Sydney Australia

I really had a good time in Sydney. I found the Australian girls to be friendly, fit, independent and very much self empowered which I liked. They were also lonely and liked attention. They were horny too, my favorite trait of them all. It was hard to find an Australian male that could use a word with more than four letters other than the word "shout" which is a rare five letter word in their vocabulary. The average vocabulary for the men in Australia was maybe sixty words with "beer" and "your shout" being the most common words composing about 75% of their speech. In other words I wasn't too impressed by the men of Australia. They have to shorten all words to only four letters so that they can remember them. For instance, an American was called a "sepo". Sepo comes from the root word "septic tank" and is used to describe Americans because the Australians feel that Americans with their big words they use are all full of shit and therefore similar to a septic tank and they shortened it to four letters and it becomes sepo. It is a very derogatory name and it is used in the newspapers all over Australia to refer to Americans. There are a lot of other examples of Australian slang like arvo meaning afternoon or good'ay an extremely rare six letter word but it was used to replace entire sentences and used frequently along with a grunt or two to differentiate the various sentences from one another.

Drinking beer is a very ritualized ordeal in Australia. If five people walk into a bar then each person has to take a turn buying a round of beers for everybody and that is called a shout. Australians keep very close tabs on who's shout it is so that they never miss a beer. If someone buys a second shout then everybody has to buy another shout. If you try to get out of buying your shout either because god forbid you lost track of the shouts or you just didn't have enough cash or something then you risked getting the shit pounded out of you for sure. If twenty people walk into a bar together then the same rules apply which means you must drink twenty beers. So never walk into an Australian bar with more people than the number of drinks you want to have or you are in trouble. That is why Australian men always hang out in large groups, they like their beer. Most of them can sit the glass on their belly on the rare occasion when they need to set the pint down in an emergency. They are all prepared for emergencies.

We were walking around in Kings Cross an area of clubs in Downtown Sydney one night and Sue and another girlfriend were dressed in revealing outfits and they were walking ahead of Paul and I. They looked like hookers. A pimp finally collared Paul and I and told us we had to take our bitches (another rare seven letter word) elsewhere. While we were laughing we told him the girls were not working the streets they just looked like they were.

As we walked along, we saw a little tiny bouncer threw a big tough looking biker type guy out of a club near where we were. The mean biker guy told the bouncer he would be back and was going to kick the bouncer's ass. The bouncer guy just stood there with a fearless look of resolve on his calm face. The biker guy went down the street and collected the other fifteen members of his motorcycle gang and they formed a semi-circle around the little five foot tall bouncer. They all towered over the bouncer by about a foot and outweighed him by an average of over a hundred pounds. There were a couple of cops standing nearby and I looked over at them as this was starting to look like the bouncer was in some trouble. The cops just smiled and said don't worry about him and they turned to watch the action. The guy that had been booted out reached into his pocket and started to pull out a pocket knife as his buddies closed in on the shrimpy bouncer who was dressed in a very smart suit and tie. Just as the hilt of the pocket knife cleared the top of his pocket and the idiot started to smile menacingly at the bouncer all hell broke loose. In maybe ten seconds all sixteen of the men were on the ground bleeding and rolling around holding their heads or bellies or arms or groins or whatever and the bouncer went back to his cool as a cucumber pose standing next to the door. I had never seen anything like that before in my life. Not even in a movie. The little bouncer had pulled out a little rubber and lead billy jack from under his suit and downed every single one of the biker guys so fast they didn't know what hit them. They were trying to crawl away on their hands and knees bleeding profusely. I looked over at the police and they smiled at me, then they just turned away and slowly walked on down the street. I learned a valuable lesson that day. If a guy is working as a bouncer and he is really small then there is probably something special about him and you should not mess with him. If he didn't get the job just because he was big and tough then there must have been another reason and this little guy sure was good.

The beaches were beautiful all around Sydney. We went often and I enjoyed the casual nudity at them. There were some problems however like sharks, stingrays, stinging jellyfish, man eating saltwater crocodiles and the worst problem of all the blue ring octopus. About every hundred meters on the beach there was a sign with a bottle of ammonia hanging on it. The sign read, "In case of jellyfish stings pour this bottle of ammonia over the stinging area. If this bottle is empty or missing then immediately urinate on the affected area to neutralize the jellyfish toxin. Failure to do so could result in death. Immediately summon medical help for the victim or victims." The stinging jellyfish were common.

The salties as the crocodiles were called (one of the longest words at seven letters) were rare in Sydney but one woman was eaten while we were there so they did show up sometimes. She was taken from shore and dragged into the water by a big saltie. Normally the salties are only up in the north of Queensland but they wander around sometimes and can be found almost anywhere near water.

