VB Tinnies in the Van
March 3 - April 5, 2019
Two Lucky Idiots at the Airport
We’ve been at this world travel thing for long enough that we should know what we’re doing by now, and yet we still came perilously close to blowing an entire month abroad in Australia because of a simple oversight. As Americans, we’re used to the rest of the English-speaking world inviting us into their country with open arms and no restrictions. So, when we showed up at the Berlin airport at 8pm on a Sunday, two hours before our flight to Sydney, and they told us we did not have the necessary Visa to be allowed into the country and there was nothing we could do to get one now, we freaked the fuck out. We had no trip insurance, the flights cost thousands of dollars, and Mazz was expected to be working in Australia for the next several weeks. The airline attendants very unhelpfully informed us that there was a kiosk that could take care of the ATA forms we needed in 5 minutes, but that kiosk was closed. BUT, if the kiosk weren’t closed, we could have the forms we needed in only 5 short minutes! We asked if there was anything else that could be done. They told us we were S.O.L.
So we got on our smart phones and began to desperately try and fill out the forms online on Australia’s government travel website. Mazz got hers filled out first, gave the site our credit card information for the $20 charge, and instantly got an email that her form had been accepted - it just didn’t say how long it would take to process. On his phone, Kirb had ended up on a different website that turned out to be broken, so we had to fill out all of the information again on a different site with our hands shaking uncontrollably the whole time. The last of the people were making their way through security by this point. We ran over to the counter and the women there acted like they weren’t willing to even try and scan our passports again. After a few failed swipes, Mazz’s passport went through, and they checked her bag in. They tried Kirb’s passport again. Denied. They asked Mazz if she was ok flying without her husband (seriously?). Kirb insisted the woman keep scanning his passport. Denied. Denied. Denied. Accepted! The woman at the counter was shocked. She said it usually takes hours for the clearance to go through. She had clearly been drinking our sadness and failure like sweet nectar and did not want to see us get on this flight. We could barely breathe. We snatched our boarding passes and held them tight against our chests. We were the last two people to make it through security and boarded directly onto the plane. It was by far the most stressful thing we’ve had to deal with traveling. Big ups to Australia for having top-notch Internet infrastructure! Infinite stink-eye to Germany for still not knowing how the internet is supposed to work!
Now safely on board, it was time to fly to Qatar for 6 hours, wait around a few hours in the Doha airport, and then get on another 15-hour flight to Sydney. That trip sucks, y’all! Our ankles got all puffy for 2 days afterward. As soon as we sat down in our seats, the guy in front of Mazz was the one guy in the entire vicinity who jammed his seat all the way back for the whole flight. But we watched a lot of movies and played 2-player Mario on the Switch and eventually when we landed we were in summer instead of winter and there were palm trees and sunshine and all that bad stuff was a distant memory.
We Live Here Now
Unlike our other adventures, this trip was meant to be less of a ‘vacation’ and more of a ‘sabbatical.’ Mazz’s work had some funding for a collaboration project with the University of New South Wales, and no one else in her group wanted to go. Mazz didn’t really either at first, as she had a ton of work to deal with, but then Kirb pointed out that if she ran away to Australia for a month, she could focus on getting her projects done without having to deal with the distractions that came with being at her office every day. If we treated it more like a change of scenery than a proper vacation, we could enjoy the tail end of Australian summer instead of suffering through the tail end of German winter.
Kirb was also looking forward to using the time in Sydney as a writer’s retreat. He’d been hard at work writing a fantasy novel, and was getting pretty tired of looking at his living room in Berlin all day every day while he wrenched tales of excitement from his brain bits. With the collaboration project covering an Airbnb for the month, all he had to do was buy a flight (and not miss it like an idiot) and then he’d have a new, sunny place to be creative for a month. We decided that on work days we’d both work, and on weekends we’d explore the greater Sydney area. Anything to convince ourselves this was not a vacation.
When we had gone back home for Christmas a few months before, we had mentioned to our friend Christopher that we were going to Australia for a month. He said he wanted to go too, and we sort of thought it was just one of those things people said. But then he told us again a few months later that, no, he actually wanted to go, and that it was a trip he’d always wanted to take, and so we told him to come on down. Our Airbnb just happened to have 2 bedrooms, so he could have a space of his own. He said he was planning to visit a cousin who lived there, and wanted to see Tasmania, and would use our place as a base while he explored the country. We told him that sounded like a great plan, but reiterated that we were going to be working the entire time. He showed up a few days after we did and said his cousin never emailed back and he hadn’t planned literally anything, so he proceeded to just live at in our apartment for the next 4 weeks as our roommate/house cat.
