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BILL BRYSON

SYDNEY - A CITY AT EASE WITH ITSELF

Through Sydney airport in less than an hour, Bill Bryson can scarcely believe the contrast between these Games and those in Atlanta four years ago: everyone seems to be thoroughly happy with life. Even the opening ceremony provided the world with some less hackneyed Australian images - and thankfully no Crocodile Dundee

Here's an interesting fact I read on the long flight to Sydney from the States the other day. According to an article in the science section of the New York Times, every hour the average person "sloughs off" 60,000 skin fragments, 160 million motes of dust, and 20,000 particles of clothing lint, among rather a lot else. No wonder my seat was a mess when I got off the plane.

On my flight there were 397 passengers, all sloughing away for 14 hours. That means that between us we left behind 111 million clothing-lint particles, 889 billion dust particles, and enough skin to make at least two new humans. That's quite a lot to ask of the cleaners, isn't it? When you consider that on the day in question, Friday, mine was one of 958 flights to come and go at Kingsford-Smith Airport and that I was just one of some 28,000 skin-sloughing passengers, the numbers clearly don't bear thinking about.

I mention this because the very first person I saw when I alighted at the airport on Friday was a petite oriental cleaning lady, who looked at me not in the doleful, quietly embittered way of airport cleaners in all the rest of the world, as if to say, "Do you know where I'd like to stick your skin flakes and lint, mister?" but beamed at me with a thousand-watt smile and said: "Welcome to Sydney, sir!" In the course of the next ten minutes, I was welcomed to Sydney by seven people more - all of them seeming to mean it.

What's more, instead of taking most of the morning to get through the airport, as I had stoically expected, I was out in comfortably under an hour. I am still so dazzled by the numbers that I must repeat them here: At 6.40, my plane touched down; at 7.08 I cleared customs; at 7.13 my bag tumbled onto the carousel; at 7.18 I was stepping into a cab. On what was supposed to be the most chaotic day in the airport's history, I passed through in 48 minutes. My little regional airport in New Hampshire handles four flights a day of no more than 16 passengers each, and they still can't get you in and out of the airport in that kind of time.

And so it has been everywhere I have gone since. Sydney has been gripped by an efficiency and friendliness that are a wonder to behold.

The city has been behaving as if hosting an Olympics is the easiest thing in the world, and quite a lot of fun, too. Of course, the proceedings have barely got under way and there is no telling what might happen in the days to come, but so far, and goodness me, it has been nothing but one happy story after another.

The weather has been dry and mostly glorious. The transport system has coped ably with the demand. The two Koreas walked together at the opening ceremonies, warming the hearts of millions. Australia appears to be on course to win about 800 medals, raising local spirits immensely.

Everyone, everywhere seems to be having a wonderful time.

There have been, it must be said, one or two well-publicised hitches, most notably with visiting bus drivers getting lost. Some commentators have even made comparisons with Atlanta, where many drivers famously took their passengers on long, inadvertent tours of the outer suburbs and North Georgia hills, but the comparison isn't really fair. For one thing, not one driver at Sydney is called Bubba. Moreover, the Sydney problems have been more in the way of introductory hiccups, whereas at Atlanta many athletes were made hours late by hapless driving and one actually missed his event altogether.

Nothing of that magnitude has happened at Sydney or is likely to.

It is salutary (and if not salutary at least entertaining) to recall that at this early stage of the last Olympics Atlanta was coming to pieces in quite a comprehensive way. First, there were the celebrated problems with the computers, which led to many interesting deviations from reality, as when a boxer from Uganda was listed as being more than 19 feet tall and a German swimmer found himself transferred to the Ghana squad.

Then there were the many security lapses, of which perhaps the most memorable was the fellow who was noticed sitting in the stands at the opening ceremonies with a gun in his lap, patiently awaiting the arrival of President Clinton and several other heads of state. He and his trusty firearm had somehow managed to pass undetected through two metal detectors and a bag check.

My own favourite, however, was the occasion at a men's basketball match when the Georgia Dome was plunged into darkness for 12 minutes after a technician pulled the wrong switch. Now I know almost nothing about electrical systems, but I am nearly certain that if I pulled a switch and a basketball arena was instantly plunged into darkness, it would not take 12 minutes before I wondered what would happen if I pushed the switch back again.

In comparison with all this, Sydney has been a clear triumph, and nothing has better captured the spirit and quality of the proceedings than the opening ceremonies. I don't know how they were received in Britain, still less how they came across on television, but I was there and I have to say they touched and dazzled this cynical old heart.

Speaking personally, I thought it was splendid that Ric Birch, the show's director, filled the proceedings with Australian cultural and historical references that no foreigner could possibly understand. All over the world there must now be billions of people who believe that, according to Aboriginal dreamtime tradition, the spiritual cleansing of Australia led directly to the development of the Victa lawnmower and a craze for very vigorous tap dancing among the young.

I can't pretend that I understood the half of it myself, but I am certain it was all a good thing. At least it has provided the world with some new Australian images that don't involve kangaroos, Crocodile Dundee, or lugubrious halfwits drinking Castlemaine XXXX at dusty outback pubs, and it did - no one seems to have remarked on the significance of this bring the indigenous peoples into the very heart of the best and biggest show Australia will ever see.

It's been a sensational start. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Bill Bryson's latest book, Down Under, is published by Doubleday, price £16.99
©Bill Bryson 2000. All rights reserved

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