After leaving Memphis,

we drove southeast towards Tupelo, intending to complete the Elvis experience by visiting his birthplace. As soon as we turned off I55 we were in stereotypical Bible Belt country: almost many churches as homes, and as many trailers as permanent houses. Abandoned cars and trucks lay rusting in driveways and ditches every half mile or so beside dilapidated wooden shacks discoloured by age. Every now and again a pristine plantation-style house on a bowling green lawn would appear, bordered by less fortunate properties.

Driving along one particular stretch of road with with dense green foliage on the left and rolling fields on the right, some movement caught my eye among the trees: a big bird of prey (we weren't sure what kind, but it looked like an eagle of some sort) took off low and wheeled across the road, only to fly directly into the path of an semi truck coming the other way. There was an audible thump as the truck passed us, a few feathers flew up and I spun round to see the truck carry on down the road. We'd seen plenty of roadkill already but this was a bit of a shock...!

We carried on to Tupelo and found the Presley house more through luck than judgment and stopped to take a few pictures. We ambled through the Elvis Aaron Presley Memorial Chapel (what was that I was saying about a pilgrimage last time?) and hit the road again, this time along the Natchez Trace Parkway to Hazelhurst, where we stopped for the night.

Hazelhurst was a perfect example of most of the towns we stopped in on the way to New Orleans: we'd hit an identical strip of chain motels and fast food joints, fill up with gas and coffee and set out to find "downtown", or whatever constituted the original part of the town. Once off the neon-lit main drag we'd crawl through street after street of bungalows in various states of repair, but more often than not we'd be completely unable to find anything resembling a town centre. The sprawl seems to take over so rapidly and spread so wide that I can only assume that downtown is maybe three solitary streets hidden somewhere within a huge expanse of homogeneous suburbs.

The next day, though, we found an honourable exception: Laurel, midway between Hazelhurst and New Orleans, looked at first to be exactly the same as every other strip-mall town so far - if even a little scrappier around the edges - but then after half an hour of fruitless to-ing and fro-ing around the 'hood we discovered the original town centre in all its antebellum glory. Granted, it was only about three by three blocks in size, but it boasted a good few imposing gothic edifices and made for a pleasant ambling stroll before we drove the final stretch to New Orleans. Pity the one café in town didn't have any tomato sauce...

We arrived in Memphis

to find it warm and muggy - a happily faint echo of the sweaty furnace of the last time I was in the South - and took a cab to our salubrious lodgings. "The King's Court Motel?" said our incredulous driver. "Lemme just say, if it was just you sir, you'd hear a knock on your door at midnight askin' what kind of woman you be wantin'. Short or tall, blond or brunette. Or what drugs you be after."

Happily neither came to pass, although it wasn't the most opulent place I've ever stayed. We dropped our things, made damn sure that the door was locked and walked the two blocks to Beale Street. On this particular evening the street was closed off and given over to hordes of bikers: on one block, bloated Hell's Angels-types reclining against massive chromed hogs and on the other, home boys revving neon-lit Japanese racing replicas. We found a street-side bar and took in the scene for a while and then stumbled back home, jet lagged to the hilt.

The next day was clear and cold, and the streets were devoid of life to match. We got some breakfast and then caught a bus (complete with garrulous and faintly menacing nutter) to Graceland, taking us through a grey and dreary sprawl. A sign on the road in from the airport had hailed Memphis as "America's Distribution Center" and this moniker was, on the surface at least, a damn sight more apt than "The Home of Rock 'n' Roll". The Memphis that rolled past us in the gathering rain was boxy and concrete, frayed with weeds around the edges.

Graceland hove into view, and we bolted from the bus. Ash elected to sit out the tour, having already been there a few years back, so I jumped lonesome on the mandatory shuttle bus for the hundred yard journey across Elvis Presley Boulevard, slipped on my electronic tour guide headphones and crossed the hallowed threshold.

