The Native Life, and Leaving/PERTH

Now that my body was finally back to its original state of unblistered perfection, my time in Oz was coming to an end.  I was to leave the day after next for Vietnam, and honestly I felt relieved.  With great respect to the efforts of Jessie and her friends, it seemed I was not designed to enjoy Australia.  My spirits were being sapped more and more every day by the nonsensical government regulations, crushing exchange rate, and a nightlife filled with such preening over-tanned fight-crazy douchebags as would put even Jersey to shame.  And have I mentioned the prices?

Remember, 4 days a week, for one hour, you can get a drink for $6.  Happy Hour: Australian for "Fuck You"

If that wasn't enough, internet users here still have download quotas.  My personal theory is the Australian government believes the internet may actually run out, and thus conservation is necessary.  And what's the deal with being a country and a continent at the same time?  Does it make you feel like a big man?  Enough already.

Still, with a day and a half left I wasn't quite finished with this sunburnt country.  For one, I had yet to see a kangaroo.  Sure, I'd feasted on their flesh and all, but I wanted to see one up close and hopping.  I could go to a zoo, but then I could go to a zoo anywhere and see one of the be-pouched bastards.  Instead, I was told of Heirrison Island, located in the middle of a bridge over the Swan river, and home to enough kangaroos that they have to fence them in, away from traffic.  Perfect.

Well, I followed the riverfront to the bridge and hiked all over that goddamn island for hours, finding nothing but dust, scrub brush, and a dirty water trough.  The afternoon sun was burning my shoulders where sunscreen had been neglected, and in my desperate thirst I wondered whether the murky water was intended for kangaroos or people, and if I couldn't just chance it this once.  However, reason prevailed.  As much as an Australian longs to fight their fellow man, I knew they hated the 'roos even more.  Surely, the water must be poisoned.

My thirst unsated, I began the long trek back to the city.  While I had been told people don't often spot the kangaroos on the island, I thought the universe would just let me have this one.

Pictured: Not Kangaroos, Probably

Although the powers that be were insistent on throwing up this kangaroo cock-block, I did get a sort of existential consolation prize.  And that would be seeing a Dr. Doom vanity license plate.  That's right, Perth.  I found him.

And he drives a Subaru.

Chuckling at supervillain-owned hatchbacks wasn't the only action on my docket this night either.  Earlier in the week, I had found a flyer for some sort Goth club night in Fremantle.  Ordinarily I'd keep my distance, but my time here had confused my brain into thinking a $10 cover was a bargain, and who out there doesn't want to know what Australian goths are like?  Moreover, there was something special about this event, something that spoke to me.  Maybe it was the badly drawn furry art on the flyer, and promises of "Burlesque Performances".  Maybe it was the fact that one of the bands was called Matty Trash and the Horrorbles.  Come on.  The Horrorbles.  I told Jessie we had to go.

This flyer is a master class in how to get me ironically excited.

"Creature of the Night" turned out to be everything I hoped for, and more.  Girls in corsets hawking awful handmade purses and pillowcases, bands whose music ranged from mediocre to nu-metal, and people playing beer pong with lone glasses of beer and actual ping pong paddles.

I didn't want to say nothin', but...You're doing it wrong.

The burlesque performance was a couple of girls strutting their stockings to Marilyn Manson's version of "Personal Jesus", and it confirmed my belief that girls cannot watch other girls striptease without claiming they could do better.  Sure it may be true, and these ladies were definitely amateurs, but I'm of the opinion that some burlesque is better than no burlesque, and uh, shut up.

But you can form your own opinion:

After I'd had my fill of $6.50 beer and $8 whiskey cokes, we managed to catch the last train back to Perth. Turns out, this was the party train.  After stepping over a pile of puke to board, Jessie and I took some of the few seats not covered in trash, or worse.

Luckily I had the designated Cigarette Butt Seat between me and the vomit.

We started a conversation about the show, the music, the distinct lack of furries despite what the topless tiger-woman promised, when a man lying across three seats in front of us growled, "Shut the fuck up or I will kick your fucking ass."  He then groaned loudly and muttered something about feeling sick, while I began talking even more loudly and distinctly, because Fuck Him.  While I respected his throw-up prowess, if indeed the puddle on the floor did belong to him, I wasn't about to give this fetal-curled bully the satisfaction of backing down, not after I had seen the last third of the film classic Never Back Down.  If there was one thing those 25 minutes had taught me, it was to not Back Down.  Never.  Jessie and I continued to talk, louder and louder, while he groaned and cursed me out more, and eventually flipped over onto his other side.  FIGHT: WON.

