COVID PREAMBLE (skip if you’ve been here before): Just like every day, everywhere, we wore our masks in the Uber, at the airports, on the flights, in the museums, in the hotel lobbies, etc. and ate outdoors for every meal except those in our own room or car. And, just like before, this kept us from getting sick during and after the trip. I should note we also got our Covid boosters in July so as to be at peak immunity while traveling.
Friday, August 7th
Our flight from LAX to SYD was scheduled for 11pm. This was good in some ways; it gave us a full working day with time to shut down the house and take an Uber after rush hour, a more relaxed approach to the day of travel than we usually get. I assumed the flight would be one of the gigantic airwhales with two storeys of passengers. While waiting for our Portugal flight we’d seen a Qantas beluga shaped plane at another terminal and imagined we’d be on it in 3 months.
But this was American Airlines. And the flight turned out to only be about 80% sold. This means that our extra $180 paid to sit together in a 2 seat row was a mistake, maybe. There were two more empty rows of two seaters behind us. At first this was great, we thought we could, after takeoff, claim another row and stretch out a bit. I mean it was right behind us, we should have first dibs, right?
And we had plenty of time to imagine it because our plane just sat there for 90 minutes while the pilot waited for the “log book.” There was also a guy in a maintenance vest that came on and did some stuff, but we never figured out what. On my first trip to the bathroom one of the panels was just hanging open and exposing all the piping. I popped it back in and went on about my business. This AA plane was clearly old and not well kept, nor well cleaned after shuffling the previous passengers off. Very reassuring thing to realize about the machine that’s supposed to keep you alive as you fly 15 hours over the open Pacific ocean at night, a place that will kill you within hours if you even survive a water landing.
Before we even took off some lady sat back there in the empty row behind us and crumpled herself into a cocoon in the AA blanket. The guy in front of us, who took an aisle seat in a three seat row, had his own row to himself as well. But we were stuck jammed into our old rickety upright seats for 14+ hours. The plane was old and tired, the crew was old and tired, and this may have been the most uncomfortable flight we’ve taken in many years. We tried to sleep of course, I have an inflatable neck thing, eye mask, and earplugs, but every time my body would give out and try to drift off the baby next to us would cry or the lady behind would kick my seat (in her sleep?).
Once underway they began meal service and delivered a special meal to the guy in front of me. I had requested the gluten free, as I always do because of my wheat allergy. But it never came, instead I got chicken and rice like everyone else, except for the guy in front. When the stewardess gave us our meals I asked about the gluten free and she said she had no idea. Imagine a fake tan fake blonde 66 year old who’s mad she has to do one of these long haulers every couple weeks to afford her place at The Villages. She was not suffering through some woke loser’s whining about their special meal. Sam spoke up for me and said “maybe you gave it to the guy in front?” That didn’t go over well. We were very firmly informed there’s a special list with seat numbers for meals like that and it’s a small club and I wasn’t in it. (except I was, or should have been. I saved a pdf of the special meal selection when I did it on the AA website months ago…but okay, boomer…) The only good thing about the lack of folks in the hind quarters was that the bathrooms were almost always available and cleaner in the latter half than usual. Usually on these long haul flights there’s a line of folks waiting to go when the hour of everyone’s morning routine in the departure city hits and by god, if you’ve never flown a 10+ hour flight and gone to the bathroom at the 11th hour – I don’t want to ruin your lunch by providing a description.
Speaking of morning routines, about 90 minutes before landing they began the breakfast service and guess who got a gluten free breakfast. Me. I’ll never know if that lady messed up and realized it later or what, but the meal had my name and seat number printed up and stuck on it so who ate my dinner ten hours ago, then? It sounds like I’m complaining too much, but a big part of the calories in a plane dinner is the bread and crackers and things that come with it, and I couldn’t eat any of that, so I had to eat my “emergency snacks” that I always bring on flights like this to keep stocked up on carbs OR to eat on a hiking trail or on a long drive if we can’t find food. It’s not great to deplete that right at the beginning, that would be like starting a war with Iran BEFORE you have refilled the strategic oil reserves… nobody would do that on purpose!
Sunday, August 9th
We arrived in Sydney late, and already with a tight turnaround for our connecting flight to Coolangata. At immigration I got called over to speak to an agent, then the agent referred me to another agent. This was, I thought, because I noted my “criminal conviction,” on my entry form filled out on the plane (Australia still does those little manual sheets that you have to fill out while sleep deprived on the plane – America switched to digital machines at the airport a few years back)
And here’s where I need to back up and tell you a story about something from six months ago. When we decided on Australia for real and started booking, we started the visa process too. For every other country this has meant an online for and/or an app or something like that. Usually a photograph and a small fee. When entering info in the app for Australia there’s a question about “do you have criminal convictions?” And then before letting you move on a pop-up warns you to check the definition of that because they are more stringent. It turns out the definition is if you’ve ever appeared before a judge, and I mean ever.
Which I have. A few times as a juvenile (an accident where I slid off the road into a field, and a fake speeding ticket) and one time as an adult (one of the controversial LA red light cameras that were later taken down that caught me making a right turn on red with my mother in the passenger seat no less).
Because of all that I had to get fingerprints taken and an FBI background check done (which hilariously just comes back as a blank piece of FBI letterhead since I have no “real” criminal record) and write a letter to Australia begging them to overlook my criminality and let me vacation in a country that started off as a British penal colony. (Although that said, in 2026, I can’t blame anybody for taking a second look before letting an American in).
So anyway, months later after no sleep I see the same question on the little form on the plane and said “yes I have a criminal conviction.” By the way, this is a bizarre little experience I didn’t have to think about before this: what it’s like saying you’re a convict/felon/etc. and thinking about how that looks to others. Unless you’re in the south, then apparently you’re a hero that should run the world, apparently. But this wasn’t Alabama, this was Australia, in which children don’t regularly die from Misplaced Bullet Disease (or the Measles…sigh) . The second immigration guy took me to a side area with waiting chairs (not a good sign) and said if my form matches what it says on my visa this will be short, if it doesn’t, I’ll be here for a while.
About five minutes later he came back and said it matches and I’m good. So now you know, YES if you had that traffic ticket at 16 you better disclose it or you could be stuck sorting it out with the “immigration force” for a while. Now, would they have known about ANY of those “convictions” if I didn’t voluntarily disclose them? Hard to say. What happened 30 years ago in Ohio might be lost to time forever, or maybe it’s duly noted as well as my height and blood type in some Interpol file that Australia’s immigration AI can correlate with my entry card in 2 seconds…there was no way to know ahead of time.
Speaking of time. We’re doing okay, we have just under 2 hours before our connecting flight and our checked bags popped out relatively quickly. We kinda thought this would be the hard part.
However, figuring out the next bit was not easy. I saw some sign about connecting terminals at the far end of the building and we walked down there. At that end there’s just a train, but not sure what for. “TRAIN” it says with a platform. For what? We asked an employee how to get to domestic flights and she pointed in the opposite direction, so we we walked down there and were even more lost with no signage for anything but international bag check and security. Next to us was an “information” booth with nobody in it. While we were trying to figure things out an information guy in a blue vest came inside the terminal (we were next to one of the doors). The first thing he said when we asked how to get to terminal 2 domestic was “well, you’re gonna need a jacket or you’ll freeze,” which was very confusing (and we were very tired). Turns out that was his way of saying you gotta walk outside to a bus stop and it’s colder here than California (which is true, but coming from a historical triple digit heat wave, I was delighted with the 60 degree Australian wind).
So we get on a bus, which makes a 15 minute drive to what feels like a completely different airport because it actually is, physically; the international and domestic terminals are on separate upper quadrants of a runway design that creates a giant + with no public tunnel or shuttle between them on the airport property, so transfers happen on the surrounding roads. Imagine landing at LAX and then having to drive out of there and down Sepulveda and back in to take a domestic. At least in Aukland they have a walking path you can take to get back and forth (although, that was kinda hell to walk after being up for 24+ hours, to be honest).
