Australia's View

Wonder Down Under 

        ''Do you have any special dietary requirements?'' For a vegetarian abroad that is always a welcome, if unexpected question. Here I was in Australia, expecting 10 days of living on bland, leafy fare. Instead, I was being given a choice--and I had to be specific.
        

Sydney Opera House is a huge draw for sydney siders and tourists alike,

and many come for the cafes its lower concourse

Was I a vegan, who eschews all dairy products? or, was I an eggetarian, or a fish-eating vegetarian? or, was I a plain vanilla vegetarian who eats vegetables and dairy products but no meat? At celebrity Neil Perry's Rockpool, Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year 2001, it was difficult to spot a vegetarian option in the main menu. But they were only too happy to whip up an inventive mix of fresh vegetables in garam masala with tomato, onion, basil and coconut milk, served with rice.
   Sydney, the largest city in Australia, offers a choice of great restaurants. The cuisine is as varied as it gets, but the decor is almost always minimalist, with a pronounced use of steel, glass and black and white dominating the colour scheme. The decor was minimalist even at Oh! Calcutta!, run by Basil Daniell, a Pathan chef from Peshawar. But, there were dietary suprises here too. I found my plate being filled with paani puri! This was followed by variations on indigenous Indian dishes like malai kofta, with some chilli achaar to savour. Certainly, Australia offers plenty besides bland Anglo-Saxon fare. Cadmus, the new upmarket Lebanese restaurant owned by Habib H.Farah, not only offers commanding 13th-floor views of Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House but also unforgettable vegetarian food. There was a choice of braised cabbage rolls with mushroom rice cakes with sauteed green vegetable, red lentil and tomato soup, fresh fruit for dessert and enough for several meals. OK, I wasn't on a gastronomic tour. It was just that life Down Under was pleasantly different from what widely-held perception led me to expect--in more ways than one.

The 70 year old Sydney Harbour Bridge rise 134 metres over the awe-inspiring
landscape.

More than two dozen Indian films and music videos have been shot here over the past few years---Indian filmmakers spent more than as $ 30 million in this country last year---but the number of Indian tourists is yet to touch 50,000 per year. That's set to climb rapidly, for Australia offers scenic beauty, pleasant weather, hospitable people and, to top it all, cheaper prices than perhaps anywhere else in the developed world. The Qantas flight from Mumbai---this was just before the official Australian airline suspended its Indian operation---took about 12 hours, with one stopover in Singapore, to reach Melbourne. It took much less time thereafter to discard the baggage of received notions.
    
   Out went Crocodile Dundee, even as I watched Greg Parker handling his pet crocodile at Ballarat Wildlife Park. Australia's aboriginal past was shoved back into the history compartment of memory, too, for the only pride of place it occupied in real life was in the new museum in Melbourne. And, I realised that the unruly on-ground behavior of Australian cricketers does little justice to their warm national character. Less comfortably, out went the sun too, as I arrived on a cold, supposedly peak summer morning. ''If you don't like our weather, just wait for an hour,'' I was told. And, as I soon found out, sometimes it doesn't take even that long for the weather to swing to another extreme and, if you are lucky, you can get the feel of four seasons in a single day that's just one of the city's charms.
 
     Melbourne, the second largest Australian city, with a population of 3.2 million, is characterised by Victorian architecture and a self-assured feel that is distinctly European in character (with anti-British sentiment running quite deep, though, Australians prefer to liken Melbourne to San Francisco to Sydney's Los Angeles). But, in what has been voted one of the world's most liveable cities, you can see many more non-European than the national figure of 4 percent Asians.
    
     Bourke Street, which is a bit like of London's Leicester Square, represents the city's quintessential character. You can shop, eat, or just laze around watching the world pass by on colourful trams. This, I remember thinking, has to be the urban equivalent of Australia's better-known beach imagery.
   Melbourne Cricket Ground had to be at the top of the agenda, but I soon discovered that when their national team is not doing well, and especially when neighbouring New Zealand is faring better, cricket-loving Australians are too busy nursing painful wounds to make polite conversation about game.
   After dusk, when the city was all lit up, the 242 m-high Rialto Building's observation deck offered breathtaking views of the city and neighbouring areas. The moment somebody opened the door to go on the porch, the gust of wind was like all hell let loose. It was enough to send adventurous explorers right back inside the enclosed watching area.

     If Melbourne has the ambience, Sydney has the views. With incessant rain and humid weather, the first impression was rather rotten, though. Once the weather cleared, the much-photographed Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House looked truly compelling, especially from the three-and-a-half hour Bridge Climb. This was followed by a tour of The Rocks, where European settlement began in Australia, which was like boarding a time machine. You can't go to Sydney and not visit Bondi Beach. This represents the great outdoors that Australia is justly famous for. In fact, one had to head outside the cities and into the lap of nature to really understand the Australian way of life.

   

A Gathering at Bondi Beach

  If Sovereign Hill outside Melbourne was memorable because of the way the era of gold rush in the 1850s has been recreated and is being marketed, horse riding at Glenworth Valley outside Sydney had a more personalised feel to it. Aboard Ebony, the temperamental horse I happened to get, I decided that I wouldn't apply for a job as a cowboy in a hurry.
     With the famed Gold Coast and the awesome Great Barrier Reef beckoning at some distance, it was already time to pack bags for the return journey home. It's perhaps best to leave a country when there's still plenty more to see, so that there's a reason to return.