Sydney, Australia

AUSTRALIA SYDNEY We land on a Qantas Boeing 747-400 with winglets at the wingtips, arriving non-stop from Los Angeles. A curious thing that only happens in this corner of the world: the pilot announces the local Australian time and the day too; in fact we leave Los Angeles on a Tuesday and land on Monday, that is, the day before - obviously because we cross the date line from east to west. It's 22:00 and we don't feel like renting a car, let alone taking a taxi to the hotel, so Mauro and I decide to sleep at the airport. We find that hire-car prices are very high if you take one on the spot, so with a trick I get lower prices: I sent an SMS to Nicola in Italy and he booked one for the following morning from Italy, sending me the booking code. Even though the airport carpet is a bit hard, we manage to sleep.

Once we've picked up the car we drive straight to the Blue Mountains and admire the majesty of the Katoomba valley, where every tourist passing through Sydney stops. We also take the chance to stroll around the pretty little town, and stepping into the small train station we notice how clean and tidy it is - exactly the opposite of certain places in the world. A sign on the wall listing the rules to respect says: 300 Australian dollars fine for putting your feet on the seats, 100 for spitting on the ground, 100 for playing your radio loudly, and so on. We head back toward Sydney and visit the bay, then in the evening make for the international airport, where an Air New Zealand B767 takes us on a 4-hour flight to Auckland.