It’s been over fifty years since the publishing of Kerouac’s seminal On The Road, having played as much a part of the Beat Movement as it’s legacy forms a piece of legend for anyone who idolises the past and present of what’s hip and cool today. About three weeks ago I set about myself to undertake a spontaneous and poorly planned road trip to the most foreign regions of the great and often barren nation that is Australia, my peers likening it to the journeys travelled by Kerouac in the post war era across America. The plan was to hitch hike to the Northern city of Darwin, over 3000km by road from my home in Brisbane, I brought with me just over $150, an overnight bag and a satchel filled with journals. Whilst I did not seriously consider myself a modern day Jack Kerouac, the parallels between his adventure and mine were becoming very clear, oh but how the roads had changed in half a century- and they were soon to bare their glaring differences.

It all started upon waking up in the sweltering Summer heat of my inner-city workers cottage after another wasted night of binge drinking on the university down time, the only real souvenir from the night before being a crippling hangover, half a cask of wine and a Swedish backpacker lying next to me. I looked over to her and had a rather powerful thought as she lay there with a pillow covering her face to block out the sun. This girl, in the month or so of travel she’s had, has probably seen more of this island continent than I have. Without wanting to spend another minute in that airless bedroom I collected myself and headed into my lounge dialing the numbers of contacts I thought might want to take a bit of a road trip to the furthest corners of the nation on this beautiful November day. As it turned out, in this day and age nobody had the keen adventurous spirit of myself, so I thought “fuck it” and embarked on the expedition alone, hitching a ride about two hours north to the coastal community of Coolum with an old friend of mine who lived up there. Coolum, being a bit of a bohemian seaside paradise was my home for the night, but not wanting to dwell too long, I scored myself a bag of strong hydroponic marijuana from a group of hipsters and hit the road again. This time, my intentions were to blindly head north with the first person to offer a ride.

Either people are less welcoming to the wandering stranger these days or Mr. Kerouac let on that getting people to trust you enough to ride shotgun in their car was a lot easier than it actually was. I suppose in this age of car jacking and chilling backpacker murders the former probably holds some truth. I ended up sitting on the shoulder of a highway for most of the morning and if it weren’t for the cool coastal breezes I could have easily perished then and there having brought no water with myself and baring another killer hangover. Eventually, a man in a white utility stopped and offered me a ride with him, he was taken aback that I had no idea where I was headed and in response to my wild aspirations of nation wide travel, suggested I ride with him up to Hervey Bay on the glorious Fraser Coast.

“Mate, you’re fucken crazy. I’m not gonna drive you up to bloody Darwin but I live at Hervey Bay, I’ll drop you at Centro.”

Hervey Bay isn’t exactly a holiday destination and I had no idea what ‘Centro’ was but whatever. I was game.

As it turns out, ‘Centro’ is a shrine to the suburban dream. An enormous shopping mall complete with attached tavern and transit centre. Even a days drive out of the city and into the world of coastal fishing towns and surfer communities is not enough to escape the grasp of suburbia and everything that propagates its continuation in this contemporary existence. Devastated, I circled the carpark, realising I’d allocated more money to drugs than I had to food and without a bed to sleep in I prepared myself for the first of many rough nights. After scraping together seven dollars, I hit the local Super IGA and bought myself some bread, tabouleh and ham. This was a bit of a lavish but it provided both dinner and breakfast to the point where I couldn’t eat any more, the ham kept fresh under the cool of night.

(This is just a tip for those of you who don’t know. Home made sandwiches are fucking cheap and filling. Deli meals can be made for under a couple of dollars and it’s usually enough to feed two. Get involved.)

It was about here that I realised there was no turning back for a while. I had committed myself to the road and I was no doubt in it for the long haul. The cost of heading back prematurely would set me back in rent for a week, something I simply could not afford to do. I waited until sunset before moving to find a bed, the shame of being judged by all these middle class suburban people was a new experience for me and a perspective I had never imagined I’d view. For I truly was what the majority of them thought and from that there was no escape; I was lost and with nowhere to go. I rugged up underneath some plastic packaging in a cardboard box that once held a refrigerator behind a TV studio housed in a warehouse, fulfilling every homeless person cliché along the way.

