Putting the “fun” back into the fundus

There’re laws for everything these days; where to walk, where not to walk; where to stand, where not to stand; what to eat/what you’re not allowed to eat (eg: people, dogs, cats); what trees to plant and where/what you’re not allowed to cut down; laws for housing; laws for building; laws for waste management and even laws which tell you where you can take a dump/where you can’t (eg: train carriages, street corners, department store fragrance counters); laws about having to go to school and where; there are even laws about who can marry/who can’t/what to marry (eg: boys vs girls vs Chihuahuas).

So many laws … covering so many things … and each one (supposedly) developed and enforced both in the best interests of society today, and for its future development. So tell me why, with all of these stringent boundaries directing us towards a better community and nation, they are still letting idiots breed?

Given that Mrs Donkey has been “in foal” of late, and ready to burst any day now, we have been touring the parental rapid training circuit for the past few months and have discovered that we are surrounded by a world of humourless, insular, self-obsessed dim-wits with nary an awareness of the world three blocks away from their hovels between them, and all of whom are soon to release/inflict similarly soft-baked offspring onto a society with, in my view, inadequate mental health and rehabilitation services to cope with the onslaught. Surely something needs to be done immediately to address this scourge which looks liable to set the development of this nation back a couple of decades?

I can tell by your sceptical frown that you think the recent nights I’ve spent sleeping on the floor in order to accommodate Mrs Donkey’s expanding (and aggressively demanding) bed-space requirements are sending me a little fruity, but before you click back to YouPorn, allow me to describe some of the cretins (oops, I mean) characters from our prenatal classes.

The fun kicked-off immediately in Session #1, when in response to a question from the midwife, “What will each of you bring to the birth?”, this one guy, either an imbecile or a comic genius, replied in a cocky manner and without so much as a hint of a smile, “My Mum!”. Both the midwife and Donkey displayed super-human powers of self control to stay upright on our chairs and to smother our chuckles and guffaws as it became clear from his confusion and bemusement moments later that he was actually deadly serious … as was his partner; and she was staring down the barrel of 24+ hours of pain, puffing and panting, all in the company of her mother-in-law! I mean, this was the stuff of crappy ‘70s TV sitcoms, and yet there was not a self-deprecating smile in sight!

The midwife’s response to all this, after 20-odd years of circumventing the unenlightened chauvinism of over-bearing fathers-to-be, was to repeatedly remind the clearly misguided partner of this Mummy’s Boy at every possible opportunity over the following 5 weeks that she didn’t have to have her partner’s mother helping her son ‘down at the business end’ during the birth if she didn’t want to, but on reflection, I think she may have been a-few-ova-short-of-a-conception herself, and never quite grasped the implications of her feller’s maternal dependence.

As I mentioned, this revelation from Little Lord Fauntleroy emerged only minutes into Session #1, at which time I suddenly grew fearful that I may have stumbled into a real-life zombie scenario, so in order to preserve my life, I resolved to pay a little more attention to my fellow prenatal class mates, only to discover that I had unwittingly stumbled into a real-life zombie scenario!

At the time of our first prenatal class, Mrs D and I were the least-baked of all the attendees – most of whom were expecting within the following three months. The maternity outfits of the ladies were tightening into a myriad of multi-coloured beach balls, and one might have expected their lads to have had some ideas and plans for what to do come beach-ball deflation time. On the contrary, a quick look at the male faces around the room revealed a mixture of either blank surprise and wonderment, or the tight-knit brows of a gathering of super-sleuths executing elementary deduction in an effort to ascertain a) how they came to be in this room, b) how long it had been that their partners had been walking around looking like beach-balls (and why), or c) how they could convince their partners to allow them to invite their mothers to attend the birth.

Honestly, these guys, (allegedly) the fathers of six-month-old, unborn children, looked genuinely, acutely shocked at their situation - sagging eyes, slack-jaws, white knuckles gripping the arms of chairs. It was as though they’d only just found out, on the way to the class, that their missus was knocked-up.

This observation was confirmed immediately thereafter when, in response to the second question of Session #1, “What would you do to support your partner during labour?”, at least three of them answered that they’d probably stay out of the room so as not to get in the way of the experts, while two others said they didn’t know, “…and that’s why [they’d] been forced to come here tonight!”

Hang-on a minute, these are the people who are having children?!

As the weeks unfolded, these nit-wits learned that there are resources such as the internet and books that one can (SHOULD) access for information which can help them prepare for having a baby (“Wot, are we having a bay-bee?”), but overall, very few of the half of the participants that Donkey ended up having to talk to had any insight into their situation, and absolutely no interest in dwelling-on any of the opportunities for humorous exchange to which the presented material lent itself, such as one of the pregnant participants referring to her post-natal self as a milk-factory, or one of the male participants worriedly asking when his partner’s figure would return to normal, or when one couple asked in unison when they could get their hands on the government’s baby bonus. C’mon people, this is funny stuff; comedy gold! How ‘bout a chuckle at the ape who just wants the baby out so that he can climb back on board, or perhaps a disbelieving snort at the prissy social-climber who refuses to breastfeed in case she will no longer be able turn the heads of the ball-boys down at The Club.

You may have guessed from these observations that Mrs Donkey and I didn’t quite endear ourselves with our fellow classmates. Our constant giggling and chuckling as we joked with each other about strategically placed mirrors and women down on all fours grunting like a barnyard animal may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but hey, Australians are culturally-renowned for using humour to help deal with fear. At least our approach (we think/hope), which requires one to have intellectually confronted one’s fears in order to turn them into something amusing, reflects a certain spark of intelligence; an admirable contrast, we think, to the stinking, viscous muck oozing about inside the skulls of our compatriots.

Which brings me back to my earlier comments regarding laws. We have laws for and against so many things in this society, so how come these morons are allowed to stick their appendages into each other and create offspring? Shouldn’t the long-term best interests of society prevail here? Couldn’t the money currently spent by the government on baby bonuses be better employed in the purchase of a bulk-order of Ginsu knives with which said appendages could be liberated from their intellectually-challenged owners?

Something needs to be done … and fast! I don’t want to inflict Baby Donkey on a social group whose favourite pastime is picking lice from each other’s back hair and cracking them in their teeth. I want more for my child; literature, art, music, dancing and above all, humour … not football, motor sport, World Wrestling and The Biggest Loser. But if our pre-natal classes are anything to go by, I think that’s all she/he’s going to get.

I’m calling for a major judicial overhaul. Remember former-Prime Minister, John Howard’s famous anti-immigration battle-cry some five years ago, “We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances under which they come”? Well there’s a whole generation of new arrivals who’ve come-in through the back-door (not literally … but you know what I mean), and it’s high time we turned the same, tough stance we’ve committed to border-control upon our home-grown stock. Selective breeding, people, the time is most definitely nigh.


The scene outside Donkey's prenatal classes just the other night. There goes the neighbourhood. Pic : http://www.revok.com/zombie.html

Gaggin' for a shag

S'no wonder I'm such a sexually and emotionally repressed Donkey, I've been deprived of the basic human right to an education! Let me explain, I'm not talking about the usual, reading, writing and arithmetic kind of education here (believe me, I've had Shakespeare, spelling bees and calculus coming out of my whatsit for years!). No, I'm talking about the fundamental building blocks of education which exist in the form of children's fairy tales.

Now before you hit speed-dial to dob Ma and Pa Donkey into the child protection authorities, I must clarify that I did get the usual, Mother Goose-style fairy tales from my folks, such as Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk etc, but what I didn't get were the "real" fairy tales, as compiled by the good Brothers (indeed very Grimm by name and nature).

Such as the one I've stumbled across this very early morning while struck with an almighty, new year's hangover and unable to sleep with Mrs Donkey snoring away beside me. The story's called Old Hildebrand, and features a silly peasant whose saucy wife's having it off (I kid you not) with the fat parson. The two illicit lovers, in order to get Old Hildebrand out of the way so that they can "...spend a whole day happily together...", concoct a scheme in which the trusting peasant is sent by the sly, randy, old Churchman on a holy pilgrimage to Italy.

