Sydney

We only got a brief taste of Sydney on our first night there (at the spiffiest youth hostel ever built!) because we were off early the next morning on the train to the town of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. These are only a few hours outside of city, but originally we weren't sure if we should take the time away from Sydney to see them. It turned out we were very glad we did despite the fact that there was a man who looked like a crazy Irish gnome yelling "You can't let anymore people on the train! Can't you see it's full" at every stop. Oddly enough (or not) the train wasn't even very full.

Katoomba is a slightly faded old mountain resort town that has one main street that leads from the railway station right down to the edge of a surprisingly high cliff that marks the start of the Blue Mts. It used to be quite the attraction for "society" coming from Sydney and there is a huge old hotel that is a remnant from that era. Dylan made lah-de-dah noises at it until I pointed out that I believed that was where he had booked us for the night. Good on Dylan, it was wicked cool. There were old women having tea on the wide, enclosed verandah, stained glass, a library and billiards room, a ballroom....everything you'd need to make a hotel feel Shining like. There were even large "ladies" and "gentlemen" baths at the end of each hall (from a time when a bathroom in your room was only for the extremely wealthy....I had a hard time picturing women in 1900's outfits dashing out to the bathroom at 3am).

The temperature is generally quite a bit colder up in the mountains then in Sydney and the day we were there was no exception. There was a blustery rain coming down off and on by the time we got to the edge of town and it was sort of snowing! They were just little flakes, but unexpected! To our glee, all this crazy weather resulted in a rainbow stretching out over the valley. We marvelled at the "3 Sisters" rock formation and hiked down the "Giant Steps" to the valley floor where the temperature was at least 10 degrees warmer. It was a beautiful place to "bush walk" and we spent the whole afternoon doing so, tramping through fern forests and hiking up beside cascades and waterfalls. Along the top of the cliffs huge cockatoos swooped above our heads, and down at the bottom you couldn't hear a sound from the town above. It was exhausting, but I didn't want it to end. Had the skyway gondola run later than 5pm we would have continued on in another part of the mountains, but (perhaps luckily) it wasn't and we still had a dark and cold 1/2 hour walk back to town because we had snubbed our noses at the tourist bus. By the time we got out of the restaurant where we ate dinner (we found salads and great chai -hoorah!) the temperature was the coldest it had been on our whole trip - possibly under 40 degrees.

This called for some fire sitting in the hotel lounge which we did before wandering around the entire hotel checking out these crazy etchings of naked women being chased by demons. The next morning I asked the woman at the front desk where they all came from (thinking it was odd subject matter for a hotel and that there must be some weird endowment story behind it). She told us they were by a famous Australian artist, Norman Lindsay, and she said it as if we should know him.

It must have gotten colder during the night because it actually "snowed". Although no decent New Englander would call the dusting of flakes on the ground a snowfall, the locals were pretty excited by it. It was kind of fun especially since the dining room where we had breakfast was decked out for "Yuletide" in July complete with a xmas tree. An older man we met at the train station told us it hadn't snowed there since 1967.

We were back in Sydney by early afternoon and as soon as we stepped out of the train station we were greeted by the sight of Sydney Harbour complete with the opera house and harbour bridge. It was one of those 'can't believe I'm really here' moments. Our hotel was right by the harbour in the "Rocks" section of town which has still retained many of its historic buildings. Better yet, it had a turret which got to be our room for the last 2 nights. The remaining daylight was spent wandering around the harbour and the Rocks, stumbling through a film shoot, and crossing the harbour bridge at sunset. Crepes for dinner!

The next day we set off for the Aquarium which had its pluses and minuses. Plus: walk through tunnels where manta rays, giant turtles and sharks swim over your head and beneath your feet. Minus: shitloads of kids - you had to plan out your every step for fear of stepping on one. After that we were ready to be people free, and spent the rest of the day doing our usual city wandering: exploring buildings, markets, parks and churches. In the evening we saw an advance screening of a new Australian movie called "Look Both Ways" and I'd heartily recommend it if it happens to come your way. Leaving the theatre and stolling home past the lighted opera house was, I have to admit it, very romantic. Much better than coming out of the Seekonk cineplex.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales was on the agenda the following day (at this point I'd started to lose track of exactly what day it was). We sauntered through the Royal Botanic Gardens to get there in the hope of maybe seeing a "flying fox" (fruit bat) which we had been told could be seen in a certain section of the park. Now usually when I read in a guide book, or am told by a local that I could see a wild animal, I figure I have a snowballs chance in hell, but I had already been in Australia long enough at this point to know that the Australians tend to tell it like it is, and if anything, are prone to understatement. Sure enough, we didn't just see a fruit bat, we saw trees full of them! Apparently they are denuding the trees and making the area smell like guano so the park wardens are trying to discourage them from roosting there, but it was still really cool to see such large bats right out in the light of day.

It was tough for the Art Gallery to compare with such fine bats, but it did its best displaying Australian art from the 19th and 20th centuries including some (but not nearly enough) by indigenous artists. I was unimpressed by the art of another supposedly famous Australian, Sidney Nolan, who is especially well known for his series of Ned Kelly paintings. He belongs to that school of art where the artist paints something in the style of a slightly deranged kindergartener and then puts it out as "innovative". Not for me.

