Sarah and I had spent New Year's Eve in Bangkok. We celebrated with a table of young Thai college students who generously shared their sparklers and their popcorn. The fireworks display was OK, nothing great, but it kept alive our tradition of countries throwing us big parties just before we leave. Australia had the massive fireworks at Closing Ceremonies the night before we left in October, and Yangshou had some impressive fireworks for a festival just before we left China.

On January 1st we rested in the sun in Bangkok, and on January 2nd we took a nearly empty flight to Sydney, landing at about 9 PM.

Our first wave of culture shock hit when we walked out of the customs area in the Sydney Airport. Where were all the touts? No one was trying to sell us a taxi ride or lure us to their guesthouse? We walked through the terminal, and no one paid us much attention.

The next shocker came when we tried to find a place to sleep. In Asia, the golden rule of lodging is never to book ahead. If you do, you will invariably pay too much or get stuck in a room you don't like. There is a vast over-supply of nice rooms in almost every town in Asia, so your best bet is to go to a guesthouse when you arrive, look at the room, maybe bargain a bit, and if you don't like what you hear or see just head to the guesthouse next door. It's simple, and best of all it leaves you totally flexible to head off to whatever town you choose at any time without really worrying about where you will spend the night.

I pulled out my guidebook and started calling hostels all over Sydney. Full. All of them. Turns out January is the summer holiday month here and with the Australian dollar doing so poorly (the locals call it the "Australian Peso") the whole country decided to take their vacation in-country instead of over-seas. Everything was full. As a last resort we went to the tourist information booth and asked them to book us a room. The lady asked what price range we wanted and I replied, "Oh, maybe $40." I tried to sound non-chalant. We had been spending $10 per night for the last three months, and as I threw the figure out it seemed an exhorbitant rate. But what the heck! We were tired, and why night splurge a little, right?

The lady behind the desk managed to maintain a straight face when she said that her cheapest room started at $85. Gulp. We pulled out the credit cards from the bottom of our packs where they had been lounging undisturbed for months.

We hopped a bus into town. It was strange to see individual houses with their own yards. We didn't see any motorbikes. We passed a bus that was almost empty.

After checking into our hotel, we marched straight to a restaurant and ordered the biggest, crispiest, freshest salads we could find. It was 11:30 at night and we sat there munching and crunching like dairy cows in a field of alfalfa. Uncooked, unpeeled vegetables are a big no-no in countries that do their food preparation in the same place as their food defecation (ie, the town river) so that feeling of cool crispy greenness was very unfamiliar but very welcome. Later, when we got back to the hotel room, I drank a glass of water poured straight from the tap, just because I could.

Our next day in Sydney was filled with errands. Reserving a car, buying maps and books, getting our Egyptian travel visas for the next leg of our trip. By late afternoon we had checked everything off our lists, so we rewarded ourselves for a job well done by going to Bondi beach. On the walk along the promenade, I saw a beggar laying asleep in the little nook of doorway. I realized that in all our travels through Asia, even through Laos and Cambodia, two of the poorest countries on earth, we hadn't seen a single homeless person sleeping in the street.

The next day was supposed to be a get-up-early-and-go kind of day, but thanks to Budget Rent A Car we didn't get the car until about 1:00. I find it a bit ironic that I've travelled all over backwater Asia, I've ridden on ill-designed Laotian speedboats, I've flown on airlines without computer systems, I've purchased tickets from small-town Chinese ladies who use abaci to add up the fare, I've travelled through all these third-world, irrational, backwards transportation systems, and yet the longest delays we have had on this trip have come not from them but from Budget Rent A Car, a modern, 21st century company. I have a confirmed reservation but they've given away all their cars, and so we wait. For hours. And it's happened to me not just once on this trip, but twice. At least when my uncomputerized Vietnamese guide tells me he will be waiting outside my hotel at 5:30 a.m., I know he will be there, confirmation number of not.

The drive out of Sydney took a while. Traffic was fine and there were actually very few suburbs by American standards, but I was driving ridiculously slow because I hadn't driven anything larger than a motorbike in four months, I had to continuously remind myself "left lane left lane left lane" and I kept turning on the windshield wipers.

Sarah and I didn't have an exact plan. We knew enough about Australia to know that it was an awfully big place. We also knew that we wanted to see some small towns, a bit of every-day Australia, not just from from tourist site to tourist site. With our limited time, this meant we would have to pick one part of the country and ignore the rest. It was a tough decision. Queenland -- the state that covers the Northeast part of the country -- is known for its rainforests, beaches, and The Great Barrier Reef, but because it is the rainy season up there now and because the climate is similar to what we've had in Asia, we decided to go elsewhere. North and western Australia are primarily desert, which isn't very welcoming in the dead of Summer. This left Southeast Australia.

We figured that we would follow the coast south from Sydney, then west to Melbourne. From there, we would drive on the The Great Ocean Road, Australia's version of the Big Sur, at which point we would either continue west towards Adelaide or turn back to Sydney.