The weather in Sydney was totally bonkers while we were there. March is the end of the summer in the southern hemisphere, and our trip started with some very warm, pleasant days. Then the weird anomaly days started creeping in, where it would suddenly get unexplainably hot, the sky would explode into rain, and then there would be lightning blanketing the horizon. Kirb was often confused whether he was wet because of sweat or rain. The second weekend we were in town it rained so hard for two straight days that some of the streets flooded. It became common that the weather app on our phones would tell us there was 100% chance of rain for the entire day, and it would be dry and nice. It would tell us that it was going to be dry and nice, and then we would go out to enjoy it and get soaked in rain showers. We learned quickly that there was nothing about the weather in this city that could be trusted.
Delicious Things Everywhere
Sydney has a huge international community, especially from Asia, and each of those transplanted cultures have brought their cuisines to the city and found their niche. In particular, the Chinese dumpling game is very strong, which thrilled us to no end. We love a dump. Though eating out was generally pretty expensive, there was no shortage of amazing things to eat no matter which neighborhood you were in. The bar scene didn’t have a whole lot of character, though we found our spots. Drinking in Sydney was also not cheap, even if you went to a bottle shop to get beer or wine to bring home. A 6-pack of 12-ounce cans of swill cost $15, and you had to go to a bottle shop to buy them. Compared to Berlin, where beer is cheaper than water and can be brought in at least 2 places on every city block, the liquor laws in Sydney felt particularly draconian.
Bin Chickens, Giant Bats, and Things that Want to Kill You
Australia is home to many wondrous, strange, and terrifying creatures, and you don’t even need to leave the big city to see them. The ibis, or “bin chicken” as the natives call it, has specifically evolved a long, slender beak to open up garbage cans and dumpsters and root around inside (side note: “root” means something entirely different to Australians). In the Royal Botanic Garden downtown, there was a whole tree full of wild cockatoos. Kookaburras make real weird noises! One of the birds in the city just sounded like a crying child.
Mazz was particularly thrilled to learn that Sydney is full of gigantic bats, and every night they would take to the sky, filling it with adorable squeaks and big, leathery wings. The bats in Sydney are actually called “flying foxes,” and are the literal size of a full-grown fox with wings. Some people may think bats are gross, but not Mazz. They filled her with a constant source of delight. What neither of us find cute at all are spiders.
On one of the coast walks we went on, we went inside a changing room to put on our swimsuits and found a palm-sized gray spider waiting behind the door. Mazz “nope’d” right out of there. We got to talking with some nice girls outside, and they told us this was a huntsman spider, and that they were harmless, but this one was just a baby. They can get bigger than your whole hand, and have a penchant for crawling inside people’s cars and hiding beneath their sun visors. When you pull the flap down, the face-huggers drop onto your dashboard and speedily shoot across it, causing you to crash your car. People rarely die from these crashes however, as the drivers have already perished moments earlier from seeing such a terrifying fucking spider inside of their car. Kirb asked one of the women if she could tell him which spiders were poisonous, and she proceeded to point out a little red and black guy hiding in the doorframe of the changing room that would “mess you up pretty good.”
That’s Not Right
The most entertaining thing about Australia is the seemingly endless parade of things that seem similar to American English but are just different enough to be humorous and off-putting. If we could help it, we would choose to remain oblivious about what these words actually meant to Australians so we could continue to joke about them ad-nauseam with each other.
Excursion 1: Spit Bridge to Manly Walk
One of the first activities recommended to us was the walk between the Spit Bridge to the suburb of Manly. This 10km hike takes you along beaches, posh neighborhoods, and through forested coastal trails that hug the waterline. The start of the walk was only a short bus ride away from the center of the city, and at the end point all we had to do was catch a ferry and we were in the middle of town again. Sydney has a particularly great deal for public transit on Sundays, so all of the trains, busses, and ferries we took cost us each a total of around $2 for the whole day. This was one of the only cheap things about Sydney, and we appreciated it.
Excursion 2: Animals and Wine
Australia is world-renowned for both its exceptional wine and its adorable and unique critters. We found a tour that promised to take us to both and gave them all the money. We met up real early in the morning for a bus pickup and were driven several hours through the torrential rain into the Hunter Valley. The first stop was the Australia Walkabout Wildlife Park, where our tour guide proceeded to get our hopes up that we could put our hands inside of the kangaroo’s pouches, especially the kangaroo who had the red collar, before letting us know that actually he was joking and we couldn’t do any of that at all and if we even got close to the one with the red collar it would gouge us mercilessly with its razor-sharp claws.
