raven | Darwin and Sydney

One of the first things I said when arriving in Darwin and being met by Sunny at the airport was: “I’ve come twelve thousand miles, and, and…”

“And?” he asked.

“You’ve grown a beard!”

He had. And throughout the next few days, his mother and mine subtly and not-so-subtly tried to make him get rid of it. Impressively, they managed to imply, suggest and insinuate all manner of things without ever mentioning the “terrorist” word, but he stood his ground and was still happily bearded when departing for Newcastle.

I stayed in Darwin. No offence to it whatsover, but it’s not a place where you go to do anything much, it’s a place you go to just to be there. It’s lushly tropical, warm all year round (at one point I found the cat asleep in the sink), and the time I spent there was the real holiday. I sat around, read a lot (I got through five books in that week), slept forever beneath creaking ceiling fans, watched DVDs (Shlok and I watched Shrek 2, enjoyed it thoroughly and spent the next two days doing Puss in Boots impressions at each other), acquired an interest in Aboriginal history and read up thoroughly on the subject, played cricket barefoot and generally joined the geckoes in soaking up the winter sun.

And coped with the jet-lag, of course. It was horrendous. I have, over many years, got used to the forwards-five-hour and backwards-five-hour changes for the USA and India respectively; I know instinctively how to adjust and can be over it in a day or two. However, the time difference between BST and Darwin is eight and a half hours (if it had been winter here, it would be nine and a half and that would probably have killed me) and I could not cope with it. Invariably, I got up at three in the morning and went to bed again at eleven, was forced out of bed for my own good, snapped at people and fell asleep in my dinner, it was not fun. For my first week, I didn’t sleep more than four hours at a time at any point. It made me cranky.

On Thursday, getting up at three am proved an advantage; we had to be at the airport by six in any case. The flight was the same one we arrived on, only we were following it along its full course this time, onwards from Darwin to Adelaide and Sydney. It’s also the same flight Sunny takes to go back to university, and I cannot get over the fact a domestic flight can be four hours long and encompass two thousand miles. Australia is a big country.

As they so often are over there, the skies were cloudless; I looked out from the plane window down at the landscape with abject fascination. Around Darwin, the landscape is that of the coastal Northern Territories, sparsely populated with lots of palm trees. I’ve already mentioned the beach at Casuarina, the warm, blue water and the ocean stretching out towards Asia. Darwin is closer to Indonesia than to Sydney, and you can feel it. But the further south we got, the more it changed, until in the end the ground we were flying over was baked dry red, like no-one had ever lived there. At which point I dozed off.

I only woke up again on the descent into Adelaide. I had to walk across the tarmac to the terminal, and got a pleasant surpise the moment I stepped out onto the ground. It was cold. Until that point, I hadn’t really believed that this was Australia’s winter, but I enjoyed the slight chill for all the five minutes I had to enjoy it; the transit was quick and then there was another hour’s flight to Sydney.

Once in the city, we were staying in an apartment overlooking Darling Harbour (I should have mentioned before that although we’d left Shlok and his mum behind in Darwin, there were still lots of us, as you would expect for a trip that was part holiday, part family reunion). It was very comfortable and very pretty, and I very much approved. The next morning I got up at five, something of an improvement, so left a note for my parents and went out to explore the city on my own.

The last place I did this in, investigate early in the morning just when people are waking up, was Washington DC, but the main difference between the two is the water. I walked around the harbour, across Pyrmont Bridge and into the city centre, which was already noisy and full of people. The monorail was running, swinging by my head as I crossed the bridge, and I did consider trying to find out where it went, but figured being on your own sans phone and local currency limits what you can do, so I turned round. By the time I got back everyone was still asleep, so I curled up in the living room and read American Gods.

That day was spent doing the classic touristy things, going out to see the Sydney Opera House. While pictures do exist of this trip, they’re on Sunny’s digital camera, not mine, so getting to see them again is proving problematical. In any case, the photo I really want is the iconic shot of me standing with both the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House in the background. We shall see. Anyway, going back, the Opera House was spectacular. I remain baffled as to how it stays upright, but was interested to learn that because of a dispute with the original architect, who left before completion taking the plans with him, the interior is built almost as a building within a building and so is not appreciably curved. That said, we got to see inside and the various concert halls and theatres are deserved attractions in their own right.

