Chapter 3: Four days in Madrid

Madrid was in some ways a frustrated and foreshortened stay; not in length but in what I was able to achieve. I will have to return to Madrid - and Castile more broadly - one day to finish it off. But then I will also have to return to Lisbon one day, not to finish it off but because I enjoyed it so much. That's the trouble with my travels: I cover a lot of ground but I never seem to get anywhere, because nowhere ever gets ticked off the list. It gets moved back down for a while. Except maybe Dubai. Yes, except for Dubai.

Nevertheless, I'm thankful for being free to believe I'll be back. On the train from Lisbon I shared a carriage with a man from California who was visiting 14 European countries in 31 days, and often going to multiple cities in those countries. I can think of election campaigns with a less frenetic pace (hi there, Prime Minister. Holding one campaign event a day went well, didn't it?). To top it off, he'd been to Australia and New Zealand last month, covering the North and South Island, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, the Reef and Uluru in three weeks. After Europe he plans to go on to Africa. When I suggested this trip would help him work out where he'd like to come back for longer, though, he demurred and said softly that maybe he could tell his kids. Reading between the lines he'd received some bad news and was making the most of his time. Good for him.

Perspective notwithstanding, I didn't feel I made the most of my time on day one. After finding my way out of the main train station I headed to what I knew to be the closest metro station to my hostel. I'd screen capped the route, of course, but the stop had two entrances that were both on the same street: I couldn't tell North from South. And so I headed in the wrong direction, increasingly lost and decreasingly warm. The streets all looked the same and the one I needed was too small to be named on maps, and once it was apparent that I had no idea where I was I opened up my Booking.com app, where the page showing the name of the street was open without needing mobile data. Rather than garble the pronunciation my strategy was to just show them the street name and ask if they knew where it was, knowing it must be close.

People kept pointing me in the same direction, so all was well, right? Wrong. I was wandering further and further away from where I'd left the metro station. Too far to be heading towards the hostel. An hour later I still wasn't in out of the cold. For a while I thought there might be two such streets or, less charitably, that people wanted to appear helpful so were providing directions even though they had no idea where I needed to be. But then I figured it out. 

The app page I was relying on features the hostel name and street address, but it also has a photo, usually of the hostel but in this case of a local landmark building. And it just so happened that the building in the photo was really close to my hostel. The directions I was being given were perfectly accurate... assuming it was that building I was trying to reach. Excellent. Just great. After connecting these dots together I found somebody to whom I could explain what I was looking for, and he kindly Google mapped the route I needed. At no stage could I have been more than 400m from the hostel. 

Again I've lavished far too many words on just finding my way to drop off my bags, so I'll move forward. I got unlucky with the weather here: it's expected to be cool in March but it was unseasonably cold even for Madrid. Cool is one thing, SNOW is another. 

I wasn't equipped for winter weather other than a pair of trousers and my pair of Portuguese jumpers, and I didn't want to buy lots of gear for what is likely to be one freezing week of the entire trip. So I adjusted my plans. I had wanted to go to Segovia, a World Heritage-listed town just outside Madrid with a Roman aquaduct, but it was forecast to be even colder there than in Madrid so I decided against it.

The Tuesday I had arrived was forecast to be the warmest and clearest of the four days I had available, so I headed out to the zoo. Big mistake: it's terrible, and I was in and out in under three hours. So I wasted my clear day, but que sera sera. Wednesday was supposed to be 13 and rain, Thursday nine and SNOW. So I retreated into the museums, on the assumption that priceless paintings have to be kept warm.

I'm not the most cultured of people, and I only really intend to visit the most top-tier of galleries across the continent, but two of them are in Madrid (there's actually three big ones here, but I skipped the third). The Prado inherited much of the Spanish royal family's art collection, and like most royal families they had expensive taste and tax revenues to sate it. So the Prado is full of Titians and Tintorettos and Rubens and Rembrandts and El Grecos and Goyas. There's a couple of Boschs and a Caravaggio too. To be honest I don't really know enough to fully appreciate what I was looking at, but I enjoyed wandering around and pretending.

