sunshine

I suppose to many my life of jetsetting across the country and hanging out with interesting people and looking things up on maps and going and looking at them and taking photographs and other notes, might seem intensely glamorous. I suppose it does to me, too, though it does get to be hard work. I have been at a conference all week and it has been tremendous, but at the same time, it has been tough and I have probably slept about 4 hours a night (I imagine people tend to exaggerate how little sleep they get as anything over 6 hours looks like not much of a problem, until you do it). I am not quite sure of that 4 hour figure as I was in a hotel room in Caloundra where my mobile and laptop had one (Melbourne) time, my watch another (local) time, and the clock by my bedside had another (one hour in advance of Melbourne time, which is one hour in advance of Caloundra time). Phew. It gets dark earlier in Caloundra, and it gets light earlier too, and that is also confusing, to the parts of my brain (most of it) I can’t reason with. So you see my problem.

I am now in Maroochydore, in a motel called Wun Palm. I think it might just be the rain/humidity/blah blah factors, but at the moment I don’t feel extremely favourably inclined towards the Sunshine Coast, which is unusual for me, as you might have noticed I generally find multiple things to love about every part of my lovely nation. Leaving Caloundra this afternoon – shortly after the above posting – I meandered around the hinterland and ended up in Nambour, which I don’t have much to say about though I liked its civic offices and its cane railroad, so maybe I did find positive things there, but on the whole, don’t like it much. Thence to Maroochydore, where as I said I am right now, except by the time I put this on my blog it’ll be around 24 hours later.

What else can I say. Every cup of coffee I had in Caloundra was shit, shit, shit, it was either weak as piss (what is the derivation of that term? I’ve never tasted piss, but I bet it has a strong taste – any comments?) or stale and bitter. I know coffee is meant to be bitter, but its bitterness is supposed to have a richer erm I don’t know what you’d call it, and this Caloundra coffee just basically sucked shit I can’t explain. It just tasted like you’d imagine coffee would taste like if you read about it.

I have to give up coffee (never will).

The other D-U-M-B thing about conferences is you get fed every two hours and you start getting grumpy if you aren’t fed. By the end we were all milling round like zombies wanting our nourishment. It is disturbing when you realise what you’ve become.

What I like about the Sunshine Coast is the old Sunshine Coast, of which there are a very few vestiges. As I said to someone on the first day, however, I was walking round wishing it was like it was thirty years ago, then realised that thirty years ago I wouldn’t have appreciated it at all – tacky.

But there was a way cool place across the road from the Caloundra Civic and Cultural Centre, a supposed resort called Kronk’s, which I have some pictures of.

The above was deftly composed a few days ago maybe Thursday. The next day was a bit of a debacle as I was rung by Virgin about an hour before I was due to depart Sunshine Coast Airport (I was driving down a backstreet in Coolum, wasn’t that a Peter Sarstedt song or was it Ralph McTell), and told that my flight had been cancelled ‘due to engineering’. Or the lack thereof presumably. This caused a dragout from two hours to seven hours in transit, as we all had to be bused to Brisbane and cool our various heels there for an age, then be flown to Melbourne. Total nuisance, though I did manage to read two books (Tribes of Palos Verdes by Joy Nicholson and The Boys in the Island by Christopher Koch – two books about gangs and hangs, basically). Virgin ridiculously gave out vouchers for treats for people who had been inconvenienced by their fuckup, and this was redeemable for $6 at airport cafes, basically bringing the overpricing down to something slightly reasonable for a scenario you wouldn’t be paying for anyway if you weren’t stuck at the freaking airport. Also I got to sit next to a guy who really needed two seats, and who held onto the seat in front of him contorting himself towards the aisle, so he didn’t touch me.