Skin Deep

This is my fourth visit to Sydney and I'm still not quite sold. The initial impact of the beauty can't sustain the place indefinitely, and when its effect wears off, I find myself feeling a little unfulfilled. Looking good, after all, is never enough on its own.

Sydney is ridiculously beautiful. The city clings to the edges of the ocean and a preposterously stunning natural harbour, with its bays and coves and sweeping shores. In the middle of them, two of the world's most iconic and recognisable structures sit alongside one another, and very occasionally you can glimpse them through the legions of photographers.

Can you tell what it is yet?

The residents seem to take the city's aesthetic pleasantness as a challenge to their own. People care about how they look here. Beach bodies, surgically enhanced when deemed necessary (about 20% of the time) keep themselves in shape through constant exercise. What should be a tranquil, restful stroll through the Botanical Gardens is always rendered exhausting thanks to the joggers. At least 10% of Sydney's 4.5 million inhabitants are running around the Domain at any given moment.

Sans joggers

People love Sydney for its beaches. Until this time, that always meant Bondi to me, and I'd never really seen the appeal - basically a crowded beauty contest with the occasional threat of being eaten by a shark.

Sydney Harbour from the Manly Ferry

At the weekend I took what must rank as one of the best public transport options in the world - the Manly ferry. Basically a half hour cruise through the harbour, better than any tourist charter, for $6. And when you walk out onto the art deco wharf at the other end, you have been transported to a world whose inhabitants, whilst no less concerned about their appearances, seem a little calmer and content. It felt somehow Californian, if that can possibly make any sense.

Manly Beach

I think if I were going to live in Sydney, I'd want to be in Manly. I've always stayed in Kings Cross, where hundreds of strip clubs (Showgirls, Bada Bing, The Pleasure Chest), extremely gay men, homeless people, drunks (more in the morning, they seem to sober up or run our of money by midday and just fall asleep) and backpackers (millions of them plodding around like upright tortoises) all mingle with the rest of the Sydneysiders as they hurry about their day.

Fountain, Kings Cross

I hope I haven't sounded too cynical here, because I like Sydney. It's just that beneath its beautifully tanned skin, I can never find enough soul to keep me going. I'll take the uglier, calmer, more interesting Melbourne any day of the week. She'd still be great company in my old age long after Sydney had had her wrinkles botoxed out.

Blue Mountains

It's funny how our perceptions of the world ebb and flow with our surroundings. Things start out pretty simple in the womb. Through childhood your world is small - house, school, grandparents' house. As we grow up, the world we physically inhabit expands, as does our perception of it; country, continent, planet. Universe. The number of people we know or remember increases as we encounter them.

At some point it stops expanding and, as we get older still, it begins to contract. We start forgetting things as our memories fail us; people, places. The spaces we actually inhabit become our world again; second childishness. And when that last act is over, we're stuffed into a tightly fitting receptacle once more. Back, in a sense, from whence we came.

A similar thing happens with people from different places. Their perceptions of time, space, distance, culture and others are shaped by their environment. It's why people from little country towns are more likely to be rednecks. And it's why if you're English, you consider a journey of anything more than two hours to be an enormous expedition only to be undertaken in the most pressing and unavoidable of circumstances.

Big countries, like Australia and the States make you immune to lengthy overland travel. Small ones, like England make you lazy and complacent. My tolerance has slowly increased over the last year; cover enough long distances and they begin to diminish; every step you take seems to foreshorten the next. And you learn through experience that most of the things you travel to see are emphatically worthwhile, encouraging you to make the effort more often.

With time more precious and finite than ever, I can't resist "popping" out to the Blue Mountains for a night from Sydney. It's only two and a half hours on the train, and will be my last chance to get lost in a little nature before the long haul home. I was thinking how I never "popped" to the Yorkshire Dales or the Cotswolds from London, and wondering why. Then I paid $7.80 for my ticket and climbed aboard one of Sydney's awesome double decker trains.

