No Time To See Sydney

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  Sydney, Australia
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Malaysian Airlines might be my favorite airlines of all time. When I booked the flight I asked for the cheapest and the travel agent said, "the cheapest is Malaysian Airlines. Are you sure you want that?" I was nonplussed. I had braved Norwegian Air forcing me to run across the tarmac in sub freezing weather in sight of the Russian border with a customs guy nearly accusing me of smuggling vodka in my water bottle. I had flown with RyanAir on a flight so cheap that they try to intimidate you into using their inflight gambling system. How bad could Malaysian Air be? They were excellent. Good food, comfy seats, and tons of movies, TV, and music on demand from personal video screens. We ended up watching too many movies instead of sleeping. Unfortunately it ended up being one of the worst flights I had taken. Let me explain something about travelling. Anytime you visit a new place you get introduced to new bacteria living in the food and water. Generally this bacteria is mostly harmless and causes no problems one you are used to it

Hungry Jack

. However getting used to it means spending a day or two very near a toilet. One doctor wrote that after spending two weeks in a new place nearly everyone will suffer from it. We had only been in Malaysia for one week and I was hoping to avoid the Traveller's Curse but it stuck at the worse possible time -- on an overnight international flight with a large stranger sitting in the aisle seat. I'm sure he was not happy at being woken up every hour so I could visit the bathroom but I'm sure he realized that I was even less happy about it. So that made it the worst flight of my life despite the wonderful video on demand.

When we arrived in Sydney we had some trouble with customs. They have a strict "no food" policy and we forget about a bag of mungbeans we had. They spotted it instantly on the xray and get very cross with us. Apparently mungbeans are an especially bad offense because they can sprout and grow and reproduce unlike the chewing gum we were also carrying. The customs guy had to get a supervisor to determine how much fine we were faced with or if they would just deport us. Fortunately they decided to just give us a warning and they entered Kim's name in a database for their most vile offenders. I imagine it contains arsonists, rapists, and bean importers.

On the bright side we had no problem finding Janine, our ride to Melbourne

Sunset

. We found her through the internet and agreed to split the fuel cost with her and provide her with company. After watching movies instead of sleeping on the plane I think we weren't good company and generally one of us was napping. Janine was really nice and we talked a lot about travelling and Australia. She offered to help us find our way around Melbourne but we didn't know our plans so she just pointed us to the nearest train station.

The drive to Melbourne was nice. The countryside was similar to Texas but instead of armadillos and deer the roadkill was wallabees and kangaroo. Kim got some experience driving in Australia (which she would need for all of the driving coming up). I didn't have my license with me so I didn't drive.

I always think of Sydney as the capital of Australia even thought it is really Canberra. I think this will be the only country of our entire trip that we don't visit the capital. That's extra strange given how much time we will spend here and how flexible we are (driving).

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