The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost

by Rachel Friedman

  “I couldn’t get out of bed in weather like that,” one guy says. He shakes his head sadly.

  “Can’t wear those in the snow,” the other announces proudly, pointing to my flip-flops.

  Home is so far away, mentally and geographically, that I’m starting to feel like I’m not even from there anymore.

  My first overnight bus is a lesson in discomfort. I take my assigned seat next to a German sprawled out like we’re in yoga class. Around two A.M., he groggily inquires if I’m carrying “something sharp—like a knife” in my pocket. He claims something is poking him, and it’s “very, very irritating,” he informs me, promptly elbowing me with a gangly limb as he settles back into sleep.

  “Umm, no, I’m not carrying a knife,” I mutter, but I sure wish I were. I can’t sleep. I am in an aisle seat, and I try lying back against the headrest, but really I don’t understand how anyone sleeps sitting up. On planes, I normally unlock my food tray and bend myself over it, making a pillow out of my folded arms and drifting off happily, or lean against the side when I have a window seat. But I have nothing to rest on here, and sleep is just not happening, so I shut my eyes and wait for daylight to come.

  Six hours later, before dawn, I’m dropped off at a desolate bus stop in Coffs Harbour with a spiky-haired British girl. We quickly realize we’re headed to the same hostel. A minivan is supposed to pick us up, but when it doesn’t arrive, we consult our vague guidebook maps and shove off into town. Carrie studied law at university before a summer in France led to a year there, working for a charity. That led to a year abroad in Australia. She’s obsessed with Bruce Willis and is remarkably adept at inserting him into seemingly unrelated sentences, as in: “Isn’t this just like in [fill-in-the-blank movie] when Bruce Willis did/said/thought/wore …?”

  Carrie and I drop our stuff at the hostel and, after two cups of strong coffee, head straight to the Big Banana together—an homage to Coffs Harbour’s number one export. The whole country is chock-full of these kitschy “big things” (the big prawn, the big gum boot, the big Captain Cook, the big poo), and it all started with the Big Banana. Why did Australia construct all these magnificent gaudy sculptures? I can understand the regional and historical ties of some, but the big poo? Whatever their reasons, they punctuate many a childhood memory of family road trips, a fact I am sorely jealous of.

  The Big Banana is just what you’d expect. We stand outside it, snap a photo, then stroke it phallically like everyone else does. Inside is a haphazard exhibit. The lead photograph, with the caption SPECTACULAR VIEW OF THE BIG BANANA, is missing the corresponding photo. We peruse the abundant stuffed-banana souvenirs and sidestep the unnerving number of kids chin-deep in drippy chocolate-covered fruit. Outside the Big Banana are trike rides, since no Australian tourism is complete unless it requires a helmet and the possibility of hurting yourself at least a little.

  Carrie wants to visit the botanic gardens, but I want to see Mutton Bird Island, so we go our separate ways, with plans to meet up later at the hostel. I’m used to traveling with Carly, each of us with definitive ideas about where to go and what to see, with Carly usually winning the debate, so it’s strange to disengage from someone I’ve spent the afternoon with. It’s freeing to do my own thing. I walk along the coast to Mutton Bird Island, kicking the sand along Park Beach. When I get there, I notice lots of scuttling crabs in the mud, and a distressing amount of mutton bird poop, but no actual birds. Behind me on the walk is an Irish family, parents and two kids.

  “Well, I saw the birds, so now you have to see the airport,” says Dad.

  “But why would you want to see an airport?” the confused mom asks. I want to know, too, but I lose his reply in the wind.

  Mutton Bird Island is associated with one of the Aboriginal communities’ dreamtime myths, the creation stories that explain their origins. Before Westerners arrived, only elders were allowed to visit the sacred island. The mutton bird’s real name is wedge-tailed shearwater; it was given its current moniker after early settlers tasted its fatty, muttonlike flesh. The bird’s migration patterns are astounding. They cover about fifteen thousand kilometers in two months, pursuing an endless summer across the Pacific. The trip commences in mid-April. All the chicks are left behind until, desperate with starvation, they set off after the adults, somehow managing to trace the unfamiliar migratory route. In the first year, only about half those leaving the nest survive, but still they are compelled to try and make it on their own, like most of us are.

