Home Again - Part 1

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Beginning

Where to begin this story. . . for once this is an easy question to answer. Usually I find that the end of one adventure is the beginning of the next, and the exact distinction between the two can often be a blurred line. For instance, when does a big trip begin? Is it when the plane lands? When the plane takes off? When you leave your house? When you first had the idea? All of these are legitimate places to begin a telling, however, starting the tale too soon leads to a boring beginning, but starting too late leaves key details missing, so you are left with a great mess. This story, however, starts precisely ten minutes before landing.

The 747, which had been called upon to replace the much more alluring A380 that had originally been scheduled for the flight, very aptly approached Sydney by flying directly over Botany Bay. Much like Captain Cook must have felt some 239 years previously as he entered via the same passage, the sight of land brought about a euphoria unlike any I’d recently experienced. The words “giddy schoolboy” come to mind, though I dare not use them for fear of sounding like, well, a giddy schoolboy; I am much more mature than that. This was my home, and I could feel it, even though, technically speaking, I grew up some 2500km further north. Everything below me looked precisely how I remembered my home looking, half the people on the plane around me sounded like the friends I remembered from home, and the prospects of the coming weeks got the better of me.

The girl across the aisle from me gave me one of those “What’s wrong with you?” looks, so I returned a “Hey look! It’s something totally amazing and I wish you could appreciate it as much as I do” face. She didn’t see the humour, so I returned to looking out the window.

The plane rounded slowly, and the excitement grew. We flew over a tiny, likely unnamed and unknown strip of sand beside the runway that I quickly deemed to be the best beach I’d seen in three years, before the plane finally touched the ground. I practically had a fit.

I suppose that this reaction was an accumulation of the cold and miserable weather in Seattle (it was 21 Fahrenheit when I left, and 21 centigrade in Sydney when I arrived) alongside the homesickness of being away from family and friends for more than two years. Or perhaps it ran deeper; I determined that more investigation was required along this line of thought as I walked off the plane and through immigration. Over the next three weeks I was going to be set on getting to know my home country properly, getting to understand the sights, sounds, faces, and ideals through my new set of eyes. Eyes that were no longer biased by the indifference bred by home, and that could now qualitatively compare everything against a plethora of other bits of knowledge from around the world.

To say it succinctly: in all my time growing up in Australia, I never looked at the place through the wondrous eyes of a visitor. Instead I looked at it with the blinkers on; never really appreciating all that was there to see. Perhaps I wouldn’t like what I saw this time, or perhaps I’d love it more than I ever had before and never be able to leave again. . . only time would tell.

A Fantastic Idea

Jeff, my best friend, whom you may remember from the first few entries in this journal, picked me up outside of customs. I was in quite a mixed state for sure: smelly and unkempt, having endured (relatively pleasantly I might point out) a good 18 hours in transit with some inhumane timezone shift somewhere in the middle of the pacific, yet giddy with excitement and practically jumping with energy. We said our hellos, before Jeff stated, “I was thinking we could just go straight to Bondi”. Never before had a better idea been tabled.

They say that the best cure for jetlag is to spend time out in the sunshine, so going for a swim at a beach, sunbaking for a moment, before swimming some more, all while surrounded by bikini clad beach bodies that put most every woman in Seattle to shame (sorry ladies, but thick coats, scarves and Casper-complexions don’t really do it for me), must indeed be the cure for all of a traveller’s worries. Of course, I never really get jetlag (touch wood, for I am writing this while awaiting its onset in Seattle), but if I did, then the beach trip would have been a godsend.

What precisely is it about a beach that makes me so happy I wonder? I am not the greatest swimmer, nor can I surf or boogy board with any confidence. Sitting on a beach lapping up the sunshine also gets rather boring for me unless I’m engrossed in a good book or album, which invariably leads to me turning a brighter shade of scarlet. So, all in all, on paper a beach doesn’t sound that fantastic, yet, whenever I’m on one I feel instantly gratified just by being there. The sun warming me to the core, the sounds of waves crashing on the sand, the feel of the sand itself, and the people all around who are doing nothing but enjoying their freedom and their good fortune of living near a beach, all add together to make me as happy as can be. It’s a simple formula, yet it works wonders for me. The girls in bikinis helped a lot too, but they were only a part of the picture.