With the next day being my last here, I check out of Grand Central and drop my bags off at Dan's.  In the morning I meet Jessie to go see Rango, an animated movie about a confused outsider lizard in an acupulco shirt who finds himself a small desert town filled with people who want to fight him.  More or less.  Something about the film seemed oddly resonant.

Now, I hadn't seen any kangaroos, and it didn't seem likely to happen in the few hours I had before my flight that evening, but I did see something.  As chance would have it, the least likely animal I would expect to see in Australia.  On my last afternoon, I went to...Penguin Island.

Like Skull Island, but not quite.

It took a train and a bus, but I made it to the dock in Rockingham exactly one minute before the last ferry left at 3:00.  I was the only person on the ferry not counting the captain, and I've never been very comfortable as the only person on a boat ever since a particularly stressful experience in Bangkok, and I briefly considered walking to the island (which is actually possible, on top of a 1km sandbar).  However, the ferry ride was more pleasant than terrifying, and I made it to Penguin Island fine and dry.  My expectations were low after Heirrison Island, but finally timing was on my side.  I present to you...the Little Penguin:

Yes, these are the smallest penguins in the world, and yes, they are native to Australia and New Zealand.  Somehow Australia is home to both the deadliest creatures in the world, and the most adorable.  How?  Life Finds A Way, I guess.

Pictured: Life Finding A Way (Not Pictured: Sniper Support)

Once I had my fill of the critters so cute that Australia calls 'em Fairy Penguins, I had about an hour to kill before I needed to get back to the ferry.  And that's how I learned about my new hero: Seaforth McKenzie.

This guy.

Seaforth was a Canadian man possessed of just the right combination of money and crazy that he actually lived in the caves here for years, squatting illegally until the government basically gave up and leased him the land, presumably wary of offending a voluntary cave-dweller with a name like Seaforth.  And before you go thinking he was just another lonely penguin-obsessed hermit like all the others, he actually operated a store out of a cave to serve visitors, and offered lodging.  He also threw the most mind-blowing parties you've ever seen (citation needed).

Party Central

Penguin Island was also home to a massive Pelican mating site, so to protect their eggs and those of the penguins and other birds, you can only walk around on the island on raised wooden walkways.  These walkways are, of course, covered in birdshit.

If, like most of my audience, you're into pelican orgies, have I got a treat for you.

It was on these walkways, surrounded by thousands of surly, screeching birds, that it started to feel like I was in a Hitchcock movie.  They lined the railings, flapped overhead, and covered all the terrain surrounding.

The mood soon changed from feeling like The Birds to actually being in the movie when one gull decided I was being too uppity and started screaming and attacking me, forcing me to flee.  A goddamn bird had made me Back Down.  Shameful.

The bus ride back to the train station was something special, as if on my last day Australia had just decided to open up all her spoils to me.  For one, I spotted an ultra-rare Australian Juggalo on the bus, complete with trashy rat-tail haircut.  He sure was a long way from his natural habitat.  Second, I finally got a picture of a Black Boy plant (kind of):

Flora doesn't get much more blurry or offensive than this.

I meet Dan that evening at a Belgian beer cafe, to spend the last hours before my flight sipping on crispy Stellas.  The way this classy joint operated was they steam-cleaned your glass just before serving the beer, and then cut the head off with an implement called, funny enough, a head cutter.  The whole operation is all sorts of classy, although it's up to you if feeling like you're in a European commercial is worth a 10 dollar Stella Artois.  After guzzling a couple down and a cherry beer called Bellevue, I said my goodbyes to Jessie and caught a cab to the airport.

I left Australia feeling much more positive than I would have expected, and only some of that was the Belgian beer working.  I have a layover in Singapore, and my mood is brought down somewhat by the realities of budget airline travel.

Or "Hell", as Dante famously called it.

After I've picked up my bags and gone through Customs, I notice that my Puma shoes are missing from the side pockets of my backpack where I usually keep them.  I find the Lost and Found, but no one's working.  I wait, and finally an employee comes that I'm able to talk to.  They tell me to talk to a representative from the airline, and I'm pointed to a booth where...no one's working.  Finally someone shows up, and I'm told that after passing through Customs, I can't get my shoes back.  Oh.  Wait, what?  According to this guy, and the shitty email I got later from Tiger Airways, once you pass through immigration you basically give up any right whatsoever to anything you may have lost, and they're not going to even bother and look, because fuck you and your fancy new shoes.

Now down to just my flip flops, things were looking a little dark, and cynicism was beginning to creep through my usually sunny outlook.  Then I dropped my MP3 player in a toilet.  Maybe it wanted off this sinking ship, I don't know.  Now I had Vietnam to look forward to.  At least I had my health.

