They got in on the main city rank, now re-opened at a third the original size. “Can we stop at a bottle-o first?” one asked.

“Right-oh!” I replied. “But where are we going?”

“Formule 1″

“You beauty!” I thought to myself. The Formule 1 motel is one of those cheapo deals out on the highway. $59 a night for a basic room and the dining room is a vending machine.

But it’s a nice long fare.

We went through Braddon, stopping at the Bottle-O there. That’s the trade name, and it’s a good one. Well-stocked grog shop, free parking outside, off-licence to print money, it is.

One of the two young men went inside and I hit the “Pause” button on the meter. It was going to be a good fare and people who stay at cheap motels are reaching into their own pockets to count the pennies. I look after them.

The guy in the back seat, a fairly chunky sort of fella, caught sight of the “Route 66″ keyring I have bluetacked to the dashboard. It’s one I bought at the Route 66 museum in Chandler, OK last year, and I keep it there for daydreaming purposes. That half day spent exploring the old road between Tulsa and Oklahoma City was a very happy one!

“I’m going to ride Route 66 next year with my father,” he said. “We’ll pick up the Harleys in Detroit, ride them to LA, and ship them home.”

Wow! What a trip! This chap immediately had my attention.

His mate got back in, with a six pack of Jim Beams to help the night ahead go down, and we set off on Canberra’s own Mother Road. Northbourne Avenue.

We talked Route 66 and the USA all the way. The food, the cars, the motels, the people. I mentioned that I’m planning my own father-son trip along Route 66 next year. From the other side of the generation gap. Myself, my son and my daughter.

I had lusted after a rental Mustang, but looking at the reviews it sounds like it wouldn’t be as much fun for the third person, sitting in the cramped back seat, peering out through a couple of tiny side windows. I’d be doing a lot of the driving, but some of the time it would be me in the back seat, and I wanted to enjoy the experience.

So we’ll likely hire something with a bit of size and a bit of style. A Chrysler 300C would be ideal. Lots of room for people and baggage, space for extras, a bunch of buttons to press and an image that is unmistakably All-American.

Not as much fun as a Harley, to be sure, but I’m not a Harley kind of guy. I wished my passengers the best for the trip, put my foot down and whipped off in a cloud of dust for the airport, where I watched the planes climb into the night sky and sent my thoughts with them.

Earlier that day, a package from Amazon had arrived, containing a DVD: Route 66: Producer’s Picks.

Not a lot to do with Route 66 as such, but for the feeling of driving through Sixties America in a classy car, there’s nothing to beat it. The black and white scenes, the corny live-to-camera adverts, the unforgettable theme music, the guest appearances of later stars, the thought-provoking plots, and above all the lifestyle, it’s a pleasure to watch.

I’ve got a bunch of maps and guidebooks, any number of websites, and all my dreams to keep me going until next year.

“You free?” they asked.

Avoiding the obvious riposte, I indicated that I was available.

“EPIC,” they said.

I agreed. Exhibition Park in Canberra. Not on the way to the airport, but a nice fare, straight up Northbourne. The National Folk Festival is being held there in a few days, and these folk looked like early attendees.

Dropped them off at the main entrance, headed back down the road. Northbourne Avenue is as close as Canberra comes to having a main street. The Federal Highway from Sydney becomes Northbourne about where EPIC is located, and suddenly drivers are out of highway mode, sliding through suburbs and motels, the flagpole of Parliament House visible in the far distance on Capital Hill across the lake.

An odd car ahead of me. Covered in advertising, foreign numberplate, roof rack full of stuff. I pulled out my camera, but the battery pack was exhausted, so my fallback was the iPhone’s minicam.

I pulled alongside when the lights turned red at Antill Street. Quite a long change. The smiling driver noticed me beside him, wound down his window and told me he’d driven here from Switzerland.

I was astonished. I’ve heard of people doing such things, and indeed my first book was partly inspired by two such journeys (same vehicle, same people, thirty-five years apart), but here was one of these rare marvels actually driving down Northbourne Avenue!

“It took me seven months!” he said proudly. I nodded – such an epic journey over some of the most difficult territory in the world.

I could see the lights about to change. I won’t say I’m familiar with the patterns of every intersection in Canberra, but most of the major ones, you get to know them well.

“Do you have a blog?” I asked. Strange to be chatting with a driver of another vehicle. His steering wheel was on the left hand side of his Volvo, so of course he was only about a metre away.