  After Coffs Harbour comes Byron Bay. If Sydney and its northern-beach environs took me mere hours to fall for, then Byron Bay is love at first sight. The streets are a bustling mix of cheap eats, art galleries, spas, yoga centers, and little shops selling flowery dresses. Its new age laid-back persona ohms through the whole town, and I can feel my whole body adjust to the new relaxed rhythm. Even the waves are serene; they curdle toward the shore with languid indifference.

  My hostel is full of murals and mess, the walls and furniture all varying shades of ocean blue. Two backpackers lounge in a cream-colored hammock out on the balcony, flipping through tattered magazines, legs tangled together. Nearby picnic tables are packed with shirtless guys and girls. Bare feet abound, as usual.

  “Breakfast is free, and dinner is four dollars,” says the tattooed hipster who checks me in.

  The dorms rooms are typical—six bunk beds wedged in and not much else. I throw my stuff on one, then head off to catch the shuttle inland to Nimbin, a nearby town in the North Hinterlands I’ve wanted to visit since reading about its otherworldliness in my guidebook. I’ve got plenty of time to explore Byron when I get back. I’ve already decided to stay here at least a few days.

  Nimbin was a quiet, struggling dairy town until the 1973 Aquarius Festival, a convergence of college kids, hippies, and alternative-lifestyles adherents. After the party ended, many attendees stayed on, some forming communes. Soon enough, other creative types found their way here, as did environmentalists and people interested in permaculture.

  The main drag has an unexpected frontier feel, low wooden buildings with jutting roofs offering needed shade. But unlike an old western town, the roofs sport psychedelic paintings—rainbows and dreamy lizards, dolphins in the sun and radiating stars. People smoke pot everywhere, blatantly and without pretense. Every few steps I’m offered cannabis or Nimbin cakes, the local equivalent of pot brownies.

  The shuttle offers an optional tour that leaves an hour after letting us loose to explore the city center. After scarfing down a veggie burger at the Rainbow Café and traversing the length of the teeny town three times, there isn’t much left to do, so I gratefully hop back on the air-conditioned vehicle. The driver is a transplanted Londoner, Ed, who has lived in Nimbin for nearly twenty years. He tells us all about how Nimbin (Nimbinji to the Aboriginals) used to be a place where the old men of the tribes headed when they became too feeble for the nomadic lifestyle. They’d come here and chill with the other wise old dudes. There was plenty of bush tucker (foods native to Australia), so they didn’t have to hunt every day, and periodically the young members of the tribes who showed particular promise would stay with them for a stretch to learn about the history of their people.

  Ed describes Nimbin’s annual Hemp Olympics, where, he tells us, “getting a green medal gives you a whole different kind of high.” Events include joint rolling in the dark (if you make it to the second round, they turn on a fan) and bong throwing.

  Ed is eager to prove there is more than this to Nimbin, however. After visiting several permaculture communes, we check out a company that develops and produces alternative-energy sources. It was started by a man called Peter Pedals, who at first simply pedaled a bike to charge a battery for his electricity. Then he hooked up the bike to do his laundry. Then, just for shits and giggles, I guess, he rigged it to a juicer and pedaled around town selling his homemade concoction. Now they make items like solar-powered flashlights, water-powered fans, and plant-based air-conditioning syst
ems.

  On the shuttle bus back to Byron Bay, I strike up a conversation with an American girl. She attended Berkeley, came out here to travel Australia the summer after graduation, and was about as far along in her journey as I am now when she hit Byron Bay. That was nine months ago. Now she unrolls a thick blanket each morning near the beach to sell her homemade jewelry. She shows me a beautiful necklace, transparent blue beads on a silver chain.

  “How long are you staying?” I ask her.

  “Probably forever,” she replies dreamily.

