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“If you really want to dip into beer culture, go to Oktoberfest,” a beer-wise London friend advised. I started making inquiries and found out that Oktoberfest was held in Munich and - surprisingly - started on September 21st. How is it that an October Festival starts in September, I wondered, before remembering that the October revolution in Russia actually took place in November. Obviously some momentous October events had a tendency not to happen in October. Pondering over this curious phenomenon, I even found an inverse connection between Oktoberfest - the world’s biggest celebration of beer drinking - and the October revolution, which had led to the almost complete absence of beer in the world’s largest country.

Some of the Oktoberfest statistics I managed to dig up were quite staggering. Allegedly, in the course of the Festival, one million gallons (5 million litres) of beer were consumed, and the total length of the urinal “troughs” for the men added up to 2, 575 feet. The data on the length of women’s urinals, or rather toilets, were not available, the reason probably being the absence of an appropriate measuring unit.

On top of this, the insatiable 8 million visitors attending Oktoberfest each year, reportedly, gobbled up 725,000 roast chickens; 320,000 pairs of grilled sausages; 65,000 pork knuckles, and - as if it wasn’t enough - 72 whole roasted oxen.

“Beware of Australians at Oktoberfest!” they told me at the German National Tourist Office in London. “What’s so dangerous about them?” I inquired, not disclosing the fact that I was an Australian myself, if only by passport. “Well, they are a bit…er… rough…” was the reply.

Here I have to say that during my seven years in the West I’ve developed a powerful spirit of contradiction: the moment I see a forbidding sign, a placard calling for this or that, or hear a warning, I feel an urge to disobey. An innocuous “No Smoking” plate causes strong cravings for a cigarette. A “No Drinking or Eating on the Premises” triggers pangs of hunger and thirst. When I see a poster “Vote Tory”, I feel like voting Labour. A “Vote Labour” political broadcast evokes strong Conservative sympathies, and Paddy Ashdown’s fiery calls to vote Liberal Democrat never failed to discourage me from voting altogether and to remind me of the fact that as an Australian subject I don’t have the right to vote in British elections anyway.

“The rougher is the research - the better it is for a feature,” I decided. On an early September morning, having totally ignored the Tourist Office warning, I boarded a bus, full of young Bierfest-bound Australians, in Earls Court. The package, offered by a London-based Australian tour operator, included accommodation in tents near Munich, Bierfest, a mysterious “Frog Convention” in Austria and Dachau Concentration Camp - an unlikely cocktail, not dissimilar to the infamous “Ruff” (beer plus vodka) of my Soviet youth.

The bus was to take us to Ramsgate, where we were to board a ferry to Ostende to be followed by a 14-hour long overnight drive to Munich. I had no idea that I had embarked on the wildest journey of my entire life.

On the way to Ramsgate, I kept throwing furtive glances at my travel companions, none of whom seemed rough or threatening. A lad behind me was telling his “mate” how he was backpacking from Sydney to Brisbane and suddenly “saw a huge giraffe crossing the road…” A plump freckled youth on the seat in front read a tabloid article with a long heart-chilling headline: “Baby Geoffrey suffocated when his boozed-up dad fell on him after a stag-night binge on beer and vodka.” For no apparent reason, I started feeling a bit uneasy.

A modest-looking girl sitting next to me was immersed in an Australian book “Drinking Games.” I craned my neck and peeked over her shoulder: “Contestants sit around a timekeeper, who allows them one minute to drink a film canister full of beer. The ultimate goal is to drink 100 canisters in 100 minutes, without a break to piss or puke. All bodily waste is eventually emptied onto a timekeeper, a voluntary position that is, unbelievably, highly sought after…”

This was the first clear sign of impending danger.

