit.

During the first course I served on I was pretty chilled and relaxed. I chatted a fair bit with Beth and the Polish girl as we peeled and chopped vegetables and the like. The meditation teacher was this American guy. He came up to me one day and said I had to stop talking so much and so loudly as it was disturbing the silent meditators. My voice does carry. He seemed stressed. He should meditate more I thought. I’ve been waiting 27 years to express that come back. Perhaps I should meditate more which may mean I wouldn’t hold on to such pettiness so strongly. I also remember a time some kid stole my clutch-pencil for me in class in like year 6 or 7. It was one of those pencils with a plastic casing and a ‘clutch’ to hold in a lead (really graphite) which you didn’t have to sharpen as you just pressed up more lead (graphite) and voila (another French word) you have some more lead. Anyway some little prick stole it and even though I don’t need or want my clutch pencil anymore – it was green by the way – I still wish all sorts of misfortune and unluckiness on the person who did it.

Meditation supposedly helps you deal with such deep down attachments that are making you miserable. I bet the person doesn’t even remember taking the pencil – though I suspect the person knew exactly what the fuck they were doing.

Just focus on your breath. Watch it go in and out. Watch the rage rise and pass away. Rise and pass away. Fucking prick, in, let it go, out. You don’t actually say anything like that when you meditate, or at least the technique doesn’t teach you to do that. It teaches you to just observe.

Soon the first course had finished and a new one was due to begin in a couple of days. Us servers went back to doing gardening and the like. We all took a walk to a nearby village one day and had a look around. I had the best apple I’d ever tasted in my life on the way. It was on a tree hanging over the fence on the road we were walking on. It was so good that I tried to find the actual tree on Google maps years later. Just like in that movie Lion, where the guy tries to find the village where he was born using Google maps and then one day he finally finds it and goes and finds his mum who he was separated from when he was a young kid and fell asleep on a train. I think I actually did find that apple tree, I swear!

The first course had taken its toll, I realised it was time for me to go back to Australia and, as I had done at the start of the journey, I had miscalculated and had now run out of money. I did a calculation and it seemed after staying in Paris a few nights and buying that avocado, I probably didn’t have enough to even get back to London to get my flight back. I certainly wasn’t going to Barcelona to try and find Agatha, who had pretty much ghosted me, just as Corinne had.

I rang up my mum – who my wife and I live with at the moment as we’re trying to save money to buy a house, and well, she has 5 bedrooms and only uses one and we can use the whole top level, and she lives 800 metres from the beach so it’s a great set-up in its own right – crying and asking if she could lend me a little money so I could make it back, she said leave it with her and she’d see what she could do. I said I was ok for now, I would serve another course where I’d be fed, and have a bed and showers and all so it was all fine.

I think that day I walked into the forest that bordered the mediation centre and just sat under a tree for a few hours being one with nature.

Beth sat the next course so I didn’t have anyone to chat to in the kitchen really. She was a chatterbox as well to be fair, just my voice is deeper.

A Romanian woman called Elina came to serve on the next course. We did chat a little but I did the ‘right’ thing and didn’t gossip excessively with her. I did find out a little bit about her though. She said she was an actress. I joked and said, does that mean she was a waitress? She said no, she was a working actress. As we didn’t talk a lot towards the end of the course I asked for her address and started writing to her. I still write to her on occasions after nearly 27 years. I tried to catch up with her in Paris last time I was there a few years ago. But she was off filming. She does some weird stuff, which I like. She’s often semi-naked.

It turned out she really was a working actress. She was in Schinlder’s List and an episode of Seinfeld. However, she was discovered by a film director in the USA called Hal Hartley when she was a waitress, so I wasn’t far off the mark.

The American guy was replaced by a Swiss guy on the second course I served on. He was much more chilled and brought Swiss chocolate with him for the servers to eat. I ate too much one night and my body wasn’t used to it. Since I’d been obtaining from sexual activity it had all been pent up and the chocolate seemed a catalyst for my libido to go into overdrive. My Skin also got itchy. I tried going to have a shower to regain some balance, but afterwards I just had to have a wank and let it all out. There were a few stains on the sheet.

