le cauchemar

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at the end of our trip, gerard labelled our holiday 'a nightmare'. i can only ever remember having had one nightmare in my life (involving getting trapped in a thorn bush while being pursued by a vampire), and the two experiences were quite dissimilar. in reality the holiday wasn't too bad - it's just that every fairy tale has to have its villain. the villain - in this case - was me! ;)

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i was late leaving darwin because a small aircraft made an emergency crash landing at the airport and it took a few hours to clear debris from the runway (would you believe). i kept thinking of that tiny piece of metal that flicked up into the concorde's engine in paris all those years ago and caused the plane to explode and incinerate its passengers.

i had just come off nights and had missed a day and a half of eating and drinking when i turned up in hot and humid singapore. pre-arrest at hostel reception, i had to bolus myself with 1L ice lemon tea before i could even put down my bag. the bag itself was little (only 6kg plus carry on sack!) and i was feeling pretty proud of myself until gerard rocked up the next day with everything he needed packed into a little carry-on rucksack c/o ms poppins and i had to hang my head in shame.

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we happened to be in KL during the 50th anniversary of independance - merdeka day. jet fighters flew low over the city and a midnight celebration involving the littlest fireworks display in history occurred in our part of town, where thousands of revelers sprayed each other with shaving cream before hurling empty shaving cream cans across the crowd. the sound of metal hitting random skull frequently punctuated the cheering and laughter.

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if you look at a world map, you'll see that anyone wanting to sail from anywhere in the east to anywhere in the west or vice-versa basically had to sail through the straits of malacca, so the straits settlement of malacca is, historically, of infinite importance. first the portuguese, then the dutch, then the english controlled this little town, each leaving suprisingly little evidence of their occupation before leaving it in the hands of their successor. boring. my impression of malaysia is that it is a made-up country - something carved out by colonial powers for trade purposes with no real national identity - and the modern sense of 'nationhood' cannot aptly be applied to it. i don't know much about indonesia, but it seems to be a made-up country on the other side of the dutch/english dividing line, and i think we'll see many more 'new nations' and civil wars before things attain some sort of natural balance in the region.

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my first impressions of singapore were of a sterile utopia. a country where you can get arrested for kissing or possession of chewing gum, where there are multi-storey billboards in the middle of the town warning of the dangers of jay-walking and the benefits of being a considerate pedestrian, and videos being played on loop in all metro stations educating people on how to spy on other commuters and report suspicious behaviour to the police. people were neither happy nor sad - just shopping.

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but as i dug a bit deeper i found a place in my heart for singapore - and not just because one of my favourite people comes from there. there's something classy about it, and as gerard and i sat in the colonial palm-tree lined raffles hotel indoor courtyard being served singapore sling cocktails by waiters in full livery with a lounge band strumming a double bass in the corner, i realised that at least for one evening, i was not above looking down my nose at the rest of the world, not above treating myself, and certainly not above being bourgeois.

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i'm back in darwin now, living in a beautiful raised, airy house in the burbs with a (mercifully) non-medical housemate. i've finished a week of nights in the emergency department which i found fascinating, and am looking forward to more. and yet part of me feels bored and concerned that a creeping stagnation is on the horizon. big ideas have been replaced with no ideas, and spontaneous activity with general debility. gerard was right about our nightmare. he's suspiciously right about most things. the biggest challenge awaits - it's time for ondrej to face his waterloo.

the plague

i watched the sun rise over the timor sea at 07:00am from the escalation ward on the 8th floor of the royal darwin hospital on my second last of 7 night shifts, then went home and vomited. in 24 hours i'll be on a plane to singapore, so let me take this opportunity to show you some pictures of darwin beaches at sunset - just gorgeous. if the waters weren't full of crocodiles, box jellyfish and deadly irukanji, one would almost consider going for a swim.

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charles darwin

i feel a rush of pride about living in a city that has been named after a man of science. darwin. a frontier city, a mish-mash of aboriginal, south east asian and anglo-european that is so disconnected from the rest of the nation that one might consider it to be in a different country altogether (were it not filled with the usual bunch of bogans and goons of all different races and ages that make up the bread and butter of australian society). it's the middle of winter and it's 30 degrees. i'm sunburnt. people never turn off their air-conditioners. i think i was bitten by a mosquito and developed a transitory viral-type arthritis. welcome to darwin.