  Back in Byron, I stroll along the sand. There’s a juggler performing. His head is shaved minus a small circle in the back where a dreadlocked ponytail sticks out like a cactus in the middle of the desert. I’m not sure he’s technically juggling, actually, since the oversize clear orbs are always in contact with his body. They flow up and down his arms one after another, over his smooth skull, then back down his arched stomach. I keep expecting them to drop, wondering if they’ll shatter on the sandy sidewalk, but they never do. Around him struts a woman on stilts, her dreadlocked hair in pigtails, her abnormally long blue pants a shade darker than the ocean behind her. It’s hypnotic here, the dying waves, the soft sand, the promise of all the days to come on the road. Unlike in Ireland, I feel completely alone but not at all lonely.

  [13]

  Our heroine dives into the depths of the briny sea, then launches herself from great heights. Survives the crocodile’s lair and a particularly strong current, is rewarded with some small insights.

  Heed this warning: four and a half hours in Surfers Paradise is four hours too long. From seductive, sleepy Byron, I arrive in the land of gaudy skyscrapers and shopping centers. I’ve left New South Wales for Queensland, and this is the last stop on the Gold Coast, a stretch of beach where the overzealous tourism has a commercialized, theme-park feel. Along the Esplanade, elderly men stroll with pretty, young Asian girls on their arms. A crazy-haired woman scrutinizes the sand with a metal detector. Coming across a Hard Rock Cafe is the final straw. The only indication that this is still the Australia I love is a prominent sign at the beach cautioning: DANGER, MARINE STINGS, yet two swimmers happily splash away.

  While I’m lying down on a bench waiting for the minutes to rattle by until my train arrives, two creepy young men approach me, doubling the number of creepy men who have approached me since I arrived in Australia over three months ago. The first guy wears smudged sunglasses and asks if he can have my plastic water bottle when I finish. He’s rambling somewhat incoherently, but from what I gather his current plastic bottle has a hole in it and needs replacing. My bottle is still three quarters full, and I tell him I won’t be done for quite a while, but he shrugs and stands there. After ten minutes, he finally gets the hint and starts to walk away. Then he turns back. “You’re a very pretty girl.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I wish someone would say that about me.”

  “What—that you’re a very pretty girl?”

  He shakes his head sadly.

  The second guy towers over me, blocking the sun. He makes Romeo #1 look like the picture of good health, he is so abundantly drunk and dirty in ripped shorts and bare chest.

  “Hey, babe.”

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  “Baaaaabe,” he pleads.

  “Go,” I command in the same tone I used to employ with my West Highland terrier.

  “I could have taken you out. A good Australian bloke. It’s really too bad,” he says, like I have just made the biggest mistake of my life.

  I take this second interference as a sign and head to the station to wait for my nine P.M. train. When it hasn’t come by nine-thirty, I call Greyhound only to be informed there is a one-hour time difference in Queensland, a fact I feel the government should swiftly and decisively remedy so no one is ever unwittingly stuck in Surfers Paradise again.

  I reach Brisbane, my next destination, late at night, but the hostel’s owners have left me a key in an envelope outside the entrance. This place’s best years are long past. It has a sinking roof and overgrown brush everywhere, as if the house itself is one more root. Inside, the kitchen is a mess. Unlike other hostels, where everyone tidies up after themselves, here, abandoned, crusty pots and dirty silverware overflow the sink and countertops. Hair clogs the shower-stall drains. The beds smell like they have been doused in insecticide. I chose the place based on its proximity to the station and city center and, as always, its price—twenty-three dollars—but instantly I’m glad I’m staying only one night. It’s the kind of hostel that makes you consider scrapping the whole consciousness-raising backpacking thing and checking yourself immediately in to the nearest Quality Inn, which would feel like the Four Seasons at this point. In general, though, Australian hostels are pretty great, and they’re ubiquitous. Some nine hundred thousand backpackers wandered through Australia in 2003, spending around $2.7 billion.

  I’m out the door by eight-thirty A.M. to explore Brisbane before catching a four P.M. bus. It feels like 100 degrees already. I’ve been in Sydney for three summer months, but the Brisbane heat is a new beast to be reckoned with. A few times I buckle against the nearest tree, swooning and fanning myself like a lady-in-waiting. I spend much of my day lazing through the botanic gardens, walking along the raised bridges where the mangrove roots disappear below brackish water. When I have longer stretches in places later on in my travels, I’ll wander like this for many days, luxuriating in the little surprises around every corner. It won’t be anything like our speedy family trip through Europe when I slept (slept!) through the Alps. It will be slow and meandering. It’s so counterintuitive for me to absorb my surroundings instead of studying the regional culture, history, and exports as though preparing for an exam. In scorching Brisbane, I discover one of my favorite ways to see a new city even if it’s not hot as Hades: walk without purpose, pausing every hour or so for an iced coffee or an inviting park bench to people-watch or strike up a conversation with some willing locals, but never entering any of the myriad galleries, government buildings, or museums on offer. In Brisbane I’m my own tour guide.

