Wednesday, March 18 2009, 14:01

Parading our navels - the Mardi Gras parade.

Gosh. It's coming up for two weeks since Mardi Gras. Just like the brightly coloured gays themselves, all the brightly coloured Mardi Gras flags on Oxford Street and beyond have come down. This year's has to be the best yet. Normally, all the focus of Mardi Gras is on the parties, but this year, my eurhythmic involvement in the Freemasons parade float has lent the season an urgency and anticipation for the day itself. Come Saturday afternoon, the five of us marchers, Greg, Luke, Chris, Mikey, and myself, donned our teeny red aussieBum shorts at a mate's place in Surry Hills. Chris got his taken in at the last minute to be less flappy, but with the unexpected consequence of losing half the crotch - resulting in a shamefully (verging on pornographically) low-rise waistline.

By four, the summer-roasted streets of Darlinghurst were aleady full, and once we'd stopped to divest ourselves of t-shirts and to apply sunscreen, we were suddenly painfully obvious as parade marchers. I think it's the closest I've ever been to celebrity: we were stopped repeatedly by tourists who wanted a photo with us - lots of Japanese girls especially.

We had an hour or so to lounge in Hyde Park, get used to our sashes (!), and get snapped by various large lenses before we entered Elizabeth Street, restricted to the parade participants. Even here, the park railings were lined with (mostly Asian) tourists, taking photos of us doing nothing in particular. Once inside, we milled around, checking out the other floats, and catching up with other mates marching, like Bryan, Tim, and Matt W.

Anyway. Saturday was the day I chose to experiment with Twitter. Since I had no pockets in my shorts, my phone (from which I sent my tweets) and my camera had to share my underpants with their usual tenants... Here's what I tweeted on the night:

• 1.46pm - We've got the shorts on. Have to be inside out to hide the aussiebum logo tho. That's gay politics for you!
• 4.19pm - beyond weird. People are stopping us to have their photos taken with us! Nature's call is way stronger than my vanity though...
• 4.58pm - two thai guys just went by, hand in hand in amazing gold traditional dancer costumes. They looked incredible! Hope I can find a photo later.
• 5.59pm - entering the staging area. Leather demons on the left of us, angels to the right. Lots of wings, butts and, and straps in evidence.
• 6.30pm - been up and down the staging area. GayFL, gay rugby...
• 6.32pm - ...gotham girls on skates, bums hanging out of chaps, chaps hanging out of speedos, sex in the city dancers, japanese tourists snapping away, even taking photos of us using mobile urinals. Nice.
• 6.48pm - just had a quick dress rehearsal. We're shit hot :)
• 7.07pm - the fake tan industry has done well today. If only i had a $ for every orange guy with white armpits...
• 7.23pm - :( the toilet queue is as unspeakable as i knew it would be. I'm currently doubling as support post for a gotham girl on skates
• 7.44pm - so we've got the freemasons and vocalists on our float, which is like ARQ on wheels. Shitloads of lights, big sound.
• 7.45pm - our whole area's like a dance party actually - great way to warm up. Think the dykes on bikes have started :)
• 8.13pm - everything's moving! Real party atmos - love it! Phone and camera have to squeeze into undies v shortly...
• 8.14pm - love to see the State Transit bus driver's as grumpy as usual. No smiles there!
• 8.15pm - cough cough. Noone warned me about the fumes from all these idling trucks! Splutter
• 8.18pm - surf lifesavers woohoo! U can't go wrong with boys in speedos
• 8.19pm - and we're off! :)
• 8.27pm - i spoke too soon. Waiting a bit more, while some bad spanish music is pumping out at us.
• 8.27pm - here we go for real
• 9.25pm - what a BLAST! incredible. Knackered though. Might have to do it again next year ;)

