Getting to Sydney was not easy. The most obvious, easiest and cheapest choice was to get to a small town called Kerang, then get a bus back to Albury, where we started our canoe trip, and then get the train to Sydney. Of course we didn't do that.

Instead, we tried to hitch from Barham. We both put on our huge! backpacks (we were packed for a canoe trip, not a backpacking trip) and had to carry a dry bag between us. It was painful. It took us half an hour to walk about 300 meters. Then we stood on the shadeless shoulder and waited. Several people nodded but none stopped.

After an hour, we decided to walk another k into the burgh of Kindrook, pop 600. We hoped to get less local traffic there. No luck. We ended up hiring a cab to take us to Cohuna, on the main highway. It cost $27, and we had to wait about 20 minutes while the cabbie drove one of his regulars to a bingo game.

Cohuna looked more promising. We sat under a tree this time, and figured we'd give it a go for about an hour. We waited and waited and no one stopped. Which amazed me. Usually someone stops, even if it's just to laugh at you. I was about to give up when a white car pulled over. It was Brandon, our buddy Jim's apprentice, on his way to a doctor's appointment in Echuca, about 60k away. It was right on our way. We hopped in.

Brandon is a totally decent guy. He told us all about his varicose veins and a local cop in Barham who is so gungho that she tried to arrest his band, Savage Element, for playing on the sidewalk in front of the bakery. The same cop also gave a drunk driving ticket to a guy who was on his way back home from fighting a fire--he was having a drink when he saw the fire, then he reported it and went out to help fight the fire. She nabbed him on the way home. Brandon couldn't believe her callousness. Aside from that, he said she was a nice "bird,"--young girl. "If she wasn't a cop I'd be chasing her," Brandon said. Well not really. Brandon has a girlfriend who is studying civil engineering. During this we almost met death. Brandon decided to pass a car around a blind bend. As soon as we poked out into the oncoming traffic lane, I saw another car coming right at us. I thought No Question, Brandon will swerve back. Instead, he slammed on the gas and punched us right around the truck and out of the way of the other car in about two seconds.

Just before that he had been complaining about how his car wasn't working. It was so fast I didn't have time to be terrified, except in retrospect (it was nothing like Katy's seemingly hour-long death-defying truck passing stunt on the way to Quetico last May).

Brandon brought us right into town, where Eric and I debated whether to try hitching the rest of the way--more than eight hours' drive. Brandon had said it would be no problem. We must be getting old. Hitching all that way just didn't appeal to either of us. We just wanted to beam into Sydney.

So we decided to get a bus-train connection to Sydney--of course it was the same bus we could have caught from Kerang earlier in the day (Kerang is about 27k from Barham). And had we booked the day before, it would have been a lot cheaper. We tried not to think about that. The bus and train ride was slow and generally awful.

We got into Sydney early the next morning. Eric had this idea that we should walk around and check out two or three neighborhoods before deciding where to stay. I couldn't imagine doing that since we both barely slept on the train. But we did. We checked our luggage and walked all over the place. It was a total blur.

We've been in Sydney since then. There's not much to tell. Sydney is the country's biggest city, with about 4 million people. It has a huge downtown and some lovely parks and a very nice wharf area. It has lots of museums that we were too cheap to visit. Right now some tall ships are in the harbor from Russia and Mexico; we toured those for free. Like Seattle and Auckland and Toronto and probably a million other cities, Sydney also has a space/observatory needle.

We ended up staying in a neighborhood called Darlinghurst--the gay neighborhood, with lots of young folks, and a pretty good strip of middle-priced gourmet restaurants. It's just about half a mile from King's Cross, the seedy neighborhood where the youth hostels are.

We spent five days puttering around the city, doing errands, and trying to find our bikes. That was a bummer. The guys in Albury were supposed to ship our bikes to an office here. We told them to take their time, since we didn't think we'd get to Sydney til February. When we arrived two weeks early, we called the bike shop.

They still had the bikes (drat! if we had known that, we could have ridden them from Albury, and saved ourselves a train fare, not to mention Sydney hotel rates of A$84 to A$110 a nite).

It was a Friday. We politely asked the bike shop to ship the bikes pronto. They said they'd try, but might not ship til Saturday.

We called again Monday morning and they still hadn't shipped the bikes. I went nuts. Every day in Sydney was sucking enough money out of our pockets to pay for a week in Indonesia. They finally did ship them mid-day Monday. If all goes as planned we'll pick them up tomorrow just before our flite takes off (guess how that will work out?).

Sydney didn't blow us away as a city, but that's partly because we were too tired to enjoy it. We just needed to stay in the same place for several days in a row, and relax. We got off to a bad start when we found Darlinghurst's cheapest motel (The City Crown on Crown), which came complete with rude clerks. One guy threw keys at us when I asked him what a room looked like. So we spent a little more to stay in a normal hotel, where people actually smiled at us.

We lazed. We slept in, watched tennis matches on TV, we ate banana pancakes, and we took siestas. Somehow we also did a million errands and visited some work mates of mine who I'd never met before. We found a great place in King's Cross that serves Sangria. And we saw a great play, The Present, about a young Aussie boy's sexual awakening.

Hopefully we'll be on a plane to Bali tomorrow.

next: Indonesia.

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