Sun, Sea, Sex and Sangria: A Weekend in Benidorm

Sticky Vicky's reputation precedes her. The things she can do with a ping pong ball will make your eyes water. I won’t go into too much detail on a family website like TM, only to say her routine is not restricted solely to ping pong. According to this, unfeasibly larger items like glass bottles, giant candles, light bulbs and, more disturbingly, razor blades. For her festive show she produces a Christmas tree. I wonder what she does for an encore?

Now approaching 70 (yes, 70), Sticky Vicky has been performing her act to shell-shocked tourists for over 30 years. She continues her seven-day-a-week grind to his day. She has now enlisted the help of her daughter who opens the show with an acrobatic magic act before her mother takes to the stage and takes her clothes off. And this is only one of the “attractions” on offer amongst all the seedy nightclubs touting “lesbian shows”, the free-entry all night “disco-pubs” and reams of tribute acts (Peatloaf, Michael Bauble, and so on), all centered along the notoriously chaotic confines of the so-called Yellow Brick Road. But we are a long way from Kansas. Welcome, then, to Benidorm.

To be fair, the Spanish coastal town has always been sex obsessed. In May this year Benidorm celebrated the 60th anniversary of then-mayor Pedros Zaragoza’s decision to legalise the wearing of bikinis. The decision was reached after a British woman was fined 40,000 pesetas for wearing one at a beach bar. In fear of losing the town’s appeal as a frisky tourist cash cow - especially at a time when the local fishing industry was fractured - Franco’s fascists turned a blind eye. Which is more than can be said about the tourists. Benidorm welcomes five million of them every year, all in search of sun, sea, sex and sangria.

But now in 2012, is Benidorm finally suffering the hangover from 60 years of hedonistic overkill? The east coast of Spain has suffered dramatically from the fallout of the noughties Spanish property boom and the subsequent Eurozone crisis. This is evident from the number of derelict bars you can see, and the building projects abandoned mid-construction. Now there is a genuine fear the cranes might collapse, like they did a couple of days ago near Sotogrande on the Costa del Sol. According to an engineer questioned on the Olive Press website: “Because they are so close to the sea, the salt in the air is eroding the cranes much quicker than would be the case with structures further inland.” A disconcerting thought.

And do I denote a touch of chippiness from the harassed, overworked bar staff? One cafe refused to put onions in their cheeseburgers because it “stinks the place out”. It’s hard to argue against something like that. Another sounded her frustration at the thought of replacing specific elements of the “large breakfast” option. Her reaction seemed to suggest I had asked her to solve the Spanish debt crisis rather than put a spoonful of baked beans on a plate. I sensed she was clearly someone in desperate need of an escape.

The tourists are older here, too. Following the packaged tours of the 1980s and the subsequent violence that ensued, younger revelers decided to forgo the hen and stag parties of Benidorm for the burgeoning bedlam found in Ibiza and Malaga. There's a running joke in the ITV comedy series Benidorm about this, where the elderly cantankerous Madge barges her way through the busy streets on a mobility scooter without actually needing to use one. Wheelchairs and scooters rent from 20 euros a week. The flyers are everywhere.

But coming to visit for a long weekend outside the July-August peak season, everything seems business-as-usual. The popular TV show has no doubt helped to further promote the town in the minds of overseas travelers, and I found the beaches friendly and well maintained. Surprisingly, there are actually some very pretty aspects to Benidorm. I loved the views from the church of San Jaime and the charismatic side-streets and market stalls of the Old Town, like a scene straight out of Granada, and the epic, seemingly endless mountainous surrounds to the west which so define the landscape in this part of Spain. The joy in overlooking a vast ocean vista with caffe con leche and tapas on a glorious day is surely one of the world’s greatest pleasures. No wonder the Spanish don’t get any work done.

The old town is also the best place to take in the full scale of Benidorm’s 6km radius of revelry. Since the 1960s, the playa has become a breeding ground for hotels to rise indiscriminately into the sky - the tallest at 186 metres. But now there is just no escaping the colonising British, as they liberate their minds - and most of their stomach contents - from the cold, workaday routine of life back home. As a result, Benidorm has taken on the puzzling moniker of a “home away from home” for the Brit – the kind of place they can relax without having to concern themselves too much with any of that foreign stuff.

I can’t say I understand a lot of this; particularly those creature comforts that supposedly define "Britishness". Here, "Britishness" is aggressively advertised on every street corner: Guinness and Tetley’s, all day breakfast, the Daily Mail, Sunday carvery, Sky Sports, "Tracey and Tony from Wales welcomes you" and English spoken everywhere. The conditioning is so complete after two nights that a couple conversing in Spanish at the bar sounds particularly alien. “Maybe they’re tourists?” a friend asks. Hold on, I thought we were the tourists?

This manufactured paradise comes at a cost: the ugly flipside of our drinking culture is not a British trait which serves us well, particularly abroad. Benidorm takes every rebellious, binge-drinking, kebab-chewing Saturday night you’ve seen in Leeds, or Bristol, or Blackpool or just about anywhere and spits it right back at you on a regular basis. No wonder the locals have scarpered to the hills.

Now there is talk of a 5am curfew to give the authorities time to “clean up the empty bottles, the rubbish, the vomit”, according to an article in the free Round Town paper. But 5am seems pointless, like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Another tactic may be fining promoters up to 60,000 euros for organising bar crawls. “It’s an unforgivable image,” says Paco Carrasco, owner of a chain of nine pubs. “Nobody wants to be heading into work, or down for an early morning walk on the beach to be confronted by… a group of loud drunks.” I would agree, but then is there anything more British than complaining?

Beached As

I think I should explain this photo. A full body spandex wet suit – costing all of seven dollars – may cause you to resemble a gimp on spring break, but it can also stop you from becoming fish food; struck immobile by any number of stray stingers proven to inflict prompt, swift, grievous bodily death. This is something our lifeguard Zack “can’t stress enough”. Two weeks ago a man was hospitalised within an hour after meeting the acquaintance of a bluebottle jellyfish. A Lycra wetsuit is therefore the easiest seven dollars Zack will make all day.

