Monday, November 28, 2011

Australia/Hawaii 2002, part 6: Sydney (days 1-2)

Day 1 in Sydney was lost due to the late flight from Yulara, but I got to walk around at night. On Day 2, I wanted to do the Bridge Climb as soon as possible, but in retrospect I should have done the hop on/hop off bus tour that was included with my Sydneypass early instead of waiting til the last day (when I realized that I hadn't done it yet). In Cairns, I was on the boat pretty much the whole time, and in the Outback I had put together a series of small tours, but Sydney offered me the opportunity to do what I wanted, when I wanted to, and as a result I ended up making some real-time adjustments to my pre-planned itinerary.

Photos accompanying these two days can be found here.

Thursday, September 26: Sydney
From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans

Finally made it to Sydney for the second time this trip, but this time for more than an airport transfer. I picked up my Sydneypass, which allows unlimited use of the public transport system (ferry, bus, train) and the special Bondi and Sydney Explorer tour buses, plus a round-trip on the Airport Express. I got a 7-day pass, as they offered only 3, 4, and 7 days (I figured I’d be there parts of six days so I’d get a 7-day pass). But because we got in later than scheduled, and because the bus had to make its way through rush-hour traffic, I didn’t get to the hotel until around 6:30 pm. So much for my day in Sydney.



The hotel I stayed at, the Old Sydney Holiday Inn, was right in the heart of The Rocks, Sydney’s oldest and most historic area. I got a good deal booking the room online when I was in Alice Springs. I arranged the BridgeClimb (climbing to the top of the Harbour Bridge) for Friday afternoon and queried on other things that need tickets like the play Mamma Mia, at the Lyric Theater in the Star City Casino over in Pyrmont (next to Darling Harbour, a quick 10 minute ferry away). I also found out that the semifinals for National Rugby League would be in Sydney this weekend, one inside the city at the Sydney Cricket Grounds (aka Aussie Stadium) and the other out at Telstra Stadium (aka Olympic Stadium) on Sunday. (The Australian Rules Football League’s Grand Final was this weekend in Melbourne, on Saturday.) I did book a 2:25 BridgeClimb for Friday. From my room, you can see a large part of the Sydney Harbour Bridge among some of the rooftops of buildings in The Rocks.

After dropping off my stuff, I wandered down to Circular Quay (pronounced “key”), the main transportation hub in the central area and the home of the ferry wharves. On the west side of Circular Quay is the Harbour Bridge that links the south and north sides of the harbor, while on the tip of the eastern side of the Quay is the world-famous Sydney Opera House. It’s an amazing-looking structure, and so visually arresting that it’s hard to look away. I took a bunch of pictures and then dragged myself down the Quay back on Macquarie St to Alfred St to George St., the main thoroughfare in The Rocks area. I hadn’t really had a chance to get my bearings and look at my list to see what’s where, so I picked an Italian restaurant for dinner called Amo Roma (now Appetito) on George St. The meal was Italian sausage and fettuccini, with artichoke, pine nuts, and garlic. As it was getting late and I needed to plan my next few days, I went back to the hotel for the night. My plan for the next four days pretty much includes what I want to see, while allowing some flexibility to change if I want to (or have to). I hope.

Friday, September 27: Sydney
“The Climb of Your Life”

Friday was my morning tour of the Circular Quay area around to the still-amazing Opera House, the Royal Botanic Gardens, and The Rocks. Circular Quay station is only a 5-minute walk from the hotel, and then the Opera House is only another 5 minutes on foot. Continuing around Bennelong Point (where the Opera House sits, named after the first aboriginal to try to bridge the gap between the British and his tribe) is the Royal Botanical Gardens. First started in the mid-1800s, this is a huge tract of land with great lawns, large trees, and flower gardens. It’s a favorite place of Sydneysiders to visit; I suppose it’s similar to Central Park in New York. A sign inside the park reads “Please Walk on the Grass.” In smaller type it reads “We also invite you to smell the roses, hug the trees, talk to the birds, and picnic on the lawns.”