I suppose I took this thought to heart as Bondi would be only the first of 16 beaches visited during my trip home, not a bad effort one thinks.

Jeff and I hadn’t seen each other in far too long, so catching up on each other’s lives filled our conversations for a long time. To have a friend that you can abandon for three years and then instantly pick up with without a second’s discomfort is something rare that we should not take for granted. I must endeavour to remember this lesson in the future.

Sydney Over Eighteen

I had visited Sydney twice before. Once when I was little more than a baby, which I hardly count, and once as a seventeen year old with my brother on the way back from Melbourne, when we saw the obvious tourist sights but didn’t linger long enough to experience the city itself. This time, however, I was twenty-five, and I was planning on hanging around for a little while to get the full experience. Jeff and I were staying at Paul’s apartment (Paul has also featured in this journal before, in Hong Kong and India, for those playing at home), an old high-school friend of ours who has slowly migrated south over time and has been settled on the north shore of Sydney harbour in recent years. The view from Paul’s balcony belies its true location. If you were to be blindfolded and taken there without knowing it’s location, you would swear that you were outside of the city limits in a forested valley. Red gums are everywhere, quite literally filling the entire valley that his balcony looks down on, with only small glimpses of adjacent buildings peeking through the trees. This green valley is not, as it would seem, 100km away from Sydney, in fact it is only about 15 minutes by bus into the center of the city. Thus, Paul has found the perfect balance between peace and quiet, and city living. The only downside is that the area is mostly residential so only two pubs are within reasonable walking distance which, mind you, is a bit of a deal killer for some.

We met Paul at his home, another happy reunion, and quickly the three of us were happily on our way to a good time. I shan’t go into the full details, lest certain Aunts or grandparents think lesser of me, so instead I will leave you with the short set of instructions on how to convince people that you are a lecherous drunkard without the use of great quantities of alcohol or flashing.

Paul had taken us - Jeff and I plus Paul’s girlfriend Bridgid - to the supposedly infamous Crows Nest Hotel; a place notorious for being a general good time, if only you can get into the place. Given that my best efforts at scrubbing up didn’t involve nice shoes or an iron, we weren’t exactly meeting the yuppie standards of Sydney. Add to that the handful of beers already consumed prior to and during dinner, it was no certainty that we could get inside. We lined up, IDs in hand, and filed past the bouncer without trouble, until Jeff attempted to pass. Apparently he looked a little worse for weather, and the bouncer gave him a hard time, asking as to exactly how much he’d drunk that evening. The truth didn’t seem to go down well with the bouncer, him presuming it to be an understatement, but he eventually capitulated and let Jeff in with a warning to take it easy (sidenote: in my experience “take it easy” seldom has the desired effect, but that is another story). Jeff attributed his false drunkenness to bloodshot eyes on account of the day spent swimming at the beach, but I assured him that is was just that he looked shifty, which was an outright lie on my behalf for it was I that looked shifty.

Inside the bar/club I noted that although it was still quiet, it had the feel of a place that would pick up and turn into a lot of fun in short time, and this is indeed what happened. Paul and I hit the dancefloor with our best geriatric impersonations in an effort to wow the ladies with the latest moves from the US, however, it seemed that the spastic monkey was out of fashion. Undeterred, I continued. Jeff, on the other hand, chose to watch from the sideline as he emphatically refuses to dance and has done so ever since I’ve known him. Each to their own I say, but every now and then I would take leave of the dancefloor to stop by and have a brief word or two with Jeff, just to ensure that he wasn’t bored, but he was in fact having a good time on his own it seemed.