During our pre-snorkelling debrief (and I can’t stress the word brief enough, particularly for someone whose closest memory to deep sea diving was picking up a brick from the bottom of a swimming pool about 15 years ago), there is a lot of information that Zack “can’t stress enough” – an overwhelming list of catastrophes to put the willies up any Great Barrier novice. It may be one of Earth’s most beautiful sites (the world’s largest coral reef system stretching to some 1600 miles) but the challenge makes us fearful like gladiators at the Coliseum.

Coral may be beautiful to look at, but don’t for heaven's sake stand on it, even if you panic. Hard coral can cut, leading to possible infection upon which your leg will be summarily donated to marine science for research purposes. Because of May’s Super Moon, the tide is so low the coral lingers close to the surface. This makes the likelihood of entrapment very high. “Snorkel around the coral,” Zack says. “I can’t stress that enough.”

Leave only with photographs, we are told, and don’t remove any of the coral. Swim within the buoys. Don’t wave to friends while in the water. Don’t graffiti your initials on the shell of a green turtle. Don’t chase a giant trevally into the baying path of a nearby reef shark. He may not have said those last two, but fear had taken hold by this point and creating its own imagery. The Aussie adage of “no worries” did not seem to apply here on the reef. There seemed to be plenty to worry about.

I got the hang of breathing without asphyxiating quite quickly, although much of the experience was bewildering. Humans may make passing impressions of marine life but we paint quite a pathetic picture, really, and betray our aquatic ancestry. You can’t help but get the impression any passing turtles are having a tremendous time observing the flailing spectacle from the ocean’s murky depths. I bet they gather on the coral in groups and piss themselves laughing.

The tide pushes me over a particularly dense section of coral and for a moment I’m awestruck – a mass of gently pulsating, bleak tentacles seemingly drawing me in, closer. Quite frightening, really. As for observing the sea life, the glass bottom boat was more successful. “How did you not see a turtle?” says one of the crew. I think I was trying not to swallow my own body weight in salt water. Sorry, sir.

The Low Isles – where we are – are a coral cay on the outer reef encompassing hard coral, which means we won’t see the more colourful stuff they show on the adverts. That’s fine with me. Low Island is a paradise which will take a child two minutes to run around (I overheard this fact). It is an hour boat ride from the Australian mainland. It has a lighthouse and a cabin for the island’s only inhabitant – a caretaker – which is obviously a job which comes with its own perks. Day trippers anchor yachts near the giant catamarans which shuttle tourists into the reef on a daily basis. Queensland University has a base here for its marine biologists and it’s clear to see why. The reef contains 1500 species of fish, 5000 species of mollusc, 2195 known plant species. Nine different species of seahorses live here. Nine.

They can also keep a close eye on how quickly the whole thing is disappearing. The reef is pretty high on the Things to See Before You Die list, or rather, Things to See Before They Die, followed closely by watching the Rolling Stones. Since the 1920s, rising sea levels have seen Low Isle shrink by 20 per cent. Then there is coral bleaching caused by an imbalance of algae in the warmer waters. At this rate, the Great Barrier Reef could be extinct within a hundred years.

Evelyn, a superior sea faring intellect, takes our bushy tailed troupe around the exposed coral. She’s a master of the Australian understatement. She spots a tourist trampling over the bay in the faraway distance and spares no sympathy; he’s exposing himself to injury from conefish, stingrays, jellies and other nasties. “People don’t listen to me,” she sighs. She tells an American tourist not to touch a sea cucumber (pictured opposite) – a spectacularly inert object from the starfish family which can eject a harmful toxin from its phallic like body – to which the man responds by running his fingers across it. Her frustration is palpable.

Someone spots a sea snail – an unassuming shelled creature about the size of an old 50 pence coin. Evelyn explains the creature can render a human quite redundant in less than 60 minutes. My thoughts go back to the lone traveller in the distance and I wonder what’s worse: the fear of instant paralysis or an almost certain bollocking from Evelyn. Given her current state of mind, I’d take my chances with the conefish.

You shouldn’t joke, really. This is, after all, the part of the country where Steve Irwin was killed, struck in the heart by a stingray. Appropriately, we were told this fact after our snorkelling session. Evelyn said, with more than a hint of pride, that tropical North Queensland “has them all” in terms of flying, crawling, biting, stinging, killing things. This is where, only last week in the Daintree rainforest, a golden orb spider was filmed eating a tree snake. I should probably repeat that. A spider eating a snake. You don’t need to try and picture the ghastly scene, because you can see it here on YouTube.

A park ranger in the Daintree casually stands by the biggest spider I have ever seen, relishing in the story of how the males are devoured by the females after mating. Woody Allen would have now made a joke here about how much this reminds him of an ex-girlfriend. A ranger at the Daintree says she loves her job in the forest and how it’s better than an office job, although you do have to put up with snakes. Not too dissimilar from journalism, then. Ba-doom.

From the Skyrail you can see the vast expanse of rainforest which meets the sea and the sky beyond, and the views are breathtaking. Stomach churning, too, if you’re no keen lover of heights. The Skyrail reaches 1788ft at its highest point. Packed into a cart no larger than a fridge-freezer, the cable car actually sways in the wind. Sitting on the floor of the car won’t help you either, because you can still see the tops of the trees through the flooring; designed, seemingly, to give all the vomit a chance to escape.

But the views are insane, and just about the only place in Australia where you can see anything like it, including the township of Cairns and the reef islands beyond. We had already fallen in love with the place by this point – the cheese selection in the Port Douglas Coles had put paid to that.

Port Douglas is sea village with an easy, Byron Bay attitude with some of the best restaurants I have ever visited and absolutely no pretensions, because the environment speaks for itself. Bill and Hillary Clinton spent their wedding anniversary here, and Bill must just love the place. He was eating in the sublime Salsa restaurant on September 11, 2001, and just had time to sign a dinner plate before a plane hit the north tower and he was promptly evacuated from of Australia.