So we get to the domestic terminal and then try to get our Jetstar bag tags, but it’s a madhouse sea of confusion. After getting the tags we found the Jetstar bag area which was a huge line (or combination of them) that wasn’t really moving. At this point our flight was leaving in under an hour and we’d already walked past the bustling security area that might take a while to get through when we’re done with this bit.
The lines weren’t really moving, but there were a lot of them and the room wasn’t perfectly square, so a lot of people didn’t notice the shorter lines at the far end of the building where it compresses at an angle, but Sam did. However, when we got to the shorter line we saw why nothing was moving anyway. And here is where I’m going to tell a story that will make all the boomers upset on Facebook about having to scan their own groceries smile and feel appreciated for what is otherwise a completely luddite approach to technical innovation. Virgin Australia and Jetstar share a bag drop area that’s replaced humans with machines. Along the back wall of the check-in area of the terminal is a series of boxy large machines with computer touchscreen terminals and luggage runways. They want you to lift your bag into the thing, click buttons, and it’s supposed to take it away to your flight, no humans needed. Except a lot of those humans are the very same boomers that can’t figure out self-check-out (or in this case “in”) technology when buying groceries and the arms-crossed younger folks behind them aren’t in that big of a hurry, really. Here everyone’s in a hurry and there’s a lot at stake. There was one human operator there for each five machines (in a row of many 20 machines), so they spent their time going back and forth between folks who just stood there and couldn’t figure out the interface. When it was finally our turn we figured it out very quickly (our flight was leaving so perhaps we had better motivation than others), but there’s a step at the end where you have to confirm you’re done so the next person can start fresh, and I think most folks don’t understand that, so nothing moves and the new person just stands there unsure what to do since it seems like the last person didn’t complete it (sometimes the bag is still sitting there too). Behind us was an older woman that was struggling and Sam stayed and tried to help her, but the process wasn’t working and the lady finally revealed that she’d already checked it with another airline by mistake or something…so at that point Sam noped out and I was already pulling her away so we could run to the security line.
Security actually was pretty quick and easy. Disturbingly so, as nobody at the domestic terminal asked for any ID. We scanned our boarding pass QR code to get our bag tags, and again when boarding…and that’s it. No shoes off (which is true in America now too, thankfully), and no need to empty water. Coming from America, which has been understandably uptight about aviation security for 25 years, this was very odd. But maybe Australia is just a safer place.
We got to our gate with about 20 minutes to spare so we ran around and got some quick food before….the flight was delayed. They never SAID it was delayed (god, that would have been great to know an hour ago when we were sweating and checking the time in that bag drop line!), they just didn’t begin boarding until the flight was already supposed to have left. So we ended up in Gold Coast about an hour later than we planned.
When we landed the pilot apologized for getting there late and especially to the folks who had their 7am flight cancelled and rebooked to this one. Imagine getting to the airport for a 7am domestic flight and then having it moved to 10:30….and then that flight being delayed another hour. These folks were supposed to be in Gold Coast five hours ago. They might as well have driven. But we flew Jetstar, which is the Spirit of Australia, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
One thing I liked (not the gasoline smell) about the tarmac in Sydney (local flights board outside like in Burbank) was the sea smell. I live next to the same ocean, but it smells different over here for some reason than in the Marina.
Getting our rental car was fairly uneventful (surprise, that international drivers license everybody said you’d need isn’t necessary at all, nor is the extra insurance, apparently!), and made us temporarily members of the Mazda family again with a Mazda CX3. As usual Sam drove in the first day because she has more experience driving on the left (Thailand) and can sleep slightly better on flights. Unlike Portugal we didn’t need to drive as far, and not at night, to get to our lodging in Surfer’s Paradise.
Once checked into our apartment (just like in Oahu most of the places to stay near the beach are condos converted to temp rentals instead of hotels) we went to a nearby Thai restaurant for dinner, during which our tour operator for Monday afternoon’s “swim with humpbacks” texted us and said due to ocean conditions they were cancelling it. They offered to rebook on Tuesday, but needed to know ASAP. We immediately said yes (we built in a slack day for this reason), but they sent tickets for 8am on Tuesday. Keep in mind we’re staying an hour away and they always want you at the docks to check in half an hour before the tour. I emailed back explaining this and …………………………….they rebooked it for noon, phew!
We picked up groceries at the nearby Woolworths before crashing early after being up for about 45 hours.
Monday August 10th
Up around 4am I waited for the sunrise. I can’t remember the last time I watched a sunrise not feeling like crap. But if you go to bed at 7pm and crash out, it’s easy! It looked like it was going to be amazing, with just the right clouds. However, when the time came a storm rolled in and ruined the whole thing.
We ate breakfast in the hotel and walked (the storm passed by then) to a nearby coffee shop for coffee since the room didn’t come with any. The coffee was….not great. Sam, who has a fancy espresso machine at home, said they burnt the beans. We walked back to the hotel and set out southwest into the Spring Brook Rainforest. We stopped at many of the points of interest on the main park road, which were all either waterfalls or outlooks. For half of it we were walking through some gusting winds and rain (so we found out where the sunrise ruining storm went from earlier this morning!), but I suppose that’s apropos of a rain forest, no?
We saw signs to look out for (so as not to drive over) kangaroos and koalas. At one point near the best lookout we saw a cat sized thing hopping across the road. At first we thought maybe it was a baby kangaroo, but a few miles later we saw a sign to watch out for padamelons, which is what that thing must have been.
We did see a rainbow at Best Lookout, though, so there’s that.
We finished in the park around 2 and drove to Burleigh Heads for dinner and then a walk on the beach with gelato.
Tuesday, August 12th
We ended up at the Fingal Head boat ramp for our tour early so we drove back to town and got some chicken and chips to eat in the car. The tour actually launches from a little boat ramp area about like you might expect on the Ohio river in some small town. Just a little parking lot and a concrete ramp. There was a bathroom though that was impeccably clean compared to a similar boat ramp in the U.S. It was weird sitting there thinking about how from this little ramp would be our stepping stone to swimming with some of the largest mammals on Earth, a thing that eluded us everywhere else on larger boats from more touristy ports.
When the tour prep started they wanted us all to put on thick wetsuits, which for me was worrisome as it was a perfectly sunny day and although not particularly hot to just stand around in normal clothes, a 5m wetsuit is like putting on a polar jacket. I moved to the shade and tried to keep my cool while the tour operators explained the safety information.
If you missed my post earlier this year about pre-heat exhaustion that last paragraph might need some explaining. I’m still getting various tests run by my doctors even now (took the “heart stress test” a few days ago) as I write this blog – but for months now I’ve had scary symptoms (similar to panic attacks, I guess) after different types of exertion or even just being outside in high heat. So I’d had anxiety for months about how this was going to work – putting on a wetsuit and sitting in the sun for a while – without having an “episode” of shaking hands and feeling like I’m going to pass out.
After we boarded the little boat we just sat in the sun for a few minutes. The boat is basically an inflatable with some rodeo rider style “seats” in the middle. I began overheating in that Eskimo suit and had to do my breathing exercises to bring my heart rate down, while simultaneously worrying that A) the tour operators would notice and kick me off the boat or B) I’d pass out and who knows what would happen after that.
