My dad is an engineer by training. He is usually extremely methodical. There are logical, rational processes for everything. An example of this was a striking memory from my childhood, when we were packing to migrate to New Zealand. We had a 23kg allowance each. Back in those days, it was rare for anyone to have the opportunity to travel outside of China, so we had no idea what to expect at the airport. It had been an arduous 2-year process for our residency application to be accepted by New Zealand, and for us to be released from China. My parents were terrified that we might be turned away at the last hurdle at the airport check in counter.

So predictably, Dad came up with a system. He listed all our worldly possessions, one by one, on pages upon pages of white paper, and categorised them as A (essential to pack), B (optional) and C (would be left behind with my grandparents). He weighed everything in categories A and B, with an accuracy to the nearest 10 grams, and wrote all the weights down too. Luckily my parents were both on fairly unimpressive state-run television factory engineer salaries, much of which having been spent on a series of bribes over the preceding 2 years to be allowed out of the country, so we didn’t have too many worldly possessions for Dad to tally up. Mum rolled her eyes and put up with it, because she knew that this was kind of Dad’s way of controlling the anxiety associated with moving your entire life to a completely foreign country. She warned me not to set foot in the room where Dad had set up this operation, in case I accidentally knocked something over and upset the entire fragile facade of calm and order.

A very significant added complication was that this all happened before ordinary people in China were connected to the internet. There weren’t many foreigners in the country, especially not in our satellite village just outside the big city that was built specifically to house the workers at the factory. At that point in my life, I had met exactly 9 foreigners. I could count them. They came to China to attend an engineering conference, and they let my parents take me along to the sightseeing day of the social program. Afterwards, my parents’ boss thought that it would be cute if I helped to make the thank you cards for them. I drew 9 pictures. Of course, these cards were all sent to Europe by snail mail. There wasn’t a way to quickly drop somebody in a western country a message to ask: “What exactly does a supermarket sell, anyway? Can you buy chopsticks in a western country?” My parents were trying to pack for an unknown future.

At some point, Dad was finally forced to admit to himself that his process was not as rational as he had claimed it to be. We couldn’t take everything in category B. And his new subcategories of B1, B2 and B3 were not assigned without emotional bias. Dad realised that beyond the physical weight of an item, there was also the weight of memory. Even though he told himself that he was making decisions purely with the logical part of his brain, there were many times when he gave into sentimentality. Mum argued that we had to take at least a few things purely for emotional value. It was difficult to cross the Chinese border in either direction. We didn’t know when, or even if, we’d be able to come back and retrieve anything we had left behind. 

I was recently reminded of this part of my childhood while doing some packing of my own. I’m currently in Bangkok for some medical (really dental) tourism. It’s a long story that I might tell you in another blog post. AirAsia was going to charge so much for checked luggage that I decided that I was just going to travel with 7kg of carry on. Don’t worry, I didn’t even make the slightest attempt to replicate Dad’s process. I’m not very disciplined and methodical. I couldn’t if I tried. I didn’t even have scales to use, so I kind of just went on gut feeling. I was pretty pleased with myself when they weighed my carry-on bag at the airport and the scales flashed “6.0”.

Even though I’m sitting here in Thailand right now, and Sydney seems a world away, I thought I’d still continue the series that I started with my last blog post, on a few of the beaches I visited in Sydney and surrounds over last summer. You see, I had already kind of planned this post out before I flew over here. And many of the river photos I took on the ferry here in Bangkok weren’t quite right, because of the sudden movements of the boat, so I need to try and take a second set maybe next weekend.

And so here are the next 3 beaches on my list:

Malabar Beach (Gadigal land)

In my collection of previous blog posts, I’ve written about quite a few of the beaches I’ve visited. Quite often, when I get there, I have the distinct uncomfortable feeling that I don’t belong there. Everyone else is tanned and toned, with a distinct salt-encrusted frizz in their sun-bleached hair. They’re all posing for Instagram in front of their phones while I try to be as apologetically unobtrusive as possible with my “proper” camera. This was even more so at Malabar Beach. There were even picture-perfect young families that looked like they were lifted straight from an aspirational photoshoot in a coastal living magazine, with sleek prams anchoring the leashes of well-exercised ocean dogs. The sun-smart toddlers were clearly very contented to splash around in the shallows.

Stanwell Park Beach (Dharawal land)

I was quite glad that Stanwell Park Beach was near a train station and I didn’t have to drive. Especially because on the day that I went, there were some very heated exchanges as people competed for space along the sides of the street leading into the already overfull carpark. This theme of competing for space continued on the beach itself. There was a small creek that ran directly into the ocean, and the final bend of the creek were popular with younger children, given that it was much safer than the open surf. But this was also the landing area for paragliders who took off from the headland nearby, which meant that quite a bit of signage and yelling was needed to happen to keep everyone safe (at least on that day, anyway … normally it’s probably not as busy).

Woonona Beach (Dharawal land)

A small thing that made me giggle led me to Woonona Beach. While scrolling up and down the coatline on Google Maps, I came across a guesthouse near the beach called the Woonona Ryder. I didn’t get a chance to take a detour past this guesthouse on my walk from the train station to the beach. But that was probably a good decision because it meant that I had more time to spend on this gorgeous stretch of sand. I discovered that when you walk up to the tip of the headland to look over the rock pool, you can also have quite an impressive bird’s eye view of Bulli Beach, the next beach along.

And now I’ll step out of these warm sunny memories back to this equally warm but at times stormy southeast Asian metropolis.