Tao tour Australia 2007

25th March 2007 2007 - The Travelling Tao Part 2 - Horsham and Adelaide

Thailand gallery - Australian gallery - part 6.part 5.part 4.part 3.part 2.part 1

The following afternoon we kicked off towards Adelaide, our next stop. We had discussed at length the complexities of the drive as we had to come back this way to drop the car off the following week. I had been nondescript about whether we could do this 700km drive in one go, Tash needed clarification, not that she was in a hurry to get there, but the way back was to be detoured via a place called Bendigo which contained as previously mentioned the heavily pregnant Kate. If the way out took two days, then the way back would too and that would be a day off of the time she had to spend with Kate. Bear in mind that the last time these two saw each other was at our wedding three years ago, and even though Kate really can talk the preverbal hind legs off of a donkey (average phone call 120 minutes) it is not the same as a visit in the flesh.

Jetlag had a say in this also, its voice over the roar of the car engine could be heard the loudest, so we stopped in Horsham near the Victoria / South Australian border. I am very familiar with the original Horsham in Sussex and it isn't a very interesting place, unless that is, if you live there, are old, or sail boats, possibly all three. Horsham in Victoria is a lot drier, there were no boats as far as I could see and most of the old people seemed to be running, as far as we experienced, Motels.

Taking the opportunity to rest, or more accurately trying to stay one step ahead of imminent sleep, we decamped to one of these motels and made use of the Chinese restaurant next door for dinner, Tash and I have a long history of these sorts of establishments, they are always eventful.

One such trip, to Castle Hill's 'Hilltop Phoenix', near the "Ponderosa" (Ken's house in Sydney), resulted in a hideous mismatch of English and Australian portion sizes. We ordered as we usually did, 3 or 4 dishes forgetting that the portion size is more American in the home country, the waiter curiously said nothing and the first we knew that something was amiss was when I noted that the entire kitchen staff had come in to the restaurant to watch us take delivery of this huge banquet. To give you a comparative idea, 4 main dishes can fit on a table in the UK, here we required an extra table. We had caused such a disturbance that when one of the other customers asked what the vegetables in curry sauce was like, I said that I did not know and there was no way I would find out, so gave them the dish. We now always ask the waiters opinion on ordering.

As Tash was chatting on the phone to an excited Ken, the waitress asked what drink I would like, "just a beer" I replied. "heavy or lite" came the unexpected reply. "heavy or lite what" I exclaimed whilst simultaneously shooting a 'help me now I obviously have a mad woman next to me' look to Tash still engrossed on the phone. In the UK heavy and lite refers to Scottish ale, a seriously treacly all day drinking old man's beer, so even though I had a frame of reference for this, I knew, or more accurately hoped, that this wasn't the case.

Fortunately for us both, the wife spotted my distress, rather like a mother can always hear her child's cry, or in my case, English whimper, she quickly diffused the confusion explaining that unlike London where almost nobody drinks and drives, in Oz some men will choose to drink low alcohol beer, or lites, so they can drive home. This is not always the case, in country towns like Bendigo and smaller, the men will drive to the pub and the women will always drive back, as Kate relayed to us a few days later. A friend of Nigel and her's had been heard to comment "I drove my wife to the pub on our first date and she drove me home, it's been that way ever since and we've been married for 10 years!" Of course I had the heavy, having only to navigate my feet 150 yards back to the motel room that night.

The next days drive to Adelaide could at best be described as brisk. We foolishly mentioned to some people the speed that we got the Clubsport up to, this is a 6 litre muscle car remember, and none of them were happy. Australian's, for all their bravado, are a nation that pay close adherence to the speed limits, so I am not going to tell you how fast, other than to say it was all reasonable but for two or three speed runs and interestingly I noted the faster you go, the more a car wants to take off, so not wanting to write off the wife so early in the trip, I approached these moments of stupidity with a modicum of cautiousness. Tash had a go too, just to keep the equality balance in the relationship and clocked a top speed only 20km slower than me, not bad for a beetle driver (she adds).

I worked out the speed in MPH much later in the trip and suprisingly, offended myself.

