The Road Home

For my last day in Canberra, my brother took me to one of his favourite restaurants for dinner. The Hog’s Breath Café is located in the city centre and is more of a pub than a café. An added bonus would be the non-existence of hog’s breath, only beer breaths. On the night we attended, the ‘café’ was playing music to hide the emptiness of customers – I suppose we were part of the pre-dinner crowd. Being meat-eaters, Roman & I ordered tender juicy steaks to settle our growling stomachs. Now that I think about it, Roman & I consumed quite an amount of cows during this trip.

My trip back to Middle Earth would not start with an airplane but with a voyageur bus. For $42AUS, and after saying my goodbyes, I caught a two-hour bus trip to Sydney International Airport. (Seats are assigned unlike in North America). I slept for most of the trip but took several pictures of the exotic Australian outback when my eyes were open. The main colours are red, brown, green, and blotches of yellow. If NASA is faking the Mars rover landings then this would be the staging area. There are hills but the majority of the land I saw between Canberra & Sydney was flat – perfect for tank warfare.

I arrived at the airport twenty minutes later than scheduled but I still had three more hours to kill. The bus travelled the final leg of the trip via a very long underground tunnel, similar to Boston’s Big Dig project. If I were the mayor of Toronto, that’s what I would do to the Gardener Expressway – push it underground. After moving through check in & security, all there was to do was walk around the area, eat, and look at the departing planes before my flight was called. It happened to be raining in Sydney that day, but I was still able to see a Boeing 747, 767, and a colossal Airbus 380 (Singapore Airlines) take off into the grey abyss.

Catering to the obsessive Duty Free crowd, getting to your flight means walking through a large DF store that has enough stocked alcohol to put Boris Yeltsin’s private collection to shame. The only thing I was interested in was finding the most expensive item, which turned out to be a cognac set for $3200AUS. Now I know why the world is in a recession.

I flew directly to Christchurch via Air New Zealand and arrived at around 2300hrs. After picking up my suitcase & exchanging my AUS money for NZ, I exited the desolate terminal and caught an evening cab to Ilam Village, driven by a talkative Chinese Falun Gong follower. The following two weeks would be spent cleaning my dirty clothes, buying extra school supplies & clothes, and stocking up on grocery food. In the blink of an eye, the last two weeks of summer break would pass and classes would start once again.

Overall, my Down Under trip turned out quite well. I explored three main cities, snapped 292 digital pictures, ate some good food, drank great beers, flew on three Blue Virgins, and met interesting people along the way. I still marvel at Australia’s 50 cent coin – it’s huge! When I first saw it, I thought it was a coaster! If you’re planning a 2-week trip to the Outback, I recommend bringing $500AUS in spending money – just keep it under close supervision. Should the opportunity arise, I would definitely do it again because I still have yet to see a road train.

End of Australian Vacation series, the first post being Flight of the Kiwi.