The Gardens are also famous for Mrs. Macquarie’s Point, an outcrop of land into the Harbour in such a way that it provides a perfect viewing site for both the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, both off to the west. In fact, the Opera House was constructed to be exactly half the height of the bridge so it wouldn’t dominate the skyline. This point was where the wife of one of the early governors would sit and wait for the fleet to come back into harbour, hence the name. Because of the vantage point, it’s a popular site for photographers. The day I was there a front was coming through just as I got to that point, so the sky was cloudy. It cleared up as soon as I left the area.

George Street, the main artery into The Rocks area, has old buildings on either side of the road, some dating back to the 1830s and 1840s. Sydney is a relatively young city, as the first fleet of settlers (and prisoners) arrived in January 1788; after the American Revolution, the British needed somewhere else to dump their convicts. The “First Fleet” is celebrated by Australians as the founding of their country as a British colony. Like many big cities, Sydney had concentrations of the poor in some areas, and The Rocks was that area in the late 1800s. When an epidemic hit, many of the old buildings were razed to the ground, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that they really started trying to save what was left of their heritage. Since then, The Rocks area has grown into a place that both locals and tourists love. I stopped for lunch at the M&M Playfair Café, a takeaway shop on Argyle Street in The Rocks, and got a salami sandwich and a Coke. Interestingly, they call all the veggies that go on a sandwich “the salad” which I suppose makes sense, but for some reason they call green peppers “capsicum”. They also seem to put a slice of beetroot on all their sandwiches. It’s not bad, it’s got an interesting taste, but I won’t be looking for it when I get back home. After lunch I wound up my tour of The Rocks and made my way to the BridgeClimb offices.

About ten years ago, a guy wanted to get permission to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge. After all, the bridge workers do it all the time. But it had never been done by a civilian, and it took several years to get all of the paperwork in order. So he decided to start a company that would do it. Sometime around the end of 2002, they will have had their millionth customer after being open for just over four years. They have four pricing packages – the base rate for weekday daylight hours, a higher price for weekday nights, a higher price for weekend days, and the highest price for weekend nights. The only difference between the day and night trips (besides the city lights) is the gear you carry (and more on that in a moment).

The first thing you have to do is fill out a liability waiver and take a breathalyzer test, and once that’s done (if you fail either of those, you don’t get to go and you don’t get your money back) you get suited up. Because we’re climbing a working bridge, they have to make sure they minimize the potential for damage or distraction to the cars and trains below, so we’re not allowed to take anything up with us as we might drop it. The only things we can take up are tethered to our bodies – a strap holder for glasses that goes through a ring on the suit, for example, and a cloth tissue on an elastic cord that goes around our wrist. The suit we wear is a one-piece jumpsuit of gray, the better to blend in with the bridge colors. Then we get our gear, most importantly a belt with an ingenious gear system that lets you be tethered to a guide wire at all times yet still let you pass by where the wire is held into place. A practice session on the simulator and we’re ready to go! Their slogan: “The Climb of Your Life!”.

From the offices, you go through some tunnels and get to a point on the bridge’s underside where there’s a catwalk over the roadway below (the road on the land just beneath the bridge deck, near the pylon) and then climb a bunch of stairs until you get to the arch. That’s the hard part, actually, since there were a lot of ladders to climb. After that, it’s fairly simple to walk up the arch, as it’s not steep at all. We stopped a couple times for the guide to take our pictures. One of the reasons they don’t let us bring our own cameras to this is that we might drop it; another reason is so they can take our pictures for us instead, then sell the picture to us at the bottom of the climb. We do get one free group photo, though. At the top, we have a chance to pause for a few minutes and soak in the view. From there, you can see the entire bay to the east all the way to the ocean, and in the other direction (where the sun glare is strongest) you can see to Olympic Stadium, home of the 2000 Olympic Games. As protection against rain and cold, we were issued rain shells (raincoats) that yes, are tethered to your waist through the container pouch it’s stuffed in, and during the climb it started to rain a bit so we put them on. For a brief time we put on the coats as it started to drizzle, but then after it stopped the sun came back out and it got too hot to wear the jackets. All too soon it was over and we had to cross the arch at the top (between the national flag of Australia and the state flag of New South Wales; today happened to be Police Remembrance Day, so flags were at half staff) to the western side and start heading down. Some construction on the bridge – which wasn’t even opened until the mid 1920s – prevented us from being able to walk back on the catwalk so we descended through the bridge workers area. Among the interesting items we learned: the bridge is constantly being painted somewhere, since it takes 10 years to get a full coat of paint on it; there were a total of 1394 steps (or there would have been if not for the construction detour); and the bridge is 134 meters (440 feet) above the surface of the water. When we got back at 5:40 pm, we had the opportunity to purchase the pictures that had been taken, four in all. For an extra fee, you could buy all four and have the pictures put onto a CD, but that was $48 when a single picture was only $15.