But the ranger was right. I would choose the snakes, too.

Kind of Blue

A radio microphone can be deadly in the wrong hands. For our ten hour round trip to the bewildering Blue Mountains – New South Wales’ sprawling eucalyptus rainforest 260km (161 miles) west of Sydney – a rabble of English, Scottish, Swedish and Japanese tourists unknowingly form a captive audience for the idle chatter of Nick the bus driver. As a burly, knowledgeable scout leader, he would be played by Brendan Gleeson in the film version, doing his best attempt at resigned, quiet contempt. Nick’s gift for rhythmic, hypnotic narration has been perfected over the years to resemble that of a soothing day nurse: it’s the sort of measured tone you need when you’re administering some form of heavy sedation.

After an hour of staggering through Sydney’s ceaseless traffic and suburbs (over 600, apparently), it quickly becomes apparent that Nick’s patience for the job exhausted many years ago. Although he’s impossible to ignore, threads of monologue seep through, like when you're skipping through the stations on an AM radio. From Nick’s take on Sydney’s infrastructure crisis to predicting the weather forecast, the next thing I remember hearing was about the research into his family tree. “Fire destroyed the records… so many facilities these days… traced back to the 1500s…”, and then later, “You may be an adult but you’ll always be my child.” I suddenly started to envy the Malaysian lady in front of us for not being able to understand English. “My son’s six foot one… seriously, 30 years of age and he won’t leave home…” And so it went on, and on, and on.

The weather is a concern, of course. If cloud sets in over the mountains then visibility from the designated viewing platforms will be seriously limited, particularly the one over the fabled Three Sisters - a famous procession of three tall rock formations. But then the Blue Mountains has always been regarded as a world onto itself: encompassing over 4400 square miles of dense, fiercely unremitting terrain, the valley resembles a boundless sea of green from the higher reaches with gorges some 760 metres deep, and is practically impenetrable from the inside. This would have been the view for those first European settlers who within 25 years of claiming Sydney had expanded so far north and south (to the natural boundaries of the Hawkesbury River and the Royal National Park in the south) that the only route left for development was west, directly into the path of the mountains.

Kent born farmer and wine maker Gregory Blaxland is credited as the first European settler to cross this dividing range, leaving in 1813 with fellow explorers William Lawson and William Wentworth, and “attended by four servants, with five dogs, and four horses laden with provisions, ammunition, and other necessaries,” according to his diaries. The expedition only succeeded after the team listened to the advice of the local Aborigines who directed them to higher ground and to avoid the dry river beds, which had led so many previous expeditions into complete disaster. So formidable was the fear of the forest that prior to Blaxland’s successful crossing, the Blue Mountains were regarded as the ultimate deterrent for any escaping convicts. At ground level it’s easy to see why: not only is it vast, sheer and dense, but it all pretty much looks the same.

People still get lost in it today. In 2009, a nineteen year old backpacker from London left a Katoomba hostel on a 10 mile hike and wasn’t seen for 12 days. While living off seeds and berries, a team of 400 people fought through thick fog and bitter temperatures in the height of a New South Wales winter to try and locate the boy. His father was clearly less than sympathetic when he was finally reunited with the boy: “I can’t say I’d kill him because it would just spoil the point of him being back,” he said to the press. “But I'm going to kick his arse.” According to Nick, the teenager, called Jamie, was originally part of one of his tours. Once we had reached Katoomba ourselves and had been released from another one of his inane ramblings, I can easily understand why Jamie chose this point of the trip to quickly make a dash for it.

Katoomba is an idyllic township which now shuttles tourists deep into the bowls of the valley thanks to a couple of ingenious methods. One is a hair-raising cable car some 200 metres high, which is obviously quite unnerving, but positively breezy compared to the alternative: the World’s Steepest Railway. This train drops you down 415 metres of track from a nearly sheer cliff face at an angle of 52 degrees at the sort of white knuckle pace that could only ever have been designed for freight, rather than, you know, humans, with families and respiratory systems.

Upon the discovery of coal in the range, Katoomba became a key mining town from 1878 until the late 1930s, despite the mines being located in possibly the most awkward place on the planet. But human endeavour is never stronger than when commerce is concerned, so the staggeringly powerful train dates from roughly the same period, used to transport coal from the valley depths where some 100km of tunnels wind their way through the rock, all picked and blown and smashed by hand. We travel backwards up the thing in a practically vertical state, dragging us to the top of the mountain like some strange train wreck in reverse. It’s completely terrifying.

But then you’re catapulted back into a gift shop so quickly that it’s as if the violation was just some scary nightmare. Too quickly, actually, as we soon found ourselves away from Nick’s grasp and with time on our hands. This is where we tend to resort to a brand new game where we think of alternate messages to write inside the wrappers of Mars Dove Chocolate Promises, which usually contains trite and nonsensical whimsy like, “Money talks, chocolate sings” and, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”. I personally can’t wait for the day when a disgruntled Mars employee rolls into work and replaces all the messages with things like “Have a shit day” and “Go fuck yourself”.

While dozing on the way back into Sydney, Nick effortlessly relies on his successful capability of disengaging his mouth from his brain to keep his passengers awake. I distinctly remember regaining consciousness at one point and hearing, “…the standard procedure is to take on as much ballast as you can,” before trying to think of more messages to write inside chocolate wrappers. “You’re going to get fat” seems somewhat appropriate.

The Rock Show

Our Virgin Blue Embraer E-Jet 170 plays a risky game of chicken with a neighbouring aircraft as we start our descent into Sydney, like Saturday shoppers racing for the same park. Clive James said that “nothing should be allowed to detract from a proper celebration of that first, and continuing, impression of Sydney and its harbour,” but the heady mix of both goading and plummeting was distracting. James continues: “It remains one of the Earth's truly beautiful places,” and “the place is too multifarious to be captured by the pen.” But then he was born there. We rubberneck to see vanishing views of “Venice without the architecture, and more of the sea,” of bridges and beaches and schooners and a pointy opera house, but we’re efficiently parked before the scene can truly settle. This is our last glimpse of the blues and greens of Earth before our trek “through the guts” and into a contrary, arid Martian otherness.