The drive out of Sydney was beautiful. The road was a small two-lane thing, twisty and fun to drive. At times we were overlooking the coast, at other times we were several kilometers inland. We stopped a few times to look out over the water. Beach after empty beach were set dramatically up against the cliffs. We drove through a forest of scrubby trees, then entered gently rolling farmland. All the farms were neat and trim. It was like someone had picked up Wisconsin and dropped it down next to the Pacific Ocean.

We decided we would spend the night in Ulladulla for no other reason than we liked the name. But when we pulled into town, "Sorry Mate, no rooms left. School holiday."

We checked with every hotel in Ulladulla, but they were all full. No vacancies. We kept going (it was getting dark now) and rounded a bend to see a shimmering halo of neon: Vacancy. I gunned the engine and we screeched up to the door. It was an older motel, unimpressive but clean. We rang the little bell and the owner soon appeared. With pleading looks we asked if he had a room and we were overjoyed to hear that he'd just had a cancellation, so one was available! But when he told us the rate - $125 - our hearts sank. Even though we were desparate, we couldn't justify it. Our frame of reference was still set to "Asia." $125 there would buy us a week of island paradise. We just couldn't bring ourselves to spend the same amount on an Eisenhower era motor lodge.

Sarah and I have a motto for this trip, and it's one that has served us well so far. Our motto is: "It's All Siteseeing". The idea is, no matter what we're doing or how bad it gets, it's an experience we should feel lucky to have. If we take a wrong turn in Xi'an and spend hours walking through street looking for a musuem we never find, so what? Those are streets full of people we would never see back in Seattle. It's all new to us. It's all siteseeing.

But as I got back behind the wheel of the car and pulled out into the empty road, for the first time on this trip, the motto didn't help me put things in perspective. All I could think was, "This isn't siteseeing. This sucks!"

I have another motto that I keep in my metnal back pocket for such occassions: "That wasn't in the brochure." No one else seems to think it's funny, but it makes me giggle every time. The really good thing about this motto is that the worse the situation, the funnier it seems to me. For example, even when I was wracked with food poisoning, hugging the toilet in the middle of the night in Laos, it brought a smile to my puke-stained lips to think that some imagined travel agent somewhere who was assembling a glossy brochure of a luxurious trip around the world had deliberately omitted the photo of the stubbly faced guy with his head in the toilet.

But even this full-proof motto didn't cheer me up. Worst of all, because I was Australia now instead of Asia, I couldn't really catalog this episode in the "neat adventure" or "humorous anecdote" part of my brain, because it felt about as adventerous as someone not being able to find a Motel 6 along a freeway in Ohio. Not only did this suck, it sucked in a really boring way.

Sarah and I decided that at the next town we would do one of the following things: A) Find a hotel with a vacancy; B) Buy a tent and camp; C) Eat a big dinner and then try to sleep in our car.

We pulled into Bateman's Bay, 60 kilometers down the road, and drove by full motel after full motel. We looped out to the edge of town and back, but all were full. Time to move on to Plan B. We had seen a Woolworths sign as we drove into town, so we headed back towards that, hoping they might have a cheap tent for sale. By sheer luck, on one of the twisting roads that we got lost on trying to find Woolworths, we passed a motel with a vacancy! It was expensive and it was basic, but it had beds so we took it.

We set out to find a restaurant for dinner, but each place we went was packed full of vacationing Aussie families. Eventually we just plopped down at one and waited, and two hours later ate a mediocre dinner that did little to cheer us up. We went back to our lumpy twin beds and fell sound asleep.

This morning, as is so often the case, we woke up in better moods and with a brighter outlook on things to come. Change is always stressfull, and it was a mistake of mine to assume that the change of returning to Australia would be any less than the change of landing in Beijing. We just had to change the way we travelled. We pulled out our guidebooks and worked the phones, booked hostels for the days ahead. Some of the spontaneity of the Asian leg of our trip would be missing, but now we were in Australia and we would do it their way. No worries.

Back on the road, we were in good spirits. To our left was the ocean and straight ahead the Wisconsin hills. Our road cut through big swaths of eucaplyptus. Every few kilometers we passed "Kangaroo Crossing" signs. Things weren't quite perfect, because the only thing we could get on the radio is play-by-play crickett, and the only thing more boring than watching crickett is listening to it on the radio.

After a few hours we left the coast and turned inland. We dropped up over a line of hills, out of New South Wales and into Victoria. The land flattened into dry yellow ranchland. The spaces were big and wide open, but not quite as barren as I'd been lead to believe by all the Aussie talk of how empty their country is. But then again, I've driven through Saskatchewan so I have a pretty high threshold for soul-sucking emptiness.

Arriving in Melbourne felt like a homecoming. I was cloudy and cool and felt like it might rain at any moment. The downtown was an interesting mix of modern glass skyscrapers and old historic buildings. It was full of lively restaurants. This was Seattle. To be fair, a big part of this impression probably comes from the weather, and the fact that I was wearing my fleece for the first time in three months.

We dined out at a great restaraunt. I had a glass of Australian red wine and a T-bone steak that was 2 inches thick and so big it spilled off both ends of my plate. Dessert was tiramisu, my favorite. We ambled home with full stomachs, glowing with the wine and nipped comfortably by the cold. Oz was starting to look pretty good. I think we just needed some time to adjust to the tornado of change, and the dust was starting to settle and the colors were getting brighter.