A small Chinese man pushes porter from the vast red-bricked megalith of Market City towards the rat infested destinations of of Chinatowns restaurants.

His cargo is wide punnets of purple broccoli, and he sings to himself in a strange, alien sort of nasaly wail as he coughs and spits his way eyes shut  throught the familiar songlines between gawping tourists and touting waiters.

A beautiful young woman in impossibly tight white jeans that draw the male eye to consider, is she or isn't she wearing underwear, hands out leaflets promising two drinks for the price of one to the conspiculously young that drift past in a haze. Although I hover for a while , she studiously ignores me.

I am too old.

Sydneys Chinatown is a riddle of strange sounding names, no doubt fuddled in in the translation.

Chatwin observed that metaphors are rooted in the land of their origin, and that language is nothing more than a mental map of their surroundings.

Take the language away from its roots and it means little.

Imagine then metaphors for those seeking to understand the lingua franca of English (a little irony that I always privately enjoy).

In his travels through Patagonia, Chatwin encountered Yaghan metaphors, an attempt to represent abstract ideas from their environs.

One synonym that particularly binds in spell is the metaphor for teaching.

In Yaghan, this was represented by the word for the thaw of snow.

This is the logic, or to non-Yaghans, the illogic:

In winter, snow covers the ground as a scab covers a wound. It melts in the spring and leaves a smooth, flattened surface. The  thaw means the arrival of spring. In spring, people can once more move again, and then the lessons of the new year can begin.

Teaching.

The land will teach them new things this year.

Back in Chinatown, I see many odd names and I realise the truth of Chatwins astute observation.

Here are some examples as I sit and sip at a glass of wine:

'Thousand layered noodle happy luck surprise'

'Big cash lucky money drinking palace'

'Emeperors Freshly Baked Cream Poof'

Underneath that last one was a further sign, which read,

'Each poof is a supreme nutrissus snack, enjoy nice time by especially nice tast'

I couldn't resist and bought what turned out to be some long crisp cones filled with custard creams buried within some 'puff' pastry. Okay, not bad, but I did briefly wonder what a nice poof tasted like.

Of course mistranslations aren't confined to Chinatown, Sydney.

An example from the Ukrainian Immigration Authorities:

' Attention! The card is to fill be passport owner. The card also is to fill for every person that put down the passport. Fill in the card with dark blue and black ink. Please do not fill the card with red and the green. Please fill the card with printing letters and if there are words in one point, do please, do the blank'

I wondered what doing the blank actually meant, but used some common sense instead of annoying the authorities.

Okay, I know that it's old and used by every stand-up comic as the unimpeachable prop, but I swear that it's all true:

When I first visited the States in the late 1980s, the visa application forms had the following questions:

'Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?'

'Are you, or have you ever been, a Homosexual?'

'Are you, or have you ever been, a Terrorist.'

The killer to all of these strange requests for personal information was the footnote which proclaimed, it must be said, quite generously:

'Answering yes to any of these questions will not necessarily preclude you from being granted a visa.'

On wonders perhaps that if they had retained these probing questions, they might have caught the Al'Queda operatives when they first arrived.

Moving on swiftly, Australia has a rather unimaginative and peculiar attitude when it comes to naming things.

Now I don't want to imply that the early Australian settlers, you know the type, thieves, bull-buggerers, sheep rustlers, politicians and so forth lacked imagination precisely, but for bloody buggerys sake surely they could have done better?

They see a range of mountains with snow, crowning it like icing sugar, catching the flame of the antipodean sun as it rises in the newly born day.

What do they call it?

The Snowy mountains.

They come across a seemingly impassable range of mountains that seperate one part of New south Wales from the other, the only way across is way down south and around.

The Great Dividing Range.

In the notorious outback, someone found a passage, priorily thought impossible, north from Adelaide, eventually ending up in Alice Springs, through the worst heat and one of the most inhospitable climates on earth, through the spinifex, the desert oaks and the ghost gums.

The name of the intrepid explorer was Stuart.

They decided to call the passage, the....wait for it....yup, the Stuart Highway.

The only thing that I can imagine to be an excuse is that white Europeans came, saw, and basically ran out of imaginative names to call other things.

There's a place called Townsville for fucks sake.

You can hear the argument all these years later:

Bruce 1 'Well it looks like it could be a town'

Bruce 2 'Looks more like a village to me.'

'Let's call it Townsville' suggests Bruce 3.

And so it remains to this day.

Elsewhere, there are the Blue mountains (they appear blue), the Sandy desert (there's a lot of sand there), the Great Ocean road (a long road that goes by the Ocean) and so on.

There is a Bagdad and Swansea in Tasmania, a Walthamstow and a Kensington in Sydney, elsewhere there are Dovers, Brightons, Richmonds...you could almost be back in Blighty.

Perhaps I'm being harsh, there are plenty of daft names in Britain; the Lake District, the Midlands, the Black Country and so on.

But then thoughts don't have to make sense when you're travelling, that can come later.

For now it is sufficient to simply observe and make moot while dwelling over delicious inconsequences that are all that troubles the wandering soul.

Now I'm feeling Hungary.

I wonder if Emperors Dragon Happy Go Lucky Major Cash Prize Big Jobby Good Fortune Food Emporium has a decent kebab on the menu?

yechydda,