Of course, thanks to the wily intervention of a travelling egg salesman (who has no doubt been around the block a few times himself), Old Hildebrand comes home early, where he finds that "...everything was already very merry...". Very merry indeed! It seems Old Hilde's Missus and the dirty old Man of the Cloth were well into things by the time he got home, described by the Brothers G as follows;

"...The woman had already had nearly everything killed that was in the farmyard [a euphemism, if ever I've heard one], and had made pancakes [ooh err], and the parson was there, and had brought his fiddle with him [I'll bet he had, the dirty old bastard!]".

Why didn't anyone tell me about this before? How is it that the real world was denied me so callously? How different my adolescence would have been if those brave princes looking upon an enchanted, sleeping maiden, or up at a flaxen-haired beauty trapped in a tower, had done so, not with a melting heart, but with a raging erection! How different Sunday school might have been if I'd known of Old Hildebrand's saucy minx of a wife and what she and her kind get up to with Father O'Flannagan in the pantry out the back of the Presbytery (I almost certainly would have had a different answer for Father McNaughton when he tapped me on the shoulder and put the vocational question to me if I'd known it was all about "making pancakes" with the parish ladies while their hubbies were at work, and almost certainly, were this knowledge available to the young Catholic lads of Australia, the dwindling numbers of recruits in seminaries across the country could have been prevented right from the outset).

And by far the best thing about the story of Old Hildebrand, unlike those told by the fusty old Goose with the straw hat and wire specs, is that, just as in life, there doesn't have to be any great moral message at the end of it. In Old Hildebrand, there's no "don't talk to strangers", no "even ugly people have hidden qualities", no "respect your elders and loved ones". Rather, far from having to be portrayed as some moral crusader, when he learns of the treachery against him, Old Hildebrand gives the parson a flogging and then throws his leg over the Missus for a bit of pancake-making himself. Great stuff! There should be more of it ... much more, in fact. I'm as angry as all get-out to have been deprived for so long; blinded as to the true nature of children's fairy stories. I've missed so much, and need to make up for some pretty serious, lost time. Please excuse me, I'm off to church...


Why didn't anyone tell me it wasn't all virtuous chastity? A few more learning aids like this wouldn't have gone astray. Pic: http://www.measureformeasure.co.uk

The Global Circus, Part II: Caine

Japan’s a strange place! Pick-up any old travel brochure for the tiny country and there seems to be a major emphasis on formality; it’s all Geisha’s serving tea and the carefully manicured gardens in temples on Mt Fuji. Likewise, pictures of Tokyo all feature men in dark suits rushing for trains, and elegantly dressed, beautifully manicured women in sparkling jewellery and evening gowns. It’s as if the whole country is marketed as a place to go for perfect lines, order and neatness.

The traditional aspect of Japan gets a real pounding, too. Back in the ‘80s, when the Yen was going gang-busters and Australians had decided that “the Japs” were OK now, especially seeing as though they’d developed a love-affair with our coastlines and were willing to throw their hearty wallets into the experience, every kid with near-sighted, socially-climbing parents was forced to learn Japanese at school and pushed into a career in tourism. Consequently, literature and movies about Japan began to emerge, and in each one of them we were exposed to a culture characterised by formality and unquestioning respect for one’s elders (especially for one’s father). We learned that Japanese families were held together by tradition, and that honour and order were qualities to be highly prized.

As Japanese Corporations continued to rise and dominate international business, we also came to learn about a corporate culture in which young Japanese would compete for graduate positions, and once established in a corporation, would remain there, wearing there neatly-pressed, plain business suits, working 20 hour days with only a fortnight’s holidays each year, for the rest of their working life. Loyalty and respect to the Corporation was highly valued, as was anonymity and conformity, and it all contributed to the economic super power that was 1980s Japan.

Consequently, as outsiders, we came to recognise the Japanese as being a well- and sensibly-dressed, perfectly groomed, impeccably mannered and … well … stuffy race of people, and indeed that was my idea of them when I landed on the shores of Samoa in the late ‘90s; a volunteer with a limited world view and looking for adventure.

I found it in the bosom of the large, and eclectic volunteer community which comprised we seven, fairly young Australians, all out looking for a good time; three ancient, cantankerous, life-bitter Kiwis; about fifty small-town, ultra-right Christian, US Peace Corps; a handful of stand-offish, well heeled, superior UN volunteers; and twenty of the most whacked-out, extreme, 24-hour party-people from Japan.

It wasn’t long before I discovered where the Japanese hung-out by day; a squat, three-story fibro apartment block in the centre of town which looked more like an American College frat house than a Corporation office (the Japanese volunteer program refers to itself as a corporation). Any day of the week, hard-core metal would be blaring from the massive speakers mounted on the balcony (Sony, of course), and young Japanese would be lounging around in various states of undress on ripped sofas that had been ejected from the building onto the front lawn. A thick, pall of cigarette smoke would surround the seedy-looking, chain-smoking youngsters, no doubt recovering from the massive party they’d thrown on Monday night.

But despite the loud, relaxed, celebratory scene at Corporation Headquarters on any given day, it was at night that these young, hipsters really went nuts. It wasn’t difficult to get to know the Japanese volunteers; they’d be present, en masse, at any party going, on any given night. And there was certainly no missing them. Far from dressing in the staid, pressed, formal suits I’d been led to expect of the most formally attired race in the world, the Japanese volunteers generally wore some pretty out-there threads; for the guys it was generally ripped, studded, graffitied denim, tatty, fraying t-shirts and thongs, while the girls sported tartan micro-minis with decoration safety pins, garish, slashed stockings and provocatively ripped, cropped t-shirts.

Punk certainly wasn’t dead amongst the Japanese volunteers, as attested not only by their clothes, but also by their avante guarde approach to grooming. Gone were the neatly parted, short backs-and-sides, and clean-shaven mugs of the Corporate gents; these lads had dirty, matted hair reaching three quarters of the way down their backs, and long, scruffy beards that any 1970s martial arts movie grand master’d be proud of. And the girls had forsaken the shiny, long, black, straight hair of the office for bright pinks, blues, greens, oranges and beaded braids. And amongst the whole ensemble, whether male or female, was a collection of metal the likes of which could sink an ocean liner – these guys had piercings on just about every appendage and orifice going. How they managed international air travel is beyond me – I am just glad I never got stuck behind one of them at the metal detectors.

And it wasn’t just their appearance which distinguished our Japanese colleagues from the rest of the volunteers, it was they way they partied! It wouldn’t matter how long the party had been going for, the Japanese volunteers would always be completely wired on booze and fags, and going nuts on the dance floor to the heavy beats. They’d be yelling, screaming, laughing and smiling – they really knew how to have a great time.

So how could I have been so wrong about Japan and its people? How could I have thought it was all conformity, commitment and commerce, when I had these … animals in front of me, partying like it was their last night on earth?

Well as it happens, another great quality of the Japanese volunteers was that they were very open and friendly, so before long I came to understand a bit more about them. Each and every one of them did, in fact, belong to a corporation in Japan, having joined after college and having put in the long hours, day after day, wearing the pressed suits and parting their hair in order to be promoted up the ladder to a level at which the Corporation agreed to sponsor them for one or two years as a volunteer in a developing country. Many of them saw the opportunity as their last great “hoorah”, before returning to Japan, and really knuckling-down to work, marriage, family, a mortgage, crowded trains and dark suits … and they were all committed to giving the experience an almighty nudge while they still could.

As the years went by, I came to recognise these traits in many young Japanese abroad, not only volunteers. Out on The Trail, I met many Japanese back-packers who had decided to take a year off from the corporate grind in order to see the world, and almost always, the girls wore bright, funky clothes and smoked like chimneys, and the guys grew their hair and beards long. While the girls often travelled in twos and threes, and could generally be found dancing in bars to loud music, I noticed that the guys would often travel alone, and would assume an air of quiet dignity. I eventually came to recognise this persona in many of these young men, with their matted hair, long beards and John Lennon glasses, as they attempted to pass themselves off as wizened, travelling sages on some kind of wandering, spiritual journey in search of the truth of life.