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4 weeks have passed now since my arrival. several things set darwin apart for me. foremost: aboriginality. the rest of australia lacks an aboriginal population. murdered or beaten into submission or chased off, they're just not there. the northern territory is an aboriginal territory, and the streets (and hospital beds for that matter) are filled with non-english speaking aboriginal people with different views and languages and traditions that are very much alive and well, contrary to what i had started to suspect from my ivory tower in the south east of the country. and that realisation is life-affirming. obviously there are issues and confusions at the interface between any two (or more) cultures, and i'm not going to provide a running commentary on the saga, but there is a wonderful vitality here that doesn't exist in the rest of the country, and darwin is a greater place for it.

for all intents and purposes, i'm now in a relationship, and the ability to approach social interactions without the desire to pursue anything sexual or relationship-based has been a life-changing liberator. all of you single people out there know what i mean. it's the hunger. that hunger that's always there whenever you meet someone new - the hunger for intimacy, or sex, or just a chance at something new. this is the first time i've really been without it for living memory (and with confirmed juvenile-onset alzheimer's, my living memory is not that long), and it's so interesting. so boundlessly wonderful to be able to approach new people from an angle of emotional self-sufficiency, with no need in there tainting the interactions.

obviously this just impacts upon casual interactions. once you dig a bit deeper, the vast majority of people are unutterably dull, including myself and anyone else who works in the health system. i now believe that i lost my personality on a crowded street somewhere in early 2004, and think it may have been trampled on, crushed, and kicked into a gutter, only to be washed into the sewage system during the next storm and later out to sea where it now swims unhindered. i wish it well, my personality. my ex-personality that is.

i've been camping a few times, getting out on every available weekend. many of the parks around here are quite similar: cool-watered gorges and rockpools for swimming in under waterfalls, with hikes around. i'm not complaining. the greatest of these parks is kakadu. last weekend, in a relatively last minute set-up with two other doctors (helen and chris) from the emergency department, we bundled ourselves into a 2WD (after our 4WD-hire deal fell through) and headed down to kakadu for a weekend of pleasure. we were told that jim jim falls was not to be missed, so we drove as far as we could down the 60km 4WD track (about 50km) towards the falls in the little sedan (with a couple of 21 year old german hitch-hikers) and walked/hitched the rest of the way there. it was amazing to see how many people with 3 or more empty seats in their cars simply refused to pick us up. as is always the case, it was a couple of people with absolutely no room who stopped to pick us up, and got the germans to climb on the roof and had me and helen clinging to the roofrack at the back. hanging off the back of a 4WD down a dirt track in kakadu sounds really great in the re-telling, but the agony of those arm cramps is unparalleled. helen's poor old arms gave out near the end and she was thrown clear.

jim jim falls was spectacular. an arena or rock that seemed to stretch straight up into the sky some 200m with a waterfall spraying mist down into a cool, deep waterhole below, surrounded by other warmer rockpools for paddling in. bliss. the german boys pranced around on the rocks half naked for our pleasure, and we eventually hiked right up to the source of the falls over a plateau of rock in the afternoon sunshine for more swimming in the rocky, desert streams. it was one of the most beautiful places i've ever been.

the following day we went on a cruise along the south alligator river (misnomer - there are no alligators in australia except in the zoo) and chilled out watching electric blue dragonflies posing on lilly pads and big estuarine crocodiles patrolling their waters. it's the dry season, but there's lots of water nonetheless. look at the pictures and try to imagine what it will look like during the wet when the water level is up to 6 metres higher!

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we ended our day at a rocky outcropping in the north east of the park known as ubirr, with high quality aboriginal rock paintings and a sun setting over wetlands reminiscent of an east african national park. not a bad way to spend 48 hours.

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back in darwin, i'm keeping busy doing a relieving position (and so getting rotated around to a different speciality each week which is interesting and skills-boosting) and seeing a variety of things at the darwin festival which is on right now, including traditional aboriginal dancing and (would you believe) an opera.

my apartment is a dark little hole next to the hospital with mildew climbing up and down the walls and into my lungs, and if i don't die of invasive aspergillosis in the meantime, i'm going to move in to a funky little apartment closer to the city in two weeks. i'm working nights this week, and then during my week off after that i'm being carried off to malaysia/singapore by ridiculously cheap tiger airways tickets and the promise of an olympic gold-medal standard cuddle with gerard in KL. will report back on those adventures soon. in the meantime: peace.

quote of the week: "It's probably not a good idea to be chewing on a toothpick if you're talking to the president, because what if he tells a funny joke and you laugh so hard you spit the toothpick out and it hits him in the face or something."