Part 1 - Sydney
March 4 - 8, 2005
Friday, March 4th: Leaving Atlanta
We left Atlanta on Delta at about 7 PM, on the way to LA. The flight was uneventful, and we arrived in LA around 9 PM local time. Security in LA was, as it usually is, kind of a fiasco. I'm always surprised that such a busy airport has such bad security facilities.
Our flight was supposed to leave LA around midnight, but it got delayed a couple of times, and we ended up boarding closer to 2 AM. Things were starting to get pretty surreal at that point, as I was approaching the "been up for 24 hours straight" mark. We boarded our Qantas flight (a 747) and got settled into our seats. We had seats in the back (row 72), which was nice - the plane tapers in the back, so instead of having three seats on each side, there are only 2 seats plus a half-seat-width gap between the seat and the window. That's pretty much ideal for a long flight, because once you get into the air, you can get your bag down and stash it beside your seat for easy access to everything.
There was some kind of electronic problem with the plane (the radio or the intercom or something), so we were stuck at the gate for about an hour after we boarded while they worked on it. I was kind of halfway dozing off during that period, but we finally got into the air about 3 AM.
Saturday, March 5th: On the Plane
Saturday passed entirely in the air. The flight from LA to Sydney was about 15.5 hours, but it really wasn't all THAT bad. Once you get past a certain length, the flight is just "long" and you deal with it, I think. They served us dinner shortly after takeoff, then turned off most of the lights so everybody could sleep. I don't sleep well on planes, but I was able to nap for maybe 4 or 5 hours total during the flight, usually in 15 or 30 minute intervals.
The flight was about as pleasant as it can be. The seats are larger and roomier than most coach seats (not like business class, but at least not absolutely ridiculous), and every seat had an entertainment system with movies, TV, games, etc. I didn't really watch anything, though. I'm just not that into watching movies to pass the time, I guess. I did watch the in-flight map, which is always very interesting to me - tracking our altitude, speed, location, etc. I mostly read and did crossword puzzles and tried to sleep. I used a neck pillow and my Bose noise canceling headphones for the first time, and they worked out fairly well. The neck pillow took some adjusting to get used to. The headphones did cut a lot of the engine noise, but not nearly all of it. (Still much better than Julie's really cheap ones, though.) But there was an unforeseen side effect - with the engine noise reduced, you can hear the inane conversations and various other noises of all the people around you much, much better. In some ways the engine noise is preferable.
Sunday, March 6th: Sydney
We arrived at the Sydney airport around 11 AM. The overnight flight and daytime arrival seems to be pretty much ideal, as we had NO jet lag at all when we arrived. We pretty much just went straight into the day with no problems at all. We reclaimed our bags (and got sniffed by the cutest little beagles wearing sweaters) and made it through customs (they're big on quarantine for fresh fruit and stuff, and you can't take ANY food from the plane into the country). One of the first things we saw once we got into the terminal was, oddly enough, a Krispy Kreme. I was very tempted to stop for some doughnuts, but we moved on to get out some cash and get a taxi to our hotel.
Their money is fairly simple - there's no 1 cent piece (they just round totals up or down), and they have 5 cent, 10 cent, 20 cent, 50 cent, $1, and $2 coins. They have $5, $10, $20, and $50 bills. (We never saw anything bigger, if they had anything bigger.) All of the bills are different colors and sizes, with a small, clear plastic window (presumably to make counterfeiting harder). The exchange rate while we were there was about 75 to 80 cents US per Australian dollar. So that was in our favor, but things in general still seemed pretty expensive.
We got a taxi in the taxi queue (which was nice - I don't have much practice at hailing cabs, since you really just don't use them in Atlanta), and the guy didn't exactly know where our hotel was. He didn't seem to be ripping us off, he really didn't seem to know the best way to get there. The taxi ride was about $45 including airport fees, bridge and tunnel tolls, and tip.
