Let's start with the four,
steely-eyed Cambodian men, desperately wanting to cave my head in with empty
beer bottles clutched tighly in their grips. Frankly, it wasn't in the spirit of Christmas, but seeing
as they were Buddhist and I am Jewish, perhaps the good ol' Xmas cheer didn't
apply. Given Cambodia's
torrid history, it is quite probable that these men had been kiddie killers in
their Khmer Rouge past, so when I tossed their beach table into the fire, I
might have stoked old passions of violence. The flames danced higher and higher, and things were
starting to get a little too hot for comfort.
The Christmas Eve party at
Utopia and The Tent on Sihanoukville's squeaky-white beach was rocking at Full
Power. By 3am, several hundred
travellers had consumed copious amounts of eggnog substitute (i.e. beer, vodka,
whiskey), the music rotated between new dance and that wonderful oxymoron of
old modern rock, and one more moron, myself, was getting a little too close to
the fire. I don't know where my
pyromaniac tendencies come from, but ever since I almost burnt down a friend's
house as a seven-year-old, I've had this fiery attraction to big flames. Adding alcohol to any flame is a
bad idea, so the dozen or so vodka-redbulls I had drunk was only asking for
trouble. After attempting to
firedance, including one spectacular maneuver involving putting out a flaming
stick on my rib-cage, the bonfire had gradually eaten through its logs and was
in risk of dying. I could not face
the prospect of the fire's demise, which would quickly end the party, so I
looked at the first thing around me that would burn, which happened to be a
wooden table. I didn't think
anyone would notice my deft lift-and-lurch of the furniture into the fire, even
when I picked up the kerosene bottle and poured enough lighter fluid on the
fire to create a fireball you could see from space.
'Now that's a FIRE!' I
screamed to general applause, which is quite possibly why I didn't hear or see
the Cambodian proprietors of the The Tent appear from the darkness with
bottles, hell-bent on revenge. I was quickly surrounded, but fortunately for me
The Tent's owner was a cute Australian named Belinda who preferred reason to
blood. I apologized for
being a complete dink, received a stern lecture in the value of property in a
poor country, the personal pride Cambodian's take in their establishments, and
why I'd probably be dead by now if she hadn't been around. We quickly got chatting
about opening beach bars, Cambodian corruption, dirty tricks by competitors,
music, my three sentences to finish, and by the time it was all done, even
Belinda agreed that the fire looked pretty cool. The Cambodians backed away, but kept their cold eyes
fixed on me all evening. A
few minutes later I was skinny dipping with friends under the stars in a warm
sea, and the incident was over. It was without doubt the best Christmas Eve
ever.
'You have no idea how close
you came to getting killed,' explained Belinda the following day, as I dropped
off a whack of new tunes to keep The Tent rocking in its post-Modern Gonzo
future. 'These guys wanted
to bottle your head in. In fact
they still do.'
With that being the case, I hopped on the back of the motorbike and told
the driver to hightail it up the beach where I could ponder my latest
near-death experience with a cold beer, gentle massage, and the sound of the
sea lapping up on the sand as gentle as a kitten laps milk.
Less than two days later, a
quad-bike ran me down on Sydney's infamous Bondi Beach. 'For chrissakes, you guys are LIFEguards,' I said, picking myself up from the sand and
disentangling my legs from the front axel. I was playing Frisbee with my back to the vehicle, and
I had just managed to make out the panic in the eyes of Sean the Frisbee
chucker when the bike slammed into my back. It had surfboards attached on either side and was
driven by two hunky lifeguards in red speedos. Near Death by Hasselhoff, it sounds like a cheap cologne. I was too shaken to get to the bottom of how exactly
they managed to pilot their rocketship into my bodily planet, but it probably
had to do with the fact that we were surrounded by dozens of tanned girls in an
assortment of make-believe bikinis.
Catching a Frisbee is difficult when you're trying to figure out if the
bevies of nearby blondes are actually wearing anything. Are those translucent straps real, or
merely a figment of my pervy imagination? The lifeguard was probably thinking the same thing,
which is why he drove straight into me.