Luckily, we didn’t sit there for too long and after some tense minutes of me doing my breathing exercises we were underway and speeding out into the ocean. The wind was so strong that I was cooled off. However, running roughshod over the waves at the front of the boat turned Sam and myself into bullriders with bruised tailbones by the end of the day. Multiple times we actually went airborne and almost flew off the boat if it wasn’t for the other people grabbing us. To be clear, this was usually just Sam grabbing me, since because I have more mass it was harder to stay planted. I also should clarify that in this strange rodeo style seating everyone else could hold onto the back of the seat in front of them. Sam and I were at the front. Nothing to hold onto at all, just bracing our feet on the sides of the boat (which, due to being an inflatable, were only about two feet above the floor). It felt a bit like riding on the hood of a car while somebody races down a dirt road.
As soon as we escaped the marina we came upon a pod of humpbacks that were playing around. Here we are – already! Let’s do this! Everyone wanted to get in the water with them but the captain got up front and started giving us a bunch more directions instead. The engine was off and the sun was beating down again. I had to start the breathing exercises again as the black coat started heating up. Again. I guess being right in the front saved me from getting noticed since the captain basically just looked past us while giving his speech.
Imagine seeing the whales playing around right in front of you and the guides being like “nah, we’ll go find them elsewhere.” What?! They’re RIGHT THERE! This is what we travelled 7,000 miles for.
Eventually we got on our way again and at first had trouble spotting whales. A few times we spotted them and jumped in but they went away, just like the little giant sperm whale we swam with for five seconds in Hawaii earlier this year. This was making me a bit grumpy (and I’m sure the others too) as we wondered why we had to be all the way out here just poking around and not getting anywhere instead of swimming with the whales we already found. The crew never did explain this to us. And it got even weirder.
After a couple of unsuccessful water entries in which we found whales, but they swam away, Sam lost her flipper. For this trip all our snorkeling tours provided all the equipment, but Sam and I decided to still bring our own snorkel and mask because they’re usually better quality, but not the flippers. So she lost one of their flippers. They said not to worry because they could speed over to one of the whale watching tour boats also on the water right now and grab a new pair, which is exactly what they did. Which meant ten minutes of us getting buffeted around violently again, of course. When we arrived we found a playful group of whales in the same place we’d NOT entered the water earlier. They gave Sam a new flipper and this time we did get in that water.
Since we’re entering from both sides of the boat and trying to intercept whales swimming toward the boat, some folks are always ending up closer to the path of the whales. This time I’d ended up at the back, so farther away. Rather than try to swim like mad (which the guide warned us scares them away) I just kinda drifted forward. This left me basically alone, maybe thirty feet back from the rest of the group actively swimming towards the whales.
At first I was seeing nothing. I should mention here that visibility was limited the whole day because of the rain yesterday filling the water with a lot of dirt (or something). But your heart rate is up and you’re here hoping and all excited, so you keep desperately scanning and swimming and looking around. Because humpbacks (like many animals that live in the ocean) evolved to be “invisible” in the water it’s easy to delude yourself into seeing the shape of something and then realizing it’s nothing at all.
And then a humpback whale swam right under me. It was right there! So big it won’t fit in the frame (not that I was looking at my camera at that moment, just keep clicking the shutter and hoping).
And then two more joined it on either side.
I didn’t chase them, as we were instructed that is illegal. But ..soon every one else on the tour zoomed by me happy to just kick their legs to chase as fast as they could.
These photos are objectively horrible due to the camera wanting to focus on the closest “object” to which was the dirt floating in the water from the rain. Trust me, to my human eyes they were not blurry, they were unforgettable.
Sam had her phone camera on (can’t control it in the water, so you have to press record and just leave it running) and you can see the whales at around fifty seconds in:
After they swam by us they did flipper slaps to say goodbye.
So after that everyone thanked Sam for losing her fin, otherwise we wouldn’t have had that interaction with those whales. And, although we had a few more drops, that ended up being the best/closest one of the day.
After the tour we changed clothes in the parking lot and went to nearby Mooloolaba for dinner. We went to a Mexican restaurant and didn’t realize until later that they charged us another $4 for a cup of salsa (this place had no chips and salsa either…weird). This would be a recurring theme in Australia – huge extra charge for something usually (though not always, looking at you, King Taco) free in America.
Wednesday, August 12th
Today was our scheduled Byron Bay Julian Rocks snorkel tour. This place has been built up online as the best place to snorkel in the world. Their website even brags people say it’s better to snorkel there than the great barrier reef. For us that made it a must do.
Byron Bay is about ninety minutes from where we were staying in Surfers Paradise, so we got going early, figured we’d check out the bay and get something to eat in town before our 1:30 tour.
Which we did, we walked around the little beach village area. We walked out to the beach and saw how close Julian rocks are to the shore and were looking forward to getting out there and seeing what it was all about.
That blip on the right is Julian Rocks. A strong swimmer could actually swim out to it, though I would never advise or do that since conditions can change and then you could be in trouble getting back. Remember that: conditions change.
We decided to eat at a little place called Sushi In that sells premade rolls, sashimi, and nigiri, (and gluten free soy sauce!) which is just our style so we can mix and match (there’s a great chain like this in New Zealand that we wish would come to the US that has even more options). Afterwards we walked around the corner to Blue Cow Gelato which actually had really surprisingly good flavors. The best of which is the “Black Hawaiian,” which has to be referencing the black volcanic rock there since the gelato is jet black. Why black? Because it’s a mix of coconut, chocolate…and charcoal. Believe it or not, charcoal is actually a pretty interesting flavor. We had it many years ago at a gelato place in La Jolla too, much to our friends’ horror.
However, as we were sitting there eating our gelato under a parasol the sky turned grey, then dark, and a light rain began.
This unfavorable weather would continue the rest of the day. However, we’ve seen interesting fish in rainy water before, so it wasn’t a big deal. At the snorkel place they got us all fitted into wetsuits and then strongly urged us (like yesterday) that we leave everything at their office and not take anything on the boat. Just like yesterday it was a little boat with those inflatable sides and just enough seats for ten people. We assumed we’d just be walking to the beach, since it was only a few blocks away.
Unfortunately, we found out too late that their intended mode of transportation to the beach was to load us all in a van and share whatever germs everyone had been cooking from their various tourist flights from all over the world (we all talked about our trips while standing around in the wetsuits waiting for the safety briefing, one of them was from Thailand, another from England, and so on). Since our bag was locked up in the office we suddenly had to board the stupid bus with no masks. You might ask why we didn’t leave our masks hanging around our necks. When outfitted with your wetsuits and preparing to get in the water you don’t want to cling to anything that you don’t want to get wet. By the time you put the suits on you’ve stored away your wallet, your phone, and your mask (which is useless if it gets soaked, not to mention it’ll just float away from you out on the ocean anyway).
I get that nobody else in the world cares about their health anymore, so nobody else thought about this, but their previous description of this to us earlier in the day (we checked in at their office before wandering off for lunch) was that we’ll “go to the beach” and point at the beach which was one block east of the office. We thought we were just walking down there, a reasonable assumption considering you can see the snorkel spot from the beach.
No. We had to get on a smelly (wet humans get in and out of it all day long) minibus and swap viruses, driving down the road to the closest boat launch, where they had us walk barefoot across rocky asphalt for even longer than yesterday (we learned by visual inspection quite often that just like Kiwis, the most famous of which would be Peter Jackson, Australians also like to just walkabout barefoot all over the place) and then …help them launch the boat! Everyone had to wade into the water and push as the waves splashed up and then scramble on. We had to do this once before in Thailand on a long boat trying to escape the tide slipping out from under it as the sun set on James Bond Island- but that was a mistake, not part of the “experience.”
Ten minutes later we were at the snorkel area, a tightly controlled square of sea on the north side of the tiny island. The waves were extremely choppy, not sure if that was from the rain or if it’s always that way, but it might have been the roughest water we’ve snorkeled in. From the copious amount of warnings in the waivers we signed I suspect it’s always that way. However, unless you get close to “land” (in this case the razor sharp corals lining the sides of the island) choppy seas aren’t really a problem for good swimmers. Also helpful to bring your own snorkels which have auto-shut-off valves to keep water out of the tube when waves splash up!