I fell asleep at three in the afternoon. When I woke up Sunny had appeared. Literally. I went to sleep and he was still in Newcastle, and when I woke up he was sitting on the foot of the bed. I fumbled around for my glasses. “You don’t have a beard.”

“No,” he agreed.

“Good,” I said, and went back to sleep.

[I don’t know if I can take credit for this – I’d rung him the previous evening, and asked if he still had it, and he’d said yes. “I don’t like it,” I wailed.

“What if everyone here thinks it’s sexy?” he demanded, only for someone in the background to shout, “It’s the most disgusting thing in the world!”, so I think perhaps I wasn’t alone in my opinion.]

They woke me up eventually, and we settled down for a long evening drinking red wine and watching the Ashes.

The next day involved family, again. Pedar has a friend living on the outskirts of Sydney whom he was at medical school with, so we all got the tram and the train to a place called Strathfield to visit her and her familly. (I was disappointed to hear Sydney doesn’t have an underground train system, although the monorail almost made up for it.) They in their turn took us somewhere called Parramatta, which seems to serve the same purpose in Sydney as Southall does in London – it’s where all the Indian people hang out.

“It’s this restaurant,” Sunny explained on the way there. “The food. When I’m in Newcastle I dream about the food. Try the paneer. It’s amazing.”

He ordered it and I did, and it was amazing. I’m not a big food person and definitely not a big paneer person, but mmm, yes. Amazing. Actually, all the food in Sydney was more or less amazing. I decided later that it’s something to do with the cosomopolitan aspect of the city, the way it’s a European city in the tropics and closer to the Far East than it is to anywhere else, but you can really get anything you feel like to eat. I decided early on that I wanted to try octopus, having always wanted to try it. “I’ve had octopus,” my uncle said.

“How was it?”

He looked thoughtful. “Stringy.”

After the paneer, I went with Sunny to help him buy food for going back to university. It involved a lot of masala and more ready meals than I’d ever seen in one place. Following that, we went back to the city, and Sunny and I ended up being the only people hungry enough for dinner. We wandered round the harbour for a while, and then he took me for sushi. I’d never had it, and so he sat me down in a small restaurant with a moving sushi-train-thingy (very nifty, anyway) and grabbed interesting looking dishes as they went by.

They were all very nice, except the ones with avocado. I can’t remember any of the names, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. As I said later, I nailed two of my food ambitions in one go – one of the dishes we tried had octopus in it.

“How was it?” asked my uncle.

Sunny and I glanced at each other. “Stringy.”

More red wine, more watching the Ashes. I do love being on holiday.

The day after that was slightly different. We drove up to the Blue Mountains, about an hour away from Sydney, and according to the signposts, nearly a thousand metres above sea level. (Two days before, it had amused me that some of the seats in the Opera House are below sea level.) It was lovely, with spectacular views across the valleys, lots of related mythology from the Aboriginal Dreamtime and the world’s steepest incline railway. Perhaps steep is too understated a word; I wasn’t expecting exactly how steep it was. It’s a five minute journey at the most from the top of the mountain to the valley below, but at its steepest point, you find yourself facing straight downwards, with only the bar in front stopping you from falling vertically. As Sunny observed, the only thing that stops it from being an impressive natural rollercoaster is the fact you go at five miles an hour at all times.

We’d probably have stayed longer in the mountains, but it was time for Sunny to leave. He had lectures he couldn’t miss, he said, and he got the train for Newcastle from Sydney, bearing with him very little luggage save a promise never to grow a beard again and a metric tonne of ready meals. He says he’ll descend on me in Oxford next year. I hope so.

And after that it all got a bit depressing. We still had a day or so left, and on the last morning, I woke up at nine o’clock, jet-lag finally done and dusted a few hours before we had to leave. It was aggravating, to say the least. But apart from that the whole thing was lovely. I’m really rather glad I bullied everyone into it, because all in all, success. And I’m tired and I want to go to bed, and it’s half four in the afternoon. Sigh.