Today I’m on a mission to find what touts itself as ‘the biggest second-hand English bookshop in Germany.’ Subway map in hand, I set off in search of the elusive Gneisenaustrasse U-bahn station, which the bookshop website claims as its closest but doesn’t seem to appear on any city map.

Once there, I figure out why. It’s a forgotten old slum area, with shelled-out buildings (granted, they just be tumbledown, but I’m a sucker for war stories), an oversupply of 65-cent döner street vendors and all the signs in Arabic.

It’s hard to tell if I’ve crossed into East Berlin somewhere on the underground or if it’s just a dodgy part of the west. Coming out of the station I nervously skirt a gypsy woman who proffers me her baby, and fretfully mumble something incomprehensible to the two grubby boys who ask if I’ve a day ticket they could ride on.

Then I realise I’ve left the directions to the bookstore in my diary at home. I start looking around for approachable-looking people to ask for directions, and, finding none, eventually corner a young guy with bleached hair and a surfboard under his arm. He reminds me of the surfer dudes back home who are always either stoned enough or docile enough to be harmless, so I feel that it is safe to approach.

And indeed, his directions turn out to be faultless, though looking back perhaps I should have been more wary of the surfboard – Berlin is well inland, after all.

Needless to say, after the pains I’d taken to get there, the bookshop itself is a grave disappointment. It seems promising enough when I enter, with walls of books – very handy, given the nature of the establishment – and those comfy old brown chairs that everyone likes. Even the store guy peeling a sack of potatoes at his desk doesn’t put me off.

I’m not really startled until, ducking under the rafters to get to the back of the store, I barrel straight into a homeless fellow carting a pot of stew – or haggis, or possibly sauerkraut, it’s hard to tell – up from a ragged set of cellar steps. It seems the place has a makeshift kitchen-cum-homeless shelter in its basement, and old Gunther at the front desk is readying spuds for the shindig they’ve planned for the evening.

I don’t buy anything, in the end. All the books, though admittedly quality reading, are in highly dubious condition, and I’m not fond of reading in my rubber gloves.

The upside of staying in one destination for more than just a couple of days is that you can justify writing yourself off for days afterwards in the name of ‘cultural enlightenment’ - ie. ’sightseeing’ the inside of various clubs. This evening, Kylz assists me in the sizeable problem of what to wear (ie. what I can scrounge out of my backpack that isn’t already soiled, scrunched or just plain holey).

‘Girls’, Willy sighs after we’ve deliberated in my room for a couple of long hours. ‘The people here are much too fashionable to care about being fashionable.’

Now, the men out there reading this might think that that was a very profound and insightful comment from a member of the male species to come up with. But au contriare, my friends. Patiently we sat the boy down and explained gently exactly how much time money grooming and sheer effort it takes to look that fashionably unfashionable.
(In the end I settled for jeans, in case you were wondering.)

We spend most of what turned out to be a fabulous night in the Weekend cocktail bar high up in a sheer glass building with 360 degree views of the entire city (and its ten thousand cranes from all the construction sites). And needless to say, I spend most of the next day in bed.

Today we went to free the balloon. I mean, we went for a ride on a tethered balloon which gives you a great view of Berlin, but because it’s advertised as ‘the world’s largest captive balloon’, the imagination runs wild with all sorts of pictures of protestors standing out the front marching around with placards and yelling ‘Free the balloon! No more balloons in captivity!’ Okay, maybe that was just from lack of oxygen up that high…

The evening consists of our first experience of the famous Berlin nightlife. Somewhere dark in the former east, en route to a gallery opening, I manage to find myself in somewhat urgent need of a bathroom stop and duck into what turned out to be a very dark and smoky, hard-line communist bar - wearing stiletto boots and carrying a gold handbag.

Too busting to hold out, I inch towards the loo with my bag to the wall and a slightly horrified look on my face which I hope is interpreted as ‘They’re factory boots, comrade, steel caps inside…’

The gallery opening itself is more than impressive though. It’s in an apartment complex which had been leased out to various artists who are now holding open-house exhibitions of their work. The wine is flowing, the nibblies aplenty, the dancing in full swing (albeit, only by the under-fives and over-70s), and there is even an ancient bubble machine whirring away in one corner. Oh, and the art is pretty cool too.