The hotel was the Pensione hotel, and it was at the south end of George St., which is kind of like Peachtree or Broadway for Sydney, apparently. I believe it's the oldest street in the city. The hotel was kind of on the edge of the Chinatown area. The area looked a little bit seedy, but it was actually fine, and the hotel was nice enough. It was fairly new, having been refit into an old, narrow, somewhat oddly shaped building. Our room was right by the stairs from the street and right by the small reception area, so we really didn't see much of the hotel. The room was smallish and fairly sparse, with just the bed, a nightstand, an ottoman, a cabinet, and a TV mounted on a bracket WAY up in the air - the ceilings were about 15' or more.
Australian TV was pretty lame, really - I think we had about 6 or 10 channels max at any place we stayed. They mostly seemed to show news, music videos, and American TV shows. There was a lot of sports programming, nearly all of which was incomprehensible- cricket, National Rugby League, and Australian rules football. Crazy stuff - I'll take baseball and football over that stuff.
After we got settled in, we went out walking. We walked north up George St., passing the Queen Victoria Building (an old building that was converted to a really cool shopping mall) and a lot of other cool buildings. We went up to Observatory Hill, which is the highest point in Sydney at 145' and offered really nice views of the harbor. It was very pretty, with a big green lawn and a bunch of giant Moreton Bay Fig trees. There were wedding photos being taken EVERYWHERE we went. It was early fall, and the weather was still nice and warm, but not oppressively hot, so there were wedding parties (sometimes 2 or 3) in every park.
We walked around the Harbour Bridge area, up under the bridge by the harbor overlooking the Opera House. There was a nice street market open under the bridge, with a lot of arts and crafts stuff. We then walked up onto the bridge. Unfortunately, the observation deck in one of the bridge pylons was closed for the day, but we did get a good look at the harbor and the Opera House as we walked across the bridge. The water was beautiful - very clear and blue/green in color. After crossing the bridge, we took transit back toward the hotel. Sydney has a pretty nice, extensive train system (plus ferries, buses, and a monorail system). We took the train back across the bridge and got off at the stop closest to our hotel. We wandered through the Darling Harbour area and through Chinatown and the Paddy Markets, got something to eat, and went back to the hotel.
Some other cool stuff:
Palm trees near Observatory Hill
Shadows under Harbour Bridge
Monday, March 7: More Sydney
Monday was another walking day in Sydney. We started out by going back to the Darling Harbour area near our hotel to visit the Chinese Garden of Friendship, a large, formal garden donated to Sydney by the Chinese government or something. It was very pretty, with a lot of streams and waterfalls, rocks, pagodas, and all sorts of plants. (It was pretty amazing how much stuff was in bloom everywhere we went - everything was much more flowery than here at home.) It was also amazing seeing all sort of tropical birds flying around free - cockatoos, parrots, lorikeets, etc. We stopped off by a comic shop that we happened to come across, and I bought a few old comics. I got a good buy on some old Eternals comics by Jack Kirby from the 70s ($1 each), but most everything else was fairly disorganized and expensive.
We walked over to Hyde Park, one of several large parks in the middle of Sydney. The Anzac Memorial (ANZAC: Australia-New Zealand Army Corps) was at the south end, and it was very nice - it was reminiscent of the various memorials in Washington, DC, with a small war museum in the basement. Then we walked north through some small formal gardens in the park, down a pedestrian mall lined with giant trees, toward a very pretty fountain.
We continued up Macquarie St., where a lot of historic buildings have been converted into various sorts of museums, and into the Domain South and the Domain North, two more large, beautiful parks. The Domain North was home to the Royal Botanic Gardens and had lots of beautiful landscaping, laid out very informally - you could pretty much just stroll around anywhere, and it was nearly all outside except for one greenhouse area. As we walked, we started noticing some large shapes in the trees and eventually realized that the trees in the park were home to a large colony of very large bats. (Like, 2+ foot wingspan bats.) There were thousands of them hanging in the trees, mostly asleep, but some were moving around. That was very cool.