At first I was sucked-in by the stories of these higher-planed enigmas, such as the young man who, in order to save money on entry permits, risked imprisonment in a Chinese labour camp by hiding in the woods to skirt around border crossings, or the guy who shaved his head and face to pass himself off as a Tibetan monk as he spent three years studying in a mountain monastery (I now know this to be a centuries old story of the first foreigner to study Buddhism in Tibet). But eventually, I came to understand a little more about Japan; about the safe, privileged family environment, and the rigid corporate culture that these young men had come from, and I came to realise that, far from being the spiritually enlightened and centred souls that they portrayed, they were just as insecure and out-to-impress as the rest of us.

Over the years, I met many of these young Japanese men who claimed to be wandering the world on a spiritual quest for the answers to life’s mysteries, but there was one that I met which really hit home to me just how ridiculous this invented persona really is, and I would like to introduce you to him as the main attraction in the Global Circus Big Top today.

It was the 29th December, 1999. I was holidaying in a budget, beach-side resort with the future Mrs Donkey, and a fluffy-haired friend of mine, and we were naturally gearing-up for the big party that would herald the meltdown of all the machines and computers in the world. For three days we’d joined about fifteen other, like-minded young people in a beer- and music-fuelled binge which was definitely gaining momentum.

During this time, through all the raucous laughter, dancing and singing, I’d noticed a young, wild-haired, bearded Japanese man sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room. He had not spoken to another soul in three days, but instead simply watched-on as we got louder and drunker, and from time to time, nodded knowingly to himself.

So by this day, I was suitably drunk enough to have few remaining inhibitions, so I staggered over to engage with this young fellow. He spoke and answered my questions haltingly, with short, three word statements, annoyingly punctuated with pauses which I assume he felt added weight and mystery to his persona.

After a while, my fluffy-haired friend staggered over to join us, just as this enigma was telling me about himself,

“I have been travelling [pause] for many months”, he informed us.

“Cool”, says I, “I love travelling”.

Ignoring me, he continues, “I travel [pause] alone”.

Fluffy drunkenly pipes-up, “You’re like Caine, that guy from the TV show, Kung Fu. He wanders the world alone … can you do Kung Fu?”, and with that, Fluffy leaps into a flying kick before hitting the deck in a drunken crash to hoots of laughter from everyone present … except Caine.

“I do not [pause] approve of violence”, he replies, “I am searching for [pause] truths”.

“Huh?”, Fluffy and I grunt in unison.

“I am writing [pause] a story”, he says.

“Oh yeah? Cool”, says I, “What kind of story?”.

Caine fixes me in his weighty gaze “I am writing [pause] a Millennium story”.

Just then, the future Mrs Donkey sends out a sharp, high-pitched scream as Fluffy, having been in the act of taking a sip of beer, suddenly sprays her in a golden mist of laughter, “Well you’d better get on with it, Mate, you’ve only got two days”, and then turns to me, “What a twat!”.

Caine says nothing. He rises, and wanders off into the trees.

To this day, we are none the wiser as to whether Caine’s Millennium [pause] story was ever written, but no doubt the long hours of data entry in a poorly-lit, open-plan office alongside an army of well groomed, dark-suited, fellow data entry clerks on his return home to Japan may have proved an insurmountable barrier to the development of this truly remarkable breakthrough in modern literature.


Given a scowl, some odd garments an air of self assuredness, any insecure youngster can travel the world pretending to find the truth to life’s mysteries, just like Kwai Chang Caine. Pic: http://media.monstersandcritics.com

Movember in Jaipur

Movember my ass! Now these guys have really got it goin’ on this November. Pic: www.daylife.com

I recently spent a few days with an old friend who’s reaching the point in her life where her father is doing all he can to set her up with a nice, prosperous young man from the homeland. Sanjita was sitting back in a fancy bar in one of the city’s more stylish precincts, a glass of sauvignon blanc in one, slender hand, and a smouldering cigarillo, dangling glamorously from the other, as she discussed her predicament.

“Oh Donkey,” she pouts provocatively, “Bapa’s finding me one, skinny, high-panted young executive after another. Most of them are nice enough … one or two have even been quite charming, but I just don’t think I could ever get past those bloody, twitching moustaches! Kissing them must be like eating a mouldy mango! Why do these deluded fools think they look so attractive with those tufts of black fuzz on their lips?”.


Movember is over for another year – hoo-bloody-ray!

I shall be spared (at least for another eleven months) from having to listen to the boys from IT swanning around the office, rattling their tins for donations, banging-on about the wispy growth on their upper lips, showing off to the women in the office by stroking their manliness (am talking about their moustaches, here) while at the same time emphasizing their sensitive, new age sides by contributing to what they consider to be a worthwhile cause.

They are like a bunch of strutting peacocks, these men who have fallen into the Movember fad. They stand around the water cooler comparing the size of their droops, secretly (and often, not-so-secretly) fancying themselves as ‘70s porno-stars, something they surmise to be quite endearing to your average, modern, professional woman.

Well, lads, on behalf of those of us who don’t mind getting a bit of work done every now and then, I have a little message for you…

First of all, that pathetic, tufty protuberance below your schnoz isn’t making you the apple of every woman’s eye. You gotta understand that it was never the moustache that made Long Dong Silver and Johnny Holmes famous - it just happened to be the ‘70s when they were doing their thing, a decade synonymous with T-shades and the mo. So just ‘cause you work in IT, and therefore watch a fair bit of porn on the company’s time, that doesn’t necessarily make you a super stud in the sack.

And secondly, it’s pretty obvious that most women with any sort of taste don’t really go for moustaches these days, otherwise every bloke’d have one, or every gal would be married to a cop, dig?

So finally, with the end of a long, slow Movember now upon us, I can breathe a sigh of relief from all the grief and abuse I receive for being a Donkey who hasn’t decided to let himself go in the preening department this November.

It seems that, just because these selfish dudes who are doing something for charity for the first time in their lives (and let’s face it, the reality is that they’re not shaving for a month, which actually means they’re doing less!), they think it’s OK to judge those of us who choose to maintain minimal facial follicularity, and accuse us publically of not contributing to “the cause”; after all, they’re the ones growing the mo, so the least I could do is sling ‘em a donation.

“The cause”, hey? - and this is where Movember really gives me the shits. Usually, when someone does something for a cause, they tend to know something about that cause, but ask any of these judging bogans what the cause is, and they’ll tell you the stock, standard line,

“We’re raising funds and awareness about men’s health issues”, they parrot the Movember website.

“Oh really? That’s interesting…” offers Doubting Donkey, all smarmy and patronising, while at the same time, oozing sophistication, “and what health issues would they be?”.

“Um … men’s health issues”.

“Right”, says I, rapidly losing all patience and suave, “Now take you’re fucking ugly caterpillar lip, complete with crumbs from the Lunchtime Seafood Special, and get the fuck out of here!”.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a good cause, and I really should be proud that one has come along that even selfish people who are only interested in silicon- and computer-enhanced women and football (and not necessarily in that order) can get into. But the thing about Movember is that no one really knows who or what they are raising money for, and the level of awareness of the “men’s health issues” that they’re raising awareness about, for the most part, seems to be remarkably absent.

I’m from the old school of alms-giving. If you want my cash, you gotta perform. Dress a monkey up in a vest and fez, and have him dance on a wire in front of my balcony while I drink chilled French champagne, and here’s a tenner. Have a young girl kidnapped at birth and sent to the circus to have ribs and vertebrae removed so she can perform all manner of contortions in front of myself and my fellows, and I’ll gladly sling her a fiver. Have an armless and legless man write an essay on pre-war European existentialism using only his mouth and blunt pencil, and I’ll shout “Bravo” while I shower him with loose change, or simply be able to tell me why you’re growing that ridiculous fungus on your upper lip, and I’ll gladly provide you with a modest, tax deductable donation. Anything less, my lazy, young, bogan, IT friends, and you can move your rattling tin on past ol’ Donkey.

