Sydney

We arrived at the Sydney airport at 8 am on Monday March 9. Picking up our luggage and clearing customs was pretty quick and easy, and we took a cab to the Quaker Meeting House in order to check in and drop off our luggage.

Since it is recommended to adapt to your new time zone immediately, and not sleep and eat according to your old schedule, we headed out to walk around Sydney and get oriented. The Meeting House is just off Elizabeth Street, one of the main thorough fairs, so we started going up north that way. Sydney is a typical mix of urban styles and economic levels. Most of the buildings are new, but some of them can be as old as 200 years. Many of the older commercial buildings have been turned into shopping arcades. The main thing we noticed walking around was how young most of the people seemed – lots in their 20s and 30s, and very few over 60. We ate lunch in a Greek restaurant about half way and moved left a block or two to George Street and continued north to Circular Quay where all the ferries are. From The Quay you have a good view of the Opera House and the Sydney Bridge.

Then we walked into an area called The Rocks, which is where the city was first built, and we had a coffee. The coffee language is different and the cup sizes are normal, not Starbucks huge. We have ended up drinking what is called a flat white – coffee with hot milk but very little foam. They also serve a latte, and a short black, which is espresso, and long black, which is regular coffee. From the Rocks we walked up to Observatory Hill by way of the Garrison Church. The Hill gives you a good panoramic view of Sydney Harbour. Then we walked down the hill on the other side to Darling Harbour for a beer. Darling Harbour has many tourist attractions, but they are expensive and many of them oriented towards families with children.

Walking back to the Meeting House took us through their China Town and we also stopped at Paddy’s Market, an old market building converted into a mall, for groceries. The Meeting House has a nice kitchen and eating area, so we ate supper there. Although it seems to be in the city, it is considered to be in a suburb called Surry Hills, so we walked around there a bit too. Many of the buildings have second story balconies with lovely iron work balustrades, which seemed like quite a distinctive feature. Later we saw the same style in some of the towns outside of Sydney. It may have developed because of the warm climate. By the way the temperature was probably in the 70s. It had rained over night, and it was mostly party cloudy, so really ideal for walking about. My pedometer registered 20,790 steps! We were in bed at 8:30, and really were adapted to the new time by the next day.

Tuesday March 10 we were up early and out exploring by 8:45. Again we walked north up Elizabeth Street until we reached Hyde Park. Can you tell that these people came from England? There is an impressive Anzac Memorial there for WW1. Midway up the park we checked out St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, a very Gothic church, and then stopped for a coffee at the top end of the park.

Across the street we went into the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We remembered that when we were there in 1990, it had been wrapped by Christo, but the person we asked at the information desk couldn’t verify that memory. We looked at the 19^th & 20^th century Australian art, landscapes and portraits mostly. I liked the contemporary stuff more myself, which seemed less imitative of European art. Or maybe they were doing a better job with the 20^th century art movements. There was some interesting aboriginal art also. Sydney has a huge Botanical Garden, which a person could easily spend lots of time in. We strolled through a good portion without really trying to learn a lot about the plants. We ate lunch at a café across from the Circular Quay. At a lot of restaurants, you order at the counter and then they bring you your food. It took a little while waiting for table service to figure this out. On the other hand, you rarely tip much, unless there is real table service and then it’s only 10%. From the Quay we walked up to the Opera House and around the inside a little. We walked back thru part of the Botanical Garden to the Sydney Museum, which has exhibits about the founding and growth of Sydney - interesting panoramas of the city from different time periods, for instance. This time we took a ferry back around to Darling Harbour.

We stopped in at Paddy’s Market again, and while Ron was doing some shopping, I got a fifteen minute Chinese back and shoulder massage for $15 dollars, which got expanded for another $5 to include some head and neck time too. I don’t think I have every felt so tight after 2 days of walking and lugging around a very heavy purse with guidebook and everything! We returned to supper at the Meeting House and some more wandering around the Surrey Hills neighborhood. We have already picked out a favorite pub. The weather again was pretty perfect – in the 70s with some cloud cover. 23,225 steps today.

On the recommendation of one of the other guests at the Meeting House, on Wednesday we took a train out to the Blue Mountains. Central Train station is just a few blocks from the Meeting House, and Sydney has a very extensive network of trains. In two hours we arrived at Katoomba. Luckily we brought an umbrella with us, but we could have been dressed a little more warmly. We had gotten used to the Sydney temperatures and hadn’t really planned for the mountains to be a lot cooler. Mostly it was foggy becuase we were actually in the clouds and therefore wet, but occasionally it actually rained. But it was not disastrously bad, only a little uncomfortable. Anyway, Katoomba has a sort of 1890s Art Deco frontier style. We had coffee at a café that supposedly also served Bob Dylan once. At the end of town, maybe a mile walk, you come to a cliff with a huge panoramic view, except that, of course, we were in the clouds and couldn’t see a thing. However we continued along the cliff edge trails to a different overlook and got below the clouds.

Their iconic rock formation is called the Three Sisters because it is 3 rock columns that stand out from the cliff. The story is that they were 3 sisters escaping from some unwanted male attention. A sorcerer transformed them and then died before he could change them back. As we walked back along the cliff trail, the clouds rose so that we finally got the expansive views across the valley to other mountain tops. The landscape is very reminiscent of New Mexico table land, but much more forested. At the other end of the trail is an attraction called the Skyway Station. We took a cable car across a narrow gorge with Katoomba Falls at the head. The cable car has a glass floor and the cliffs drop away very dramatically and the valley floor is far below. There were other cable cars and trams we could have taken down to the valley floor, but we elected to walk back into town for lunch. After lunch we looked into the Carrington Hotel – very old fashioned ritzy décor, felt like an ocean liner. Then we took the train back to Sydney. 17,440 steps total this day.