The second course also finished. As everything does. I’d managed to book myself a seat on a plane leaving from London in a few days so as soon as the course ended I said goodbye to Elina and hitched a ride with Beth, who was also heading back towards England, and some French girl who had done the two courses back to back, so she’d been meditating for like 20 something days in a row. We visited the French girl’s flat in Paris, it was just a little thing with a shared toilet in between her floor and the one below. She also lived with her mum, as my wife and I now do. We walked around Paris a bit and then Beth and I had to turn our attention to where we were staying for the night.

Beth said we could get a bed at Shakespeare bookshop. It turned out we couldn’t, we ended up getting a place at the California Hotel, or some name like that. We had contemplated sharing a room but I stipulated we definitely wanted separate beds. I don’t know if it was ever even remotely on the cards, but that was perhaps the last chance to have actual sex on my European tour and I was too Buddhist to even give it a go. Like I said though, not sure even if it was remotely ever on the cards!

The next day Beth and I hitchhiked from London to Paris. I won’t write about that again here, just click on the link above to check it out.

After Paris and London, the next leg of my journey was India.

 

Juanito’s Travoles 50-Yr-Backpucker – Dublin to Paris on a bus blogger de blog Pt16

13 December 2022

You know I should be ‘working’. But I turn 50 on Friday and I work for the government, so I’m instead I’ve got SBS world movies on and my rose gold coloured (not sure if that should be hyphenated to rose-gold-coloured – I don’t think they taught me that at school) MacBook Air in front of my shitty work laptop where I just move the mouse every so often to stay online (and answer the occasional query). I just walked up to Supabarn and bought a Three Mills bakery baguette, some turkey ham, some rocket and mixed lettuce, and made myself a sandwich with some cranberry sauce that’s been in the fridge since last Christmas (or perhaps the one before). I got regular pork ham for my son.

Back in 1995 (not literally this is not Back to the Future)

I wish I could write more about Tubbercurry, Sligo. It was the birthplace of my grandmother Bee, in 1899. We called her Bee. She was Bridget, which is also my Daughter’s middle name. After 27 years Tubbercurry is just another place, just a few memories. It’s also called Tobercurry. It’s confusing. One end of the town there’s a sign Tubbercurry and at the other end there’s Tobercurry. It could be an Irish thing. Not like one of those stupid Irish joke things. I’ve worked out they racist. More an Irish spelling thing.

On a side note, in recent years I found out I had a great, or great-great, grandfather from Guangzhou in China. No one told us when we were young. Also a racist thing. But my great-uncle Cyril did look very Chinese.

So Tubbercurry. I remember a poly-tunnel (a big plastic dome-shaped tunnel) where they grew their gherkins and tomatoes.  A pen for the pig who ate the whey that was leftover from the cheesemaking process. The homemade cheese with organically grown poly-tunnel gherkins, and little organic tomatoes on the homemade bread. Perhaps a cow. I don’t think a cow, I think they just bought in their milk. Cows are a hassle, you have to milk them everyday. At Inisglas Stuart used to get frustrated with them and kick them on occasions. Pigs are easier, they don’t care. They eat buckets of food scraps and wallow in the mud. They don’t care. They’re pigs. We took some acid at a ConFest hippy festival in Victoria in the 1990s and ended up sitting in a mud puddle like a pig. I can see the appeal.

There were also the rows of kale, spinach, onions, scallions, potatoes – you’re never far from a potato in Ireland – homemade cordials, digging, planting, harvesting. We’d go pick wild blackberries a couple of times, which formed the basis of those cordials and also homemade jams. Mostly the German organic gardeners’ son and I just shoved them in our mouths while we were out walking in the countryside, which is literally everywhere when you work on an organic farm. We had early morning starts, long days, fairly early to bed, nothing much in the way of TV, but there was a TV somewhere, I remember the kids on the farm asking about Home & Away, an Australian TV soap. It wasn’t a very exciting time. I didn’t mind because I was busy, and I liked the soil on my hands and connection with the earth. It was nice. But that was it. Nice. And kind of relaxing, uncomplicated, just honest manual labour to produce food for people to eat. Not whatever I do for the government, in my current job, which is much more abstract than pulling out a scallion, digging up a spud or picking a capsicum or eggplant in a poly-tunnel. Those are the memories I have of that time. Perhaps around 3 months of nice, relaxing, uncomplicated, life.

