Sydney

4 days in Sydney

Easter came early this year and school started late, so as a result, fall (or spring depending on which way your toilet water runs) fell after the 4th week of classes, and with zero assignments, tests, or quizzes to my credit, it hardly seemed well-deserved. My last class of the week ended at noon Wednesday as usual, and so I had plenty of time to catch the 2PM bus/train to Sydney; the trip is roughly around 1000km and takes just over 16 hours. The first leg was 3 hours long and featured the movie “What a Girl Wants." I can only imagine that this must have been a favourite of the driver; it was not particularly well received by the 98% of passengers that, by some freak demographic mistake, turned out not to be 12-14 year-old girls. We had a 2-hour stopover in the town of Casino; this wasn't really the major metropolis you'd expect from the hub connecting Queensland and New South Wales transport, but it was the “beef capital of Australia" and offered everything from a fountain flowing with pink water to a pub offering $4 steak dinners.

The XPT train was a few generations removed from its French cousins – it had a buffet car, drinkable water, automatic doors, and toilets that didn't empty directly onto the tracks. There was some promotion on where you could buy 2 children's tickets for the price of one, and so, everyone had brought along their kids, the neighbor's kids and 20 of their closest friends; the rugrats wailed, ran down the aisles, and sang random pop songs til the wee hours of the morning, and when you combined this with a cabin temperature just a smidgeon above freezing and seats that were painstakingly engineered to make any orientation unbearable, the ride was not the most conducive to sleeping. The train set down at Central Station around 7AM and I was off to find a place to stay; I booked a hostel from the visitor's center but forgot to take down an address, directions, or the name, and despite a few hours of wandering, could never find the place; instead, I found one that offered a discounted rate for a room on floor 13 for which the nearest toilet was on floor 2 (and naturally, both elevators were malfunctioning).

Sydney is one of the great cities of the world, but unlike those grand European centers, it's not particularly monumental. Sure, there's the Opera House, but that's about it, and there's remarkably little you can do with it – they let you climb it, and they don't even hawk little souvenir opera houses in the courtyard. I did, however, take a few dozen pictures from every conceivable angle, and if you're so inclined, you can use these to reverse engineer the thing and have your very own opera house in your backyard. The real attraction is the town's natural wonders – the river, the coves, the endless parklands, rocky bluffs and extensive beaches; I didn't really get around to seeing many of these, so I'll just have to bore you with explorations of a typically English city with about as much intrigue as a box of fishsticks.

Hyde Park (don't get confused, all neighbourhood, street, and monument names are displaced from somewhere else) has what is apparently one of the world's largest cathedrals. The nearby botanic gardens has a huge colony of flying foxes that can be smelled and heard from miles around. Sydney Harbour Bridge, affectionately called “the coathanger," isn't much to look at but it is pretty big and if you shell out $150, they'll let you climb to the top of it; I opted for walking across it; it was of course during this time that I was on the traffic-covered, reverberating hunk of metal that I got my interview phone call from a prospective employer in Thailand. On the opposite shore, I visited Luna Park, which is a rip-off of Coney Island, and explored the terribly unexciting North Sydney business district. I hopped on a train to Kings Cross, an area the guidebook proclaimed to be “a pocket of filth with an over-abundance of sex, drugs, and backpackers"; upon exiting the station, I was immediately bathed in a sea of electric light, with an intensity roughly twice that of our sun. Dodging past the hawkers for the countless strip clubs and massage parlours on the strip, I sought out the cheap ethnic food and internet that such an environment guarantees. Moving into Darlington and onto Oxford St., I encountered many more kilometres of the same assortment of Kebab shacks and noodle shops. I had looked into a number of shows around town that night, but for several reasons (the foremost being not finding the venue til 2 hours after the show had ended) I didn't catch any of them; as always, there was an opera on, but tickets started at 50 bucks, and that bargain price was apparently for a seat where the view was not only obstructed, but utterly nonexistent (I understand that it may have also been directly over a deafening air vent).

