Author: Mike & Ali

We have been on the road now for a bit less than two weeks, and we are really only a good days drive from home.

On the way though we have spent some time with friends, camped in some beautiful spots, done some great walks, and I have cycled down a good stretch of the Oxley Highway.

What is so special about the Oxley? Well, if you are a motorcyclist like me then you have probably either ridden it or it is on your bucket list to ride, and if it isn’t then it should be.

For the non motorcyclists, let me try to explain, although the best way to explain would be to put you on a motorbike and get you to ride it, then you would understand.

The Oxley winds it’s way up the Great Dividing range from Port Macquarie on the central NSW coast up to Walcha near Armidale on the tablelands. For much of its 180k stretch it has a speed limit of 110, although the limit on the best 40k stretch has recently been reduced to 80 despite a longstanding petition signed by just about every motorcyclist who has ever riden it, including me.

This road though is just so much fun to ride. When the road is dry and the sun is shining, and you get up before the caravaners, it is just awesome fun. I have had the pleasure of riding my Ducati up and down this road quite a few times and it really is what riding a bike is all about.

So, on this trip I didn’t come on a motorbike, but I do have my push bike on top of the car, so I wondered if it would be anywhere near as much fun coming down the best bit on a pushie.

We camped the night before up at Apsley gorge up near the top which was pretty spectacular. The next morning coming down to Port Macquarie I got my bike off the roof when we got to the really good bit and got Ali to drive the car down. The first thing I learned is that in a car or on a motorbike you don’t notice that even downhill has some fairly significant uphill bits.

In total I cycled about 40ks of the highway, about 10ks of which was a tough uphill slog, but that was well worth the effort for the 30ks of downhill. Not quite as exhilarating as doing it on a Ducati, but still heaps of fun and thoroughly recommended. I tried my hardest to exceed the 80k limit but the most I could get was just over 50 before having to brake for the next bend.

Anyway, that’s another thing ticked off the bucket list, maybe next time I will give it a go on rollerblades.

So, after 28 shifts, most of which were 12 hour days, a total of 3 days off, and a run of 18 days straight, my work at the athletes village is complete.

The hours that I worked were long and hard, but there were other chefs there who worked four weeks or more of 12-14 hour days with no day off at all, so my hours were pretty relaxed in comparison.

It has been a very long time, about 15 years, since I have worked full time in a kitchen, and although I used to do quite a bit of casual work for game days at Gold Coast and Brisbane stadiums it has been at least 5 years since I last did that. So, to say that I was physically unprepared for the rigours of being in a hot kitchen, on my feet constantly, day after day for 12 hours at a time is an understatement.

To tell the truth, until I got to the halfway point I didn’t think I was going to make it. Week one wasn’t that hard but I was still on my feet all day. Coming straight from an office job, that in itself was tough. Week two was when it really started to ramp up and I was physically exhausted by the end of each day. By the midway point though, I had found my grove back in the kitchen, knew what I was doing and my body (feet in particular) had got more used to my new environment.

18 months ago when I decided that I wanted to go back into the kitchen to work the games, it seemed like a good idea. Had I known how hard I would have to work and how many days it would be for I might have thought twice about it. I’m glad then that I didn’t really think it through, and consider that going back into the kitchen at 50, for a major event, cooking up to 18,000 meals per day, after a 15 year break was a stupid idea, as it was an awesome experience in the end.

Why was it so awesome? Well to start with getting to work with a great bunch of people from all over the world, all focussed on the same goal was great. I worked with great people from Brazil, Chile, Spain, Phillipines, India, Ireland, England, Indonesia, a variety of African countries, and there were even a few Aussies there too!

I think that when you bring people together for a relatively short period of time for a high profile event it brings out the best in people and the team needs to gel together quite quickly to get things done. There is also the advantage that there isn’t time for the workplace politics to come into play that so often happens in a large workforce that is together for a longer period.