I can't really put into words how much fun it was. Mildly terrifying meets red carpet movie star. Most of the time I was trying to keep at least partially focussed on putting my feet and arms in the right place (with occasional verbal hints from Chris on my right), but every time I turned my attention to looking at the crowds (all 300,000 odd of them), I was overwhelmed; you can't imagine what it's like to have all those people shouting and waving and taking pictures and SCREAMING! It's enough to make you forget your dance steps. Mikey jumped right in though - every time I turned to my left, he was making love to someone's camera ;) Ahead of us, on our float truck, Freemasons vocalist Katherine Ellis was MCing over the top of our dance track; TV cameras loomed overhead at times; yells of "Graham" or "Chris" occasionally came from the sides, but I only saw a handful of people I knew until we came out of Taylor Square and I heard Neil bellowing my name at the top of his (almost-breaking) voice, and there he was with John, Matt, and Mark. I dashed out of the line and probably terrified some small tourists by grabbing the railing and semi-vaulting over them to plant a smacker on John before bolting back to my place between Mikey and Chris.

In some ways it was over too quickly, in others it seemed to go on forever, but by 9.25 we were almost at the end of the route, passing people who'd chosen shitty places to stand, where all the parade marchers stopped their marching/whipping/cavorting. Around us: exhilarated faces and cheshire cat smiles. Soaked with sweat, exhausted, but grinning from ear to ear... it was amazing. Definitely up for a re-run next year.

A mix of photos taken by me, Chris, Neil, and Mark

Monday, March 23 2009, 12:22

Fiji

It feels a bit weird to be writing a blog while on holiday, but the reality is that we've got plenty of time to relax, so it's nice to put fingers to keyboard and write about our experience of Fiji so far - so I'm writing this from a sun lounger beside our pool, while John soaks up some UV next to me (obviously I'm in the cringing in the shade like some undead creature).

Most people don't get much thrill from just boarding a plane, but when you're flying staff travel, the anticipation and excitement of actually receiving a boarding pass and being told you really can fly today is enough to see you through the disappointment of discovering you're on a flight full of screaming children. DJ155 to Fiji on Saturday felt a bit like flying Britannia to the Costa del Sol with Daily Mail readers.

Fourish hours later, we picked up our Budget hire car and zipped off towards the Coral Coast along the Queen's Road, the major road that runs from one end of the island of Viti Levu to the other, and more scarred and pitted than an acne-ravaged youth who succumbed to the unbearable itches of chicken pox as a child.

Fiji from above is a bright emerald in coral blue seas, and from the road it's no less verdant. But you don't see from the air just how poverty-stricken it is. The villages we passed through have very few shops, no restaurants; it's more subsistence than anything I've ever seen. In contrast, the resorts are gorgeous oases of flourishing capitalism. Ours, the Wellesley, is a small boutique resort that's peaceful and relaxing, with spacious rooms along the edge of a shallow valley that runs down past the pool to gardens that border our private beach. Lush!

Unfortunately you have to negotiate a narrow, winding, steeply up- and downhill dirt track to get there. It's the sort of road you get a 4WD for, but we had to get our little Suzuki past it, driving very slowly in second and first gear all the way, with my hands squeezing the steering wheel until my knuckles were white. Additionally, we've discovered that the fuel gauge doesn't work. After two hours' driving from Nadi airport, it still cheerfully reports a full tank. Yesterday, after putting twenty litres in it, it veers fitfully from its former optimism to an alarming EMPTY and back again.

Anyway. Enough typing. The pool beckons.

Wednesday, March 25 2009, 22:40

And there was much rejoicing...

Have I ever told you that John loves bats? Every time one passes overhead in Sydney, he points skywards with childlike delight and exclaims, "ooh! a bat!" I'm willing to concede that great fruitbats overhead is one of Sydney's more exotic phenomena, but it's also pretty commonplace. Every single night they make their daily pilgrimage from the Botanic Gardens to Centennial Park, but John points them out with unvarying enthusiasm as if it were the first time. Fiji only has two native mammals, and guess what? They're both bats. So no change there then...

Anyway, the big news of the week is that John and I are now permanent residents of Australia, which is for me an event of surpassing excitement and satisfaction - the end of five years of planning, saving, and crossing assorted digits. Luckily we don't have to book a holiday to celebrate since we're here already :)

But I've skipped gaily ahead, as usual. I forgot to mention that practically the first thing we did when we got here was try the local narcotic - kava. This is a root vegetable that the locals dry and pound up into a powder, then stir into water and chug down in small bowlfuls. We didn't have much. Enough to make our tongues numb and have a good night's sleep - well, I had a good night's sleep, John was worried about getting typoid from drinking unboiled water...

