Australia

We made it home. After 3 flights in 3 days and over 21 hours of total flight time, we are back in the US of A. Bless anyone living full time in Australia. The country itself is great, but trying to get anywhere else with that as your home base takes some next-level dedication to travel. 

Japan to Australia

I'll confess to being fairly poor at geography. Part of this is a lack of natural skill; the other is cultivated through a lack of desire to improve. Even from the time I started driving, GPS had become prolific enough that I saw little benefit in the seemingly gargantuan effort it took to pay attention to where I was going. 

Most of the world's attention is focused on east versus west, be it: time zones, cultures, or alliances amongst nations, more attention gets paid to longitude than latitude. This is all a pontificatory way of saying I didn't realize just how far south Australia was from Japan. An excruciating Qantas flight ensured I will never forget.

Visiting Australia wasn't a part of our original itinerary when we begun planning this trip. All we had really set out to do was visit Japan. After noodling on the calendar a bit, I saw that the Australian Open was beginning roughly a week after we had planned to return home. It's a bucket-list item for us to attend all 4 major tennis tournaments (2 down, 2 to go). Given that, you can begin to see how a roughly 2-week trip snowballed into 4.

Melbourne Park

The Aussie Open takes place in Melbourne Park - a huge park in the middle of the city containing everything from botanical gardens, national monuments, and even a cricket stadium. We ignored all of these. I came there with one goal and that was to soak up as much tennis as possible. I'm sure Melbourne has many wonderful qualities, but if I'm there in mid-January, I'm never going to see them. 

The first and second rounds of the tournament took place in our time there, which is always a mixed bag. The atmosphere is incredible. You can walk around the premises and take in world-class players (most of whom you've never heard of) duking it out. The outside courts are often the most fun at these stages. Not only do you get closer to the action, compared to the larger stadiums, but the matches tend to be more competitive. It's fairly rare for a top 10 player to even drop a set in these earlier rounds. But at the end of the day, we attend these events to see the best in the world, and we did just that. 

Diversity

One thing that surprised me personally was the diversity in Australia. Tennis is an international sport, so it makes sense for its spectators to be multicultural, but it seemed every match we saw had a loyal and vocal contingent for their flag. During one night match, we were watching Australia's top player in their biggest arena. Understandably, the local crowd was cheering on their man, but that didn't hold a candle to the noise we heard coming from court 3. Turns out a Colombian underdog was in the process of upsetting a seeded Greek player. The energy from both sides was electric. Makes me want to attend a World Cup match someday. Compared to Wimbledon, the Australian Open was way less white*.

*If you don't understand why that's funny, google the Wimbledon dress code.

Sydney

Since we had made the trek down under, we figured we'd spend at least one day in Sydney. I admittedly knew next to nothing about the city. I knew the Opera House, that address from Finding Nemo, and...that's about it. Saachi booked us a boat tour where we got to see some wonderful angles of the Opera House, the Sydney Harbor bridge, and even the coastal office building that inspired the famous Nemo address. It was also on this tour that we noticed folks walking on the top of the Sydney Harbor bridge. A quick search showed that there were still a few slots left for climbs that afternoon. Adventure thy name is me.

Climbing the bridge is not for the faint of heart. 440 feet at its peak, my knees were wobbling as we began our ascent. Surprisingly, the higher we got, the more I became acclimated to the height. Even to the point of me peering over the edge at one point, something I never thought I'd do. I guess at a certain point you simply accept that if something does go wrong, you're dead no matter what. But it's all perfectly safe. They even let you do the climb in high winds and rain, as we did.

Wrapping Up

At this point, the coffee's fading and the jetlag's taking back over, so I'm going to wrap it here. It's been such an incredible trip. One we'll never forget and I thank Saachi for the idea to record it as we went along. It's been great to document and reflect throughout the journey. One book I read during the trip was _Die With Zero_. In the book, the author speaks about a concept called "memory dividends". Effectively that when we experience things, we not only get to enjoy them in that moment, but they can also spark joy throughout our lives as we re-remember them. We've been incredibly fortunate to accrue countless dividends the last few weeks. We can't wait for the next ones.