So last year Rachael, the wife, said “Let’s go to Australia to see Sharon and Johnno.” OK, I said. Now, bear in mind she wants to do as much travelling as possible while we can, because let’s face it, none of us are getting any younger. I won’t tell you how old I am, but there are a few years between us and she’s a little further north in age than me, so travelling long haul now while we’re relatively young(ish) isn’t such a bad idea! Besides, Sharon, one of Rachael’s besties, has come over to see us several times in the 30+ years since she moved to Australia, so it’s only right we paid a return visit.
Now, when I was told it would be over 24 hours of travelling door to door, I was like, yeah, so what? I’ve done long haul a few times and I enjoy sitting on a plane with access to all the movies and documentaries I can binge on, without worrying about sitting next to someone who won’t share the armrest or snores in their sleep. And no, I’m not talking about the wife… well, not strictly, but you take the rough with the smooth, right? Anyway, the wife decided we’d go Premium Economy on this long haul, and it was great. Probably not as good as business or first class, but at least it was just the two of us sharing the armrest, and the snoring was bearable (although probably not for her 🙂 ).
This time I went for documentaries and got hooked on an Aussie documentary series about the brain: four hours binge-watching two decades of brain research, and boy was it fascinating. The brain is the one organ in the body (a blobby, jelly one at that) that does nothing but receive information and return it in a way that’s uniquely your own perception and reality. It almost puts reality into question. Think about that for a second. It’s a blobby organ in your head that processes and transforms information into sight, smell, sound, touch and taste, and it does it differently for each and every one of us.
Let me give you one example. The documentary featured a study on a person who’d been blind from birth. Having lost one of those senses, sight, they’d developed their own perception of the world through sound, clicking with their tongue and listening to the echoes to build a three-dimensional picture of their surroundings. The documentary showed how, when technology translated that into a 3D image for the rest of us, it was wildly similar to what a sighted person would see. Honestly, it was a fascinating 4 x 1 hour series delving into reality, mindset, health and happiness, and I highly recommend it. It also put me on to something called the BRAIN Initiative. Anyway, I digress. Back to 24 hours of travelling.
Obviously our circadian clock was thrown totally out of the window. Jet lag! We left London at 9am on a Sunday morning and arrived in Brisbane at 7pm on Monday evening, with a four-hour layover at Singapore Changi Airport. Changi is an incredibly hi-tech place, with robot mops and self-driving wheelchairs, some of them empty and just wandering around the airport waiting for someone to transport. If you got in the way of one it would politely say “Excuse me, thank you”, which was kind of sweet but mind-boggling at the same time.
Now, back to the travel time. Look at the clocks and it seems like 33 hours, but Brisbane is ten hours ahead of the UK, so it was really about 23 hours of planes and airports. Fly east and you lose those hours chasing the sunrise, fly west and you get them back, which is how my weirdly visual mind makes sense of it anyway!
To cut a long story short, we’re on day three of jet lag, where day and night are the same and the body clock is properly screwed up! You wake up early and want to go to bed in the middle of the afternoon. It hit harder than we expected, but luckily we’d already planned a pretty non-existent itinerary for the first week. It’s all about not planning much, napping and resting when your body tells you to, and eating when you’re hungry!
So on day two we decided to go to the beach. We’re staying on the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane, where the sun rises out of the Pacific Ocean in the morning. We’d been to Costa Rica some years ago and watched the sun set over the Pacific (I’m such a nerd when it comes to celestial movements), and from that side of the ocean it happens at the end of the day. From this side it’s the start of the day, so my plan is to get up early one morning, maybe tomorrow, and watch the sun rise. With my body clock way off at the moment it’s completely doable, as I’m waking up at 3am anyway. Sunrise is just before 5am at the moment, with first light about half an hour earlier, so by my calculations leaving around 4:10am should get me to the beach in time for the whole show. From where we’re staying it’s a 17-minute walk, so all good.
Anyway, for now we enjoyed a morning on the beach at 9:30am: miles of golden sand, plenty of surf and a warm breeze. Australia is heading into spring, which is pretty much like a good summer for us in the UK. Granted, we’ve had much hotter summers recently, but I think you get me if you’re from the UK!
So enjoy today’s walk along the Sunshine Coast. Shortly after this we went for lunch at Bocca Italian at Bokarina Beach, a little taste of Italy right on the Sunshine Coast, where we had Polpette (mini meatballs in tomato sauce) and Pizzette al tartufo (baked pizzette with truffled Parmesan fondue and garlic butter).
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