I’d saved a few hundred pounds during my time on the farm. I was still on the dole and getting around 40 pounds a week – or maybe a fortnight, in those days 40 pounds seemed to get a fair amount – from the government. Volkmar and Claudia paid me another 20 pounds a week for helping out.

Apart from the one trip to Dublin, I didn’t have any expenses. We had food, lodging, I just ended up buying a little bit of tobacco for entertainment once we smoked the whole tin Volkmar had shared with me, and a few stamps to write postcards and letters to family, Agatha in Dublin, and even one to Corrine in Switzerland.

I farewelled Sligo and headed to Dublin one last time. At the time it was one last time, I may make it back there again. I’m thinking 2025 could be good, a 30 year anniversary trip.

I booked a bus ticket from Dublin to Paris. It was going to take like the best part of two days and one night or something, but it was only around 25 pounds.

When I got to Dublin there was no-one to see in Dublin. Agatha had left to go back to Barcelona. I had her address there and I wrote that I may try and visit her after I went to France. It was late October I think, or perhaps even early November. The streets of Dublin were grey and drizzly like some atmospheric detective drama, which drizzly days in Dublin seem perfectly suited. There was even some thick fog hanging about the lampposts.

It was not a happy day. I didn’t have much time between arriving from Sligo and leaving on the bus. I just walked around a little to stretch my legs, and smoked a cigarette in my green Melbourne tram conductor’s coat, in the fog under a lamppost, just like and fuckin’ Irish spy. Standing under a lamppost, in the dark, the smoke drifting into the air mixing with the fog. I felt pretty tough at the time. Working on farms is a good work out. Even a skinny young man like me develops a few muscles and tone after a couple of months on a farm. Some broad shoulders and the start of a six pack. Maybe 2 cans’ worth.

The bus left close to midnight, I got on and then we headed to some port where the bus was put on a ferry and then the ferry went over to Holyhead in the UK. We didn’t have to stay on the bus on the ferry and I got out and had a cigarette on deck as I watched Ireland drift away and the UK approach. It was a good feeling to have arrived and left Ireland by sea. It’d been around six months. Some of the best and most interesting of my life.

We got back on the bus and down through Birmingham (I don’t know if that was the place, Google maps suggests it as a route from Dublin to Paris so perhaps), sleeping a little, looking out the window a little.

We arrived in London in the morning and had to wait to swap buses. The sun was warm. We had about 2 hours to wait.

I needed to go for a pee but had no pounds to pay for the turnstile to get in.

‘I don’t have any pounds’, I said to the cleaning guy.

‘Just jump over’, he said in what may have been a Jamaican accent.

And in that way, due to the kindness of strangers, I was able to pee. I’d been on the bus around 12 hours, though Google Maps reckons you can do the trip in around 8 hours and 28 minutes, I guess you stop a few places along the way. It was at least the best part of the night and most of the morning. After the pee, and a bit of standing around at the bus stop, we set off again for France.

The bus went down to Dover, then the bus got on a train and across the Chunnel. We were on a bus on a train under the English Channel to Calais.

I’m sure we passed the Somme at some point.

In the late afternoon, we reached Paris. I was knackered. Some guy was at the train station spruiking a hotel. There were three American girls there. He convinced them to go with him to the hotel. I was super tired, and I had some notion I might as well follow the girls, so I just went. We stopped for pizza along the way.

It wasn’t cheap. The hotel, not the pizza. $100 for a night or two. A quarter of my savings. I always seem to get a bit ripped off on the first days in a new country – but nothing compared to the sapphire scam of Thailand a few months earlier. It was in Francs though so I didn’t work out that immediately. It was a decent hotel though, nice clean sheets. Actually super nice, white and crisp sheets, with nice fluffy pillows. I had a shower. It felt like I was washing away months of country soil. It was fucking amazing. I used all the little soaps and shampoos and the soft towels, then got into a nice fluffy bathrobe. I masturbated, then slept like a baby.

