Sydney and Embarkation Park

Its been nearly 36 hours since this all began, and despite a slight headache I'm better for the wear. There is mounting excitement for this place and what is surely to come...already I feel at home in the in-between places, searching for some alley that will guide me from the tourist world of appearances to the locals life of relationships and places.

A few people I've met: Dana, massage therapist on the train back to SF airport on his way to Amsterdam. He and I immediately hit off talking after I we had been listening to this other fellow's self produced hip hop album in the subway station.

The next person would be Walter. I ran into him in the crowded subway train at central station in sydney. I was carrying all my baggage then, just arrived from the airport quite a wide load. I happened upon the city's morning rush hour, lots of coats brushing by me as the unloaded at the city center. I asked him where I might be able to find the youth.

Later today, after having found a place to stash my luggage, I ran into him in the city center, selling magazines. We spent the next three hours discussing economics and the current world order--he is quite a historian, tying up for me in a most intelligent way the goigs on of todays neoliberal-driven crisis with the role of China. Turns out privitization is an oppurtunity for greed, and we joked about how when the US made its move into australia, privitizing health care and the commonwealth, all that amounted was the selling of government land to the banks and increased competition in the job market for street sweepers...this is quite a laughable world we live in today.

Just now I ran into Aragorn, a dutch traveler staying in my room. He has been at it for 12 months, earning his way as he goes...handyman at a hotel, working the harvest in the outback, the fishmarket. He admires how connected one can get to a local community throug work, and how it is both the fastest way to develop real relationships and to see the parts of the community that are real and true.

His latest gig was two weeks working on a fishing boat up north. The work consisted of waking up at two in the morning to drag in nets, hundred-fifty kilo cages really, to break them down, clean them, and throw them back out. He said one morning the pulled in 45 sharks, big nurse sharks, and had to wrestle them off the deck back into the water by jumping on their backs and grabbing their gills. You have to be careful because if they hit you with their tail they are strong enough to break your legs, and of course a bite can be mighty bad. He said that the water is so warm up there that it is home to tons of bacteria, so if you get wounded you have to disinfect four times a day or it will eat away at your flesh. It was hell, he says, smiling, two thousand dollars richer, feeling like superman.

Tomorrows my last day in the city. One taste of downtown, stilettos and show girls is enough. Hopefully I'll get to stay at Walter's place tomorrow night, and then off to the coast, to the forest, and the homes of people I have met only in the well-traveled tributaries of the travelers mind, we'll all make it there sometime.