The tour was great! I knew nothing about the King before it other than he'd had some excellent tunes and had ignominiously died on the bog, and while I didn't become an instant Elvis fan or scholar, it was consistently intriguing nonetheless. The mansion was a shag-pile '70s time capsule, the cars satisfyingly bloated and the planes just jaw-droppingly extravagant. The weirdest thing was the nature of the tour itself: with everyone listening to a personal voice-over through their headphones, the house was mostly silent when you took them off and it felt more like a pilgrimage than a tourist attraction.

We took the free shuttle to Sun Studio after that (a bit of co-operative marketing that would have seemed opportunistic had not both tours been genuinely worth the money), this time for a guided tour by a Jack White-lookalike called David. The studio is only two rooms in size, but again the tour was flawless and this time our guide's enthusiasm - and the revelation that the studio is still active at only $75 per hour (Coba Fynn, do you read me?) - made it seem far more relevant than Graceland had ever been.

The next day we picked up our rental...vehicle. Having run out of compacts, or intermediates or whatever it was we'd originally reserved, the woman at the desk "upgraded" us to a Chevy HHR, a faux-gansta exercise in retro ugliness and reputedly a complete vacuum of driving enjoyment. I pleaded with her but to no avail; it was the HHR or nothing. I bitched and moaned all the way to the motel where we loaded up our gear, backed up and headed towards the exit, crawling past as we did so a distinctly real gangster type who threw me a gesture that seemed to say, "Word. I respect your choice of transport, yo."

I nodded helplessly and we got the hell out of Dodge.

En route:

Neil and I both took our leave from Brisbane on Monday, after a final day of fine hospitality from Chris and Leyla. I was sad to leave - it had been great to be around C&L again for a while; I'd just started to appreciate the pastoral side of the country, and even though I woke up every morning in a portable nylon sauna drenched in my own sweat, the weather was starting to agree with me.

The flights to Heathrow were mercifully quiet, and I tried to stay awake as long as possible on the flight to Kuala Lumpur and then get some sleep on the second leg to Heathrow. Once the sun was down and the lights out, I stretched out on the row of empty seats and shook out my blanket. Hundreds of little sparks of static discharge lit up the blanket as I unfolded it - rather a pretty spectacle in the circumstances, 35,000 feet up in the pitch black with the odd accompanying flash lighting up storm clouds outside the plane...

I met up with Ash in Gatwick (a bit of a crappy airport, but a welcome reunion just the same!) and we left again for Memphis the next day. We were flying with Northwest Airlines, or NWA. Oh yes. I was this close to asking the stewardess if I could have an Ice Cube in my water. She was very stern, and I did not. I think she would handed me my white bitch ass had I done so.

Instead I mused on the fact that incidences of turbulence occur exactly when there is a cup of scalding hot coffee placed on a tray inches from one's lap, and additionally whenever some sleep is in order.

Anyway, we have arrived. Next up: we hit Memphis, and set phasers to tourist.

The eve of the wedding arrived,

and with Leyla off in the Stambrook Plaza hotel to prepare, the groom and his compadres did the same. Chris and Brian picked up the kilts and I took the opportunity to have a last-minute bagpipe practice. And then we all got drunk.

So it came to pass that on the day of the wedding, where I was required to don the proud national garb of my country and rouse the wedding guests to attention with the skirl of the bagpipes, I was prone on the couch watching Empire Strikes Back and trying very hard not to barf. In our collective defence (Brian was perceptibly wan-looking as well), we'd had a very light dinner of pizza and beer, with a dessert of beer and some beer as a digestif. In hindsight perhaps a little Cointreau instead would have sorted us out.

Fortunately an excellent breakfast of freshly-laid eggs (what else?) and Weet-bix (the vowelly challenged antipodean version of Weetabix ideal for the bowelly challenged) raised me from my torpor once my stomach had stopped churning. The photographer arrived around 1 pm to take some 'candid' shots of the Chris and his groomsmen getting done up in their kilts - no, not that candid - and by 3 we'd arrived at the Botanic Gardens to set up the red carpet, chairs and so on.

Neil, Davis/d(e) and Jenna wandered away from the body of the open-air kirk to help me tune the pipe drones before Leyla arrived, and so I played through a few tunes to warm them up. As I was finishing up Neil pointed through the trees to another wedding that I'd accidentally subjected to an atonal aural battering. We surreptitiously slunk back to our own wedding and I judged the pipes to be as tuned as was necessary.

