My arrival into Sydney at 5. 30am on a June Sunday morning did not bode well as a sign of enjoying my week long stay in Australia. After waiting patiently in a queue to get through immigration, I went down to the baggage claim. No sooner had I got there when I got taken aside by Customs and frisked – arms and legs splayed and repeatedly asked what I had in my luggage though it had not arrived. I noticed other arrivals from the same plane look me up and down and give me a wide berth. Did I have alcohol, cigarettes, perfume, or anything else over the limit or anything else that I should have declared?

I had none of these items and the aggressive questioning really irritated me, even more so because I was sitting next to 2 lovely men from Croatia on the plane from Singapore, and they were both carrying about 12 bottles of plum brandy each, from their family trip home to Zagreb, and I was carrying absolutely nothing incriminating whatsoever! The woman asked to see my passport and took an inordinate amount of time flipping each page over and an almost audible tut could be heard as she flicked through. My Customs card was in my passport and she took it out and wrote something on it. I could not quite make out what, but it looked like a number. Talk about having your card marked. She handed my passport back to me and left me without saying a word so I went over to the luggage carousel and waited.

Whilst waiting for my luggage to arrive, I got talking to a lady in a wheel chair and helped her with her luggage when I caught the same Customs woman watching me with a beady look in her eye. I then realised I was in for the long run here at Sydney airport and thought back about why she had descended on me, why she was being so rude and aggressive and why she had picked me out. Maybe because I looked slightly dishevelled after the overnight flight, maybe because my passport has a lot of stamps in it or maybe she just doesn’t like Beetles – who knows, I will never find out.

My luggage arrived, just a small suitcase (with a suit, shoes, couple of books, jeans, jumpers and that really was about it), and when I got to the Customs post, the inspector looked at my Customs form, I noticed the same Customs woman walking towards me and then I was promptly handed back to her with no words, no explanation and taken away into a side area. The whole thing had an Orwellian feel to it.

I was instructed to open my own luggage, but not to touch anything inside. If I hadn’t been so tired, it would have been quite funny, because she was so dramatic, barking orders like I’d just arrived in prison and had to obey without question. Back pack first, then luggage. Item no 1 in my day pack: yummy biscuits from Singapore for the journey I’d planned to make to the Blue Mountains. The female customs official tried to confiscate my chocolate chip shortbread biscuits bought in Singapore for the long airport wait and I’d forgotten to eat them, by claiming them to be ‘food’ – I agreed and said yes, shortbread is food, but they are unopened and totally allowed. I asked her if she wanted one and she sourly said that she could not accept food because it might be poisoned. My day dreaming got slightly the better of me, I’d taken the seven hour overnight flight from Singapore, had no sleep and was far from best form but some childish notion inside me propelled me to an alternate universe where I was watching the Customs woman writhing on the ground having eaten a poisoned biscuit.

The female customs official then got slightly hysterical because I have been to Indonesia not once but twice (and now three times) and she would not listen to my answers. Diving, I kept saying, for diving. She kept telling me that I had been to Bali in December 2004, and I kept saying no, it was 2 years ago in December i. e. 2003, it was like a pantomime act – oh yes you have, oh no, I haven’t. I started to wonder – are you supposed to argue with Customs officials? What happens if they think you are being argumentative, what powers do they have next, even though I am only telling the truth because this woman is mistaken. Then she saw the recent US stamp and then the Myanmar stamp and this sent her into a whole line about why, why, why, why without bothering to listen to my responses which were polite and succinct.

I have no idea whether I was being accused of being an international terrorist or a drug dealer or what, but the woman was fast gathering speed in her distrust of me and there seemed to be some unspoken accusation hanging in the air. I asked the woman, why did you stop me, what is it that you suspect me of? She told me in very snotty and superior tones that she was not at liberty to tell me. So not a good start! And what was so ironic about this whole episode – I was after another 30 minutes dismissed – when I got out of the airport and later picked up a newspaper, I discovered that the whole of Australia was up in arms about the Queensland woman who got caught smuggling 4 ½ kgs of cannabis in her boogie board in Bali, and the suspicion that they had been put there by a Brisbane airport based gang of airport based dug dealer baggage handlers.

It was winter in Oz back then, in June 2005 when I made this trip, so it was like an early autumn day in the UK, cold and windy, briskly chilly but sunny at the same time, if that makes sense. I spent only a week in Australia and visited the Blue Mountains for a few days and spent the rest of my week in Sydney; did the usual touristy kind of things, Darling Harbour, Opera House, the Botanical gardens. I especially liked Darling Harbour which is really lovely to wander around. There are some very nice sculptures in a tranquil area bordered by the sea on one side and tall high rise buildings on the other. It felt a little bit like being in Manhattan. There’s one lovely huge spiral pond type of thing, a bit like an Escher drawing that consists of lots of downward spirals like a snail shell each carrying dribbles of water. That had me fascinated.

I have been to Sydney three times before and have never been carried away by it, and I hope that my airport experience did not colour my view, but I came to the conclusion that the area from Liverpool st upwards to circular quay – about half a km – is architecturally interesting, with a mix of early 20th century buildings and modern high rise, and it too has character. But there are some pretty hideous modern buildings when they could be so amazing – there are so many cities, London included, where modern architecture, in my opinion anyway is done so well. I found the rest of metropolitan Sydney to be pretty dull (sorry Australian readers!) and samey and decidedly lacking character, though found a nice suburb, Surrey Hills, just to the right of central Station which has lots of nice cafes and restaurants and those colonial types of narrow terraced houses with pretty wrought iron balconies. I also kept being ripped off with change, this happened every single day when I would be short changed in shops. I was also over charged by the hotel I stayed in in the Blue Mountains, which again didn’t feel too good; I guess this thing happens everywhere where you are noticeably from out of town, but this is the first time in any country this has happened to me.

What could I have done differently? I really don’t know, maybe it is luck of the draw, but it was not a good experience and the attitude of the Customs official was really uncalled for and quite unnecessary. Have you had any bad airport experiences? Write in and tell the Beetle!