October 24 2007 Sydney Australia

Last weekend was another holiday weekend in Hong Kong and Lee had Friday off, so we decided to take 5 days and go to Sydney. Lee found a great deal with Qantas, including hotel, so it really was quite reasonable, including our four night stay at the Four Seasons, right on the waterfront at Circular Quay.

The flight to Sydney from Hong Kong is “only” 9 ½ hours. I was able to kill a lot of time watching movies, listening to my podcasts, doing embroidery and reading. For some reason on this trip I decided to give the TV show The Office another try. Usually I just get so irritated with the people on that show that I can’t stand it and stop watching, but I seem to finally be acquiring a taste for it. Maybe it’s kind of like Seinfeld was for me at first. I used to walk in on the kids when they were watching Seinfeld and I never understood what was going on; now I love it.

On Friday we toured the Sydney Opera House. The Opera House is amazing. I have never, ever, ever seen a building like that. It is other-worldly and yet fits perfectly into its surroundings. It took fifteen years to build because they weren’t sure how to actually build what the architect designed.

I expected to have some profound reaction to seeing the Opera House for the first time, but instead I felt almost puzzled. We could see it right outside our hotel window, so when we entered our room Thursday night and opened the curtains there it was. I felt like what I was seeing wasn’t real. I never completely lost that feeling. When you have seen pictures of such an iconic structure for so many years, seeing it in person is just eerie.

The opera house looks different and wonderful from every angle. In my mini-notes that I take on my phone to remind me of what I’ve seen on a vacation I wrote “oranges, spheres, inner bird wings”. I’m not even sure what I meant, except that the opera house design is full of spherical shapes, and the roof inside looks like the wings of a bird.

After touring the opera house we walked through the Royal Botanic Gardens. At this point we realized that the plant life looks JUST like Hong Kong. We knew why too – after WW II Hong Kong was devoid of plant life because the population had either burned it for fuel or eaten it, so they imported plants from Australia. The animal life though, that’s another story. We didn’t see kangaroos or koala bears, but we saw all sorts of very unusual birds. And in the Botanic Gardens there were hundreds of bats sunning themselves in the trees, in the sunshine. They looked like bag worms hanging there. They also made noises that sounded like monkeys hooting. Very, very ODD.

There were a lot of little kids around – student groups mostly, looking very, very Australian, mainly because of their darling bush hats. Australians have a hat fetish it seems, especially the little kids who all go around looking like Bindi. They even have those floppy hats as part of their school uni's.

Friday afternoon we took a bus to Bondi Beach, just about the most famous beach in Australia. We could have been in LA or Hawaii, except that it was windy, and cold. I put on my bathing suit, but did nothing more than lie on the beach and watch the surfers.  When we got back to the hotel I had to take a shower to get warm. Later that night we went out to a really nice restaurant - Aria - with a great view of the opera house. After dinner we checked out an old pub called The Hero of Waterloo in the area of Sydney called The Rocks. It definitely was Old & Picaresque. Some odd friendly Australian guy sat down and talked to us; an Irish band played. Too bad we’re not better pub-crawlers; there are so many opportunities to experience pub-life in former British Colonies….

On Saturday we took the adorable green and white ferry to Manly. We sat out on the deck and admired the wonderful views of the opera house & the Anzac bridge from the water. We did something called the Manly Scenic Walkway, a 10K walk along the shore of the harbor. This was probably our favorite thing we did. Great views and varied environments, from  rocky beaches, to sandy cliffs. We saw sea-view houses where extremely rich people live and out on the water dozens and dozens of sailboats, spinnakers out catching the breeze. We startled giant lizards and tried to get closer to brilliantly colored red & blue birds.

At the end of the hike we took a bus back to Manly and then caught the ferry back to Sydney. That night we ate at a good mid-range seafood restaurant, also on the waterfront, with another glorious view of the opera house. Does the opera house define Sydney, or does Sydney define the opera house? It seems like they are just both intrinsically a part of each other now.

Sunday we rented a car and headed for the Blue Mountains, misty eucalyptus covered hills west of Sydney. They are a combination of the Great Smokies and a tiny Grand Canyon, interspersed with mountain tourist towns. We took the scenic route there. As we climbed into the mountains the views got really nice, and the locusts, or whatever they were, got extremely LOUD. They were so deafening that it actually was hard to hear ourselves speak at times.

We stopped for lunch at a place called the Tomal Botanic Gardens. As it was still fairly early we wandered around the gardens first, and I got some great flower pics using the macro setting on my camera. After lunch the views got progressively more mini-grand canyon-like. We drove to a small town named Katoomba and did a very touristy thing called "Scenic World" where we rode a cable car with a glass floor across a canyon and saw the tallest waterfall in the Blue Mountains and a famous site called the Three Sisters.

After Katoomba we stopped in another small town called Leura for an afternoon coffee & a snack. Then it was back to Sydney where we decided to sample Australian pizza that night. No, we did not have the kangaroo OR the emu pizza, but it was still pretty good.

Monday morning before heading back to Hong Kong we did something called the Bridge Climb. We signed up to climb the girders on the Anzac bridge over Sydney Harbor. I was apprehensive because of my fear of heights, but it actually turned out to be pretty tame and not very scary at all. We wore jump suits and were strapped into a safety harness that was attached to the bridge, PLUS the walkways we took were all surrounded by cables and guardrails. The view was tremendous; they only better view might have been from a helicopter. My only complaint was that it was really hot, and we ended up spending a lot of time just standing around while they tried to make money off of us by taking endless pictures of us on the bridge. I got so bored at one point that I actually started daring myself to look straight down; anything to add a little excitement.

I loved Sydney; I loved Australia. I want to go back and spend more time there. Australia is huge and we only saw one tiny piece of it. I hope we get a chance to visit the rest of that amazing country.