That is of course, unless you can grow a real moustache like my two Rajasthani camel-riding friends (pictured above) in a single month. Now that’s manhood, and that, not the embarrassing wisps you’re sporting in this office, is what’ll drive the ladies wild with desire. Right girls?

What the parents don't know...

Ma and Pa Donkey and I have a bit of an unspoken understanding – they don’t ask me what I do, so I don’t have to lie to them. It’s a pretty good system, ‘cause although they know I am out there saving the world from horrible, nasty things, and can bandy-about down at The Club that their little baby and his Missus are kind of … um … “modern-day missionaries”, they may not be very happy to learn about what it is I am doing to make the world a better place, some of which may not go down too well over a few stiff, mid-afternoon gins and a couple of rounds of bridge.

It’s a bit of an odd conundrum, I guess. On the one hand they know that I am doing good stuff, and they are clearly proud of it (even though I think they’d secretly prefer to be able to stick-it to Lord and Lady Wexford-Southerby-Smith by boasting that their son is clearing six figures a month), and yet on the other hand, if The Club ladies actually knew what I talk to people about all day long, and what I teach others to do, Ma’s reception at the first-Tuesday cake stall would be frostier than the top of Mrs Whitaker’s prize-winning lemon sponge.

Basically, the problem comes down to values. Y’see, Ma and Pa Donkey are strict Catholics, and I was brought up in the full traditions of the Church; Sunday mass, weekly confessions, love and respect for one’s neighbour, faith, hope and charity and, of course, not to touch oneself.

(With that knowledge finally out in the open, no doubt many of you will be nodding in satisfaction as the penny finally drops regarding why I am such an emotional and sexual cripple).

I was a pretty good religious sponge, too. I took on-board all of the various rules and teachings of the Mother Church, and like so many others, never questioned a thing. Unfortunately, the whole dogma of the Catholic Church is flawed, because to be “a good, young Catholic gentleman”, and to adhere to all the teachings, one ended up contradicting oneself.

The case in point was the one about providing charity, love and support to all those in need, or, to quote the Ten Commandments, that whole “do unto others as you’d have them do to you” thing. At about the time that I was struggling to do everything right, and trying to follow all that religious gaff to the letter, there was something going on in the world which was really throwing the cat among the religious zealots … that thing was called AIDS.

All of a sudden, from about 1984, there was this thing out there called AIDS that was killing everyone. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was wealthy tycoons in New York, movie stars in Europe or poor, peasant farmers in Zimbabwe – the pictures were the same; emaciated bodies, no hair and horrible pain.

Our Catholic upbringing went into overdrive to do something about all this – to help the poor, the afflicted, the helpless, and indeed there was a distinct half of the media who were urging us to do something. But oddly enough, in support of the other half, who were telling us to leave these poor wretches well alone, were our very own clergymen, and of course, head amongst them, none other than his Holiness, The Pope. Because, despite a couple of typically misguided reports from tabloid current affairs media that the disease was carried and spread by household cats, it soon became apparent that AIDS was getting around thanks to a world which had “suddenly” gone crazy for sex!

While thousands of gay men and drug users were dropping like flies, we, the Faithful remained firm; singing our hymns and saying our Rosaries. When AIDS moved-on from the streets of San Francisco and took hold in Africa, we looked-on and prayed for the souls of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. As the pictures on TV and in magazines got more graphic and the stories more personable and real, our spiritual leaders stood firm on their condemnation of condoms, and even began to spread lies about them.

By this time, however, some of us had snapped-out of the secure daze of ignorance. By this time, some of us had realized that to be a good Catholic was impossible, because you couldn’t just stand by and watch innocents suffer and die when something could clearly be done to prevent it –put simply, you couldn’t obey all the rules about sex and condoms AND help those who were in need. The two were incompatible.

So, poor, ol’ misguided Donkey had finally realized that there were more important things amongst the religious teachings than just a set of rules to be followed. He realized that humanity needed to be valued above the dictates of a faceless following; that a human life was worth saving from suffering, regardless of what the person had done or continues to do. In coming to this realization, I realized that the Catholic rules about sex and condoms were ridiculous – they were simply rules to be obeyed, and absolutely nothing to do with caring for people.

So nowadays I devote my time to preventing the transmission of HIV (which causes AIDS) and other nasties created by an individual inserting their dick into someone’s bum, vagina or other orifice, of which one or both of the owners are infected, or a used, infected syringe into an arm. I go out into the world, ramming condoms down people’s throats (not literally), and I tell them to use these all the time. I ask detailed questions of men who stick their dicks into each others arses, of young girls who sell sex for money or new clothes and of young men who sell their bums for money to buy drugs which they shoot into their arms with (hopefully, but not often enough) sterile needles. I work solidly to try to ensure that the people who are the least likely to be invited to Ma Donkey’s bridge games, namely sex workers, drug users and men who have sex with men can have the knowledge and resources they need to live for as long as they should, with minimal pain and suffering.

While some who sit along the pew from Ma and Pa every Sunday morning would not approve of the offspring of two of their number peddling the sinful, depraved wares of Asia’s latex manufacturers on a daily basis, I am convinced (and I think, deep down, so are Ma and Pa) that the Big Bloke Upstairs is nodding in approval at what some of us are trying to do, even if we are breaking a few of “his” rules.

It’s World AIDS Day again. Please go out and buy a red ribbon, and wear it proudly to commemorate all those who have died from, or who are living with AIDS. But most importantly, try to find out about the organization from whom you are buying that red ribbon – no doubt they’ll be the ones who are out there doing all the things that Ma and Pa Donkey’s Club friends would disapprove of, and that’s definitely an organization worth supporting.

Icarus flies again

Ah, but first…:

A couple of years ago, back when Donkey first started this thing, he was working for Saving the World HQ. To be brutally honest, despite the name, it was not the greatest job in the world, and was about as taxing as eating a sandwich! So while one never actually wrote blog posts when one was at work (well not very often, anyway), Donkey generally found that he had plenty of energy when he got home to sit down for 2-3 hours to pound-out some magnificent missives for you and all.

That’s not been the case, however, since one day, waking up with a keyboard imprint in the side of my snout and a gallon of Donkey Drool cascading across the desk and onto the floor, I decided I’d had enough of being bored out of my pea-sized brain, and hot-footed it to the oxygen-starved streets at the top of the world, where I re-discovered the invigorating claustrophobia of not having enough hours in the day in which to get everything done.

The result of that, of course, is that when Donkey finally hangs his chaff-bag on the top hook at the end of the day, he’s way too knackered to think about something to say or some witty observation to expound. No doubt for some of you, that’s more a blessing than a curse, but for me, it is a great sadness, ‘cause I love being an active member of your community, rather than a sinister, lurking, dirty-ol’ Donkey-type.

Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know that I’m not really all that slack, just incredibly busy and exhausted at the end of the day after all the odd things I have to do in order to keep the good folk safe and healthy. If I could, I would let you know all of the certifiable, ridiculous imaginings I’ve got chasing a piece of cheese on a treadmill in my mind, but I’m only equine, after all (I think) and I can only do what I can.

And now on with the show…:

As I was saying, two years ago, when this all started, I was living in a place that was so stiflingly hot that at 3am on any given day it was still 35°C, and it had been hot in that hell-hole for so many centuries that the stink outside your door was beyond belief. Add to that a billion, crappy, window-unit air conditioners rattling away at the same time, and before you know it, the volume of the world outside had been pumped-up way higher than eleven, and was rumbling and shaking as though the Japanese International Sumo Team had devoured twelve pots of Mama Flatulina’s famous stewed beans. The noise, and the stink, kept everyone locked-up in their airless tombs, day in, day out.

