MrGareth’s Missives

This weekend marks ten years since I first set foot down under, shortly after the Sydney Olympics and shortly before George Bush was elected President.

(Most of my initial "Ozervations" are documented here so I won't bore you with them now.)

But the landmark did lead me to consider what a different world it suddenly is.  We have the first black President in the US, the first female Prime Minister in Australia and a coalition between Tory and Lid-Dem in Britain - all situations frankly unthinkable ten years ago. England won the Rugby World Cup and the Ashes, twice, and Wales won a Grandslam, also twice.  All of those were fairly unthinkable ten years ago as well!  (England is still rubbish at football but somethings really never change.)

Speaking of unthinkable, today I can map myself to the square yard using my phone to talk to satellites who can find me in seconds.  I can go to a gig and publish video of it to thousands of people while I'm there - at the click of a few buttons.  I can pause live sport while I'm watching it, and if I can't watch it I can program my TV to record it from anywhere in the world.  You can even point your phone at a house and find out how many bedrooms it has and how much it is worth.   CIA agents in Langley, Virginia, can use remote control planes to shoot people in Yemen or Pakistan without getting up from their desks.

Six months before I came to Australia, I stood in the lobby of the World Trade Centre in New York, wondering if I could be bothered to queue up to visit the rooftop restaurant or leave it for my next visit.  It was quite unthinkable then that those two enormous towers wouldn't even be there anymore.

Ten years ago it was certainly unthinkable I'd still be here ten years later - afteral I only "popped in" for a couple of months to see some people I had met travelling, before flying on to tour South East Asia. I never made it.  By tthe end of the first week here I was researching visa options.  Sydney really is the most amazing city and I'm glad I'm still living in it.  The climate is so perfect you need install neither heating or air conditioning in your house.  The landscape is so beautiful and accessible - with stunning National parks to the North, West and South - there's never an excuse for being bored and with more than thirty first rate beaches to chose from - all within an hour's drive of where I live - it often seems a shame to go anywhere else for a holiday! 

After 9/11 and as one ill-advised war after another kicked off in the early half of the decade, terrorist threats seemed almost incessant: Jakarta, Bali, Madrid, London.  Sydney seemed a great place to come and hide from the world, seek sanctuary from a planet seemingly gone mad - like the book "On the Beach" predicts.  Then as the GFC hit in, and Australia miraculously dodged a bullet, it repised its epithet of Safe Harbour. There is always a sense that you're at the bottom of the world down here - but for most of the last ten years, thats been a good thing!

To celebrate the landmark I bought myself a Kayak!  I christened it this morning and realised that what it has done is open up the other half of Sydney to me to explore. The half that is water.  So much of Sydney is little bays, expansive waterways and pretty little harbour beaches not really accessible by road, or certainly not easily noticeable from the road.  So it seemed an appropriate present to buy myself to mark the decade.  Who knows if I'll be in here in another ten years, but the formula is still just as good as it was ten years ago!

I must confess that for the last four years i've been conducting a not-so-secret love affair with the city of San Francisco.  During annual visits for a conference, each year I've been lucky enough to take some time to explore a little.  Alcatraz one year, Sausalito another, Berkeley this year.  And every year I find an excuse to pop over to Haight Ashbury quickly (which seems to have become a spiritual home).  

It's a town that excites me tremendously, and with it now feeling really quite familiar, I can feel quite at home there.  In Muslim countries it is traditional to make guests feel more comfortable by telling them it's their "second home".  Well I don't need anyone to tell me that San Fran is mine.  But a good deal of the affection for the place has been a sense of it's almost twinning with my first home, Sydney town.  However, this year's visit revealed a more identical twin than that even: San Diego.

"It's apparently the most perfect harbour in the world" my friend told me, an epithet I'd also heard about Sydney.  It's assembled around a beautiful body of water just like Sydney (and San Francisco) and is "held together" by a beautiful bridge (again like Sydney). It's a working port with a large student population and a thriving CBD (San Francisco too). But from there on in, the similarities with SF diminish but with SD they continue in uncanny fashion.

The climate is remarkably similar.  I was blessed by a beautifully sunny weekend in the late Twenties/early thirties.  The summer peaks in the region of 40 degrees while the winter rarely dips below 10 degrees during the day and the sky is always blue. 

There are countless beaches, although i think Sydney has San Diego quite beaten in both quantity and quality (but then Sydney does have an embarrassment of riches in that department).  Sydney's Bondi is mirrored by Ocean Beach: a grungy, vibrant and groovy area with a terrific cluster of bars and apparently one of the best burgers in the US.  

On the northern side across the massive Coronado Bridge is Coronado which while not physically similar to Manly, fulfils a similar role as a laid-back get-away spot.  It's the home of the Hotel Del Coronado, famous for hosting Billie Wilder, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemon and Marilyn Monroe while they shot "Some Like It Hot" in it's grounds.

San Diego also shares with Sydney a passion for the art of fireworks, as this video - of the KGB sky show to celebrate 100 of radio I was lucky enough to attend at the Qualcomm stadium - demonstrates rather well.  (The sense of parallel made all the more profound by driving on the wrong side of the road and entering “fall” in one and spring in the other.)

It certainly felt like a parallel universe in so many ways, and I urge those of both cities to consider the other an attractive destination option for a glamorous holiday that while at first glance might appear merely "more of the same"; in actual fact delivers at once so many new experiences as well as a validation of the everyday ones.    After all, travel is as much about what you learn about your home as your destination.

[BTW: Many, many thanks to my gracious hosts - Simon, Launa, Matthew and Ryan - who ensured a delightfully relaxing and enjoyable excursion!]