Virgin Blue don’t fly direct to Ayer’s Rock Airport from Brisbane, so your flight south to Sydney takes one hour and ten minutes, followed by a journey northwest of three hours and thirty minutes: a combined travel time of four hours forty minutes. Leaving from London Heathrow, you could travel to Cairo in roughly the same time. Looking down over endless tracts of land - seemingly uninhabited, unperturbed and increasingly unremarkable - the sheer scope of the ground below takes on a breathless uniformity. Although we were only stopping halfway across the country, this is a scene that goes on. And on. And on.

That is until The Rock comes into focus like a giant mutant hump on the landscape. The initial reaction is almost comedic: it is both instantly identifiable yet incredibly alien. The only thing to do is gawp at it, which has been the standard response of tourists for well over 50 years, since Northern Territory aviator Edward ‘EJ’ Connellan learnt quicker than most about the financial implications of dropping people into the country’s red centre. When Connellan started chartered flights to Uluru, his business advisors were adamant, asking “Who would ever want to visit that?”

From 1959, Connellan ran Qantas ‘Butterflies’ and Douglas DC3s from an airstrip directly beside the rock. Archive images show aircraft narrowly avoiding the monolith as they come into land. In 1962, tourist numbers reached 5,500. Now, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park gets around 400,000 visitors a year. Wisely, a new airport was opened in 1984 outside the recognised National Park boundaries, some nine miles north of the Uluru site. This is the beige brick, steel pole and corrugated iron structure that you still arrive at today, seemingly modelled on a British leisure centre from the 1980s. It is still called Ayer’s Rock Airport, which is confusing, considering 26 years have passed since the land was handed back to the native Anangu traditional owners. Staring at a departure screen with the technical capabilities of Ceefax, Sydney suddenly feels thousands of miles away - both literally and metaphysically. Elemental things like time and space seem to serve very little purpose here.

In a trait so adorably Australian, the inherent dangers of the outback are everywhere. “Be prepared for dingoes and wild dogs,” says one sign, slightly gloating, I feel, and featuring this fabulously contrary advice: “If threatened by a dingo – STAY CALM!” Step outside, and within seconds a swarm of flies assemble into a makeshift beard to buzz around your face. Tourists, blurry eyed from a long haul flight and starting their outback journeys in the desert, may be averse to assume that they had not only landed on Mars, but also travelled back in time and been turned into defenceless prey for marauding beasts and insects. And that’s before they've even seen the resort.

The Ayer’s Rock Resort, located in the manufactured community of Yulara, is a purpose built holiday park run by the cast of Adventureland – mostly gap year, rosy cheeked sorts with time to burn and money to save. The resort currently employs 800 people. This number jumps to 2000 in peak season: chefs, janitors, Japanese interpreters, masseuses, bus drivers, newsagents, doctors, police, all employed to assist you in your gawping.

I am fascinated as to why anyone would purposely choose to stay here in complete isolation for longer than is truly necessary. The nearest town, Alice Springs, is 266 miles away. Our waiter Andy has been here for a year and possesses the resigned weariness of a man unsure as to whether he should spend his time polishing the cutlery or stabbing the implements into his knees. “I quit today,” he tells us. “I’m over it.” I’m told by one of the tour guides the average length of stay for employees is three months. We’re here for three days, and I would think that should be more than adequate.

Bill Bryson has a theory about this, that the rock possesses such a captivating, arresting, hypnotic quality that once you’ve seen it, it is hard to pull yourself away. “You realise that you could spend quite a lot of time – possibly a worryingly large amount of time; possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time – just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it.” We talked to people on their third, fourth or fifth visits. Our tour guide, the indomitable Cheryl, is one week into a year long stint, travelling out there at 5am most mornings to catch the sun rise over the rock. We follow her out there one morning, and I can see why she does it.

Once you’ve paid the $25 entry fee to gain access to the park, it takes a good 20 minutes of driving until you can successfully bask under Uluru’s looming shadow. Now, considering that such a vast amount that has already been said on the subject, I want to make it clear from the outset that attempting to quantify and express those initial emotions is probably rather perfunctory, because even if you haven’t seen it, you can probably imagine just how amazed you will be when you finally do. Like Bryson says, “It’s not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock.”

So here’s what you already know: it’s big. It’s huge, actually. It even looks big from the resort’s designated look out points, and they’re 20km away. To take a photo on ground level with the rock in full frame would almost certainly involve having to stand around 5km away from it. It is 1150 feet high, five and a half miles round. The base walk takes three and a half hours. Yes. It’s big.

It is also the same colour as the ground surrounding it due to the iron in the sandstone, which creates a rusted cover of redness. A very gradual erosive process is marking Uluru with dripping, clay-like contours and indentations on the surface, as if the whole thing is melting in slow motion. The rock has hills, and large crevices, caves, imprints and bizarre cavities. It has a front and a back. Every view from the ground level is unique; it never appears the same way twice. To dismiss it simply as a rock does Uluru a great disservice: it has personality.

This might explain Aboriginal dreamtime stories attributing the rock’s creation to giant snakes and lizards. The spiritual significance that the Anangu place on the rock is still very prominent: it is prohibited to photograph certain parts deemed sacred for ceremonial purposes, and despite signs imploring people not to, hoards of people still attempt to climb it.

Of course, it would be quite simple to stop people from doing this. You would think that the sheer exertion involved would be discouraging enough. Small sections of guide rope and a slight dirt track have been planted into the rock for assistance, but it’s a small gesture. There have so far been 38 deaths from people attempting to climb it – eight from falling off. But Cheryl thinks the figure could be in the hundreds. “People get back to their hotel rooms and don’t come out,” she says.

