Travel with Indigo

We flew into Sydney first and spent a week or so there seeing all the must-see sights. Our hotel, the Shangri-La, though recently redone in the manner of say a Hilton, had by far the finest vistas of any hotel in the city. From its upper floors, and especially from its club floor lounge, we could see the sunrise over the Pacific, the harbor entrance called the Heads, all of the eastern harbor, the iconic Opera House and Harbor Bridge, and most of the western harbor. Sydney is in my humble judgment one of the world’s finest cities and one of its most beautiful. It is a fabulous place to which I would gladly return often and where I could envision living. Business Week, in its annual list of the world’s best cities, ranks it number four (Melbourne is ranked eight, giving Australia two in the top ten. The highest ranked US city is Honolulu at twenty-eight.)

What makes the place so very special is its enormous and dazzling harbor, really more a huge fjord, with arms, bays, and inlets jutting from it in all directions. The shoreline rises steeply with the result that almost all housing has a fine view of the harbor and its active ferry and private boat traffic. The city’s CBD is easily and pleasantly walked, with parks large and small in profusion, and as you might expect the harbor front is everywhere tastefully developed. Crime is not really a matter of much concern.

While there we visited the renowned zoo where a private guide explained the habits of the bewildering array of strange creatures that inhabit the country. The cuddly koalas for example eat only the leaves of certain species of eucalyptus and sleep twenty hours a day. They sleep by wedging themselves into a fork in the limbs of the tree whose leaves they have been chomping on. More often than you might think they become dislodged and plummet to the ground usually far below thus becoming their own worst predator. This should not be surprising coming from an animal known to have an intellect not all that much higher than a clam. To their credit, however, they are also one of the few animals of this country that are not injurious or lethal to humans.

Kitty and Grant one night attended the equivalent of the Super Bowl of rugby, a wildly popular sport here, held in a stadium far larger than any in the NFL. I preferred watching the game on TV in a fine bar rather than from the bleachers amidst a raucous crowd. On a day when the winds blew over forty knots, we unwisely chartered a small sailboat and huddled together in chilly discomfort while the skipper coasted along some of the city’s elegant neighborhoods.  On other days we toured the various seaside neighborhoods including the famous Bondi beach, toured the Opera House and walked across the Harbor Bridge.

We boarded one day a small, single engine float plane and flew low and slow over the harbor, the Opera House, the Harbor Bridge, Rose Bay and other harbors and bays, to and along the coast, over Manly Beach, and north to Cottage Hill Inn. There the pilot landed on a saltwater, steep-sided lagoon, and docked at a fine restaurant where we had a leisurely lunch followed by a scenic return flight.

The center city has some wonderful nineteenth century, multi-level shopping centers loaded with stores selling every conceivable product you might want, all tastefully designed and spotlessly maintained. We wandered around Darling Harbor and through the sea life and wildlife exhibits there. It is in these that you begin to appreciate what a dangerous place Australia can be. Of the ten deadliest snakes in the world, seven are in Australia. It has two species of deadly jellyfish (jellyfish, mind you!), lethal spiders, a tiny blue octopus that is instant death, heaps of hungry sharks including the great white, shrubs, thorns and trees that can put a serious hurt on you, and of course those hyper aggressive salt water crocodiles who have an offshore range of ten miles.

Recently, a local guy checking his crab pots in a north Queensland river failed to return to his camp where wife and son awaited him. A search revealed his camera, sandals and a huge slide mark in the sand made by the 20-foot croc that got him. This was not an uncommon event. Often it’s campers in their tents or imprudent fishermen in small canoes who fall victim to the wily man eater. Beaches in northeast Australia have signs warning of both the jellyfish and the crocs. It’s odd and disconcerting to see miles of pristine beach washed by warm inviting sea in which nobody is swimming. Understandable though.

Before departing from Sydney, we drove an hour or so west into the Blue Mountains, which are not true mountains at all but actually more like low, rambling foothills. They get their name from the pale haze that lingers in their valleys said to be caused by the oil in the leaves of the predominant eucalyptus trees that blanket the area.  There we stayed a few nights at the venerable Lillienfel’s Resort Hotel from which we could gaze out over some of these wondrous pastel tinted valleys.

At a nearby tourist attraction, we rode a cable car down to a valley floor and there wandered around a maze of boardwalks set in a dense rainforest of enormous towering eucalyptus. What pure delight. So outsized were all the trees and plants that it seemed as if we were in a scene from Honey I Shrunk the Kids. The air was dank and cool, the winter sky obscured by the tree canopy high above. Here and there were boarded up coal mine entrances nearly undetectable among the giant fern leaves and dense shrubs. Helpful signs told us what specie of flora held our attention at that moment and a map kept us from getting lost among the boardwalks. What began as a most dubious exercise turned quickly into an afternoon of joyous discovery, one of those quirky things that happen to travelers now and again.

