Views Over the Southern Seas

I've got a few more pictures up on Flickr from our big holiday last October, but the 27th was mostly a day of travel. Still, if you're going to be travelling between cities, there's something to be said for travelling between Sydney and Hong Kong.


So we woke up in central Sydney, made our way by shuttle bus to the airport ... and spent several hours in the air, with the occasional glance out of the cabin window to see, first the northern Outback, then the Indonesian archipelago sliding past below. I forget which films I watched on the back of the seat in front... Anyway, in due course we landed in Hong Kong and took a bus to our hotel. By that time, it was quite late, so we ate in the hotel's pretty good multi-ethnic buffet and crashed out.

Notes and reflections on Hong Kong will accompany the next day's photos. But there are a lot of those to sort out and polish up.

Views Around Sydney, Over a Museum, and Under an Aquarium

Another day's worth of photographs from last October's big holiday have now gone up on my Flickr photostream.

The 26th of the month was our last full day in Sydney and in Australia, and we spent it catching on a few things we still wanted to see in the city. Unfortunately, it was another grey day, so the photos aren't postcard-perfect, but it had its points of interest.


We started by heading down to the Hyde Park/Macquarie Street area, to look at a few of the oldest public buildings in the city (mostly from the outside), and the park (named after the one in London, apparently) with a grandiose quasi-classical fountain at the north end and its grand war memorial at the south. Macquarie Street, by the way, is named after an early governor of New South Wales, who managed, by dint of improvisation, luck, and employment of a convict fraudster who turned out to be a competent architect, to give the place a decent colonial-Georgian start in things like its first substantial church, its mint, a barracks building, and its hospital. Incidentally, the bookshop in the old mint building has the most substantial door I've ever seen in a bookshop...

Then we turned right to head towards Darling Harbour once again. This is one of those city-centre areas which is clearly designed to look good to visitors and to show what a cool city this is, and it's pretty good at this. The children's playground not only has lots of water features; it has a working hand-powered Archimedean screw (very educational); there's a really nice-looking Chinese garden (confession - with limited time in hand, we didn't pay to go into that, but got some nice pictures through the gratings in the walls anyway); and so on.

But we passed on through, because we were heading for the Powerhouse Museum, south-west of the bay. I can best describe this to British readers as an Australian combination of the V and A and the Science Museum, only smaller and newer than either. Hence, along with an interesting assortment of land and air vehicles, many of local relevance (the steam engine which pulled the first passenger train in New South Wales, Aussie-built aircraft, rocket nosecones recovered from the Outback down-range of Woomera), there were examples of Australian industrial design and the like (Speedo swimming costumes, for example). There were also a number of entries from an art competition which simply took "Lace" as its theme, some of which were definitely interesting - not least the wrecked, rusting pickup truck, its bodywork converted to intricate lacework by application of a plasma torch, and the pieces created using 3-D printers (which are, I get the impression, becoming the avant-garde designer-artist's toy of choice these days).

But in due course, we moved on and back to Darling Harbour - to take a very quick look at another transport-related museum, the Australian National Maritime Museum. This has much of the stuff that one would expect - including a boat made of beer cans as well as canoes, record-breaking speedboats, big models of battleships, bits of lighthouses, and (when we visited at least) an exhibition about immigrants sailing to Australia in the 20th Century. But it's the stuff outside, parked on or next to the wharfs on the Harbour, that really commands attention, including as it does a destroyer (HMAS Vampire), an Oberon-class submarine (HMAS Onslow), a trawler with a heroic war record (the Krait), and a small but complete lighthouse.

And then we crossed Pyrmont Bridge to the last serious tourist attraction of the day; Sydney Aquarium. This is, well, a fine aquarium, with a couple of big tanks where one can do the "walk around under the water" thing, one holding dugongs, the other sharks. The latter, incidentally, looked really good, and one had to read the labels quite carefully to determine that actually, none of them would be terribly interested in eating people. I can quite believe that some species suffer very badly from looking so much like man-eaters that they get killed on sight, despite actually being harmless shellfish-eaters. There were some other good things in the aquarium, incidentally (not to mention a Lego Moby Dick), but as the lighting was generally at aquarium levels, it was hard to get decent pictures.

Then it was back to the hotel (via coffee and cake at a place in the Queen Victoria Building) before heading out for dinner at the same Thai place up near the rocks which we'd visited before. Yeah, it was good Thai food.

Views of a Zoo (and Central Sydney)

When one heads off to Australia - as we did last October - it seems that part of the point should be seeing some of the local wildlife. And we did, at various points - but a lot of those animals had the traditional wild animal tendency to hide from human inspection, or at least not to be where we happened to be. So we decided to cheat, a little, and spend a day in Sydney's Taronga Zoo. The only snag was, the day we scheduled for this (the 25th) turned out to be the greyest and wettest of the entire trip. Oh well.

Actually, we wrapped a little other sightseeing (and required shopping) around the zoo trip, starting with a stroll down George Street as far as the rather grand Queen Victoria Building with its two huge and slightly kitsch roof-suspended clocks, then heading back up to Circular Quay to pick up a ferry across the harbour. The zoo actually has a rather wonderful location, on the slope of one of the many hills running down to the water; when one arrives by ferry, one can catch a cable car over the zoo to the entrance higher up the slope. (Assuming that the wind isn't strong enough to close the cable car, that is. We got lucky and arrived before that happened.) The zoo itself also seems fine, with a range of animals including but not limited to a lot of Aussie species. The animals look quite happy and healthy, too.

