Australia/Hawaii 2002, part 8: Sydney (day 4)

I found out in 2011 that Zenbu had closed a few years before. And in 2002, they didn't have Skype or any of the VOIP internet phones, so we had to use calling cards. The view of the Sydney skyline from Taronga Zoo is one of my favorite images of my whole trip. The rest of the pictures from today are here.

Sunday, September 29: Sydney
Koalas, Sharks, and a Zenbu (oh my!)

Happy Birthday, Mom. Although when I wake up at 9 a.m., it’s still 6 pm on the 28th, so I have to wait til tomorrow my time to wish it to her in person. She doesn’t know that I’ve arranged with Dad to call her at home at 10 pm on the 29th (Houston time, which is 1 pm on the 30th in Sydney). In preparation, I bought a phone card that gives me international calls for just 50 cents a call plus 4.9 cents a minute. Thanks to the “backpacker” culture that exists in Australia (and all over Europe too), there’s a large infrastructure here that caters to the extreme-budget traveler, in the form of hostels ($10 per night, as long as you don’t mind sharing a dorm-style room in bunkbeds with several other people – though that’s a good way to meet people), special tours, discounted meals, internet cafes, and phone cards. For $10, I get a card that gives me about 3 hours of talk time to use over the next 48 hours or so.



Time for the trip to the zoo. It’s been said that the animals in the Taronga Zoo, on the other side of Sydney Harbour and a 12-minute ferry ride away, have a better view of the city than many of the people. The zoo is built into the side of the hill and is virtually invisible from the water due to how it’s constructed among the trees. But because of the slope, there’s a “Sky Safari” skyrail that takes you from the bottom at the ferry entrance up to another entrance at the top. It’s much easier seeing the zoo going generally downwards than having to climb most of the time, so forewarned by various internet people that I should do that, I went up around 10:15. The winds picked up, however, right after I got off, and they closed the skyrail about 10:30 for the rest of the day. Made it just in time! The Taronga Zoo is similar to many other zoos I’ve seen around the world, with the major exception that they had a large section of animals native to this part of the world. Kangaroos are common to many zoos, but you generally don’t see wallabies, spiny echidnas, duck-billed platypus, bongos, dingoes, koalas, meerkats, Australian penguins, wombats, and Tasmanian Devils (in addition to the nocturnal and bird sections). I did see some wild wallabies back in Alice Springs, hopping among the rocks in Simpson’s Gap, but got to see them up close here – they look similar to kangaroos but they’re smaller. They had traditional animals (seals, lions, tigers, chimps, giraffes, etc.) and even an exotic Kodiak Bear all the way from North America. I lucked out and got to the koala section at the top of the zoo right around 10:30, as they have a “koala encounter” session for just an hour a day, from 10:30 to 11:30 in the morning. For just $2, you can enter an enclosure with a handler and several koalas, who are typically sleeping in their eucalyptus branches (they sleep for something like 20 hours a day, since they get so little nourishment from the leaves they have to conserve their energy) and have your picture taken with them. No touching, please. You have a couple minutes to take however many pictures you want of them and with them. They really do look extraordinarily cute and cuddly, but I hear they’re kind of ornery. There was another section later on that had more koalas, some apparently new parents holding their kids. Typical of Australia is their crocodiles – they have “freshies” and “salties” and in the warm weather up north they’re all over the place. Sydney generally gets too cold for their tastes. At the far western end of the zoo they have a picnic grounds, with the amazing view of the Sydney skyline across the Harbour. I didn’t linger as long as I might have at the zoo, since I wanted to make it to Olympic Stadium in time for the 4:30 National Rugby League semifinal game, but I did see everything in the zoo in a little over 4 hours.

Because of the game, all the way out at Olympic Stadium, they set up an express train leaving every 15 minutes or so out of City Centre. So I had to take the ferry back to Circular Quay and catch a train to City Centre, where I changed trains and headed out. In a perfect world, I would have liked more time to see the Olympic site, but I wouldn’t have enough time after the game before everything closed, and I’m not sure if my Monday schedule would allow it (my last day in Sydney). I sat on the train with a couple of guys who had mistakenly gone to the wrong stadium – yesterday’s game was at Aussie Stadium south of downtown, while this game was at Telstra Stadium in Homebush Bay. Of course, the Olympics won’t let you have a corporate sponsor’s name on a stadium (because then they won’t get their cut of the profits), so the stadium became Olympic Stadium for a while. The name has stuck, and it’s known as both Telstra Stadium and Olympic Stadium. The two guys explained the difference between Rugby League and Rugby Union (some minor rules, I think, but the main difference is that League is favored more by the “working class” while Union is favored more by the “upper class” as they put it.)