The thing about this place, however, due to the massive industry associated with illegally tapping-into the electricity supply using only a paper clip and some elastic from a pair of Rajiv’s old, brown underpants, is that perhaps only five of the fourteen million residents of that place had ever paid an electricity bill (that’s five, not five million). As a result, the electricity authorities believe that only five (again, that’s just five) homes actually receive electricity, and when the demand (from the additional thirteen million, nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-five, undetected users) gets too large, the system (developed and built in 1943, and only upgraded after the total customer-base of Yamuna Power Inc. exploded overnight by an unprecedented 25% in April, 1945, when a Mr Sanjoop Nankernee finally got sick of the late Mrs Nankernee’s whining about the outside light not working) goes into complete shut-down, and all five people jump on the phone to demand immediate action.

And everyone out there in the massive urban sprawl who is drawing on the illegal electricity knows this. They know that the system can’t cope, but Devji from No. 32 will be damned if he’s going to run only one air-con unit, when Sanjay from next door is running two. And when Sanjay learns that Devji’s upped the ante, so too, will he switch on all four of his. By 7.33am, the whole city’s running at full load, and everyone knows that the power will be all gone by 7.35am … and yet no one switches anything off. It’s just the way it is.

And when the power does go out, a sweeter silence you have never in your life heard … there are actually birds out there somewhere in the haze … you can hear their melodic calls … until six million generators kick-in at 7.36am. Then we’re back to business as usual.

Jump forward a couple of years, and I find myself in stunning Fiji, this time on assignment for Saving the Herd. As you’d expect from your intrepid Donkey who’ll stop at very few lengths to ensure the readership receives a complete overview of what some of the World’s exotic locales have to offer, I hit the bars and nightclubs of Suva last night in a mighty fashion comprising the consumption of a great many beverages and the some rather odd, shouted conversations. Indeed, a casual passerby who happened to peer through a darkened window of O’Reilly’s at about 12.42am may have seen a shaggy, barnyard beast swinging from, and grinding against the raised poles situated around the seedy dance floor, and the resultant looks of horror on the startled faces of the young locals thereon. Needless to say, by sunrise this morning, the only things anyone should have been expecting to get out of Donkey would have been repulsive snores and another bucket of Donkey Drool swelling his pillow.

But instead of sleeping on until mid-afternoon, being careful to lay completely still so as not to rock the bed and create a great, jolting, Fiji Bitter-induced stab to my head, Donkey was wide awake at 5.30am thanks to the wonderful, competitive devotion of the good people of the Friendly Islands. Because at 5.30am, from right outside my window, came not the gentle, soothing trill of the morning sparrows as they greeted the dawning sun, but rather the thumping bass of a mega-amped PA system, amplified electric drums, guitars and a host of mic-ed-up, happy-clappin’ angels singing their praises to Heaven on high … en masse!

Anyone who’s ever been to the Islands will recall well the myriad of multi-coloured churches that have been erected to The Almighty, often numbering in the realm of 3:1 churches per member of the population, with almost as many denominations, sects, break-away evangelist communities and “outreach” centres to match, and Suva by far has the largest and most diverse range of these compared with any other city in The Pacific. Now despite their common, constant promotion of working towards spiritual and community harmony, in Suva, as with anywhere that you have a great collection of conflicting, doctrinal dogma, the many churches are in heavy competition for the immortal souls (not to mention the substantial financial contributions) of those “poor, lost souls crying out in the spiritual wilderness”. Unfortunately for Donkey, the way to win that competition amongst the spiritual majority of Suva, is to play music louder than any other congregation, and to play it earlier.

So at 5.30am on Sunday morning, equipped with the biggest hangover Donkey-kind has experienced in … weeks, I was holding onto the bed head as the room was spinning around with increasing, alcohol-induced velocity, while the bed bounced all over the floorboards with each base-line from the church next door.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Just as I was getting the room under control and starting to cope with the jolts, the hymns and clapping started-in on 6:4 time. Even in my delicate state, I thought that was pretty amazing, until I realised that every second bass line was slightly louder than the other. When it started in on 8:4 time, I finally twigged that my plush little, abode – oh-so-peaceful during the week - was situated bang in the middle of a weekly religious war zone being fought on multiple, spiritual fronts.

I guess it’s fair to say it did get me praying, “Jay-zus! Will you shut the fuck up!”, I bellowed before turning green and being forced to hang onto the pillow again for stability. There was nothing for it, I was going to have to sit this one out, and I lay there snivelling in misery as new players joined the cacophonic war outside, and the musical crescendo continued to build.

And then, by 7.45am, completely at my wits end, and with every non-fixed item in the room having moved six feet from where it had been the night before, it all stopped in mid-beat “Alle-fucking-luiah! It’s a miracle! Praise be to Him on High!”, I cried.

It seems that air-cons and musical devotions are not dissimilar when it comes to keeping up with the Joneses; just as Devji and Sanjay had gone head-to-head with the cooling, only to create a meltdown, so too had the spiritual soldiers of Suva battled with weapons of over-amped bass until there was nothing but silence. Clearly, in the armoury of the churches of Suva, electricity is not a bottomless gift from God, and no army can fight a war without appropriate resources to ensure back-up.

The result? Donkey was able to sleep-off his aching scone until afternoon, and not one of those well meaning institutions managed to enjoy his hooves upon their hallowed floors last Sunday.


They may look cute (from afar), but I think the close-up on those eyes suggests a deliberate, satanic ploy to hurt Donkey's head. Pic: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_9FazTC7TfeA/RsKSyqH8LmI/AAAAAAAAAFk/LYn3naHXSwY/CIMG0128.JPG

Mormons, Man, they MUST be taking the piss!

I mean, they’ve just got to be. Sit in the cool, hazy shade of a decades-old mango tree between the shimmering hot hours of 11 and 3 in any Samoan village on any day of the week (except Sunday), and look out into the sweltering white heat to see what you can see. The air is so stifling that even the bloody chickens that squawk-out the hour all night long and who contribute a solid, uninterrupted, sleep-depriving racket from 7am until 10 seem to have gone to ground and are following your lead underneath some bush or coconut tree. With the exception of the gentle swish from the swaying coconut fronds, the world is silent and still; not a soul is out there … not a single sign of human life.

That is unless you count the members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints as human, in which case there they’ll be, wandering along beside the sizzling, bitumen road in the full heat of the blazing sun, their black, woolen trousers intensifying the blistering heat, their starched, white, long-sleeved shirts plastered to their backs and chests with sweat and their black ties at full-mast, turning wet from the top down as they soak-up the rivulets which run down cleanly shaven necks.

Only a harsh practical joker could conceive of this most ridiculous concept; to force their own to put on the most inappropriate clothes and move through the world in the hottest part of a hot day in a hot, hot country, with nary but a holy book to hold above their heads as a means of shading their eyes from the sun’s fury. Even the latter is funny, as those tricksters in the LDS Church hierarchy, I presume in an attempt to see just how far they could push their prank before someone would call them on it, have decreed that the compulsory, standard-issue holy book be of such minute dimensions as to provide not a sliver of shade.

These senior-ranking, nutty funsters, holed-up in Utah and sitting around in their uncomfortable ceremonial underwear don’t stop at these hilarious attempts to give their young brethren sunstroke, either. Not content with taking the piss out of their only-recently-embraced, darker-skinned communities of the Pacific, they’ll also have a stab at their own kids, by sending them “on mission” to these new, fertile hunting grounds of the Pacific. Now even I admit that it’s pretty funny to send a skinny, white, blond, crackling-voiced, acne-ridden teenager from the outer-suburbs of Utah to a village in Samoa to convert to Mormonism people who speak a completely different language, by knocking on doors of houses that don’t have any. I mean, this is the stuff of those stupid practical joke TV shows, isn’t it? Surely there must be a TV camera hidden somewhere up in the rafters of the thatched roof, capturing every confused facial expression of these young kids as they stand awkwardly outside the traditional, wall-less house, sweating profusely in the midday inferno, reading out passages of a tiny book in a language that the people dozing inside cannot even understand? MasterCard my ass! That stuff is priceless!