We were instructed where the sharks are normally seen and that there’s usually sea turtles and to not approach them, etc. However, upon entering we found…just a bunch of fish. This was turning out like Molokai, except it wasn’t sunny and warm, it was cold, choppy, and dark. I did see at least three …. somethings on the bottom in the sand that were reminiscent of the guitarfish we have in La Jolla. They may have been a type of shark, but they stayed down on the bottom and visibility was low.
After getting home and doing some digging I’m almost certain this is a Wobbegong, a special Australian fish that would have been great to see in more detail as they’re kind of weird looking; a cross between a leopard shark and an axolotl.
Sam got cold and a bit nauseous from the waves after about 20 minutes and went back to the boat. I stayed out there because…might as well. There’s a truism about snorkeling that it might look like there’s nothing there for the longest time, but if you just patiently wait you’ll eventually see something. And that was true here too. With about two minutes left in the excursion a large gray nurse shark drifted beneath me.
I followed it as long as I could, which was easy since it was just meandering around unlike the leopard sharks in La Jolla that dart away as soon as they realize they’re being followed. But that only amounted to a few minutes before they ordered me to get back on the boat with the rest of the shivering snorkelers. Because of the distance to the bottom, even in the “shallow” area, I never was able to get up close to the shark (though I saw it go right up behind an unaware freediver that was with our group).
Back in the minibus Sam and I realized we could at least pull our chin bits of the wetsuits (these included the head covering) over our noses to try and catch aerosols. Better than nothing I guess. On the way we saw folks stopped on the side of the road pointing at wild koalas in the trees. Sam and I were on the opposite side of the bus so we just saw humans pointing up and then…the roof of the van blocking our view. Back at the shop we were all told to take off our wetsuits and wash them and turn them inside out and hang them on the rack ourselves.
I’m sorry, what? Firstly, no wonder they smell bad, thousands of people have sweated and pissed in these and then nobody really cleans them? The “cleaning” was just to trust the folks that will never see you again to dunk their suits in a tub of water. The same tub for all 20 people, by the way. The proprietors disappeared during this bit to fiddle with oxygen tanks (there were two boats, one with ten divers and another that was split between snorkelers and free divers) and boats so nobody was actually forced to wash anything before hanging their suit back up.
Because of this we were even more thankful there were two rudimentary hot showers with soap in the locker room.
Finished with that experience we walked back to the car and changed into street clothes. We decided to just eat at the same sushi spot for dinner and get the same gelato again, figuring we really enjoyed it and we’ll probably never return to Byron Bay for the rest of our lives.
The topic of discussion at dinner: where would this snorkel rank on our all time list? Sam said lowest. I have to technically rank it above Molokini because I did see one shark at the end and Molokoni had nothing but tiny black fish. So maybe second worst organized tour. Probably third worst all time for me (worst being when I had the bright idea to try and snorkel in Malibu and there was zero visibility and I got rolled and lost my mask and snorkel).
We’d gone on other tours that didn’t amount to much “exciting” going on under the water, but none of those made us work. Wouldn’t you be mad if you went to an expensive restaurant and after eating they said “okay now come in the back and wash your dishes?” And you realize you just ate off dishes that other patrons maybe didn’t wash very well because they were never coming back. Now imagine the last people to use your wine glass probably peed in it.
This stung even worse because this was the part of the trip I convinced Sam to partake in (scuttling Melbourne so we could do more water activities in Gold Coast), and we wasted a whole day driving all the way down and back up. We could have done another humpback whale swim instead and spend more time with them!
However, we also saw bats for the first time in Australia, congregating next to the Byron Bay courthouse. Walking to the car after sunset the bats were up and flying around, which I’d never seen before either. I tried to take photos but forgot to flip the neutral density filter off the lens (I use it in place of a lens cap now so I don’t have to search for it when I need it) so all the photos are maxed out at 128,000 ISO and super blurry since it was already dark before taking the ND filter made things unseeable. That said, pretty amazing camera to still capture this – a bat in flight at night with a ND filter on!
Thursday, August 13th
We checked out of our gold coast hotel and headed up to Tamborine Mountain. We first visited the rainforest skywalk. Before entering the skywalk there is a room that has scale models of all the interesting bugs you may see in the forest like walking sticks and Goliath beetles and other oversized things.
We saw nothing on the walk except for a single large fire ant and a tiny spider.
After that we made the short hike to Curtis Falls.
After the falls we went back to Long Street for lunch, which was difficult because almost every restaurant was a cafe with sandwiches I can’t eat. We got gelato after, of course, but it was nothing like yesterday. Long Street is a little touristy street up on Tamborine Mountain with cafes on both sides and souvenir shops. That said – we noticed here that postcards are in short supply. Normally we’re comfortable just slacking off and waiting a few days to get postcards, but we’d been here a week and barely seen any. We didn’t buy them here either because by the time we were done with our late lunch at 3pm all the tourist shops were closed! That’s another strange thing about Australia, even in the big cities there’s a trend of either shutting down between 3-5 (some places in Europe do this as well) or just shutting down at 3 and calling it a day. Very frustrating if you’ve gotten used to getting up at 5 or 6 and eating your dinner early as a consequence. For context, in Los Angeles, a restaurant that offers lunch and dinner being closed at 4pm is unheard of. How do we know this? We almost always end up skipping lunch now on the weekends and going for a restaurant (outside) early dinner at that time on Saturday and/or Sunday.
The fading dim sunlight at 3pm in August was also bizarre. Not for them, but for us coming from 100 degree heat that lingers past the sunset at 9. It was nice to be in a cooler environment for a few weeks where we could walk around and not lose ten pounds through sweat. Early sunsets are often a gift on vacation as well, it means you don’t have to wait a while to catch the sunset and you can take night or star photos without having to sleep in till 10am the next day.
Anyway – back to our story: We left Tamborine Mountain and drove to Brisbane through traffic most of the time that rivals LA traffic. This is a recurring theme. LA gets a bad rap for traffic, but if you visit New York, Bangkok, Vancouver, Toronto, Brisbane, Aukland, Columbus, etc. at rush hour you’ll find the same red lines on Google maps. Finally checked into our hotel it was about 5:30, so we decided to get a light snack for dinner at 7-11 as we walked to the star casino sky view.
You might have gasped at the “dinner at 7-11” line. Don’t worry we didn’t eat old cancer hotdogs, the 7-11s in Australia are Japanese style 7-11s with a cooled case full of sandwiches and sushi-type eats made and delivered that morning. We ate these often on our Japan trip and it’s sort of like a reliable “McDonaldsesque” travelers experience. It’s not the greatest thing in the world to eat, but it’s consistent quality and taste, quick and easy…and cheap! In this case (and in Japan too) we mostly stuck to the onigiri (I mean I can’t eat the bread sandwiches or wraps anyway) and smoothies.
Initially we thought about driving or trying public transit to get from the hotel to the Sky View, but after getting the 7-11 and seeing how vibrant the night life was in downtown Brisbane we just decided to walk there. It was a long walk through a very popular part of town with what felt like miles of Asian themed restaurants catering to an almost exclusively Asian customer base. As time wore on in Australia we realized the Asian population there is much larger than (maybe an old racist like me?) assumed. I joke that I expected a lot of tanned crocodile Dundees in kangaroo leather… but honestly the people we saw and interacted with on our trip were mostly Asian, and I’m not talking about the Chinese tour busses at tourist spots (although there was plenty of that – as there is everywhere now – too). I suppose this is an equivalent of someone from Australia going to San Francisco and being surprised it isn’t a city full of long haired hippies.