The atmosphere of the village was great, and although I spent most of my day in the kitchen it was a great place to be.

And, dare I say it, I actually enjoyed being back in the kitchen and not having to worry about budgets, board reports, performance evaluations or ASQA audits. So am I tempted to return to the kitchen full time? Not on your life, no way, I am not that delusional. Would I do another major event like the Com Games though, yes, absolutely, bring it on, where do I sign up?

So for anyone who has never been in a commercial kitchen or worked at a major event I will try to give you an idea of the scale of the operation.

Every morning I would start at 3am to cook breakfast for 6,000 hungry athletes. I would often be walking through the gate at the same time as some very drunk athletes returning from a night out in Surfers.

Breakfast prep consisted of around 200 litres of egg pulp for scrambled eggs, over 150 trays of bacon, 15 boxes of mushrooms and plenty of other breakfast staples such as gallons of porridge, countless tins of baked beans and more chipolatas than I ever want to see again.

I never actually counted the number of chefs and cooks on the roster, but preparing, cooking and serving 6,000 breakfasts, lunches and dinners, with a few hundred ‘overnight’ meals as well requires quite a few sets of hands. Those of us cooking in the hot production kitchen essentially relied on the team in the cold production kitchen for all our ingredients to be supplied and prepped so we could do our job of suppling the team in the service area with cooked and ready to serve food, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There was never a time when food wasn’t available, with breakfast running into lunch, lunch into dinner, dinner into supper and supper into breakfast.

So while still cooking breakfast we would have to get lunch on the go, ready to be set up by 11am, and then towards the end of my shift we would have to have dinner ready to hand over to the night crew who started at 3pm.

The volume of food that we went through was mind boggling. You could walk into one of the cold rooms in the morning and see pallets of produce in there and go back in the afternoon and see it half empty.

There were also daily challenges of running out of specific items and having to make menu changes and improvise to get around the issue. The day we ran out of egg pulp was the toughest as that meant cracking hundreds and hundreds of eggs to make the scrambled.

Most of the senior chefs were equipped with a radio, earpiece and mike so that we could be in constant communication. This was a practical necessity, but also created some amusing moments and allowed the opportunity for a bit of banter. I never knew what ugali was before (google it), but after hearing the head chef yelling into his radio at the African section every day that we need more of it, it became a bit of a standing joke.

And so now, I need a lie in, a couple of days to recover from the experience, and next week we hit the road, and hopefully we can catch up along the way with a few of the people we have spent the last month working with.

Beware the sunglasses seller who isn’t selling sunglasses!

I got approached by a few different sunglasses sellers, most of whom had a pretty good array of reasonably priced very good fake Ray Bans and a variety of other fakes. All these guys seemed to be genuinely trying to sell sunglasses, and even though I didn’t need or want any I am always happy to engage in a bit of banter. But then there was the sunglasses seller whose wares were rather ordinary at best. A collection of no name glasses that looked old, dusty and covered in fingerprints. At first I just tried ignoring him, but he was fairly persistent so eventually I told him that his glasses were crap in comparison to all the other sellers. At this point he took out a pair and removed the false cover of the compartment to show me what he was really selling. So, once we established the fact that I was not a customer for sunglasses or anything else that he might be selling, he turned out to be quite an interesting character to chat with. He is Vietnamese, makes his living by selling homegrown weed to tourists (apparently the French are his best customers), and told me that if I hire a scooter I shouldn’t get a helmet. That seemed a bit odd so I pushed for more details. Apparently the police target tourists on scooters wearing helmets, as wearing a helmet suggests that you have money to spare! I guess it costs as much to hire a helmet as it does to hire the scooter. Anyway, apparently the police stop you and ask for your licence. Although you don’t need one to get the scooter it is still a legal requirement. If they can’t get you on the licence then they will ask for your passport. If they can’t get you for not having your passport then they search you to see what else they can get you for. Of course, it is all about the bribe. According to our Vietnamese friend $200 can make just about any problem with the police go away.