The next morning I woke up and watched Scooby-doo in French, masturbated, and then decided I’d head into the centre of Paris on the train. I laid in bed a few minutes – the sheets felt so good – before heading down to breakfast.

I met someone at breakfast who’d bought a cheap airfare from Dublin for around 40 pounds. About 15 pounds more than I’d spent on my bus ticket, though I would have saved 15-16 hours travel time, and perhaps gotten a cheaper place to stay. But I liked my clean crisp white sheets and fluffy white towels, and little soaps and little containers of shampoo and conditioner. And being able to watch Scooby-doo in French. It was more value for money than a rip off. Plus they had croissants and things for breaky so I could fill up for most of the day.

It was a struggle buying a train ticket. I had zero French. My French teacher in year 8 had said I was so bad at French that I should have to go back to year 7. They didn’t even teach French in year 7. I think she was just a cow and it was more of a reflection on her that I didn’t know jack shit French.

After struggling to try and find the words related to tickets – it was like pulling marshmallow shaped unicorns out of the air – the young ticket woman asked, ‘where you want to go?’ she was low-level grumpy but not overly impolite, just sounding tired of foreigners who go to France and can’t speak any French. And hell, she knew English and I knew not French, so I got to appreciate that fact.

‘The Louvre’, I said, shrugging my shoulders struggling to figure out where I should be going in Paris, but somehow everyone knows the Louvre, even uncultured guys who grew up on the Gold Coast with shitty French teachers.

She gave me a ticket which lasted a few days so I could get on and off a few times while I was in Paris. It may have been a 10-trip ticket. The dude clipped a little hole in it every time I entered the station. Apart from the long trips back and forth from the hotel, I mostly walked around though.

I went into the centre of Paris and found a cafe close to a metro station. It wasn’t near the Louvre exactly, I just got off at some random spot. It had a nice little roundabout with a few restaurants, bars and cafes about.

I had a coffee with cream. I didn’t realise I’d ordered one with cream. I asked the waiter why the coffee cost more than the price they’d written on their blackboard. I didn’t realise that the cream would cost me a few extra francs. The water was nice, it wasn’t his fault I couldn’t speak French. The coffee was nice though.

I found my way to the Louvre. It had some cool stairs that kind of floated down in a spiral. They probably still have them there. I didn’t visit the Louvre last time I was in Paris, I went to the Musée d’Orsay instead.  I saw the Mona Lisa and some Egyptian stuff. Just like today there were signs pointing to the little painting by Leonardo, La Joconde in French, so you could make a v-line for it and get a photo with it. La Joconde wasn’t as impressive as the other Italian Renaissance paintings in the room. It’s just very little. And really, it’s only kind of super famous because some dudes stole it. I’m no Italian Renaissance expert, but it’s more of a nice little portrait than something you go ‘wow’ over. The Egyptian stuff was in the basement. That was pretty cool. I also saw the Venus de Milo. The armless beauty. Even before the internet I knew that was super famous. How did we figure such things out before the internet, perhaps in books, TV shows and popular culture absorption.

For lunch I found a supermarket, where I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. I got some bread and an avocado, and an Asterix & Obelix jar of Nutella, which had a collectable glass which held the Nutella as a gift for my niece and nephew. The avocado was like $5. My money was quickly evaporating.  It was starting to dawn on me that I would never get to Barcelona with the money I had. I got some Gauloise blonde cigarettes (they were much cheaper than the avocado) from a bar and something to drink from a little shop, some orange juice and water, and then some nice nuts from a nice lady from the nut shop, and I went down to the Seine to have a little picnic. It was glorious. Being in Paris with an avocado, French nuts and a very strong cigarette.

