June 6, 2015
Goodbye Tom: Hello Australia
I woke up early in the pitch dark room, Tom still breathing heavily as he slept on the bed opposite mine. I was excited. Not by Tom, I assure you, but by the fact that the boat was no longer rocking. We had arrived, at long, long last, in Australia. I pulled on some clothes and practically ran outside onto the deck to take a look. And then, as I stepped outside into the surprisingly chilly air, I saw it. There it was; the land Down Under. It looked like a port.
Knowing that I had a very long cycle imminently ahead I forced down a couple more breakfasts at the buffet, and then it was time for myself and the now-wide-awake Tom to depart the Dawn Princess. Returning to the real world was going to be hard. No more free food. Well, not for me anyway. Tom, a keen dumpster diver, was looking forward to taking advantage of the Australian tendency to throw away perfectly- edible-if-slightly-out-of-date food.
We walked off the ship together and it was a relief as we reached the back of the queue to see that the border officials at passport control were smiling and joking with the passengers. Evidently the fact that we were arriving on a cruise ship looked like it would relieve us of any hassles with regards being allowed into the country. And so it proved. The border guard I eventually walked up to just scanned my passport and said “Welcome to Australia.” There was no passport stamp or anything, and it was all so informal that I felt I had to ask him whether the working holiday visa that I had applied for had indeed been activated. His response was to say “I don’t know mate,” peer at his screen, and then say, “Looks like you’ve got some kind of E-visa. Don’t worry about it mate.”
That was the easy part over with. We still had to make our way through customs of course, after collecting our luggage and balancing it on trolleys and wheeling everything over to them. “Are you travelling together?” asked the woman who greeted us there. “Sort of” I replied, an ambiguous answer that I hoped would be non-committed enough to avoid me having to do any jail time on behalf of my companion’s misdemeanours. It wasn’t that I thought Tom would be stupid enough to deliberately try to carry drugs into Australia, I just thought that perhaps he might be stupid enough to accidentally carry drugs into Australia. I was sure that there must be corners and pockets of his bags that held things long forgotten, but in any case it didn’t really matter because these customs officials were obviously used to dealing with old cruise ship customers and probably wouldn’t even know what a drug smuggler would look like if it stared them in the face. Which was kind of lucky, because it’d probably look like Tom.
As it turned out they were all very friendly and they didn’t do more than x-ray the bags and then take a cursory glance in the boxes to see if the bikes were clean. Seeing that my tyres had no dirt on them they said everything was fine. I felt a little put out by how little interest they had in examining my bike more thoroughly – I had, after all, spent two days scrubbing it clean and repainting it. They didn’t even bother to dig down and find the chain-rings that I’d disassembled, individually cleaned, polished to a shiny finish, and then reassembled in four different incorrect ways before finally getting it back together in the right order. What a waste of an afternoon!
“Do you have anything else? Camping gear? Anything like that?” the official asked.
“Yes, I have a tent.”
“Your tent pegs, have you cleaned them properly?”
“Yes! Yes! Would you like to see them?!”
“No, it’s okay.”
And with that we were through and allowed, at long, long, long, last to set foot onto Australian soil. The Australian soil was covered in tarmac of course, it being a car park that we set foot onto, but still, it was an Australian car park. We immediately got to work reassembling our bicycles right there, and no sooner had we begun to do so than we were greeted by a friendly man named Rich. Being a reader of my journal, Rich had written to me and kindly invited me to come and stay with him in his home, conveniently located just a couple of kilometres from the port in Fremantle. He’d proffered this invitation some time ago, before Tom had become a part of the bargain, but he’d been good enough to extend the offer to the both of us, even after reading some of my less-favourable Tom-based journal entries. I was surprised that Rich was not much older than me, for some reason I had been expecting someone older, but it was lucky that he had come to find us because my screwdriver was broken and I needed one to get a troublesome rear rack screw to behave, and Rich offered to nip home and get one. Whilst he was away doing this, Tom, who had already got his bike assembled in a remarkably fast time, sat and cut his fingernails right there in the car park. He was a strange fellow.
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Once Rich had returned and my bike had resumed its bike shape we were able to cycle together through the streets of downtown Fremantle to Rich’s home. This was an extraordinary experience. It didn’t look real. It looked like a movie set. There were footpaths everywhere, and they were clean, well-maintained, devoid of hawker stalls or badly parked cars. There were bike lanes, and vehicles moving at a sensible speed, and pedestrian crossings where the vehicles actually stopped, and no motorcycles going the wrong way, no motorcycles at all in fact, and white people were everywhere, walking around, speaking in English. I couldn’t work out why everything was so clean, so neat, so tidy, and then it finally dawned on me. I’d travelled so far east, that I’d arrived back in the west.