Almost immediately, Leyla turned arrived with her Dad and I had to stop worrying about playing and get on with just doing it. Somehow it all more or less came together: I got to the end of the aisle just as the tune ended and I stopped without the bag deflating too slowly (in which case it tends to bray like a stricken donkey). I took my place alongside the rest of the kilted contingent and breathed a relieved sigh.

The ceremony was entertaining as well as solemn, and there was a palpable joy to the proceedings - despite the legalese involved in a civil ceremony, it was less grave than a church wedding and in the leafy surroundings of the gardens felt much more celebratory. As the register was signed, I retired to a discreet distance - as discreet as possible with the pipes, anyway - and played a few more tunes. Davis/d(e) wandered over as things were wrapping up and looked bemused; I took this to be the sign to finish up and did so.

We took to the river on the Kookaburra Queen for the reception and to admire fabulous Brisvegas as it slid majestically in the gathering twilight. There were speeches, there was eating, drinking, mingling and even a very little dancing from your host. Anyway, I've been writing this entry for four days and three continents, so I'm going to call it a day now and post this sucker. Next up: rock and roll, baby - we hit Memphis.

Due to my sudden apparent respiratory dysfunction,

and deprived of the week's planned aquatic adventures, I jumped on the coat-tails of Neil, Bryan and Chris as they ploughed a tourist furrow through Brisbane and its environs. First up on Tuesday was a prescient re-run of my introduction to Brisbane from three years ago: along the Brisbane River on the CityCat ferry, a wander through the manufactured (but pleasing) cultural epicentre of the South Bank* and then a drive up Mount Coot-tha. This time we stopped off at a trail that led through the woods to an abandoned (and wholly unsuccessful) gold mine shaft on the back slopes of the hill. Wending our way through the pseudo-bush, Neil displayed a borderline obsessive desire to find deadly spiders and a competing tendency to freak out at the merest suggestion of anything brushing exposed skin. Three quarters of an hour later, the collective paranoia of impending paralysis** or death propelled us out of the bush and back to civilization.

"What are the inhabitants of Brisbane called?" someone asked during the drive back to Chris' house. Idle speculation ensued.

"Brisboneers, perhaps?"
"How about Bris-boners? Heh."
"Brisbanians, I heard."
"Brisoners," said Neil. "Brisoners." Genius. I can't imagine many Aussies thanking us for that one, but I intend to promote it wherever I can.

On Thursday, with Chris embroiled in wedding preparations, Neil, Bryan and I decided to go to Australia Zoo on the independent recommendations of three different Brisoners. We borrowed Chris and Leyla's warhorse '87 Mazda - an oldie but a goldie like the Trøll - and headed north, passing within sight of the striking Glasshouse Mountains and arriving at the zoo about 11.30. We paid our entry fee - a fairly hefty A$43 (!), although reduced to A$32 by a promotional token kindly provided by Leyla - and were hurried by the staff towards the Crocoseum for the main show. (Yes. The Crocoseum.)

For the uninitiated, Australia Zoo is part zoo (if a fairly benign-seeming one), part theme park and part Church of Steve Irwin. The most surprising part is that it hasn't managed to make the transition to shrine yet. The place is still festooned with banners, signs and sayings of the man himself and is still billed as "Home of the Crocodile Hunter". It's as if they haven't quite come to terms with the fact that the man whose personality drives the place, whose enthusiasm permeates it and who basically provides its reason for being, is no longer here to give it legitimacy. The present tense abounds.

We sat down to the show, and some terribly venomous and entirely apathetic snakes were paraded in the centre of the arena. Next some parakeets and parrots buzzed the audience, and finally the big screen lit up to show an intro by the man himself to the main crocodile show. The host skipped lightly over the fact that big Steve had shuffled off this mortal coil ("Ah, we love him don't we? God bless ya Steve. Now, on with the show!") and Monty the croc swam silently into view.