Quite recently, a family had to be rescued from the top with second degree burns when the searing heat caused their Crocs footwear to melt. Considering the temperate out here can reach 45°C (with the lowest evening temperatures recorded at -4°C), it is little wonder that Uluru is often closed to climbers. The Anangu have a word for people who climb the rock: minga. Ants.

Cheryl offers a more geological explanation as to how a giant rock might end up in the middle of such a vast, expansive and relatively flat nothingness. Uluru is in fact only the tip of a much larger underground sandstone mountain which descends 6km (around 3.7 miles) into the earth. To even comprehend this, you need to imagine a time of around 500 million years ago when huge fragmented clumps of sandstone were being rapidly transported from newly formed mountain ranges via fierce flowing rivers and dumped into oceans which have long since vanished. The ground around Uluru is still diminishing, unearthing more of the slowly eroding rock in the process. “Come back in 20 million years time and Uluru will be about two kilometres tall.” And Andy will probably still be working there.

In contrast, consider Kata Tjuta, which is actually 200 metres taller than Uluru and much bigger with a circumference of 24km (nearly 15 miles). Visually, it is much more staggering than it's iconic neighbour. Made up of 36 ‘domes’, it is located 16 miles from Uluru, and famously referred to as The Olgas. This is down to a somewhat elaborate display of brownnosing from intrepid Bristol born explorer Ernest Giles, who saw the protruding, phallic-like anomalies from a look out point at King’s Canyon and, for some reason, immediately thought of naming the tallest peak Mount Mueller, after the German born explorer Baron von Mueller, who happened to be funding his expedition. Mueller, instead, named it after Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia as a way of returning the complement for being made a baron. It is highly likely that Giles spotted Uluru at the same time, although all credit seems to go William Gosse, who gave it the name Ayer’s Rock in 1873 in recognition of South Australian Premier Sir Henry Ayers.

At Kata Tjuta, Cheryl leads us directly into a giant gorge amongst the domes, where vegetation thrives at even the highest, driest points. Here, we learn of the ancient techniques used to create paints for early Aboriginal rock art, and a brief lesson in botany: “Do you know why they call this a Dead Dog Tree?” she asks. “No bark.”

Of course, out in the desert of the Northern Territory, you’re probably more likely to come across a group of feral camels than you are wild dogs. While you ponder which one you would prefer to meet, rest assured that the federal government are doing something about this. In the sort of headline that quickly makes you realise how very far away you are from Leeds, Thursday’s NT News reveals an Egyptian businessman will construct an abattoir in South Australia with plans to process around 100,000 feral camels a year. Shipping camel meat to the Middle East will generate 250 jobs and $60 million a year.

I’ve now sat on the back of a camel twice. If the camel I encountered in Marrakech was a Ford Fiesta, then ‘Murphy’ in the Northern Territory is a Holden Commodore: a giant, snorting, 6 cylinder beast. Camels are so endearingly awkward in appearance that I’m not sure I like the thought of seeing one of them on my dinner plate. They’ve proliferated in the outback since their arrival from the Canary Islands in 1840, where they were used to help carry cargo during the building of cross-country telegraph lines. Their Afghan pilots didn’t have the heart to kill them when the work was done, so instead they let them go. Not being native to Australia and free of any serious diseases, the camel population is now increasing by some 90,000 a year. We even spot a group of them coming back from Kata Tjuta, and the desert’s a big place. The ominous array of footprints strewn across the red sand proves just how you're never quite alone when staying in the middle of nowhere.

Our final night is spent at a boisterous alfresco buffet as the sun sets over Uluru – its bright red hue altering in the twilight to a shadowy brown, before being silhouetted by the silver moon. Scott is our astronomer for the evening, pinpointing a blanket of crystal clear constellations from the Southern Cross to the rings on Saturn. I doubt there are many better places on the planet for someone like Scott to live, given the desert’s nightly palette. He has a degree in astrophysics, a masters in psychology and is about to start studying for a doctorate. His colleague Brett, however, has merely downloaded the Stargazer app for his iPhone. “You’ve wasted your time, mate,” Brett says. Scott chooses to ignore this.

Scott’s decision to up sticks and hit the desert links in with Bryson’s theory of obsession, and we find evidence of this everywhere. I talk with Heather Duff, the ‘artist in residence’ at the Ayer’s Rock Resort who travels up from Melbourne for three months every year to sell her bright Uluru landscapes. For her, the rock is a constant source of inspiration. I can only agree: the hardest part about leaving Uluru is actually forcing yourself to stop looking at it.

Honestly. Just go there.

Green Streets

South Australian Liberal senator Mary Jo Fisher lost her flippin’ marbles in parliament this week with a quite incredible rebuff to Gillard’s carbon tax proposals, drawing barmy metaphorical collusions between coalition policy and the Timewarp from Rocky Horror Picture Show. But this was a tame protest when you discover the sort of phone calls Independent MP Tony Windsor has been getting this week, one of which concluded with the words, “I hope you die, you bastard”.

Windsor copped some flack for taking the threat straight to Channel 7 instead of the police - which is more like the sort of thing a normal person might do - and then broadcast the message on the ABC, comparing the vitriolic response to the anger which sparked the shooting of American congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That might sound a bit rich, but then Opposition MP Sophie Mirabella trounced Windsor by comparing Her Maj’ Ms Gillard to Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi. It was more in reference to his deluded ‘my people will die for me’ comments, rather than all the killing and stuff.

Even The Terminator stepped in at that point. “I think that's a pretty colourful way of describing the Prime Minister, and it’s not language I would normally use myself,” said Tony "shit happens" Abbott. Now we have a media war with lefty organisations pointing fingers at talk radio shock jocks for fuelling the fire. Like 2GB’s Alan Jones, who had an on-air argument with Her Maj (pictured left with Greens leader Bob Brown) after she arrived ten minutes late for his breakfast show interview. “Surely courtesy has to be part of the way in which the public are treated?” he tuts, probably tapping at his wrist watch. “Alan, I believe I am a very courteous person. I’m also very busy…” The tiff continues, descending - quite inevitably - into name calling. Children, please.