It was a crisp misty morning. At times it felt as if we were driving inside a gigantic chilled beer glass. The white cliffs of Ramsgate resembled flakes of fresh draught Guinness foam. On the massive Belgian ferry, whose male crew members looked like secret paedophiles and child-molesters (this is what an excessively sensationalist media coverage sometimes does to your perception of foreigners), I didn’t see much of my fellow-Aussies, whom I rejoined only after we docked in Ostende. A minor transformation had occurred to them: they were noisier and ruddier than before, and many were carrying crates of Stella Artois on their shoulders. “What a strange thing to do,” I thought. Carrying beer to Bierfest was on a par with carrying coals to Newcastle or water to the Thames. Only later did I realise that taking Stella Artois to Munich was not on my travel companions’ agenda.

In Ostende, our group was met by another bus with a Munich-based Australian driver Mick and a guide called Leonie, a diminutive Liverpudlian girl, who from having to deal with too many Antipodeans spoke English with a feline Aussie accent.

“No puking on the bus, mates!” announced Mick, starting the engine.

For the first half-hour or so everything was relatively quiet. Some of the Aussies were asleep, probably saving strength for the impending battles. The girl next to me was now studying the rules of another fairly innocuous drinking game called “Balancing Act… requires ten cans of beer per player…”

Suddenly all hell broke loose. Everyone on the bus was drinking. The Aussies were frantically unpacking their crates of beer, and in no time all of them had tinnies glued to their lips. Those who had failed to bring their own supplies were able to buy booze from the driver - with a surcharge for the service, of course.

“Our official attitude was no drinking on the bus, but since they are going to drink anyway, we had to introduce the policy of controlled drinking,” Leonie told me in confidence.

Meanwhile, ‘controlled drinking’ was slowly but surely getting out of control. Hiccups, burps and four-letter words sounded from all sides. An uneven potpourri of singing and farting soon joined them. Discarded beer cans were rattling on the bus floor like empty projectile cartridges.

“Wanna beer, mate?” I was asked by the flabby redheaded youth, whom I saw reading a tabloid in the morning. His face was quickly acquiring the colour of his fiery hairstyle. I nicknamed him Baby. He was sitting next to a burly muscular youngster in dirty military fatigues who was trying to drink from two cans simultaneously. I christened him Bully.

It was interesting to observe how the beer was changing the behavioural patterns of these normal Australian kids. Their speech was faltering in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol they consumed. They were becoming boisterous and aggressive. Baby was now inserting f-curses not just before, but also after, every single word he uttered. The no-puking-on-the-bus regulation was violated every couple of minutes. The modest-looking girl, who had probably finished reading “Drinking Games” (her glassy eyes indicated that she had achieved “the ultimate goal”) was looking at me steadily. I moved aside lest she should take me for a “timekeeper” - the position I hadn’t sought.

It was getting dark behind the bus windows. The prospect of sleep seemed increasingly unlikely. My personal Bierfest started long before Munich.

“If you look at your right, you’ll see the city of Brussels, the capital of Belgium, which is the country we’re in now, by the way,” Leonie stated matter-of-factly. No one was listening. Somewhere near Liege, a truck with a load of pigs stopped next to our bus at traffic lights. The Australians suddenly went silent for a moment, probably struck by the uncanny resemblance. I noted that the pigs on the truck were much more orderly - and cleaner- than my human fellow travellers.

Mick had to make frequent “piss-stops” to allow his passengers to relieve themselves. “Take it a bit easy. Remember there are six days of Bierfest ahead of you,” he pleaded from behind the wheel. His words were falling on deaf ears. Neat Belgian forests were flooded with torrents of antipodean urine.

“That was the longest piss of my life!” Baby announced proudly after one of such stops.

The oldest person on the bus, I didn’t want to be a party-pooper until Bully decided to sit on my head. I pushed his sweaty bulk away and returned to making some rickety notes in my memo pad. “You bloody journo!” Baby suddenly screamed in high-pitched falsetto. I grabbed him by the collar.

“Be civilised!” Leonie intervened.

“I am going to f…ing sleep,” declared Baby suddenly. Having wriggled his jelly-fish-like damp and fat body out of my grip, he switched off. In a second, he was snoring and farting in his sleep. His beer-saturated head was bouncing against the window like an Aussie rules football against the pitch.

