Explore with Fran

Why it’s ok to feel down even in the Promised Land

This is a little bit different to my usual posts. My customary ruminations of life on the road. How I got there, and how long did it take? What I did on arrival. The weird and wonderful foods I’ve tasted. Who could forget the immediately unforgettable snake I had in Beijing? And my experiences as I delve into foreign cultures.

However, this is a rather more personal post. A side to the Yorkshire Expat that maybe you don’t always see. A side that perhaps not many people see would be a more accurate description. What life is really like for a new expat. When you up-sticks and travel to countries both near and far, but not your “home” country. However long you live in a new country, your home will always be the same. Will your heart ever migrate as well as your body? Well, that’s something I will write about in future posts.

The idea for this post came to me the other day as I was walking around Cremorne reserve, on the North Shore of Sydney. Every time I turned a corner on the path I was greeted with a world-class view. Genuine picture postcard stuff. And the deep, melancholic side of my nature wondered, where do you go from here. Not literally, but spiritually. In the UK, on dark, dank, miserable days, a picture of a sunny beach, or a boat filled harbour would immediately lift my flagging spirits. The thought of logging onto Expedia and booking a flight somewhere bathed in sunshine put me in a sunny disposition.

This got me thinking. When I have a down day, and they will inevitably come, what will it take to subsequently lift me out of the doldrums? A friend has suggested beef hula-hoops and a vigorous dance to Beyoncé. I remain to be convinced but bought the hula-hoops earlier and am just downloading the latest track from the big bootied beauty.

With migration, the brochure sells the dream. It doesn’t give instructions on how to live it. That part is down to the individual expat. And all of us will have different ways of approaching it and adapting. The need to become a social chameleon. Blend in to the new surroundings. Make friends. Find your favourite coffee shop, nearest bottle shop, best local Thai takeaway, amongst the multitude of choice. Which newspaper will you prefer to read, and importantly in Sydney, which rugby league team will you adopt. I think I have this one sorted, South Sydney Rabbitohs. And where are the best fish and chips? Another one I think I’ve nailed. They may not be Mr Chips of Whitby, but Doyle’s at Watson’s Bay run them a very close second.

Apartment hunting is another mystery. It’s something of a dark art in Sydney. You don’t find a few you fancy and then casually make appointments that suit you. Each of them has their own 15-minute “inspection slot” and everybody turns up to that. The other day, there were about 10 of us literally falling over each other as we attempted to view a 1-bedroom apartment. I have seen 4 (recent update, now 5) so far and, needless to say, the search continues.

As I draw the curtain on the first month of being away, and we move from winter into the first day of spring, some of the pieces are falling into place. I have my Aussie driving licence and am now registered with Medicare, the health service. But I still have lots of the jigsaw missing. Pieces that I may not find and slot into place for quite some time yet. But as I was told, change is a process, not an event. And big change is a bloody big process, so bear with me whilst I complete the puzzle.

‘Til the next time…

When people first heard what I was doing there was a mix of “are you mad” and “can’t you just fly across”? But this, my friends, misses the very essence of why I was doing it. It wasn’t the destination that was important. Although, plainly, that’s underselling Sydney. In my humble opinion one of the world’s greatest cities. What was important to me was the journey. What I’d experience whilst I was getting there.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

And, if truth be known, I was kind of compromising. Given that the actual epic train journeys on my list were the inimitable Trans-Siberian and also the Canadian Rocky Mountain train. So, 4 days would be a cinch. Wouldn’t it?

Having been dropped off and saying my goodbyes to Doug, I rolled out of East Perth train terminal at 11.55 on a Sunday morning. My first thought was, this carriage looks a little more crowded than I expected. My second thought was, damn, I have a seat mate. That said, the lady from Germany was nice enough and didn’t talk much. My ideal travel companion. She only piped up every now and then with very bizarre questions. I could deal with this.