The guy from the hotel taught me to say ‘ou se trouve‘ which, ‘where is [insert place]’. I asked some paramilitary ou se trouve le toilette when I was in some fancy looking building. They laughed and one of them pointed me in the right direction. There were paramilitaries all over the city. There had been some bombings by an Algerian group in the months earlier. I wasn’t able to find a rubbish bin as they’d sealed them all to stop people putting bombs in them. And on the way not he bus when we got to France the police got all the African looking people off the bus for interrogation. I never saw so many police and paramilitary in a city. They had serious weapons too. Proper machine guns and all. But still they laughed when I asked them in bad French how to get to the toilet.

Later in the afternoon I walked around some more. I decided while in Paris I should  catch a movie. I asked some guys who were walking along chatting to each other ou se trouve le cinéma, they interrupted their conversation and with a roll of the eyes one of them broke off and showed me the way to  the nearest cinemas. It was a bit out of the way so the guy was super nice to help me out. Actually all the French were nice to me. The cinema was some arty one and showing some English language independent film. I was the only one to laugh at any of the jokes. I think everyone else was French, and maybe the jokes weren’t that funny. But I thought they were. It was a nice film.

I spent one more night at the hotel, it was all I could afford. I visited the Eiffel Tower the next day. I asked someone ou se trouve le Eiffel Tower, and they rolled their eyes and pointed to the big pointy steel thing pointing up into the sky. In those days you could walk right under it. Nowadays it’s fenced off like some zombie enclosure. I didn’t go up the tower. It cost too much. Sitting underneath it was enough. I’d contacted the Vipassana meditation centre at Le Boise Planté and they said I could come down and help serve other doing courses the next day. I’d also written to them when I was in Ireland, so they were kind of expecting me. It was in the direction of Auxerre, about 2 hours south of Paris.

I just walked around Paris some more, I didn’t go to any more museums or anything. I just soaked up the Parisian atmosphere, the seine, the cigarettes and so forth. In the evening I went back to the hotel asking another person, ou se trouve le métro. I guess that was a bit like asking, where is the railway system?

I had just enough money to get on the bus down to the meditation centre, but that was about it. How to get back to London, to Australia? That was another story for another day. I wasn’t even sure exactly how much money I had left at the time. Working out the francs took a little bit to sink in. I think I may have had $50-60 left. Merde.

I wasn’t going to have to think about that for a month or so though while I was at the meditation centre. At that point I wasn’t sure how long I’d stay. A month in France sounded nice. A nice round number.

I worked out what bus I needed to get from Paris to Le Boise Planté, paid some more of my precious francs and then headed off. I left the rest of my Gauloise Blondes on the bus on the seat just before I got off. You couldn’t smoke at meditation centres. They didn’t even have coffee.

While waiting for a lift from the bus stop to the meditation centre I struck up a conversation with an old guy. He spoke no English and me no French. I tried a few words in German. I don’t know what he was saying but he had a good old chat. Perhaps about a cat, or village life, maybe some story about the days of nazi occupation, or perhaps something about a nice courgette he once had. The French did have very nice vegetables as I would find out during my stay at the meditation centre.

The guy from the meditation centre picked me up in a minibus after I’d been chatting for half an hour or so with the old man from the village.

It was dark. We drove to Dhamma Mahi. We didn’t talk a lot.

They found me a bed in the servers quarters. They gave me something to drink and eat and then I joined in the evening meditation and went to bed. The sheets were much more rustic than the fancy hotel ones.

I was back in the sanga, the buddhist community, my family.

I was calm. It was going to be my last adventure in Europe for a while.

Juanito’s Travels 50-Yr-Backpacker – Tubbercurry (tobercurry) Sligo, Derry Girls, Netflix, Bruges, and Sustainable Travel – 1995 (and 2022) BlogPt15

The organic farm in Tubbercurry (aka Tobercurry) Sligo was much better run than the biodynamic one in Inisglas, Wexford.

It was run by a German family, Volkmar, Claudia. I guess the German part is always a clue that efficiency may be on the cards. Besides, unlike Inisglas, these guys actually lived off the money they got from the farm so less time for poet yoghurt makers, like Stuart and ex-drug dealing chicken farmers on the run from the UK police.

Volkmar and Claudia had a very blonde boy and a girl. How this German family ended up in Tubbercurry, in the west of Ireland, I’m not sure. I think they said they saw an opportunity to buy a farm and went for it. I admire people like that, sometimes it seems we’re overwhelmed by choices to the point we are frozen with choice.