Extending political similes further, this is far from Her Maj’s Poll Tax moment. Australia is well placed to cement its standing as a world leader in combating climate change, what with Green Party influence amongst a sympathetic coalition that recognises the potential of leading by example. But no one said changing the world would be easy.

There’s an old adage that tells of how the rich and powerful lose their connection to ‘the people’ when they forget the price of milk. Aussie diary farmers do not share such dilemmas: just the sight of the price tag alone is enough to cry over, spilt or otherwise. A price war has erupted in which the Big Two (that’s Coles and Woolworths, who share a supermarket monopoly with an equally repugnant and exploitative business sense) are both selling own-brand milk for $1 a litre. That is quite clearly outrageous, and completely cripples the farmers they claim to support.

Multi-million dollar conglomerates can afford to do this kind of swindling financially, but not morally. We have fresh organic produce delivered to our door and we try to get all of our meat from the local butcher, and I’m sure many others do the same. Australia doesn’t need to import produce in the same way Britain does, and the bush farming community is highly valued. Insults like this one will be hard for shoppers to wear. As Julian Lee writes in the Sydney Morning Herald: “We would like to see some truth in advertising, so the next time I see a supermarket ad with a farmer in it, I expect him to be in a headlock rather than an embrace.”

The campaign for daylight savings time in Queensland has stepped up a gear, judging by this graffiti I discovered on the back of a bus seat. Granted, the 345 to Aspley isn’t particularly a front runner when considering potential hotbeds of political unrest. State Premier Anna Bligh should have no reason to be losing sleep just yet. Brisbane residents want daylight savings so that they can enjoy the sunshine for an hour longer, which in turn puts north Queensland farmers out of whack as they are quite accustomed to the idea of starting and finishing earlier. Queenslanders are often faced with the prospect of a referendum regarding daylight savings - the topic is likely to be re-packaged for Queensland’s 2012 elections. Small scale campaigning may already be under way. After all, the writing's on the wall. Or, the bus seat, rather.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Laid’ (ABC1)

With minor exceptions, finding a good Australian sitcom amongst the turgid quagmire of American guff is a bit like discovering Solomon’s treasure. Not surprisingly, when I told an Aussie friend how good ‘Laid’ was, her reply was self-evident: “really?”, said with complete incredulity.

‘Laid’ is a black comedy in the Bridget Jones mould which is both intelligent and silly, awkward and charming, detailing the frumpy sexploits of Roo McVie who finds herself inexplicably cursed on the path to true love when her former sexual partners start dying in increasingly bizarre circumstances. In last week’s episode, two of them pop their clogs choking on hors d’oeuvres at an emergency meeting of Roo’s ex-boyfriends. Roo’s desperation in dealing with the revealing sinful extremities of her past is funny enough - she visits the hot-tub of a self-taught ocker shaman in attempts to dispel the curse - but then she must also face future implications for any potential new suitors.

Roo is played by Alison Bell with a endearing lightness of touch; her roomie Celia Pacquola is hilarious. The show’s writers Kirsty Fisher and Marieke Hardy cite ‘Gavin & Stacey’ and British comedies as their main influence, and there’s no denying a certain post-Gervais overtone to the show's dry humour. I first fell in love with Hardy as a regular guest critic on Jennifer Byrne’s ‘First Tuesday Book Club’ - with this show, she seems to have spearheaded a crucial movement for female comedic talent offering a better and more relevant alternative to the country’s dated, male-dominated gag blowers that you find on shows like ‘Good News Week’ and ‘Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday’, many of which are about as funny as heart surgery.

In a gesture of bipartisanship, I should rightfully add ‘Ben Elton: Live from Planet Earth’ to that list, which I intended to watch for this week’s AU Tube but couldn’t quite muster enough energy to sit through a whole episode. The tortuous, creaking sound of Elton’s career flat-lining was just too overbearing: the jokes are so bad not even the studio audience quite know what to do with themselves. The discomfort is palpable. I’m guessing the show hasn’t had a British airing, but it takes a particularly brazen act of disregard from Elton to presume that such a prehistoric show could ever carry weight for an Australian audience, especially when a program like ‘Laid’ proves so convincingly just how much native palettes have matured.

The A Team

Those accustomed to the dilapidated nature of English football grounds will be suitably awed by Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. Maybe all football stadiums are like this now - plasma screens, airconditioning and inbuilt food stalls selling nachos. The beauty of supporting a team like Swindon Town is that it’s possible to believe that nothing has really changed much for the past hundred years.

Given the sunken nature of the Suncorp pitch, the ground resembled a leaky goldfish bowl when the Big Floods hit in January, retaining the waters which climbed into the first ten rows and no doubt seeped into the boys changing rooms. The first game back on the freshly drained and sandy turf was last week’s football game between Brisbane Roar and Gold Coast United - the last game of the A-League - and judging by the 20,000 strong crowd, with their faithful flags, Magnum Ice and $6 beers, you would be right in thinking that the whole ghastly catastrophe of the previous month had all just been some terribly messy dream.

‘Roar’, of course, sounds more like a breakfast cereal than a football team. They play in a sort of fluorescent orange; a dribbling vision of monosodium glutamate. Gold Coast United have a more boring name and possess an unfortunate affliction of having to play in the same colours as the Brazilian national team. But you won’t confuse the two: Roar win with a convincing 4-0 victory (the first of which is scored after three minutes), securing their place as A-League champions and not without a certain flair. Roar winger Henrique is particularly sprightly; he may be more Julian Joachim than Michael Owen, but he’s still the sort of ferreting annoyance to cause any defence an awful bother, while the fourth goal was a training ground tap in thanks to a napping Gold Coast who were already half way down the M1 by that point.