A week in Cambodia isn’t very long, but it is long enough for a taste, and for me to be certain that I will be back in a few months for a longer stay, hopefully in conjunction with a much longer South East Asian experience. It isn’t really long enough to make any informed comment about the place, but I do have a few observations, some good, some not so.

• Culture, history and religion: I really would love to spend a bit more time finding out about this, but on face value what you see is a predominantly Buddhist country with clear evidence of French influence. Plenty of beautiful Buddhist temples and statues to see sitting alongside European architecture in Phnom Penh at least. Cambodia has been through quite a bit of turmoil in recent history. Independence from France, invasion by Vietnam, American bombing, but by far the most disturbing is what the Khmer Rouge did in the 70’s. They wiped out around 2 million Cambodians under a rule of torture and terror and hid it from the rest of the world. There are a number of ‘killing fields’ around the country where the evidence of the mass graves can been seen. The Tuol Sleng ‘genocide museum’ in Phnom Penh is a must see and is certainly as moving and disturbing as any Nazi concentration camp. This is where much of the torture and inhumanity happened before victims were taken out to the killing fields.

• Tourism: certainly on the rise, but still fairly low key compared to many parts of Asia. In the beach areas though there is a thriving backpacker market and heavy Chinese investment with casinos and hotels popping up in Central Sihanoukville. Way more cranes on the horizon there than I have ever seen anywhere. I lost count at 30. There is obviously a seedy side of Tourism in Phnom Penh though. I saw way too many middle aged western men hanging out with young Cambodian women, and way too many bars with young women hanging around outside.

• Safety and security: I never felt threatened or concerned for my safety (apart from when on a bus on the highway) at all. In the night markets there were plenty of warnings about pickpockets and bag snatchers but the simple solution to that is have pockets with zips and carry your bag on your front. We did a lot of walking in Phnom Penh, night and day, and I never felt unsafe.
• Food and drink: the coffee is excellent, beer and cocktails ridiculously cheap and the food is good. Not awesome like Thai or Indian, but good. Spicy but not like Thai hot. Mostly the food is cheap, and if you eat where the locals do it’s really cheap. Be brave and eat at the night market when in Phnom Penh, well worth the experience. You pick what you want and then sit on a mat in the middle of the market and they will cook it and bring it to you: awesome. Don’t forget to take your shoes off before stepping on the mat, remember not to point at what you want and remember to only eat with your right hand.

• The People: The immigration and customs officials at the airport could do with a bit of customer service training. They were extremely unfriendly and unwelcoming, but after that it was all good. All the Cambodians we engaged with were friendly and helpful. Their English is very good so communication isn’t an issue and I never felt like I was being ripped off or coaxed to part with my money on some ruse or other.

Anyway, thank you Cambodia, I will certain be back to see a bit more of this beautiful country in the not too distant future.

Now, onto the Commonwealth Games village.

I know calling this post ‘part 1’ implies that there will be a part 2, but I would like to add a quick disclaimer here to say that I am not making any promises.

Anyway, the past couple of days have been pretty hectic, but now that I am sitting here on a white sandy beach overlooking a beautiful bay with colourful fishing boats and contemplating a massage on the beach and the first cold beer of the day ($0.50 a beer so I might have a couple of those), it has all been worth it.

This time 2 days ago I was starting my last day at work. Since then I have shared some departing beers and a few laughs with my workmates, spent about 10 hours on a plane and 6 hours on a bus, and now, after a good sleep last night, here I am on a beach in a place called Sihanouk Ville.

I didn’t know a lot about Cambodia before arriving, and still don’t, to be fair. I suppose I expected it to be a bit like Thailand, and there are certainly plenty of similarities. I know that sadly it isn’t unusual for many countries in Asia, but one of the most noticeable things is the rubbish everywhere. We spent a few hours wandering around the streets of Phnom Penh before getting the bus down here and it is striking just how much litter there is.

