Wandering an Incredible Life

Maybe I’ll surprise somebody, but Australia and I didn’t get along very well.

Believe me, I would have liked to write something nice about every place I’ve been to, but I can’t hide the truth: Australia, among the countries I’ve visited, has been one of my biggest disappointments, together with Thailand. I’m partly to blame, clearly I haven’t been able to find the “right” places, whatever this means. But then I ask myself: how easy is for a foreigner to search out the “right” places?

In South America it wasn’t that hard, while on the Australian east coast I had the same problem I had in Thailand. Here is almost impossible to escape the tourists’ and backpackers’ current and, trapped in this forced migration, one ends inevitably in everyone else’s destination, where the days goes by always the same way, one like the other: beach, alcohol, sex.

Does it seem appealing?

No, it’s not. Not for me.

For sure, spending the days on the beach is pleasant: let the majestic oceanic waves sweep you, bodyboarding, pretending to be a surfer….it’s fun. But the fun ends at night, when the beer comes, the wine, the damned “goon”.

The goon…just the existence of this evil concoction is a visible symptom of a serious problem with the Australian liver. Four litres of this excuse for a drink that somewhat resembles wine and costs 10 Australian dollars. The same amount of cheap beer cost three times as much, some decent wine costs eight times as much. Make your own considerations.

Every night, when the darkness comes, every backpacker takes out his own alcohol and the drinking games start, card games not necessarily funny that are good just to drink a lot of alcohol in a short time. Once you’re perfectly drunk you can eventually go out, keep drinking, overstep the limits, do stupid things that you wouldn’t do if you were sober, and eventually forget everything. With a little luck in the meantime you had sex too. In any case this here simply means looking for the drunkest girl in the club and take her out. It doesn’t matter if when she looks at you she doesn’t even see you, her eyes dull, sunk in the alcohol. It doesn’t matter if the day after she doesn’t recognize you, or pretends she doesn’t see you. At night she’s just one more erotic mammal, stupid and helpless, and in the end this is what she wants as well, this is the reason why she started drinking some hours before.

The high tide of alcohol comes every night on time, and floods everything, erases everything. When it goes down, at the dawn, it leaves on the streets its unfailing wrecks: ruined and unconscious youths, aggressive and stunned men, girls with dresses too short and heels too high that could have been pretty when sober, but now they are just rags, soiled with vomit, sleeping on a bench.

Not for me thanks.

Few days before arriving, a Japanese friend of mine told me: “Be stupid, get drunk. That’s the way you enjoy in Australia”. I had brushed off that comment with a smile at the time, but now I’m leaving this country without smiling much at all.