I love CouchSurfing. I have probably already said it, but I love CouchSurfing. For everything it brought to my trip – locals’ recommendations, discovering cultures from the inside, meeting great people, sharing joys and, most importantly, making amazing friends – I am eternally grateful, and in debt to all the CouchSurfers around the world. They will be most welcome at my place, when – or rather every time – I will be settled down somewhere.
Nevertheless, despite all the qualities of the CouchSurfing project, it does have one major drawback. It needs the Internet.
I am not talking about the problem of accessing the Internet, though. Travelers can find, nowadays, an access to the Internet – may it be a Wi-Fi hot-spot or a cybercafe – relatively easily (thank you McDonald’s and Burger King, aka Hungry Jack’s for our Australian friends); as for the hosts, it is obvious that CouchSurfing cannot expand to the regions of the world that are not reached by this powerful medium. This is something that will improve with time; and after all, on the other hand, it is sometimes a relief to find that you can be impossible to reach in some parts of this world. Yes. It is.
I am, actually, talking about the fact that CouchSurfing needs messages between the host and the surfer if they are to organize the latter’s stay. Such a conversation, obviously necessary, takes at least a week, if not several. Which means the traveler needs to know a week in advance where he is going. CouchSurfing is an amazing project, but it restrains the sheer freedom of travelers, especially those, like me, who are always on the move, always on the road, and only following the wind.
This is what I realized, the night before I reached Sydney, after a phone call to Kevin, a CouchSurfer that I thought would be able to host me when I would arrive there. In the silence of Newcastle’s train station, the fact that CouchSurfing was, after all, also a social act, implying social rules and roles, became all but too obvious to me.
After all, one of the reasons why I am traveling is to escape the constant demands of the society.
Maybe such a thing is impossible.
Kevin needed a few days before I could crash at his place (do not get me wrong – what I wrote above only concerned my own person, and I perfectly understand and respect peoples’ needs. Kevin was an amazing host and I am glad I have had the chance to meet him). I thus ended up looking for the “cheapest” hostel I could find at 2am in Central Sydney – nothing could really be called cheap in this city, but well. I ended up in the YHA of the Railway Square, built up on the former Platform n°0 of Sydney Central Station, sleeping in ancient night trains transformed into dorms. An incredible charisma and atmosphere for what is supposed to be an accommodation for backpackers. I found out later that this word has a different meaning in Australia.
After a good night of no sleep, I started my visit of the
The Royal Botanic Gardens, sumptuous haven of exotic (well, exotic for Western people… Let us say native) trees, plants and even animals, are situated right next to the Opera House. I thus decided to go through them before taking a walk in the streets of Sydney.
The Australia Day, celebrating the invasion of the Aboriginal’s country – would say the most fervent protesters, or the cynical; some others told me it was only an enormous excuse to get wasted – indeed came and I found myself surrounded by Australian flags. I mean, like, loads of people were proudly bearing a small Australian flag in the streets. Seriously.
I always wondered how people can possibly be proud of their country. How can someone feel proud about something he does not even know? I mean, alright, I understand how you can be proud of your village, if you know every inhabitant to be a great man or woman. But a country?! Does everyone, everything in your country deserve your pride? It is like claiming to the world: I am going to defend every single bad thing or person you find in my country, regardless of if I know it or not, because I know my country to be the best of all, regardless of if I know all the other countries or not.
Please. Being born in a country, or even living in it, does not mean you owe it such a thing. Make your own judgment.
Anyway. I chose to visit the Art Gallery of New South Wales during this day, instead of attending one of the countless concerts taking place in the city, the biggest of all having been sold out way before I had even arrived in Newcastle. It indeed had an exhibition I did not want to miss, displaying five of the famous Chinese terracotta warriors with incredible artifacts discovered in the same tombs. Unfortunately (for you), it was strictly forbidden to take pictures in there. Sorry.
I did end up sleeping at Kevin’s, but for a couple of nights only, at the end of my stay in Sydney. I hence only saw them a couple of times, him and his flatmate. I wished I had more time to spend with them; it was a gay ecological vegetarian household. Simply awesome.
I spend my last day in Sydney checking out the famous, rich, almost where-to-be-seen but still gorgeous Bondi Beach before taking a ferry to Manly and walking along the coast there.
I needed to continue on my trip – Bailey had already been waiting for my arrival long enough. However, Tim had told me I could not miss the Blue Mountains, a magnificent national park just west of Sydney; I hence decided to go over there just for one night, before heading towards Canberra, the official capital of Australia.
(Unfortunately. Had nobody had the brilliant idea to tell the Australian officials that a city built out of nowhere could not, in any case, have the life and the culture a real capital needs?)