Sometimes the most extraordinary adventures occur as you’re on the home stretch. Peter Davis reports.

Going home. Those simple words can spell relief, disappointment and anxiety, all in the one breath. But when the time is up and the resources are exhausted, that’s what most of us inevitably do. We head for home. And it’s on this homeward stretch that some of our richest adventures occur. Maybe it’s do with being more receptive to experiences once we are closer to our comfort zones. Or maybe it’s just one of those quirks of travel.

I attribute the beginnings of my political education to the fact that I once couldn’t get home. It was Paris in May, 1968. We lived in England and that year we returning from our annual sojourn in Spain. My parents thought a trip home via Paris would be ‘nice’. The moment we arrived in Paris, the students revolted. Everything in that city ground to a magnificent halt. Roads were clogged, airports and train stations ground to a halt and the banks ceased to operate (this was way before ATM’s). But I was only 14 and all I really remember was watching the nightly theatre of protest from our hotel window. In my mind I was out there at those barricades, lobbing stones at the fascists and listening to Jean Paul Sartre preach revolution to the worker-student alliance. After five days of what the French call Le Spectacle, we could finally exit France. That had been the best holiday of my life. Back in England I purchased a black berret as a fashion statement to accompany my new vocabulary. A decade later, as a student of French politics in Australia, I learnt what a dismal failure that revolution had been.

On another homeward stretch in the 1990’s, I was with my partner at Syndey Central. We were waiting for an early morning train back to Melbourne after a relaxing and uneventful holiday in the Blue Mountains. And that’s when Sam entered our lives. We first encountered him in the breakfast queue. It was a balmy, almost hot summer morning but he was dressed in a heavy torn tweed jacket, a think green jumper, an equally thick beanie and heavy corduroy trousers. He carried the smell of the streets with him and his solid but elderly and stooped frame was flanked by two large cardboard suitcases. As the queue inched forward he coaxed his cases along with his scruffy boots that had no laces. Then he spoke in a perfect, mild mannered mid-Atlantic accent. “I’ll have a coffee and croissant please” he said, reading the chalkboard above the waitresses head. “Sorry. We’ve sold out of croissants” screeched the girl at the counter, pronouncing the ‘t’ in croissant. The man with the suitaces turned to me and said, “What kind of a country sells out of croissants at seven in the morning?” We invited him to our table and in the half hour before our train departed he spun many stories, mainly about social injustice or about concentration camps. He also revealed to us the contents of his suitcases. One was packed with sheet music. He was composing a musical about Ned Kelly. The other case was full of Kaleidoscopes. He made them himself and hawked them around various department stores. They were beautifully crafted out of foil and cardboard. The three of us pointed our Kaleidoscopes to the windows in the station roof and I marveled at the fractured life of this gentle American who sleeps on the streets and eats croissants for breakfast. The Kaleidoscope he gave us still occupies an important place in our study. And every year since, at Halloween, we receive Sam’s greetings from his home above a record shop somewhere in Los Angeles. His carefully hand scribed letters are packed with satirical comments and drawings on the American system. The last one rendered the White House as an exploding, evil pumpkinhead. “Thank god you were on your way home” Sam once wrote. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have met you”

Recently I was on my way home from a journalism assignment that took me to several pacific island nations in less than ten days. It was a rushed and exhausting trip. My partner had arranged to meet me at Melbourne airport. I was to arrive on a Sunday morning and instead of going straight home to Melbourne we were going to drive to Bendigo to see our young nephew in the matinee performance of Les Miserables. He was playing Gavroche and I wanted to see him at the barricades.

But my plane was delayed. So my partner journeyed ahead to Bendigo and I planned to get a taxi home and scribble an apology to my nephew. In my mind I had already written the message “Keep the red flag flying, sorry I couldn’t be there” My plans changed again when I finally landed at Melbourne airport. I walked out with my bags towards the taxi rank and was immediately confronted by a bus that had the word BENDIGIO displayed in huge letters on the front. The gods, it seemed, were smiling. I might just catch the second half of Les Mis. Can you please take me to Bendigo? I asked the big woman at the big steering wheel of the big bus. “You’ll have to book” she retorted with an acerbic tongue that I normally associate with parking officers or tax inspectors. “How do I do that?” I asked with forced politeness. “You ring this number” – and she handed me a card. I pulled out my mobile and dialled the number on the card. It was HER phone that rang And so began a truly bizarre dialogue with this self-styled post modern bus driver. “Can you please take me to Bendigo?” I asked again “How many bags have you got” she asked – peering down from her mobile to gaze at my suitcase and my camera gear. She nodded the nod of a general instructing the executioner to take aim. The dozen or so passengers already on board sat stony faced, as if under ‘don’t move or I’ll shoot’ instructions. I fantasized that I’d stumbled upon a mass kidnapping. This would be the scoop I needed, the career break that would set me up in luxurious retirement. I searched for signs, the blink of an eye, the twitch of a nostril. But there were none. Just a bunch of people waiting for me to get on a bus. I pulled out my wallet. “I only take cash on this bus” announced the commandant, not just to me but to half the airport, including those people in planes not yet landed! “I don’t accept cards” I sensed she knew I had no Australian money. Now it was a battle of wills. Somehow I got her to wait as I dashed into the airport to find an ATM and secure some dollars – All the while I kept the phone connection active and briefed her in every detail on my progress as I coaxed the brightly coloured Australian money out of the machine. “That’s it, I’m almost there. Ahhh! Eureka! I’ve got three magnificent fifty’s – I hope you can change one of them” I said as I puffed my way back to the bus.

When I finally settled into my seat I had the strange feeling that I’d stormed someone else’s party. The other passenger all seemed somehow connected. They still weren’t really talking but I sensed I was the odd one out. Five minutes chat with a couple in front of me and I learnt once again how truth really is stranger than fiction. That bus was full of people on their way to a balloon conference in Bendigo. Not balloons as in the hot air variety where you stuff yourself on a gourmet breakfast as you take in the sights five hundred feet below. I’m talking party balloons. The sort that people contort and then explode in children’s faces and cause adults to have even higher blood pressure. And to make matters even more depressing, this was to be a five day conference with keynote speakers arriving from the US of A! My on-board jokes about a lot of hot air went down like a…well, you know what I mean.

The bus got me into Bendigo just in time for the second half of Les Miserable. I delighted in watching my nephew die at the barricades, like a true revolutionary. I wanted to yell Bravo and Viva La Revolution! But I didn’t. I sat there, applauded politely, remembered my own days at the barricades, wondered if there’s a god of balloons and contemplated my next journey home.

Ó Peter Davis

Peter Davis lives in the hills outside Melbourne. He’s a freelance writer/photographer and a senior lecturer in creative non fiction and travel writing at Deakin University.

This article was first published in the Melbourne Age