Sydney To Brisbane

Left: Downtown Sydney, as seen from our landing aircraft. The famed Opera House is visible on the left edge of downtown.


The flight got bumpy passing through the clouds near Sydney, where a massive cold front from Antarctica had just passed, and where it was still raining. The plane came in from the east, looped over Botany Bay and the Sydney suburbs (many swimming pools down there) and came in from the north, passing downtown, and landing beside famous Botany Bay.

As it turned out, I arrived in Sydney on a landmark day: the coldest November 16th in one hundred years! High winds, rainfall, and snowfall were occurring all across the region - shockingly late in the season!

Debarkation put me in the duty-free shopping zone. I saw a sign saying 'Tourist Refund Scheme', which sounded like a big conspiracy, but since I was a tourist, and could use a refund, I immediately sought out the office, asking them to explain who they were. Turns out, if you buy a large amount of goods ($500 AU or more, if I remember rightly), you could get a refund on the taxes involved (all very confusing). I bought several things in the duty-free zone and waited for the connecting flight to Brisbane.

The duty-free area of the airport sported big signs warning of the dangers of cigarettes, but none at all about the dangers of alcohol, which was also being sold in vast quantities.

I boarded the crowded Boeing 767 for the flight to Brisbane, and sat next to the Great Britain Rugby Team, heading to Brisbane for a weekend match. They were difficult to talk to: thick, lower-class British accents. Their time spent not listening to I-Pods was spent bopping each other on the heads with newspapers. The fellow next to me said he wasn't worried about the upcoming match: "yeah, well be all right!"

"Spot of Tea?" the stewardess asked, before handing me a box. The box had a cherry muffin in it - the tea followed later (the serving crew was harried because of the short duration of the flight).

The eastern coast of Australia was socked in with clouds, but sometimes you could see beaches, green grazing land, river valleys, small cities, and other features. The Gold Coast was laced with canals, and as we approached Brisbane, big beaches, green and brown colored water signifying shallows and river sediments, and in the distance, forest-fire smoke, were all in evidence.

As we came into the flat, sunny, mangrove-laced coast for landing, the aircraft wobbled in the turbulence generated by the high winds. As we debarked, the British Rugby team began mocking the way Australians speak: "G'day, mate! G'day mate!" they said. They seemed like a nice enough bunch of blokes, but still, I wished that when Saturday came around, they'd get a good taste of Australian mud.

I was beginning to get a bit scattered, after travelling so much. The exit interview was odd - the hippie-like fellow wanted to know where I was staying, but he was nice: he explained, in the event of a disease outbreak on the plane, they had to know how to find me fast.

My arrangement with Andrew was to meet on the departing flights upper level of the International Terminal, but no one was there. Suddenly I felt very alone and very vulnerable: as far from home as I'd ever been, stranded on a distant Pacific coast, on a very windy day, in a near-empty airport terminal.