I got somewhat less out of the Reina Sophia museum, where I went after the Prado and whose centrepiece work is Picssso's Guernica. I actually don't much like Picasso (the off the cuff good-natured insult I'm proudest of making was when somebody's head was described as a 'work of art', and I agreed that it was a Picasso).  But Guernica is probably the most important painting of the 20th century, at least politically, so I wanted to see it. There's also a couple of Salvador Dali paintings there, in amongst a bunch of other less interesting stuff. But unfortunately I saw less than half of Reina Sophia, because I started to have trouble standing up.

I know the name of this blog is weird. I've called it a 'wonky tour' because I'm a bit of a wonk - in other words, a nerd - and the things I'm doing reflect those niche interests. A 'wonk' is also naval jargon, I have learned, for an inexperienced and clueless sailor, which I think reflects me as a traveller as well. And finally, I fear I'm a bit wonky on my feet. I'm very distrustful of my knees' intentions of coming along for the entire trip - there's another 186 days to go - and galleries involve lots of standing still in front of paintings. When it started to become uncomfortable it was time to go. But I'd seen Guernica, and that was what I came for.

Thursday was SNOW day. I'd greeted the forecast with a bleak sense of humour, but I didn't really believe it. Perhaps they meant there would be snow in the early hours of the morning, which would surely be melted by the time I was out and about. Still, I knew enough not to expect a day for outdoor activities, so I decided to visit the Museum of the Americas, to be followed, if time and energy allowed, by the National Archaeology Museum. 

The Americas Museum, which features exhibits of (mostly Latin) American culture from both pre- and post-Columbus, could be very good: certainly the collection seemed so. But it was hard to know what I was looking at because signage was only in Spanish. That's not a complaint; I've no doubt that monolingual Spaniards have just as much frustration in Australian museums and they are in no way obligated to compensate for my inability to read their language. 

What I really wished I could determine, though, was the extent to which it acknowledged the Spanish invasion and aggression as the single most seminal moment in American history. My best interpretation is that it was mentioned in passing at most. I don't believe history should be something to be ashamed of - either individually or even necessarily collectively - but it is something to be open about. However, Spain is certainly not alone if it struggles to do this. *Cough* Australia Day *cough*.

Remember this was SNOW day, and I was wrong about the forecast. I had been assaulted by small, fleeting little spots of white on my way into the Americas Museum, but they were nothing much to worry about. Whilst I was inside, though, they had snowballed into something else (sorry... yes, I did make that pun). This time they were icy little grapeshot pellets of cold death. In the middle of the day. The warmest part of the day. The snow was melting upon hitting the ground, but collecting in the trees and in people's hair and jackets, including mine, adding more white to my beard than I'd like. 

I covered the 400m or so between the metro station and the museum like the world's least gainly SAS commando, with mad dashes across exposed territory interspersed with long pauses under shelter to recover, reconnoiter my surroundings and consider the optimum route to attack. At one stage I fled into some sort of library museum, feigning interest in a flamenco dancing exhibition I couldn't read whilst basking in the central heating.

Moral of the story: don't go out in the snow. 

The Archaeology Museum has an easier time of it politically than the Americas one, since it tells the story of multiple invasions of, rather than by Spain. I had only added this place to the list in response to the weather and losing Segovia, but missing it would have been a terrible mistake. It has an enormous, impeccable collection of Iberian artefacts from pre-history to post-Reconquista. I spent too much time in the prehistoric and Roman Hispania galleries and had to rush through the (much smaller) Egyptian and Greek collections. But for €3 I got the highlight of my time in Madrid. And free heating.