Olympic Stadium is pretty darn big. They installed some temporary seats for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies two years ago, which extended outwards like spokes from the two end zones. Those have since been removed, leaving seating for “only” about 65,000 or so. Being used to American Football (which they call “gridiron” here, since football means Aussie Rules, Rugby, and Soccer) I was surprised when I found out that the game would not be sold out and I could just walk up and get seats. This was, after all, a semifinal playoff game, where the winner would play the winner of yesterday’s match, the Sydney Roosters, and a game like this in the NFL would have been sold out. So I got a $25 seat in the corner of the end zone and watched the Cronulla Sharks (from a suburb of Sydney) play the New Zealand Warriors. There were a lot of Warriors fans in the stadium, all of whom were probably Kiwis. Aussies and Kiwis generally don’t like each other when they play a sporting event. Fortunately for me, I happened to sit in front of a guy who was explaining the game’s rules to his girlfriend so I got to hear and try to understand what the heck is going on. It’s kind of complicated, but you score by planting the ball across the goal and get a “try” or 4 points. After a try, you get to attempt a “goal” for 2 points, where you punt the ball through the uprights from the sideline. A “field goal” is a punt through the uprights from anywhere, but you only get 1 point. You get 6 tackles before you have to turn the ball over, so after 5 they generally kick it downfield. If you fumble it forward it’s an automatic turnover, but if it goes backwards you can still get it. Passing is only allowed backwards. And the game is only 90 minutes long, and that’s not an NFL-type time where 60 minutes takes over 3 hours, this game doesn’t go much past 90 minutes (two 40-minute halves and a 10-minute halftime). In the low-scoring game, the Warriors led 6-0 at the half (which was read by the announcer as “six to nil”) and won 16-10. It’s a very strange game. Now the Warriors play the Sydney Roosters next weekend in the Grand Final. I’ll be in Hawaii, so I’ll have to check the score by internet. I have a vested interest in the outcome of the game, now that I’ve seen a playoff.

As it turns out, my plan to see the play “Mamma Mia” fell through. I happened to pick the day they had the matinee show at 6 pm rather than the normal time of 8 pm. Monday night was out because that’s the day for the night-time Harbour cruise, which doesn’t go out on Sundays. These ferry cruises (the nighttime one tomorrow and the afternoon one yesterday) are also included in the SydneyPass which also covers ferries, buses, and trains. I decided to have dinner in the CBD area, as I had a few suggestions. After arriving at the Town Hall stop (just before City Centre), I checked out the “QVB”, as the Queen Victoria Building is known. This is a turn of the (20th) century building that was just recently converted into a multi-level shopping area, more on the high end (clothes, jewelry, etc.). I saw enough to know that I didn’t need to come back here to shop on Monday. The AMP Tower was just a block away; that’s the tallest building in Sydney, and supposedly in the entire Southern Hemisphere. There’s a fee to go up and look around, and there’s also a revolving restaurant on top. I decided to pass on the night viewing in favor of a daytime viewing tomorrow, where the clear skies would let you see a whole lot further. The Great Synagogue, which dates back about 150 years, was just another block down, but it was closed (just like a lot of things at 7 pm on Sunday night). I passed through Hyde Park and the ANZAC Memorial on my way to Beppi’s Italian restaurant, but sadly it was closed as well. (Why call ahead?) Getting hungry at this point, I passed up nearby Chinatown (I didn’t have any list of restaurants there) in favor of going back up to Circular Quay and then making my way to Darling Harbour for dinner, as I had scoped the place out on Friday night.

Had I opened up my map all the way, rather than keeping it folded to show just a couple of panels, I would have found out that Darling Harbour was walking distance from where I was at the time, only about a kilometer or so (roughly 2/3 of a mile). But no, I spent more time waiting for the bus going north to Circular Quay, dropping my stuff off at the hotel, finding out that the ferry doesn’t run to Darling Harbour this late on Sunday, catching a bus south to City Centre, buying a ticket on the monorail to Darling Harbour (which is not included in the SydneyPass, but it was only $4), and then walking to a restaurant. After a lot of walking around the city, it was nice to be able to sit down to a nice dinner, so I chose Zenbu, a fusion restaurant. Sydney has quite a number of these type of restaurants, combining Western fare with Eastern influences from places like Japan. For the entrée or starter (what we call the appetizer) I had coconut chicken strips, which according to the menu was “succulent chicken tenders deep fried with coconut and Japanese bread crumbs, served with curry lime mayonnaise and maple plum sauce.” For the main, I had the wasabi filet: “beef medallions grilled to temperature, served with 5-spice sweet potato and sake/mirin glazed onions with a wasabi mayonnaise dipping sauce.” Incredibly tasty, and with the exchange rate it only ran me around USD$20. I was noticing, by the way, that all of the restaurants I’ve been to did not have matches to give out (which I take as souvenirs). They’re all non-smoking, and when I asked at one place they said that the convenience store might have matches or a lighter. That’s not the point…

After dinner I was tired from all the walking I did at the zoo and in the city tonight, so I went back to the hotel and crashed. As there was still a lot I wanted to do in Sydney on Monday, with just one day left, I decided to pass on the trip out to the Blue Mountains for Monday. I justified it to myself by saying that the first two legs of my trip (to Cairns/Kuranda/Great Barrier Reef and Alice Springs/Yulara/Uluru) were pretty much nature-based and I wanted some city time back in civilization. I plan on seeing stuff in The Rocks and the Opera House in the morning (along with some opal shopping for Lori) followed by the AMP Centrepoint Tower, the Great Synagogue, the Jewish Museum, and other things in the CBD in the afternoon, dinner at a nice place near Circular Quay, followed by one of Harry’s famous meat pies in Wooloomooloo and maybe another stop in King’s Cross.  But the main point of Monday is to just be able to take things leisurely.