"Where the Bali hell have you been?"

"There and back. Just there and back. And now I'm back. And this is the end. Or the start. Or whatever. Take your pick. Blog off!"

--- but not before having viewed some last impressions of Bali:

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Last rites

Well, I've booked my wake-up call for 5 a.m. and my airport shuttle-bus pick-up for 6 a.m. One more sleep and I'm homeward bound!

Judging by all the single mothers sitting in the cafés along Mitchell Street and sipping their Pina Coladas (don't even know how to spell the stuff let alone waste $10 a pop on it!), yesterday must've been "Pension Day". Darwin has a "Canberra-ish" sort of feel to it as, being the seat of the Territory government, it has at the bottom of every highrise building housing the myriad of government departments a constant cluster of so-called "public servants" taking their 'smokos'. My theory is that even non-smokers in the "public service" become habitual smokers so as to be able to cut down on their present-at-work hours (in other occupations known as 'working hours') from the required 7-and-a-bit to probably less than 4 or 5.

Q: Why have public servants stopped looking out of the window in the morning?
A: Because otherwise they'd have nothing to do in the afternoon ...

I have no idea what it would be like to walk around in this hot weather (or, for that matter, in any weather) with hemaroids (hemorrhoids?) up one's butt but I'm convinced it couldn't be much worse than having a heatrash up one's groin. And so I spent the afternoon in an air-conditioned arcade just outside a COLES supermarket, sitting in one of those coin-operated massage-chairs. Except this one was out of order which kind of summed up everything as I sat there with this large sign stuck on the wall above my head which read, "OUT OF ORDER".

Putting Descartes before the source

I've been away! Have I been away? Or have I just been dreaming or hallucinating?

There was a a chap in the seventeenth century, René Descartes, who opted for reason over a divine source of knowledge. He probably wishes he'd never said, "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), because it's all anybody remembers about him.

He arrived at the cogito through an experiment in radical doubt to discover if there was anything he could be certain of; that is, anything that he could not doubt away.

He started out by doubting the existence of the external world. That was easy enough. I do it all the time! Then he tried doubting his own existence. But doubt as he would, he kept coming up against the fact that there was a doubter. Must be himself! He could not doubt his own doubting.

Maybe he should have said, "Dubito ergo sum."

There can be no doubt that I've been to Bali! I've got the sunburn to prove it. And the prickly heatrash in the groin. And an empty wallet.

"I'm sunburnt and heatrashed and without money, therefore I must have been to Bali."

I Still Call Australia Home

I've been to cities that never close down,
from New York to Rio and old London town,
but no matter how far or how wide I roam,
I still call Australia home.

I'm always travelIing, I love being free,
and so I keep leaving the sun and the sea,
but my heart lies waiting over the foam,
I still call Australia home.

All the sons and daughters spinning 'round the world,
away from their family and friends,
but as the world gets older and colder,
it's good to know where your journey ends.
Someday we'll all be together once more,
when all of the ships come back to the shore,
I’ll realise something I've always known,
I still call Australia home.

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I will always call Australia home! Bloody oath!

Touch-down

Leaving Bali just before midnight and arriving in Darwin at 3 o'clock in the morning is murder. I had a spot of bother getting my bag's of apostrophe's through Custom's. As they told me, "We've got heap's of apostrophe's in the country already; we don't wan't any more import's." However, after consulting various regulation's, two senior Custom's official's allowed all my apostrophe's in. But they did suggest that in future it would help if I didn't enter on my arrival card under "Occupation" the words "Apostrophe-NAZI".

Never arrive anywhere in the dead of night and expect a welcome! Darwin Central was booked out. The night porters John Dada and Umit were most apologetic but full is full! So were all the other 24-hour reception places as there are a couple of conventions in town. Anyway, they were all around $200 a night and more!

(Actually, there was a "backpacker-ish" sort of place that had a single, self-contained room for $75, and while the reception-guy's dreadlocks didn't inspire confidence, I was prepared to take a punt but blew my fuse when he wanted to inspect and photocopy my passport as part of the registration process! Inspect my passport? And photocopy it? In my own country? I realised later that this seemed standard procedure in the Top End to catch out illegal immigrants but at the time I considered it an affront to my civil liberties.)

Took a taxi back out to the airport and was determined to catch the first flight down to Sydney. What stopped me was that the next flight out was only on Wednesday. And it would have cost me another $427 on top of what I had already paid. Took the shuttle bus for the second time into town and found a room at the inn - the Poinciana Inn on the corner of McLachlan and Mitchell Streets, to be precise - where Esther, the night-porter - from Kalimantan!!! - even allowed me a very early check-in at 6 am so that I could go to sleep immediately. It's right in the centre of town at the top-end of Mitchell Street which is the entertainment strip of Darwin with wall-to-wall bars, restaurants, and discoes from one end to the other. It's a slightly ageing but spotlessly clean place of the kind that reminds me of hotels in the 60s except that this one must have been built at least ten years later as Cyclone Tracy wiped out all of Darwin at Christmas 1974. At $125 a night it's just a very ordinary hotel. Compare that to the $15 a night I paid at the exquisitely appointed and rather exclusive Banjar Hills Retreat! Saying 'good-bye' to Bali meant saying 'good-bye' to low prices, to immediate eye-contact and friendly smiles!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the owner of the hotel is a German. Although I have not actually seen the word "VERBOTEN", the place has sticky-taped signs everywhere: 'NIGHT-SWIMMING PROHIBITED", 'NO SMOKING IN ROOM - PENALTIES APPLY", "NO UNATTENDED CHILDREN IN LIFT", "NO SPITTING OFF BALCONY", and "PUT LITTER IN BIN PROVIDED".

It's now midday and I'm almost rested and sitting in an internet café called Cheap AZ Travel in Knuckey Street next to SUBWAYS which is half the price of any other internet place in town and where half the world seems to meet as there are people of all shapes and shades living in their own parallel universes.

I've had some Chinese food, or, as the Chinese call it, food. I've also been into Woolworths and bought Swiss cheese, sliced ham, crunchy breadrolls and apple juice, and some traditional soft licorice - all the sorts of things I couldn't get in Bali.

I am now ready to explore the city. First impressions: it's hot, hot, and hot! And it's a huge concrete jungle! No real feel of an outback town or what the Darwin of old used to be.

I was going to visit the Mindil Beach Sunset Markets on Fannie Bay tonight but was told that it won't start again until the 30th of April. I'll be on the morning-flight to Sydney on the 25th, then the bus, then the old CAMRY up to Riverbend - and I'm ready for a long, long holiday at "Riverbend"! Home sweet home? You bet!