Since I’m pottering about in Germany currently, how about a spot of history? Here’s World War II in a jiffy – and animated! A little slow in bits but close enough to true, I’d say…

Next on the Berlin tour is the Brandenburg gate, the famous marker between what used to be east and west Berlin. Then to the city’s oldest chocolate shop so that we can see the same gate replicated in chocolate and wafer biscuits ‘for our viewing pleasure.’

Outside the chocolate shop, which was in a 17th century limestone building, our guide points out the myriad of battle scars on the building’s surface (’The way to tell and original building in Berlin is if it has bullet holes in it’ There are more bullet holes per square inch in Berlin than in south LA’).

In fact our entire city tour revolved around the legacy of the WWII Allied bombing of Berlin: ‘This used to be the royal church…ah, this building used to be magnificent…oh, and this place was fabulous - til they were all reduced to rubble in the bombings’ (at this point our guide would stop to stare hard at all us Australian, American, Canadian, and British tourists taking his tour, in other words all of us who could conceivably be considered spawn of the Allies.)

But ‘Hi, I’m Kristian!’, as his name tag read, turned out to be an extremely informative and animated guide, providing us with a ten-minute summary of Germany’s entire history right down to the finest of detail (’Friedrich the Great always wore a red tunic in battle so that if he was wounded and bleeding his men would not notice and fear for him - much the same way Hitler always wore brown pants’), and pointing out the Canadian, French and American embassies - ‘Oh no wait, that’s just Starbucks.’

He even managed to not slap Amber from North Carolina when, at the very end of his extremely thorough historical spiel, she twisted her hair around one finger, snapped her gum with a resounding crack and asked ‘So why did the Nazis build the Berlin Wall again?’

There’s something about backpacking that attracts the eye to any poster, sign or pamphlet bearing the word ‘free’, so in Berlin we couldn’t help but take up the opportunity for a free walking tour with an English-speaking guide

And although the three and a half hour tour turned into six hours, and the ‘free’ turned into ‘we’re going to harp on about living off commission until you feel obliged to give us a €20 tip’, the tour was utterly fascinating.

Not to say that we weren’t slightly worried that we’d engaged the services of a whacko when the first spot he led us to was the world’s ugliest apartment building (’Do you know what this is? Prime real estate of the communist east - only high flying politicians and Olympic medallists were allowed to live here’) and most inconspicuous-looking carpark, which in fact turned out to be the site of Hitler’s underground bunker (’There’s no marker or memorial because we don’t want neo-Nazis coming here and sacrificing goats. Now, everyone do a little jig. Go on, don’t be shy! There, now you can all say you’ve danced on Hitler’s grave.’).

Around the corner stood the former entrance to what used to be Hitler’s Chancellery, now replaced by a modest row of shops including - get this, no-one can ever say the Germans don’t have a sense of ironic humour - a gay sauna, a Chinese takeaway called Peking Duck, and a travel agency called Welcome to Russia.

A Berliner favourite is the ‘beach bar’, which, being so named, can lead unwitting Aussies to feel they’ll be at home there. Picture a narrow strip of dirty sand with a couple of bamboo huts and lazy chairs, wedged between a major highway on one side and a railroad on the other. Hmm. We lasted a full 20 minutes then headed off, thinking we’d find more joy in the Jewish museum. Not so. More fool us.

After spending five hours wandering about it, we take ourselves off to Alexanderplatz (yes, the square that Matt Damon dashes across in the Bourne Supremacy), where the communist government of the former East erected a massive TV tower as if to show the West that whatever super duper technology you capitalistic…capitalists have, we can do…almost as well. Too bad the East Berliners used to say they’d like to knock the tower down and ride its elevator into the west.

Not to say that everything about the former DDR was bad – I’ve mentioned before how quickly I became a fan of Ampelman, the East Berlin equivalent to the little green walking man on traffic lights. He just has so much more pizzazz about him than the regular stick-figure dude, with his cocked hat and jaunty little leg…

Today we tipped our caps to our Charlottenburg hostel and our red fish-netted friends, and trundled off to meet up with Count Willy, whose family, conveniently for us, happened to own quite a pad in Berlin.

‘It’s just a small place’, Count Willy said. ‘It’s really only for when my parents swing by now and then’ (daddy is the German Consul-General to China, and mummy the women’s delegate to the UN as well as Countess of Someplace in central Germany).