A few facts about the train and the journey. For a start, the whole trip takes 65 hours, covering 4352kms. Leaving Perth every Sunday through winter and arriving at Sydney’s Central Station at 10.20am on a Wednesday. There are 41 carriages plus the locomotive engine. The symbol of the train is the wedge tail eagle, Australia’s largest, with a 2m wing span.

There is a range of services, the most expensive being the Platinum and Gold, where you have your own cabin and fold down beds. Having spent all my money on a business class flight to get here, I was in the more parsimonious Red service. Plain and simple, but fully reclining seats. With a shower and 2 toilets for the whole of this carriage. You did get provided with a towel though.

For food and drinks on board the Red service carriage, there was the Matilda café, open between 7am and 10pm serving hot meals, freshly made wraps and sandwiches, hot meals, hot and cold drinks and the all pervasive meat pies. Probably the most sought after item in the café though were the 2 power sockets. As the whole of the Red carriage didn’t have any, there was a fight to secure the opportunity to charge up the multitude of devices that we all seem to travel with.

I managed to somehow circumvent this by getting access to the Red Lounge, a place where you could pay $10 a day to be able to sit in large comfy seats and have access to unlimited power sockets. And I got access for free. One of the chaps working in the Matilda café recognised my Northern accent and told me his mum lived in Pontefract. We reminisced about the sweet factory and the locally produced Pontefract cakes. After that, I got free coffees and when I asked to buy a wristband giving me access to the lounge, he gave me one without charge. I certainly wasn’t complaining.

And the time passed ever so blissfully. How relaxing is train travel. Sat in your carriage, rocking across the Nullarbor Plain for endless hours. I was not even yet at night 2 and strangely don’t want the trip to end, what is that? A world within a world, without the constraints of daily life.

In the morning we hit Adelaide (south Australia) and my German friend left the train and was replaced by a lady going to Broken Hill (New South Wales to stay with her daughter and her family for 3 weeks. I was tempted to hide the “Cheesecake Factory” box that she said was for the grandchildren.

The day passed in a haze of reading and napping, and once dinner was served I had a final nights meal of Australian lamb and a couple of glasses of Riesling. Retiring to the carriage, and having dropped my seatmate off at Broken Hill, I now had 2 seats upon which I was able to spread out a little. I’d like to say I slept, but snoozed is probably a better description, waking to an early sunrise, and after a final few hours, rolling into Sydney Central Station.

The next stage of my adventure starts here.

After what must have been my shortest ever flight to Australia, all of circa 4 hours, I landed in Perth, Western Australia. It was rather novel, completing my obligatory landing card, to not be ticking the “tourist” box, rather, opting for the “migrating resident” that I had now become.

Greeted by a light afternoon rain, I hot footed it to the shuttle bus to make my way direct to Fremantle, known locally as Freo.

Freo is only some 30 mins away by train from Perth, but still some 4127 kms from Sydney on the opposite coast. An impressively maintained little town, replete with colonial buildings, it looks untouched for the last couple of hundred years. That said, I don’t think South Terrace would have been known as “Cappuccino Strip” way back then. A moniker that is richly deserved, judging by the amount of bloody fantastic coffee I had whilst there. Double shot anyone?

I was in Freo for 5 nights, having my own apartment some 10 minutes walk from the centre of town. From the moment I bought my Vegemite and Mac ‘n Cheese from Coles, I felt like a local. My first morning breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup and a flat white cemented this feeling.

My time in Freo flew by in a haze of some great experiences. Putting aside the famous Watson’s Bay chippy in Sydney, for me, some of the best fish and chips in Australia are to be found here in Western Australia. It wasn’t long before I found my way back to Cicerello’s (est. 1903) at the fish boat harbour. And what visit to fish boat harbour is complete without a cheeky visit to Little Creatures micro brewery? Sat in the late afternoon sun, sipping a chilled pint of cider, brewed on the premises. Did somebody say “promised land”?

