Wednesday, May 3

The plane took off at 3 PM and landed an hour later in Darwin. The passport machine in Australia hated me but there was a human present. On the advice of the taxi lady, we took an Uber to our apartment hotel in the tourist heart of Darwin. As with all unattended hotels, getting in was a bit of a chore since Agoda had put my name wrong on the reservation, but a phone call brought an actual person to the front desk in a minute and it was all sorted immediately. We even got to do laundry in the included washer-dryer. It was a pretty luxurious apartment, but we were there for just the one night.

We went to Hanuman for dinner, as we had one night in 2012. It is still a great place, swarms of waiters sharing one brain and swooping down to deposit plates of this and that – the first dish was their signature oysters — and so to bed.

Thursday, May 4

The tourist street has no shortage of coffee and orange juice. But first, this interjection from another vacation. Remember Annika, last seen stranded at LAX due to inclement weather? Well, she made it to Guatemala, and El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and she writes:

“Ometepe Nicaragua is heaven though, I’ve been here for the past 3 weeks and joined a commune, fell in love with an Italian fire spinner and crashed 2 motorcycles “

Puts our tepid adventures into perspective, doesn’t it?

The flight from Darwin to Sydney passed over hours of desert watercourses. They have been filled up by a hurricane, and the patterns are outlined in dark green. I don’t suppose this view can be had often. When we got to Sydney, we were once again met by Elizabeth, who had invited us to stay at her house near Bondi, and we had dinner at her house, with her mother and her sister and her boyfriend, and Jazlyn. I guess you’d call her a “ward”, if this were a British novel, which Australia nearly is, a teenage girl with big ambitions and no family capable of helping her realize her dreams, so Elizabeth and Roxana are providing support.

Friday, May 5

Elizabeth and Roxana’s houses are surrounded by Banksia and visited by birds and they live a short walk from the beach, so we were fairly immersed in nature this morning. We walked north along a path past a couple of beaches, and rocky outcroppings between the beaches where people were fishing, and just NSW early fall idyll generally.

We met our friend Brendan for lunch. Brendan worked for Opcode. A small cafe nearby had takeout lunch on offer, and it was only a block and a half walk back to his house.

In the afternoon, we went to the new art museum which is devoted to Aboriginal art. One of the pieces there was by Jazlyn’s grandfather. She had never known of him, but some aggressive genealogy on the part of family members managed to get her and her brothers a visit to see him, only two weeks before he died.

I was impressed also at the museum, that the guards sometimes walk up to you to tell you the provenance of a piece, and not just that you’re standing too close to it. With art vandalism becoming as prevalent as it is, museums will become more like airports.

We watched the sun set behind the Sydney Opera House. That view has been Discovered. A Japanese tourist had a live cockatoo in a clear plastic bubble worn as a backpack.

Afterwards, dinner at a place near Elizabeth’s house, modern food.

Saturday, May 6

I woke up in the middle of the night and looked out to window to see if the Penumbral Lunar Eclipse was visible. Yes, I guess, with great contrast enhancement performed in the brain or Photoshop, as seen on the Internet. The earth’s shadow is fairly unnoticeable around the edges.

Elizabeth drove me to the airport and the passport machine didn’t work and I waited around and got on a plane to Fiji.

Dave spent another few hours in Sydney and boarded a plane to Honolulu. It arrived late, and missed the tight connection that Hawaiian Airlines had sold him, but they did find him another flight that got to San Francisco just as Annika did, and they were able to share an Uber up to the house.