At this point my adventure had already taken a turn for the worst. Where Kerouac had the thriving culture associated with the Beat scene in post-war America, I was stuck in the heartland of the unremarkable. The towns not big enough to have something going on, whilst Capitalism and the spread of mass consumerism meant that they were no longer quaint enough to be interesting. I was just barely surviving in a place that held all the character of a wasteland, however at the same time, the very fact that I had to struggle to survive at all in the middle of suburbia is what made it mentally bearable- you could say it kept me sane.

The next morning at five I was out of that place. In a classic case of being at the right place at the right time I sighted a van with detailing indicating it was from Rockhampton- a small city another full days drive north of where I was. I waited around for the driver and sure enough he was heading home and kindly offered me a lift. If I had learned anything from my previous experience of hitching a ride it would have been that knowing where you are going is important if you don’t want to be berated for being a foolhardy idiot. Thinking that I wasn’t really interested in another lecture, I made up a string of lies claiming that I was a Rocky local and had found myself down the coast after a weekend camping. Pretty weak story and he probably thought I was a weirdo but it was enough to keep him quiet.

I landed on the streets of Rockhampton with all the expectations in the world. Two days driving from home and I was a free man. The truth is that Rockhampton is a cruel and unforgiving place for a man with no car and no money, I may have been free from commitments back home but my dire situation with regards to money and transport left me with little options. With no map easily available I figured I had a fifty percent chance of finding the right road to get me out of this town and keep me going up the north coast- it was either left or right. The trouble was that these days Rockhampton is an urban sprawl of single story factories and arterial roads that seem to go nowhere in particular, the place is unnavigable on foot. Completely disheartened, I decided to check out the town but ended up sleeping on the streets of Rocky for three nights in a row. Taking left overs from bakeries around the city became the norm, I felt like I had been doing this my whole life and with each heist I’d get a little thrill and sense of satisfaction. It’s weird how you change when you’ve seemingly got nothing to lose. After the third night I got the opportunity to shower at a roadhouse which I jumped at and soon found myself in a fresh set of clothes ready to take on whatever the road could throw at me.

Again, a long day waiting for a ride on the shoulder of what I figured was the road north and I was back in the midst of the world of a hitch hiker. Deep and meaningful conversations with people I would never see again. It’s like they become my best friend for the time that we were together and then just as easily as we’d met, we were separated, a polite wave goodbye and they’re gone. I’m gone. I found myself in the quiet seaside town of Mackay. Picturesque, quaint and for the first time in my adventure I felt like the trip was worth my while. There’s something a little more wild about Mackay, it’s this ‘wildness’ that gets preserved because there exists here a certain quality that not even the developers of sprawling shopping malls and chain hotels can capitalise on. It didn’t even bother me that I had no bed, the charm of sleeping on a real beach, under the stars is often unmatched. Money was not an issue either, earlier in my journey I had purchased some salt which I had been saving for a moment like this, for in the wet sand live small shellfish called Pipis. You can dig them up with your foot and cook them on an open fire, they taste like a tough mussel. Add a bit of salt and there’s no fresher taste. The idea of sustainable living outside of the law and society has always excited me and for the next leg of the trip I felt like a true modern day proponent of the themes behind On The Road. Spontaneity, creativity and the blatant rejection of a mainstream lifestyle. To top it off I was seeing a side of the country I had never seen before.

For the next week or so I floated slowly up the coastline of what is known here as the Whitsunday’s with whoever would take me, smoking joints, eating shellfish, sleeping under the stars and avoiding all the tourists leading normal lives. I had never felt more content. I had truly made it. This is what the road is about, I thought to myself. Airlie Beach, Bowen, Home Hill, Ayr and finally Townsville. All of these towns with the same pristine beaches, some more beautiful than others but all possessing their own distinct charm. It was this part of Australia and my adventure, that inspired me to write anything at all and now, here I sit in an internet café in Townsville spending the last of my dollars whilst frantically tapping out a story from a collection of scattered journal entries and drug muddled memories. At this stage, I feel like I needn’t continue anywhere. I’m out of money and I think I’ve seen enough. There’s plenty more of this life of mine and just the beginning of what you could call my life on the road. Extra points for getting the reference.

