That's what you get when it rains

Been an expensive day. And an unhealthy one. Not something I’d readily repeat in a hurry.

First order of the day was my contribution to the Qld treasury coffers courtesy of the local boys in blue. It seems my driving habits from Sydney aren’t too appreciated here. Speeding in Sydney is like trying to run through mud. Trying hard but not going very far. Do the same thing without the traffic however, (like the long open roads here) and silly speeds ensue.

Lesson learnt though. Just a matter of setting cruise control and doing the steering. No stop start traffic here. There is nothing and I do mean NOTHING here that requires rushing.

Secondly, almost embarrassingly so considering my last post, I had Maccas for breakfast, KFC for lunch and was seriously considering a thin pepperoni pizza for dinner. But after a quick glance at my expanding waistline I headed for the gym and played basketball for about an hour. Then it was vintage cheddar, Vegemite and Vita-Wheats for dinner…..

Last thing was paying for a new guitar I just bought. Well almost new. Got it from a girl in Brisbane and it’s pretty much new. Had to buy a hard case locally as Aus Post won’t accept anything over 105cm in length.

Which leaves the question of what I’m going to do with my existing guitar. Really don’t want to send it back to Sydney so I’ll probably trade it in for some $$ off the case. Am considering donating it to a local primary school in Cloncurry though. I’ll call them tomorrow to see if they could do with one.

Hopefully tomorrow bodes a better day with respect to both input and output. And if it doesn’t bloody rain again, we can get some work done.

Food for thought

The biggest challenge I face right now is stopping my brain cells from slowly switching off. As I may have mentioned before there is a lot of downtime in this job and I’m on a holy quest to find something to do to fill it.

Anybody that’s spent a bit of time with me quickly realises that I abhor sitting idle with nothing to do (often indicated by a sudden shaking of my leg) and I normally just prefer go to sleep instead. But when you’re up at 5.30am and not usually sleepy till midnight, that’s a few too many hours to be spending asleep.

So, I guess this blog is one way to fill in sometime. Catch is that if I have enough time to write something decent, I probably don’t have anything too interesting to actually say either. Ah well, such is life.

But not today. I actually got a chance back in April to dash home to sort some things out, but also gave me a chance to repack. After umming and ahhhing I decided to bring my SnowPeak Giga Power liquid fuel stove.

Now for those of you who aren’t gear nuts like me, it’s basically a portable stove that runs of any high combustion liquid like kerosene, white gas or petrol. I have since discovered it runs very well on AVGAS and I have an unlimited supply of it from the planes that I’m working on.

So instead of getting stuck in a motel room eating cold soup and instant noodles every night, I can cook pasta properly, fry eggs, steak etc and have a decent meal without having to go out.

In the spirit of cooking and boredom avoidance, I decided to see what I could do with the stove to cook some quick healthy meals.

Lo and behold, warm or cold soba noodles in a tradtional Men Tsuyu soup.

One pack of soba noodles $2.50
A few sachets of complimentary motel sugar FREE
One bottle of Pearl River soy $2.20
One bottle of local dry white $5
One pack of dried Shitake mushrooms $2.30
A couple of fresh cup mushrooms $1.20
One red onion $0.60

Boil up the mushrooms in 500ml of water until soft
Throw in 125ml of wine and 125ml of soy sauce and the sugar
Add fresh mushrooms
Gentle boil until it looks all good
Set aside

Boil up soba in about 4 mins.

Add soba to soup and add onions
Tada! Dinner is served.

Nothing too flash, but sure beats Maccas everyday. All for about $15 and is enough for 3 nights of food. And not too bad tasting if I do say so myself. Hardly any fat, very little sugar and if you scale back the soy, not too much salt.

The sauce that’s made up can be kept over night and just chuck in new noodles the next night. One bunch of noodles is enough for most, 2 if I’m really hungry.

All ingredients were bought from Woolies btw. I used to bag out the Asian sections in supermarkets all the time. In Sydney that makes sense when you can get it cheaper and fresher from the asian store usually located right next door, but here in Isa, it’s a God send.

Well if I’m really struggling for food I could try this:

Ok, quick comparison of Sydney to Mt Isa.

A gentleman who is considered wealthy by local standards is wanting to buy something to run the family around in.

Sydney
Porsche Cayenne $150,000
Method of payment: multi-year finance lease through line of credit owned by the family trust


Mt Isa
Piper Malibu $3.5M
Method of payment: $100 notes coz fifty's won't fit in the back of the ute



A young twenty something year old steps out of a car like this. You immediately think

Sydney
Drug Dealer

Mt Isa
Young mine worker with an alcohol and pokies allergy

An example of peak hour

Sydney


Mt Isa


I think you get the idea.
Really it comes down to 3 things:
A) there's some good money to be made here either on land or under it
B) there's no one to impress, no image to keep up with andC) if you avoid the pokies and the pubs you end up saving a stack of money

That plane above is a plane I've seen here and in Cloncurry. And yes it was bought brand new for $3.5M and it's used as the 'family runabout'. And the other thing, there's no finance around here. Banks won't touch land owners after all this drought. I can pretty much guarantee you that it would have been a case of 'here's the cheque, where's me plane?'

When you see things like this, you realise how image driven Sydney is.
Beautiful city, beautiful harbour, beautiful looking people. It's almost as though living there you're implicitly driven to keep up and look good. And when you're only earning the average of what everyone else is around the country, there's not a lot of change left in the piggy bank at the end of the week. That cycle of work, borrow, buy repeat seems to be getting worse by the day. I've never met so many good looking broke people than in Sydney. I'd be willing to bet, most under thirties in Sydney would have less than half or even a quarter of their net assests in cash. The rest is all fluff. Flashy car, flashy clothes, flash home and no money left at the end of pay day.

