There's something nice about finally returning home after a long time away. I'm not quite sure when I started looking forward to spending a night in my own bed, but after a week in Atlanta, the better part of a month in Sydney and a long weekend in Norfolk with only the most fleeting of temporary visits back, I can assure you that I'm looking forward to curling up somewhere familiar and comfortable. And just to make it clear, by "somewhere familiar and comfortable" I mean home.
Don't get me wrong, I've loved the traveling --- it's a wonderful opportunity to catch up with friends in foreign lands, and a chance to make new friends and acquaintances as I do challenging and rewarding work, but it's nice to be back.
Now, I wonder if the milk in the fridge is suitable for a nice, hot cup of tea....
Holly and I have put a couple of our photos up on Flickr (as Ben suggested) Because we're uploading from internet cafes, there's obviously a limit to what can be sent to flickr, but you can find them here. If you're interested :)
"It’s a bit dark right now, isn't it?"
"Not really."
"No, it's far darker than I'd expect it to be right now. I mean, look at those clouds"
"You realise that you're wearing sunglasses?"
"I'd forgotten"
"That's your problem, then"
Only a week left in Sydney. Wow. I've been here for about 18 months, and now the time to leave is coming up a little too fast. Here's hoping that my efforts towards becoming a surfer pay off. One day, I will stand up on that board!
Maybe I'm looking back at my experiences in London with rose-tinted glasses, but I can't remember the Tube back there being half as crap as CityRail is here.
Last week, nary a single train that I tried to catch actually arrived on time and about three were cancelled for no apparent reason other than the fact that they were monstrously late (hint: if they ran on time, this wouldn't be a problem) Of course, the splatter of cancellations and the general tardiness of the rest of the network means that what trains there are seem to be full to bursting. Lovely.
Having a stereotype to live down to here, Holly and I went looking for a complaints form in our local station, perhaps to gain some form of compensation for wasting an hour or two a week cooling our heels in the less than salubrious surroundings of Newtown station. Couldn't find one. Went and spoke to the bloke at the ticket desk. After carefully explaining that we weren't going to complain about him and that he was, indeed, a paragon of slightly overweight virtue, he finally and somewhat grumpily handed over a plastic wallet designed to keep tickets in and suggested that we phone the number on the back.
Oh well, obviously the bastards have an idea about how to run a mass transit system, and equally obviously the penalties for not running the service aren't steep enough. Apparently the Japanese system is that should the trains run late the person responsible writes a public apology that is printed in one of the daily newspapers in the letters page. Perhaps it's time for Michael Costa (the transport minister of NSW) to start writing. I believe we need a broadsheet newspaper alone to cover the execrable performance of public transport in this city.
A year and a day ago Holly and I left the comfort of our lives in Britain to travel and see the world. In some ways, it doesn't seem as if any time has passed since we were sitting in the back of a taxi, speeding towards the airport and rummaging through the various bags we had with us in a bid to find my sun glasses (hint: never put dark glasses in a black case in a black bag when there's not much light about) I vividly remember the strange mixture of elation and trepidation as we waited for the flight, and the soft sense of sadness for leaving people and places that I loved behind.
When you scare a snail it retreats into its shell for a time before slowly and tentatively poking itself back out into the world. It's been a bit like that to go travelling. For a time we were moving so fast that we only had fleeting contact with anyone other than ourselves. Now that we've stopped in Sydney we're slowly sending feelers out, exploring our surroundings and making new friends. It's great, but hard work, and it would have been harder still were it not for Aussie friends from home, especially the Rev (and the other Holly!).
Rather than sitting here trying to think of all the highlights (and lowlights) of our travelling, I'm going to reminisce by linking to some of the older entries when there was a little more time for blogging. Fundamentally, I'm still a lazy soul.
Holly and I spent a week in a hostel and escaped to Annandale to live with Amy and Stuart (and Dylan and Trinity) just in time to avoid the ruckus that was the Rugby World Cup. Yay! Within three weeks, and on the same day, we had both managed to pick up enough work to allow us to relax a little and start having some sort of life. Or we will, cos we're yet to be paid. But once we've been paid, we can start to have a life. Which will be nice.
Right! Now things are up to date, it's time to start blogging properly again.
I've decided that if I carry on attempting to finish blogging about our travels I'll never get to blog about my life in Oz, so it's time to scoot through things at a rate of knots. Here are the highlights of the remaining bits of our travels:
The Cameron Highlands were very nice, and we stayed in a place called Father's Guest House. Holly caught a cold, so we didn't actually do that much hiking around, and the one time I went for a "short" hike the group I was with took a wrong turn and we ended up taking 4 hours instead of the planned 2 to finish our walk. Holly was thoroughly unimpressed!
I enjoyed KL too, and not only because we stayed with the extremely friendly Sam and Penny, not forgetting Jessica, who called me "hairy uncle simon" Holly was still under the weather, so again our adventures were a little curtailed. Jessica was also ill, and by the time we left Sam was coming down with something vicious. I was fine, though. I bought a laptop here too. And jolly nice it is: an Acer Travelmate 800, with built in Bluetooth and wireless networking. And it goes like the clappers and has oodles of memory, though the hard drive is a little cramped --- can't win them all! The battery life is pretty good too, clocking in at around 4 hours of hacking time.
On to Singapore, which was bloody hot. Fortunately we were staying in a pokey room with air-con, so it could have been far worse. We also went to Brewerkz which sold some nice beer and did a very reasonable Happy Hour at about 2 in the afternoon. And I caught a cold too. Damn!
After Singapore, we flew to Perth, hopped on to an organised tour of the South West and ended up stranded in Albany. Doh! In any case, there are worse places to be, and on arriving back in Perth we promptly hired a camper van and scooted north, where we did a little diving. We then returned to Perth and flew out to Sydney.
Yes, that's a highly abbreviated, unamusing, dull account of the remainder of our trip. I should have been less useless filling things in at the time. Sorry.