“On the roof,” he said, indicating behind him. Sure enough, on one of the components of his roof equipment – he seemed to have an entire ecosystem up there, covered in advertising – was a web address: www.lcbdirect.ch.

The lights changed and we went our different ways. I got most of the way to the airport, before a radio job took me off to West Belconnen, and it wasn’t for some time that I had leisure to whip out the laptop to check out his adventure.

He drove from Switzerland to see the Melbourne Cup!

His blog, in a PDF format, is here.

What a story! He wisely drove with a succession of co-drivers, who wrote a lot of the blog entries, and there are some truly hair-raising adventures along the way, not least with machine-gun toting soldiers and policemen helping or hindering the journey.

More later.

– Peter Mac

Foursquare on the iPhone

We’ve got a new game, my day driver and I. A game where cabbies shine.

IPhones each, we share apps. Sometimes they are classics. Shazam is just a brilliant piece of software. You want to know who sings the song on the radio? Just Shazam it for a few seconds and it comes back with the title, the artist, a link to the lyrics and a download button from iTunes. There are currency converters, weather forecasters, games a-million.

And now Foursquare, funking off the iPhone’s GPS and social networking. It’s a scavenger hunt, it’s a map of your day, it’s a point-scoring exercise, it’s gathering facts and sharing info.

Once you download the app, create a new account with all the regular rigmarole of user name, password, icon picture etc., Foursquare checks your location, finds nearby places of interest, and asks if you want to check in. Meaning do you want the world to know that you are currently at that location.

It might be a bar or a restaurant. A museum or a supermarkt, a statue or a cab rank. If where you are isn’t listed, just add it. And then check in.

You get points for checking in. And for adding new locations. And for doing all sorts of stuff, such as checking into a location with “bar” in its title on a school night.

And for adding tips. Yeah, I know all cabbies love tips, but these are information tips. Drinks are half price on Thursdays. Ask for the Megaburger with Rickie’s special sauce. The receptionist has four breasts – she’s got a double-decker bust.

Interesting, useful titbits of trivia and advice. Invaluable as a handy guide to the traveller.

If you check-in at a place more times than any other place, you become Mayor of that place. My co-driver is Mayor of the Canberra Airport Taxi Rank. If you are Mayor of a bar, and that barkeep knows his savvy, you get a discount on your drinks. Sometimes the office of Mayor changes several times in an evening, depending on who has the quickest fingers on their iPhone!

Cabbies are good at this game, because we go lots of places and have time to check in while we are waiting for the next fare. To another place.

My Foursquare is here: Skyring.
M co-driver is here: PeskiePete.

–PeterMac

Taxi 18 at the Shine Dome

Chet Baker in Paris

But for now, it’s Chet Baker and his golden trumpet. I’ve got a CD of the Barclay Sessions in Paris in the mid-50s and I have Chet playing background music as I drive around Canberra.

“He blows a golden trumpet,” I tell the passengers, and out of all jazz musicians, I think I love him most of all. He also sings, and some of his love songs are classics, full of emotion and wordplay. My kind of music.

And my passengers’. I’ll pick the music depending on the person approaching my cab, and if they are of a certain age, I’ll put the mellow jazz on. St. Germain or Marc Moulin for the younger folk. Or Miles Davis‘ Kind of Blue for the older, more sophisticated gentlefolk.

I picked up a public servant from a government department in the Parliamentary Triangle last night. She got into the back seat and named another department, this one in Belconnen. Nice long fare, and I slid onto the Tuggeranong Parkway with the meter clicking over happily. She didn’t say a word, just sat back as Chet blew his trumpet for us. I could hear her turning the pages of the L A Burdick catalogue I keep in the back.

I love driving a beautiful cab around Canberra with jazz playing. “And a beautiful woman beside me,” I sometimes say. “What more could any man want?”

The best job I’ve ever had. And it’s true. There are worse ways of earning money, and being chained to a computer, churning out code, is one of them.

We got to the destination and she paid with a government credit card. And a five dollar note for me.

“That was the best taxi ride I’ve ever had,” she said. “Great music, that chocolate catalogue to read, and you didn’t drive like a maniac.”

My smile in return was golden. If I’d been a cat, I would have purred.

The tip will help with the trip. I’ll think of Chet with Turkish delight as I raise a golden glass of Efes Pilsen.

