cycling interrupted by work

White noise backdrops Sydney nights. Maybe twenty minutes sometime around four in the morning is not peak hour. In Bendigo peak hour lasts twenty minutes.

We have not travelled together before and Sydney is no place for hicks like us from down south. I’m from a regional city; Liz is of Macedonian extraction; Sandy’s card says she’s a lunatic and insanity consultant. We’d be out of our depth anywhere.

Getting out of Sydney airport is beyond us. We gab away and pay no attention, walk past the lift suggested by the uniformed person we ask for help, and mistake the entrance of a toilet for the concourse exit.

Sydney’s domestic airport train station demands payment of a surcharge—an access fee, a toll on travellers. Liz buys the tickets—they're on 'the tab'—if there proves to be one. I pray to my atheist god for a tab because the ticket price is extortionate.

We alight at Central Station’s platform 21 and swim against the human tide down a tiled tunnel to platform 23 before about-facing and bobbing through the late afternoon jetsam to platform 18.

Our eyes roll into the backs of our heads following station names as they scroll up the information board. It's clear that trains to North Ryde depart from somewhere else. Again we change platforms. The second Northern line, the other Northern loop, rolls out of platform 16.

The train deposits us on an empty North Ryde Station, a cavernous subterranean pit smelling of burnt rubber, and far too grand for us three southern souls. We must be close to hell. It takes two prodigious escalators several minutes to winch us up to the surface. The rubbery smell sticks to us.

The fine print on my ticket says it’s valid till four in the morning. Nonetheless, after a one-way journey and with eight hours till 4 am, my return ticket is 'captured' by the exit machine. Ah, that’s what return means. My night on the town ends here.

A narrow Sydney footpath Indian-files us—me under a backpack, Sandy wheeling a case, and Liz toting a shoulder bag—to the Quest Apartments at 92 Delhi Road. Liz checks us in and we are each given an electronic card, which reception calls a ‘key’.

Neither Liz nor Sandy can slide the key in and out of the slot that activates the lift with the requisite timing. Lights on the dashboard flash and it beeps admonishment. Back at reception we admit to being Victorian and plead for mercy.

We are famished and disoriented, but reception provides neither compass nor cut lunch. Hunger enables us to lab-rat our way through the maze of fourth-floor corridors that finally lead us to apartments 409 and 410 in a sterile wing of an alien corporate world.

Navigating the labyrinth we trudge past the entrails of room service, deposited like scat outside apartment doors—white plates of vast acreage smeared with the pink and chocolaty remains of absurd desserts. No rice pudding or two fruits here.

The apartment fridge is fuelled with enough alcohol to put a small rocket into orbit, but not so much as a complimentary dry biscuit graces the sideboard.

It’s 28 balmy Sydney evening degrees outside, but stifling in apartments 409 and 410. My hot-flushing colleagues crank up the humidity. Sandy points and clicks the air-con remote controller repeatedly. Nothing.

She blames herself—thinks she’s jinxed the air-con, the lift, the railway network. Liz pushes the ‘key’ further into the power slot that activates the system and de-activates Sandy’s nascent delusion.

We all feel slightly foolish—we have failed Corporate Travel 101. We are not-for-profit people in a corporate world: the ordered newspaper does not materialise next morning; none of us has any idea how to get breakfast out of the bain-marie.

Fortunately we are not in Sydney to master Corporate Travel 101. We are here to train 17 people to be good presenters of a unique primary school mental health program. On the afternoon of day one Sandy wows them with tales of schizophrenic purgatory. They buy all her books and she returns to Melbourne.

Late the next afternoon Liz and I sit on North Ryde Station and read 17 evaluation sheets. The two-day format that came to me while spinning out to the Whipstick eucy farm on the Cervélo is just right. They love the program: its cleverness, its simplicity, its plain language, its heart. They want to run it in northern Sydney.

The training is a rolled-gold success. Seventeen out of 17 people give our presentation a perfect score. High fives all round.