I love just wandering the streets in cities I have never been to before. Walking is one of the best ways of discovering. You really get to experience the sights, sounds, smells and feel of a place up close a personal rather than behind the glass window of a bus or taxi. The streets of Phnom Penh were no disappointment. They are hectic, eclectic and very interesting.

Although there are pavements, it is impossible to walk on them as they are full of parked scooters, the occasional car and plenty of street vendors. This means that you are largely forced to take your life in your hands and walk along the edge of the road. At first this seems pretty scary, but you very quickly get used it. There don’t appear to actually be any rules of the road at all, but I assume that cleaning up foreigners is particularly bad karma so they seem to mostly avoid it. This is in itself quite impressive when you consider that just about every available inch of road is filled with scooters, tuk tuk’s, medium sized trucks and the occasional car heading in every direction quite randomly.

Crossing the road is actually quite fun. Best thing to do is just walk at a steady pace in a straight line and don’t do anything unpredictable. If you follow this basic procedure it seems to put you in a kind of ‘karma bubble’ and the traffic just kind of flows around you. Anyway, that’s enough talk of traffic, after my last post people will start to think I am obsessed with it.

We also spent a bit of time yesterday wandering a very large and crowded market area. I always find food markets particularly interesting and seeing what new and exotic ingredients I can find is always inspiring. Food and drink is actually one of the most pleasurable things about travel. I love finding out how and what the locals eat and learning how it is prepared and cooked so that I can give it a go. The butchery sections in Asian markets are usually a bit confronting though, what with pigs heads and a variety of fly blown innards of some description usually being front and centre.

The most surprising thing about Cambodia so far is the coffee. It is actually very good. If this is one of the last remnants of the French influence here it is a very good one. I say surprising because I think that our coffee culture in Australia is probably amongst the best in the world, and it is usually very disappointing getting a coffee in most places overseas because it is so bad in comparison. Last year, with a mate of mine who lives in Fremantle, WA, we cycled across a not insignificant part of Austria, Slovakia and Hungary in search of a decent cup of coffee, and failed miserably. We did find a few very nice beers though. But here in Cambodia, decent coffee is everywhere, even the most run down ramshackle places seem to have an espresso machine.

OK, so what else can I tell, you about Cambodia? Well maybe I need to see a bit more first so perhaps there will be a part 2 after all, but for now, the beer is cold, the shine is shining and the water is clear and inviting, so I have got better things to do at the moment.

For the past few years I have had to drive up and down the highway between the Gold Coast and Brisbane on most work days.  Got to say,  I am really looking forward to taking a break from this, and as I write this, I have four more days to go in my current job, so the light at the end of the tunnel is very bright right now.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it is a crappy road, and I don’t even drive all the way to Brisbane most mornings.  It is in fact superb road: you could drop that Gold Coast to Brisbane stretch of the M1 pretty much anywhere in the world and it would still stack up.  It’s mostly pretty straight, four lanes, well signposted even with clearly numbered exits, good surface, no tolls……..so what is the problem?

Pretty simple really, it’s not the road, it’s not even really the volume of traffic, it’s is the way it is used.

With the upcoming games, a couple of changes have been introduced as part of the whole Games Traffic Management plan.  Trucks have been banned from the two right hand lanes, and the speed limit has been reduced slightly: the 110 stretch is now 100 and the 100 bits are 90.  I am certainly very much in favour of the first change, but not a big fan of the second as I really don’t believe that speed is the problem.

I know this is going to sound like a rant and I am going to sound like a grumpy old man, but for $&#*’s sake people how hard is it to move to the left?  It’s not rocket science, you overtake and then you move back to the left, simple really.  It is so frustrating when every morning there is a procession of cars in the right hand lane with space to the left. It drives me insane.  And at the risk of being sexist and careerist (ok, probably not a proper word, but it is now coz I just used it), the worst offenders appear to be tradies and women.  In the afternoons especially, the right hand lane seems to be Ute after Ute with a tradie dressed in high vis behind the wheel interspersed with the occasional female and a smattering of P platers.

