I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like, or just keep reading here.

When I got off the plane in Sydney, I headed for Kings Cross because that’s where the cheap hostels are. Cheap? It was the worst place I stayed in all my travels. It was like a homeless shelter.

Top of my to-do list for the next day was to collect my mail from Poste Restante. Back in those days, we didn’t have phones or the internet, so the only way to stay in touch with someone was to tell them what city you were headed for, and they would send you a letter at Poste Restante. To find your letter, you’d go to the biggest post office and rummage through all the Poste Restante mail.

Rumour had it that 10% of Swedes visit Australia, and they are all called Larsson or Lindberg, so finding your mail is tough if your last name is Lawrence. But I found my mail eventually. There was one letter from my mum, a book on learning Tahitian from a lovely girl in Bora Bora and a letter from Amy, who I met in Moorea.

Amy’s letter had her address in Bondi. Bondi is popular because it’s close to the city and because it’s beautiful. Amy was living by the beach with a bunch of travellers, and they let me stay for a few days.

Amy and I had a bit of a fling in Tahiti, but by the time I got to Sydney, we were not flinging anymore. We were still friends, though, and we hung out for a few days until she got a job, and I decided it was time to move on.

Australia is enormous. It’s 1,600 miles from Sydney to our destination in Cairns.

Someone offered me a ride to Port Macquarie, a beach town in New South Wales. The beach towns are gorgeous, but they are all a bit civilised, so after hitchhiking up through Byron Bay and Coffs Harbour, I was pleased to make it to Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Surfer’s Paradise is like a posher, richer, more modern version of Miami Beach. It’s all fancy restaurants and rich people in cocktail bars… and surfers! I rented a surfboard, and after a couple of days, I could surf well enough to lose my contact lenses.

Next stop, Brisbane.

I hadn’t been shopping for months, so I went looking for some new clothes. I was walking through the shopping district when I heard Beep! Beep! Beep! from behind me. There was a 1960s Volkswagen van with two young ladies waving frantically. It was Anette and Helle from Bora Bora! They made me get in, and we went for a drive.

We ended up back at their campsite, and they invited me to stay the night. There was a mattress in the back of the van that the three of us shared, and as it got dark, Anette whispered to me, ‘I broke up with my boyfriend!’

You might remember the night in Bora Bora, when Anette wished she were single.

‘Tomorrow!’ she whispered.

When tomorrow came, we went shopping in the city centre, and I went into a bookshop while they went clothes shopping. When I came out, I couldn’t find them. They were gone.

I wandered back to my hostel, sad and alone. It was time to hitchhike some more.

Hitchhiking in Queensland is cool, with all the tiny towns with just a pub and a corner shop. I had a bunch of traveller friends that I met in every town. We weren’t travelling together exactly — some were hitchhiking like me, others took the bus — but we’d all agree on the next town, and we’d meet there in the pub. We had a game of poker going, and when we sat down in the pub, someone would pull out the cards, and we’d play some more.

It was illegal to drink in Queensland unless you were planning to have dinner, but there was a trick that everyone soon learned.

‘I’d like a beer, please.’
‘Are you planning to have dinner?’
‘Yes, I am.’

They would give you a little sticker to put on your shirt to say you were planning to have dinner. You didn’t have to actually eat anything. You just had to plan to.

I usually got rides quite quickly. I met a bunch of really nice people, and we talked about their lives and my adventures, but I wasn’t so lucky on my next ride. I stood by the road in the hot Queensland sun and was still there six hours later. My luck improved, though, when a flatbed truck stopped, and the driver called me over.

‘We saw you this morning. You’ve been here all day! Why don’t you come back and spend the night with us? We’ll find you a better place to get a ride tomorrow.’

‘Thank you! That would be marvellous!’ I said.

‘Jump in!’

There were three couples in the back of the truck — about my age — and they handed me a beer. We drove out, way out, into the country. We eventually arrived at this big ol’ colonial-style house with a veranda. They had acres of land, with a river running through it, and a huge swimming pool. Everyone stripped down to their undies, and we swam.

When we got out of the pool, they gave me a beer, then some wine, and they offered me a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken (I’d never had Kentucky Fried Chicken before, and I was instantly hooked). We drank and we sang and we played guitar until late into the night, and in the morning they took me back to the road. I was in a better spot this time, and I got a ride almost immediately.

Next stop was Hervey Bay.

Hervey Bay is right next to Fraser Island (now called K’gari), which is a big island about fifteen miles off the coast. I had hardly been in Hervey Bay for an hour when two Swedish dudes asked me if I wanted to rent a Land Rover with them. After another hour, we had two Land Rovers, four Swedes, two Swiss, two English and a German — with a mix of men and women. We bought some food, drove onto the ferry, and arrived on Fraser Island in less than an hour.

Fraser Island is seventy miles long and is made entirely of sand. There is a tropical rainforest, lots of freshwater lakes, dingoes and NO ROADS! It’s a paradise. We drove along the beach for a bit, swam in the sea and just had a wonderful time.

As evening came, we stopped by one of the lakes for the night. We sat around a fire, drinking beer and a bottle of Southern Comfort. The two Swedish men pulled out their guitars, and we sang.

The highlight of the evening — of the whole trip — was when Peter and Anders played Swedish folksongs, and the beautiful Anneli and Catarina sang along. The songs were filled with sorrow, but their voices were celestial, and I think we all wept a little. Tatjana snuggled up in my arms, and we passed around the Southern Comfort. It was heaven on earth.

