Terra Incognita Australis Post XII: Leaving OZ

Far too many things in life are over as soon as they begin: childhood, high school, college, weddings, The Lord of the Rings, and long-expected travel. Like a man with no memory, we're saying good-bye just after saying hello. When you consider how much energy is expended just getting ready for a major event or journey--the time, the money, the planning--it's hard not to be somewhat let-down by the result itself. These things always end with a pang of disappointment. The question is whether we are looking forward to what comes next or desperately clawing at what lies behind like a man falling off a sandy cliff.

Leaving Australia, I felt more of the latter.
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Of course, it was a sunny morning. Projected high for the day: 80ºF (85ºF more likely). There was talk that rain could roll in, but it didn't seem likely. My hosts and I took the labs for one last walk up to the dog park. Amazingly, it all felt so natural. Yet, without doubt, it was completely unnatural. As much as Killara felt like Northern Virginia, I had to keep reminding myself that I was actually on the other side of the world...upside down.
After being dropped off at the airport by my amazing hosts, I realized that I was running a little behind on schedule. Thankfully, I had checked in ahead of time online; easily one of the greatest inventions since movable type. Especially so when it seems that at least two families of nine people in which one person speaks anything remotely resembling English would like to check two overweight bags per person. One guy bizarrely insisted on remaining away from the check-in counter somewhere over near the entrance of the airport. His parents--entirely confused--kept letting people pass their entourage in line. When "mystery man" would return he would proceed to rail at them in Arabic and then at his wife in English for not continuing to advance in line without him. Weird.
Thanks to hauling some major butt I managed to make it to the gate in time to get a little snack before boarding. Already it was about 3:15pm (Sydney time). I was taking the time, it being Sunday, to reflect on the trip, write a few blog posts that you all of course will have already read, and to edit my photos. I also was dealing with an important issue (one that would come back to haunt me): when was I going to sleep? What seemed to work best for me on the way to Australia was staying up when it suited, eating at local time, and then sleeping at a sensible local time. I planned to do this again, but the fallacy of this plan would stay with me for the next two weeks for one simple reason: Sydney is 11 hours ahead of London. More on that later.

As I boarded the plane, I took my place next to the window (why did I tell the travel agent that, at 6'3" I prefer the window? It's like that scene in Point Break where Patrick Swayze has a cataclysmic brain-fart and decides to go for the vault, which the Dead Presidents never do because they're too smart for that. Okay, it's nothing like that but you get me). I started to feel the gut wrenching tug of this amazing country. Everyone told me that I was foolish for taking such a short amount of time, and, at this point, I realized how absolutely right they all were. My mind raced with all kinds of thoughts and questions: what if I never get back? what if fires destroy Melbourne? what if I am unable to move my legs when I get to Singapore? I was so involved in reading and ruminating that I hadn't realized that we had left the gate and were beginning what seemed like the longest taxi in the world. It's a little known fact that planes leaving Sydney actually take off from Brisbane. I'm just kidding.

I looked out the window and was shocked to see the Harbour, right there. My mouth dropped open on the spot. Here again, up to the last moment, was Australia making something that is completely unremarkable everywhere else in the world a sight to behold. A golden, antipodean sunset glinting off the wings of a beautiful new airplane while taxiing past the greatest open-water port in the world. Then, as if scripted, a fishing boat--the kind we usually see on the Chesapeake Bay--came racing alongside the plane at full clip; it could barely keep up. A small girl was waving good bye to us, strangers all, from the bow while her dad fought to keep the boat outside the markers. To me, her name was Australia. It is a moment that I will never, ever forget. No other, and I mean no other, country in the world. Period. We reached the end of the taxiway and swung away as Australia raced off into the sunset, water, and red haze.

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Regarding my plan to beat jet lag, my thought was,
"Well, when I leave Sydney I will arrive in Singapore at 9pm. So I will stay up until the plane takes off at 11:30pm and then go to sleep."
That all seems sensible, right? Of course, until I set my watch to London time. Now 11:30pm becomes 3:30pm.
"No problem," I thought. "Since it's a 13+ hour flight I can just stay up the next five hours and then go to sleep at 8-9pm, GMT and get some reasonable rest."
Now, those of you playing the home game will have realized what failed to occur to me. I woke up at 8am, Sydney time. If I stayed up until 9pm, GMT, that's 8am Sydney time. The other thing--that did not escape you avid travellers--is that this is assuming that I get to sleep.

I didn't. On every other flight we had "Parents of the Year" (or PoYs, as I will now call them). When their little ones would start crying, they would get up, give them a pat on the back and take them for a little walk round the aisles. Brilliant. Worked a charm. On this flight though, we had the anti-PoYs. Their infant was screaming (and I mean SCREAMING) the whole way to London. Yikes. No sleep for Will and a 6am (5pm Sydney) landing was interesting. By this point I was so jet-lagged and backwards, running on years of my life and the folly of youth, that I decided to stay up until that evening. J will admit that by the time 5pm (4am Sydney, 2-days later!) I was falling asleep standing up. All told, I went to bed at 7:30pm, Monday in London (6:30am, Tuesday in Sydney). I had stayed up for 46.5 hours. I am never doing that again.

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As an epilogue, it would be impossible to thank all the people who made this entire adventure possible. It was everything that I had hoped for from the moment that I took up a studentship funded by an Australian governmental organization. The things that I learned, saw, and experienced will stay with me as long as I live. I know I have said that a lot throughout this series of blog posts, but it is not hyperbole.

I titled this running journal "Terra Incognita Australis" as a corruption of Terra Australis Incognita; "unknown southern land" in Latin, the name given to the posited but undiscovered land that most cartographers assumed must exist south of Asia prior to the discovery of what is now Australia. I did so to emphasize my own ignorance of the place and how, to me, it really was an unknown. It is no more.

As a vain attempt at a summary, here are my final thoughts on Australia:

1) It's big

2) It's hot

3) It's still really far away (from everywhere)

4) It is the most wonderful place on Earth.

Every day of my life will be one that takes me further from this first meeting, and hopefully closer to the next one with this incredible country.