The sharks were way more common. The worst offenders were bull sharks but there were also plenty of great whites and tiger or reef sharks around too. Most of the beaches had shark nets to try to protect the swimmers from the threat of sharks. The nets did not always work. We were sitting above the beach one day when we saw a shark swimming among the swimmers. We though sure someone was going to get bitten and we watched intently, too far away to do anything. The shark cruised through all the swimmers and zeroed in on a young girl about three years old sitting in the water near the edge playing near her father. The father saw the shark coming at the last second as it swam rapidly toward his daughter. He grabbed her arm and quickly dragged her up the beach. The shark came all the way out of the water and up onto the dry sand chasing the girl before wriggling its way back into the water and swimming away through all the other swimmers. The lifeguard cleared the beach for a couple of hours and nobody was bitten. Very weird shark behavior though, why did it just zero in on the one girl and ignore all the easy pickings of the other swimmers? I will never know. Another day I took an underwater picture of a bunch of swimmers and when I developed the film, there was a large bull shark in the middle of all the swimmers in the photo. It never bothered any of us and without the pic we would have never known it was there.

The blue ring octopus is one of the most deadly creatures on earth. Is is tiny and very pretty. They wash up on the beach sometimes looking dead but they are still killers even almost dead. The live ones in the water can kill you before you know what hits you. They can kill in under a minute. Only one person has ever survived a blue ring attack and that was not until 2010.

The problems were not just in the water either. There are leeches all over Australia. Anytime you walk through grass or other vegetation you risk getting them. They climb on you and without you feeling them before they bite you, suck their fill of blood and then fall off. The first sign you have been bitten is the copious amounts of blood pouring out of the bite site.

Then there are the flies. There are a lot of flies. Oh wait did I say a lot of flies? I meant to say that there are an insane amount of flies everywhere in Australia. You just have to get used to them crawling all over you and your picnic lunch or whatever. If you try to shoo them away they lift up about six inches to let your arm go by and they immediately drop back down on you arm or food or where ever you try to shoo them from. If you do keep trying to shoo them there are special hospitals they end up putting you in because you go totally nuts.

Then there are the insects like the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are just as numerous as the flies and just as thirsty as the leeches only they come to you. Funnel web spiders are another common deadly pest all over Australia. Again they can be deadly unless you quickly get anti venom for the bites. For me the most annoying thing were the cicadas. There were so many cicadas that you had to shout in each others ears to be heard above the all the buzzing racket they made. To get to sleep at night I had to throw firecrackers outside to scare them into silence for a few minutes.

Then there are the snakes. Australia is a very beautiful country but it has eight of the world's ten most dangerous snakes and they are common. The tiger snake is one of the most dangerous even though it is only about three feet long at the most. It is very venomous and very aggressive. It is afraid of nothing. It can stand straight up with only about an inch of its body on the ground. I saw them frequently. If I saw them on a road I would tease them by going up close to them and then slowly backing away. They would chase the car as I backed away. There were lots of stories in Australia about tiger snakes ending up in the undercarriages of vehicles and crawling into the car and killing people or mechanics working on the car. The other snakes were common too like browns. Browns get big. Taipans are less common and not as aggressive but are still deadly. In actual numbers very few people die of snake bites even in Australia. The most common deadly vermin in Australia is the honey bee with about ten deaths a year. Yet almost all people are so afraid of the snakes that they want to kill them all and yet they ignore the bees. Go figure. Most of the snake bites occur to males that have been drinking alcohol and the males are messing with the snakes when the bites occur. Stupidity is no excuse. Leave the snakes alone.

Then there are those cute kangaroos all over the place. All vehicles that drive in the country need to have roo bars on the front of their vehicles. A roo bar is a special bumper, kind of like a cow catcher on a train, that is designed to knock kangaroos off toward the side of the road instead of through your windshield when you hit them. The kangaroos sit on the roads at night because the tarmac holds heat in and it can get cold at night in Australia. They sit there in big mobs absorbing the heat and then you come over a hill in your car and bam bam bam you run right into the whole mob at sixty miles an hour. Without a roo bar you would be dead. I don't know how many people die a year because of accidents involving roos but it might be fairly high. Australians consider roos kind of like giant rats and many farmers and such shoot them for sport on sight.

There are still more vermin. Dingos, Australian wild dogs, are famous for stealing babies even though I think there is only one case of that happening. The Australians shoot them on sight because they are so afraid of them. Again that is unnecessary killing. The cane toads are a serious pest. There must be billions of them around at night. They too are venomous. They can squirt toxic white milk out of their eyes if you get too close to them. When you drive at night there is a constant sound like popcorn popping as you run over all the toads on the road. There are special car washes to wash off all the cane toad fluids and body parts under your car. If you don't wash it off right away then the vehicle gets stinky as hell. The last vermin that is common is the tick, especially the shell back tick which can kill people if they don't get medical help. So overall Australia has lots and lots of reasons to not live there or even visit if you are the worrisome type.

Drowning is another danger, especially when the big waves from storms hit the beaches. There are lots of surf lifesaving stations along the beaches. The clubs are manned by volunteers who practice their lifesaving routines regularly on the beaches. They can be entertaining to watch practicing. The real reason for the clubs I think is to have a place to drink beer and eat food when the bars are closed like they were on Sundays and some holidays when we were there. Only travelers were allowed to drink in a bar on a Sunday. To enter the bar you had to sign in to a guest register to verify that you lived at least thirty kilometers away making you a traveler and therefore able to buy alcohol. Kind of a stupid law since there was no enforcement of it.

