Bookings and budgies in Melbourne Diaries

I’m in the middle of a long weekend, sleeping in each morning for the first time this year and trying not to think of the work obligations waiting for me on Tuesday. Yesterday, I finished booking most of the hotel and flights for my China-Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan trip in September - it’s a peak tourist time in China so I needed to do this early. There is a sense of unreality about the whole thing, as I am not 100% confident that my payment for a flight from Urumqi to Bishkek, two locations that may as well be Middleearth for most tourist, is going to be binding six months from now. The journey looks like a decent one, starting out in Guangzhou on the day of some hiking festival and then moving to the Terracotta warriors or the Great Wall (most likely the former), then into the desert through Dunhuang and Turpan, ending up at the far west of China at Kashgar. From there I fly to Bishkek Kyrgyzstan and then head south into the tense, conflicted city Osh, followed by a high-altitude border crossing into Tajikistan and across the Pamirs (the end point of the Himalayas), edging very close to Afghanistan (the travel sites are coy about this, but there are suggestions that some tourists make quick day passes into Afghanistan, in the comparatively safer northern end) and end up at the corrupt, communist outpost of Dushanbe. Being older (and wealthier) than I was a few years ago, most of this will be in hotels and by plane, but it will still be a little rough in places. I’ve told myself this is the last of my more difficult trips, as it is getting harder dragging my body around hills and through various diets in order to stay at the necessary level of fitness. Every day my legs are in some sort of pain - I sympathised with a FB contact who completed the incredibly gruelling ‘Six Track Marathon’ yesterday, and wrote this morning that he was physically unable even to get out bed.

NK from the office is similarly adventurous, going off to a year for Tonga on some Foreign Affairs-sponsored work-cation. According to her, it was either that or Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. Having been to the latter before - a dusty, loud, traffic- and waste-clogged place that drops to minus forty degrees centigrade in winter (despite being surrounded by the paradise of the Mongolian steppe), I told her she’d almost certainly made the right choice. NK has been dropping increasingly obvious hints to me, hints I’m not responding to. Quite simply, we’re too different. She’s a very nice, attractive girl who should have been married by now, but I think has been a bit sheltered by her parents - living overseas should be good for her. I’m too cynical a personality for her. I’m also wary of work relationships of any sort, especially in the jittery, massively risk-averse space I work in, where one can lose their job over a cup of coffee with a rival stakeholder. It’s not a place for middle-aged drama.

Will spend the afternoon cooking at home, watching my budgies, who get let of the cage at weekends, flap around the house. One of the two girls has taken to lesbian behaviour, engaging in courting rituals and occasionally trying to mount the other bird. According to the budgie forums, this is not unusual among caged birds - it sure is strange to see!