Anyway – all this is to say we kind of regretted scarfing down the 7-11 food earlier since there were blocks and blocks and blocks of restaurants here, many with what looked like easy takeaway, meat on a stick, that kind of thing.
But we skipped by all that stuff and kept going to the Sky View.
Walking back to the hotel I was punched by a homeless man who apparently thought I was a danger to Sam…we think. It was a very confusing moment. It started by me stopping to take a picture of this graffiti in an alleyway:
After starting to walk again we noticed there was a little homeless congregation on the sidewalk, so quickened our pace. I tried to put myself between them and Sam (not because anything was obviously dangerous, it’s just a good idea to do this in general when the situation is unpredictable). But then this one guy yelled “hey buddy!” In a very gruff way and then shifted be be behind us in the middle. When I shifted again to try to get between him and Sam he punched my arm. (note that this was the weakest punch you can imagine from a clearly emaciated or drug addled older person) This obviously disturbed us a lot more, and Sam sort of grabbed and clung to my arm on the other side and we walked faster while I sort of prepared to fend off another punch. However, after Sam grabbed me the guy said “oh sorry, is that your husband…sorry sorry” and went back to chatting with the other homeless folks on that block. So I guess when I walked a few paces into the alley and Sam stayed on the sidewalk this guy had started checking her out, and when I came back out and got close to her he assumed I was a threat to her and wanted to be some kind of hero? That’s the best we can figure out.
I should also note here that if a homeless guy really did try to get into an altercation it would not have ended well since I was holding onto a tripod with a metal camera on the end that would make quite a dent in anyone’s face if need be. That said, I was so surprised by the punch (homeless people have yelled at me before, so that’s not super surprising) that there was a brief moment of disbelief where he probably would have got the upper hand if he knew how to fight (I don’t).
Friday, August 14th
On Friday we didn’t really have any plans other than just walk around Brisbane. So we walked around Brisbane, starting off with breakfast under the south end of Story Bridge. Then we walked across the bridge and around the Brisbane River until getting to the Griffith area where we stopped for snacks and then back across the river to go up to the Sky View during the day.
While there we were trying to figure out what else to do. We’d been in Australia for nearly a week and not seen any koalas or kangaroos so we figured we should go the Brisbane Koala reserve in case we never get to see them in the wild.
So we went and saw a lot of them both. Including an area where you could pet the kangaroos.
After that we headed to Eat Street Northshore for dinner. Eat Street is a conglomeration of restaurants (sort of like permanent food trucks, really) with bright lights and DJs and live music in a kind of carnival / bourbon street / las vegas strip-ish atmosphere with lots of neon lights and oversize props (giant crabs at the seafood truck) and things like that. I had a stuffed baked potato.
Saturday, August 15th
After checking out of the Amore Hotel we went to the Fish Factory, which is a fresh fish market and fish based restaurant place. The yellowtail sashimi was good, but the tuna and salmon sashimi wasn’t that flavorful. I suppose I’m always comparing to the unforgettable fresh seafood buffet in Noboribetsu.
The Brisbane airport was a much smoother experience than Sydney, no mad lines to check out bags, no lines at all, in fact. Security was easy (Australia doesn’t make you dump your water on domestic flights).
Our flight flew over part of the great barrier reef, an interesting preview of where we’d go swimming in a few days.
Our rental car was a nearly new Kia K4, which felt like quite an upgrade from the old Mazda cx-3 we’d driven around the Gold Coast.
We stopped at a laid back restaurant on the outskirts of Cairns for dinner on the way to Port Douglas. After a lengthy negotiation with the chef, we determined that I could eat the gluten-free pizza. The drive to Port Douglas was a slow dark curvy test of patience in the rain, much like the PCH in some spots. I wouldn’t see until driving back down two days later that it’s more like the PCH than I thought; the road curved along the coast, in cases just tens of feet from the shoreline. Upon reaching port Douglas we discovered our hotel was ….not that nice. It was apparent (due to different color and consistency of hairs left behind) that the previous renters of the moldy bathroom and multi-stained couch had not been cleaned up after. Other than when sleeping we basically just stood up the whole time we were in the room for the next two days.
This wasn’t necessarily a surprise. We waffled back and forth about whether to stay at this place. It had “three stars” on Expedia and some reviews were bad, some were good. In our search for an alternative in Port Douglas (near that marina) we found that all the other lodging had similar descriptions OR was unbelievably expensive, so we stuck with this one (which was still not cheap) and hoped.
The AC too was only half working, the classic advertising that you have AC but the unit has notes “not to turn it down further than (insert a number above whatever feels comfortable to you). Even the arrangement of the place was bizarre, two small “bedrooms” joined by a jagged walled bathroom that felt like an experiment (the toilet was basically under the sink). When I say “joined” I mean it was a Jack and Jill bathroom, with two doors. And yes, even though we were only there two nights we ended having at least one “oops” experience coming in on the other person using the bathroom.
And again, like in Gold Coast, here we were instructed to empty the trash ourselves after our stay. Pretty annoying considering we’d be checking out at 7am before our snorkel tour in a couple days. I didn’t really want to budget being someone’s maid at 5am on my vacation, but here we are…
Sunday, August 16th
We ate breakfast at a cafe in Port Douglas before driving up to mossman gorge. The little town of Port Douglas was actually nicer than we expected. It had a very Santa Barbara vibe, with hip breakfast cafes branching off a main drag with art galleries and upscale dining. We thought Cairns, the larger city with an airport, would be where all the good stuff was and Port Douglas would be a tiny little port city. We were wrong. Sam noted while we were eating that most of the folks seemed to be locals (it was a Sunday morning) and most of them had kids. Again, a surprise, for what we thought was just the jumping off point for some of the Barrier Reef tours (they also leave from Cairns, but have to “drive” farther to get to the reefs from there).
Mossman Gorge makes you buy tickets for a bus that takes you to the gorge walking path in the rainforest. I understand this is to protect the wildlife and all, but the gorge itself was…just a little gorge? Some boulders in a stream. That said, the water was pretty rapid and there were foolish people aplenty ignoring the copious warning signs that people can die quickly after misjudging the current or the shallowness. After seeing the creek in person I’m not sure what the draw is to need to wade out into it anyway. The waterfall pools elsewhere in New Zealand or Oregon I get… I never did it myself, but I understand the allure of standing under this rushing waterfall like a character in a movie about a tropical paradise. There was no waterfall here, though, just a creek rushing around boulders.
I’m complaining a lot, but this was better than spending the day working.
We continued up the coast, stopping at various rainforest walks, until we reached Cape Tribulation. Which, again, was nice, but definitely not one of the top five beaches in the world or anything.
Also worth noting here that in the north all the shorelines have signs about crocodiles. So this isn’t a spot where you could even wade out and enjoy the water, either. Most of the area is actually more swampy than beachy, so given that I understand a little why the locals would appreciate the beaches.
As usual, when the tourist traps disappoint I turn to smaller things – insects! Here in the rainforest there were lots of big ants (though not the size of the red one on Tamborine Mountain in Brisbane).
On the way back to Port Douglas we stopped at a roadside attraction that had a sign for “exotic fruit flavored ice cream.” We had wattleseed and black sapote. I’d never heard of either of them and don’t feel a strong need to have them again – but they were interesting and if I saw them as flavors at one of our swanky gelato shops back home I’d go for it again. They also had durian, jackfruit and a few other tropical fruits, but we’ve had those many times (you can even get durian ice cream at the Los Feliz Costco now). On the drive out Sam spotted a mangosteen tree in their orchard, but that wasn’t on the menu. (ironically Los Feliz Costco had mangosteens from Mexico when we got back home)
Back in Port Douglas a few hours later we decided to eat at a more upscale place for dinner (though to be honest they were kind of snooty and it probably wasn’t worth it) before grabbing some groceries and going back to the so-called “resort” early. Our snorkel tour was set for 8am the next morning and we’d have to pack, check out, AND CLEAN THE ROOM first.