The senior-ranking Mormons are even trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of us. Did you know that until relatively recently, black people were forbidden from joining the hierarchy of the LDS Church? Fortunately that’s all changed now, and the Mormons have been churning through the Christianity-rich Pacific Islands ever since, swelling their numbers and making piles and piles of steaming, hot, tax-free cash in the process. The practical joke part of it is that a new, sacred “tablet” allowing black people to join the Church was found at about the same time as the financial data about modern Christian expansion in the Pacific became available, and now, thanks to a new, instructional tablet from God (allegedly discovered down the back of someone’s couch), there’s a brand new, community-funded LDS Church going up every couple of kilometers in Samoa. What’s funny about that? Only that every Tax or Inland Revenue Department in the world seems to have swallowed this stuff hook, line and sinker!

But for me, the best indicator that the Mormons are having an almighty lend of the rest of us lies in their promotion of the saintly, virtuous young Mormon. They and their youth-oriented literature bang-on-and-on about chastity before marriage and being faithful to both God and their wives (although if being faithful to one wife seems a little too difficult, they can always marry another), and yet, in the villages of the Pacific, when it comes to converting potential new members, the Mormons seem to have gone with the age-old adage of advertising agencies the world over; “sex sells” … or at least it certainly helps the salesman to get his foot in the door.

I am sure it is not by coincidence that most of my female friends in Samoa have looked dozily-out from the shade of the mango tree on a hot afternoon and seen a buff, young Samoan Hercules, his six-pack visible through his soaking, see-through white shirt, and thought, ”Mmmmmmm, that’s nice”, before proceeding to call him over for a chat about the Mormons. I am also sure that it is not by coincidence that I have later seen my female friends, after a night of sweaty, close-up dancing in a sweltering Samoan nightclub, wander out along the sea wall, hand-in-hand with that very same Mormon missionary. Virtuous chastity indeed!

And the practical jokes aren’t just for the Pacific, either. Just as white Mormons send their kids “on mission” to idyllic tropical locales to flounder around in the heat, trying to recruit new converts without a scrap of common language, so too, do some lucky Pacific Islanders get to become missionaries also. Just the other day, on a freezing, blustery afternoon in Melbourne, I watched a couple of young Mormons in the same black trousers, white shirts and black ties, standing at a tram stop reading passages of their book and trying to give out their riveting written material. While one of the guys looked local, seemingly from one of Melbourne’s wealthier suburbs, the other guy was a buff, young Polynesian lad who was shivering in the bitter cold (again, that old fish-out-of-water gag - you just can’t beat it!).

The Australian kid was standing on a chair and proselytising, while the other guy, through chattering teeth, was “working the room”; roving amongst the assembled passengers, handing out magazines and whispering words of salvation … or so I thought, because while the written material that he was shoving into the faces of unsuspecting commuters, like all the others I have ever seen, almost certainly contained lengthy diatribes on the need for young people to stay “pure”, his next action was quite unexpected indeed.

I watched him approach a very well-dressed, good looking young lady in a short skirt and stylish, knee-high boots, to whom he said something. In reply, she looked up from her book and shook her head, to which, with a flash of sparkling teeth, he gave a loud laugh, dumped the collection of magazines and brochures he was holding on the ground at his feet and sat down beside her (very closely) for a chat. Before long, they were both laughing at each other’s jokes and getting along very well indeed, and although Donkey is not the most intuitive guy when it comes to cross-gender signals, there was enough cross-legged toe-pointing, twirling of ringlets of hair and showings of the inside of wrists to send the message loud and clear that they were not talking about eternal life.

So they may have pulled the wool over the eyes of their own, and the tax fraud investigators all over the world, but the Mormons aren’t fooling me with their claims of purity and chastity; young people are the same the world over; when beautiful people are pointing at you and saying “Mmmmmm”, it doesn’t matter how many copies of The Book of Mormon you read to stop the urge. Sending this young kid to Australia might have been a clever little prank designed by the powers-that-be in the LDS Church to humiliate him, but for this young missionary and his new, tram-riding friend, the next few hours were shaping-up to look as though the joke might definitely be on the mugs who coughed-up the cash to send him here to spread “the word”.


This really has nothing to do with the story, but I laughed to find the "Mormon hunks calendar". Told you they were having a lend. Pic: http://www.jewishjournal.com

Boost Junkies

Even heroin junkies must have looked young, vibrant and fresh-faced once. Perhaps back when they first started using; back when the drug wasn't the driving force of their life. Back then, it had been a heady, exhilarating rush of art and culture, music and friendship, self-exploration and reinvention which brought these once passionate people together in a spirit of social abandon and thrill-seeking.

Perhaps it was their alternative views; their love of a perceived beauty within the lustreless urban landscape of our increasingly homogenous cities which sent beautiful, vibrant, talented young people in search of each other, and of something new and life-giving. So it was not so much the dependence on the drug, not initially, which egged these ones along, but the good times - the fun, the laughs, the smiles … the belonging.

At first it’s all good – fun people having fun and enjoying each others’ company. Eventually, the heroin helps the fun along a little … well, a lot, really. The positive conditioning of the good times drives them to further drug use, and before long, the dependency kicks-in, and it’s about then that the thing which once gave everyone such a boost [sic] starts to have a whole new effect on the young, vibrant and fresh-faced.

Initially their skin loses that rosy-cheeked, shiny complexion as it dries up and the life-blood slowly drains away. The glinting eyes and tantalising lashes retreat deeper into their skulls, leaving behind sinister, oily shadows, and their vivacious, plump red lips become dry, cracked, thin and grim. The full and rounded curves are soon replaced by spindly limbs and pendulous flaps of loose skin, and their bounding interest in, and enthusiasm for a big, wide world becomes consumed by a jaded paranoia directed at those in their immediate proximity. Before long, these once vibrant young beauties have become haggard, walking zombies, present only in their stagnant, sluggish consciousness, and we discover that the wonderful thing which once gave these people such a buzz begins to use them up; to suck the will to live right out of them ...

Just like fruit juice does!

About five years ago here in Australia, there was a massive revolution in the shopping malls and food courts of the outer suburbs. At this time, McDonalds was losing its massive, decades long dominance of the fast food market and was forced to completely alter the way it did business after nearly half a century of flipping the same five burgers; fruit, salads and wraps were now on the menu, and all the other pretenders were following suit. Why? Because someone had got onto the idea that whacking fruit, yoghurt, ice and low-fat ice-cream into a blender and dumping the lot into a massive, polystyrene cup was not only healthy, but a brilliant way to make a great, steaming pile of cash.

These smart folks also realised that there was a huge market of young people out there who wanted to be active and healthy, but had no shining beacon other than the Golden Arches to go to for fun. Virtually overnight, the Boost Juice Company came into being and opened their outlets all over the 'burbs. Within them they placed an army of staff who were the happiest, smiliest, most energetic, outgoing, healthy young playthings you've ever seen. I remember not really understanding the attraction one day as I stood, four-deep at the counter trying to buy an OJ, but when I got up to the front and held up a tenner, I remember being bathed in the radiance of four semi-naked young men and women with six-packs and tans throwing cups here and there, juggling fruit and doing cartwheels while my order (rapidly upgraded to a super-sized power fruit shake with extra Boosters and performance-enhancing Wheatgerm SyrupTM), was crushed and blended into a creamy, fluorescent sludge. It was the most brilliant marketing coup of all time, and like every self-proclaimed sexy young person in the country, I fell into step with the hipsters behind the blenders and became addicted to fruity goodness.

As soon as this fast food revolution hit the ground, however, I was off. I took up residence overseas, and I lost touch with the fortunes of the young folk at Boost. But just the other day, feeling a bit sore and sorry for myself at having wound-up back in the big city after so long away, I wandered through the doorway of Boost Juice looking for some sunshine and happiness.

