Arriving and Planning to Depart….

So it was a week spent being very grumpy and quietly stressed but the outcome was fabulous as I’m penning this note from Sydney, Strathfield, to be exact. At the time of being denied boarding I had no useful idea of when I would fly. After the initial Qatar Airways rejection, due to a ‘damaged’ passport on the Monday, I went to Liverpool and put getting a new one in motion. That was delivered to my home on the Thursday – 4 days. Then I applied for an amended Australian visa. Again the instructions on the Australian Immigration website were clear as to how to amend but as to whether I’d got one wasn’t! So I rang up a chipper Aussie in Canberra, on a Help Line, and to paraphrase his answer to my question about a new visa amendment being issued he said “Aw mate, you just need to look at the website, I’ll walk you through it.” So he did, there it was, and I said “it isn’t like the form I got when I originally applied?” “Aw mate, this screen is better than your form it’s more up to date. Grab a tinny, chuck a shrimp on the BBQ and chill. She’ll be right.”

So confident that Australia would take me I re-booked my outbound flight. This whole reschedule when you include a new flight, another overnight stay in Manchester, a new emergency passport, lost accommodation cost in Sydney, driving to Liverpool and Manchester and back etc. totted up to c£1,200. Booking accommodation a week later was virtually double the price in Sydney. I think the Chinese New Year may swell the demand in the city?

Check your passport condition.

(As we stayed near Terminal 2 the night before I did pop down to Check In the night before for them to confirm I could fly: they checked the system and the computer said yes.)

Anna has been magnificent through this miserable week although whether power washing the drive is what she expected in return we will never know.

The flights are long ones: the total time including stopovers to get here was 25 hours. The first jet, a Boeing 777, was also fully booked and the seat space approximated, in size, to a small gap where I’d managed to wedge my upturned wheel barrow at the back of my garage. However the longer flight on an A380 would have been a wheel barrow and a half. The flights were delayed but uneventful and some sleep came. It certainly came to my neighbour, a middle aged Brazilian lady with no English, whose snoring was redolent of the breathing pattern of two Clydesdales pulling a heavy dray up a steep incline. I must ask where else do you now see signs for a ‘lavatory’? Very 1960s.

Anna had steered me toward an apartment in Strathfield. A suburb I knew nothing of (neither did she but it existed on Booking.com.) A very expensive taxi got me here and eventually I gained access. It being morning according to my body clock I dumped my bike box and luggage and went in search of groceries. With a new SIM card not yet bought I was navigating using photos of maps I’d downloaded. I got lost in the dark. Ambling along were two Chinese lads and so I enquired as to where the supermarkets were? To cut a long story short they went out of their way to escort me to a couple. They were both Chinese nationals. One had residency the other had citizenship. The major difference seemed to be that one could vote and the other couldn’t. I thought this not much of a benefit but given the absence of democracy in the PRC then maybe it had some cache. One worked in logistics the other in banking. They both had great English and couldn’t have been kinder. Sadly my interrogation ended when they brought me to the last supermarket and I had to set them free.

Strathfield and Burford are virtually exclusively Chinese or Korean with maybe some Vietnamese. Yorkshiremen are not common. That was of no concern other than that led to no bars or western food restaurants but a myriad of Korean BBQ restaurants and other variants. Judging by how busy they were it seems they all dine out regularly. I had a Vietnamese dish on one night.

On my first full day it was a matter of getting items. My airline luggage weight restrictions had been pernicious and I needed stuff like mosquito repellant, powdered milk, tins of tuna, a gas cylinder etc. on top of this I needed a SIM card. For 50GB of data I paid A$ 22. Public transport is affordable and the train station outside my apartment took me to Circular Quay and the iconic bridge and opera house.

So next it’s trying to catch up on some sleep, completing the cycle route planning, a test run of the velocipede and last minute final purchases before I head south. I’ll pick up next when on the road. Beep beep….