Are you supposed to keep left on the motorway? Umm, well yes, absolutely you are. The Queensland drivers handbook sees fit to mention that on any road where the speed limit is over 80 that you must keep left unless overtaking or turning right. Queensland transport sees fit to list failing to keep left as an offence worth two demerit points and a $100 fine. https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/fines/demerit/points#keepingleft

Anyone ever seen the police enforcing this?  Anyone know anyone who has ever got an infringement notice for it?  I highly doubt it, especially considering that the police fail to abide by their own rules. I once followed a police car all the way from Brisbane to the Gold Coast and it sat in the right hand lane the whole way, and I can assure you he wasn’t overtaking traffic the whole way as it was in the middle of the night and we were the only two vehicles on the road, and he was driving under the speed limit and I therefore could not legally overtake………arghhhhhhhhh, so annoying. They are pretty quick to give you a ticket if you are a few k’s over the speed limit though. And don’t get me started on driving instructors; there is one in particular who I see sitting in the right hand lane on a regular basis.  So if the police won’t enforce it, and driving schools don’t teach it, what hope have we got?

So if you don’t drive much (or if you learnt to drive in Queensland), you are probably wondering what the big deal is and probably muttering to yourself that I am a grumpy old man and that I should just build a bridge and get over it.  Well, the big deal is this; our road toll in Australia is appalling when you compare it to most European countries (by capita or by vehicles on the road obviously as we have a much smaller population).  More on the stats a bit later.

So why does this make our roads more dangerous and what data do I have to prove it? (More on the data later).

Very simply, it encourages ‘undertaking’ (passing on the left) and weaving.  If people can’t get past the idiot sitting in the right lane driving a couple of k’s under the limit then they lose patience and go on the inside.  To make matters worse, it isn’t just the far right lane that is a problem as plenty of people will just sit in the next one in without moving left to fill the gaps, so as a result those that are a little less patient are weaving from lane to lane in all directions rather than just a nice simple process of overtaking on the right and moving back to the left.  So simple, and more importantly, so predictable.  What we have a the moment is a highway full of traffic that moves in a totally unpredictable way (and we wonder why there are so many accidents?…).    And, to make matters worse, indicating appears to be optional.  I remember when I learnt to drive I was taught ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’.  Seems pretty intuitive to me,  look in the mirror to make sure it’s safe,  indicate to let others know your intentions, and then move.  I’m not sure what gets taught here, but you would be forgiven for thinking that it might go a bit like this; ‘change lanes whenever you want, you do own the road after all. Indicate if you feel like it, but only after making your initial move. Mirror?  That’s for checking your make up.

So, let’s take a moment to compare our roads with somewhere like, say Germany.  Germany has an awesome motorway network. Most of it has tolls, no speed limits and signs everywhere telling you to keep right. They drive on the right remember, so for us that would be like having reminders to keep left. Could that really make a difference?  What, just a few keep left signs could make our roads safer? Surely not.  Germany also has snow, ice, fog, the occasional mountain road and much more traffic.  So with all that speed and dodgy driving conditions you would expect it to be a pretty dangerous place to drive wouldn’t you?

Australia doesn’t have a great deal of snow, ice or fog and we have speed limits slower than most of the rest of the world, so, you might expect our roads to be pretty safe in comparison to Germany.  Not so unfortunately.  We have about 5.1 deaths per 100,000 people whereas Germany has 4.1.  It might not seem like a massive difference but when you consider the fact that on much of the German motorway network you can drive as fast as you like it seems crazy that ours is higher.  If you compare us to the UK where their speed limits are similar and they also drive on the left then clearly we have a problem.  In the UK the road toll is as low as 2.8 per 100,000.