You might wonder why I’m harping on the cleaning. I don’t like garbage, dirty stuff, germs, etc. At home we have developed a sort of division of labor that has Sam doing the laundry and me taking out the trash. Vacations are a welcome respite from dealing with trash. Until the “resort” asks you to collect and dispose of your own trash. (note that we did our own laundry a few times as well in lodging that had in-unit machines) This is why people (including us) haven’t booked an AirBnB for ten years. (I should also note that in aparthotels where we’ll stay multiple days we will wash and clean our own dishes even if they offer a cleaning service, that’s fine)
Monday, August 17th
This early morning reef snorkel tour was one of the anxiety points of the trip. Any time I have to get up early for anything it causes me to worry because of my history of insomnia, which causes cortisol to release, which causes me to not sleep.
One way around this is to go to bed early, which puts my mind at ease, at least for a few hours, because I feel like I’ve got a long runway to fall asleep. On this trip we’ve been mostly going to bed around 8 and getting up by 6 anyway, so this night wasn’t really any different (which helps in the falling asleep too because melatonin is released per schedule). So we were up with plenty of time to eat and pack and collect all the trash ( sigh) and check out before going to the marina.
The boat we were on was large, a double decker, but actually the smallest of the tour company’s fleet. We sat outside but once underway at high speed kept getting belted with reams of spray off the side of the boat. This went on for ninety minutes before reaching the first reef. We visited three reefs, all fairly close to each other, but I’ll collapse my description into one because they’re all essentially the same thing (though the last one seemed the “nicest”): some colorful little fish, colorful corals sticking out against bleaching, and a command not to wander too far from the boat or the lifeguard will literally whistle at you to turn around. The website for the tour company just says “Agincourt Reef” as where we went, I’m not sure if that reef is large enough to encompass all three spots.
The boat always parks on the shallow side of the reef, ostensibly to let you in where the fish are, but this also means you’re constantly fighting the strong current that’s tipping over the outer edge of the reef, forcing more wave energy into a smaller vertical column of water as it pushes back out into the Pacific. This made the snorkeling more tiring than anywhere else we’ve done it, even the open ocean. You feel like you’re treading water and going slowly backwards unless you kick your hardest. For me, this resulted in toe joints that rubbed so hard against the flippers that the day after my bloody toes look like they got in a brawl. I’m editing this post three weeks later and my toes haven’t fully healed yet. The tour operators appreciate this water flow because it makes it really quick to swim back to the boat and get people out of the water. It would be hard to lose anyone because they’d have to get pushed out back past the boat, which the multiple lifeguards would see.
So what did the swimmers see? I guess the standard stuff you’re supposed to. Giant clams. Coral. Parrotfish. I saw a bunch of the big wrasse. I saw a basketball sized jelly. Sam saw two reef sharks, but I didn’t see any.
But no minke whales. The only place those exist is on the pictures on the interior of the boat and on the company’s website. Once they had our money there was no mention of whales again. Not by the guide that showed us pictures of everything we were to see on the reef. Not by the safety briefing guy. Nothing. And they never appeared.
I know we can’t expect whales to just show up, but this was heavily marketed with pictures of these whales, and it’s actually the reason we stayed two nights at the dingy apartment in Port Douglas instead of just booking a regular reef tour from Cairns (where we flew in and out of) like everyone else. The only boat that has government certification to let people in the water with the whales (in the reef area) is this one in Port Douglas. And we timed this trip because Humpbacks and Minkes are in peak numbers in mid-August. This worked for the humpbacks on the gold coast, but the Minkes on the reef were nowhere to be found.
But I would have been okay with this if more of the animals we’d heard about showed up on the reef, be they sea snakes, eels, manta rays, sharks…. anything really. We didn’t even see a sea turtle. There’s more to see in southern California than actually out on the great barrier reef, and the kelp forests in SoCal are back – while the corals here are clearly dying off..I thought back to our Belize reef tour, which had some eagle rays and reef sharks and things like that too.
That said, SoCal is NOT the place to snorkel this year. El Nino, tropical storms, and a heat dome have produced the hottest water temperatures in years but surf that’s so dangerous the TV news has started doing daily reports of how many people have been pulled out by lifeguards (can be as high as 70) and then the count of DEATHS. We cancelled our laguna trip before going to Australia as the beach was closed. We cancelled our La Jolla Shores trip when we got back because, two weeks out, the wave energy is as high as 3,000 on a scale where anything over 300 usually keeps us on land. This is not even mentioning yet my little heat nerves problem that would make it difficult to sit on the beach this year with temperatures sometimes entering the 80s (bizarrely high for San Diego which has a reputation for being in the 70s all year round).
I guess I’m just jaded by seeing so many interesting things elsewhere that by the time this snorkeler actually got to the crown jewel, it looked a little tarnished. Also it was cold. The other tours provided wetsuits, but this one just handed out lycra stingers (thin suits to protect from UV and jellyfish stings, not temperature). So, at certain points, I was sitting on the boat between swims shivering in direct sunlight. Still, that’s better than overheating, so I can’t complain too much.
We got to see the last gasps of this particular unique ecosystem. Sam later said the reef snorkel might be her favorite part of the trip (or maybe second to humpbacks), so I don’t want to convince her otherwise. She did see sharks, after all, and since I spend hours and hours more time with sharks (in La Jolla) more than her that probably stuck out.
So what did we get to see? I saw some Nemos, some giant clams, and a big jelly.
(yes, dad, I know they’re clownfish, it’s a joke)
Back in town we had a bit over an hours drive to Cairns so we just stopped by the local IGA to get snacks for dinner to eat on the road.
Tuesday, August 18th
We’d originally planned to visit the famous Kuranda scenic train and sky view (a gondola) today but found out a few weeks before our trip that it would be closed only on the day we would be in Cairns, as is our luck. So we drove up to as many of the things as we could.
But first we stopped for breakfast at a waffle shop that miraculously had wheat-free batter, this might have been the first waffles I’d had in ten years. However, seeking food in downtown Cairns was a stark contrast to Port Douglas. There were homeless folks here. There were dark alleyways. There was an overall sense of it just being not as nice. Not that you can’t find something good, but it’s between casinos and stuff like that. This was more Virginia Beach boardwalk and less Malibu.
There were two hikes through the rainforest that didn’t result in any big game, but here and there we saw some interesting fungi and insects, including rainforest butterflies, an inchworm, and a green nolid moth caterpillar.
We still ended up visiting the same waterfall view along the railway (guess you don’t need a ticket after all) and noticed they were sending some kind of maintenance car along the tracks.
It rained on and off during this bit and walking back to the car we saw lots of colorful rainforest butterflies.
We also saw two other little things for the first time: an actual inchworm doing its thing, and a lacewing larvae carrying it’s “house” around.
After the hikes we drove back into town for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant a few blocks off the esplanade before returning to our aparthotel. At the apartment we investigated the tropical garden and pond attached to the unit and saw a bunch of chichlids and a big eel, all of them queued up when we arrived because other guests have fed them.
Wednesday, August 19th
After checking out it was raining so we tried to go to the Cairns aquarium, but it was clear everyone else had the same idea, so we kept walking and went to the Esplanade. By the way, the whole thing has crocodile warnings and in some cases physical barriers to keep you from going in and getting bit. We didn’t see any crocs, but the idea of marketing the esplanade as this sort of Santa Monica cliffs style walk was funny considering it’s basically a crocodile infested swamp!