Anyway, the ’small place’ turned out to be a thirty roomed pad which took up the entire tenth floor of an apartment building, complete with dining hall lined with severe-looking portraits of severe-looking predecessors dating back to the fifteenth century. It’s worth mentioning here that Willy himself has not just a title but twelve middle names and some very impressive dental work.

We’d arranged to meet up at the Reichstag building, assuming he chose that site because it’s a large landmark and even topographically-challenged travellers like ourselves couldn’t possibly miss it. But as it turned out he’d obligingly used some family connections to get us on the list for a private tour of the place.

Before we managed to get too excited though, we were seated dutifully in the parliamentary chamber and our guide proceeded to lecture us for 45 long and painful minutes - in German - on all 120,000 laws of the constitution of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

The excitement of whooshing down Kangaroo Valley’s ‘rapids’ having knocked the beans out of me, I embark with my faithful travel mate on an epic journey back upside the world.

Berlin. At last we locate our hostel. In itself it’s fantastic - clean and with great amenities - but for only €12 a night we know there has to be some catch…and we quickly learn that the descriptive terms ‘happening and funky area’ happen to translate to ’surrounded on all sides by sex shops and strip joints’.

Not to say that the locals aren’t friendly - as we wander past the nearest erotica joint with a pizza in hand and our eyes tactfully averted, a pair of hookers in see-through red fish-nets, a couple of burly, no-necked Soviet-looking security guards and a group of bikers all pause mid-brawl to bid us a schönes abend and guten appetit.

In the evening we catch the underground to Rosenthaler Platz, part of the former east turned super-funky, where friend of friend Adi “keeps” an apartment. I say it so because my understanding is he’s only there when not at his other apartment on one of the North Sea islands or the other one in Lausanne, Switzerland.

But he and his girlfriend are in fact very nice and cook us a delicious meal of many meats, of which I recognize chicken and bacon but am at a loss to identify the rest, though that doesn’t stop me going back for thirds.

From the dinner table by the open window I could have reached out and touched the famed Fernsehturm (East German TV tower) at Alexanderplatz. Probably I would have fallen out the window then, but that’s of little consequence.

It started with a list.

Granted, with my dad it often starts with a list. Sunscreen. Bug spray. Very groovy flap hat. That sort of thing. Old joggers – because you will fall in the water. Crash helmet. Because you will hit your head on a submerged rock and die.

We’re canoeing down the river in Kangaroo Valley, on the south coast of New South Wales, and dad won’t let anyone in their canoe without presenting a ticked-off checklist of necessities. Change of knickers. Sunglasses. Mum-made sandwiches. We have it all.

We’ve been told there are rapids and that we’d be supplied with helmets accordingly. The water is high given all the recent rain and someone carked it in this river a few years ago when it flooded, a kid on a school trip from Sydney.

In the event, the rapids were little whooshes of foam over five centimetres of water. Still, and somewhat amusingly to the rest of us, my sister’s boyfriend manages to capsize the both of them in it, leaving the rest of us to scoop up their flotsam of camera cases, water bottles and oars floating down the river.

For the most part, though, it’s altogether tranquil going. Particularly as dad’s an especially deft rower, so I spend much of the day with my feet up and oar in the bottom of the boat.

Six canoes in total, the twelve of us float downstream, pausing occasionally to yell at each other over the roar of the cicadas “PEACEFUL, isn’t it?” “Yeah, TRANQUIL – BEWDIFUL day!” and park in amongst the branches overhanging the river for snacks, only to find the canoes suddenly teeming with spiders. The water dragons, scores of them that line the banks, thankfully don’t find their way into the boats.

Crash helmets might have come in useful later, on the minibus trip back to the canoe depot where the cars are parked. With two dozen people (plus one wasp that kept on trying to get in through my

window) piled in, plus all the canoes dangling off the back of the trailer, we have some slight momentum issues trying to climb the hill leading up from Bendeela camping ground. No doubt the lone cyclist trailing behind us is somewhat alarmed to see the sight of us barreling backwards down the hill, engine stalled and brakes screeching.

But after a few more false starts and the distinct whiff of the gear box burning we’re on our way again, careening around a hairpin bend, which, thankfully, no one is coming around. Back to dry – and flat – land again.