Australia without seeing a single kanagaroo or koala

Sydney, Australia

''Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time"
- Bertrand Russell

After being relieved of $50 each at Christchurch airport, for departure taxes and an Australian visa, we finally left New Zealand and flew off to sunny Sydney. My mate Jenny, her fella Simon and her daughter Charlotte, moved to Sydney last Christmas and we would be staying with them in the fancy northshore suburb of Mosman. A train ride from the airport and a brief taxi journey later and we were at their house, a swanky looking place on a quiet road just a few minutes away from Sydney bridge. It was great to see them again, and not just because they gave us food and wine and pretended to be interested in our endless travel stories. We hadn't seen anybody we knew since Mum&Mum© left Mexico three months previously, and we hadn't seen these guys since last October. It was a great novelty being able to have a normal conversation again with people we knew. Quite frankly, neither Cara nor I have a single story or anecdote that the other hasn't heard already, and the other is always there for every new experience we have. It is getting so bad, I've resorted to talking Cara through my list of Most Impressive Pimples As A Teenager. Riveting stuff, I am sure you will agree.

Our first week in Australia was spent hanging out with Jen, Simon and Charlotte, taking in the sights of Sydney and catching up on what has been happening in the last year. We visited the aquarium in Darling Harbour and watched Deep Sea 3D at the Imax. During the week, when everybody was either at work or school, we would slouch on the sofa watching DVDs or wander around the city, looking for good noodle houses. Cara and I were missing Thai food so much, that we went to an Asian supermarket, bought a wok and a bucket of ingredients, and cooked up a few recipes we had learned in cookery school at Chiang Mai (this will surely have to go down as the most shameless name dropping of any blog entry).

After a week, Simon had to fly off to Mumbai, in India, on business and Cara and I settled down into a fairly lazy routine of not doing very much. After all this time away, it felt good to be staying in a real home environment, and although we didn't really do anything, we certainly enjoyed not doing it. The house was just a few minutes walk away from Balmoral beach, which is one of north Sydney's most pleasant little suburban beaches. A few times, Cara and I would take a walk down to the beach, buy fish 'n' chips from the place across the road and sit on the sand to eat it (sorry Oz, but you seem to be afflicted by the fresh fish/frozen chips debacle that scuppered New Zealand). The various commuter ferries cruised by in the distance, and seemingly every toddler in the southern hemisphere rode passed in a pram. It is worth noting that a small portion of Balmoral beach is sectioned off with a shark net that has in front of it a big sign saying the net is not shark proof. Almost as ludicrous as the warning found on the back of a bag of peanuts stating bag may contain nuts. Next thing you know we'll have warnings on the side of aeroplanes stating plane not impervious to gravity. Is it a shark net or is it not? Balmoral beach also has a resident flock of reasonably tame cockatoos, and one day we tried to get a couple of photos of them as they were feeding on the park across from the beach. As I was crouching down to get a photo of one bird that was getting quite close, it jumped up onto my hand and tried to stare me down. Annoyingly, it was the hand that was holding the camera and the strap was around my wrist, so I couldn't transfer it to my other hand. I tried to nudge the bird up my arm so I could switch hands with the camera, but after much squawking and pecking at my fingers, it jumped down again so I missed the shot. Thinking it was a great Kodak moment not to be missed, I tried to encourage the noisy little bag of feathers back onto my free hand to get another chance at a shot, but as I put my hand down in front of it, the bastard clamped down on my thumb and bit as hard as he could. In a vain hope of getting him off me, if only because it really bloody hurt, I lifted my hand up and away from him, but he just hung on and I spent the next half a minute jumping up and down and waving my arm about with a big cockatoo hanging off the end of it. I was not very impressed, but the 200 other people in the vicinity thought it was hilarious. Eventually, after realising I wasn't a really big peanut, he let go and trundled off to join his friends. I was a bit wary of them after that, but Cara, who is always impressed by the sight of a cockatoo, insisted I go back and take a picture of her with them around her. No further attacks occurred.

