Europe

The weather in Brisbane was cool, fresh and autumnal. It was early May. Emigration seemed like a strange dreamworld, the forms, the bodies of the other travellers in motion.

The plane was near empty. A cheap Garuda flight to Bali. Just me and half a dozen other Australians, two of whom were noisily getting drunk at the back of the flight. "Whey! Bali!" As we lined up at immigration they staggered about in front of the line. "I think I've lost my paaassport mate. Think I left it on the plane," one of them said. "Fuckin shut up," his mate said. At the airport we were accosted by hotel touts who were waved away by the more experienced travellers. I took their pamphlets at least, greenhorn that I was.

In the pool I overheard another Aussie traveller say "These Australians they come here and they get drunk on the plane, spend a week here drunk, get drunk on the plane home and then say they've seen Bali."

On the plane out of Bali we were held up for about 2 hours on the tarmac by a single first class passenger who kicked up a massive stink about being shunted into economy because of overbooking. Two hours of sitting in a massively full 747 on a tropical tarmac and finally we were off. 20 hours and three landings later we were in London, where my mum was there to meet me. London seemed thoroughly sedate and twee compared to the frenetic chaos on the streets of Kuta.

London was hateful to me, first impression. No value for money whatsoever. I quickly realised what people had meant when they said London was "inhuman." But it wasn't the kind of inhumanity I quite expected. The weather was amenable, warm and springlike. The buildings were clean and the the roads immaculately maintained.

Paris was just as mean as London but more expensive still. Preposterous prices. We paid eight Australian dollars for a cup of tea under the Eiffel Tower. And this was 1993. My impression of the French was that they hated foreigners, particularly those who spoke English. It seemed a harsh and user-unfriendly place.

I slipped out of Paris from the Gare du Nord station. Rolled out of there in the early evening, an overnight train to Prague. At the time Prague was still a touch exotic, something of an unknown quantity. Certainly it seemed like a whole unknown world to the folks back home in Australia. I managed to fall asleep for a few hours on the train as we tracked through Germany, waking up at 5 in the morning in East Germany. I put on my headset and listened to the Stone Roses "I wanna be adored" as we rolled out through the East German countryside, all dreamily covered in early summer fog that slowly lifted to reveal the kind of half-wooded hills topped with castles and hunting lodges you expect from the storybooks. It's been said that East Germany was more the "real" Germany than the West, which had been Americanised.

As we entered the Czech Republic time seemed to slip back a few decades. People seemed to go about their business more slowly and dressed more simply. I saw a body swinging from a rope on a tree branch, a woman.

I liked it in Prague, enough to stay.