Many of you will already know that although John loves the earth and nature, he doesn't like nature touching him. He's pushed the envelope on this trip - draped with iguanas at a local wildlife centre, and swimming with leopard and white tip reef sharks and a turtle and various other fishies in the sea near our resort, startling innocent crabs on the beach at night with the camera flash, and being startled frequently in return by the ubiquitous army of frogs and cane toads that infest every moist patch of grass on this island.

Today we drove down to Suva, Fiji's capital, described by our resort guidebook as "a thriving metropolis of 168,000 people." GOSH! Strangers to the big city that we are, we got a bit turned around on our way in, but found our way to the Aussie High Commission, were invited by the security to jump the queue (these British passports get us in ANYWHERE), and were out of there with new visas inside fifteen minutes. Hurray!

John persuaded me that it might be fun to check out Fiji Museum in the Botanic Gardens, but it was on the way there that we discovered that John's paranoia was well-founded, and that I am a poor, clueless, naive poppet who was begging to be robbed. Luckily John dragged me away from the nice man who'd befriended me and was offering me a wooden Fijian mask (the local equivalent of "come and see my puppies"?), while his pal was no doubt readying himself to divest my bag of its valuables. From there on, we regarded everyone with a cynical and steely gaze and strode through town like we were on a Very Important Mission. No stopping.

Let me say it outright: Suva is a shithole. I'm sure it's got redeeming qualities, but although we found a supermarket that put our local to shame (not hard really), we didn't find any others. We did find something like peanut-flavoured wotsits, but I'm still not sure if I like them, so I don't think they count.

It was nice to stop on the way home at Pacific Harbour, the tiny town with its gaggle of tacky souvenir shops run by ladies with zazzy hot potato afros, all offering us "good deal, not tourist price". Yeah, whatever. We left empty-handed, but I was happy to have shopped without having to have my wallet stuffed down my pants (not pretty on a 36 degree day)!

Wednesday, April 1 2009, 22:23

Starlit stallings, sunkissed splashings, and a stony-faced welcome home

We've been back in Australia for most of a week now, but I didn't finish telling you about our holiday. I think I may have mentioned earlier that the roads in Fiji are sub-optimal. We had a few startling moments in the car before the end of the trip; the best moment was when we were leaving our resort to drive over to the opulent resort half an hour away, the Warwick. Actually, we hadn't left yet - our poor Budget car didn't even get to the top of the first, loosely stoned hill; we had to roll back down in the total darkness and try it again; once we got off the winding dirt track, I took it quite slowly but still almost had the front of our car sheared off by some mad truck driver flying around a corner in our lane... Dinner tasted even better for having made it alive to the hotel, and without having mown down any of the locals who were strolling along the roadside in the total darkness :) We had some added excitement on the return journey too, missing the turn-off for our resort and nearly driving into a ditch in the dark. Lucky, lucky!

Another of our evenings out was in the resort next door, Crusoes. Dinner was lovely, but the hotel had a Hi-de-hi feel to it, and we fled just as the limbo competition was about to start. In our own resort, we'd discovered an amusing advantage to be exploited at the bar: although the staff knew to serve red wine in bigger glasses than white wine, whoever had put them through their training had neglected to mention that you don't put the same amount of plonk in! So our glasses of red wine held about a third of a bottle :)

We spent our last few days just relaxing in the resort, flat out on the loungers, splashing limply in the pool, snorkelling in the lagoon in the afternoon, or sea kayaking at sunset... and of course drinking huge glasses of red wine by night :) But the exciting part of the holiday was still to come - entering Australia on our new residency visas! I had a secret hope that the customs official would greet us with a warm smile and a, "Welcome to Australia!" when he saw our fresh new visas... but it was not the case ;) But to make up for that, we were through customs and quarantine (with my several hundred grams of kava) in record time! Hurray!