We ate at the cafe in the botanic gardens, where I had my first taste of some foods that you don't really see in the US. I had a meat pie (beef in gravy, in a pastry shell - very good, and they come in all sort of varieties, some with potatoes, some with cheese, etc.) and an order of potato wedges. The wedges are served with sour cream and sweet chili sauce. (Ketchup isn't that common, it's called "tomato sauce," and you usually have to ask for it and pay extra for it.) I'm addicted to the sweet chili sauce now - that's some good stuff.
We continued north through the gorgeous park, with views of the bridge and opera house across Farm Cove from where we were, out to Mrs. Macquarie's Point, which also had nice views of the harbor. We then walked around the edge of Farm Cove to Bennelong Point, where the Opera House sits. It really is a strange looking building, and it was cool to see it up close after seeing long shots of it for so many years. We didn't take the (somewhat expensive) tour, but we did walk around the lobby a bit and peek into the auditorium when we could.
By this point, it was getting somewhat late in the afternoon to do anything too ambitious, so we walked over to Circular Quay, where a lot of the ferries depart, and took a ferry ride over to Manly, a suburb of Sydney with a nice beach. Supposedly the beaches are topless, but alas, we didn't see any topless women frolicking in the surf. (We did see one super-hot topless woman showing off for the ferry as we passed the sailboat she was on, though, so I did get my quota of breasteses filled. :-) Manly was a nice beach town with a gorgeous beach. We walked around the beach and areas nearby for a bit, had dinner at a local pizza place that we came across (we were the only customers besides the family of the people running the place), and caught the ferry back. The sun set as we were riding back, and we saw a pretty sunset behind the bridge and opera house (kind of a fuzzy picture, because the light was low, I was on a moving ferry, and I'm not a great photographer). We then headed for the hotel for the night.
Some other cool stuff:
Julie in the Chinese Garden Tea Room
St. Mary's Cathedral from Hyde Park
International College of Tourism in Manly
Tuesday, March 8: The Blue Mountains
We got up relatively early on Tuesday and headed over to the Hertz office to pick up our first rental car, a nice automatic Toyota Camry. After getting the scare treatment from the Hertz guy about the way damage charges work in Australia (apparently you get charged $2500+ for any little damage, like a door dent in a parking lot, and they refund you the difference after they get it fixed), we walked around the corner to the parking deck. In a scene that could not have been scripted any better, Julie (the passenger) walked up to the driver door and I (the driver) walked up to the passenger door, then we both kind of went "huh" and walked around to the other side, then laughed at the great start we were getting off to with the whole "driving on the wrong side of the road" thing.
By far, the most serious problem I had with driving on the wrong side of the road was unforeseen ahead of time. I know you have to keep left of the median, I know the steering wheel is on the opposite side of the car than I'm used to, but I wasn't mentally prepared for the turn signal to be on the right side of the steering wheel and the windshield wiper controls to be on the left. So, starting with about 95% on day 1, down to about 10% by the time we left, I turned on the windshield wipers when trying to signal a turn. (What's really bad is even after a month back home, I still sometimes have to stop and think about which control to use in my own car, and occasionally turn on the wipers accidentally when I don't stop to think about it.)
Picking up the car in downtown Sydney was definitely a trial by fire. It wasn't as bad as, say, London, but the complications due to all the bridges and tunnels, plus getting used to the whole "wrong side of the road" thing, plus rush hour, plus all the new signage conventions to learn made for a nerve-wracking morning. But we eventually found our way to the freeway and headed west out of town for the Blue Mountains.
Starting about 40 or 50 miles west of Sydney, the Blue Mountains apparently aren't really mountains at all, but a plateau that's been weathered by rivers and creeks to create some fairly dramatic scenery. Our first stop was at Falls Reserve, to view Wentworth Falls. It was here that we really began to be struck by just how different the flora were from what we were used to, and that was a continuous source of fascination for me throughout the trip. They just have some really cool trees and plants over there.