After half an hour or so of slowly perfecting my wiggling I got a tap on the shoulder. It was Jeff, surrounded by large men in black shirts. Apparently four bouncers had approached him at once, presumably fearing that the raging drunk leaning immobile on a table would not respond to just one of them, and he was being kicked out for drunkenness. Precisely how a man doing absolutely nothing but sipping a drink occasionally constituted public drunkenness while a raging man flapping wildly and randomly on a dance floor while trying to meet girls (me) was sober enough to remain inside was quit perplexing, but that was the case: Jeff was now waiting for us outside. I guess that, in ultra-yuppie Sydney, refusing to dance is equivalent to turning up blind drunk and half naked anywhere else in the world, and heaven forbid that you be the odd one out in a club.

Jeff the Entertainer

The following morning, after lethargically waking up on an air-mattress that I could not recall inflating, the three of us managed to find a proper eggs breakfast and cappuccino. Living in Seattle leads people to believe that they know the be-all and end-all of everything pertaining to coffee, and if sheer volume of product is anything to go by, then people here may have a point, but for my own snobbish taste buds there is nothing in this world that comes even remotely close to a proper Australian cappuccino. Call it short-sighted, but this is how I truly feel, so that morning I was once again feeling excited about being home. If this trend continued, that is waking up and feeling excitement about being where I was, then the theory of falling in love with my home could very well come true. However, I have diverged, so on with the things you want to hear about.

After breakfast we rounded up some troops, including Bridgid, one of Paul’s roommates and his girlfriend, and the five of us headed to Manly Beach. Manly is a north-eastern suburb of Sydney which is fortunate enough to have what could be described as nothing short of an amazing, and stereotypical, Australian beach. A long mall of surf shops, ice-cream stores, antique pubs, and random beachy shops runs between the beach itself and the harbour which folds into the land behind it. All about there were thousands of beach goers making use of the perfect summer sunshine on a Saturday and the place was positively thriving. Some people would call it a zoo; I thought of it more as a theme park, albeit a very cheap and open one.

We walked along the mall, checking out the people around us as we went, looking at stores, filling waterbottles, and reconsidering the amount of sunscreen required to stave off certain death from above, when we came across a small crowd gathering around a group of street performers. For a laugh we stopped to see what they were doing and discovered that they were a trio of breakdancers: two from Brooklyn NY, and one from Sydney (the Sydneysider was the only Caucasian of the three which the leader quickly pointed out by saying “we asked for someone local to help us out and this was the best they could come up with”). The act was extraordinary even before it began as their “warm-ups” defied gravity several times. By the time they actually got the act proper started the crowd had tripled in size and a palpable buzz was building. Now, breakdancing is nothing new, and we’ve all seen it before on the television, but I’d never seen it done properly in person, so when they started spinning on their heads, doing ludicrous handstands and generally making it seem as casual as brushing one’s teeth, I was actually quite spellbound. However, the truly most memorable moment came when, without a second’s warning, they grabbed Jeff from the audience and placed him in the middle of the circle along with three other men.

The four of them were to have a dance-off.

Jeff doesn’t dance.

The competition began, and mercifully Jeff was not first off the mark. A lumbering white man did the honours and managed to look like he was actually fairly competent at the whole “wiggle the arms” business as he dissed the man across from him. In response, the second man waltzed over and gyrated semi-spasmodically at the third man, who had been talked up by the hosts due to him being the only non-white person within 500m. The response was truly astonishing as he set forth to demonstrate beyond doubt that black men simply can dance better than their white equivalents, at least within this tiny subset of Australia. This left Jeff to finish the dance off.

Bravely he stepped forward (full credit for that mate) but I seriously wondered what he was going to pull out for the occasion. It turned out to be hilarious as Jeff simply didn’t know where to begin. He laughed, he lifted his arms, but no dancing magically flowed out of him. His turn was over.

By this stage I was doubled over in laughter, as were our friends, particularly in light of the previous night’s escapade. I was ready to give him a good pat on the back for his effort and run for the beach before his shame caught up. However, the breakdancers had another card up their sleeves: the two men that had clearly shown proficiency for dancing were summarily dismissed leaving Jeff and one other alone for a “playoff”. Did they really want to see that again? To make things more entertaining they took Jeff and the other man off to opposite sides and showed them a move, giving them a quick idea of how they could win the dance-off. Then the music started and the battle began.