–Skyring

Bonus video

It was a quiet shift last night. I have a book with me – at the moment it’s Paul Theroux’x Ghost Train to the Eastern Star – but I rarely read in the cab, even if it’s such a rattling good railway story as this.

Instead I succumbed to my romantic side and watched one of my favorite movies, reduced to a splinter of its original self on my iPhone, but still as grand a love story as you can get. In fact, just the thought that I had it ready to play when I got a spare couple of hours had inspired me to download a song to match.

Perry Como, my patron saint of sentiment, singing with the aid of a bass-voiced backer:
You pray that you will find
Someone warm and sweet and kind

I’ve met her on three continents now: child of New York, English language teacher in Japan, intrepid Greyhound explorer of Australia. She’s as much in love with travel, the world and its people as I am, and she is the sort of someone Perry Como would have us find.

I staid with her in Japan, sleeping on the couch in her tiny living room at night while by day we explored Hiroshima and climbed up to the pagodaed peak of Osaka Castle. I took a picture of her smiling out over a smoggy city. She had been there several times before, but was happy to guide yet another visitor up.



I’ll be forever catching up to Cari, I think. She’s seen more of my country than I have, and she’s off to Antarctica later this year. My travels usually involve revisiting the same places, and I’m only half joking when I say that I have a favorite luggage trolley at all the great airports. My last world tour, there was only one new destination for me. But what a place!
The bluest skies you’ll ever see are in Seattle
And the hills the greenest green…

So I watched Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle when I had time, and listened to Perry Como when I could only sneak a couple of minutes.

There were a few people I wanted to meet in Seattle, and the thought of visiting the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field was a bonus to an aviation nut like me, but mostly because it was a place I’d always longed to see ever since I learnt how to pronounce it properly. And to check out those blue skies.

The movie (and the song) were a way of revisiting this fascinating place, and I cherished the scenes where I could recognise landmarks. The Space Needle, of course, and Pikes Place Market, where Tom Hanks discussed the cuteness of his bum with a coworker and some years later I posed Ringbear for a night shot.


I loved Seattle. The Museum of Flight was all I could hope for, and I got to board a Concorde. The Space Needle was delightfully hokey, one of those Sixties visions of what the future would be like, but it had the most stunning view over Seattle. Forests, lakes, mountains bordered the corporate home of Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks. At one stage I looked out and there, just clearing itself out of the clouds, was the biggest mountain I’d ever seen. It was so much a part of the sky that at first I thought Mount Rainier was a cloud. I stood goggle-eyed.

I loved Seattle. So the song and the movie brought back some happy memories.

At a couple of points in the movie, a little map of the USA appeared, and a planetrail of dots showed the characters flying from Seattle to New York. That was me in October, and Cari was there to meet me that evening, sharing a dinner before I cabbed it back to my Harlem hostel.

The next day we did a bunch of touristy things, including a visit to the Empire State Building, where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan began their shared life together.

Get this. Cari, born in New York, lived there for most of her life, at home on the viewing platforms of towers across the world, had never been to the top of the Empire State Building. She actually called her mother while we were there to report the fact!



My day in Seattle and my guided tour of Manhattan: days to sparkle in my memory.
Never knew a day so fair,
It makes you feel so proud that you could cry!

I’ll admit it. There were tears in my eyes when the closing credits rolled, reflecting those when I hugged Cari goodbye before boarding the long evening flight to Sydney.

Back to my everyday world of cabdriving. Back to my days of smiling dreams of wonderful people and places.

I wonder if there are any sweet romantic films of New York?

Once again, the airport road system has changed, so that was an added challenge. Paul, my day driver, has been telling his passengers that the new layout is a joint venture between the airport and the taxi industry to make the trip as long as possible, and honestly the roads in and out are the most appalling series of loops and zig-zags and detours.

I dropped my passenger at the terminal, and headed back into the city empty. Once I was clear of the roadworks, my phone rang. The young lady on the other end identified herself as a Qantas representative, and while I was wondering about the various reasons for Qantas to call me, she totally floored me, telling me I’d won a prize in a travel writing competition.

This was a competition I’d entered well before Christmas, and after looking at the vast quantity and quality of the other entries, displayed online, I’d given up hope that my modest little piece about Guernsey had any chance at all.