The Falls Reserve area has a number of walking trails with a number of scenic overlooks and waterfalls of various sizes. One of the trails takes you down into the gorge on a trail literally etched into the side of the cliff, crossing the 935 foot Wentworth Falls a number of times. (None of my pictures of the falls really do it justice - it's so tall, it's really difficult to capture all of it in a single photo.) We really weren't prepared to hike the full 3ish hour trail, so we instead walked about 30 minutes into the trail, to the base of the first stage of the falls, and then retraced our steps. If I ever go back, I'm definitely heading back to walk the full trail, as what we saw of it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
Next, we headed up the road a bit to the town of Leura for lunch at a cafe. We ate at a lot of cafes and bakeries while we were in Australia. They had a few fast food places (McDonalds, Hungry Jacks [Burger King], KFC, Pizza Hut, plus a couple of Australian chains), but they weren't nearly as ubiquitous as they are in the states. They didn't seem to have any chain sit-down restaurants that we could find, except for the one Outback that we saw while driving back to Sydney from the Blue Mountains. I totally would have stopped, just to see what it was like, but we weren't sure how to get off the freeway and get to it. So little local cafes and bakeries were pretty much the best choice for lunch, and the food was generally pretty good.
On the way back to the car, we spotted some cockatoos eating seeds in a tree. Julie's a big fan of birds, so she was very excited, and I have to admit that it was really cool seeing these kinds of birds just flying around everywhere. We got back to the car and drove out to the Sublime Point lookout, where we got our first glimpse of a famous rock formation called the Three Sisters, and a cool view of our next stop, a town called Katoomba, perched atop a cliff.
In Katoomba, we went to Scenic World (http://www.scenicworld.com.au), where we rode the world's steepest incline railway 415 meters down to the valley floor. This thing was INCREDIBLY steep, much steeper than I was expecting, and it actually descended through a crevasse in the cliff wall. The photo doesn't do it justice, as the rails flattened out a bit at the bottom - the middle part was the steepest. Apparently there used to be a lot of coal mining in the valley, which is how the railway originally got started. Eventually the coal mining stopped (leaving miles and miles of tunnels carved into the cliffs) and the area was turned into a tourist attraction. The valley is filled with rainforest, and there's a nice boardwalk that winds through the rainforest, with signs pointing out various things of interest, like plants and trees, old coal mining equipment that was abandoned, and a spring that is pure enough to drink from. We got another nice view of the other side of the Three Sisters from the boardwalk, as well. The boardwalk eventually ends at the station for the Flyway, a cable car that lifts you back out of the valley. I was pretty impressed with Scenic World - it's one of the nicest, least tacky tourist activities I've ever seen.
Also in Katoomba was the Echo Point lookout, a very popular lookout point for the Three Sisters. If you look carefully in this photo, you can see some people on a walkway to the leftmost sister. Some later photos were taken as I walked out to that point. Along the trail to the Three Sisters, we saw more views of clear blue sky with beautiful green trees with white bark. Julie was too tired to walk the million steps out to the Three Sisters, so she stayed at the lookout while I walked on. I'm really glad I made an effort to get into shape before going on this trip, as walking up huge flights of rough-hewn stairs was something of a recurring theme for the trip.
Leaving Echo Point, we drove up the road to Blackheath and Govett's Leap lookout (another very tall waterfall is faintly visible). Then we continued north a bit, before starting our trek back to Sydney as the sun began to set. The trip back was not without adventure, as we once again missed a turn going into Sydney and had to improvise. I don't think we ever successfully went where we intended to go while driving in Sydney, but we didn't really have any problems in the rest of the country. If you can drive in Sydney, you can apparently drive anywhere in Australia.
Some other cool stuff:
Jeff, this one's for you - me sportin' a Ping shirt under a giant fern
Gorgeous blue sky at Wentworth Falls
