The Wandering Tattler

[We're back on line again, after having been temporarily closed down after a computer program thought it had detected "some characteristics of blog spam" on my site. i just received an email from blogspot apologizing for the inconvenience and telling me I'm free to go back to work. Unfortunately, the computer I'm using in this hotel is extremely slow or the internet connection is extremely slow, so I'm not sure that I'll be able to upload many pictures. Needless-to-say, I'm accumulating GB's of image files, as I'm shooting hundreds of pictures daily.]

I didn’t sleep well last night after discovering that I’d failed to bring my Australian ETA (visa). I’d made multiple copies of each of our many travel documents, but apparently in setting aside copies for Lynn, I’d failed at the last minute to put a copy of my own ETA in our “Australia” folder. I tossed and turned all night and at 6 am (11 am in Keene) I called our travel agent, who faxed a copy of the missing document. Of course, neither the airlines nor the Australian Immigration authorities asked to see this piece of paper. It’s an electronic document, so presumably the Australian agent who stamped my passport in the Sydney airport saw the travel authorization on his computer screen after he scanned my passport.

Our 10-hour flight from Honolulu to Sydney was fairly smooth, and Qantas did provide a few amenities to relieve the tedium. We watched two movies and were served reasonably palatable meals. We had a little more leg room than on domestic US flights (and much more than on the inter-island Aloha Airlines flights) and since our 747 was only about half full, we were able to stretch out a bit and take naps from time to time. There’s almost nothing to look at below the plane during a flight from Hawaii to Australia, but by checking the flight-course channel I discovered at one point that we were passing over the western end of Fiji. As fate would have it, a heavy cloud cover obscured any view of Fiji, but I did see one of the two small islands that lie just to its northwest. During our flight we not only crossed the equator but also the international date line, necessitating some complicated resetting of date and time on our digital watches.

After landing in Sydney and making our way through customs and immigration, we picked up some currency from an ATM and got our rental car from Budget. We were driving on the left side of the road again for the first time since England, and that is always cause for a major rush of adrenaline. Our course on the M1 to downtown Sydney, about 6 miles north of the airport, seemed pretty straightforward (aside from trying to signal lane changes by turning on the windshield wipers) but we missed a turn in central Sydney that would have taken us toward our hotel and ended up driving across the Harbor Bridge instead, something we had been trying to avoid. The Harbor Bridge signs drew us like a flame draws a moth. Once we had crossed the bridge it was too dark to consult a map, even if traffic had been slow enough to allow it, and our mistakes were compounding by the minute in narrow congested streets. After driving about randomly in North Sydney, at times thinking we were fated to wander this unfamiliar territory until dawn, we finally found our way back onto the bridge and through sheer blind luck made a fortuitous turn off the main highway and found ourselves on Harrington Street. This street is only two or three blocks long, but it took us an astonishing amount of time to find our hotel. This ordeal reminded me of the Kafkaesque adventure that ensued when we tried to return a rental car to the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Our hotel was probably less than a mile from our hotel on the Rue de Rivoli, but in between lay the Place de Bastille and at the end the medieval labyrinth of the gare itself. Fortunately, both adventures are now merely stories to be retold and embellished.