Peter Carey
30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account
Bloomsbury, $27.95hb, 248pp, 0 7475 5500 1

Mark Mordue
Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip
Allen & Unwin, $24.95pb, 344pp, 1 86508 414 X

A COUPLE OF CHAPTERS into Dastgah Mark Mordue reveals: 'I'd never been overseas before.' Amazing! In Australia in 1998, was it still possible to get through not just your teenage years but also your twenties without at least sporting an 'I've been to Bali too' T-shirt? Or trans-Tasman hopping to New Zealand?

Having avoided that Australian rite of passage, Mordue has the style to jump in at the deep end. Sure, he soon arrives in Kathmandu, but he takes neither Kuta Beach or Khao San Road as his first overseas arrival point. Any Calcutta fan — and, perhaps surprisingly, there are a lot of us out there — will agree that it's the ideal baptism of fire for a first-time traveller. Better yet, Mordue chooses Sudder Street and the Fairlawn Hotel, undoubtedly the Fawlty Towers of the subcontinent, as his place to stay.

Taking Calcutta as a starting point is a good beginning, but Mordue stubbornly eschews the current travel-writing trend for what Michael Palin defines as the 'across the Andes by frog' school — that is, complicate some straightforward trip by choosing an absurd form of transport or adding some curious quest to the voyage. Hitchhiking around Ireland toting a refrigerator instead of a backpack, or buying an elephant as personal transport for a jaunt across India, have been good examples of the genre. Dastgah is simply an account of Mordue's own route around the world, a straightforward recital of unremarkable destinations — India, Nepal, London, Paris and New York — before arriving, thankfully, back in Godzone.

What adds interest to Mordue's book are a couple of more unusual destinations. In Turkey, he wanders all the way to the wild-wild-east and continues, in the longest section of the book, with a fascinating ramble around Iran. In that much-maligned country, nothing turns out to be as threatening as the rumours would insist. Iran also gives the book its title.

Mordue's unrealised fears are a delight as he proves once again that God doesn't only look after drunks and little children. Again and again He also demonstrates concern for world travellers and backpackers. Sure, Mordue gets his cash card (and his PIN number) spirited out of an ATM machine in the Pigalle, but that's just God's way of warning about the dangers of hanging around in red-light districts. If you don't get pickpocketed (Peru for me), have your car broken into (Rome and San Francisco in my case), or get your flat burgled (Sydney, within a week of arriving, and by a Kiwi, just to prove how mundane it was), you clearly haven't been travelling enough. Usually, however, your worst fears are never realised.

Arriving in fundamentalist Iran, Mordue chews his nails about 'danger and uncertainty, past the spinning gun barrel, the hard and dubious men, the swirl of strange music and space'. None of the bad stuff happens; in fact, it's simply 'kindness, always kindness'. While he's busy worrying about rip-offs, there's somebody at the back of the bus keeping an eye on him and paying 'for our bus tickets as a gesture of friendship'.

Cold New York is equally warm towards down-on-their-luck travellers. Arriving penniless after his Parisian ATM disaster, Mordue almost immediately bumps into the editor of a new magazine who not only takes the first story he pitches but also writes him out a cash cheque for US$2000 (yes, real dollars, not Pacific pesos) as an advance.

Furthermore, when the chips are down, if you're an Australian, there's always sport to come to the rescue — although in India, Mordue has to explain why another Australian spectator has made himself so unpopular that he needs police protection.

'Why is this fellow here so rude?' asks an Indian fan. 'He is really most unpleasant gentleman. Nobody here likes him one bit. We think he should go home now please.'
'He's just a dickhead,' Mordue explains, and then has to elucidate what the term means.

In Iran, it's an Australian sporting disappointment that comes to the rescue. The Socceroos failure to defeat Iran at the MCG in 1997, thus allowing Iran to get through to the World Cup finals and to go on to defeat the great Satan, was clearly a game worth losing. 'Australia and Iran very great friends,' a taxi driver informs him, as if Australia's loss was simply a matter of good sense.

Dastgah is subtitled 'Diary of a Headtrip'. It's a diary that encompasses everything from an explanation of its title (dastgah is a Persian music term) to an account of witnessing someone having their American Express card imprinted on their face by a high-heeled dominatrix in a Manhattan S&M bar. I could live without Mordue's poetry.

In contrast to Mordue's first big trip, Peter Carey's 30 Days in Sydney is local boy coming back from New York for a squiz at the old haunts, attempting to sum it up in terms of 'Earth and Air and Fire and Water', something you 'would never seek to define Manhattan by'. Having arrived at Kingsford Smith, it's simply a matter of sitting back and letting old friends tell their tales: of a Blue Mountain bushwalking adventure (counterpointed with a newspaper report of the calamity it could have turned into), the Sydney_Hobart tragedy in 1998 (and a less disastrous warning about messing around with Sydney weather in sailboats on the Pittwater), police and political corruption, bushfire terrors, Aboriginal injustice and another look at poor old Bligh and the bad boys in the Rum Corps.

Numerous little tales weave their way through the book, including an account of that magical Sydney word 'Eternity' popping up in the Harbour Bridge's end-of-millennium fireworks, to the delight of Australians aware of its story and the undoubted mystification of almost everyone else who saw it. Eternity popped up again during the Olympic opening, to equally good effect. There's a nice tale of an unnamed NSW premier and his attorney-general handling the need for a drink after closing time by the simple expedient of endorsing the publican's licence to extend the hours from midnight until six a.m. 'We liked this reckless behaviour. We liked the lawlessness and if we sometimes suspected our leaders were a little criminal then they were our criminals at least.' We also bump into almost everything else worth mentioning in the Sydney saga, including the Opera House, Parramatta Road, Waltzing Matilda versus Advance Australia Fair, the Darling Harbour monorail, RSL clubs, even the Bourbon and Beefsteak.

But why does Sydney get all the attention? The same cast of events gets the once over in John Birmingham's recent Leviathan, and there's no end of steamy subtropical weather, sexy salsa music and barely constrained passion and mistrust in the movie Lantana. Why doesn't any of this stuff happen in Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane or even Melbourne? Well, perhaps not in Melbourne.