Food

Soon after arriving in Australia I became aware that I was not just a traveler anymore and that I now belonged to a distinct subset of traveler; I was a backpacker. A massive industry exists in Australia to cater for this budget conscious group of young travelers. Because of such infrastructure, for the first time on my trip I was able to plan where I wanted to go, stay and do everyday for the next two weeks. Although this took a bit of spontaneity out of life, it did mean that not a single day was wasted. My day-to-day challenge, now that I had planned everything and in turn spent most of my money, was how to get food for next to nothing. The buzz I got from using my resourcefulness to do this nearly gave me as much pleasure as I would have got from eating the food I could no longer afford. In the first few days my sense of morality and imagination had to agree on exactly how resourceful I was to be be.

By accident I found that I was able to walk in to any hostel I wanted, the dorms often had an open door, and CCTV was usually only present in the bar areas. I could have taken anything I wanted from a spoonful of Nutella, to thousands of dollars of cash. I could have taken things that would have gone unnoticed, things that would have been inconvenient to lose, or things that to lose would have ruined someones trip. In the supermarkets, when I wasn’t wondering if I could eat tinned dog food, I made a point of knowing the whereabouts of all the blind spots, cameras and mirrors. To live like this wouldn’t have been so hard. And as for the guilt or remorse I would have felt; I knew that inside of me I could have justified it to myself and done it all again the next day. That would have been an easy life. The real challenge was how to get by without turning to the dark side.

I have been surprised to find, and I’m even more embarrassed to admit, that on top of the amazing life I’ve lived for the past 6 months, karma seems to have played its part in my life. Particularly with money I noticed that all the rupees scammed off me by Indian taxi drivers came back to me as cups of tea from complete strangers. The thousands of Thai bhat, Australian and Singaporean dollars that mysteriously disappeared from my wallet were returned as a free speedboat ride, discounted food from the innumerate lady-boy, and the money I found blowing in the wind along Bangkok’s Khao San Road. And that’s just the shallow, financial, quantifiable side of my life. I’m sure that in every other way, in ways that I cannot put a value to or even recognise, things have been going my way. My point being that where I have not meddled with this balance, not indulged my greed, and not manipulated others; I’ve still ended up on top. Now I’m not saying I turned the other cheek and left fate behind the wheel, I just mean that I didn’t want to end my run of good fortune for a bit of pick-pocketing and a few shoplifting sprees.

And so legitimately and honestly I learned to eat in Australia for next to nothing. I quickly found that most hostel kitchens had free food shelves that were stocked-up by fellow travelers who didn’t want to see their surplus food go to waste. Usually there would be rice or noodles there that, combined with a sachet of soy or chili sauce I had picked up along the way, would make a filling and flavorsome meal. When I arrived in a new place, I would find out which restaurants and cafés were offering promotions. Sometimes the promotions would require a purchase, and so, usually with the cashiers blessing, I would wait for another customer then piggyback on their purchase or exchange my voucher for their cash. And for desert, though they never advertised it, McDonald’s sold 50 cent (32 pence) ice creams. Everyday I found something new, ate something different, and got a real buzz in the process. On one occasion, when my bus stopped in a small town and I had to shell-out some hard cash to eat, I went in to a bakery and bought the cheapest loaf of bread I could find. As I walked out of the bakery on to the street, a man who had been on my bus approached me with his hand out.
‘Give us a few dollars for a pie would ya mate’
‘Fuck you I didn’t just buy a one dollar loaf of bread to indulge your expensive pie-eating habits.’ I thought but didn’t say out loud. Instead a big grin spread across my face as I walked past the man (who thought I hadn’t heard him and started shouting at me), filled-up my water bottle from a fountain in a park, and sat in the shade of a tree to eat my bread. As I sat there staring at the sea, something fell in to my lap; a pear. I looked up. The tree I had sat under was full of them.

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