Our next stop was another island, and Tatjana and I swam on the reef by the Whitsunday Islands. I laughed into my snorkel, almost drowning, when a very large Māori wrasse came and bit Tatjana on her bottom. She thought I had pinched her, despite my protests. A few minutes later, I got my very own bite on my buttocks, and I turned to see Tatjana pinching me to get her revenge.

We did our tour of the next island — Magnetic Island — on horseback, and our guide led us to ride bareback through the ocean. Queensland is often visited by a deluge of box jellyfish, locally called stingers. Our guide told us there were no stingers around today, but most of our group didn’t believe her.

Tatjana and I — and all my poker-playing friends — agreed to meet at Mission Beach for Christmas. It was strange to be celebrating Christmas in the hot, tropical sunshine, but we managed. The inn we were staying at had several huge barbecues, and we bought ribs, steaks, chicken and anything else you might cook on a barbecue. Lots and lots of it. And plenty of beer and wine.

When Christmas Day came, I was sick with some horrible tropical disease. I was so ill, I could barely stand. Tatjana took good care of me and held me in her arms, whispering, ‘Ich liebe dich. Ich liebe dich.’ as she stroked my hair. I wasn’t ready for love, though, and neither was she, and we agreed to go our separate ways. Tatjana went back to stay with her uncle in Townsville, and when I returned from the verge of death, I set off for Cairns.

Cairns is special. The highlight is the Great Barrier Reef, just off the coast, where I saw every fish in the ocean. I wasn’t quite ready for the reef sharks, who swam fifteen feet below me, and I was even less ready for the diver who thought it funny to grab a shark’s tail to be towed around. ‘Don’t make him angry!!’ I shouted into my snorkel.

Our snorkelling guide showed us the head of a giant moray eel poking about two feet out of its cavern, until our guide dangled a fish near its face, and suddenly there was eight feet of moray eel poking out of that cavern. ‘I hope they don’t eat snorkellers,’ I thought.

My partying with my poker friends reached its peak on New Year’s Eve, and we partied far into the night. I eventually fell asleep in a sunlounger just as the sun was coming up, then slept the whole day through.

Traveller’s Tip: It’s a bad idea to sleep the whole day, barely dressed, in the tropical sun. The skin on my face peeled off in a single layer.

That was enough fun in Queensland, and it was time to head for my final destination — Darwin. I stood out on the road, and my ride came quickly. It was a big, blue transit van driven by an ageing hippie with a tiny, four-week-old, Australian Cattle Dog on his lap.

The usual route to Darwin in those days was to drive down to Townsville, across the middle of Australia, then straight up to Darwin — 1,800 miles in all. But my hippie driver knew a shortcut.

We set off over the mountains behind Cairns, and we were soon driving along a tiny dirt track, in the hot, hot sun. After a couple of hours, he stopped the van and got out to top up the oil. The van had an oil leak, but it was OK because he had eighteen gallons of oil in the back. We stopped every two hours to top up.

There were some tiny towns along the road. None were big enough to have a pub, but we could stop to get some water and rest for the night. Eventually, we turned south for Mt Isa, and our dirt track got even smaller. We saw countless kangaroos along the way, and my hippie driver had this theory that if you beep-beep-beep the horn as you go by, the kangaroos will stay out of the way — but the kangaroos didn’t know this theory. Their theory was that if a van goes beep-beep-beep, you are supposed to jump in front of the van in a frenzy and scare the passengers halfway to death. He did lots of beeping.

After a bit more driving, we saw a car by the side of the road with a flat tyre. They had been waiting seven hours for someone to come along and rescue them, and once we got them back on the road, we agreed to stick together in case one of us needed help. There was only one town for 200 miles, and after that, the road started to get bumpy. But did we slow down? Reader, we did not. The bumps got bigger and bigger until, eventually, our whole van got airborne and came down with a crash, and the engine fell out the bottom.

We were going nowhere after this, so we waited an hour for the other car to show up. It was only about 100 miles to Mt Isa, so I hitched a ride with them.

I managed to find a tow truck in Mt Isa and sent them back to find a hippie with a broken van transit van with its engine on the ground. Meanwhile, I found a pub where I traded stories with the 1926 North Queensland Rodeo Champion while we drank lady glasses of beer.

The hippie van showed up the next morning. His engine was back where it was supposed to be, and would I like a lift the rest of the way to Darwin? ‘Er. No, thanks.’ I said, and I got a bus instead. I took the bus to Three Ways in the middle of Australia, then hitched a ride the rest of the way up to Darwin with a young German couple in a Volkswagen sedan.

Driving 600 miles through the burning hot sun in a Volkswagen was a new experience. The car didn’t have air conditioning, so we tried opening the windows, but even when we just opened them a little, the car immediately filled with hot desert dust. Driving at night was no good because it was pitch black, and the evening was when all the kangaroos came out to play. We managed to make a ten-hour drive take two days, but we got there in the end.

Darwin had been almost completely destroyed by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, and they picked the perfect period to rebuild. Imagine a city dressed in 1970s fashions. All the buildings had something cool to say. Darwin was lovely, but I don’t think it’s worth a week of driving to go there, and I might skip it next time.

There wasn’t a lot to do in Darwin every day at 4 pm, when everyone would take a glass of wine out onto the verandah to watch the thunderstorm. Beautiful! I only stayed a few days, though, and then I got my plane to Indonesia.

I’ll tell you all about that next time.

I’m writing my memoirs. Follow along if you like.

All About Me