One evening, Cara and Charlotte wanted to watch the cinematic train wreck that is Moulin Rouge, so Jen and I took the opportunity to go off into the bars of Sydney and get smashed. We drank far too much and talked the hindlegs off a donkey that I had brought along for effect, just like the old days (the drunken ramblings that is, not the donkey). Ah, nostalgia, it's not what it used to be.

Our original plan was to spend a week or so in Sydney, then move on and spend another few weeks travelling around the east coast of Oz, but that plan was terminated and buried in an unmarked grave fairly quickly. That we were enjoying staying with friends so much, coupled with the fact that Australia turned out to be only slightly less expensive than Monte Carlo on grand prix weekend, had persuaded us to essentially write off Oz as a travel destination and just hang out in Sydney for a few weeks. As Australia is even easier to get to from London than Watford is, we didn't feel too guilty about summarily executing Australia's part in what is probably the most fascinating and heroic travel story since my mate Steve's suitcase got sent to Malaga by accident. We could always come back in the future, and it will probably be quite an attractive option the older and more intolerant I become. So it was settled, we would spend the entire three weeks vegetating on Jen and Simon's sofa, wearing out our welcome and stoutly avoiding absolutely everything of the remotest cultural significance. That last part is not actually true. One afternoon we made the slog over to East Sydney to visit the "World Famous" Bondi Beach, as the kiwis probably refer to it. And what a thrilling experience it was too! Some chaps, who looked like orange schoolboys with goatees, were sitting on surfboards, calling each other dude and making token gestures at riding little waves, a seriously scary looking old geezer, who looked like he spent twenty five hours a day pumping weights, was jogging up and down the beach in a pair of speedos that would make a Patpong Ping-Pong girl blush and an assorted assembly of underwhelmed tourists, including us, trying to whip off the odd photograph when the sun peaked out behind the clouds. And it is much smaller than you imagine. To be fair, it was the middle of winter and we were not seeing the beach under the best circumstances. In summer, I'm sure it is, well, busier. We were soon back on the bus into the city, where we caught the ferry to Manly to check out Sydney's second world famous beach. Considering I come from a part of the world where the sea is so disgusting even the fish are scared to swim in it, I should probably stop poking fun now and just say that Sydney's beaches are quite pretty.

Whilst in Sydney, we were also able to catch up with a few people we met earlier in our travels. Andy and Claire are an English couple we met on a boat travelling up the Mekong river between Vietnam and Cambodia over a year ago, and they have since settled in Australia, living in Manly on the northshore. We had dinner at their apartment one evening to catch up, although we didn't hit the booze too hard as Claire was just a few months away from giving birth to her own little Australian. We also had a chance to meet up with Dave and Lisa, the Canadians we first met in Iguazu in Argentina. They were travelling the world in the opposite direction to us, and our paths finally crossed again in Oz. They are both a great laugh and Dave is the only human being I know with a more ridiculous haircut than me (excluding the pasty folk with the dreadlock extensions, obviously). We met up with them in town one afternoon and drank a few beers in Sydney's oldest pub, which apparently is older than me.

Just before we had to leave Australia, Charlotte celebrated her thirteenth birthday, so we all went out to a new Thai restaurant up the road and had an excellent dinner. It was probably one of the best Thai meals I have had outside of Thailand, and we had a great old time. Fear not, newly fledged teenager Charlotte was having her real birthday party the following weekend with all her friends, but as it was a school night, she had to spend her actual birthday with us boring grown ups.

That pretty much sums up our stay in Australia. Three weeks and I didn't even manage to see one kangaroo, koala, spider or snake, although on one afternoon in a park, we did stumble into a group of large fruit bats, and as you can see from the photo, they seemed very happy to see us too. Oh well, next stop Singapore, again.

Mik

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Pointless aside No. 237
"Because you'll win bugger all on the lottery"- Quote from an advert for ING Direct seen on the side of a Sydney bus, featuring Billy Connelly. The same Billy Connelly who's advert FOR the UK National Lottery was voted the most irritating advert of 2002. Funny old world.

p.p.s. I've just realised that I rather rudely failed to thank Jen, Simon and Charlotte for very kindly allowing us to plant roots in their home for three weeks and making us feel so welcome that we struggled to leave. So, thank you all very much and we look forward to returning soon, maybe when it's a bit warmer.