Sydney, that uncultured city everyone down south is so rude about. But weather can be everything – the dark blue sunny skies, the warm days and the cool breezes made for a relaxed, languid and thoroughly enjoyable week away. It often felt like an Asian city, and it was so good to be back in a real city. Yet strangely, I think the highlight was the moment an echidna waddled over to sniff my shoe!

After eight days on the Overland track, any hostel would have been alright, even the cheapest one in Sydney that advertised itself as ‘good but not very good… if you want quality don’t stay here’. I probably should have been a little bit fussier… Creaky lino floors, slimy tiles, stained sheets, food caked into the cooker, overflowing rubbish bins in every corner. There was no toilet paper, no cold water (only hot), no cutlery. People slept in beds they shouldn’t have been sleeping in. The sitting room was occupied day and night by lonely men watching TV. Students and working holidayers were living there for months and had tired of a city in which they could not afford to do anything.

Some of the guests could see the humour in the situation, and I made a lot of friends this way. Even the cockroaches were funny. But when my bed broke and the mattress started sagging dangerously close to the person below, I was moved to a room of my own with even more cockroaches, overlooking a roof strewn with filthy old socks, and next door to a toilet and sink smeared with I-don’t-even-want-to-think-what-that-brown-stuff-was and a drain hole crawling with bugs and sodden rolls of toilet paper disintegrating on the floor. On my own, it didn’t seem so funny.

So in fleeing the cockroaches I wandered the streets and found myself in a completely fascinating lecture on Japanese tattoos.

Everything at the Art Gallery of New South Wales begins with the following phrase: ‘First of all I’d like to acknowledge the Cadigal people whose land we are on’. But I have no idea what this is saying, especially when what you then say has nothing to do with the Cadigal people. However you wade into indigenous affairs, you seem doomed to lose.

The Opera House (which really is beautiful, to my surprise, especially close up) held a festival celebrating first nations. Perhaps it was just because the weather had turned colder, or because it coincided with the hugely popular night noodle market, but the turnout wasn’t very good, despite the fact that indigenous culture seems to be increasingly fashionable. There was a cooking demonstration using native ingredients (just throw in a bit of mountain pepper and wattle seed) which really came to life when the food started flying around the harbour. There was some incredible dancing and singing, which I had assumed would largely be a tourist thing, like the didgeridoo busking elsewhere, but it didn’t really have that feel. The best, and by far the most popular, moment was when a black-skinned woman leapt up from the audience (roughly half black, half white) and joined in one of the dances. I wished I were aboriginal, ‘first to arrive and last to leave’, but no, I was stuck on the colonial side, and the only thing I could think of doing that would really help was to go home.

So I went back to my hostel, slowly opened the door and stuck my arm in to switch on the light. Little cockroaches scurried under the bed. I put on a Haydn mass, laced up my boots and started attacking them like an aboriginal dancer, crouching, stamping, hopping and twisting. I think they’ve all gone now.