Which takes me to Derry Girls. It’s a TV series on Netflix if you haven’t heard of it. There are many choices of shows and movies to watch, most of which you really get the sense you’ve wasted part of the precious life you have after watching them, seems like we just have to fill our lives up with stuff, whatever that stuff is. I include myself in that and I find it difficult nowadays to just listen to a crow crow, or look at a flower, to be quiet and mindful of what is going on around me. But back to the tele, Derry Girls is set in Derry in Northern Ireland, which is also the setting for one of my previous blogs. I mean Northern Ireland, not Derry, which I have never visited.  It’s about these young Irish catholic women (Derry Girls, not my previous blog), and a wee English lad, growing up in the 1990s in Derry – or Londonderry as it’s also known as. I watched the show and cacked myself silly (cack is a way of saying poop). Which is pretty much irrelevant to this travel tale, except that after watching the show I decided I should try and visit Derry when my wife and I do our round-the-world trip in 2023 to celebrate my 50th birthday (hence the title of this blog if you hadn’t yet cottoned on).

I have already planned out our trip on a Google Sheet. After visiting South East Asia, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia (which has its own Google Sheet) we are flying off to Vienna, down through Italy, including Sicily, and then, according to the Sheet (which is the 2nd Sheet in the 3 Sheet series covering our whole trip, the third being Mexico/ Latin America), we were going go fly from Palermo to Athens and then across to Turkey via the Greek Islands. There are many Greek Islands, so I’ll be a bit more specific. We were going to go to the island of Tinos then across to Ikaria and Samos before heading to Turkey to visit the Ancient Roman site of Ephesus. Ephesus gets a shout out in the bible, as Paul or John or someone writes letters to a church there or something. I’m not a regular church goer but my father-in-law passed away in Mexico last weekend so we went to church and there they mentioned Ephesus. It was a sad weekend, but I’ve taken a few days off of work and thought I’d write another blog post rather than watching more Netflix.

Back to the 50th birthday year travel plans, the Greek Islands were set, until I saw the crazy antics of those young women on Derry Girls – Orla, Erin, Michelle, Clare and James. I consulted my wife about my thoughts on changing plans to include a quick trip to Derry. She said, ‘if we’re going to Derry we have to also go to Bruges’. Bruges is in Belgium and was also the name of a Netflix movie which had a few Irish lads in it. By the way neither Netflix, nor the Irish tourism board, give me any money for promoting Irish-related viewing on my blog. I don’t even put ads on my blog. It seems inauthentic to me. And as a young person who was in his 20s for most of the 1990s, and who once even attended a Nirvana concert at Fisherman’s Wharf in 1992 on the Gold Coast, and who smoked so much hash on the way to the concert that I ended up lying down in a mud puddle the whole time and barely remembering more than one song, I was, and am all about authenticity – which sounds like something Rick from the Young Ones might say, sans le hash. I think you should only write for yourself and write as though nobody is reading this. Which, in this case could quite literally be true. Let’s face it, I’m no Patrick Leigh Fermor – author of a travel trilogy, of actual books with pages in them, rather than a trilogy of Google Sheets, or blogs – accounting for his walking trip across Europe and onto Constantinople in the early 1930s. Come to think of it, there’s still a bit at the end of the third book where he goes to Greece that I haven’t read. Well, he does go on a bit to be honest.

So, after consulting my wife, I consulted the appropriate Google Sheet for Europe and tried to work out how I could swap the Greek Island section for a trip to Derry, Ireland and Bruges, Belgium. But the thing is, if I go over to that part of Europe, I feel obliged to go try and visit my friend Elina in Paris. Obliged is the wrong term, I mean, there’s no way I would visit Paris without at least seeing if she was free for a coffee, as she was the only dhamma vipassana buddy from the mid-90s I still kept in contact with. We’re both doing what vipassana people do though – even though I have strayed from the path a bit – and we are growing old, constantly changing, and sooner or later going to simply pass away. Yes, coffee in Paris, when we’re in our 70s or 80s, could be the go.