Katoomba is the main hub town in the Blue Mountains, and it gets you very close to the Three Sisters, the park's most iconic sight. With the mercury hovering around 40ºC, it's probably a bit hot for walking, but I stride out anyway. A long walk along the cliff, down 900 steps into the valley behind the sisters, round to Katoomba Falls and back up the (slightly sinister sounding) Furber Steps, and I am well and truly knackered. I was out for about three hours, and it took another three to prise the sodden shirt off my back.

The Three Sisters

Blue Mountains National Park

In the morning, and similar heat, I spurned the chance to lie around in bed and walked off towards Leura Cascades. There were hardly any other people about, so I found myself sharing the trail with the locals instead, and many of them were strangely calm and unfazed by my presence.

A friendly lizard

At the falls, I had a choice of heading back along the cliff walk or dropping down into the valley and through Fern Bower before, inevitably, having to climb back out again. There were plenty of moments on the endless descent, perspiration flooding my eyes, when I regretted my choice, but reaching the bottom and standing underneath Bridal Veil Falls wasn't one of them.

Bridal Veil Falls

I boarded the train back to Sydney smelly, aching and knackered. But smiling contentedly, full of the simple joy that I get from being immersed in nature, and earning it through sweaty toil. I stared out of the window for a while before apparently dozing off, the perimeter of my tiny universe, which thankfully still seems to be expanding, nudged a little further forth.

Melbourne

Cities, I've been thinking, are a bit like cakes. They all look different, taste different and have different things in them. They're iced differently, or not at all. But for all their dissimilarities, they're still all cakes. Same basic ingredients, same process, same result. Cake.

Melbourne is different. It's more of a kitchen sink cookie of a place; a little bit of everything. Aussies slate it for the weather, but being English, that's never bothered me. Beneath the ever-changing skies, it is an edgy, arty and interesting city that is constantly reinventing itself.

The centre of town is a grid of big streets, but in between them are the famous laneways; gritty alleys where tiny cafes, bars and shops hide among the rubbish bins of the big chainstores. And I think this might be why I love Melbourne so much; because most of what is so great about it is obscured. It hides in dark corners while the bits of the city that resemble all others bathe in light.

It's not a naturally beautiful place like Sydney, so it is made great by the people in it and the things they have created. It's busy, like all cities, but if you look carefully you find moments of calm and stillness that seem missing in other cakes.

Rings of suburbs orbit the nucleus of the CBD, each with their own character; each vibrant, dynamic and unique. Not unlike a miniature London, smaller and more compact yet with more space, and never claustrophobic.

The food in Melbourne is incredible; cared for, thought through and loved. From the little lunch joints wedged down Centre Place to the three hat restaurants, Melbourne eateries are outstanding. Coffee is the source of great pride, and much squabbling over who's turning out the best cup. It doesn't matter - you might get the odd dud, but on the whole the coffee is life changing, and unquestionably the best I've had in anywhere in the world.

All this means I'd been anticipating my return to Melbourne for much of the year. It's been hovering just above the horizon, a shimmering sun. I've forced it to the back of my mind most of the time, because arriving will also herald the end. Back in amongst it this time (I lived there for five months in 2009) I somehow feel like a bit of an intruder. It's a city made for living in more than visiting - the sadness of your impending departure will always cloud a short visit.

And that's how it felt this time, like I kept myself back to save myself from getting hurt. I rolled around a few old haunts: Section 8, the bar in the middle of town consisting of some wooden crates and a couple of old shipping containers all fenced in by chainlink; MoVida, the best tapas restaurant outside Spain; New Gold Mountain, a slick, stylish and brilliant cocktail bar lurking behind an unmarked door.

This post has been sitting undrafted for a while now. I'll never be happy with it because I can't convey in words how amazing Melbourne is. Many things I've deliberated and pondered over have held me back from writing more as I move, so I'm posting it anyway, and moving on. It's not going anywhere, after all, and knowing it's there is somehow reassuring.

Ashes to Ashes

Quite frankly, it's piss poor. This is supposed to be a travelogue, blog, log, whatever, and yet I have only posted two things in the last month; one saying I need a holiday, and the other that I have decided to do fu*k all for the next however long. As far as retaining what lingering reader interest may have survived the last year's laborious nonsense goes, this must surely be the death knell.

