10,090 Miles Between Us.

"Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line.  I left Los Angeles on January 3 and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on January 5.  For me there was no January 4.  None at all.  Where it went exactly I couldn't tell you.  All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of earth, it appears I had no being. ...

Now, I vaguely understand the principles involved here.  I can see that there has to be a notional line where one day ends and the next begins, and that when you cross that line temporal oddities will necessarily follow.  But that still doesn't get away from the fact that on any trip between American and Australia you will experience something that would be, in any other circumstance, the starkest impossibility.  However hard you train or concentrate or watch your diet, no matter how many steps you take on the StairMaster, you are never going to get so fit that you can cease to occupy space for twenty-four hours or be able to arrive in one room before you left the last one.  So there is a certain sense of achievement just in arriving in Australia - a pleasure and satisfaction to be able to step from the airport terminal into dazzling antipodean sunshine...

Let me say right here that I love Australia - adore it immeasurably - and am smitten anew each time I see it.  One of the effects of paying so little attention to Australia is that it is always such a pleasant surprise to find it there. Every cultural instinct and previous experience tells you that when you travel this far you should find, at the very least, people on camels.  There should be unrecognizable lettering on the signs, and swarthy men in robes drinking coffee from thimble-sized cups and puffing on hookahs, and rattletrap buses and potholes in the road, and a real possibility of disease on everything you touch - but no, it's not like that at all.  This is comfortable and clean and familiar.  Apart from a tendency among men of a certain age to wear knee-high socks with shorts, these people are just like you and me.  This is wonderful.  This is exhilarating.  This is why I love to come to Australia.

There are other reasons as well, of course, and I am pleased to put them on record here.  The people are immensely likeable - cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging.  Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water.  They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.  The food is excellent.  The beer is cold.  The sun nearly always shines.  There is coffee on every corner.  Life doesn't get much better than this."

- Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country -