I had spent some considerable time in the previous three months advising Nathan, the groom, on what he should be wearing on the day. He has heard me comment a few times, I am nothing if indiscreet as some of you are aware, that as a Queenslander he is at an immediate disadvantage when required to dress up. In fact my groomsman speech was entirely based around an incident a couple of years ago when he ignored my suggestions that he really should wear a black tie outfit to go to a black tie ball. He turned up in his work outfit, beige slacks and a blue checked shirt to quote the speech and we had to have an emergency conference call to work out what he could do to salvage the situation, "go to the bar order 3 jack and cokes and look at everyone else like they are overdressed", was the eventual advice he received and the night was saved.

In a very odd, for two men anyway, Pygmalion like manner (but without the love story obviously) I had taken Nate around the best suit shops in London to deck him out for the big day, eventually we got him a suit made, I helped him pick out matching ties and advised him on the appropriate shirt to wear (double cut away collar with French, or double cuff, dependant on which county you are in, with a tie tied in a Cross Knot, not a four-in-hand , or Windsor or Double Windsor knot, the sort of knots you wore to school).

I also keyed Nate up with some ideas on shoes and a belt and off he went with a couple of days to spare before flying out, no doubt with my last words of "you must take the suit with you when you go to buy the shoes and remember to try everything on" ringing in his ears. I had meant that he wear the suit when trying on the shoes, I suspect that he instead heard "make sure that you have the suit in close proximity to you when you look at shoes, it will bring you luck". He did in fact do this, choosing the Duty Free shops in the Heathrow departure lounge as the ideal shopping arcade for wedding attire.

One the day itself it turned out that he had not yet tried the belt on. It would have comfortably fitted me and I am significantly more rotund than Nate, so it was fortuitous that I had the measure of the situation and had brought my "complete gentleman's toolset" with me (see, I told you that packing for this trip was a nightmare), one extra belt hole was quickly manufactured.

...and there's more

Previously that morning, the day of the wedding, Nate, Russ and myself were off in the Clubsport somewhere in north Adelaide having an "it's not too late for us to make a run for it mate (it's a fast car we could be interstate before anybody notices) lunch" and I was suddenly compelled to ask him whether he had removed his expensive wedding shirt from the packaging yet. The answer of course was no. Hotel irons are shit and shirt creases are not easily removed.

Being of English stock I have, like all men of my age, a good working knowledge of the books and films of James Bond, the most recent outing Casino Royal had been given a lot of media coverage before I left, and thankfully one program had covered the more esoteric passages in the source book, namely that there is a recipe for scrambled eggs in there and one for a cocktail. There is also detailed instruction on how to remove creases form a man's dress shirt. With most of Australia under water restrictions, bad or worse dependant on where in the country you are, neither of my two partners in crime were particularly happy when I hoisted their shirts onto the shower curtain rail, turned it on full beam and turfed them out of the hotel room so we could go and do errands. On returning the heat and mist had done their job, the shirts were ready, the boys then dressed and my job was nearly over.

So I have digressed a little, we had all met up for the first time on the Thursday night, though I had been emailing Russ, my Groomsman counterpart for a couple of months, I had yet to meet him and as you can imagine or have experienced first hand, being the bride and groom and having a lot of people come in from out of town means that invariably you are the only two who know everyone, so both Nate and Marisa had their hands full herding us cats around and introducing people left right and centre. Things went well, mainly due to the power of alcohol and those of us favoured drinking rather than eating soldiered gallantly on into the Friday morning. At about 10:30pm Tash received the phone call that she had been waiting for, Kate was a mother, so was very happy, additionally the newborn had been given the names Abbey Natasha. You can imagine the state the now happily crying Tash returned to the bar in, it helped to make the night more of an event.

Friday was to be an easy day but for the wedding run through. The guys were getting married in Adelaide's Botanical Gardens, so we met up and walked to the garden, where it was to take place. The Secret Garden is a kidney shaped green maybe 60 foot by 40 foot wide, bordered on the long edge by a small concrete sided, but at the tail end of a hot Australian summer dry, stream that snakes an 'S' shape to the long bottom side of the garden. The cleft of the 's' has a single tree that would beautifully overhang the stream were it to be full. The lower sides of the garden had tree and bush cover thinning out quickly to reveal a gazebo at the top of the green that connected this to the rest of the gardens and a path or two running parallel to a pampas grass hedge that finally enclosed the space in. There is a reason why I have just described this.....

