Farscape tour of Sydney

My name is John Crichton, an astronaut. A radiation wave hit and I got shot through a wormhole. Now I'm lost in some distant part of the universe on a ship, a living ship, full of strange alien...

Oh no, wait - that's not my life, that's the Jim Henson Company's prematurely cancelled cult sci-fi drama Farscape. I'm not an astronaut, I'm just an aimless wanderer with too much time on his hands, looking for ways to fill his last few days in Sydney.

Hang on, wasn't Farscape filmed in Sydney? I smell another pointless and frustrating challenge!

Kind of green

I can't drive and I have no intention of learning to drive. I'm not interested in cars or the responsibility of owning and operating one. It's just another one of those quirks you'll have to accept about me, like how I'm not interested in settling down, having a relationship last longer than six months or spoiling my blog with ads to make a few pounds a year.

Still, there are times when having a car would be bloody convenient, especially when my plans for day trips end up lying some way off the train and bus networks. Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park and Berowra Valley both looked tempting and conquerable on Google Maps, lying on opposite sides of the rail line and Pacific Highway just to the north-east of Suburbia, but when you show up eagerly at a train station to be greeted by a sign informing you that the Berowra Valley trail begins 10 kilometres in a non-specific direction, you remember the lesson you thought you'd finally learned a long time ago - that Australia is big, and even on a local map nothing is as close as it appears.

But I persevered and managed to get at least an abridged introduction to both national parks, joining the Great North Walk at several intervals within reach of public transport and turning back after a couple of hours before the sun started to set and the 136 bus ceased its limited Sunday service, rather than heroically carrying on and risking spending the night in the open air if I didn't come across a town. If you're under the delusion that I'm some kind of thrill-seeking adventurer and not just someone trying to fill his days with nice visuals to accompany his audiobooks, I don't know what blog you think you've been reading for the last two years.

Rockin' the suburbs

I'm not sure how I'm rockin' them exactly, unless 'rockin'' means 'living in and walking around,' in which case I am a bloody rock god. If 'god' means someone who walks around for a few hours at a time trying to photograph elusive birds until he gets tired, a bit bored and sunburnt, so goes back to his comfortable room to watch QI (there must be some obscure religion, surely?)

I stayed in Sydney Suburbia for six weeks in the end, which has been plenty of time to get to know one specific area intimately, on days when I wasn't stubbornly insisting on extracting the maximum value for money from my travel pass by making six-hour round trips to see some slightly different cliffs. This month's blogs may get a little repetitive, sorry. I hope you like green.

What are we doing here?

You get a very different perspective on Australia if you cross the planet in stages and take your sweet time getting here. Flying from London to Sydney with a compulsory stopover in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur isn't enough to build an anthropogeographical map of the world and its people in your mind that can be utterly demolished when you land in this far-off country, inexplicably run by white people. What the hell are they doing here?

I've visited plenty of fallen colonies in the last couple of years, some of which have only shaken off the European influence relatively recently, but this is the first one I've been to where they stayed for keeps (I haven't discovered America yet). After working my way through East Asia and noticing subtle marks of ancient colonisation and migration - Chinese-hybrid Thais, Malaysia's migratory melting pot, the malleable Buddhist faith - it's very strange to head south and see white people where you'd expect people to be darker than that.

Admittedly, most of them are slightly tanned. And - get this - they only speak bloody English too! Or a close approximation anyway.

A month of Sydneys

I don't normally celebrate New Year, which gets the same attention from me as my birthday, Christmas and Ramadan. Despite spending my last three December 31sts in capital cities where they don't let the arbitrary turning of the Gregorian calendar pass by unnoticed (Edinburgh, Taipei, Seoul), I preferred to spend those pivotal hours like any other: on my computer, avoiding contact with revellers or just being asleep.

But when I ended up spending this New Year in Sydney, and was invited to see in the New Year from the best vantage point in the city and enjoy several hours of drinking in the park, sleeping through the event this time seemed a little disrespectful. And anyway, this might be most easterly (and earliest) New Year I'll ever have, which, combined with the equally redundant time zone system and the end of my month in Sydney, somehow resulted in a night worth celebrating. Happy Early New Year!

Oh yeah, I'm in Australia. Didn't I mention that? I should probably backtrack a little...