There's an odd disconnect between Steve's posthumous, almost childish enthusiasm for his reptile quarry and the respect with which they have to be treated. The fact that the zoo staff effortlessly toss food into the slavering mouth of this million-year-old apex predator in front of a rapt audience sits uneasily with the fact that he met his untimely demise in just such a situation, contrived to place him in harm's way for our entertainment. I got the feeling that one doesn't go to Australia Zoo to see the animals so much as to hope, subconsciously, that Bill, Jimbo or Frank slips up this one time and trips into Monty's gaping maw.

We watched the informative but curiously flat show - a real live crocodile swimming around is admittedly quite impressive, but only for the first five minutes - and then tramped off to look round the rest of the place. We saw kangaroos, wombats, inconceivably deadly snakes and mighty birds of prey, and yet it never really grabbed us by the throats, so to speak. We took our leave and headed back toward Brisbane after a couple of hours.

On the way back we stopped at the eponymous village nestling amongst the Glasshouse Mountains and ate a rather excellent fish supper for lunch while debating what to do. Mount Ngungun presented itself as being closest and only moderately challenging, and after a five minute drive we abandoned the Mazda and commenced our climb. It was difficult enough in parts, and midway up a particularly vertiginous stretch Neil shouted, "Bloody hell! Look at the size of that thing!" or something to that effect. A massive spider, black with yellow spots on the joints of its legs, hung sphinx-like on its web beside the path. This single hand-sized beast - I haven't been able to identify it yet - was suddenly infinitely more compelling than any number of crocs, wallabies or tigers from Australia Zoo. Not a metre from a well-travelled path, we'd come across just the sort of arachnid fiend that we'd all been looking for since we arrived. It may have been poisonous or it may not, but it was right there and the three of us marvelled at its size and proximity. We climbed on, avoiding the numerous leviathan ants that scuttled towards our feet, and reached the exposed and spine-like summit after half an hour's climb. The flat brushland and verdant forests of Queensland were laid about us and from them shot the monolithic Glasshouse Mountains, their colors attenuated by the hazy distance. So close to the end of the holiday, and on a whim, we'd accidentally discovered our most truly Australian sight yet.

* Bribane hosted World Expo '88 and by all accounts went from an inward looking rural town feared by sheep everywhere to a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis.
** There is a paralysis tick here. A paralysis tick. Dear god.

Insectile armageddon.

In slightly happier news, it was my birthday yesterday and I've now reached the ripe old age of 29. (Although arguably, the first clause in that sentence should be revised.) The household was sluggish at best after Chris' stag/buck's do the night before, and that suited me fine. We ate some freshly laid eggs for breakfast* and once the menfolk were up and about, we headed over to the park across the road to throw a rugby ball around for a while and otherwise bask in the afternoon sun.

After some dinner, Neil and I trotted back out to lob the ball back and forth during a pastoral ramble through the desiccated woods that dotted the park. We saw wild bush turkeys pecking for insects (a suicidal eating habit if ever there was one); kookaburras darting through the trees and web upon web of indeterminate spiders. Neil walked into one. There was swearing.

Australia, it appears, is a veritable zoo of fanged, taloned and poison-spewing minifauna. "Watch out for redback spiders," we were warned. "Their venom causes you to swell up until you explode all over the place. And then your corpse melts."

Neil told a story of a wolf spider that crawled onto a friend's shoulder. "It was the size of his hand. It's not poisonous but it would tear your arm off as soon as look at it. They could only kill it by tying it between two pick-ups and ripping it in two."

And the ants! The ants have reached Phase IV down here. "And then you have the fire ant. It's deadly to all other ants. It can breathe fire, you see. And it teleports inside your brain to eat it from the inside out."

* "Ach, I think I'm egged out. I'll give them a miss."
"Are you sure? Eggs are a known appetite suppressant."
"So is all other food!"

Torpedoed!

My jet lag has now entirely disappeared but has been replaced by the lesser know tent lag. I had thought that my internal body clock had successfully set itself to Brisbane Mean Time, but it now seems to be inextricably linked to the sunset and sunrise. It gets dark, and I more or less fall asleep where I stand. It gets light, and the sun's rays blast straight through the blue flysheet and then through my eyelids and I'm awake at 5:19 am or whatever godforsaken hour sunrise occurs at today. On the upside, this sleeping pattern makes it nigh impossible to get a hangover and was fixin' to be just the job for the early starts required for the week's forthcoming diving course.