We all filed into the garden, the bride and groom to be, us, the bridal party, the brides mother and the Pastor. Russ, the girls and I were told where we would be standing the following day and took up our positions looking outwards across the green grass

Rehearsals if you are not the actual bride and groom are mostly quite dull, not this time. Maybe it was the hot weather, maybe Adelaide has a soft spot for young love, maybe they had already appeared on several websites and I have yet to find them, but as it turned out on this occasion we had something to spice things up a bit. In the far corner of 'The Secret Garden' was a couple snogging quite passionately; they weren't that far away from us, so knew we were there, but did not stop. (For those of you more graphically minded, they were both knealing, she over him). At least this gave us something to talk about during the boring bits of the rehearsal.

My problems really started as the rehearsal finished and we all left, the couple continued unabated. Nate, Russ and I stopped by the end of the pampas bush to work out what we were doing for the rest of the day, as creepy as this now sounds, I was staying in the garden to take some photographs of flowers. For reasons that I am not about to go into I use a small GPS device that sits on top of my camera to fix the geographical position of the pictures, this little fellow needs about 5 minutes to boot up however, so I was stuck there almost out of site of the increasingly amorous couple, but with a large lens camera. It didn't look good.

Thinking quickly I thought I should move along a bit out of the way to diffuse any accusations of being a dirty voyeur. In one of those, "oh I wished I had never had that thought moments" I thought that I should move out from behind this bush into an adjacent green, more in the open so that;

A. I could be easily seen and positively deflect any suggestions of ungentlemanly activity on my part that might cause problems with my Visa application and

B. This bloody GPS might make my life easier by getting it's game together slightly quicker if it can see the sky.

Confidently stepping out the other side of the pampas bush I was very unhappy to catch sight of another pair of entwined legs, mildly panicking I quickly backtracked out the other side of this 'love bush' back to where I started. Ohh what a mistake, the female from the original couple by now had a leg outstretched and both arms hanging from the fence, in flagrante, there was nothing left to do, I made a hasty exit through some (moderately prickly) flora and away to another part of the gardens very quickly.

The wedding went off without a hitch, though it turns out that I had to dance with my respective bridesmaid, this came as a shock as the last time I danced was at my wedding and that could be described at best as the two-step round and round shuffle. Thankfully 'Lissa, my bridesmaid was very gentle and I survived the ordeal, only being heard to squeak "but I don"'t even dance with my wife" by a few people close by.

Russ and I, due to our position in the bridal party were up last in the speeches, our hope had been that at least one of them would be bad, so we would be spared the pressure of having to deliver a good best man's speech. Sadly for us, but good for the wedding, they were all excellent. Marisa's brother went first and was witty and funny and when he finsihed, I took the chance to go to the toilet, the entrance to which was just behind where David was and therefore the rest of us were to stand. A man's toilet requirements are brief and frequent as most ladies like to point out, so I was not alone in my visit. What was concerning was that as I started to leave I found that along with the other dude standing by the exit door, that we couldn't. Nate's father had started to speak, we were trapped in the loo, unable to leave without drawing attention to ourselves, unable to stay in there, because at least on my part, it really would be noticed.

My toilet chum and I were quickly joined by two other gentlemen, who had also hoped to fit in a quick "jimmy riddle". In hushed whispers we introduced ourselves as the atmosphere suddenly took on the air of naughty school kids, this was apt as we were all obviously English, receding hairlines, alcoholic tendices and weak bladders, it's a wonder how my country has done so well over the years. One of my confined compatriots bore a striking resemblance to the actor Ray Winstone (called Trev), the other, Scott, had to be a Pom as he had actually bothered to wear a shirt and tie and the doorman was called Zack. I introduced myself to them, explaining that "my wife and I live around the corner from Marisa and Nathan in London" Scott's reply of "Who's your wife" confused me and my retort of "The woman sitting next to me on the bridal table" returned the compliment back to Scott. Trevor on the other hand nearly gave us all away by laughing at this far too loud for a man hiding with three other males in a toilet corridor during the Grooms father's speech.

Fearing discovery, more importantly, fearing the door opening and having Nathan's father direct us back to our seats so he could continue his speech, we quickly discussed our options, stay in here all night or make a break for it during a pause in the speech, a decision was reached and Scott saved the day by leading the way and striding out of the door just as we heard the applause to a joke by Nate's father.

No-one noticed, that is, until now.

The night nearly over and all our duties discharged Russ and I reconnected with out respective partners, Claire and Tash, we had a drink, toasted each other, then the bride and groom and relaxed.

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