The esplanade was miserable in the rain so we walked back to the car and picked out a sushi restaurant in the Edge neighborhood called Ok Sushi. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. The sushi was…just okay. Also they charge extra for the gluten free soy sauce. BTW the fancy Port Douglas restaurant the other day charged an astonishing $4 for an extra ramekin of ketchup (without telling us). There’s no tipping (mostly) in Australia, though, so I guess this is how they recapture some of that extra money.
Then it was off to the airport for our flight to Sydney, which arrived after dark so I couldn’t see anything of the city from the window seat.
Thursday, August 20th
We started our day with a trip down the street to Woolworths to buy our hotel room breakfasts for the next four mornings. Our aparthotel was a nice one in Mascot, which is an upscale new neighborhood by the airport. There was a street of convenience stores, groceries, and restaurants next to the hotel as well as a functioning metro station that we never ended up using.
After eating we drove 90 minutes northwest to the Blue Mountains. We had tickets for Scenic World. We started our visit on the cable car, which has a long wait.
On the other side we noticed that almost instantly you’re on national park land and off scenic world land. Turns out scenic world is a bit of a scam, everything you want to see is actually located in public parks, but the cable cars belong to scenic world. Oh well. We walked to the creek cascades and then to the three sisters lookout before taking the cable car back to the main scenic world building.
Once there we had some lunch at their cafe before taking the express drop thingie (a refurbished old coal miner rail drop) down to the valley walk. Once on the longer walk we were alone. Even though it’s only a 25 minute walk none of the big bus driven tourists went down there beyond the rail drop and back up.
Of course, if you’ve already done a rainforest walk anywhere else in Australia you know there’s nothing to see.
We took the gondola back up and by then the park was closing (at 3:30pm for some reason) so we drove to nearby Victoria’s lookout and then walked down to Empress Falls as the sun was setting behind heavy clouds.
Sam warned me about going all the way to the bottom, but I didn’t listen. I thought she was concerned about the length of the trail and having to come up after dark, but the trail wasn’t that far. She was concerned about something else.
Along the trail it walks you down through some of the waterfalls with carefully placed stone blocks in the water.
Then, once at the bottom you’re greeted with a confluence of waterfalls flowing through rainforest rock tunnels equalling anything in Oregon or Vancouver.
It was about ten till 5 and Sam was very concerned that we shouldn’t dally here, though I still didn’t really get it. I thought she didn’t want to have to come up in the dark.
After ascending the first few flights of very vertical steps I found out what she was really worried about. My heart started racing and my hands started shaking (and no I did not want to shake all night long, but was worried I wouldn’t have a choice). I sat down on the stairs and noticed that my calves were twitching and vibrating like my hands. Very not good. We were, I dunno, a thousand feet down in a canyon as the sun was setting with no cell service and I was having another episode. I realized then that I’d not really drank much water all day. The Scenic World folks make it clear that there are only bathrooms at the visitor center, once you take a tram or whatever you’re on your own until you get back up. So I was likely dehydrated from deliberately limiting my water intake to not feel like having to pee every five minutes where there weren’t any bathrooms. Luckily we’d done a modicum of preparation for this outcome and I quickly drank an electrolyte powder with the remaining water in my bottle. This and some relaxed breathing got the shakes to calm. The nerves and heart rate were another story. We spent the next twenty minutes breathing slow and deep and taking slow steps all the way back up. All while the occasional young folks sprinted by us, blissfully unaware of the changes old age will bring.
But we made it just as darkness settled in. Back at the car we had food, bananas, rice cakes, stuff like that, which I quickly scarfed down.
We’d planned to go to glow worm caves after this hike (as it has to be dark), but we read that (unlike the glow worm paths in New Zealand) the trails involved stairs, so obviously that was not going to be a good idea. What would we do instead?
Sam is nothing if not consistent, so we went to the Sydney Costco.
I don’t know how they manage to do it, but every Costco in the world has the same pattern of not having enough parking for their customers and not enough checkout lines. This particular Costco seemed to use the same layout as Vancouver in that it had a few stories of parking garage under the store and then a ramp or elevator to get up to the warehouse. It was as hilarious as it was frustrating that even here in Sydney there were folks driving around for hours and honking and all sorts of road rage looking for the too few parking spots.
Friday, August 21st
We went south to see Australia’s version of the PCH, or at least the one near Sydney called The Great Pacific Drive. (We cut Melbourne out of this trip so The Great Ocean Road will have to be another time) We started off at Sublime Lookout and worked our way backwards (meaning north).
Our next stop was the area where the road sticks out into the ocean for a mile or so. The remnants of an earlier road now fallen into the ocean could be seen lining the rocks next to the divided highway on stilts. Perhaps this is what’s in store for the Big Sur back home?
The next stop was Bald Hill.
We originally had some walking and hiking on the itinerary, but the waterfall was described as a difficult and in parts dangerous steep hike, so after what happened yesterday and with the full Australian sun beating down we skipped it.
We drove back to Sydney for an early dinner at a Thai restaurant by the hotel. You may have noticed we’ve been eating at Thai or Vietnamese or…basically nothing traditionally Australian. That’s because, as far as we can tell, other than Vegemite (which Sam did buy and try), there’s not really any traditional Australian cuisine on offer anywhere. Maybe there’s some aborigine dishes you can get inland, but in our travels it was mostly cuisine from everywhere else. That’s not an insult, technically I’m not sure what cuisine would be “local” back home in Los Angeles either (I’m considering tacos Mexican for the purposes of this analysis).
After eating we drove down to Luna Park town to take pictures of the bridge and the opera house at night.
Saturday, August 22nd
Today was our last full day so we started out by visiting the East Coast beaches, Burrows Park at Clovelly Bay and then Tamarama, at which we walked to the Bondi Beach viewpoint.
On the way to somewhere we took the wrong road and ended up adding 20 minutes to our trip. We decided to just go into the neighborhood where we were and eat instead. This is my opportunity to whine to you about how crazy the roads in Sydney are. Ultimately Sam agreed they were about the same as Bangkok, but with markedly more polite drivers. The problem is that the roads seem to have been designed in three dimensions by tossing a bowl of spaghetti on the ground and trying to emulate that structure. Roads often just split off into two without much signage or stop lights. The placement of mandatory right or left turns is never clear until it’s too late and don’t follow a pattern (sometimes the middle lane turns into a turn lane, sometimes it doesn’t). Because of this, even with google maps going, I ended up on the wrong street several times. Thankfully I never ended up actually driving into oncoming traffic, but there were a few times where I had to double-take to make sure because driving through intersections sometimes means curving to the left to accommodate a right turn lane facing you at the light. On the Harbor Bridge there are also flexible lanes that change direction based on time of day and traffic, so the normal indicators you’re on the right (or in this case left) side of the road like a double line… are gone, there are just a bunch of lanes. At one point I drove up onto the bridge on a thin side lane that felt like it was for bicycles or pedestrians but there was no way to get back to the main lanes.
So anyway – on our way to lunch this happened again and we were stuck driving miles through a tunnel in the wrong direction. Oh! Right, I forgot to mention the tunnels. Because Sydney is made up of a bunch of inlets there are underground tunnels everywhere, most of which have tolls. Eventually we just decided to stop worrying about the tolls (the rental company bills you after) because they were unavoidable, in some cases because you don’t realize it until there’s no opportunity to change lanes or pull off. This was one of those times. So our 2 mins to lunch became 20 by the time we got out of the tunnel. We gave up and looked for something near.
And we found something. An interesting neighborhood that seemed very England inspired with little single story cottage houses sharing walls arranged around skinny streeted cul-de-sacs with lots of trees. Technically this was in Redfern, but the style of neighborhood extends up into Surry Hills, which is more famous. The main street is miles of little local shops, very reminiscent of certain mixed usage (residential/commercial) streets in San Francisco. A nice place to live, probably.
