7-30-19 - Connecting the dots from Sydney to Latvia
/Day 44. The drive back to Cairns Airport from Port Douglas isn’t nearly as harrowing as going out. Although the narrowness of the roads relative to our giant mini-van left Leanne gripping the seats convinced I was going to careen off the side of the road and down the seaside cliff most of the drive. We made it so apparently it only takes a week to unlearn 30 years of driving on the right side of the road and re-learn it on the left.
We breeze through the airport process both into Cairns and out of Sydney although Cairns to Sydney is a domestic flight so we don’t have the usual immigration and customs processes to content with. I spend the flight frantically catching up on this travel blog which was derailed by the China visa process. Yes, I am going to complain about it until I have that visa in my hand.
Good travel fortune continues to shine on us as we are able to get the largest taxi bus I’ve ever seen. We get all 7 of us, 7 backpacks and 3 suitcases into the taxi bus and could have fit another 5 people. That thing must barely get 1 mile to the gallon. I am seated in the front passenger seat. It still takes some getting used being in the passenger seat on the left side but at least I don’t have to drive. I try to initiate a conversation about gas mileage with the taxi driver but he merely stares at me, smiles and keeps driving. After several fruitless attempts, I conclude that either he does not speak English or I’ve managed to do something so utterly offensive that he is refusing to speak to me. To make myself feel better, I settle on the former being the reason.
Of all of the Air BnB places we’ve stayed so far, we’ve only met one owner. Almost all of them operate with a lockbox where you are provided the code, retrieve the keys, use the place and leave without ever seeing anyone. For Sydney, the owner, Inna, is meeting us to let us in. After small talk in the elevator, she lets us in to our apartment in a high rise building.
The kids immediately ask for the WiFi code. The WiFi in Port Douglas was pretty bad and it resulted in the China visa process taking three times longer than it could have. So the first thing I do is log into the WiFI and run my speedtest.net app. I am utterly dismayed that the needle doesn’t even move off 0. Is it even possible to say you have WiFI if the speed is 0 MB per second? Apparently, I’m not good at hiding my dismay as Inna says “Oh, if you need better WiFi signal, I can put you in another apartment where the router is located.” It turns out that she owns 28 apartments in the high rise that she rents out on Air BnB and similar sites. Even more impressive she has been doing it (+ 19 other apartments in another building) since 1993, well before the advent of the Internet and Air BnB. The new apartment has blazing fast Internet speed which puts me back in a more talkative mood.
Leanne and I spend the next 2 hours talking to Inna and learning her and her husbands fascinating story. Inna was born and lived in Latvia which was part of the USSR at the time until she was 10. After many attempts, her family successfully got permission to leave in 1979. She said there was a limited window in 1979 – 1980 when Russia hosted the Olympics and was getting a lot pressure from countries including the US to allow Jewish Russians to leave so they could return to their homeland of Israel.
So her family was granted leave with a visa to go to Israel; however the family flew to Italy where they applied for visas to the United States, Germany and Australia. The Australian visa came through first and she moved here to Sydney. I asked her if the US visa came through first, would she have moved there and she said yes. I vow to stop complaining about the damn Chinese visa as at least my entire future isn’t dependent on getting it as Inna’s was on her getting one.
She said when she moved here, many Australians looked down on her and called her derogatory terms for immigrants back then. Now however; Inna, the Queen of Sydney Air BnB with her 47 apartments, says “they don’t look down on me anymore.”
We excitedly tell her we are going to Latvia in a few weeks. It was another connect the dots moment from Sydney to Latvia.
We find a close by Australian pizza place with live music and talk about how the trip has changed our outlook and perspective. For me personally, I started thinking about in London we were talking about hundreds of years of history, which turned into 2,000 years with the Roman Empire in Bath, England, which turned into 5,000 years with Stonehenge, which turned into 180 million years with the Daintree Rainforest with Korea and Japan filling in thousands of years of history in between.