Elina is an actress whom I met in 1995 at a Vipassana meditation centre in France (spoiler alert for a later blog post). She lives in Paris. Last time I visited Paris (you can read my account of that trip here) she was off filming something with her husband so I was unable to catch up, but I feel I’d be rude if I didn’t at least try and visit her if I was going to Bruges. She makes very weird films which I’m occasionally in the mood for once I realise most stuff on Netflix is a load of shit. Elina and I had been penpals (were we actually sent real letters and cards to each other) for some time in the 90s and early 2000s, when she lived mostly in New York, and we’ve kept in touch on and off since then. To be honest, my efforts are more than hers – though she always writes back when I write to her. I’ll see a film Elina’s in on SBS television and then I’ll send her a message and then we chat again for a few days. It’s always lovely and, for me, brings me back to those days in Ireland and Europe in the 90s, just as Derry Girls has. I always thought of her like some sort of past life soulmate. Though I don’t think I ever expressed that to her.

So, a trip to Derry would have to involve both Bruges and Paris. It’d also mean we’d need to spend at least a night or two in Dublin, on the way to Derry, as most planes tend to fly from Palermo to Dublin rather than Derry. And even if we didn’t travel by plane I haven’t been to Dublin since 1995 so I couldn’t go all that way without a visit to Temple Bar and a pint of Guinness. In the movie Bruges yer man says, ‘I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin’ and, ‘I’m still in fuckin’ Bruges’, and ‘Bruges is a shithole’. His words, not mine. But the things you do for love and a chance to visit Derry and Ireland again. The movie might actually be called In Bruges, but that’s not that important at the moment. The important thing is I had allocated 8-9 days on my Google Sheet to go from Palermo, Sicily, over to Athens and then across the above-mentioned Greek Islands, and then over to Selçuk, Turkey where we could visit the ancient city of Ephesus, the Roman Empire’s capital in Asia Minor, before heading up to Istanbul as our last European destination. They’re in Eurovision, so I’m going to say they’re European. Let’s park the debate on whether Australia can be considered part of Europe due to their inclusion in the song contest for now.

I’m committed to sustainability and wanted to limit our travels by air as much as possible, trying to instead use trains and boats. I know, until we have electric boats and 100% renewable energy powering the grid, it is a difficult calculation to make as to what form of transport wins out in terms of carbon emissions. Planes are definitely not the best though. And besides it’s much nicer spending time on a train than a plane. To get from Palermo to Paris by train takes the best part of 2 days, assuming you may want a stopover in somewhere like Milan on the way. Then we’d need at least 2 nights in Paris in the hope that Elina may be there to catch up for a coffee with my wife and I. To get from Paris to Bruges is not that bad, a couple of hours, easy enough. Then you need at least two nights in Bruges in order to ‘see things’.

So we’re up to 6 nights already. Then we could either spend another 2 days travelling from Bruges to Dublin across the UK – I did something similar back in 1995 from Dublin to Paris, which I’ll come to in a later blog – or you could fly from Bruges to Dublin, then spend the night there before taking a train and bus up to Derry where you’d also want to spend at least 2 nights, enough time at least to do some sort of Derry Girls tour of the place, before then flying back over to Selçuk, probably via Istanbul. What’s more is that all the accommodation in these places is like double the cost of those I’d found on the Greek Islands.

In many ways it’d just be easier just to do a Patrick Leigh Fermor and walk around for years not worrying about all these schedules or the impact on the environment. I’d be tempted but for the fact I can only take 3 months off of work at the moment, and my wife has no interest in walking around Europe for years, even if it did include Bruges.

So, in the end, we’re going back to Plan A. No Derry, no Bruges, no Paris and just  flying from Palermo to Athens and then flying from Athens to Ikaria – skipping Tinos as I get very seasick and I couldn’t work out the ferry schedules – and onto Samos then over to Selçuk.

