Sydney, 2025
Rainbow over Govett’s Leap, January 2025
I am one of those travellers who returns often to places they’ve been before. When I say I love to travel, I’ve come to realise that what that means, actually, is that I love how it feels to return to places which have lodged themselves at strange and immovable angles into my heart, places filled with memories and sentimental value for me. It feels like coming home. I like coming home. I am reliably a great creature of habit. Of course, I also love discovering new places, but in any given year you will definitely find me going to Japan, the UK or Australia (or all three), and I don’t go for the thrill of new experiences.
Or well, I guess—to put it more accurately, I sort of do, just not the kind of new experiences that you’d normally associate with travelling. I think when you’re always leaving and coming back, you live in time lapses, months and years passing between snapshots of cities and skylines and the streets that you know. What you notice, always, is what has changed. What hasn’t changed. I have mused about this with London, and again, in Sydney this time, I noticed it very much. And the newness of each trip is the feeling that you can’t step in the same river twice. Places change, and so do you. When you’re in an old place with new company, it’s also a completely different experience. So I keep going back, but it’s never the same.
I don’t mean to repeat myself and say all over again what I said about London. Sydney is a very different site of memory for me from London. It is a place I associate with family, with looping runs around the neighbourhood blasting Ke$ha in my headphones, with balmy, brilliant summers, and long hikes that feel emblematic, now, of a liminal era of my life. On this trip, it felt like Sydney was welcoming me back with such characteristic warmth: it was both sunny and breezy most days, with beautiful skies and sparkling blue waters. Views of the harbour, the Opera House, the Botanic Gardens, all as vivid and lovely as I remembered. I had the most perfect day out in the Blue Mountains with possibly the best weather I’ve ever encountered there. I will never forget gazing out at a double rainbow at Govett’s Leap at the end of the day, and feeling like I never want to leave.
Yet leave I must; leave I always must, if only to come back again, and learn all over again that there are still wonderful things that can delight me in familiar places, that there are always new memories to be made. Thank you Sydney for the best start to 2025. I couldn’t have asked for a better New Year adventure.