I finally got a few more hours of clear, if somewhat bracing, weather on Friday. Enough to go for a wander through the central part of the city, from Puerta del Sol, to Plaza Mayor and on to the royal palace. I didn't go into the palace: like the galleries, my interest will pall if I go to them all and I'd rather value the ones I do go to as much as they deserve. So instead I caught a train to Retiro park, only to find once I left the station that the rain was trying to kill me again. Time to call it.

I didn't get to know Madrid as well as I'd like, and so I can't honestly say whether I like it all. That's fine: it won't be the last city on this trip where that happens. And I'm now drafting this piece on a bus to Granada, and the first true bucket list agenda item of the trip. The sun is shining and we're passing through a forest's-worth of olive orchards set in the foothills of the snow-capped mountains off in the distance. Spain's alright.

Random observations:

- I only encountered one or two Portuguese people in five days who didn't speak any English. But finding people in Madrid who could understand me was much harder. My assumption is that as a country gets larger and more people can get good jobs in more or less domestic industries, the pressure to learn English is reduced. Certainly English wasn't common in Japan either.

But I still managed well enough. And it's an important reminder of one of our less recognised privileges: the ability as English speakers to go anywhere in the world and find somebody there who will hear you and listen to your plea for directions. So many people here have some level of fluency in three, even four languages. My monoglot ignorance is galling.

- Dubai effectively sells off its train stations, naming them after whatever corporation buys the rights. Madrid appears to give them away as gifts to friendly cities, both elsewhere in Spain and elsewhere in the Latin world. How else to explain the presence of a Córdoba, Sevilla, Valencia, Oporto, Buenos Aires, San Francisco or Los Angeles stations? I looked it up, they're not suburbs that later had cities named after them, and there's too many to be a coincidence. It must play havoc with attempts to plot courses in Google Maps. Note, though, that there was no Barcelona. Some frenemies evidently aren't worth pretending for.

- A *lot* of beggars with disabilities, leading me to think the Spanish government is dismally failing its most vulnerable citizens. And it wasn't a sympathy scam, unless people were able to hide their ostensibly amputated limbs. Looking after people with generosity and dignity isn't just the decent thing to do, it's a matter of societal survival. Spain may learn that the hard way.

(You didn't imagine I'd drop the politics while I'm away, did you? I woke up at 6:20 to watch the footy this morning too.)

- Speaking of street scams, I survived another one. A woman in Puerta del Sol more or less bowled straight into me and tried to stick a piece of lavender or something in my hand. Had I taken it she would have started pestering me to pay for it. She probably would have left me alone if I'd given her €10, which I could afford if it came down to it. But pickpocketing is a bigger threat, because I don't particularly fancy being in a foreign city with no phone to work out where I am or money to get myself back to the hostel.

It sucks, because as much as I don't want to be overly guarded or security conscious the whole time, you do have to be. So to help me to relax I've taken to keeping a €20 or €50 note tucked in my sock for emergencies. It's rather uncomfortable but so it goes. And I'll leave you with this lovely thought for the next time you use an ATM: I guarantee backpackers do it with Australian notes too.

Chapter 2: Five days in Lisbon

Lisbon is 17,748km from Melbourne. New York is closer. Rio de Janeiro is closer. Even Greenland is closer. The antipodal point - the place you'd come out at if you really could start digging and just keep digging until you come out the other side of the earth - is in the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of here. There's a few islands that are closer to it but, in all likelihood, I'm as far from home right now as I will ever be.

And yet I'm drafting this as I sit in one of those tiny little restaurants with only 20 seats (enough to seat the entire WA Liberal Party, by the way), and one of the three other people eating here is from Melbourne.

This is the second time in recent days that I've been struck by how small the world is. The first was on Thursday, when I, an Australian, was served lunch on a United Arab Emirates plane by an Indonesian flight attendant, and that lunch included mango chutney from India, cheese from the UK, biscuits from Sri Lanka, and breadsticks made in Italy but distributed from New Jersey. And Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump think you can press reverse on globalisation? Three continents had to collaborate to make my lunch (not very well, I might add, but that's besides the point).