On the whole you could say that although the road has since been sterilised by all that we find sickeningly comfortable and normal in this modern world, there remain parts of this planet that are untouched- or preserved. The Beats may be long gone but the basic principles visited in their most famous literature still remain relevant. At least to some.

PEACE.

by my good friend and bigtime cool guy from Brisvegas Australia, James Gemmell.

The Joke

A man arrives at the airport and gets into a taxi. The man asks to go to the city centre.

Taxi Driver – “Do not worry, I will get you there nice and fast, no problem, I’m a professional, I’m  a professional “

They keep driving towards the city centre when a red light comes on, instead of stopping the taxi driver goes right through the light, and even speeds up.

Passenger – WHAT ARE YOU DOING?? You just went through a red light”
Taxi Driver – “Don’t worry, I’m a professional, I’m a professional”

They keep on their journey and then they burn right through another light

Passenger – “YOU JUST DID IT AGAIN, why do you keep doing that?
Taxi Driver – Don’t worry about it, I’m a professional”

So they keep driving when they come to a green light. The taxi driver screeches to a halt and almost causes a crash behind him.

Passenger – “NOW WHAT ARE YOU DOING?  You just stopped at a green light, what is wrong with you?
Taxi Drivers – ” There might be other professionals around, and I don’t want to crash”

That joke pretty much sums up the driving in Romania to a T. The lanes are really only there as guidelines and when I was there I experienced road rage, where two drivers literally got out of their cars and started strangling each other right on the side of the road, quite an intriguing scene. I also found out that if you don’t break the rules on the road, you really won’t go anywhere, so all you can really do as a passenger is hold on and pray. Oh and when you are in a taxi, it is rude to put on the seatbelt, no wonder that they have the highest casualties on the road of any other European country.

Enough about the driving. Since this is the first travel article, I am going to write a little about my experiences, throw in some pictures and generally try to explain/review what I did.

I had the added benifit of visiting someone who knew the area, the history and more importantly had a car that they could show me around in, so it might not be what you get if you went backpacking.

The Mountains

The second day I was there, I was taken up into the mountains, which was incredible. We drove for about 2 hours out of Bucharest. We visited Vlad the Impalers (better known as Dracula due to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula) castles. He was known as the Impaler due to the way he killed his enemies, and the name pretty much sums it up. The reason I say castles is because there are two, and no-one is really sure which one he actually stayed in. One of them happens to be located on a road that is easily accessible  and the other on top of a mountain, so of course they call the more accessible one his authentic castle, purely for tourists. It is definitely worth going to see both, but don’t expect to Rasnov (the non-touristy one) without a fight, because we sure as hell couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Rasnov – Draculas Castle

From there we ventured further in to the mountains. This place really is beautiful. This part of the country was untouched by Nicolae Ceauşescu who, in Bucharest, destroyed most of what used to be called ‘The Paris of the East”, but more about that later. We actually experienced a traditional funeral, in a town of no more than about 100. They still had the coffin in a cart, being pulled by a horse. It is incredible to see how little this part of the country has changed, and was really breathtaking. It felt as if we were intruding on this moment, because didn’t live there and definitely looked like outsiders. This is the reason that I did not take a picture of this moment, but it really was an a moment to behold.

We then kept driving and came across sellers by the edge of road. I can’t imagine it was the best job, but just imagine the views from the office, stunning some would say.

View from the “office”

Cheese and Pretzel seller

Apple Sellers Car

Apple seller jamming

The last stop we made on our trip in the mountains was to Peles Castle. Legend has it that to stop Ceauşescu destroying it, the people who worked there claimed that there was a poison in the wood, that needed to be treated before it could be knocked down. They claimed that the gas would kill any workers who tried to destroy it because it would be released. They stretched out the “treatment” long enough and kept making excuses for enough time that he never got a chance to destroy it. It is fantastic that it still stands because this place, as my friend Steph said “Looks like the palace out of beauty and the beast”. To be fair, I think it is a pretty fair comparison, take a look.

