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Out of the Blue
The passenger from hell
When a man goes berserk on board, what can a flight attendant do?
By Elliott Neal Hester
[08/17/99]

Malaria dreams
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[08/14/99]

Wanderlust
After Ed
With some help from Bali, I learned how to let go again.
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[08/13/99]

Travel Advisor
On location
Our expert steers you toward those famous movie settings you've always wanted to see, plus offers the lowdown on travel insurance, accessibility information and that elusive Dutch B&B.
By Donald D. Groff
[08/12/99]

Rendezvous of the sun and the moon
Our eclipse correspondent witnesses ancient treasures and a modern miracle in Iran.
By Jeff Greenwald
[08/11/99]

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The supreme Sydney experience ... is a walk on a brisk sunny morning around the headland called Mrs. Macquarie's Chair, through a complex of park and garden beside the harbor. Except only for Stanley Park in Vancouver, this seems to me the loveliest of all city parklands, but its loveliness is of a sly, deceptive kind. It is like a park in the mind. The grass is almost too vividly green, the trees look curiously artificial, parakeets squawk viciously at each other in the shrubbery. The shifting scene around you, as you walk the park's perimeter, seems more ideal than actual -- water everywhere, and those gray warships at their quays, and glimpses of Riviera-like settlements all around, and a sham castle in a garden, and the inescapable passing of the ferries.

And slyest of all is the prospect as you round the point itself, where the families are spreading their picnic on the grass, and a solitary ibis is burrowing for edibles in a rubbish can; for there suddenly like an aery fantasy the Sydney Opera House, most peculiar of architectural masterpieces, spreads its white wings in the sunshine, light as some unsuspected waterbird, with the massive old harbor bridge, a beast to its insubstantial beauty, all brutal heft above.

And here is how, later in the essay, she moves from an encounter in an elevator to the heart of the continent itself:

After lunch one day (Warm Salad, believe it or not, with Chicken Liver) I met Kev in the elevator, with three of his friends from the office. They stood there in silence, sometimes shifting on their feet. "I've just eaten," I ventured for conversation's sake, "a plate of Warm Salad," but it did not make them smile. They looked at me anxiously, trying hard to think of a reply. "Good," managed Kev at last, and with relief, murmuring polite and embarrassed excuses, they left me at the 17th floor.

Away to the west of Sydney, over a long innocuous hinterland of suburbs, neither ugly nor beautiful, neither poor nor rich, with Lebanese laundries, and pubs with names like Gladstone Arms or the Lord Nelson, and ladies in flowered housecoats exercising their dogs at lunchtime, and pizza houses with blown-up pictures of Vesuvius behind their counters, and streets called Myrtle Street and Merryland Road -- out there beyond the western suburbs you can see the outline of the Blue Mountains. Snow falls up there sometimes, and log fires burn in resort hotels: and beyond them again, beyond Orange and Dubbo, there begins the almost unimaginable emptiness of Australia, extending mile after mile after mile of scrub, waste and desert into the infinite never-never of the aborigines. Nearly all Australia is empty. Emptiness is part of the Australian state of things, and it reaches out of that wilderness deep into the heart of Sydney itself, giving a hauntingly absent sense to the city, and restraining the responses of advertising executives in elevators.

Finally, to frame the piece and give it a fulfilling circularity, this is how she ends her Sydney portrait:

I have been at pains to draw the warts of Sydney in, but on the whole, I have to say, few cities on earth have arrived at so agreeable a fulfillment. Those old Hungarians are right -- they are very lucky people, whose fates have washed them up upon this brave and generally decent shore. But just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no city is a paragon to its inhabitants, especially at the end of a hard day in the office, and by 5:30 Kev's morning euphoria has long worn off. The ferries down there are jammed to the gunwales with commuters. The bridge looks solid with traffic. It is drizzling again. Bugger it, Kev remembers, tonight's the night for Andrew and Marge -- avocados again, you can bet your life, and they'll probably bring that snotty brat Dominic to crawl around the table. "Night, Mr. Evans." Night Avrie, silly cow. "Night Kev." Night Jim, you pot-bellied Ocker. "Just before you go, Kev, heard this one? There's this New Zealander...."

Jeez this rain is miserable. Get out of the road, you silly sod. Christ, who dreamed up that Opera House? (We all know who paid for it, don't we.) Avocado and prawns, you can bet your life. What was that woman on about in the elevator? Warm Salad! Shit! Look at that traffic! Look at that madman in the Fairmont! Who'd live in a town like this, I ask you. Warm Salad! We must all be bloody loonies ...

"Kev, Kev, is that you? Marge and Andrew are here, dear, and they've brought little Dominic with them."

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