In a spectacularly cruel twist of fate, then, my diving course has been both metaphorically and literally blown out of the water. Chris dropped me off in nearby Stafford Heights today for my dive medical, where a nurse used a spirometer to measure my lung function, and then passed me onto a doctor for more traditional reflex, visual acuity and physical checks. Looking at the printout from the spirometer, he re-tested me with it and printed out the second, slightly better test.

Apparently my lung capacity is 115% of the expected size for my height and weight, but the FEF_25-75% (trips off the tongue, don't it?), measuring sustained flow of air over the middle few seconds of each exhalation, is only 73% of the predicted value. He apologetically told me that it should be at least 75% to be completely safe, and he had to put me down as temporarily unfit to dive.

As I was leaving, he suggested that I could organise some further tests to bear out whether or not I'm beyond hope. Unfortunately these particular tests are A) expensive and B) have a lead time slightly longer than the 16 hours left before the course is due to start. Oh well: bagpiping as a kid has clearly given me disproportionately big lungs, and on/off asthma around the same time has partially screwed them. Bugger.

Had it not been an unseemly hour to do so, I'd've gone straight to the pub to drown (oh, the irony) my sorrows.

The holiday gathers momentum,

even if your host does not. Chris' family - mum, dad, sister and brother-in-law - have arrived, and only this morning Neil was dropped off from his brief fishin' sojourn with another Brisbanian mate. Chris and I spent an evening erecting a tent city/favela in the back yard for the migrant Joads wedding guests and each night, replete with some native culinary delight, I stumble back there and sleep soundly until awoken by the sound of the chickens, or the soft slap of bat guano hitting the tent under the palm tree.

I've had a remarkably sedate few days since our Platoon episode on Tuesday; highlights include sitting around, sitting around reading, and sitting around drinking. A couple of events distinguish themselves: I took a trip into Brisbane proper with Davis/d(e) and Jenna to look for some culture and wound up sitting around reading in the Botanical Gardens, and secondly, I've booked myself onto a PADI Open Water diving course next week. This should take four days and hopefully my respiratory system will remain bagpipe-capable for the wedding on Saturday. Another expensive arrow is added to my poor-people-need-not-apply extreme sports quiver! It's fun to be middle class.

This afternoon the stag/buck's do kicks off, and then on Sunday I'll start reading up on the dive course. Sitting around (reading/drinking) will give way to action. Stay tuned!

J'arrive!

My jet lag has all but evaporated, and I'm now reclining in conspicuous luxury chez Chris et Leyla. The house is excellent; in fact, it's really more of a property than a house - chooks (chickens) out the back; a massive barbie (barbeque) on which to cook snags (sausages) and a fridge (fridge) full of beer (beer) in the basement. Admittedly it is slightly less full at the moment.

In addition to the blessed diminution of my jet lag, I have also returned to more or less normal impulses to eat. Airlines have this well-developed strategy to keep the cattle passengers so well fed and occupied with eating that they're distracted from their distinctly unnatural environment and hence do not descend into screaming anarchy. This strategy unfortunately means that I ate five airline/airport meals over the course of approximately a day and a half and proceeded to feel hungry pretty much all the time for the first day I was here. Luckily, a gigantic, delicious steak introduced to the barbeque for the briefest of encounters sorted that out on the first night here.

Yesterday Chris and I were driving semi-aimlessly around, looking for some generic rainforest to marvel at and somehow the conversation turned to both last year's and this year's road trips. I mentioned that in the States last year we'd considered, in passing, trying to find a shooting range. Quick as a flash, Chris was on the phone to an ex-work colleague, the car pulled a U-turn and we were heading south of the Brisbane river towards Belmont Rifle Range.

"Good God," I said. "What the hell are we playing at?"