Now everyone knows what a long-time heroin user looks like – they're easy to spot when they've been using for many years, but most families of long-time users will later tell you that they were unaware of the physical changes that were taking place in their loved ones over many years of drug abuse, because they were seeing them everyday. It's not until someone who hasn't seen the user in years points out their drawn, haggard face and spindly arms that they realise the dramatic, pathetic change that has come over their son, brother, sister or daughter.

And that was what I saw, after years of absence, when I walked up to the juice bar the other day. Just like the heroin junkies hitting passers-by up for 20 cents outside on Chapel Street, the corpse-like gaze staring at me across the grimy blender-top was slack jawed, under-nourished and disinterested in “How my day’s going”, whether I would “like any special Boosters today” or what my “plans are for tonight”. Instead of the cartwheels, six-packs and shining teeth, this zombie was completely spent from years of Booster abuse, had handles hanging out the end of her stretched crop-top from too much super-charged passionfruit sorbet and her teeth were stained with the tell-tale signs of having overdone it on the pick-me-up-carrot-juice. Her entire appearance was like someone who’d been on a twelve week wilderness endurance trek – even the Boost Juice logo on her bedraggled headband had split and was crusted with strawberry puree.

“Hang on a minute?”, I thought to myself, “What happened to the vibrant, young playthings bouncing around on the energy-inducing goodness of blended fruit, yoghurt, ice and fancy grass?” And then the penny dropped – these poor things are completely spent. There’s only so long one can keep pushing one’s body, with or without psychological or physical stimulants. Muscles will eventually give up, as will your brain, because they are only cells. As with the heroin addicts, the high might be great, and your brain might want more and more, but a snazzy image, sexy, young staff and sweet, fruity drinks will only push an individual for so long before the body stops bouncing off the walls, and lands with a painful thud.

The Boost Juice Company has, I am sad to say, had its day. It has provided its staff, and indeed the rest of us, with too much of a good thing, and while that thing once gave us all a great … well, Boost, it failed to recognise when enough was enough, and the result is an entire nation of washed-up, disinterested and brain-dead juice junkies who have lost the will and ability to function normally.

So be careful what you wish for – you can have too much of a good thing.

No one working at a sink could ever be this happy - this shot was obviously taken in the heady, hey day of Boost's urban expansion - it's a different story now. Pic: www.winterhalter.co.uk

The Global Circus

While travelling through Vietnam with Mrs Donkey over the last two weeks, I found myself reflecting on my personal growth over the past decade, and particularly how my understanding about people and the world has expanded, been challenged, altered and re-developed during that period. It was in Vietnam, ten years ago, that a young, naive, fresh-faced Donkey took his first fearful steps beyond his own cushy borders, into the so-called third world, and where he was first exposed to the attitudes, beliefs, practices and (non-) activities of the backpacker community ... t'was my first exposure to life on The Trail.

I can recall sitting on a boat in Halong Bay, all those years ago, surrounded by crew-cutted, tattooed, muscular British "lads", chain-smoking, guzzling beer and joking loudly about life on The Trail; diving in Phuket, trekking in Karakoram, beach parties in Goa, ganja in Thamel, ping-pong balls in Pat Pong, venereal disease since Bali ... being only two days into my own adventure, I remember feeling uncharacteristically timid beneath their monolithic self-confidence and bravado, and I wondered if I would ever be able to assimilate into multiple cultures and environments the way I imagined these seemingly older, self-sufficient, modern-day adventurers, and their gorgeous, bronzed, semi- (and occasionally) naked, nubile female counterparts had been able to.

Before long, like so many inexperienced travellers before me, I signed-on as an apprentice; I sat at the feet of my betters, and I began my learning by lapping-up all the bawdy tales of life on The Trail. As befitted my role, for hours I listened, bewitched, as I learned of daring escapes from corrupt customs officials, of ways to ensure you don't get ripped-off by vendors and rickshaw drivers, of where to go to buy the cheapest chapattis, of how to smuggle beer into Pakistan, and through all of the lessons, I respected and worshiped my new teachers as one reveres a wise and noble sage.

Before long, I too found myself wearing the voluminous, earth-coloured hemp trousers and brightly striped, cheese cloth shirts of my betters. Before long, I too had neglected my bodily hygiene, and been content with sleeping on mattresses containing a menagerie of microscopic fauna. Mirroring my fellow disciples, I allowed my stinking body to waste away to skeletal proportions, and before long, I too had succeeded in shedding my materialistic ways, and had altered my life so as to live my life exactly as poor people do in villages, all over the world

For example, each day I would sleep late, and rise in the late morning with an almighty, beer-fuelled headache. Wiping the crust from my eyes with my sleeve, I would dress in my unwashed "uniform", and sit down to a large plate of banana pancakes and a papaya milkshake. As I sat, I would look through the Lonely Planet and decide what I was going to see and do that day, and then I would dig into my pocket to discover that if I did any of the things on my list, I would not have enough money left with which to get drunk and stoned that evening, and so instead I would open my travel journal and spend the rest of the day reflecting on the evils of the materialistic west.

Occasionally, were I lucky enough to save a couple of pesos, ringgits, rupees or yuan during an argument with a rickshaw driver on a given day, I would endeavour to head to the market to purchase a souvenir or two in the form of some of the typical objects that the local communities buy and sell every day. I would head out into the sweltering heat, and wander past an endless progression of stalls selling bright pink, orange and red bags, coloured, cotton lampshades spotted with reflective mirror circles, colourful juggling balls and firesticks and rows upon rows of garishly striped shirts and tie-up fisherman's pants. With these exotic, everyday objects and clothes, I would imagine myself in the future, having returned to my friends and family back home, describing to them how poor people decorate their homes, how they amuse themselves around the fire in the evenings, and about the clothes they wear while fishing. I imagined that my collection of exotic accoutrement would help to educate them about life in the third world, just as I had been lucky enough to receive this unique education.

Because, by the end of three months on The Trail, I had moved up the ranks from wide-eyed, adoring apprentice, to experienced, wizened teacher, willing to bestow upon others the terror, anguish and triumphs of my travels. Sure, I would occasionally need to relate an anecdote I'd heard from others, substituting the original protagonist for myself, but when assuming the role of the adored sage, it is important to be able to fulfil people's learning requirements, and besides, I was sure these things would happen to me eventually, as many adventures still lay before me. Because by that time, I had decided upon a life on The Trail. I would forever be a traveller, a nomad; no longer a prisoner to the materialistic, meaningless society from which I had come, but a fully-fledged member of a new, more aware population, one not determined by geographical borders or by race ... I had chosen to belong, forever more, to the Global Community ... at least, I was going to ... just as soon as I could scrape together some more cash.

And for that I needed to go back home to the capitalist heartland. Through my newly heightened awareness, I struggled miserably to work each day through bumper-to-bumper traffic in my ridiculously huge, fuel guzzler, and I suffered through day after day of meaningless boredom in order to line my pockets with enough money to allow me to once again experience the consciousness expansion of The Trail.

In the end, getting back on The Trail took me a good few years, side-tracked as I was by the arrival of the Xbox, the Holden HSV Commodore, numerous football seasons, nights at the pub, beachside holidays etc. But through this time, I was careful to cultivate the worldly understanding that I had acquired on The Trail, and to remain pure to the ideals of living simply, and denouncing materialism in favour of the simple, village life. I also continued to place upon a pedestal those great and intelligent individuals on The Trail (amongst which I now included myself), who knew all there was to know about getting from A to B, about crossing illegal borders, about catching planes, boats, cars, busses, rickshaws, motorbikes, bicycles etc, and most importantly, about how to live just like the communities in third world countries. I admired these people (and therefore myself) for all of these things, and especially for their ability to blend-in - almost disappear - in the counties they visited. I was itching to get back on The Trail.