All of which concludes a triumphant season for the local Brisbane team, who finish top of the league and with a 25 game unbeaten run. That’s pretty good, considering they finished second from bottom last season. Brisbane Roar now go through into a ridiculous play-off situation to decide the overall A-League champions, which is something synonymous with American sports and thankfully unheard of in Europe. By this token, and despite an incredible season, a team like Central Coast Mariners (who finished second) could still possibly go on to nab the final trophy. As someone brought up to believe that points mean prizes, I find this a baffling concept. Regardless, Brisbane Roar will play Central Coast Mariners tonight, the first of two legs, while Gold Coast United play Melbourne Victory tomorrow.

I should make some horribly glib remark regarding the quality of the football being particularly accurate for someone already accustomed to watching Swindon Town, but then the English often forget just how lucky they are to have the best football league in the world. Not that the fans have any chance of watching it, of course. Thanks to a special discount designed to get bums on seats, we acquire six tickets for the game for only $60. That’s ten bucks each - around six English pounds. You’d be lucky to buy braising steak from Woolworths for that price.

But the A-League and football in general has a larger following here than you might think, particularly over the last few years, even enough to warrant a faction of noisy, aggressive fandom. We’re not quite talking the likes of Leeds’ Service Crew here - the ‘Den’ and the ‘Orange Army’ have a fair bit of disgraceful catching up to do in that regard - but their small legion of psychotics already have a small set list and an enthusiastic drummer, and that goes a long way. Bizarrely, they may even have a political agenda: a banner during the second half reads ‘Justice for the NT’ to the bemusement even of my Australian company. Perhaps a statement against social inequality in the Northern Territory? I might be wrong, but if I'm not, then I think Millwall fans could learn a lot from these hoons.

When Australians discuss the Big Things, they’re not always referring to issues like aboriginal land rights, or excessively right wing immigration policies, or Julia Gillard’s dress sense. They might be, of course, but more than likely they will be referring to Things of a much grander scale. Perhaps as an antidote to the boredom of long distance driving, or maybe as a result of all that vast, empty space causing eccentric country settlers to completely lose their grasp on normality, but a wonderfully pointless series of giant objects can be found up and down the land - hidden, mostly, but completely wonderful in their pointlessness.

Green-bashing nay-sayers may bemoan the elegant spinning wind turbines that charge across parts of the British countryside, but at least they serve a purpose. The same can be said for electricity pylons, telephone masts, satellite dishes. Ugly to some, yes, but indispensable to the way we live. Some Big Things are there just to be there: the Eiffel Tower, the Angel of the North, the Washington Monument may present nothing more than a minor threat to low-flying aircraft, yet their awesome artistic stretch and sense of identity never fails to inspire. But if you head north along the Pacific Highway out of Brisbane and into the Sunshine Coast town of Nambour, Queensland, you’ll find the type of monolith that quite defies all you thought you knew about the Big Things in life.

Because this is where you’ll find The Big Pineapple. Built in 1971, I’m not certain of its specific measurements, but I’m sitting next to it in the picture opposite and, as you can see, it’s pretty damn big. Pretty big for a piece of fruit, anyway. Many of Australia’s Big Things are merely promotional gimmicks - the awesome Big Prawn in Ballina, the Big Banana in Coff’s Harbour, a Big Hotdog in Radcliffe - but this grossly oversized fibre-glass construction sits outside a macadamia nut farm, which just doesn’t make any sense at all. Research reveals that there is also a Big Macadamia on site, but we arrive on a Sunday and we can’t get close enough to confirm this.

A sign on the gate reveals that The Big Pineapple is “closed for future changes”. While you ponder what sort of changes could possibly be required, I should add that it is possible for visitors to climb inside the pineapple and, peering through it’s tropical plumage, observe the nut farm, petting zoo and its surrounding environs like some kind of pioneering fruit Tsar. Once upon a time, there was another giant pineapple further up the road in Gympie - “the original,” apparently, presumably said with some menace - but this was quite upsettingly pulled down in 2008. You seriously have to question the merits of a place with such a spoil sport mentality, especially one with a name like Gympie.

But a similar fate that may befall this Big Pineapple, as the site is now under new ownership following a $533,700 bill from the Australian Taxation Office forcing the previous owners into receivership. It’s future is uncertain, which evidently explains why the place is practically off limits, bolted shut with desolate car parks (yes, there are two car parks) humming to the tune of bored boy racers performing handbrake turns across a stretch of empty bitumen. That’s right: the Big Pineapple might get the squash.

You probably won’t believe me, but at it’s peak, Their Royal Highnesses Charles and Diana popped in to The Big Pineapple to have a ride on one of their toy trains during a recce of the plantation in 1982. They were growing pineapples back then, too, presumably before an insurmountable expenses bill caused the humble Queensland farmer to diversify and flounder, struggling against the monetary force of their own fruit salad. Blimey, who would have thought that giant fruit could be so depressing?

The week long, biannual Lifeline Brisbane Bookfest - which takes place in a convention centre roughly the same size as Moscow - is much more than a place where fads go to die, although if pictures paint a thousand words, then this photo would presumably include much better words than those of Dan Brown's in The Da Vinci Code, which seems to have been so eagerly abandoned that the organisers had to give the book its very own section. There were similar drop off points for Pamela Stephenson’s Billy and Halliwell’s Film Guides from the 1980s. The target for Lifeline was to raise $1 million in funds for Flood Relief, and they had successfully made well over half their total just on the opening weekend.

The Bookfest is an epic, endless search for those with the time and the inclination, and I just adore second hand book sales. I love the nosey, sticky beak nature of it almost as much as the hunt for that rare find: from a books’ ghostly inscription (“For Mum, Merry Christmas, 1977”) to the odd surprise of finding some misplaced family relic, like the photograph of someone’s child in the goat enclosure of a petting zoo that I found in a copy of Bill Wannan’s Folklore of the Australian Pub.

