It’s an hour’s flight or so. The joint is just over the border, geographically spitting distance in Australia. Melbourne being the car-loving mecca that it is, eschews the commonly held international view that it’s a good idea to connect your airport with your CBD with anything like, say, a rail line. Not when you can build huge carparks and charge people literally hundreds of dollars for parking their cars there – why build a rail line? You might have to cut down a tree or demolish an outdoor dunny, besides it’s hard work in the sun!

I digress… Can I get that late Friday flight back to Melbourne? Surely a crazy notion for returning businessmen and the like? Nope, pretty much all the flights stop at around 6pm. Hell, joints like Qantas wont even fly direct and will po-faced suggest a flight via Sydney. They’re taking the mick… so, how about some other method of transport like say the train?

The good news about the train is that it leaves from the city, meaning a scurry from work to the station is imminently suitable. The bad news, and honestly I’m still not sure I actually believe this, is that there really isn’t some form of viable direct train from Melbourne – you know, that close-by second largest city in Australia I mentioned – to Canberra. There are various sort of hilarious interchange services involving no small amount of bus travel from places with names like Cootamundra. These take about eight hours, involve changes and all that sort of jazz, and ultimately cost substantially more than just jumping on a goddamn Tiger flight from Melbourne to Canberra.

I’m not really familiar with Australia’s rail network however as I was born and raised in Darwin, I recall for a great many years the big issue was the recommissioning of a rail line from Darwin to Adelaide. A colossal rail line of 3000km with not a lot in between but red country and all for the purpose of hooking up a town with a hundred thousand people, give or take. Yet apparently that was worth doing and it exists today. Yet some sort of direct goddamn rail link from Melbourne to Canberra, the CAPITAL CITY and the CULTURAL CAPITAL of the goddamn country is not on the cards. Awesome.

There looks like there might be actual viable overnight journeys purely by coach. These, unlikely the trains, run proper overnight services and go door-to-door between the cities. This also costs more than it costs to fly, but it’s reasonable and ultimately since the only current alternative I have is to pay for a hotel night and then catch the first flight (which isn’t particular early) which then delivers me to Melbourne airport which isn’t actually in Melbourne or on a goddamn train line, meaning by the time I get to the city, then get onto a train to where I want to be it will be late Saturday afternoon.

That’s where we’re at. It’s not possible for me to be at a dinner function in Canberra on Friday night and be at home in an outter suburb of Melbourne on Saturday AM.

That my friends is a fucking joke only I’m definitely not laughing.

This time, however, I’ve decided I wouldn’t live there. It strikes me that’s a lot to do with the fact that I moved back to Australia and quite frankly Melbourne is just plain better than San Francisco in any way I care to measure. That’s got to be a bit part of it. However I didn’t even experience the stuff I liked in the past, instead it just felt like another big American city. Sidewalks packed with urine-drenched street bums, 70s-style steam-punk oversized vehicles wagga-wagga’ing down the road with their massive petrol V8s

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of charm there. There’s some great architecture and some fascinating uniquely San Francisco features like those crazy steep roads, cable cars and the stuff which us foreigners often enjoy the first few times, American diners. Although we obviously don’t quite enjoy the bizarre currency and the whole tipping culture… I just felt less of it now, I felt soul-less shopping districts, deserted financial streets, overpriced tourist-trap coastal regions and generally a lack of places that I’d like to hang out. Bustle, dollars, commerce, being hassled on an hour by hour basis by pushy beggers. Baffled by the fact that every restaurant has a queue around dinner time…

Course I know what it is. It’s me, it’s not San Francisco. It’s just like when I declared I’d had enough of London (that took ten years though…) albiet for different reasons (I realised I could be in the process of being murdered in broad daylight and people would have stepped around you as an inconvenient obstacle). Also SF has trended towards what most US cities have seemed to become, this remarkable demonstration of the gap between the have and the have nots, the worship of the greenback and ever more cars, cars, cars and more cars.

The fact is that the US is about as far away from where I want to be in my life as I can imagine. I like a throng of people, but not a jam of cars. I like a bustle of commerce, but market trade and not chain-store franchises. I like street-art but not graffiti. I like eccentric characters but not street-brawling bums. I like multiculturalism but integrated multiculture and not enclaves of English-language-free zones and a race-based class pecking order.

To be fair, I bet you can get something like that in a million places in the US but not in the cities. Unfortunately San Francisco appears to have become just another city.