But things don't always turn out as you'd expect. Rather than donning the hemp and allowing my hair to get all greasy and matted, I was given an opportunity to go to a very different part of the world to work. Here I was surprised to find available in one, dusty corner of the market in that very distant, and culturally different country, the same brightly coloured shirts and oversized pants that I'd worn on The Trail. I also found, beneath the dust, sparkly, mirrored lampshades, juggling balls and garish bags. I was a bit perplexed to find these objects in my new home, however I knew that travel was all about discovery and solving mysteries, so I purchased a pair of incense-reeking, ochre-coloured hemp pants, and accepted my first dinner invitation to a colleague's home.

Here I was surprised to find kerosene lanterns, and nary a spangled lampshade in sight. My host's family, all dressed-up in pressed trousers and shirts, sat around watching TV, and appeared somewhat annoyed when I produced juggling balls from a fold in my ridiculous trousers and began hopping on one leg.

Lying in my bed later and reflecting upon that excruciating evening, I found it difficult to marry what I had seen and experienced in my colleague's home with what I thought I knew about how people lived in the third world. Years later, I found myself living in another, what I then knew to be called "developing" country, and sure enough, in the market, I found stalls selling the now familiar pants, balls, lampshades and bags, and yet I never once saw anyone from that community wearing such clothes, or decorating their homes with these objects.

Years after that, I found myself back in the country where my eyes had first been opened to the ways of the world, all those years before, and the penny finally dropped. Here I discovered that the local community, far from wearing the baggy pants and striped shirts that I had worn, actually despise these clothes, and the people who wear them. I came to understand that banana pancakes and papaya milkshakes are served-up for breakfast in only one street in the entire city - that street of course being where all the backpackers stay. And most interestingly of all, I discovered that fishermen wear shorts or sarongs while working, and pressed, pleated trousers at home, and that anyone who wears bright coloured clothes and juggles balls on one leg is thought of as having escaped from the circus.

Donkey never pretended to assume that he was all that bright, and it has taken him a long time to come to realise that the Global Community, those young (and occasionally, not-so-young) men and women who you'll find on The Trail, far from adopting the practices and behaviours of the communities in the countries in which they find themselves, are viewed by their reluctant hosts as alien freaks, more a product of a circus sideshow than a participating member of their community. It has taken me a long time to realise that these ridiculously dressed, stinking, filthy, pompous, obnoxious, privileged and self-obsessed animals, while they form a community of sorts, should more accurately be described as belonging to the travelling, Global Circus.

Over the next few weeks, I intend to celebrate my return to DonkeyBlog by introducing you to some of the characters I have met on The Trail, and exposing these for the circus sideshow freaks that they are. The carnies have arrived at DonkeyBlog, and the big top is being arrested. Welcome to the Global Circus.


Yep, because people always walk around the village looking like this. Pic: http://www.rawganique.com

It's just a jump to the left...

After the sky-scraping, stiflingly hot, hectic buzz of Bangkok, it was a fantastic treat to slide across the border last weekend for a couple of days in Vientiane.

"There's noting to do there, y'know," they all told me, as they drew on their great tumours of fruit metastasising from ridiculous cocktails in the slick, marble-lined bars of Bangkok's fancy hotels. "It's like going back through time to a country town in the '50s". Sounded pretty interesting to me, and I was sure a town isn't dubbed "The Paris of the East" for nothing ... although I think that term may have been attributed to at least half a dozen other places I've visited in the last couple of years. Still, it was worth a squiz, so I donned my best 50s gear, slicked my donkey mane up into a great, greasy wave, and took to the open road.

The "highway" into Vientiane certainly checks out with the idea of a country town in the 50s. I remember seeing old photos of my parents' house, just after it was built in the mid '60s. It was on one of those new, outer suburban housing estates, and theirs was one of the first to be completed. I recall this one photo of my Old Man, wearing a pair of tight, checked bathing shorts, mutton-chop sideburns like a couple of dead possum carcasses hanging from a shed wall, and a grin from ear to ear as he proudly presents his own bricks and mortar. Behind him stands his beige-brick castle, and beyond that ... nothing. Apart from Mum and Dad's house, there was nothing but empty paddocks, as far as the eye could see.

Fifty years later, as my fat, Donkey ass was turning puce with each jolt of the rickety tuk-tuk, my occasional glimpse of the landscape outside revealed a copy of those old photographs. Something seemed wrong – Vientiane was a capital city, and my guide book told me it was a 30 minute ride from the border to the centre of town. We'd been travelling for 25 minutes by this time, and all I could see through the spaces between the rickety buildings lining the Friendship Highway, was paddocks. Surely we should have been in the outer suburbs of a great, Asian, urban sprawl by this time? Thinking I'd been conned like so many inexperienced tourists before me; that I was being taken on the long road via Mandalay, where I'd be bashed, raped and sold into slavery, an embarrassed rage leapt to my cheeks, and I began pounding on the window of the driver's cab, shaking my fist at him in fury.

The poor little fellow immediately pulled over, and was nearly crying as I threw a bunch of notes at him and stormed off along the road with my backpack.

By the time I had paled a little, I found myself walking along beautiful, tree-lined boulevards. Where these grand promenades began was not discernable; the rickety, paddock-backed shops simply vanished, to be replaced by moulding, but immense, stately homes. I panicked that maybe I had accidentally evaded a security check point, because it was clear I had wandered into an exclusive area in which vehicular traffic was forbidden. Later I learned that I had finally reached the centre of Old Vientiane; the driver had been doing the right thing after all ... but still, something was not quite right. Where was everyone?

And that's about the first thing you notice about Vientiane when you arrive – there's no one about. For the next twenty-four hours, I reasoned with myself, "Oh, it's Sunday, people must be inside relaxing" ... "Oh, it's only early on Monday, perhaps work starts late here"... "Oh, perhaps they don't leave their offices at lunch time, but eat at their desks", however by "peak hour" on Monday afternoon, there was no denying it – just like a 1950s country town, only a few vehicles exist in Vientiane, and the population is really very, very low.

But fortunately for Vientiane, and for a visiting Donkey, there are some really great things to remember about the '50s. For starters, one is able to walk right down the middle of the road, completely unmolested by traffic as one gazes into the canopy of overhanging elms (not yet cut down to widen the bursting arterials and to make way for electricity wires). You also get to sit in the open air at one of dozens of wonderful, alfresco cafes – say what you will about the French and their [lack of] manners – of course, I never would – but their culinary legacy is one to be applauded. For mine, sitting back at a gingham- clothed table on a neat little sidewalk while eating exquisite baguettes and sipping on the finest coffee in Asia is truly a delight in the literal sense of the word. And the best part of 1950s rural culture, is that they are unashamedly vocal about their hatred of foreigners ... especially Europeans, so you get all the joy of French cuisine, without the scowls, cigarettes and unwashed bodies. Magic!

But in case you needed just that little bit more evidence to convince you about Vientiane's time warp, allow me to share with you the contents of the laundry price list I found in my guesthouse bedroom. It looked much the same as any other laundry list, anywhere in the world, although very much at 1950s prices (did I mention that Laos is very cheap?). I scanned down; trousers, skirt, dress, shirt, t-shirt, safari suit, socks, underpants ... hang on, what? A safari suit? You mean to tell me that people in Laos still wear safari suits for events other than fancy dress parties or to play military board games and toy soldiers with their nerdy mates?

After two days of wandering around the quiet, but elegant "Paris of the East", I am prepared to concede that Vientiane is very, very much like a country town in the 1950s, not only in its appearance, but in its attitudes and its fashion. Of course, your urbane, cosmopolitan Donkey didn't quite fit-in with the quaint scene, but as soon as I get myself a pair of long, khaki socks, a pith helmet and a beret (the later to be worn on casual Friday) I'll be ready for an alfresco croissant extravaganza. I'll be oooh-la-la-ing with the best of 'em.

Have a look at the size of that baby! Vivre le France! Pic: Hagas