A Farewell to Aus

Travellers tip - there are many hotels in Sydney and your airport taxi driver does not necessarily know them all. We got him to the right district but the fact that the street name temporarily escaped us sent him into a fit. He 'asked' me to look it up in a street directory in a tone that brooked no argument, fortunately just before the time that we happened on the hotel anyway. Just as well, I was starting to fear for our safety. He pretty much failed the 'courteous and polite' part of his responsibilities as posted in the 'what you should expect from this taxi' notice in the cab.

In a rare moment of forethought we dedicated last night as our ‘last night in Oz’ celebration. The flight to South America tomorrow is going to be hard enough without having to nurse hangovers. The consequence is that once again I’m not feeling too sparky this morning, so this is going to be a vague report on our time in Sydney that will in no way convey the real pleasure that it is to be here.

The meat of it is this. We sat at cafes in the shadow of the Sydney Opera House, just across the bay from the famous Harbour Bridge, drank wine and watched dressed up people go to the opera. We sat in harbourside restaurants in Darling Harbour, drank wine, ate fine food and watched dressed up hen parties board their booze cruises. We sat in the Covent Garden pub on the corner of Hay and Dixon streets, drank pints, and watched the DJ hamming it up, turning a standard Karaoke event into unmissable comedy.

We also tried out a few more organised tours; a two hour cruise of the harbour and a full day bus tour into the Blue Mountains. Great pictures but the experiences themselves are nothing to write home about, so I won’t. The real pleasure of this great city is just being here, half way round the world from home. This is a place to soak up the ambience, not rush around like crazed tourists.

So tomorrow we leave. I suppose I should say a few parting words about Oz, but there are not enough superlatives in the English language. It’s a magnificent country with magnificent people and I wish we could stay.

Next stop is Santiago, Chile, arriving tomorrow if we measure these things by dates, or possibly the day after tomorrow if we measure these things by days. Confused? So am I. Without a work routine to regulate us it’s hard enough to keep track of the days as it is, so crossing the date line and getting two February 28ths as a result is impossible to get my already addled head around. I suppose we have our own personal leap year going on here. We’re anticipating fewer internet opportunities as we travel around South America, so these updates will probably less frequent than they have been. I can hear the shouts of “Finally, we don’t have to suffer these interminable diatribes!” but I know that our families will worry if they stop hearing from us after a while. I’m sure the larger cities will be OK, but some of the more out of the way places, such as the MV Ushuaia that we’re hoping will take us to the Antarctic, may cause us to drop off the cyber globe for a while.

Well, I’ve put this moment off for as long as I can but it’s time to see how the finances are holding up. To borrow a favourite expression from the Australian version of English, I’m pretty much expecting them to be ‘cactus’.

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