Sydney on a bus and a (broad)band

A kangaroo, a koala, a lonely lighthouse at dusk, a famous steel bridge, an equally famous opera house.

What else can you see of a city in less than 48 hours beyond a postcard-pretty harbor in a tourist enclave?

A brief ferry ride, a cable car to a mountain top in gathering darkness, a party place overlooking a city in the middle of a zoo, a merry mix of journalists from the IT beat–people, places that will not become part of anyone’s personal history but nevertheless a joyous part of the raucous world of professional nomads in search of a story, and some signs of the times.

"Should a press release be used as material for a legitimate news article?" we debated on the boat headed to the Taronga Zoo. "Is it better to work abroad and look for greener pastures while there seems to be much to be done or written back at home?"

We were a few minutes away from the Circular Quay of the Sydney Harbour, the sun was setting and the ferry was circling the Sydney Opera house, cameras were incessantly clicking while our trench coats were flying over our heads, the wind coming from all directions as the boat swayed with the waves.

Perhaps they were the wrong questions to ask. What is the need to work overseas when every now and then you are in a boat like this in a far off harbor, in one of the most spectacular tourist places on a late autumn afternoon?

Later, a Hong Kong-based editor will open the dance floor with a colleague to everyone’s surprise and applause. Later, we will share a cable car ride with an Indonesian lady, a friend of a friend (or was she the boss of a classmate in a journalism fellowship in Seoul?). Then we will meet a print reporter-turned-TV producer and filmmaker, and a marketing executive named Rizal.

Over beer, red wine and a fabulous dinner, who was thinking of greener pastures? Perhaps everyone and no one. Back home the grass is no longer green but yes, there is much to be written about in this lifetime or the next. And we’re not even talking of the great possibilities of a broadband world, of network convergence, of the future of television over an IP Protocol, of mobile phones that buy train tickets, high-speed Internet with no boundaries, the coming together of devices to make the world truly a smaller, more interconnected place.

Perhaps, to begin with, the world is really small and connected.

John, Linda, Ivan, Rizal, their friends, colleagues and acquaintances were not total strangers. We’ve met them all before, we speak one tech language. Certainly, we will brush sleeves again in another city. If not us, other people closely connected to us–officemates and media colleagues in a whole connundrum of this concept called a global world revolving on broadband speed, on Internet time.

Sydney is a moment in time of that tech space we all inhabit, an accidental place to make fast friends and memories.

We arrived in Sydney 24 hours before the Alcatel Asia Pacific media conference begins at the posh Shangri-La Hotel. The other teams from other countries arrived much later than us. But over short conversations at the lobby during coffee breaks while watching tech demos, we compared notes. Yes, we shopped and dined and made a fast and furious walk-through of a city we may never see again.

Ours began a few hours after we landed at the Sydney International airport on a Sunday morning. After seven hours on a plane from Manila, we could have chosen to stay in the room and return to our interrupted sleep and cure hang-overs of the previous weekend. After all, the conference hosts prepared for us a gala dinner at the Taronga Zoo midway through the two-day event to give us a feel of Sydney and its night life.

But the morning was too beautiful to pass off, the city too enticing to ignore that we decided to stretch some muscles and do a bit of walking to the Sydney harbor, a stone’s throw from the Sydney Shangri-La.

This being not a tourist trip or a vacation, there were no tourist guides at our disposal, no funds to splurge, and not much time to "smell the flowers," only to sip coffee probably in a sidewalk cafe and while away the hours pondering on that eternal question Pinoys usually ask themselves on a trip–Where have we gone wrong? Why didn’t we have this engineered neatness and order, this peace, this clean air? Why all the affluence in the world couldn’t quite rub on our poor and sorry country?

While sipping coffee, we expected to see kabayans roaming around the area, perhaps serving our coffee, on their way to work or merely passing through the city like us. We were not disappointed. There were many, far too many that it is impossible to think of ourselves as an "other" in this cosmopolitan city hundreds of thousands of miles away from home.

Pinoys are known to be passionate people and effervescent, noisy tourists. Even in our half-asleep state, we knew that finding things to laugh about and posing for souvenir photos are things that mattered most on a trip.

