The Best cups of Coffee pt 3: Dirty pants and old Greeks

The journey was way too long. Australia can be quite anal over many things, one of them being speed limits on national highways. Can you imagine doing a 1200km trip at 100 km/hr? I guess it didn’t matter too much, because we were on holiday, it was a beautiful stretch of road, and we were heading to the famed Gold Coast.

The catapult that shot us slowly down that long road was the combination of beach names like ‘Surfers Paradise’, ‘Broadbeach’ and ‘Runaway bay’. And Mooloolaba. Which doesn’t sound like anything familiar, but is honestly one the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever been to. What it lacks in waves it makes up in golden sand, lush Pandanus and a big old fashion sail-ship stuck in it’s cove.

I’m not the kind of guy that can just sit on a beach and suntan, pretending not to stare at other tanners through the security of sunglasses. I mean that’s fun for a while but after a minute or two I’ve got to do something. Swim, hit a cricket ball, throw a rugby ball, pat a little rubber ball back and forth for a world record 580 times. We didn’t have many of those balls with us though, so we had to resort to swimming.

Two problems: The water is freezing, and I had no swimming shorts. It was like being a Vaalie in Cape Town all over again. I did however have an old pair of shorts in my bag, but they were really dirty, like I had used them to wash a muddy dog or something. But when you’ve done your staring what else can a man do but don the dirties go diving in an ice bucket?

I ran in like I was naked and managed to survive the initial shock, paddling about in the absence of waves. When the monster ice-headache set in I set out of the water and noticed to my surprise how nice and clean my pants had suddenly become. It may seem like a really trivial incident, but we were in the habit of trying to learn something new every day, and so that night we philosophised the dirty pants into a lesson.

It goes something like this: We let low self-confidence prevent us from doing the very things that would build it. Put that in your coffee pot and drink it.

Speaking of which, on the very long drive to the beach of dirty-pants and ice-headaches we had the best cup of coffee in Australia. No it wasn’t Starbucks, not even close. It was at a dirty old Greek coffee shop stuck at one of those desperation stations, the kind you only go to because you missed the other ones in your 100 km/hr hurry on the highway.

There’s a lot of lessons in that cup of coffee too, but I think they’re quite obvious and you would get them on your own anyway. Not like the dirty pants story, that ones a keeper.