But apparently it had ranked ninth, giving me a shot at one of the twelve prizes on offer. I’ll have my choice of four weekends away at an Australian resort, and a condition of accepting the prize is that I have to write and submit a 500 word article on the weekend, with photographs and video footage shot on the Nikon camera which comes as part of the prize.

“Ooooh, with pleasure!” I sighed into the phone.

So I’ll be a guest writer for Qantas’s Travel Insider e-magazine, once I return from the weekend, which I’ll have to take in the next three months. Maybe this will be a shot at a new career – taxidriving is a job I love, but travelling the world and getting paid to do it, well it just doesn’t compete, does it?

We’ll see. Writing tight, focussed articles for professional publication is a long way from my usual rambling style.

The photograph above is of St Peter Port in Guernsey. A darling little town and it was no trouble at all to write a paragraph about it. The hard part was keeping it down to the 250 words required by the competition terms.

The Qantas lady congratulated me again, the call ended, and I pulled into a government office building to collect a public servant for her trip to the airport. She must have wondered why she had the happiest cabbie on earth as her driver!

About the same time as I flip the meter onto the night-time rate, it’s midnight in New Zealand, where so many of my friends live. I drive through the dark, wash the car and crawl into bed on Thursday morning, but it’s still Wednesday for another six hours in Europe. And in the USA, where so many of my Internet friends live, it’s just about always yesterday. They must think I’m a being from the future sometimes.

And occasionally, I have a very long day indeed when I’m travelling with the sun. Typically Hong- Kong to Heathrow, but the longest Friday of my life had two dawns and two dusks, from waking up in Canberra to falling asleep in Washington DC, with a midnight pass over a glowing Hawaiian lava field somewhere in the middle.

For me, Christmas Day was yesterday, spent on the road up to Gosford, having lunch and a lazy afternoon, and then driving home again. But it’s still Christmas in other parts of the world.

We passed through the centre of Sydney on the way up, and, waking from sleep in the back seat whilst my wife and daughter shared the driving, I took a picture of two Sydney Silver Service taxis returning from the airport. My day driver later reported in, saying that he was having a profitable shift.

One cabbie was doing very well, I noticed. We were stuck in a creeping traffic jam from North Sydney to Pymble where the north coast freeway begins, and amongst all the grim-faced drivers was a happy cabbie crawling along beside us. And a couple of grim-faced passengers in the back seat.

We had a delightful lunch with my sister’s family, including my mother down from Rockhampton, played with the toys scattered about in various stages of assembly, experimented with Skypevision with other family members and just had a grand time before it came to an end too soon and we had to be back on the road.

Christmas is a special time in the Western world. My day driver and I exchanged presents, he dressed up in a Santa cap for his Christmas shift, and every single passenger I had on Christmas Eve wished me a Merry Christmas, often with a nice little tip.

Good humour, fellowship and smiles are the order of the day.

It’s been a great year for me. Sometimes I feel that it’s Christmas every day. Sometimes I just have to stop and savour my delight. Driving around the Arc de Triomphe was a highlight, as was kissing my wife on top of the Eiffel Tower. Looking out for giant gorillas on top of the Empire State Building, walking through the entrance to the National Building Museum in Washington, watching the incredible light show on Hong Kong Harbour.

Giving a helping hand to a lady in need, swapping travel stories with tourists picked up at the airport, singing along to Abba with some party-goers, laughing at the wicked wordplay of one of my regulars, hanging out with other cabbies – it’s been a blast.

Or just driving along a deserted freeway in Canberra, a favourite song playing as I pass some floodlit monument in between passengers. A happy cabbie.

But one moment sticks in my mind. Yesterday morning Paul and I wished each other a Merry Christmas as we sat in the front seat of the cab parked in my driveway. I’d finished my Christmas Eve shift, he was starting his Christmas Day, and we just sat and chatted for a few minutes.

Another cab passed by, stopped, reversed, and the driver got out. It was Geoff, who happens to be Paul’s father-in-law. We swapped more greetings, shook hands and then he was gone, Paul fired up the car and drove off, and I went back inside, very very happy with my job, my life, my family, my friends and the world in general.

It all comes back to what I answered on my taxi driver course two years ago, when we were asked, “What do you expect to get out of being a taxi driver”.

I thought for a moment and wrote down, “A lot of company for a short time, and a few good friends for a long time.”

The instructor looked at this and said, “You’ll have no troubles.”

And he was right.

Merry Christmas, everybody!