From Sydney, we flew to Melbourne, its arch competitor for national honors as best place to live. Following a six hour flight delay due to obstreperous labor unions, we arrived on a cold rainy overcast day, not uncommon in the winter months. In fact it’s not uncommon any time of year as the city is on the shore of The Great Southern Ocean. The next land mass south of here is Antarctica and it isn’t all that far away.

In Melbourne I made one of the more modest mistakes of my life canceling our rooms in the recommended but predictable 5-star hotel for a hipper (or so I thought) place in what was said to be a trendy neighborhood. Wrong! The combination of a bad hotel room and dismal weather colored our stay leaving me with an uncharitable though perhaps a touch erroneous impression of the city. It has a more diverse population than Sydney with lots of Greek-heritage inhabitants and the slightly dilapidated, two-story wood frame aspect of say Providence, Rhode Island. There are modern high-rise glamor buildings to be sure and an enormous casino but they seem out of place, carbuncles on the landscape. It has none of the visual appeal of Sydney.

Intertwined through the CBD are bafflements of pedestrian alleyways lined with tiny eateries, specialized foods vendors, and off-beat shops most no larger than a generous walk-in closet. Aromas of exotic foods waft through these confining spaces hurly-burly with lunch crowds and bewildered tourists.

Our tour guide took us to see the most important landmarks and parks and public spaces, all more or less obligatory for the first time tourist. For comic relief he also took us to the flame opal shop of a picaresque outback character.  Flame opals are semi-precious stones found only in Australia. Some are quite striking and shops selling them litter the retail landscape of every Aussie city. This shop owner started out many years ago in the remote and desolate fly blown town of Coober Pedy as a flame opal miner searching for the stones in deep, narrow shafts with only a head lamp and a hand pick. The town gets so hot in summer, up to 140 degrees routinely, that people there live underground to escape it. This gentleman, a delightfully engaging guy with the natural gifts of a con artist, quite wisely decided that his fortunes lay in the merchandising arena rather than in those claustrophobic mines. Now he is one of Melbourne’s leading and, it is said, least avaricious flame opal retailers.

Our planned stay in Melbourne at an end, we took a rental car and drove for four (or was it three?) days on The Great Ocean Road, a misnomer as only a small part of its length is actually on the water, the rest a long straight ribbon through vast cattle ranches and farms. On one of these we spotted our first, and as it would turn out our only, wild emu.  This giant, flightless, and extraordinarily fleet footed bird is, as with much else in Australia, of course dangerous to humans. Continuing along the way, we stopped overnight in various tiny seaside villages, none especially memorable.

Following directions from our Melbourne tour guide, we pulled off the highway, drove down a local residential street to an unassuming golf club whose fairways and parking areas were crowded with a large family of kangaroos. Loitering about innocently, and with the blank look of a stunned mullet (a wonderfully evocative piece of Aussie slang), these strange creatures barely noticed our arrival. Next day we observed a herd of roos hopping across a field like large brown fuzz balls on pogo sticks—boing boing— a sight so hilarious we broke out in spontaneous laughter. These animals are so numerous as to be pests and are a considerable road hazard, hopping unexpectedly in front of speeding vehicles.

Kangaroo steaks are available in many restaurants but the meat, with the consistency and flavor of an old door mat, is nearly inedible. They do have one useful role to play in Australia, however. A person of discerning, if unconventional, tastes can buy in some select tourist shops a fine beer opener with a handle made from a kangaroo scrotum. It’s a fun tool for the home bar sure to generate spirited commentary, especially when PETA-friendly guests drop by.

Again following the directions of our tour guide we managed to catch glimpses of koalas in the wild, though spotting comatose gray blobs high up in the limbs of a tree does not rank high in the wilderness experience. And there were lots of wallabies, the smaller cousin of the kangaroo and just as pestilential. We never saw a wombat. These are lumbering marsupials that resemble a small bear with stubby legs though one with the stout and unyielding anatomy of a tree stump. It is said that of all Australian animals vying to become the Road Kill Most Harmful to Vehicles the wombat is the hands down winner.

On the subject of peculiar animals, the national shield of Australia prominently features, not hard luck convicts as you might expect given the country’s history, but both the kangaroo and the emu. The reason for this, our guide patiently explained to me, is that these are the only two animals in Australia incapable of walking backwards. Though it was of anatomically moderate interest, I didn’t see why this peculiar handicap should qualify the beasts for iconographic immortality until he added, a bit peevishly noting my bewildered expression, “Don’t you see? They can only move forward just like the country.”  Oh, I get it. And the perfect motto to accompany the shield would be Git-R-Done.