Anyway. I am in Lisbon. A long way from home. And I may have violated EU immigration law on the way in by lying to a border control agent, but it'll be fine. The woman checking my passport noted that I wasn't flying home until September and asked if I was aware of the 90 day limit for the Schengen visa (I was) and whether I was planning to stay in the Schengen zone for more than 90 days (I am).

Obviously those two answers, if put together truthfully, could have greatly complicated my path into Portugal, but I probably understood certain relevant provisions of EU visa laws better than she did and, well, a white lie was better than getting as many as five embassies involved. More on that at a later time.

As I'm travelling sans mobile data (I wanted that authentic 2007 travel experience. Also it would have cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars.), I had plotted my route to the hostel on Google Maps and screen capped it before leaving Dubai. I only had to walk about 400m from the train station to the hostel, which I figured I could manage even on three hours sleep.

Except precisely 276 of those 400m were going uphill, at an average gradient of 18%. I'd come out at the base of the Gloria funicular, a sort of mountain-climbing tram that the Portuguese are so proud of they named it a National Monument. Not proud enough to wash all the graffiti tags off the tram, but a National Monument none the less.

This thing cost €3.70 - about $5.70 - to ride. I was damned if I was going to fly -km and have the very first thing I do in Europe be paying that much to ride a tram, even if it can climb mountains. So I climbed, backpack, insulin bag and all. And stopped climbing to rest. And started climbing again.
And stopped. And started. And got the damn tram the next time.

At least at the top I was rewarded with a view:

After recovering at the hostel I went for a wander, with no plan other than to head downhill, and later find a bus back. A couple of minutes after leaving I saw a couple with cameras walking out of what looked like a fairly non-descript, plain stone building. If people with cameras were walking out, there was no reason a person with a camera shouldn't walk in, too.

It was a church. It looked like this:

I've since learned that Igreja de Sao Roque is, naturally, a major Lisbon landmark. But happening across it like that was an immensely satisfying way to start my journey across Europe. I'll never know for sure what is hiding behind a plain stone facade (though at some point it will be private premises, which is when I pretend to only speak Albanian and beat a hasty retreat).

That aimless first walk through Lisbon will stay with me a long time. 20 years after first dreaming of this trip, and three and a half years after starting to plan it in earnest, it was one of the most validating things I've ever done.

Even evading my first attempted street scam didn't manage to dampen the mood too much. I'd found my way to a major town square near the water, where I was suddenly and persistently pursued by a man dressed as a Minion (three days later I was there again, and this time he was Pikachu). This man wanted to shake my hand. Too much. He pleaded to shake my hand, even insisting, in case I was scared, that he really was just a human inside a Minion costume. And if that weren't enough when I'd refused loudly enough another fellow appeared out of nowhere and said he "can really recommend" shaking hands with The Minion.

A couple of minutes later I perched beside a statue and watched this pair in action. The Minion asked a female tourist for a hug (where was my hug?). The Minion's hand slid to her side, and when she left his confederate came over and appeared to low-five The Minion's hand. I'd seen enough and raced across to the woman to check that she still had her wallet. It was in her bag; she wasn't going to be outsmarted by a Minion either.

We're now approximately three hours into a four and a half day stay in Lisbon, so I'm going to have to speed this along. Day 2 was spent in Belem, a suburb of Lisbon full of monuments and little museums. A very enjoyable day, though one without much in the way of stories to tell. The highlight was, without hesitation, Jeronimos Monastery. Here's why:

Day 3 was spent mostly at the Lisbon Zoo. It's a ramshackle, romantic throwback of a zoo that looks much like I imagine Taronga did 40 years ago. That's not a criticism: people often falsely equate 'old' with 'bad' and 'new' with 'good' in zoos, when it's much more complicated than that. New zoo exhibits too often emphasise aesthetics over usable, complex spaces for the animals. An old style 'cage' is excellent for primates, for example, because the wire becomes one big climbing frame. One thing that a cage should do, though, is keep animals in. This isn't supposed to happen:

Day 4 was a light day after spending too much of the night before awake trying to bring my blood sugar levels up. Usually it's the opposite problem but I'm doing so much more exercise whilst away that I've thus far reduced my insulin by about 30 units (I'd typically take about 110 across two types of insulin), and I'm still scaling it back. So I limited myself to the Lisbon Oceanarium (I did say I was going to a lot of zoos), and a late afternoon wander around Alfama, that was most notable for getting on tram, finding that my card had run out of funds and the driver shrugging his shoulders and letting me ride anyway. Suck on that, Metro goons.

Day 5 was a day trip to Sintra, a village on the outskirts of Lisbon with no fewer than five palaces, a monastery, the ruins of a Moorish castle and so on. Of course it's over-run with tourists, and that's fine. I'm a tourist, and sometimes things are heavily-toured because they are worth touring.
Sintra is definitely worth touring, but it's a frustrating day out. Having gotten off the train in 15 degree weather and seen the castle at the top of the mountain overhead, I recognised that the light jumper I'd bought the previous day wasn't going to cut it. So for €22 I bought another jumper from a tourist shop... which of course has a tram on it. So I'm now a bearded vegetarian lefty Melburnian abroad with an ironic hoodie, but I am NOT a hipster.

I bought tickets for two palaces - the Palace of Sintra and Pena, both of which were homes to various Portuguese monarchs - and the Moorish castle, of which only the battlements remain. I spent about an hour at each site, which was matched by the hour or so I spent waiting buses between each site. This was a cold weekday in the off-season; how they cope with demand during summer weekends is beyond me.

The Portuguese royal family knew what they were about. The Palace of Sintra has a room called the 'Swan Room', where the roof is decorated with painted swans. It was unfortunately followed immediately afterwards by the 'Magpie Room' which obviously had magpies. But the Swan Room is both twice the size *and* much nicer than the Magpie Room. Just as well.

Random observations:

• If you have a relative who is impossible to buy for, Lisbon has you covered. There's a shop on the corner of the busiest city square that sells sardine cans with your year of birth on them. Because why not?
• Beer. You can buy it here. You can buy it there. You can buy it on a chair, on a stair, or to share, if you care. You can buy it everywhere. Cafes sell beer. Train station kiosks sell beer. A little corner shop might have a tap serving Super Bock beer. It's all over the place. And Lisbon has no problems with binge drinking that I could see, and they certainly don't have any lockout laws. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a man from Munich at my hostel in Tokyo. He divulged that during Oktoberfest they try to channel all the Australians towards a single beer hall, which the locals then avoid. The Aussies are the ones with the greatest reputation for not being able to hold their alcohol. Perhaps we are our own problem.
• I was offered marijuana in the street seven times in five days. This city must be as high as a kite.
• In addition to Portuguese people I met and talked to people from Italy, Poland, the US, Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Sweden, China, New Zealand and Australia, including a young guy on the train with me to Madrid from Essendon. The world is, indeed, a very small place.

Chapter 1: Three days in Dubai

If bigger is better, then biggest must be best.

If you were to try to pick a place where I would spend much of my first day away, where would you guess? A museum? Some historic landmark? Passed out in the hostel? 

You probably didn't pick a shopping centre, but so it came to be. And not just any shopping centre, but the imaginatively named Dubai Mall, the self-proclaimed biggest of its kind in the world. It probably was at the time it was built, but may have since lost the mantle; this might be what's motivating the big expansion project that's underway. It sits underneath the Burj Khalifa - an 800m, wax candle-shaped monstrosity that is by a considerable margin the world's tallest building and biggest over-compensation for [redacted on account of what are no doubt strict lèse-majesté laws in the UAE]. And the world's biggest building deserves to have the world's biggest shopping centre at its base. It's only fitting. 