Anyway, we found a spot to park the car and walked over to a restaurant with outdoor seating, almost at random. We knew there were a lot of options here so we checked this one out. While looking over the menu we asked the waitress about my allergies and she said “hold on a minute, we have a guy for this.” A few minutes later a very upbeat middle-aged fellow in a t-shirt came out, we assumed he was the chef or something but we never really found out who he was other than the “allergy guy.” He kneeled down to talk to us and explained he has a shellfish allergy and so he takes all allergies very seriously and will tell me what to eat here or otherwise make it a worry free experience. He recommended the persian inspired plate, so I got that. Usually I can’t have falafels anymore because they put wheat flour on the outside to make the edges crispy when frying – but this place doesn’t! Some of the best falafels in a long time – maybe ever.
So this might be a good (or bad if you’re tired of my whining) time to mention there were two anxieties chasing me this whole trip. The first was that heat/exertion panic attack thing. The second was food allergies. Austrailia, it turns out, has the “best” (their words) food allergy laws in the world. What that means in reality is that they classify Oats and some other things that don’t bother me as “gluten,” restricting what I can eat at restaurants even further. So every single meal I have to start eating (after profusely obtaining claims from the proprietor it’s safe) and then be hyper aware of my feelings to see if anything is happening. Can you imagine that? Every meal you have to just kind of wait and see if it’s going to put you in the hospital. Over time this builds into a bit of dread around eating. I convinced Sam we should pre-buy our breakfasts and eat them in the hotel because it’s cheaper and more efficient. The real reason is that I can relax and know it’s safe (in addition to the other points) for at least one meal a day.
Anyway, that place that had great falafels and an actual “allergy guy” to put my anxiety at ease is called Kepos Street Kitchen. We also got a smoothie at Kepos before heading to our next destination – which we decided should be a leisurely drive down through surry hills and Darlinghurst on our way to the opera house parking garage. The garage has two options, I think it’s $20 until 5pm and then $35 after that. Initially we got the ticket and started our phone countdowns to make sure we were out before 5.
But you know me. And so does Sam. As the sun started to slip and everything got prettier we decided to just pay the higher parking price and get dinner and souvenirs here and walk around the opera house again after dark.
What neither of us realized until seeing it in person was that the Opera House “clams” are really yellowish off-white and they’re tiles. Like they’re the size of bathroom tiles you can just walk up and touch as if it’s somebody’s shower. I also didn’t realize the rest of the complex was a dull red, echoing (or perhaps even using) the red soil so prevalent in Australia. I also also didn’t realize that the rest of the concert hall complex under those whale mouth clamshells is very 1970s (everything’s orange) and very brutalist (solid concrete block walls, tiny windows except for the restaurant, etc.).
Sunday, August 23rd
On our last morning in Sydney we went to the Rocks market. On the way there we passed a BYD dealership and decided to check it out. It was clearly a ritzy part of town, there was a wrapped McClaren in the garage waiting for its owner (or the dealer?). We didn’t get to drive them, but the BYDs seemed…. okay? Some of the design choices were weird, some of the materials seemed cheap, but otherwise they didn’t feel above or below a typical Japanese, Korean, or American mid-market vehicle. Except their prices undercut those by $5,000 or more for a similar EV in the states. That probably explains why BYDs were everywhere in Australia. There were also a few Cherys and Jaecoos on the roads. Lots of Kias. I would say there were more EVs than you’d find in Ohio, but not more than Los Angeles. And unlike Portugal, Australia’s wealthy seem to be enjoying the K curve economy. In the cities there were a fair amount of Ferraris, McClarens, and Lamborghinis scooting around. Not as many Porsches as in Los Angeles, though, those seem to be a “keeping up with the Jones’s” car back home. We have a friend that has a GT4RS and another friend that has a 911 (and another friend still that leased a 911 for a while). I don’t (personally) know anybody with a Lamborghini (thought there have been some living in our neighborhood!).
The Rocks, in particular, are a bit like Beverly Hills, in that on the weekend the rich seem to want to come here and show off.
We parked on the street back behind the bridge and when we were leaving there was a Lamborghini already parked and a Ferrari FF looking for parking. I know the FF is ten years old, but I’m a fan of the shooting brake style, the Kia K4 hatchback rentals we drove on this trip are clearly an homage to this car (or at least that shape of car).
Planning for food was a bit tricky because we knew we’d get served dinner (if you can call it that) on the flight, but that wouldn’t be until about 7:30pm. We’d eaten a big breakfast at the hotel before packing up, but knew we should eat something either before going to the airport or at the gate while waiting. At the outdoor market there was a vendor grilling Australian meats (crocodile, emu, kangaroo), so we ordered the emu and kangaroo with regular beef (we’ve already had crocs elsewhere in the world). Honestly… it was not great. Very chewy hard meats. But so was the beef, so it may have just been a case of not great quality meat or prepping.
At the airport the gate was a bit weird, kind of shaped like a long tunnel with glass partitions and there were two gates boarding side by side at the end. The groups that were supposed to board kind of just merged together. I suppose that always happens, but here the only indicator of what group was boarding was a digital sign back behind the partitions and largely invisible to most of the people. The gate agents tended to give a number that was ahead of the real boarding number so at some point we just shrugged and went for it.
It’s (not) important to note that on both legs of this trip we’d expected to ride on one of the massive two-storey beluga whale shaped jets. The AA flight from LAX to SYD wasn’t one of those, and now, even at the gate, because of the design of the airport we couldn’t see the jet we were boarding. However, once on board we saw the stairway circling up to the rich folks area upstairs and knew we were on one of the big ones again. I say again because I believe our Lufthansa flight from Munich to LAX ten years ago was one of these – it even had a whole downstairs gallery of bathrooms. This one didn’t have the downstairs bathrooms, but it did have many more than a typical passenger jet.
Unfortunately, the size of this plane also meant the tapering at the back didn’t necessitate a few 2 person rows. This one still had threes on the sides going all the way back, so we purchased the middle and aisle and prayed nobody would buy the window. Just like on the flight to Australia two weeks ago, the flight wasn’t full and there were lots of empty seats (especially at the back). But, just like on the flight two weeks ago, we didn’t get to take advantage of that. Some dude bought a last minute ticket and sat at the window next to us for 14 hours. Luckily his bladder (and other things) are better than mine and he didn’t have to get up and out more than I think three times during the entire flight. Seems like he was (again, unlike me) able to sleep through most of it too.
Back at LAX we were re-introduced to some things America gets wrong. A baggage claim that takes forever but screams some high pitched noise the whole time. A “people mover” that’s behind schedule so you still have to take the bus to some other place to get your Uber. Except the line for the bus stretched back to the other terminal, so after 20 minutes Sam called her sister (who lives in Marina Del Rey) to give us a lift to her place so we could take the Uber from there. And the cigarettes. Despite the signage there’s always some loser who has to get that last one in (or first one after arriving) standing by the doors. Usually we can count on being home about two hours after the plane lands, but this time it stretched to three. Luckily the timing worked out that we were landing in mid-afternoon, so we still had time after getting home to do some cleaning and prepping before crashing out to get some sleep before going back to work Monday morning.
Which was harder than ever before because jetleg is worse flying east especially with the time difference of a whopping 17 hours. For reference, Thailand is a measly 14 hours difference. For most of the next week our bodies operated as if they were still in Sydney, wanting to sleep only at 2am and wanting to do other things at inconvenient times. Work meetings felt like remote viewing experiences at the end of long dark tunnels.
This, and some of the other physical difficulties I complained about above, have caused us to pause on our future vacation planning. Possibly rethinking our approach and cutting out long-hauls (at least 14 hours) for now. Originally we were putting together a South Africa trip for February, but that’s almost certainly off the table. So it’s good we got Australia done now, as we may not have had the stomach for it in the future (although Sam’s already hinting we should go back for Melbourne and Tasmania at some point….).
