My flight from Auckland departed at 6.30am, which meant I needed to be out of bed at 3am - the joys of ultra-cheap round the world tickets. Somehow I managed it and was at the airport bar by 4.30 for my shot of whiskey and diazepam.
I’m not sure if it was having a whiskey at that time of the morning or the fact that mentally I was still in bed, but the flight lasted approximately 30 minutes instead of two and a half hours as I slept from soon after take off until just before landing. The first time I’ve done that for years - maybe I am getting over my fears. We’ll see.
Susie, my friend from the Buenos Aires Spanish school lives about an hour and a half outside of Sydney and had kindly agreed to let me stay at hers while I acclimatised. She was at work though when I landed so I had a few hours to kill in central Sydney and headed over to Circular Quay (which is rectangular), the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.
Because it was so early the place was pretty much deserted so I had it to myself to try and take some pictures from angles that I had seen before. I had one of those ‘Buenos Aires moments’ again while standing looking at it - the Sydney Opera House, Australia, me, here. Weird.
For a wonder of the modern world, it is surprisingly old-fashioned inside though - very much a combination of the interiors of the Barbican and the National Theatre. On a slightly grander, sunnier, more picturesque scale though.
I found this little brass just outside the main entrance.
I don’t know if you can see it clearly, but actually all of the segments of the building’s distinctive roof are ‘cut’ from a hemisphere and fit exactly into a section of a perfect sphere. Apparently it was the only way the architect could achieve the proportions necessary to mass produce the necessary building materials. Interesting I thought.
After such an early start I treated myself to an “Aussie Breakfast“, which looked surprisingly like a full English, but as it was within sight of the opera house I let them off.
I headed down to Wollongong, where Susie lives, and settled into a few days of life without teenagers, a kitchen to myself, a washing machine that worked, and TV and DVDs. I haven’t watched TV for three months, so it was blissful to veg out on a sofa, watch the tennis and drink cold beer on the balcony while my host went to work.
Wollongong's a great little seaside university town with proper shops, a pretty marina and some gorgeous looking beaches surrounding it.
The 26th was Australia Day so we headed back up to Sydney in Susie's car (A car?! What luxury!!) to watch the competitors in the celebratory Tall Ships race come past the Opera House and finish under the bridge. Well, I wanted to watch it and Susie kindly played along.
We headed over to Hyde Park for what was billed as a giant Aussie BBQ and there were certainly plenty of people there. (Much of Sydney is named after parts of London - Oxford Street, King's Cross, Lewisham. But one station name was taking it too far... Croydon.)
But at that point we enjoyed a bout of English-style cloud and rain - I think an Aussie god was taking the piss.
Which made watching the fireworks in Darling Harbour that evening a soggy, if very pretty, affair.
It was interesting watching the Aussies celebrate their national day, particularly as we don’t have one in England. The 26th January is actually the day that the first fleet of convicts arrived in Australia, not the day Captain Cook discovered it.
I’ve been reading a history of the convicts, by an Aussie, so it was great to read about a particular place, look up, and see it right in front of me. Though not that much older than New Zealand there’s a much stronger sense of history here, perhaps because Australia was born of such heart-ache and trauma, compared to the voluntary settlement of New Zealand.
For a day supposed to celebrate their national pride, there was an awful lot of navel gazing in the papers and on TV. The aborigines, and a number of liberal Aussies, call 26th January Invasion Day, and there are calls to move the date. The news was full of stories of surprisingly negative aspects of Aussie culture. So while there was a lot of mindless flag waving and shouts of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi”, there was a healthy dose of critical self-analysis being taken too. I was surprised.
When the crappy weather cleared up and the heat reappeared it was time for the New Zealand beard to go. I know it’s caused some of you great amusement, but it’s just too hot to keep it. I tried a couple of moustache variations, but settled on the clean-shaven look.
Susie, doing an excellent job as tour guide while still working every day, drove me up to the rainforest where there was a suspended walkway through the tree tops. It was pretty spectacular, but I spent most of the time worrying about how fragile the walkways looked!
The highlight though was a roadside potato in the town of Robertson. Apparently Robertson is the capital of Aussie potato farming and they’ve built a giant potato to celebrate this claim to fame.
I think it actually looks like a giant s**t though, and the locals call it The Turd.
My time in Wollongong has been all very ‘normal’, which while a more than welcome break from being on the road has also made me a bit homesick. I'm not sure why, but feeling so relaxed and 'at home' has reminded me of actual home.
I had one night where I couldn’t sleep very well so walked down to the beach to watch the sunrise and sent lots of text messages home. Probably a bit expensive, but it cheered me up and the sunrise was pretty cool!
Susie did her best to cheer me up by taking me to the local wildlife park to stroke a koala and feed kangaroos - tick that one off the Australian tourism checklist!
After the animals we drove down the coast to a little town called Scarborough and dinner at the Scarborough Hotel, which, to coin Carlsberg’s line has probably the best beer garden in the world. It was just stunning, perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. I could have stayed for days.
I could have stayed in Wollongong for months, it’s so comfortable here and Susie has been so kind - having been a traveller herself she recognises how nice it is to have some home comforts. In one of my Buenos Aires entries I referred to her as a "good egg", which she said sounds rubbish and she's right. She's a "jolly good egg".
But I’ve got to move on, so it’s back up to Sydney for a couple of days and then over to Perth to do the sailing qualification I was thinking of. I'm not sure what the opportunities for blogging will be while I'm on the boat, so there may be a short break in transmission.