Now I’m not saying that’s failing to kept left is the sole cause of this high death toll, but I am sure it is a symptom of a bigger problem.  Perhaps if we could focus on better driving standards all round then perhaps we could increase our speed limits a little and still have safer roads.  Maybe we could start by keeping left, move on to learning how to use our indicators correctly and maybe learning how to merge.  Higher penalties for texting and driving would be good and perhaps the death penalty could be re introduced for facebooking and driving (only kidding……..well, maybe).  Once we have mastered all that perhaps we could run some advanced driving courses that could tackle the big issues like picking the correct lane on a roundabout……..don’t get me started on that one!

Now I know this is supposed to be a travel blog, or at least a blog chronicling my year off, and this has really been a rant about driving to work, so I apologise for being a grumpy old man, but now I have got it off my chest I promise to keep future rants to a minimum, and they will be travel related.

I hope this hasn’t put you off following.  Off to Cambodia at the end of the week so the next post will be about that…..promise.

 

 

 

So, we have been talking about it for a couple of years now (by we I mean my wife Alison and myself), saving for a year and planning (loosely) for the past 6 months.

Planning for what you may ask?  Well, in a nutshell, I have had this idea in my head for a few years now about taking a year off to travel when I turn 50.  I wanted to re live the backpacking days I had 25 years ago when I first arrived in Australia, but go to some of the places I missed, and perhaps in a little more style.  Travelling Australia in a camper van instead of sleeping on a mattress in the back of an old station wagon for a start. Perhaps 2 star accomodation in Asia rather than hostels with signs warning about having your possessions chewed by the rats (yes, that is for real).

Somewhere along the road it seemed like a good idea to incorporate getting a job at the Commonwealth games on the Gold Coast (home for the past 15 years). Although I have been working in vocational education for almost 20 years now I am a qualified chef.  It’s been a long time since I have actually stepped foot in a commercial kitchen but it seemed like a good idea to apply for a job working in the kitchens at the athletes village.  I remember very clearly telling a friend about this at an awards night a couple of years ago.  She is also a chef, and also works in vocational education and has not been in a kitchen for while.  She did not hold back in telling me that clearly I must have lost my marbles and forgotten what it’s really like in the kitchen.  And the language she used to remind me was as colourful and descriptive as I remember from my days in the sweat box.

Not to be dissuaded, I applied and was offered work in the Village from early March through to late April. So was Ali, she does ‘front of house’ while I cook up a storm.

So when I returned from my Christmas leave and told my boss, he also used some colourful language and told me I must have lost my marbles. Seems to be a bit of a theme there.  In fact, most people have told us we are a little bit crazy, but almost without exception they then say they wish they could do what we are doing.  My response to that is always, you can, but of course, timing is everything.  Five years ago with kids still in school we wouldn’t have done this.  In five years time, who knows? We could be sick, broke or concerned that getting back into the workforce might be too hard.  The time is right now and I do not intend to miss it.

So what is the plan?  Well it goes a bit like this at the moment:

1. Quit work – done, finish up in just over a week, just in time to fly to Cambodia.

2. Take a side trip to Cambodia. Why? Well why not, I need a holiday, plus it seems like a good way to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.

3. Work the games – sorted.  My first shift is the day after we get back from Cambodia.

4. Rent out the house – our son James has got that one sorted (I hope).

5. Do some house sitting- first one lined up for Melbourne in June.  More on that later.

6. Travel Oz.

7. Do Asia (preferably the bits I missed 25 years ago).

8. Do Europe, well maybe Portugal and the Greek Islands at least

It is worth noting that the planning after point 5 is pretty loose, and intentionally so.

All of that brings me to this blog.  I am not a selfie posting narcissistic Insta, FB or Twitter user, just not really my thing, but maybe there will be a few people interested in what we are doing, perhaps it might even inspire a few others to shake of the shackles and do something that makes them feel alive for a while.

if you want to hear more, tell me about it and I will try to tell it like it is warts and all. I can’t promise a weekly blog but I will at least try to cover the interesting bits as we go along.