I get it now when people say Sydney is an expensive place to live. It's not just about how much rent or houses cost (as ridiculous as they are), it's also about living like you belong there. How much it costs to eat out, to look good, to buy things, it all adds up. And unless you wish to be ostricised as some bogan, you'll do what you can to keep apperances up.
I haven't travelled to many of the major cities like NY, London, LA etc but I think the story is much the same.

"Pretty broke people"

So much for the laid back land of opportunity of beaches and a laid back lifestyle that we get stereotyped for...

BTW, your measure of your wealth has got nothing to do with what you've got. It's about how much you can afford to give away. Have a think about the sheik in the UAE that just donated $12 billion dollars to advance literacy in his country. How much do you think you could give away without it affecting your next latte. Well, that's your measure of wealth.

A bit of culture and civility

It's been a day of relative uneventfulness. High winds mean no flying and no flying means nothing to do other than occupy myself with food, music and high thought. Well 2 out of 3 ....

Managed to find a quite well stocked cellar here and I'm slowly working my way through a bottle of 2000 Rosemount Shiraz whilst watching/listening to the SBS classical series on at the moment. I feel quite the aristocrat despite sitting in an $80 motel room in the middle of no where. Oh and all the shops here close at 12 so it's going to be a long afternoon. Did manage to clean and moisturise my hat though ... (yes leather is dead cow skin and all skin needs moisture from time to time)

So, this all leads to having to opportunity to catch up on missing thoughts from the last few days. I must though my guitar skills are making a marked improvement.

I'll split them up as I know the attention span for most people reading this ended about 5 sentences ago.

Until the next day of no work.....

Finally away

Well we're off and running for this job now. Got 2 flights in today which has kept me reasonably busy. The rain system that started south and came over yesterday has moved on.

Went out to see Spiderman 3 last night. (Yes they have a cinema here). Nothing great, about the same as the second one. Did see some previews for Transformers though which looks great. Micheal Bay directing and Spielberg producing, can't get much better than that. (Anybody wonder what I'm talking about rent 'Heat" and fast forward to the bank robbery scene. My kind of fun)

Dropped in to the local night club to have a look. Left after about 2 mins and bought a six pack of beer to have with dinner.

One thing I will say, travelling central NSW and QLD make me realise a lot of Australia still makes judgements on people from what they see straight away. Walking into a pub in Dubbo looking the way I do seems to be fuel for getting a stubbie in the back of the head. But hey, I'm not complaining or sterotyping, it is what it is. I've accepted what I have to work with and look for other ways to experience different environments.
I'll have a rant at some later point about passive racism when I've travelled a bit little bit more.

Finally, I'll be keeping this blog (hopefully) to accounts of something reasonably interesting or insightful as I get very bored with "well today I did this, then I met so and so, and then I went here..." and I wouldn't want to subject any readers to the same pain.

Waiting for clouds

Got up a little later today (7.00am) to check the weather. Cloud level needs to be at least 6500ft above ground to do the calibration flight today. It's at 6100ft and falling and rising.

So every hour we call to check the levels and try and decide whether to go up and try anyway. Why the hesistation you ask? Well each flight in running costs is around $5000 so going up just for sake of it isn't the smartest thing to do.

In mean time, I've managed to setup this blog as promised and done a bit of running around.

Hopefully we get to fly today as we need get this out of the way before we can start the proper surveying.

I'll be building a travel tips page as well so hopefully this will keep me occupied during the down times.

Getting up to scratch

For the sake of completeness I'll quickly detail where I've been up until now.

I've gotten a job with a geophysics company as a data operator. Basically I follow a plane around the country (and eventually overseas) and collect and process the data that is generated during the aerial surveys.
The team consists of 1-2 pilots, an operator (me) and of course the plane. We're based in a location anywhere from a few days right through to months at a time depending on how big the job is.

I started on 23rd April in Bourke NSW for a few days and then went to Dubbo for a week where I was trained up by the existing operator.
Since then, I've been in Cloncurry QLD by myself, learning and working but ultimately getting to grips with the job on my first real shift.

Now I'm in Mt Isa QLD for a few weeks and I've settled in quite nicely. I made most of my rookie mistakes in Cloncurry although I'm sure there are many more to come, but I'm quite confident in what I'm doing now and happy to be working.

Where is all begins

Well I've finally gotten around to starting a blog and to keep all the loved ones (and not so loved ones) up-to-date about my whereabouts. Pondering the title I came up with something that really sums up my whole life's motivation right now.

Anywhere But Sydney

Now don't get me wrong. Sydney is a gorgeous, vibrant place and somewhere that I'll always see as home. Problem is having lived there my whole life, it started to go all shades of gray and it was time to make a move. I really want to like Sydney again and the best thing right now is to get away, see what else there is out there and develop an appreciation for all the great things I already have.

Gratitude and humility are virtues often spoken of but just as often missing in big city thinking, and it's time for me to re-discover both.

So "Anywhere But Sydney" it is for now. I hope to share my simple and everyday, to my more layered and pensive moments with those who would care.

Travel isn't about "finding yourself" in new places and environments.

All the bits you're looking for are already a part of you, inside you.

Too often though they get buried under what's comfortable and easiest.

But, perhaps with new perspectives, fresh challenges and different ideas,

the parts you're looking for might just come out to play.