Back in 1995, life was far less complicated. I got my Willing Workers on Organic Farms guide book (more of a pamphlet than a book) out, I looked up farms in Tubbercurry, Ireland, where my grandmother was born, I rang up a place and arranged a time to come, then I stayed there for around 3 months, more or less. There was no Netflix, I didn’t even watch TV. There was no internet, I wrote a letter, or postcard,  home to my mum and family on occasions or made the occasional phone call. There were no websites to calculate the time you’d spend travelling between places. I just worked picking, planting and pulling out weeds during the day and at night I’d look at the stars, sit around smoking a cigarette chatting to Volkmar, or go out looking for hedgehogs with the very blonde boy. On the weekends I’d explore the countryside, picking mushrooms with a very blond boy, who seemed to know what he was doing to avoid being poisoned, and riding around country roads in between hedges visiting graveyards, abandoned churches and other things you find in the countryside.

I’d still write to Agatha, and she, from memory, wrote back a couple of times, though our letters were still tender and, for me, I was still hopeful that we might develop a romantic relationship through them. At one stage a young German woman who was riding around Ireland with her friends stayed on the farm for about a week. She was a nice woman and I had some attraction to her. She stayed in a separate part of the caravan with me and we’d watch the stars and search for hedgehogs together some night. I was still a horny young man, who hadn’t had sex since I was with Corrine the least year,  and I had thoughts of trying to get together with her, but I somehow still felt too connected to Agatha and felt it would be a betrayal to contemplate another woman. Instead I’d read a letter from Agatha and think of being with her.

I had some funny ideas back then. Looking back I didn’t owe anyone anything. And, as it turned out, my love for Agatha was, for reasons that are still mysterious to me, but which might have been as simple as she just wasn’t that into me, unrequited. Corrine was more straightforward, and even though I sent her a note or two when I was in Ireland, she was married.

So I spent the last warm days of Autumn hard at work on the farm, delivering fresh organic vegetables, like kale, even before it was fashionable, and herbs to hotels with Volkmar. There was one cool one that looked like a castle on a large estate with cute farm animals abounding. We also went to Sligo city on our regular stops. We’d stop for lunch every day on a nice table outside under a tree, to eat freshly made bread from Claudia, with home made cheese, gherkins and tomatoes from the green house and even some homemade chutneys and jam I think, as well as some pretty decent coffee.

It was largely an uneventful time there in Tubbercurry, but I was at peace. I was also, as I am now, committed to the idea of sustainability so I felt my farm labours meant something. I was also being rewarded for them I should say, getting 20 pounds a week extra and being able to save the whole of my dole check each fortnight. I had chosen to work on farms in Australia because I wanted to help mother Earth, or something like that. I mean sustainability has a much greater urgency and imperative now in the 2020s, bordering on desperation, but it’s nothing new, sustainability was big in the 70s, 80s, 90s, hell it dates back to Mayan civilisation, and cities like Palenque, in modern day Chiapas, Mexico which rose, flourished, and then declined and disappeared back into the jungle, due, in part to climate change, droughts, and unsustainable practices back in 226 BC to 799 AD.

Talking of decline, I tried to visit Agatha one more time in Dublin while I was in Sligo. I took the train across the wee country, I went to La Casa Chaparrita, but no-one was there. I tried calling into Agatha’s friend Bear place to find out where she was – at least I remember her name as Bear. Bear said I should have called ahead and that Agatha had visited some family north of Dublin where she’d work as some sort of nanny when she first came to Ireland. My grandmother had also worked as some sort of nanny when she emigrated to Australia when she was ten in the early 1900s. Agatha was on her way back to Barcelona soon. She let me stay at her house overnight. She was kind. I went back to Sligo the next day. I was sad.

The weather was starting to get colder and more miserable. When I got back to the train station closest to the farm in Tubbercurry it was drizzly. I had to wait an hour for Claudia to come and collect me. I must have looked like a sad wet puppy.

One day in Late September/ October I think, the warm weather just stopped. I said to Volkmar and Claudia that I’d move on in another week or two after finishing helping with the end of their summer and autumn cropping before the real cold set in. They thanked me and I made plans for my next journey. This time to France to stay at another Vipassana meditation centre, I thought I might even be able to make it down to Barcelona to try and visit Agatha one more time. But first things first.