No, I didn't lose my mind in the course of 14 hours in Qantas custody. I passed much of the time watching season 4 of House of Cards. I'd pretty much given up on this show after the unwatchable and absurd third season. I could perhaps suspend disbelief that a serial killer became President, but the idea of a Democratic President running on a platform of dismantling entitlements and appointing his wife to a cabinet position despite losing a Senate vote was too much. That, of course, was before the age of keratin-enriched demagoguery in which we now live. Going along with surreal plots comes much more easily now.

Anyway. Dubai. I'd gone to the mall not to buy things but to see the Dubai Aquarium in the middle of the centre, which comes to the hyperbole party with what purports to be the world's biggest aquarium window (I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one, probably two bigger tanks at other aquaria, so no pressure Dubai but you're slipping). Zoos and aquaria will be a theme of this trip: they are the least public of my niche interests but I will be visiting a *lot* while I'm away. I won't write much about them on here, though. 

The Dubai Mall and Burj Khalifa precinct comes with a sort of instant, pre-packaged faded glory, like a pair of unnecessarily expensive jeans (which can also be found here, if you're looking). Aside from the shops and the towers and the ice rink and the rest of it, the focal point is what amounts to a massive concrete swimming pool (two metres deep and complete with pool tiles) that features dancing fountains. There's a hotel across the water that's stylised as traditional Arabic architecture, but in the same way that Pixar stylises its human characters: they could easily have made it look more authentic, but they didn't lest they fall into the uncanny valley and tip off visitors that yes, they really are in the Middle East. It's not even an especially well-planned precinct: it's about a kilometre from the nearest train station, so the best fix they've come up with is for you walk down an immense long corridor equipped with travelators like the ones in airports. 

Imagine that Southbank exchanged some DNA with Chadstone shopping centre, and then the resulting cells metastasised into something malignant. Las Vegas without the vice. Singapore without the good food. And yet, it seems to work for them. Most of the shoppers were tourists. I heard dozens of languages, from throughout Africa, Asia and Europe, and Dubai Mall genuinely felt like the gaudy, depressing successor to a Silk Road bazaar. I suspect, though, that it's less a global attraction than the only obvious thing to do in a stopover city. They'd best hope Emirates Airline doesn't have a couple of major crashes, or the caravanserai will move on to somewhere else that puts white water rafting or maybe gladiatorial combat in its malls instead.

I did find pockets of living, breathing culture to cluelessly insert myself into. On day two I headed inland to Al Ain, a city two hours south of Dubai from whence you can see Oman. Again, I was going to see a zoo but it was the bus ride there that's most memorable. Upon boarding the minibus and taking the first spare seat, I was greeted with intense stares from several of the men around me. At first I took them to be stunned by my presence as the only tourist on a service that clearly caters overwhelmingly to locals. Perhaps I was lost, but if so they certainly weren't going to tell me about it. 

The stares were remarkably persistent, though, so eventually I looked up and saw a sign saying that I'd sat in a 'ladies only' seat. I hurriedly got up - there are also ladies only carriages on trains that carry hefty fines for men caught sitting in them, and for all I knew the bus was the same. Looking for somewhere else to sit, though, I found that the first spare seat also appeared to be the only spare seat. 

Increasingly confused at what I was to do - I had a valid ticket, but was I going to have to get off the bus and wait an hour for the next one? - one of the men took pity on me. He folded out the armrest next to him, which wasn't an armrest at all but a seat that, once unfolded, took up the entire width of the aisle. The next man to board the bus then proceeded to unfold the seat in front of mine, and so the bus continued to fill up, leaving me progressively less capable of escape. Bad enough, but then the scheduled departure time came and went with no sign of the driver. Unable to go anywhere and seeking some reassurance that I wouldn't be stuck there indefinitely, I asked my kindly neighbour what was going on; the bus wouldn't be moving until every seat was taken, aisle and all. 