Down Under Letting Up/PERTH

Over the next week, things started looking up for me.  Jessie was very resourceful in finding activities that required the least amount of movement on my part, and I was very resourceful in not killing myself after struggling through a morning routine of ripping my dressings and old bandages from my leg hairs, showering, reapplying said dressings which is just as gross as it sounds, moisturizing, sunscreening, and finally putting on my stockings that exist just to itch the back of my knees and make people think I have skin cancer.  A morning routine that after practice I whittle down to just under an hour.

And so, first on the agenda is a renaissance fair, because I guess Australia really wants to prove they can play the medieval nerd game just as well as anyone else.

And they were right.

I spent the bulk of my ren faire time standing in line for ice cream and spiral potatos and watching people in homemade armor beat the ever-LARPing shit out of each other with foam swords.

Briefly, I found myself locked in stocks, and simulated what times would have probably been like for myself 500 years ago.

History.

There was also Irish step-dancing and camel rides, which cost a pretty penny so I snickered and made fun of the people riding them, but deep down...down deep...I was jealous.  It was jealousy, people.  I wanted a camel ride, and I don't know why I couldn't have been more honest with myself.

Damn this pride of mine...

That night we meet Dan and a number of his friends for dinner at a brewery, where I try baked date pudding for the first time (it's pretty okay), buy a single oyster for 3 dollars, and drink a tremendous amount of beer to help speed up the healing process.  My legs aren't going to fix themselves, or something.  It was good beer.

Next day and next on the docket Jessie and I went to check out a big street festival that seemed to be one part Burning Man, one part the same street performers I was seeing a couple days ago around a mall, and one part me getting free kimchi because I was sly enough to speak some Korean around the bulgogi vendors.

And one part whatever the hell these guys were, who must live every day like it's free kimchi day.

Later in the day we head to Fremantle and walk around their Aussie version of Pike Place Market.  Feeling saucy, I make some impulse buys, like some Turkish Delight, and a Yorkie bar.

Which I, unfortunately, could not share with Jessie.

Oh, and a goddamn ostrich egg:

Conversation Starter Tip: Stand in line for something and hold an ostrich egg.

Now before you go hoping this is some kind of Chekhov's gun/egg, we never actually got around to eating the thing.  Turns out you have to boil it for a day and then crack it open with a hammer and chisel or something.  Instead, we left it alone in Dan's apartment for awhile until it became rotten and smiled exactly like you'd expect a rotten super-egg to smell like.  It also cost about 12 bucks, in case you were keeping a tally of how much money I've wasted so far.

While in Fremantle, I noticed a sign for a place called Chocolateria San Churro.  There being at least 2 things great about that name, I suggested we check it out.  Speaking from experience, if you ever find an artisinal chocolate churro emporium, do yourself a favor and burn that motherfucker to the ground because otherwise you might go in and order a dark chocolate milkshake that is so good that you'll only feel a sad emptiness the rest of your life without such sweet ambrosia.

I'm at half-mast just looking at this picture.

I spend the night again sleeping shamefully on Dan's couch, idly dreaming of churro dipping sauces.  On the following day Jessie has booked us a wine tour through the Swan Valley, which I'm told during the tour is the second closest wine valley to a major city in the world.  So, seriously hot shit.  And the wine was going to be good for weening me off the milkshake habit I had developed, enabled by the omnipresent milkshake cartons they sell in grocery stores.  For real, every Australian every second of every day is drinking this stuff.

Go ahead and ask one, but you won't get a reply because they're too busy already drinking a carton.

The tour takes us to three wineries, one brewery, and a chocolate factory.

I buy a bottle of white wine and some goat cheese, and during a nougat tasting laugh at how Australians pronounce "nougat" (they also don't know how to say "Chupa Chup", and convincing them to try never gets old).  Now, dinner was something special.  To pair with my exquisite 16 dollar Verdelho...a goddamn kangaroo filet.

Eating a national icon tastes exactly as good as I had hoped.

Word of mouth tells me kangaroo is supposed to be a very tough meat to cook, but these steaks came out perfect.  It definitely took the edge off of having ditched out on a hospital appointment, but that was a lot of noise and additional hospital bills that I was not interested in.  Before the night is through, I am also told about blackboys: a native plant to Australia that grows a long flowering spike that makes the plant look supposedly like an Aborigine holding an upright spear, if you are awfully racist.  I make it my mission to find and photograph one.

