Wagga Wagga

Wagga what? Don’t worry if you’re asking yourself where Wagga Wagga is because I bet half of the people who live in the next town over have never heard of it. Wagga Wagga (or Wagga for short) means “place of many crows” in aborigine. It’s a small town with a population of less than 50 thousand located approximately 450km south west of Sydney (if you look at a map and point to Canberra with your left index finger, Wagga Wagga will be near your pinky knuckle – I guess this all depends on the map’s scale and the size of your hand, but you have a rough idea).

I arrived here by (super small) propeller plane this afternoon and since Wagga Wagga is too small for it’s own airport, it leases the military one about 12km out of town. Good for the airport shuttle business, not so good for the broke backpacker. The airport shuttle charges $20 for a one-way trip into town and that’s pretty much the only way to leave the airport unless you’re a pilot. The airport shuttle mister was nice enough to put me in the most expensive and oldest bar/hotel west of Sydney. I guess I should have done some accommodation research beforehand instead of telling the guy to drop me off wherever he wished. The shuttle bus driver’s brother-in-law probably owns the place.

I’m in a three bed room that still has the furniture and bed spreads from the 60′s on the second floor of a bar in the dark end of town. Nice. Speaking of “nice”, I’ll spare you the details of the water in the kettle, the smell of the beer fridge or the plumbing in the shared bathroom (all probably haven’t been used since the 60′s). On second thought, I might sleep with my shoes on tonight, and hopefully I won’t get pink eye from the paper thin plastic covered cotton ball that replaced my pillow.

The town itself is nothing to brag about, there’s one main street which I walked about 12 times this afternoon. I think if you’re going to visit Australia, there’s not really any point in going any further than maybe 20 minutes from the coast, any coast. Inland Australia looks like Northern Ontario but worse (not Muskoka for you southerners, I mean half a day drive North of Muskoka). Towns are an hour apart from each other and haven’t even heard of one another and most people I passed on the street today looked like derros, riffrafs and bogans.

Looks like the only thing that this town seems to be doing right is keeping up with their stock behind the bar. I guess there’s not much else to do here between 4pm and 11pm but drink. On that note, I’m going to head downstairs for a couple brewskis before heading to bed.

Next stop is the Tumbarumba caravan park; where I will be calling “home” for the next month. (And it’s not “Tomb-ba-room-ba, it’s Tumm-ba-rumm-ba – I was corrected half a dozen times in the past two days).