Thankfully I was rescued by a burst of late passengers about 20 minutes later. Never have I been so grateful for an over-crowded bus. The ride itself could have been much worse, apart from a persistent groaning sound coming from the bus which was either caused by the driver constantly veering out of his lane onto those raised lane marking things, or by a problem with the brakes. Neither was overly reassuring but I chose to focus on what was going on out the window: it wasn't like I could do much about it without climbing over a couple of dozen men on a moving bus. And riding through the desert on a bus with no aisles was pleasant enough: half-finished high-rise towers were interspersed with sand dunes-turned-camel paddocks. George Miller could do worse for his next Mad Max filming location.

Questionable public transport options were something of a theme of the stay. I wanted an easy, light day three ahead of a stupidly early flight to Lisbon. So I spent the morning in the hostel pool (as one does on a typical Wednesday, no?) and ventured out in the afternoon. Plans went awry on the search for what is reputedly Dubai's best falafel. Dubai is... not the most walkable of places. It's all high rise buildings separated by ten lane freeways, so what I'd optimistically thought might be a 90 minute venture for lunch turned into about three hours by the time some dodgy train directions, a missed bus and incipient heat stroke worked their magic. I ultimately jumped on a bus back to the Dubai Mall, which was the complete opposite direction to what I needed, but was still worthwhile because at least I knew my way back into town, kilometre-long corridor and all.

It was past 5PM - only 12 hours before I had to be at the airport - before I made it to the Dubai Museum, one of three things I'd hoped to do that day (Jumeirah mosque didn't happen at all). The Museum is in an old fort, one of the oldest buildings in Dubai, and unfortunately the fort is itself the most interesting exhibit there. Leaving at about 6PM, I thought I'd probably run out of time to wander through the spice markets, which were just across on the wrong side of the river. But then I noticed that the map showed a 'ferry'. 

I like ferries. I ride them whenever I get the chance in Sydney,  just for the sake of riding ferries. But this was not a ferry. This was a wooden bench, maybe five metres long, with a hull and a tiller. You pay your dirham (about 40c) to the driver and walk along the edge of the boat to an empty spot on the bench, if you don't fall in first. And then you hold on while you get across the river. I'm glad I've made it out of Dubai because I'm not exactly which of these transport methods are covered by my insurance and which aren't.

The wooden bench with a hull attached put me back on dry land at what I took to be a cargo shipping terminal. That's fine, except it's pretty pointless to ask sailors from all over Asia for directions to somewhere they've never been. So I just wandered in what I thought might be the right direction. To be honest I'm not sure whether I found the 'spice souq' or not. I certainly passed a variety of spice shops, but also a lot of fabric, gold, electronics and other shops. It was the same sort of mid-20th century market I found in Singapore and Japan - all narrow lanes going in what must have been concentric circles for how long it took to find my way out. Even though I'm not sure where I was or why, it was perhaps the most satisfying hour I spent in Dubai, because at least it looked and felt like a real city.

Would I come back? Well, yes, I will be coming back because I have another 18 hour or so stopover here on my way home. But after that, probably not. Dubai is a city that wouldn't exist - at least not in its current form - without oil and a handy location in the middle of the world. That's not to say I didn't enjoy my three days: I actually did. But four, I suspect, will be enough.

Random observations:

- It killed me to be called 'boss' by some service workers or salespeople, when the only qualifier I have for the term is some disposable income to throw about. I'm not a guilt-ridden tourist but I do aspire to being a self-aware one. Money is power, and going to a place where you have a lot more of it than some of the people around you is the surest way to drive home that fact. It's an experience that should humble those of us fortunate enough to live in strong social democracies, but it could also go to the heads of some. Don't let it. 