Fortunately my injuries consisted of no more than a few bashes, quickly
anesthetized through the distraction of delicious voyeurism. You may as well call Bondi Beach
the blonde Copacabana.
I had left Sihanoukville,
Cambodia at 7am the previous day, bidding an emotional farewell to my old-new
friends, climbing on the back of a motorbike taxi, my backpack between the legs
of the driver. Four hours on
a bus, five hours waiting at Phnom Penh airport, two hours on a plane to Kuala
Lumpur, go through Malaysian customs, get my pack, go back through Malaysian
customs again, check-in for my flight to Sydney, no I don't have a visa for
Australia (I need a visa for Australia?), but the flight is leaving in 45 minutes, that's OK you can get it
downstairs, hello sir, Merry Xmas, don't worry we'll sort this out right away (wow,
I forgot how friendly and efficient Malaysians are), her hands are dancing on that keyboard and then she
tells me that her friend two terminals over thinks I'm cute (do I have to
leave?) and that's sorted and now
I'm on an eight hour flight with 20 movies and 100 TV shows on demand and I
don't want to sleep because I just want to watch them all. By the time we arrive, I've
caught up on CSI, the football premiership, the news, Wallace and Gromit, the
latest album releases, and the secrets of Cairo.
Welcome to Australia.
I had arrived just in time
for a family reunion of sorts; aunts and uncles and cousins, some of whom I had
never met, some of whom I had last seen fifteen years ago when I lived in South
Africa. Early morning clouds had
burned away to reveal a clear, blue sky. My cousin Lance drove me through
Sydney's eastern suburbs, past the beaches of Maroubra, Coogie and Bondi. I was deeply upset. Sydney is often compared to
Vancouver and Cape Town, and these three coastal cities are usually cited as
the three best cities in the world. Every time someone mentions Sydney in Vancouver,
I find myself getting on the defensive. 'But look at our mountains!' So driving past these gorgeous, packed sandy
beaches, the funky restaurants and bars, the winding streets along the dramatic
cliffs, I had to swallow a bitter pill of reality. Sydney is everything they say it is - absolutely
beautiful.
'Look, we pay for it,'
explains Gary, an old friend from high school who moved to Australia twelve
years ago. 'Sydney is not cheap,
but look at the quality of our lives, look at the weather!' It was another blue-sky
day, and any time anyone tries to trump Sydney with another city, Sydneysiders,
as they are known, have an ace up their sleeve. Weather.
Hot, dry, often. It's Rio
without the political, criminal and socio-political mayhem. It's Vancouver, a lot bigger with
better beaches and without the rain. I could go on but we just drove past some
girls who seem to be clad in bikinis made of guitar strings.
Australia is an island
posing as a country posing as a continent. There are only twenty million people, most of whom live by
the sea, and as the sixth largest country in the world, it is difficult to
imagine just how big and empty the land is. New South Wales has some six million people, and just
about every one of them seemed to be tanning on Bondi Beach. 'There was a fourteen-foot shark
sighted the other day, and I heard they had to pull about fifty thousand people
from the waters,' explains Lance. Even though the last fatal shark attack in
Sydney took place in the 1960's, I made a mental note to scan the horizons for
fins before dipping any toes in the warm Pacific. If the spiders don't get me first. The fact is, there are more
things that can kill you in Australia than anywhere else; spiders, snakes, sharks, gators,
the ozone-less sun, not to mention distracted
lifeguards. I narrowly avoided walking into a
monster black spider, swinging by its web in the cool, breezy night. 'Oh that's small,' says Lance,
taking a wide berth. But
with Australia's famous hole in its ozone, it's quite possible the critter was
radioactive.
The family barbie was warm
and delicious and if Sydney is not my home, it immediately felt like one. My great-aunt and uncle, neither of
whom I had ever met, invited me to stay in their lovely penthouse with a
fantastic view over the Eastern suburbs. With thousands of South Africans relocated in
Sydney, I was bumping into old friends I hadn't seen since high school in
Johannesburg. South Africa
were playing Australia in a five-day cricket test match, which is the
equivalent of a Canada-US ice-hockey series, and the whole sunny lifestyle left
me a little homesick, a perfect combination of my formative years in South
Africa and the last decade in Canada. Damn these colonial hangovers!
