Thanks to having changed my ticket time I didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn on 20th March. I offered profuse thanks to Roz and my adoptive “Kiwi family” and caught the bus to the airport. At nearly 4 hours, the flight was much longer than I expected – New Zealand and Australia look so close on a globe, but they aren’t! To make the flight seem even longer there was no in-flight film.
I was hungry and managed to get served 2 meals by the sympathetic flight attendant. Finally descending into Sydney, and emerging from the clouds, I was able to see something of Australia for the first time.
My friend Alex in the UK has kindly put me in contact with her sister Liz and brother-in-law Rick, who live just outside Sydney, and it sounds like I may be able to stay with them. Accordingly, on arrival at the airport I rang the number, but there was no answer.
I got a bus to the centre of Sydney and went to the post office where I was handed 4 letters at the poste restante desk. One of them was from a Bruneian friend who I met in 1989 when working in Brunei. I’ve been wondering about taking a flight over to Brunei when reaching Singapore, to visit her and another 2 friends. In her letter, Sabariah is more or less insisting that I do that, so this will likely be the plan. We shall see. The other 3 letters where from my “big 3” – the people who have managed to get a letter to me at every post restante office – Ben, Nicki, and Jenny.
I had arranged for a wire transfer of $1000 to a bank in Sydney for me to collect, and after a lot of bureaucracy I was able to get my hands on this. Then I went down to the Opera House, just to prove that I really was in Sydney! However after one photo my camera made a horrible grinding noise and I could no longer wind the film on. I decided to try to fix it later.
I headed to Kings Cross to find backpackers lodgings. A travel agency offered a shared travellers’ apartment for 15 USD which sounded reasonable, and a German girl took me there. It was actually quite luxurious – a step up from a backpacker’s hostel. The other residents were friendly and kept me talking and drinking beer until 2 am.
Before turning in, I had a go at fixing my camera but had no luck. In the darkness, under the blankets, I opened the back and removed the film, rewinding it manually, so at least I won’t lose the photos I’ve taken recently.
Yes, the Tasman Sea is a long way.
Before he did anything of note sailing, Francis Chichester did a lot of flying, including (among other adventures) the first solo East to West flight across the Tasman Sea in a Gipsy Moth fitted with floats. Not non-stop, he did it in 3 hops, including a MUCH longer than planned stopover on an island after the aircraft was wrecked while moored in an overnight storm and he had to have parts shipped out to him to largely rebuild it before flying on.
One of the big problems he had was finding the small islands he needed to stop at en route. Hence why he became a pioneer in developing new techniques in aviation navigation. Just a sextant, pencil and paper; no autopilot and a plane that was hardly a rock steady platform for taking sun sights – apparently he practiced taking sights with a sextant while riding a bicycle. Miss the tiny dot in the ocean and he’d have run out of fuel and become another aviation statistic.
See his autobiography, The Lonely Sea and the Sky; also Alone over the Tasman Sea.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Chichester.