Australia Part 3 : May 21 - June 12

Sydney: Sunday, May 21, 2006

The last time we were in Sydney was October 1999 and we arrived directly from Canada with two exhausted young kids. Due to the difference in time zones, Brennan and Sierra fell asleep before we got to the hotel and then were awake at 3:30 am. After baths, games and other sorts of amusement, we were walking the streets of the city by 5:30am. There were definitely similarities between that experience and today’s. Our flight from Hobart to Sydney was so early that we were up at 4:30 am to drive to the airport. After another great flight with Virgin Blue, we landed early in Sydney and looked for a taxi to go to the Pacific International Hotel. The cabbie didn’t speak English very well and we had some difficulty telling him where we wanted to go. He dropped us off at the Pacific International Apartments, about two and a half blocks away from the hotel. So we had to lug our bags down the busy streets to the right building. With all the books and extra stuff we have purchased lately, the bags were a lot heavier than when we carried them in Europe. It was too early to get into a room, so we left our stuff in storage and hit the streets at about 9:45am. It wasn’t as early as 5:30 but we had the same destinations in mind for the day.

We selected our hotel from a last minute deal website and made a mistake about its location. It was near the Chinatown district and the Central Railway Station; further from Circular Quay and the Rocks then we wanted. However, the rooms were half price and although not new in style, they were clean and quiet. As a bonus however, there were many inexpensive Asian restaurants from which to choose for dinner!!! The point of this admission is twofold. First it will remind me to triple check a hotel’s street address and secondly, we had a heck of a long way to walk to the main tourist areas of Sydney. The weather forecasts for the next few days predicted that today was supposed to be fine and sunny with increasing chances of rain to follow. So we wanted to see as much of the outdoor parts of the city as possible today.

After many, many, many, many city blocks we reached Hyde Park, a sizeable green space with fountains, memorials and beautiful large trees with gnarled roots. As we strolled on the stone walkways, we listened to the bells ring from nearby St. Mary’s Cathedral. At the end of the park, we were surprised to find a large fountain that was filled with soap bubbles. Some of the shorter statues were almost completely submerged by the foam. There was an empty bulk size container of dish soap resting against the fountain’s wall. Was it a prank or a mandated cleaning? We don’t know but it was fun to see all the bubbles.

Along Macquarie Street we passed many heritage buildings, including the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, the Mint, Sydney Hospital and Parliament House. The first one was built in 1819 and served as convict quarters, an immigration depot, a court and now a museum detailing this and Sydney’s social history. The Mint building was originally the southern wing of the infamous Rum Hospital built by two Sydney merchants in 1816 in return for a monopoly on the rum trade. It became a branch of the mint in 1854. The Parliament House was the Mint’s twin and was the northern wing of the hospital. It has been home to the New South Wales parliament since 1829. In front of the hospital we spotted a large round pig statue that seemed very familiar. It was a copy of the famous one in Florence and was a gift from Italy in the 1960s. The kids rubbed this pig’s nose for luck as well.

This area of Sydney had three enormous green spaces. We passed the Domain to reach the Royal Botanic Gardens. I liked the sign posted at the entrance of this welcoming expanse. It stated: Please walk on the grass. We also invite you to smell the roses, hug the trees, talk to the birds and picnic on the lawns. Entry is free. What a nice change from some parks where we have visited where we got whistled at by armed guards if we stepped off the path. As we walked through these massive gardens which were still lovely even at the end of autumn, we spotted Government House. I suggested we take advantage of the free guided tours of this historic property built between 1837 and 1845 and home to the governor of NSW until 1996. However I was met with absolute disagreement by both male members of the family. IT WAS NOT ON THE PLAN FOR THE DAY. So I graciously agreed to come back on one of our other days in Sydney. (I later discovered that this was a big mistake because the tours only operated on weekends. So I missed out on seeing the interior of this mansion.)

We continued on to Sydney’s most famous landmark, the Opera House on the eastern headland of Circular Quay. Looking at it now, it seemed like a fixture of the Sydney landscape and it was hard to remember all the political wrangling involved in its construction. A Danish architect won the international design competition in 1959 and construction started soon after that. However there were clashes of personal vision, long delays, bitter feuding, budget blowouts and tremendous political debates. The architect quit in disgust in 1966 and with a compromised interior, it was finally completed in 1973. Tours were available of the interior but we designed to press on with our outdoor activities while the sun was still shining.

We wandered onto the concourse surrounding most of the Opera House to take the obligatory photos of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The sun was in the wrong spot but we did what we could to capture “the old coat hanger”. It was completed in 1932 to connect the city’s southern and northern shores at a cost of $20 million. For an exorbitant fee it was possible to climb the top of the bridge on a specialized tour with safety gear etc. It was quite the incline and would have been very difficult especially with all the wind.

Following the concourse we reached Circular Quay, once the shipping center of Sydney. Now the city’s main commuting hub, ferries left from here to many points along Sydney’s shores. We caught one to the Taronga Zoo; a fabulous home to over 2000 critters. The zoo was located on a steep hillside so we caught a cable car to the top and then spend a couple of hours working our way back down. Finding the Australian animals was our main priority and we were very successful. As many of them are nocturnal, they can be hard to spot. We loved searching for all the native poisonous snakes that were thankfully behind glass. ( Australia has eleven of the world’s fifteen most venomous snakes.) The enormous Komodo dragon, energetic Tasmanian devil, spiky echidnas and two very active platypuses were among our favourite creatures. Our visit to the zoo was as wonderful this time as in 1999. As we left the lower exit, we realized that the ferry was scheduled to leave within minutes. We started running down to the dock, leaping around slow moving walkers and calling out to the deckhand to hold the boat. He yelled back to hurry up and we jumped on board just as it was pulling away from the dock. I guess all the hill climbing and trail trekking has paid off because we weren’t dying from all that exertion.