At the bars of Bondi, I saw
thousands of backpackers, hurting on $6 beers (that's more than SIX times what
I paid three days ago in Cambodia), sunburn and quasi-serious dress codes. I went for an all-day stroll into
the city, starting at Circular Quay, looking out on 'the most beautiful harbour
in the world.' I use quotes
because I've read that phrase so many times in the last few days, but I reserve
judgment until I've seen every harbour for myself. Turning the corner and seeing the Opera House gave me
a thrill, like witnessing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. It was the perfect
'here-I-am-on-the-other-side-of-the-world' moment. The Opera House took 15 years to build on the site of
an old tram garage, and the design was chosen from a competition of
entries. Unfortunately, the Danish
designer was a poor architect, so by the time the impressive cones were
finished, it was nearly one hundred million dollars over budget, taken a decade
longer than planned, and toppled at least one government from the resulting
scandal. Today, it is
Australia's most famous landmark, so I guess it was worth it in the end. Tourists were gawking on the steps, and
I had to wonder just how many of them had ever seen or enjoyed the opera. I don't. I even took a course of opera appreciation at university,
but it's still a lot of melodramatic screeching to my rock n'roll ears. A few steps away, some
aboriginals were playing the didgeridoo, painted in white stripes to the
delight of tourists. Like
Vancouver's First Nations, it is ironic how the defeated native populations of
the colonies have been forced into caricatures of themselves. Australia's aboriginal history is
full of horrific bloodshed, with entire tribes massacred in its early years,
pushed up north leaving states like New South Wales and Queensland relatively pearly
white. More on that later,
but it's worth noting that the aboriginal art on sale in the quaint shops of
The Rocks heritage district sells for a bucket.
I walked along the seawall
to the stunning Botanical Gardens, with its monstrously disfigured fig
trees. The view of the Opera
House and enormous Harbour Bridge demanded photo after photo. The ubiquitous Australian sticky fly
kept buzzing into my ears and nose, like fanatic cave explorers. Into the city, up George Street,
down Pitt, shops bustling, the epitome of modern civilization. It could have been downtown
Vancouver. Sushi was too
expensive (no, not Vancouver after all) so I attacked my first gourmet pies. Sundowners at the Opera House, the beers flow,
smartly-tartly dressed crowds.
A walk to Cockle Bay, which strikingly resembled the development along
the Burrard Inlet of Vancouver.
'The only way I can make
sense of this,' I tell Gary, 'is to compare it to Vancouver. They're practically
identical. You may have the
weather, but we have the seasons, the snow, the mountains, and also, a lot less
obnoxious Australians.' They're a loud and proud and jolly
lot, passionate about sport and beer, and these days, the evolution of their
culture. A few weeks ago, the
world saw rioting on the beaches of Sydney, as thousands of whites attacked men
of 'Lebanese descent' following the knifing of a Sydney lifeguard, who just may
have incited this racial conflict by running over a Lebanese guy with his
quad-bike because both of them were too busy staring at Sally from Bondi and
her bikini made of nothing. The
conflict blew up between gangs, but was politicized by Australia's extreme
right into an emigration issue and by Islamic fundamentalists into a religious
one. It was quickly squashed by thousands of coppers and a total crackdown, but
the tension between Sydney's rapidly growing Muslim population and locals is
boiling over. Like many other
parts of the world, the Muslim community's resistance to integration, coupled
with the unfortunate fundamentalism of a small minority, is causing havoc with
working-class whites, threatened by their own ignorance. Australians, for their part, have
a history of racial intolerance.
'What upsets me most,' says Gary, 'is the racist bullshit I was emailed
by people who should really know better.
We're all Australians, we're just going to have to learn to live with
each other.'
On a perfect blue sky day
with a cool breeze blowing in from the sea, it's hard to imagine anyone could
get upset about anything in this part of the world. Other than South Africa's miserable performance in the
Melbourne Test series. I've
got tickets to the match next week in Sydney, and then I have to get out of
here fast, before I forget where my home is.
The Apartment of Sol and
Miriam Ende
Coogie Bay, Sydney
30 December, 2005