One of the biggest dreams for our trip to Australia was getting to pet a wombat, but we found out through several phone calls and interactions with wildlife handlers that this was simply not going to happen for us. Much like Australian cheese, wombats are particularly “strong and bitey,” and are not the sort of fellows a stranger can walk up to and start rubbing willy-nilly. We ditched the rest of the tour group and made our way through the pissing rain to see the wombats in their enclosure anyway. They’re nocturnal, so one of them was just wrapped up inside of a big dirty comforter. The other guy, who was taking a nap by the window, acknowledged our presence by sniffing at us, and that was enough to warm our simple hearts.
On the way to the first winery, our guide asked if anyone in the van likes beer, and only the two men raised their hands for some reason (he’d asked a lot of questions like this by this point and people were generally tired of raising their hands). He then gave the two men a choice for the brewery we could visit at the end of the day: One that had won multiple awards and had a “cool table,” or some garage run by a surly man named Craig, and there may or may not be chairs there. Nonplussed with either of these options, Kirb said he’d prefer to just drink some VB tinnies in the van, impressing the guide with his ability to speak Australian.
Excursion 3: Hiking in the Blue Mountains
Blue Mountains National Park is a couple hour drive away from Sydney, but it’s still remarkably easy to get there using public transit. There are trains that leave from the Central Station regularly, and if you go on a Sunday like we did, the whole thing costs only a few bucks. We picked a hike online that looked cool, made sure we had everything we needed to know from the National Park’s website, and took off early in the morning for a day in the mountains. It would have been super useful if that government website would have mentioned that the trail was closed before we took the train several hours to get there.
We were pretty bummed that the hike we wanted to do was closed. The National Pass Trail has stairs that were blasted and carved out of the rock face in the early 1900s that sounded spectacular. The hike we did instead, called the Undercliff Trail, was a pretty great consolation prize. This trail took you underneath the overhanging cliff, where the water collected and made the area lush and covered with moss and ferns. The horizon was covered in a forest of eucalyptus trees, which give off an oil into the air that not only smells amazing but refracts light to create the haze over the trees that gives the Blue Mountains their namesake. Blue Mountains National Park seemed like a great place to tromp around, and we happily would have spent more time exploring it.
Excursion 4: Royal National Park
We almost didn’t go on our final excursion to Royal National Park because one of Mazz’s co-workers at the university told us the trains were down and that it would be very hard to get to there without them. She also asked if we had adequate “bushwalking experience,” because this hike was difficult. When we woke up on our final Sunday, we weren’t sure we wanted to do anything hard, but we figured we’d regret it if we didn’t even try. Despite her warnings, we quickly and easily figured out how to take a replacement bus down to the coast town of Cronulla. From there we caught a cute, old-fashioned ferry across the water to Bundeena, which rests at the base of - and is surrounded by - the national park. Royal National Park is the second oldest in the world, designated just after Yellowstone in the United States.
Hikers making their way to the park on foot need to walk up the hill through the neighborhoods of Bundeena. It’s a quaint little area, but on the day we walked through literally every house had a giant pile of trash in their yard.
Once you enter the park, it’s only a quick jaunt through some trees before you are walking along a perfectly manicured track directly on the edge of the ocean. The Royal Coast Track is about as pleasant and easy of a hike as anyone could ask for. It’s not steep, it’s not dangerous, and it’s exceptionally beautiful. It also was remarkably easy to reach without a car. We couldn’t believe we almost let Mazz’s coworker talk us out of coming. The full track takes two days, so we chose to just do an out-and-back to Marley Beach. It was 70 degrees without a cloud in the sky, which is unbeatable hiking weather for Northwesterners. To Australians, that’s downright cold, and we saw people on the trail wearing fur-lined vests over long-sleeved shirts.
So What’d We Think?
Sydney’s fine. It’s a city, and cities are kind of boring. Sydney in particular doesn’t have a whole lot of the character that we appreciate in cities. It has the second highest real estate prices in the world behind Hong Kong, so there’s not a whole lot of spaces left that are outdated or divey, and that’s what we’re always looking for when we go to a new city. Everything that once had unique character had been bought, remodeled, and re-marketed towards hipsters and millennials. The Chinese food was good, though. And we loved living in a place with a balcony. We traded a month of being cold for a month in shorts. That’s worth a stack of cash.
For us, the real highlight of Sydney was how easy it was to get out to the beautiful nature that surrounds it. When we weren’t running away from civilization, the people in Sydney helped make it more fun than the overpriced metropolis they inhabit. Australians are generally funny, good-natured, and easy to get along with, which makes spending a month there a pretty easy proposition. The exception to this is virtually any male between the ages of 16 and 29 who has had more than one sip of alcohol. We thought American frat guys were the worst. Oof. No wonder the government makes it so inconvenient and expensive to get alcohol in that country.