- Use of the 'ladies only' carriages varied greatly by ethnicity. I never saw an Arabic woman in a mixed-gender carriage without being accompanied my a man. South Asian women mostly used the segregated carriages as well. There were plenty of East Asian women using the mixed-gender carriages, but only a smattering of white women, and I guess many of the latter were using the ladies only part. The ethnic variations suggests that it's a mix of cultural conventions and safety concerns motivating their use. I'm interested to hear in comments,  especially from my female friends and family, whether you'd welcome the same things in Australia.

- A bunch of train stations have been named after corporate sponsors. I recognised the names of the major bank, telco and currency exchange, among others. Nobody tell Matthew Guy or if he wins the next election he'll find a way to give away the Flinders Street naming rights to Lendlease.

Prologue - Melbourne Airport.

T Plus 2 hours and 18 minutes. My countdown to launch has gone into overtime. 

At first I thought the problem was an aggrieved couple whom I'd already had to turf out of my hard-fought for (well, $30 paid for) exit row seat. They had a five month old daughter. They'd been promised a bassinet, but Qantas had over-promised and under-delivered; they had seven babies, four bassinets and two very angry parents threatening lawsuits for miscellaneous, but non-specific, consumer law breaches. And a missed departure time.

I listened in, hopefully not too overtly, as Mr and Ms Aggrieved tried to parlay their indignation into upgrades into first class, failed miserably, tried to negotiate down to business class, and failed again. The flight attendant pointed at the exit row from whence they'd initially come (and were apparently coping just fine, sans bassinet, until I turned up) and asked Aggrieved Couple if they would like him to ask my neighbours and I to move. Not bloody likely; I'd paid $30 for the seat. Though I could possibly have been persuaded to move further up the plane myself, if things became desperate. For the cause.

Alas. My sudden elevation from working class to landed (flighted?) gentry was not to be. Some other, less litigious, couple had agreed to hand over their seats - and bassinet - in return for Aggrieved Couple's. Mr Aggrieved tried to maintain the rage, insisting that a solution that involved other passengers losing their bassinet was no solution at all; that it dealt directly with his problem wasn't the point. There was a principle at stake. But as the prospect of an upgrade began to fade like a mirage on the horizon, he accepted the inevitable and disappeared further down the plane, still muttering dark threats about civil action for I'm-not-sure-exactly-what. Meanwhile the people who had sacrificed their bassinet moved to the row behind me, followed by flight attendants bearing gifts (literally) and promises that nothing would be too much trouble to make them comfortable. I think their kid is now the proud owner of a Qantas colouring book. 

Turns out, though, that Mr and Ms Aggrieved weren't causing the delay. Minutes after they had shuffled off to consider their legal options we were still firmly on the ground. Eventually the captain announced that it was something to do with a minor technical fault. Twenty minutes later the technical fault morphed into an error message. Another twenty minutes after that it was revealed it had something to do with the brakes. Oh good. I had resolved that if I didn't make it to Dubai it would be Alan Joyce's fault.

Eventually the engineers' last, best idea was to re-set the entire plane's systems in the hope the error message would go away. Like all good tech support, when all else fails you try turning it off and on again. Because that meant turning the lights off it required a somewhat anti-climactic return to the terminal, less than two hours after my triumphant, adrenaline-fuelled departure into the unknown. But it worked, and now I'm writing this over... Ballarat? Horsham? Adelaide? I don't know. I don't know what time it is either, and I'm only moderately sure of the date. Such is my life for the next seven months.

I have yet to become blasé about air travel, and I hope I never do. I just walked into a pressurised container, walked back out, walked back in again and when I complete this little hokey pokey dance in 14 hours it'll be on another continent, 10,000 kilometres away from where I started. That's a concept that was utterly preposterous in the lifetimes of people who are still alive today. It has made the world both smaller and richer, helping to extend the reach of working class scions like me into parts of the globe where not very long ago we had no business being, short of fighting a war or making a one way attempt at escaping from poverty. I do like the brakes to work, though.