Bully took up baby’s role of ringleader. Pale and nearly fainting, he kept pumping himself with beer.

“Why do you torment yourself?” I asked him. “And why n-not?” he belched out.

The very beer culture that I thought I had fled by leaving Australia came to haunt me in the European woods, through which we were now driving. The din of drunken voices was unbearable, let alone the stench. On top of it, Mick was playing some deafening rock music over the loudspeaker.

“Music helps drunken people to fall asleep,” he explained when I asked him to turn the radio down. It certainly didn’t help me. The sad Belgian Moon, soaked with beer, was mooching about in the Guinness-coloured sky.

By 8 a.m. next morning, we had reached the suburbs of Munich. From there, as Mick explained, a shuttle to Bierfest took only ten minutes - “about two thirds of a beer”. By that time, the bus had come to resemble a poorly kept pigsty on wheels.

Snow was lying on top of the tents at Campingplatz Thalkirchen, where we were supposed to stay for six nights. It should have been called Camp Hangover instead. Freezing and shaking Aussies with sunken faded eyes wandered around the camp wrapped in blankets. Some of them were already drinking their first tinny of the day - in full accordance with a tested morning after cure, recommended by TNT, an Australian magazine, published in London: “Get stuck into the beer again when you wake up and drown the bugger!”

It was too much for me. Having made my apologies to Leonie, I headed for a nearby hotel dreaming of a hot English breakfast. When I was leaving Camp Hangover, I got a glimpse of Baby and Bully queuing to the Camp’s only plywood shower shed. In their trembling fists, they were clutching white shower coupons with a German word “Gas” printed on them in big letters. I thought that they were the two people I didn’t particularly mind being gassed…

For the next few days I kept bumping into my travel companions in the streets of Munich and on Bierfest grounds. I saw Baby and Bully, with Bavarian wooden clogs on their bare feet, thumping against the cobbles and chasing a group of unsuspecting Japanese tourists near the Hofbrau Keller - the beer hall where Hitler drank with his storm troopers on the eve of the so-called Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. I saw a young Australian bloke being loaded into an ambulance, while his drinking companion, with his face covered in blood, was taken away in a police car. I saw another Australian youth wriggling on the ground in an alcohol-induced epileptic fit amidst the cheerful Bavarian lederhosen-clad crowd - lederhosen struck me as the best possible attire to conceal a beer-belly.

I learnt that during every Bierfest several Aussies die of alcohol poisoning and many more end up at Munich hospitals. Is it really worth coming to Munich from the other end of the world only to get smashed, I kept thinking? And why do so many Australians tend to treat the rest of the world as an extension of their local pub?

Leonie was standing on the steps of a bus, parked near Marienplatz, a stunning Gothic central square of Munich, instructing another group of Aussies: “Drunk or not drunk, throwing up or not - be here in time, like a Snow-white or whatever it was with a pumpkin!”

“Yesterday was a good day,” she told me. “Only one throw-up on the bus, but plenty of vomiting on Bierfest grounds. And this morning one chap was run over by a car on the way to the Festival. He only survived because he was pissed.”

And I thought then that an excursion to Dachau Concentration Camp as part of the Bierfest package tour was not entirely irrelevant, for beer was not just a drink turning immature Australian “babies” into aggressive bullies, and bullies into obstreperous and foul-mouthed adult babies. Beer culture was capable of triggering the worst forms of collective brutality. German fascism as a movement started in Munich, with a beer-swilling coup at the Burgerbraukeller beer hall, which subsequently, and significantly billed Hitler and his Nazi cronies for 143 steins (one-litre beer mugs), 80 glasses, 98 stools, two music stands - all of them smashed, and 148 stolen sets of cutlery. There’s no need to tell you that the bill remained unpaid.

Dachau Concentration Camp was an ultimate example of what beer culture could lead to, if left to run out of control.

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