Front of Peles Castle

View from Front

Courtyard

Bucharest

Up until Romania, I had never been further east in Europe then the Czech Republic. Bucharest was a completely different beast to Prague. Prague has most or all of its historical architecture in place, whereas most of the old part of Bucharest was destroyed to make way for the Peoples Palace. I also had a personal tour guide who showed me around Bucharest, with an extensive knowledge. I learnt much more than I did in Prague, purely because of the personal touch.

The People’s Palace is a monstrosity that was built purely to fill Ceauşescu’s ego. It is the most ridiculous building I have ever seen, and really dominates the landscape in downtown Bucharest. It is the second biggest building in the world, smaller only to the Pentagon. I took some photos of it while I was there, but this image does it better justice than the shots that I took ever could.

People’s Palace from the air (http://www.bucharest-life.com/media/pics/palace-of-parliament.jpg)

The buildings that flank it to the top right and left are the headquarters of the Secret Service in Romania. They are now very classy apartments in Bucharest, but still also leave a scar on the landscape.

Looking back at the aerial shot of the People’s Palace you can just make out a small church just behind the Secret Service buildings on the right. This church, called the Biserica Antim, narrowly missed out on demolition when these buildings where made. It was literally given a new foundation, put on rails and then moved 100m down the road to make way for these buildings. This is incredible, given the way that everything else was just destroyed to make way for new buildings.

Biserica Antim

Entrance to Biserica Antim

Courtyard

From here we walked towards the old part of the city. This was fantastic because this part of the city was intact, and as Dan (my guide) put it, the whole city is getting a lick of paint. From this point, I don’t have many specific names of places that we were, so I will let the pictures do the talking.

Building works and a mix between the old architecture and communist buildings

The gates to another one of Dracula’s Castles, this one is in ruins.

Courtyard off of Strada Selari

Staircase to rooftop cafe

This building used to be a cinema. What is interesting about this old cinema is that Dan remembers going here to watch movies on the weekend with his father. This was special because TV under communist regimes were limited to 2 hours a day and they were purely messages supporting communism. They did not have any other choice of what they watched, so visiting the cinema was a particularly exciting experience, that seemed to be a defining point in his childhood.

Interesting doorway in the old part of the city that leads to a “russian club” according to Dan.

This is a well conserved part of the city, with a church in the distance. Even though lots of churches were destroyed, many still stand, which is not surprising becuase more than 80% of Romanians are identified as Eastern Orthodox, according to the 2002 concensus. Recently Bucharest has started investing in new roads for some of these old streets. This is party due to the fact that some of the roads used to be made out of wood. The reason for this is because of all the wooden carts that used to be pulled around the city, and the fact that it was easier to build that a proper stone road. They didn’t really plan ahead with that type of road which is why they are doing it properly this time around.

View down the Bulevardul Unirii towards the People’s Palace

Fountain in the middle of Piata Unirii

Billboards around Piata Unirii

Sunset around the fountain.

Rush Hour around Piata Unirii

This is the CC building. This is where, on December 21st,  Ceauşescu gave his last speech before fleeing the city by helicopter. He fled to Târgovişte where he thought he still had support from his countrymen. He was decidedly wrong, and he was returned to the city centre, where he was formally tried and shot by a court on December 25th 1989.

This building made me think that Romania is heading in the right direction with their rebuilding of the city. You can’t see closely with this image, but the glass portion of the building extends all the way to the ground, where the traditional building is only a shell. A really innovative piece of architecture in my opinion, hopefully something that will be continued more and more around the city.

Should you go?

I can’t really tell you whether you should visit Bucharest or not, because the experience I had would vary a lot to the experience that anyone else would have. I had a tour of the city by some one that had lived there all their lives, who had even experienced some of the communist regime. I also stayed in a ex-patriot “compound”,  so did not actually stay in the city centre.

All in all though it is a very, very interesting place that is undergoing some major developments, and will be changing alot in the next 10 years. So yes, I do think that you should go, but I think 1 or 2 days would be plenty enough to see the whole city, it is not very big and is incredibly walkable. Also if you get the chance to head out of the city into the mountains, it would be very worth the time to do it. Keep an eye out for the reviews of the places I ate, and the clubs that I went to. They will be featured in the Places section soon.

Thanks for reading and keep it UJU

Master RAS