Susan Sontag was right, the camera-touting tourist is a global phenomenon. "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge– and therefore, like power."

On that Sunday morning at the Sydney Harbour, we were part of the daily avalanche of tourists clicking their cameras at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, and everything else in a circular pathway that has a hundred and one things to see and take in–rows of life-sized multicolored bear statues, solar-panelled ferries, a teenage girl playing a flute on the street, a Broadway singer belting out a tune, old ladies and gentlemen pouring over tourist brochures, white-haired children roaming about with their parents.

Ooohs and aaahhhs gave way to more ooohs and aaaahs as we ordered our breakfast at the Quay Cafe and were served huge sandwiches and sausages, hot piping coffee and tea, orange juice and milkshakes served in glasses as tall as a liter of Coke, mounds of fries we could never finish. Everything is big, big, big, in direct contrast to the cult of smallness back home, the result of the well-entrenched concept of micro-marketing.

We ended up hours later at the steps of the Opera House viewing the city by the bay, the midday sun up and the cold autumn wind blowing in our faces.

To speak of Sydney as a revelation is cliché. Every place, every person, every media event is a revelation, which makes for the beauty of discovery, no matter how tired or familiar the themes are.

Sydney has its own narrative, a peculiar beat waiting to be discovered amid the familiar sight of skyscrapers and a monorail snaking through the city in mid-air. In the neighboring city of Melbourne, the Commonwealth Games was ending and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was delivering a speech to the Australian parliament.

We were at the steps of the Sydney Opera House contemplating what to do for the rest of the day while six Sierra Leone athletes were seeking asylum in Australia, a controversial thing in a country already besieged with immigration issues.

For us, accidental passersby in their country, life was much simpler. We didn’t have much choice but to take a city tour via the Sydney Explorer Bus.

For a fixed fee of A$36, it takes you around the city, and you can hop off and hop on in any of the 24 bus stops. You can roam around the area for an hour or so, go back to the bus stop where you got off and proceed to the next stop that looks interesting, grab a bite, shop or pose for photos and hop on again at the next stop or the one after that until the day is over or until you’ve have had your fill of the city.

Bus Stop No. 2 is conveniently located a few blocks from the Opera House and the moment we stepped on the red tourist bus, the driver immediately asked: "Filipinos?"

"Yes," we said happily.

"There are four Filipino drivers on the Sydney Explorer bus route. You may bump into one of them on the other buses," she said as a form of a welcome before rattling off interesting trivia of the places we were passing through.

Past bus stops number three and four and St. Mary’s Cathedral, we fell asleep. We woke up before bus stop no. 14.

At the end of the day, what did we have in our shopping bags? Koalas, kangaroos and other animal stuff toys, boomerangs, dideroos, leather bookmarks, bandanas, Australian-made pencils, a pair of knee-high boots, a wallet, a bag, health products, shirts and memories to take home to family and friends.

We ended the tour on the last stop the foot of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a place called The Rocks, the oldest section of the city. It was a long walk to the hotel. But the day was not yet over. We finished it off with an Italian dinner of pasta and kangaroo pizza.

The gala dinner hosted for us by the conference hosts the following day was the main event, a gala dinner at the Taronga Zoo grounds overlooking the city.

Just when the animals slept below us in their cages and man-made sanctuary, we partied till midnight, but not before a quick tour of a section of the zoo that housed nocturnal animals. It was swell to encounter a kangaroo roaming about the place, a live koala perched on a tree and tourist guide cuddling a sleepy wombat. And hey, the Tazmanian devil is still wide awake while the bats were making their high-pitched screech in an ancient exercise that is meant to echo off objects around them in what is scientifically explained as "echo-location."

If we ever go back to Sydney, we’ll try to cuddle a wombat ourselves, and not just pet a kangaroo roaming about in the dark. Or maybe we’ll just hug a pillow in a darkened hotel room, very much like the koala hugging a tree branch, fast asleep and unperturbed by the tides and turns of what in tech parlance is now called a brand new broadband world.