The next morning, I slept in til the absurd hour of 8:30 – probably because I subconsciously didn't feel like descending 11 flights of stairs to take a shower. Finding that my bed and most other beds in the city were booked for the night, I decided to try my luck in the Blue Mountains, and following the longest single subway ride of my life (2 hours, 5 minutes) I was in the mountain town of Katoumba. The Blue Mountains are regarded as Australia's Grand Canyon as well as “the 8th wonder of the world" (#234 by my count). I fought through the hordes of Japanese tourists to look out from Echo Point (a lookout with no resonant properties whatsoever) and see the legendary “Three Sisters" rock formation (consisting of three huge stones that reportedly shared the same mother). I jogged down the 900+ step “Giant Staircase" and after watching scores of young and old gasping for air on the ascent, resolved to return by a different route. The map indicated a 3-hour hike that would take me to something known as the “Ruined Castle"; I decided to ignore that tiny portion of my brain given the task of verifying historical accuracy and retained hope that someone had gone out in the middle of the Aussie wilderness and built himself a medieval fortress. When I felt I was getting sufficiently close to my destination, I asked a passer-by how much further it was to the castle, and he simply gestured to a pile of rocks next to me and said “you're here!"; I tried with all the might of my imagination to make the rocks look like something, but in the end, I had to leave feeling a little let-down.

I took the early morning train back to Parramatta where I caught a ferry the rest of the way into the city. The Parramatta River is a dirty little channel, rife with no-wake zones and industry; the cruise, which was met by frigid temps and rain, could not hold a candle to what's offered in Brisbane for a tenth the price. I wandered through Chinatown and the markets of Glebe and Balmain; I attempted to catch a bus back to the university, but at some point dozed off, and when I awoke, I found myself in an alien land where nothing was familiar and street signs were mysteriously absent. Eventually, I jumped on the same bus going the other way, looked around campus, and strolled down what may just be the longest “main drag" in the world, where hundreds of kebab shops, bookstores and other staples of college life stretched forever into the distance. Wanting to get the most out of my $12 daily travel pass before my train left, I bussed to the harbour and took a boat to the Taringa Zoo peninsula – this was already closed so I ran up to Balmoral Beach and soon afterward headed back to town.

Sydney offers a decent selection for dinner; Chinatown and other spots provide an array of budget ethnic food. As in any Australian city, however, the cheapest and easiest answer to the food question is the soft-serve cone; on every city block, you can march into a Hungry Jack's (Burger King for the non-Aussies among you) and with a quarter can secure a towering cone of pseudo-ice-cream. Every time I ordered one of these, I was hit with the question “you just want one?" and I came to wonder how many of these things a single person could be expected to consume in one sitting (my theory is 4 due to constraints on number of hands and melting times but if you have another number in mind, you can send it to me along with the necessary cash and I'll attempt it). The streets at night were filled with a range of performers; some aborigines played didgeridoos to a hip-hop soundtrack, a group of guys in suits and ties danced in circles and repeatedly sang the only two stanzas they remembered from “Save Tonight," and an old banjo-player, accompanied by two barking dogs, performed “How much is that doggie in the window."

The night's train was significantly less rugrat-plagued and I had two seats to myself, which made the notion of sleep a distinct possibility. There was considerable debate as the arrival time since the clocks were set forward that morning, but the conductor was able to narrow it down to a 2-hour window.

…several days pass…

At the Sydney airport, I tried to negotiate a standby fare to Brisbane, but as in the rest of the world, the Australian airlines were less than receptive, and so I resigned to take the train once again. I hopped on a bus to Bondi Beach, but soon discovered that despite its “limited stops" marquee, it actually seemed to be acting as the sole mode of transport for all of the city's outer suburbs. After half an hour, I decided to walk the rest of the way to the coast. Arriving at Coogee Beach, I was greeted with dramatic cliffs, as well as scores of surfers and fish n' chips shops. I scrambled along the rocks through Bronte Beach, around Shark Point (strangely only meters away from the swim area), and into the town of Bondi; after several hours, I had made it to Watsons Bay where I caught an express service on one of the lumbering city ferries back to the central quay; the winds were high and we steered through hundreds of sailboats that had taken to the waterways.

My train left at 4PM; given two seats to work with, I managed several hours of sleep of varying quality in a series of increasingly awkward positions. When I woke at 6:10 (20 minutes before we were due to arrive in Brisbane), we had just arrived in Casino which I knew to be 200km our destination; I had never travelled on a train at Mach .5 before, but the prospect intrigued me. An announcement was made shortly after that we were running two and a quarter hours behind schedule because someone had thrown himself onto the tracks during the night – some people just have no respect for others' schedules.

Kim, one of my 29 roommates and Casino's part-time director of publicity