Back at Circular Quay, we headed to the Rocks. This area was Sydney’s first European settlement. By the 1820s it was a squalid, loud and notoriously dangerous place full of convicts, whalers, prostitutes and street gangs. However at the same time, Sydney’s nouveaux riche built three storey houses on the ridges overlooking the slums. So it was certainly an area of contrasts. Later it developed into a district of warehouses and maritime commerce but slumped into decline as modern shipping facilities moved away from Circular Quay. An outbreak of bubonic plague in the early 1900s made the local government destroy large sections of the quarter. The construction of the Harbour Bridge knocked down many more streets in the area. Since the 1970s there has been a lot of redevelopment and now the neighbourhood is a big tourist spot. As well as all the architectural details such as narrow cobbled streets, graceful colonial buildings, converted warehouses and period lighting, there were lots of cafes, shops and a boisterous weekend market. The stalls had many beautiful items created by local artisans, yummy foods and kitschy tourist stuff. The kids enjoyed some corn on the cob along with about every third person walking by us. We explored a few more streets in the quarter and then carried on up the hill to the Sydney Observatory. It reminded us a lot of the Greenwich Observatory minus the Prime Meridian. The sturdy brick building topped with a copper dome would once have had a commanding view but was now in use as a museum. We took in some great displays and then headed back down the hill to begin the long trek back to our hotel.

Our feet were tired but that didn’t stop us from enjoying a great Asian dinner. It didn’t take us long to crash after such a long day which really did resemble our first day in Sydney in 1999. The kids walked just as much as back then but they were a lot quicker today. It didn’t take 12+ hours this time.

Monday, May 22, 2006: Sydney, Australia

The predicted rain and cold weather didn’t materialize overnight and we were greeted with another bright sunny day. After a thoroughly enjoyable sleep-in, we wandered down to relatively nearby Darling Harbour. Once a thriving dockland area, it was converted into a huge waterfront leisure park in the 1980s. Initially it was a large white elephant but recent additions have turned it into a popular place with both tourists and locals. Our favourite part was the enormous Australian National Maritime Museum which tells of the country’s relationship with the sea from Aboriginal canoes to the America’s Cup. Like many of the national museums, entry was free with a request for a donation. It was all very interesting but I was particularly drawn into the story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race. On day two of the five day race a cyclone developed unexpectedly and caused at least half of the yachts to capsize or turn back. Some of the racers were killed in the bitterly cold and stormy waters. It was a captivating presentation. We also enjoyed walking around the pier and looking at the replicas of Cook’s Endeavour and the Bounty, used in Mel Gibson’s film Mutiny on the Bounty.

We crossed the harbour on the Pyrmont Bridge which is now a pedestrian and monorail route. Once it was the world’s first electrically operated swing-span bridge. I loved all the brightly coloured flags attached to the railings and whipping in the wind. The kids really wanted to visit the Sydney Aquarium. Brian had his fill of aquariums after Melbourne. So we left them for a couple of hours and Brian and I did some shopping and exploring.

Several long city blocks away from the harbour, we walked by Sydney Town Hall built in 1874. It was a lovely old building with a very ornate exterior. Next door was Australia’s oldest cathedral but what I really liked was the Byzantine style Queen Victoria Building, across the street. It had the city’s most sumptuous shopping complex and took up an entire block. By this time, we needed to head back to pick up the kids and then return to our hotel.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006: Sydney, Australia

The rain arrived today which derailed our plans to visit some of Sydney’s famous beaches. The morning started with very gray cloudy skies and bitterly cold winds. The kids were smart and stayed at the hotel while Brian and I walked back down to the waterfront area by the Royal Botanic Gardens. I wanted to tour Government House and take some photos from Macquarie Point. I failed in the first objective because the house was closed. (Remember the earlier entry about it being open only on the weekends.) The second goal was more successful although the pictures were definitely dark. We saw Mrs. Macquarie’s chair which was carved out of a large rock on end of the point. The first governor Lachlan Macquarie had it built for his wife so she could have a commanding view of the ships in the harbour. I couldn’t get anywhere near the actual ledge however because it was swarmed by two bus loads of Asian tourists. It was too cold to hang around so Brian and I continued on.

Working our way back to the hotel, we walked through some fabulous pedestrian shopping malls. My favourite was the Strand Arcade on Pitt St. which had been lovingly restored. As I was with Brian, all I got to do was look quickly at the shops but it wasn’t hard to miss the uniqueness of the buildings. Many of the shop windows were surrounded by delicately carved woodwork and had brightly coloured stained glass inserts. The doors were made of large heavy dark wood and the floors were never the same material from store to store. Spaced periodically along the block, long perpendicular corridors connected one street to another. The ceilings in these hallways were very high and had ornate ironwork railings on the upper storeys. The shops in these nostalgic arcades were often very small and distinctive. It would have been much more fun to shop here than in the nondescript shopping centers that are common in North America.

After lunch, I took the kids to see a movie at a nearby theatre while Brian uploaded the latest installment of the website. Brennan wasn’t happy with another moviegoer who seemed to be recording the movie. It explained why he periodically coughed during quiet sections of the show. We all enjoyed the popcorn and the relaxing afternoon. Later I did the necessary laundry and then we all devoured a delicious dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. We knew it would be an early start tomorrow so we called it an early night ( NEXT PAGE )