I had dinner at Sailors Thai, a place right across the street from the hotel that I had heard recommended on the various internet sites I checked out before coming here. I got an order of spring rolls and yam ma muang (“green mango salad with roast coconut, peanuts, chicken mince, and dried prawns served with betel leaves”) which was really good. The restaurant has an interesting seating arrangement – a long table that seats about 20 per side, so you end up close to your neighbor who’s at the same table. Partway through my entrée (the appetizer) a group of 3 showed up, so they sat across and next to me. Continuing my trend of finding Australians to be warm and friendly, we joined in conversation and they found my travels to be fascinating. Two of the group were on holiday from Melbourne visiting a friend in Sydney, and one of them told me that in my 2 weeks I had seen more of her country than she did. I think that’s almost a universal thing, though, where the natives take the country for granted and never visit all there is to see, and they have to travel outside their own country to make them appreciate their own more. What’s more, they ordered two desserts for the three of them and offered half of one of them to me. I’ll confess that I don’t know that I would have made a gesture like that to a visiting foreigner to my country (just like the two women from Melbourne did back in Yulara), but it was greatly appreciated and just reinforced my opinion of the hidden generosity that’s beneath the exterior that they sometimes project.

The dark cloud around that silver lining was that because I stayed so long talking, I missed the evening lights ferry tour of Sydney Harbour, so had to make a quick decision to see Darling Harbour instead, which left just a minute or two later. I had planned for Darling Harbour on Saturday instead. Good thing my plans were so flexible, they didn’t even last out the first day.

The ferry went around to the west to the Darling Harbour dock. I had to quickly read the guide book and brochures about the area, since I hadn’t planned on seeing it so soon. Darling Harbour is a huge entertainment area that was started in the mid-80s, and wound up the focal point of the nightlife activity during the Olympics. King St. Wharf was transformed into a multi-level center with bars and restaurants, while the other side of the harbor was turned into the Harbourside entertainment and shopping complex. Also in the area was the Sydney Aquarium, supposedly one of the best in the world and worth a look. Unfortunately, by the time I got there I only had 90 minutes until closing time, but I was assured that it was something you could so in that time since there were no more than a handful of people inside (it’s geared towards handling crowds during the day). So I spent the 90 minutes inside and saw a great aquarium, with a huge shark tank and a Great Barrier Reef section. I was able to finally put names to some of the fish I saw while diving last week. The rain from earlier in the day came back and dumped a bunch on us, so I took refuge in Gloria Jean’s, a coffee bar chain like Starbucks. Continuing clockwise around the harbor (going north on the west side) I passed the Harbourside building and saw some more remnants of the Olympics, this one a statue of the logo (the boomerang looking guy). My last stop was the Star City Casino, big enough to fit easily into Las Vegas yet smaller than the parent Star City in Melbourne. I even won $30 playing blackjack, which I figured I’d give back to the casino when I saw Mamma Mia later (it’s playing in a theater inside the casino complex). I did find out that there’s not a whole lot of traffic (or metro services) after around 2, so I managed to make my way about halfway back and then had to take a cab back to the hotel for the last half of the trip.

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