Yes, you read that right. The blog that nobody asked for in the first place, and that nobody pined for in its absence, is back. Though this will be one of my shorter blog posts as a half-hearted re-introduction of Hidden Gabe, it still needs to be said that I have been tragically lazy in recent months, in a manner that is unbecoming of an aspiring journalist.
The days of my weird and wonderful round-the-world trip are long behind us, and I have reluctantly hurtled myself back into the menial trivialities of life in the frighteningly middle-class terraced-house corridors of East Dulwich, I have been ‘travelling’ in a somewhat less explicit manner since then. For instance, I took a trip to Spain in June. It was undeniably a trip that was jam-packed, however it was mostly jam-packed with red-wine-laden family card games, and silently creeping further and further towards a melanoma diagnosis. And who wants to read scheduled updates about how many Catalan words I can mispronounce per day? I sure as hell wouldn’t, even if I had written them myself.
Then there was the Georgia trip. Now that was legitimately too busy and full of insanity for me to even pause for a moment. From winning over a grand on the Europa League final, to necking four glasses of wine with our own taxi drivers halfway along a poorly-maintained mountain road in Kazbegi, to helping clear a highway of debris from a truck that had recently disintegrated after tipping over on a sharp turn, Georgia was fast, furious, and fantastic. Hence, I just didn’t want to miss anything by taking time out to write paragraph after paragraph detailing every single event of the day. I just wanted to live it, not analyse it. Yes, that is as wanky as I have ever sounded on this blog.
And so, in 45 minutes I will be boarding a flight to Kiev, Ukraine. I will be spending 16 days touring the country with my companions Jake and Elliot (who are not on the same flight as me which is a pain), and really at this point I can only speculate on what’s to come. And I’m not going to do that because people don’t want to read blogs that tackle subjects that can only be written about by guessing. Oh wait, I forgot about Brexit.
Yes I apologise profusely for the cover photo of this post but I took literally one photo in my entire time in Melbourne so I have to save that one for later and use a photo of Syndey. I’m deeply sorry.
Since swooping into Avalon Airport about nine days ago, I’ve discovered that there’s really only one way to describe Melbourne; undefined. Where Sydney is a sprawling mess of suburbs and wide avenues punctuated by the inconic vistas afforded by the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, Melbourne is just a mess, full stop. This is in no way me saying that I don’t like it here, but more that it’s difficult to get to grips with exactly what it is that I like about it. When in Sydney (or really anywhere as long as you’re speaking to someone who’s visited both cities), you’ll often meet people who rave about Melbourne over the former, saying you absolutely must to go south and visit it. However, I should have seen my own personal existential inquisition coming, as whenever you ask even people from Melbourne what is so great about it, or what there is to do that’s so enticing, they’ll often just say ‘… I don’t really know’. Well, either that or ‘… you can get good coffee’.
In fact, on that note, let’s get something out of the way right now; the coffee here is good, but inferior to any I had in Sydney, and that in turn was inferior to any I had in New Zealand. Yeah, blasphemy – what of it? The Kiwis have got you beat, ‘bro’.
So what have I actually done this week? The truth is not much. Staying with my friend Tony, I’ve just been taking it easy, which includes a few days of sleeping in to midday or 1pm. Sweeeet. My liver has been fairly unhappy, however, having taken the harshest beating of my trip so far on the first night after landing. After going to three or four pubs and then getting a literal mountain of meat at a Chinese restaurant, we discovered a whiskey bar that happened to have a bit of a twist in its menu. In this place, a beer is about $10, and a whiskey is about $10 too. However, they have a ‘boilermaker’ menu, whereby you can choose a combination of one whiskey and one beer, which costs… $10. And I’m not talking shit blended whiskey, I’m talking high-quality single malt scotch. (If you’re English and you’re not familiar with the conversion rate, $10 is about £5). So I took what I would call too much advantage of that deal, then headed back to Tony’s and passed out, having gotten up at 3am that morning for my flight from Sydney.
Now then, the flight. It is not so much the flight itself that I want to talk about, but more where this flight happened to end up. Melbourne, for a city of just over 4m people, has a remarkable four airports. Tullamarine, the main international hub, Essendon, a small airport pretty much in the city centre, Moorabbin, an even smaller airport in the suburbs, and then… Avalon.
There it is. The one photo I took in my entire week in Melbourne. My man Tony.
Avalon Airport is not in Melbourne. It’s not really in the ‘Greater Melbourne Area’ either; way too much countryside separates the city and the airport. In fact, it is much, much closer to the town of Geelong. Overall Avalon is about 35 miles southwest of Melbourne, which is around the same as Luton Airport’s distance to Central London, the difference being that the London Metropolitan Area (the area around London that is continuous urban area), has 14 million people and has comprises a total area of 3,236 square miles. As I’ve already mentioned, Melbourne has a mere 4 million people, over an area of oh shit, upon further research I’ve just discovered that Melbourne’s total area is actually larger than London. That’s despite having 10m fewer people. There goes my point.
Forget that. Basically my point is that Avalon is little more than a cardboard bus stop in the middle of shrub-covered nothing. It’s not exactly the stereotypical ‘outback’ that you think of when the word Australia drifts through your consciousness, but it’s not far off. We arrived in truly atrocious weather, our plane getting battered all over the place by the thick clouds, and we slowly taxied up to what looked to be one of about two gates in the entire airport. In fact, to get a sense of the size of Avalon airport, I can tell you that I could see the roof of it while we were taxiing. The entire building is shorter than the window of a Boeing 737. I crossed the runway, reaching into my pocket to get my phone out, until a little woman wearing a tangerine-coloured hi-vis jacket ran up to me and told me not to ever get my phone out on the tarmac. Woman this isn’t Charles De Gaulle. Who’s radar am I fatally messing up by attempting to connect to the free wifi this airport incidentally doesn’t even have? I get that your job description is literally just ‘make people’s lives a little less enjoyable’ but Jesus.
After navigating my way through Avalon’s 70’s-esque interior, complete with faux-shag carpeting in the arrivals section, I stumbled my way to a city transfer bus and accidentally sat one row in front of some sort of obese man-child who would not shut his mouth for the entire hour-long trip. Keep in mind this is still about 9am. I had to turn around a number of times to double/triple/quadruple-check if he was disabled just in case my anger was unjustified and unintentionally intolerant, but he was no spastic – he was just a regular fat dickhead who cackled, coughed and violently sneezed his way into the eardrums of his fellow coach-goers.
Melbourne, as people who live in it will tell you (and as I’ve already said), is all about atmosphere. It is (as I’ve already said), an enormous city area-wise, but the ‘CBD’ – or centre – is a small grid of about 5 x 8 streets that are absolutely crammed to capacity with people, shops and restaurants. So, most days I would wake up, head into the centre and attempt to navigate the strangely tiny layout of the CBD, picking up a coffee on the way and scouting for restaurants I would later eat at. However, I gotta give it to my bro (and host) Tony; he took me to three places that were three of the best meals I’ve had on my travels so far. One was the excellent burger at ‘Beer and Burger’ in Richmond (yeah great name right), one was the chicken parmigiana at the Napier Hotel in… somewhere (which had a layer of kangaroo, or ‘smoked roo’ on top), and the third (and best) was SUT & Wine, an extraordinary Korean BBQ place in Box Hill.
Honestly, I apologise that this has been a bit of a nothing post, so I’m going to end it here. I enjoyed my time in Melbourne but most of it was just chilling out and not really doing anything. About 24 hours ago I left and landed in Tokyo, and I’m dying to write a post about all the random and hilarious shit I’ve already seen, so I’ma do that now.
Hidden Gabe 