The outback itself even without all the vermin living in it was the deadliest of all. It is a harsh environment that is hot, dry and large. It is easy to get lost because it is mostly flat and it all looks alike. If you do get lost and don't have water you will die quickly. I loved the outback. I spent many days wandering around it trying to understand its unique environment. I never got lost but I was extremely careful. I got nervous a couple of times but I always found my way out.

Paul and I became good friends after we did the picture trick to him. One night we got drunk and went to the Sydney harbor bridge. We watched it for a few minutes and then Paul says, "Let's go up to the top." Sure I was game. We walked up the suspension cables all the way to the top and then sat there watching the cars and the city lights while we smoked a joint before we climbed back down. It was easy going up even though it was kind of a steep climb but coming down was scary. I don't know if the joint had anything to do with it but it seemed slippery on the way down compared to the climb up. We made it safe and sound. There was no security at the bridge at all to prevent us from climbing on it.

We also had a friend that delivered drugs all over Australia. He was a crazy mobster type guy that was smart as shit and very experienced. He was into VW Beetles. He bet me that he could change the clutch on a bug in under twenty minutes by himself. We made the wager and he took out the engine, removed the old clutch and pilot bearing, replaced them and reinstalled the engine in under eighteen minutes with no help at all. I was impressed.

We did some other crazy stuff with him also. We stopped at a store to get some drinks one afternoon and there was a young boy with a skateboard out in front of the store. Our friend wanted to try the skateboard so he asked the eight or nine year old kid if he could try it out. The kid was not stupid. He said, "Sure you can use my skateboard after I get to drive your car." My buddy immediately said, "ok fair dinkum." He let the kid sit in his lap and we pulled out into the road. The kid was driving in a pretty good straight line and laughing with joy at being able to drive a car for the first time. Then my buddy said, "When I say go, turn the wheel this way as fast as you can until I say let go." We were doing about forty or so when my buddy slammed on the brakes and told him "GO!" The car spun around in a 180 degree spin and he yelled, "Let go!" and the kid let go until the wheel straightened out on its own and we were going in the opposite direction. The kid could not believe that he had just done a 180 the first time he ever drove a car. His face was so excited looking. I couldn't believe it either. Can you imagine this kid trying to tell his friends what he did after we dropped him back off at the store. I am sure not one person ever believed this kid. We were laughing too hard to try the skateboard when we dropped him off.

We were driving another day and he made another wager. He wagered that he could go ninety miles an hour in second gear in his bug. I didn't even think a bug could do that fast in top gear so I made the wager. Big mistake on my part. It was the last wager I ever made with him. He wound that engine and transmission up so high it sounded like a jet airplane. He did it. I was shocked. The engine did not blow but it did smoke for a couple of days after that. This guy was crazy.

He had a specially custom built Ford Galaxy 500 with bored out pistons and a custom made transmission that he used for his drug running. This car could move out. We regularly bet other muscle cars in drag races and he always won no matter what car challenged him. He was a very good driver, a bit crazy but he knew his vehicles.

We bought our weed from him and we went over to his place one day to get some. We were all smoking out and listening to music while we sucked on some beers. He and Sue went into the other room and in a few seconds we could hear the two of them going at it big time. It was a wild and furious quick hard poke and we heard every squeak and moan in the front room. A few minutes latter Sue came back into the front room with a dazed look on her bright red face and we were still laughing. Somebody told her we were laughing because we heard their little session in the bedroom and she tried to deny it happened. We just laughed harder. She didn't realize just how much we could hear through the obviously thin walls. Nobody cared that they did it so I don't know why she wanted to deny it happened. Such is life.

The craziest thing that happened with this friend started on a weekday when he brought a friend over to our house. He brought a big bag of food and pot with him. We smoked out and ate and drank for days with him and his friend. We watched the television news a lot because a prisoner had escaped from prison up in Queensland. The largest manhunt in Australian history was going on trying to find the escaped prisoner that the press had dubbed, "The Animal". The police and military had a large cane field cordoned off and they were slowly closing the noose on the escapee in the cane field. We watched it all on the tube. The helicopters and the machine guns and assault rifles with snipers up on the hill overlooking the scene and dogs and night vision goggles...the whole shebang. We laughed and talked about how maybe the guy wasn't even in the cane field. He wasn't. He was sitting in our front room. They finally showed a picture of him and we saw that it was the guy in our house.

It kind of scared me a bit but he seemed like a really nice guy to us. Then he told us the whole story about how he was going to testify against crooked cops and prison guards so they were out to kill him. He said they "let" him escape just so they could kill him. He ran full speed, barefoot, through a cane field for twenty miles at night with no light and was already gone before they got their perimeter set up. His escape was super human but he was motivated because he knew they wanted him dead.
After about a week at our house and after the big manhunt ended up empty handed for the police they left our house and he was captured again a couple of days later. It was the largest story in Australian history at the time it seemed. I tried to find a story about him on the internet but I came up empty handed just like the police did.