We arrived to the sporadic crack of gunfire, parked and walked with mounting trepidation to the office. The woman behind the counter gave us a couple of forms to fill in, took our photo IDs and A$30 each and handed us a 12-gauge over-under shotgun, 25 shells and 25 clay pigeons. Just like that.

"How do we use it, exactly?" we asked.
"Oh, just ask the range officer," she replied.

We did. He didn't seem to know how to work the safety on the gun. I groaned internally. After a few minutes of dry-firing it, with the shells still safely in their box, we'd worked it out. Chris had been clay-pigeon shooting once before and had a few words of choice advice: "Hold it tightly against your shoulder."

Those were the all of the choice words he had.

I loaded the gun with the safety on and snapped it shut while Chris loaded the clay pigeon trap.

"Pull!" I said.
"What?" he said. We were both wearing earplugs.
"Pull!" I shouted.

The clay shot into the air. Bang went the gun. Smash the clay conspicuously did not go, and landed serenely on the grass. We were all still alive (including the clay pigeon); my shoulder did not hurt; the gun broke open easily enough and a wisp of smoke came out of the barrel.

"Holy crap," I said. "That was mental." And so it went for another 49 shells - the first box being expended with minimal loss of clay pigeon life - and we handed the gun back, broken open and perceptibly warm, after about 45 minutes.

"You guys still have a bit of time left on your gun hire. Do you want to try a rifle?" asked the cheerful woman behind the counter. "You could try a two-two, a triple-two or a two-two-three."
"Uh," we said. "What?"
"Well, the two-twos go pop and the others go bang."

Some confused conversation later, we were in temporary possession of a .223 rifle with a 8x scope and a box of twenty cartridges. The feeling was massively bizarre. A klaxon went off, and the range officer said through the tannoy: "The range is now open. You may fix your targets."

And so we laid the rifle on the bench, bolt conspicuously open, and crunched off into the field over the gravel-like carpet of spent cartidge cases with the other (surprisingly nerdy-looking) shooters to pin our targets on the 50 yard wooden fence. After some more reassuringly authoritative instruction from the range officer, Chris slotted a shell in, closed the bolt, sighted over the wooden rest and fired. A small puff of dust scooted up from the bank of earth behind the target.

"I think I missed," he said. Four more shots later we swapped over and I did the same until we'd fired all twenty. The range opened again and we trudged shakily out again to get our perforated targets. Adding it up later (it took a couple of goes because my mind was whirling), Chris edged it with 97 while I'd scored 92.

We handed the rifle back and thanked the range officer and the woman behind the desk. We sat in the car. "Mother of God," I said. "That was nuts."

It had been nuts, but it had also been disturbingly both easy and fun. The concept of shooting - pointing a loaded gun at something you wish to harm quite seriously - had been neutered by the good-natured atmosphere of the place and the reduction, on the rifle range, of the whole thing to a points-scoring game. Dangerously neutered, I think; we spent less money than we would have done if we'd gone ten-pin bowling and yet we'd gone from computer game snipers to pseudo-real ones in about an hour.

We drove back home, cracked open a beer and looked at our respective targets. What a mind-bogglingly surreal start to the holiday.

The terrorists have already won:

I got through the security at Edinburgh with nary a comment, and after lugging my kit to Heathrow Terminal 3, settled into the check-in queue. (As an aside, spending five hours waiting for a flight at Heathrow does feel slightly Terminal.)

"What hand luggage do you have?" asked the guy behind the desk.
"Just this bag (which I handily checked for size at Edinburgh) and a set of bagpipes."
"You'll only be able to take one of them into the cabin," he replied.
"What? The BAA website says that I can take one item plus a musical instrument." (No laughing at the back, please.)
"I'm afraid not. You'll have to check one of them in, or put one inside your suitcase."

With a great deal of sighing and muttering I crammed The Grapes of Wrath and my iPod into my pipe case and stormed impotently off to security.

"Just out of curiosity," I asked an attendant, "am I supposed to be able to bring on a piece of hand luggage as well as a musical instrument?"
"Yes," she said. "You are."

If I ever see that check-in desk guy again his Grapes will feel my Wrath via a swift kick to the knackers.