One fine winters morning, a short train ride had me at Cottesloe Beach. More famous in the UK over the last few years for notoriety gained by shark attacks in the shallow waters off the beach. Safe to say, I didn’t venture into the water but I did have the whole beach to myself. I have to keep pinching myself to remind me that it really is winter. As you can see from the picture, not a bad winters day by anyone’s standards. With a golf course that overlooks the sea, one friend had suggested that I get myself some clubs, move to Cottesloe, and grow old. Not bad advice.

One full day of my visit to Freo was taken up by a visit to the mercurial Rottnest Island, home to the small, indigenous marsupials known as Quokkas. Rottnest is a short (if somewhat choppy) 30 min ferry ride away and is like a little oasis.

Hiring a bike for the day, the island is small enough to cycle the length and breadth, discovering amazing little beaches and coves. And that is exactly what I did. Freewheeling down long empty hills, Missy Higgins on the ipod and the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus. Boy, was I ever in Australia. And the Quokkas? Judge for yourself.

And 5 days later, I was once again packing my, rather oversized, North Face duffle bag and making my way to Perth by train. The beautiful city of Perth, Kings Park, and Uncle Doug awaits.

The most commonly heard question over the last 4 months, “are you all ready then?” The commonly heard response, “not really.”

I always knew that what would be, would be and the rest would sort itself out. And after the longest raft of leaving parties/goodbyes/drinks in living memory, my liver was just about ready on departure day, even if my head quite wasn’t.

And here we are, at the end of my first day on Australian soil as a resident. Feels very surreal to say it like that, out loud, but I suppose that’s what I now am. Arriving here on my one way ticket (granted, a very comfortable business class one way ticket) it takes some getting used to the fact I’m here to stay.

So, you will see, if you are paying attention, that it is now Saturday and I left home on Wednesday. That’s because I had a great 2 nights in Singapore. I snoozed, dozed, nodded and maybe even slept a little on the way there, arriving in the Lion city early on Thursday.

I have been to Singapore a few times before and it’s a city I really enjoy due to it’s contrast of being a modern city that is a little rough around the edges.

You have all the bars, clubs and restaurants gleaming on Clarke Quay, yet on the neighbouring edges you have Chinatown and Little India, adding a little Asian authenticity and grubbiness. One example of the modernity of the city is the “Singapore Flyer”, the world’s largest observation wheel, dwarfing the London Eye by some 40 meters. I took my first visit on this, enjoying views as close as the Formula1 track that circles it’s base, to vistas as far as the outer edges of the island.

A highlight for me of any visit to Singapore is the cuisine, and particularly the high quality north and south Indian food. Down on Boat Quay there are a few favourites of mine, most recently enjoying a very simple dish of chicken fresh from the Tandoor oven, served just with a garlic naan.

Such pleasure in ripping chunks of naan bread off, wrapping around a piece of succulent, tender, Tandoori chicken and washing down with an ice cold Tiger beer. And all at prices that don’t break the bank.

Day 2 had me doing a sightseeing trip of the city, with the obligatory visit to Raffles hotel, named after Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. First time visitors should go to the Long Bar and try the legendary Singapore Sling cocktail. I say first time visitors as it’s not a drink that you could afford to have on every visit to the Lion city.

The evening was wrapped up in a Balinese restaurant where I had Nasi Goreng, a dish I had quite forgotten how divine it is. I first sampled it whilst backpacking through Bali, it became a staple of my diet, not solely as a result of the taste, but the price suited my backpacker budget also.

With the stopover done, it was now time to pack the bags again and head off for one last plane journey, to Australia, the place I first visited in 1994 and kept returning to. There was something that just drew me back. Was it the alluring smell of the ubiquitous eucalyptus leaves? Was it the wet t-shirt competitions in Cairns? (come on, I was only 24). Or was it just a love of enjoying the great outdoors in an amazing climate?

And so, after a couple of years effort, permanent residency secured, it’s time to see if the country Down Under still has the same draw for me.

Till the next time.