Or is it? Maybe I wasn't sleeping, but waiting. Poised menacingly like a tightly coiled and pissed off cobra, waiting to explode in a fury of travelling, eating, cooking, photographing and writing brilliance the like of which the world had never seen. But no. I've just been watching cricket.

Many years ago I was an angry ant of a teenage England football supporter. Spilling beer, shouting and chanting mildly offensive drivel. Around that time I worked with an absolute gent (who was probably only 25 himself) called Danno, who once confided in me that he would rather see England win the Ashes (Cricket - England v Australia) than the World Cup (Football, Soccer). I smiled politely and secretly worried about him.

It might have been the eight years as a bookie, when my patriotism yielded to fiscal pragmatism, but I ended up wanting England to lose things, football especially. When I stopped being a bookie, I assumed my patriotism would return, but it didn't. And it didn't because in order to be patriotic, you need to feel pride, and eleven cashed up bogans strutting around a football pitch failing to replicate the form they show for their paymasters whilst carrying on the pretence of representing their country provokes anger and resentment, not pride.

Cricket is different though. Test cricket is the quintessence of a sporting contest; endurance, technique, consistency, teamwork, planning and execution. The Ashes, to an Englishman or Australian, are the pinnacle of that most refined of sports. And the Boxing Day test match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) is the highlight of that.

Two Englishmen, a Frenchman and an Australian....

If you are interested in cricket, you know what happened, if you're not I won't bore you; suffice it to say that we utterly destroyed them. It was very special indeed. So special that, after two days at the MCG I decided to shelve a few plans and spend the first week of 2011 in Sydney watching the final match of the series.

Day 4 at the Sydney Cricket Ground

Five consecutive days of test cricket is an epic thing to watch. Even more so thanks to the demolition of Australian cricket engineered on the field, a rotation of great company in the stands, and the effervescent humour of England's travelling supporters, the Barmy Army.

Nic and I looking smug on the final day at the SCG

By the final day there were no Aussies left, just a large, vocal contingent of English people there to watch the denouement; the final decapitation of the old foe coming just a few minutes before lunch. Amidst the celebrations though, came a slight shuddering twinge. England's victory arrived courtesy of the brilliant execution of a masterful plan; Australia's demise the result of hubris. Greatness never resides long in the same place; those which were great once are small today, and those which were small have become great.

Joe Cocozza is on holiday

No doubt this will sound ridiculous, and is borderline inflammatory to those of you as deep in snow as you are in work, but I need a holiday.

Galavanting around the world is exhausting. Physically, because you sleep in different places, are constantly moving, and busying yourself, because with so few days in each place you feel obliged to squeeze every last drop out of them. Mentally, because you are always thinking and planning - where to go next, how to get there, where to sleep, what to do. And emotionally, because you are miles away from home, alone, fatigued by those other considerations, and wondering how and why you can transcribe what happens every day into some form of meaningful narrative. And that's before you even begin to think about the future; about what happens when a certain plane lands at Heathrow airport one chilly Saturday morning in February.

It's okay, I'm not after sympathy, and I certainly wouldn't deserve or expect it. Not because I am extremely privileged to be in a position to enjoy these experiences at such negligible cost, but because I am in fact already on holiday. I flew up to Brisbane on Thursday, and spent my birthday with two extremely dear friends, Colin and Margot, and their seven month old daughter, Frankie, who is ridiculously beautiful, smiley and friendly.

On Friday we drove up to Sunshine Beach, Noosa, and for the last few days we've been eating great food and swimming in the sea, joined by more friends, for more good times. It rained all day today, but that didn't stop us - Colin, Lofty and I swimming in the sea anyway, the only ones out there, then standing in the street as it lashed down, playing spoof in our swimmers to work out who would go and get the key for the hot tub.

Right now I'm sat on the balcony sipping a nicely mixed Tanqueray and tonic, listening to the roar of the Pacific Ocean barely metres away. I've been circumnavigating it one way or another for most of the last ten months, never really that far away, and to hear those big waves rolling in when I wake takes me back to all those days and nights I hugged its shores. Holidays are great, but travelling will always be greater.