After staying what was to be my last night at Dan's, I spend most of the next day at Jessie's au pair house playing with my netbook and waiting for her to finish her work duties and being responsible for strangers and all that.  I'd like to take a second here to observe how fucking intense the security is on busses here:

There's the bus driver in the little cage on the right.  I guess if you have to fend off gasoline-thieving motorcycle gangs, you want some precautions.  Also, so long as I am writing about Australia, my Mad Max references will never cease.

Come night time, I get to beam with pride as she delivers a lecture about the sub-sub-subculture of furries to a college class, and then eat Domino's because it's Tuesday.  I also check into a hostel called the Old Swan Barracks, where I drink a beer at the bar, win a hat, and promptly lose it.  My life is pretty good at making its own metaphors, I guess.

The next morning is a dull series of travel-specific chores: look for another hostel, hike back to the Old Swan to grab my stuff and schlep it over to my new digs at Grand Central, and make an appointment to get my stitches out later in the day.  Since I didn't have insurance, I fretted over how viable it would be to just pull out the stitches myself and not pay the doctor his likely-extortionate fee, but I decided to err on the side of caution.  For once.  Just see how it felt.  Meanwhile, to kill time before the appointment I hung around the shopping center downtown, where a couple things happened.

I noticed KFC had an intriguing flavor of milkshake unique to Australia:

Golden Gaytime.  That nostalgic taste you remember from childhood.  From your Golden Gaytimes.

And I found a man championing a cause very few in our society are brave enough to acknowledge:

A true hero.

Once I'd had enough of watching the loneliest protest in the world, I sauntered over to the clinic and had my stitches out.  Turns out, it's a piece of piss and I absolutely could have done it myself, probably with minimal infection and only moderate excruciating pain.  Oh well, there's 85 bucks into the live-and-learn jar.

Seeing as how the rest of my day was free, and my sunburn had finally healed, leaving my skin uniformly soft and lesion-free (massive sun poisoning=cheap chemical peel?), I decided to take it easy and celebrate.  I scoured downtown for wifi hotspots, and eventually found myself in a small alley cafe called Tiger Tiger, face-to-face with some of the stupider Perth city laws.  I order a mocha at the counter, and get told I have to sit down, then wait for someone to take my order, then they'll serve me, all because they have a liquor license, and apparently if you have a liquor license you can't have counter service after 12pm.  I am referred to their sign:

Even the tiger looks like half a 'tard standing next to that law.

They also won't let me plug in my computer, because I guess electricity something something Mel Gibson.  On the plus side, my flaming-gay waiter burst into dance when "Crazy" by Gnarles Barkley came on the radio.  I must not have been the only one drinking a KFC Krusher that afternoon.

Night falls, and I wander over to Dan's, cutting through the local university.  I spy some placards advertising a gallery opening/fundraising event for some women's cause about cancer, or breasts, or periods, or something.  Period cancer?  Who knows.  Then I further spy that they have a couple boxes of wine they're opening inside the gallery.  It couldn't hurt to help a good cause, right?  And oh was I glad I stepped inside and checked out the art:

Georgia O'Keefe was more subtle, I think.

It was wall-to-wall awful vagina photoshops up in here.  Big, small, floppy, extra-floppy; every kind of pink taco you could think of was arranged in geometric patterns that would give Fibonacci the weirdest boner of his ancient life.

I loiter around the completely middle-aged female crowd for as long as I can, but they aren't giving up the wine anytime soon, so finally I move on.  What Dan lacked in starfish gash photos, he made up for in leftover wine from our wine tour and a functioning TV with which to watch Australian indie films and play Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Luckily, the walk back to my hostel wasn't too far.  Unluckily, the first wave of drunks were starting to get kicked out of finer drinking establishments during my walk.  I pass one bar, and a big guy in a wife beater out front starts to follow me.  He matches my pace and stays right on my back, getting closer and closer, until he's practically stepping on my heels.  We walk about two blocks like that, him right behind me, so close I can hear his angry breathing.  I come to an intersection, and he circles around and gets in front of me, glaring.  He hasn't said anything so far, and I'm the first one to talk.

"Can I help you?"  He doesn't respond, and stands there, drilling me with that dead-from-the-eyes-back stare.  He's only a couple inches from my face, and I'm tensing up, ready for this guy to throw the first punch.  Never seen him before in my life, no interaction with him whatsoever until a second ago, and here I am quickly considering the best ways to take this complete stranger down.

Instead, his friend intervenes.  Half a block away, I hear someone call out "Hey, what the fuck are you doing?  Let's go already!"  The raging drunk in front of me eyes me for a few more seconds, snorts, and walks off.  The rest of my walk back to the hostel, blessedly fighting-drunk free.

Sleep was becoming routine anyways.  Lucky for me, my trip wasn't going to let up that easy.