Australia. Part IV

March 6–8, 2009

Coonabarabran

A small town where long-haul truckers spend the night.

Brisbane

Another fairly large city with an incredible number of people of Indian and Chinese descent. The colonial architecture is surrounded by skyscrapers built around it in more recent years.

A second type of payphone half-booth. They’re modern, just with a retro-inspired design. This kind of half-booth is often installed in historic neighborhoods.

The grate around the tree is interesting: this is the first time I come across one that’s positioned non-symmetrically.

I had very little time to spend in Brisbane, but I don’t think I missed out on much. If you’ve been to Sydney, Melbourne, and one other city, you’ve got the urbanistic aspect more or less covered. Australia is similar to the US in this sense: there are almost no differences from city to city. After trips like this, you begin to particularly appreciate Europe, where every city is so different from the next that they could easily be different countries.

Gold Coast

There are special resort swings here for people in wheelchairs.

The intersections sport fancy resort bollards.

Traffic signal equipment cabinets are painted with government-approved resort motifs.

This is, in fact, a resort, inhabited by those whose ship has come in.

The only thing in Australia that remains a mystery to me is these striped glass covers on license plates. Approximately one in every hundred cars has one. What are they for?

Gas stations here (and in every other civilized country) provide buckets with soapy water and squeegees for motorists to clean insect corpses off their windshields. When you spend two days driving on the highway in a hot climate, your windshield turns practically opaque. Windshield wipers are obviously useless in this scenario—the only things that help are rain or soapy water and a squeegee. And yet you can’t find squeegees anywhere in Russia, although there are literally kilograms worth of insects on the roads in the summer.

Australia has a fairly large number of automatic toll roads. There are no booths with attendants where you can pay. Everyone speeds right along at the usual hundred kilometers an hour, and the toll is automatically deducted from their accounts. If you’re a tourist, you have to find a special website to pay the toll within three days. I didn’t find the site in time, so my bill was automatically sent to the rental car agency, which automatically deducted triple the amount from my card.

In Australia, like in New Zealand, you can pay for absolutely everything with a card. Even the tissue vending machine at the airport takes cards.

When you pay with a card, you have to select the type of account—checking, savings, or credit. My regular Visa card issued by my Russian bank only worked when I selected credit, even though it’s not a credit card.

At gas stations, you fill up first and then pay. The pumps are very convenient: you can pre-select an amount with a single button. And, of course, you can pay with a card right at the pump.

By the way, the trigger locks on gas pump nozzles don’t work anywhere in the country. The hold-open latches are there, but they’ve been disabled — you have to hold it with your hand the whole time.

Sydney Once More

I arrived past nightfall to discover massive, completely insane crowds. The city was celebrating Mardi Gras—the holiday for fans of alternative copulation. (I’ve previously ended up at a similar gay pride parade in Toronto also completely by accident). All my attempts to find a hotel online through my smartphone were in vain—the booking system told me that not a single hotel in the city had a vacant room. Nice to learn this after 11 hours of driving.

There’s a subway connection between the airport and downtown Sydney. At night, the underground station is completely deserted—only the ticket machines, turnstiles, and cameras are still working. There’s no living staff. The edge of the platform says "Nightsafe Area"—this indicates the small part of the station that’s under video surveillance.

The trains are bi-level and sort of ugly. The inside is filthy, there are empty vodka bottles on the seats.

The city was completely trashed. People were gradually getting wasted and turning into cavemen.

The particularly out-of-control ones were being taken down by the cops, those who’d had too much to drink were laid out or seated on the ground by the police van. The tactics of the local riot police are exactly the same as in Russia: cops grab individual people from the crowd and hurl them off to the side.

Someone got hit by a car. Both the pedestrians and the drivers were acting like complete jerks, so it wasn’t surprising. A cop bent down to check if the dude whose head was bleeding all over the pavement was dead. Some drunk chick also ran up to find out if he was dead. The cops dragged her away.

Someone couldn’t contain themselves and puked all over a Ferrari. The store window had to endure the insult.

It was practically impossible to catch a cab. The taxi driver admitted that I was very lucky, because he’d honestly turned off his “available” light so that he wouldn’t have to drive any wasted faggots.

The trash cans on the waterfront next to the Sydney Opera House have lids shaped like the roof of the Opera House.

Australia has a concept of a “standard drink”, which is 10 mL of pure alcohol. For instance, a bottle of beer is approximately one standard drink. And a small bottle of wine is four. While I was here, the department of health (which is called the Department of Health and Ageing here) lowered the recommended maximum daily intake from four drinks to two. The number of standard drinks is always indicated on the label.

The special gay edition of the Absolut bottle will remain on sale a while longer.

In the morning, the city was cleaned and polished.