Jeff’s opponent confidently marched forward before turning his newly aquired cap backwards, lifting his left leg like a karate fighter, and repeatedly writhing his legs back and forth on alternate sides much like a dog trying to take a leak while walking on coals. Jeff, looking unperturbed by the public urination act, confidence brimming beneath his new fluoro pink cap, artfully angled, took a few steps forward, bent his knees and faced his opponent. First one hand, then the other moved up to the back of his head, and while staring down his opponent he began to pulsate his nether regions at his enemy, eventually merging into a considerably more raunchy pose from the Macarena. The deed was done, and by crowd acclamation Jeff was crowned to winner of the dance-off.

Never again can I make fun of Jeff for not dancing in clubs, unless of course he gets kicked out again because of it.

Sydney City

As some of you out there may be reading this as a source of information, rather than as a tale of debauchery, I suppose I should actually talk about what Sydney is like as a city. Indeed, we did spend a day wandering the streets in the heart of the place, seeing the well known sites (which are as amazing as you would expect, even on their third viewing), and occasionally seeing the less well known places such as the supposed oldest pub in Australia. The center of Sydney is a thriving place, certainly more so than Seattle, although, by world standards at least, it doesn’t look particularly gigantic from the outside. Whereas Seattle has a dense cluster of ultra-high skyscrapers with relatively few people milling about on the streets, Sydney has a modest number of towers yet is positively packed with people milling about, even, or perhaps especially, on a Sunday. To me this makes Sydney feel like much more of a liveable place as you never have to look far for something interesting to see or do, and this suits my personality well. However, just like a lot of Australian cities, once you venture outside of that compact central area you find yourself in suburbia, where your taxi fare home in the morning increases at the same rate that your rent decreases for living so far out.

Cloudland

After a few good days in Sydney with Paul, with plenty of beach time, a few good laughs out at night, and a damn good barbeque with Paul’s friends, Jeff and I hit the road and began our road trip northwards. We did this by going westwards of course, and I could say this was because we are bad at reading maps and a little eccentric, but really it was so that we could quickly stop in and see the Blue Mountains. This mountain range, which is quite large by Australian standards but, as my guide in Nepal would have said, “that not have a name, it’s not a mountain”, essentially locks Sydney into its little coastal basin. For many years after Australia was first colonised by England this range was impenetrable because it rises more as a single sheer precipice than as a gradual rise, so much so that all travel into the interior had to be undertaken via a much more circuitous route around either the northern or southern ends of the mountains. To say that this hindered westward expansion is an understatement, and I feel that Australia, or at least New South Wales, would be a much different place had the white settlers been able to freely flow westwards immediately.

Then, at some point well into things, one smart cookie decided to talk to an Aboriginal. You see, the Aboriginals seemed to be freely moving back and forth across the range without much hindrance, so there had to be a way through, if only the white people could figure it out for themselves, or as it turned out, if they swallowed their pride enough to ask one of the locals. The trick was to follow a long ridgeline which began well before the range and slowly rose to the summit, thus getting around the whole scaling-a-sheer-rock-face deal. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, apparently this had never occurred to the gentlemen raised on the gently rolling slopes of England.

Anyway, Jeff and I, with the aid of historical knowledge were able to drive up the highway which follows that self-same ridgeline to a town called Katoomba, which sits somewhat precariously on top of the cliffs. From the viewpoint on the edge of the town we intended to look out over the precipice on what is one of Australia’s great views. From when I last visited the place, many years ago, I remember feeling awfully small as the valley opened up below me, with a faint blue tinge (from the masses of eucalypt oil floating in the air that give the mountains their name) filtering the light and adding an air of mystery to the steep rocky outcrops and wooded mountainsides. On this occasion though, the view was quite different: pure, unchanging white. The clouds had rolled in.