And how cheap! In a week that the Borders book store goes into administration, there can surely be only small condolences for a store which charges such astronomical prices for products that could be obtained at a fraction of the cost on the internet. The death of the corporate chain will only make niche independent book stores more relevant. Just remember to really stock up next time.

Kiss My Yasi

On Wednesday, News.com.au ran this rather terrifying superimposed graphic of what Cyclone Yasi would look like if placed over the continents of the world. With a diameter of 250 miles (400km), the storm quite comfortably swallows the whole of England, the state of Louisiana, and half of New Zealand.

Furious gusts of up to 285kph - flattening the towns of Tully, Cardwell and Innisfail - somehow managed to avoid killing anyone, but certainly made an aggressive attempt. Quickly identified as a Category 5 cyclone, Yasi was more intense than both 2006’s Larry and 1974’s Tracy, the latter of which convincingly destroyed the town of Cairns and 71 of its inhabitants over the Christmas period. And that was a Category 4 cyclone. Category 5 is the highest you can get: “extremely dangerous with widespread destruction,” according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website, which over the past month has become the home page for nearly all Queenslanders.

Channel 7 cancelled their scheduling for another hysterical non-stop talk fest, whipping the winds into a further frenzy and giving Queensland Premier Anna Bligh an ample platform to reclaim her soap box. She earned it well and truly with her compassion and sentimentality during the January floods, where she actually broke down in tears during a press conference, inspired by the selfless nature and courage of those affected by the carnage. This is now referred to as The Queensland Spirit. You can even buy your own slice of The Queensland Spirit on three CDs, with all proceeds going to the Flood Relief Appeal.

Bligh was back like a rampant Rambo commanding the TV coverage with her well honed, Churchill esque rhetoric, as if she might be preparing to head north and physically wrestle with the cyclone from the state’s shoreline. This was no storm in a teacup, as Bligh issued her final warning: “You have to take this window of opportunity now. Do not bother to pack bags, just grab each other and get to an area of safety. People are irreplaceable. We shall fight this on the beaches. We will never surrender.” Yes, OK, I may have embellished that a little, but with such positive public support, surely Bligh couldn’t possibly fail to retain her premiership when it comes to next year’s state elections. Heck, you would believe she was practically running the country right now, making sour-faced Labour compadre Ms Gillard look like some form of robotic intern.

If such a thing exists as The Queensland Spirit, then surely it's very embodiment can be explained by a simple sign in a Cairns café which reads, ‘Kiss my Yasi’. So it might be an idiosyncratic mixture of both tenderness and bravado, of laughing in the face of adversity, and a sort of underdog mentality: like the Bulldog Spirit, but a bulldog in thongs and a singlet. It’s actually a media invention, mostly, purported by the likes of Channel 7, who threw caution to the wind and their sanity out the window with the sort of excruciating news coverage that could actually warrant the end of the earth.

Still buoyed by the horrifically captivating scenes of Brisbane’s monumental floods, the network went into full 24-hour disaster porn mode, reporting on news that hadn’t even happened and, then when it did, a complete loss of power guaranteed that the majority of it would be completely incomprehensible. At one point, nonsensical two-ways were broadcast via Skype and a reporter’s iPhone. With journalists clearly exempt from evacuation notices, the most anyone could possibly deduce from this garbled interference was that actually, yes, it was really very windy outside. “But just how windy is it?” and so on and so on and so on.

But it’s hard to take such excessive scaremongering seriously when members of the public are continuing with their daily routines in the background. Category 5 cyclones may be unique in their severity, but storms are not unfamiliar to Australia. We are now entering a tropical cyclone season. There is actually a specified season for this, and the Bureau of Meteorology are predicting more cyclones to follow.

Being English and completely unaware of what to do in this situation, you can be sure that Toxic Math is taking precautions. I’m told the safest place is the bath tub. But without one, I’ll just be standing in the shower until this whole thing blows over.

One of the reoccurring debates on Australia Day is the design of the flag - it's an annual patriotic sticking point, like having the Queen on a postage stamp. Modern consensus seems to suggest that the Southern Cross bit is quite alright, but what really gnaws on the public conscious is that Union Flag in the top left. I was a bit surprised at the extent of vehemence considering just how many Australians proudly fly the flag even when they’re not annually obliged to do so. I can honestly say that I have never felt the need to paint a flag on my face. Any flag, for that matter. Yet Australia Day passed in a sea of blue, red and white, seemingly proud of it’s symbolic gesture despite the design.

All of which links us back to the country’s colonial past and the significance of January 26 as the date when the first British fleets sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 (and not when Captain Cook first landed in Australia, which actually happened in April some 18 years earlier). But what most Australians actually prefer to celebrate is the notion of not having to go into work, bolstered by a unified but jovial sense of celebrating their national identity. Which is why the day is traditionally spent around a barbecue, tucking into lamingtons, damper and assorted bush tucker, with the odd eccentric past time to boot: cockroach racing, for one, and even the odd thong-throwing competition. Sadly, I’m completely stumped to conjure up a British equivalent, other than eating fish and chips, at a bus stop, while it rains. On a Tuesday.

Australia Day is instead referred to as ‘Invasion Day’ by some, used as evidence of yet another aspect of marginalising the country’s indigenous population. Given that the oldest Aboriginal art in parts of South Australia are estimated to be around 40,000 years old, and that the indigenous population possessed the lay of the land for about another 20,000 years on top of that is food for thought especially to those who seem to regard Australia as a young country. I noted a greater sense of inclusion and compassion on the day in recognition of the country’s first Australians, but more can and should be done on all the other days. So perhaps a new flag is necessary, but one with a bit more yellow, red and black.

I will end on the results of this year’s Triple J Hottest 100, which is slowly announced over the course of Australia Day on the ABC’s flagship Gen Y radio station. And just what did those rebellious, pill-popping, know-all teen layabouts in their trendy sneakers vote for as the nation’s best record of the year? ‘Big Jet Plane’ by sleepy folk siblings Angus and Julia Stone. I know. Those crazy bastards.