From there we walked along the harbour inlet leading back to the ferries where we caught one to Manly Beach across the harbour. The ferry ride was terrific since it provided great views of Sydney, the harbour and the "Sydney Heads" - the cliffs that form the entrance to the harbour. This was especially cool for me since I could picture my dad coming through those cliffs 30 some odd years ago and seeing some of the same views I was now seeing. Manly is a quintissential "beach town" with a main walkway filled with shops and restaurants that connects the harbour where the ferries dock to the oceanside beach. There you'll find a boardwalk which continues on to another beach and then up a rocky promentory into a nature reserve. The rest of Manly and the surrounding area is mostly residential so the whole effect is of being much further away from downtown Sydney than you really are. We followed the walkway to Shelly Beach, which was really very pretty but absent of shells despite the signs requesting that they not be removed, and up the little cliff for a sunset lookout. We attempted to follow it further but got a little creeped out by the descending twilight and some of our company on the rapidly disappearing trail. So instead we headed back in the dark, past some nighttime scuba divers at Shelly Beach lighting up the water from below in a magical fashion, and through the main walkway, now filled with lots of teenaged and college aged kids, to the ferry that would take us back to downtown Sydney.

Our last day there (already!) we walked around the Rocks soaking in a bright sunny day, an open air market and some art galleries before taking a tour of the Opera House. I didn't find the inside as dramatic as the outside, but Dylan enjoyed the 70's architecture, and the story of how it was built was interesting. We then took a bus to Bondi Beach with the faint idea of maybe going for a swim. The bus was cramped and smelly and took far too long, but on the positive side it gave us a good opportunity to see parts of Sydney that we wouldn't have gotten to otherwise. Sydney does sprawl and has built it's share of hideous skyscrapers looming down on 100 year old churches, but I was actually surprised by the character and distinctiveness of the neighborhoods I saw. There was more old architecture than I would have expected and, at least within the central areas, not nearly as much chain sameness as you might think there would be. We ended up in Chinatown twice and it put any other chinatown I have been in to shame, including San Francisco. Not that SF's chinatown isn't cool, it's just that in Sydney "china"town is completely full of Asian people. You stand a very good chance of being the only caucasion person on the block. I thought that was pretty cool. It made me want to go to China or Japan....not that I didn't already.

Bondi, as you might expect, is extremely touristy. It turned out the day we were there was also the day of a popular fun run, so it was chock a block full of people. The main boardwalk in front of Bondi beach is crammed with shops and restaurants, and since eating outside is very big in Australia, the sidewalks are covered with tables and chairs. Neither Bondi or Manly beach is really very big because most of the beaches are inlets surrounded by cliffs. I think the beaches with huge stretches of sand are mostly up north along the Gold Coast. We were actually pretty surprised by the amount of rugged cliffs there were in Australia; I guess we shouldn't have been, but I just hadn't thought of it that way. Bondi had some pretty good sized waves the day we were there, not crazy big, but it hardly seems to matter because I never saw a stretch of water without at least one surfer on it, even into the night! The waves seemed to start further out than the waves I am used to here in New England which always seem to rise up and break right at the shoreline. I'm guessing that's part of what makes the beaches there better for surfing. Watching all the surfers was really making me want to try it that's for sure. As it was we didn't even swim since the afternoon was getting on, and nobody else was in the water. I don't know if this was because the water was too cold or because of a few signs warning of dangerous rips, but if the locals weren't doing it I wasn't about to.

We settled for a beautiful walk along the promenade that followed the coastline for about 3 or 4 miles through a few "towns" (more like neighborhoods since they all run together) all with their own beach inlets tucked into the cliffs. It is a bit like the Newport Cliff Walk only without the mansions and with much higher cliffs. There were also a few "rock pools", outside swimming pools that are cut into the cliff so that they fill at high tide. The one near Bronte was actually a natural pool with just some reinforcements added. I'd seen these before in the Azores and thought they were the coolest idea ever. The promenade may or may not have ended at Waverley cemetery, but at any rate it ended for us there as it was rapidly getting dark and the cemetery was ostensibly closed at dusk. Dylan was psyched to happen upon a cemetery because he had not seen one up until then and was starting to wonder. This one, high up on the cliff overlooking the Pacific, was worth the suspense.

We really wanted to stop and look at the fruit bats again on the way back to the hotel, but the busride seemed interminable and weariness won out. Instead we got ice cream and walked around saying goodbye, too soon, to the bridge and the harbour and the opera house.

Recommendations if you go to Sydney: Sydney was great, but there a city can only be so different, and there is so much cool natural stuff to see in Australia. So I guess I'm saying you probably won't want to spend as much time there as at the Reef or in the Outback. It's definitely worth seeing, but not at the expense of the natural wonders.

Also, take the train to and from the airport. The Airport Connect took far too long even if they do pick you up at your hotel.

I just want to say here, because I didn't anywhere else, that I hate dollar coins. Please let us never abolish paper dollars.....