  The next day I land in Hervey Bay, a do-nothing town that occupies itself mainly with setting up tourists on trips to Fraser Island. Here I happily fork over ten dollars to patronize the gruesome, kitschy Vic Hislop’s Great White Shark and Whale Expo. Vic, a strong-armed, sandy-haired shark hunter, is a self-proclaimed Australian icon. He perpetuates numerous conspiracy theories, like many shark-attack deaths are covered up as drownings, and whales who beach themselves are often shark-attack victims that, even after humans push them back in, will stubbornly rebeach, terrified of what awaits them in the water. The entrance is an open-jawed shark, and inside, three frozen great whites hold court over the crowds. “Call me Vic,” I say under my breath.

  I’ve booked an eighteen-dollar-a-night hostel in the heart of the Hervey Bay backpacker action. I make friends with a perky Canadian girl, and we go out for a few drinks. She’s a nurse who’s come to Australia to travel for a few months, then find work somewhere in the country for a few more months. Her boyfriend was supposed to come with her, but they broke up two weeks before the trip, so she is here on her own.

  “He still has his ticket,” she says. “I don’t know if he’s over here or what, but if I run into him, I’m cutting his balls off.” She mimes a snipping motion.

  “Cheers to that!” I toast a little too loudly. We’ve known each other for a grand total of two hours, but I’m connecting at inexplicable speed with other lone backpackers. We have no past and most often no future together, so we let it all hang out—our body odor, our raw emotions. It’s intoxicating to strip away the excess: it’s just me, my backpack, and the world.

  The next morning I’m back on a bus for a day tour of Fraser Island. While we’re waiting to depart, I watch two picnicking families outside the window. Each has a little girl around five, and the two are eyeing each other from neighboring tables. As if in some silent accord, they hop off the
ir benches in unison and approach each other. A flurry of animated conversation ensues, but soon one family has finished and packed up and is ready to push off. A distracted-looking mom turns to tell her daughter to say goodbye to her new friend, and she vigorously embraces her while the other girl pats her back motheringly, as though assuring her they will meet again, though it saddens her that it might not be for a very long time.

  Fraser Island is one big sandbar created by thousands of years of long-shore drift. Our bus driver, George, tells us this and much more, his voice so even and low that I drift off to sleep several times. Though his monotone never reveals any hint of pleasure, he does end each sentence (in typical Aussie good-natured boasting fashion and also because it’s usually true) with the phrase “in the world.” “This is the largest sand island in the world.” “These are the only trees of this kind in the world.” “The dingoes on this island are the purest breed in the world.” He also treats the tour like it’s a spelling bee: “Those are coffee trees—C, O, double F, double E. Coffee trees.” Finally, every time we get off the bus, he specifies exactly how long we have within a five-minute time range. We’ll be there for “fifty to fifty-five minutes” or “thirty to thirty-five,” but never the unforgivably vague ten to twenty minutes, say. He checks his watch while we reboard the bus, counting the seconds until someone is officially late and he can sigh disappointedly into his hairy wrist.

  He invites passengers to sit up front with him for a stretch, and I, perpetual pleaser, dutifully make my way up there after lunch. He tells me how all the proceeds from the tourist camping tax are supposed to go toward the maintenance of the island. He raises an eyebrow and looks meaningfully at me for longer than someone off-roading in a massive four-wheel-drive bus should. When I don’t inquire further, he moves on to more benign subjects like the various reptiles found on the island: frogs, snakes, skinks, and my least favorite—the stout, crocodile-tailed way-too-freaking-big-to-be-a-lizard goanna with its old-woman-neck wattle. I nod with feigned enthusiasm.