Apart from a funny picture of Jeff standing in front of the non-existent view, there was little to see. Nevertheless, we took the opportunity to get out of the car and walk down the “giant staircase” beside three rocky upthrusts called the Three Sisters. From right next to the rocks it was difficult to judge just how precariously the staircase was mounted, but we could still get some sense of where we were, and what little we could see was still quite remarkable. The highlight, however, was a rare sight indeed: a male Lyrebird crossed the path just in front of us, singing his eclectic mix-tape as he went. He was chasing a lady!

For those who are unaware, a male Lyrebird is one of those miraculous creatures that mimics the noises that it hears, sometimes using natural sounds or other bird calls, and sometimes sounding like a mobile phone or chainsaw. In order to seduce his lady-friend, our Lyrebird was trying everything he knew, switching from one sound to another in a constant mix of oddly incompatible sounds, all the while fluffing up his over-the-top tail feathers and trying to make himself look as big as he could. It was quite an amazing sight, and it did remind me a little of the efforts some men go to on a weekend, so I made a point to remember some of his techniques. I’ll let you know if random squawking is an effective pickup line once I’ve tried it out.

Since the weather was so awful, Jeff and I decided to head out of Katoomba and get back on the road, this time in an actual northward direction. Before we left though, we stopped in for that very English pastime of Devonshire Tea where we munched on a couple of real scones, with homemade jam (including a passionfruit jam) and cream. At was at about this exact moment that I though to myself “yeah, I really am home now”.

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Photos

The Sails
My favourite way to look at the Opera House.

Juxtapose
I like cities that aren't afraid to keep their heritage, even when it might make commercial sense to bulldoze it. It makes the place feel a lot more multi-faceted and interesting in general.

Paul, Jeff and the Bridge
Good to be with my mates again, after far too long away.

Sydney City
Viewed from the Botanical Gardens.

Jeff in His Car
Such an odd view for me, as I chauffeured Jeff around Townsville for about five years when he didn't know how to drive, and now here he is driving me around!

Bondi Beach
Yeah, I know, taking photos from moving cars is never going to be good. But taking photos on the beach makes me look like a pervert, so this is a much better option.

Paul's Apartment
Looking out over an inner city suburb... see what I mean about the remote forest look? To think that this is only 15 minutes from the city is astonishing.

Bridg and Breakfast
Nothing beats a home cooked breakfast off a barbeque in the sunshine.

Paul and I Enjoying Some Oysters
Fresh from the seafood markets in Sydney.

Not a Bad View For Lunch Part One
This is where we ate our oysters outside the fish markets. Note the unbroken sunshine.... mmmm....

Mussels!
Full sized seafood again! Yay!

Macquarie Building
This is where Paul works, and apparently it is the "greenest" building in Sydney thanks to a bunch of tricksy design concepts. I just thought it was cool looking.

Is it a Restaurant? Is it a Luxury Home?
No, it's a boat/floating event venue for throwing those very expensive parties you never get invited to but always see on television.

Queen Victoria Mall
Sure, on the inside it's just like every other mall everywhere else in the world, but from the outside, it looks a whole lot classier now doesn't it?

Intriguing Facade
Just a good looking building in Sydney city.

Small
Ok, this is of marginal interest, but this is the Society of Australian Genealogists' building. It is nothing more than this door and imposingly locked gate tucked inside an old wall. There isn't even a window. Be warned, this is how Australia treats it's marginal intellectuals.

Sydney's Oldest Hotel
And also some of it's most expensive beers outside of clubs.

Huge!
This cruise liner was moored at Circular Quay, looming over everything else in the area. Thanks to its presence the place was teeming with little street markets, street performers and millions of tourists.

Paul and I
Thought it would be wise to throw a photo of myself in here to prove that I am not a ghost-writer.

Look Out Ladies
Jeff looking good for a change. Just kidding mate.

Where I Could Live...
If I had any inclination, desire, or talent towards politics. Of course, I don't, so I'll never live here, but one can dream.