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At Rich’s neat little house on a suburban street he quickly found a map of Western Australia from which I was able to hastily plot the first part of my route. This was the first of a few things that I wanted to get sorted out before leaving Fremantle, but with work available in Gold Coast from the 10th of July I was still determined to cycle the 4,500 kilometres to get there in the 33 days available to me, and if I could get everything done immediately then it made sense for me start cycling that very afternoon. To this end Rich was an enormous help. The two things I most wanted to get in Fremantle were a phone and a spare tyre, and he kindly offered me both of these things. The phone that he fished out from a cupboard was an old Nokia which I immediately fell in love with just because it had snake on it. Then he took me down to the bottom of his garden and pulled an old Marathon Plus tyre out of his shed and gave it to me. It was an incredibly generous gift, and I was touched by his kindness, although to be fair he seemed kind of glad to be rid of it as I think it was doing some damage to a shelf.
The three of us next went back into town so that I could get some food supplies, an electrical adaptor, and a sim card for the phone. Unfortunately the queue in the phone shop was quite long, and I was by now determined to get cycling as soon as possible, so I said “I don’t have anyone to call anyway”, and I left without a sim card. At least I had the phone, so I could placate the people that had told me I must not try to cycle across the Nullarbor without a phone. I just wouldn’t mention to them about the lack of sim card. Tom, who had been mostly trailing along behind, now found an ATM and paid me the $300 he had somehow managed to spend on beer in the previous week, before revealing that he’d seen a lot of freaks in Fremantle, and he’d decided to stay.
Back at Rich’s house I gathered my things and prepared to say goodbye to Tom. It was a real shame that it had to end. As hapless sidekicks go, he was the best. The three of us were in Rich’s kitchen for this moment, and, in a final thoughtful act Tom said to me, “Chris, here’s one to remember me by,” before turning slightly in his chair and unleashing a loud belter of a fart that shook the glasses on the draining board. A considerably awkward moment of silence ensued, that was broken by Rich croaking “Please don’t do that when my wife is at home” and then it was a final hug and goodbye to Tom, the hapless sidekick to end all hapless sidekicks.
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Rich had offered to cycle with me to show me the way out through Fremantle and Perth and as we set off together he turned to me and nervously asked “I can trust Tom alone in my house, can’t I?”
“Yes, of course,” I lied, and on we went, just the two of us. On the way we stopped at the beach so that I could make an official start to my cross-country ride. It was such a typical Australian scene too, with surfers out riding the waves off the beach. I ran down into the water, got my feet wet, and then ran back to get on the bike to cycle to the east coast. There was no time to lose, I had a long way to go. “Aren’t you going to swim?” Rich cried. No I wasn’t going to swim. Who did he think he was kidding, this was Australia, there were sharks in there.
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We were able to cycle from Fremantle into the centre of the city of Perth almost entirely on bicycle paths, which seemed an incredible thing to be able to do. Everything continued to look crazy to me. It was so western and so developed, and it almost seemed silly to me how ordered and how sensible everything was. It reminded me of Canada, and was such a complete contrast from Asia that all I could do was look around and shake my head. This might have been an inefficient use of my energy, for the afternoon was drawing on and Rich wanted to see me through to the safety of a trail on the far side of Perth before leaving me. Consequently we rushed through the city, and I was only allowed a brief glance at the modern-artistic buildings in the centre. It looked like an interesting place, as had Fremantle, and I lamented the fact that I was once again rushing through, not giving these places the time they deserved.
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Even with our haste dusk still overtook us before we reached our goal, although fortunately Rich remained true to his word and he saw me through to the start of the off-road trail before bidding me goodbye in the dark. He was such a nice guy, and had offered me such kindness, inviting me to his home, giving me gifts, and showing me the way. And in return I had brought him a farting dreadlocked Belgian. So it goes. Rich appeared not to mind too much as he shook my hand and began his homeward journey to check if his house was still standing. And suddenly, for the first time in a while, I was all alone in a foreign land. I cycled on a few more kilometres in the dark before putting up my tent at the side of the trail. That task done I then sat on a rock and looked up at the stars and thought about how very strange it felt to finally be here in Australia, and a tingle of excitement ran up my spine as I considered the vast new continent that was about to unfold before me.
Distance completed: 40km
Distance to go: 4,460km
Days to go: 32
Average distance required: 139.4km/day
Today's ride: 44 km (27 miles)
Total: 40,925 km (25,414 miles)
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