So yes, we did get to see koalas, a saltwater crocodile, a komodo dragon (okay, not native, but right end of the planet, okay?), assorted kangaroos and wallabies, a cassowary, an emu, a Tasmanian devil, and even a couple of monotremes. The latter, by the way, are a bit like hard work for the return; the echidnas just slumped and whiffled around with their snouts in feeding tubes, while the zoo's platypus is in a large tank in a darkened room, around which visitors stand waiting for glimpses through the aquatic vegetation. Plus, we saw a lot of assorted smaller Aussie fauna, including a local snake and lizard being introduced to the public by one of the keepers and looking quite elegant in the process.

The zoo also has a fair number of the universal zoo favourites, incidentally - chimps, elephants, giraffes, and so on. The location made for a dramatic backdrop for the ibex enclosure in particular, and it turned out that, completely by chance, we were there on the first day that the litter of cubs recently born to the resident Sumatran tigress were on view to the public.

Then, on the way out, exiting in traditional fashion through the gift shop, we discovered the bonus exhibit. The shop has a huge floor-to-ceiling window, looking into the tank occupied by one of the zoo's resident sea lions - an amiable creature who appeared as interested in looking at people as people were at looking at her. Special bonus points for the sympathy play; apparently, she's an orphan whose mother was killed by a shark

Anyhow, zoo trip done, we rode the ferry back across the harbour, and stayed on as far as Darling Harbour. Stuff to see there: ships outside the Maritime Museum, fountains and water features ... but we would be going back that way the next day. For now, we followed the monorail track back to George Street, strolled back to the hotel, took the lift up to the rooftop viewing platform for some panoramic views of the rain-washed centre of the city, then eventually made our way back to the Rocks/Circular Quay area for dinner in an Italian restaurant.

Views of Biplanes and Business Districts

Oh yes, a little bit more is up on my Flickr photostream. By the end of the 24th of October last year, we were back in Sydney, flying in (and no, the aircraft in the pictures isn't the one we were on) and then accidentally taking an overpriced luxury taxi from the airport to our hotel on George Street, Sydney's main commercial artery. Then we assembled dinner for ourselves from a nearby shop and crashed out.

Views Over Sydney

I've finished posting another day's pictures from last October's big antipodean holiday, specifically those from the 21st of October. Which was basically a day spent wandering around central Sydney. The morning was spent grabbing some breakfast in the Rocks area, taking a look around the vicinity of the hotel, then heading down to the main shopping area - largely for practical reasons, but we did get to discover things like the Strand Arcade and the General Post Office there.

Then, after lunch in an Italian place on Circular Quay, we worked our way back around to the Rocks, and eventually up the Bridge Stairs - which put us on rather than under Sydney Harbour Bridge for the first time. Which meant that we could walk over the bridge and get into north Sydney, with some superb views on the way.

(In case anyone wonders; we considered paying to climb to the very top of the bridge, but when we looked at the small print, it seemed to us like you spent money, a few hours, and some effort to get a marginally better view - but then, you weren't allowed to take a camera with you in case you dropped it on someone. So we passed on that. The views from the walkway were actually plenty.)

Having reached the north side of the harbour, we mostly just strolled around for a bit, but that strolling did take in Luna Park, the dramatically-sited 1930s amusement park that we'd been glimpsing every time we looked north across the harbour since we reached Sydney. We're not really amusement park people, but this one did score some points for authenticity of feel and lack of tackiness; instead of tired Disney characters (or even more dubious copyright-skirting images), this one actually looked like a colourful, well-maintained period amusement park surely ought to look. Okay, the clown-face gateway that acts as the park's landmark verges on the scary, but that's all part of the style, isn't it?

Then, as dusk approached, we headed back over the bridge (glancing over and down and up at various sights of Sydney on the way), and wrapped things up by finding our way up to Observatory Hill. It was too late by then to look round the old Observatory itself, but this gave us another set of variant views of Sydney as darkness fell.

And it even left us not too far from the hotel, so we could head back there for a short while before heading out for a good Thai dinner at a place nearby.

Views Over and Under the Mountains

Most of our trip to Australia last October was quite consciously pre-planned. I'm not saying that we knew exactly what we were going to see before we got anywhere, but there were a lot of things that we knew in advance we did want to see, and we made sure we fitted them in.

The trip to Jenolan on the 20th of the month, though, was a bit of serendipity. When we were booking various segments of the holiday, we discovered that we could get another coach trip for not much extra, on something like a buy-one-get-one-free deal, and Jenolan caught our eyes in passing. Which just goes to show something, I suppose. Okay, these caves are one of New South Wales's major tourist attractions, it seems, but I don't think that they're really known in the UK. They should be.

The coach journey out to the Blue Mountains had some good stops and sights on the way, too. After a moderately early start, it took in a flying visit to the Blue Mountains Scenic World, at Katoomba. This is basically an old coal mine close to a town up in the Blue Mountains, which, as it's no longer working as a mine, has been converted to a kind of mini-theme park, with the old mining track down the side of the mountain converted into a ride that claims to be the world's steepest passenger railway. Or an angled elevator, if you prefer, really. Whatever. The views of the mountain scenery were great, including the "Three Sisters" (a striking triple rock formation with a couple of supposed aboriginal legends, probably fake, attached), and the tree-fern forest was wonderfully subtly alien.

Then it was back up the hill by cable-car, back on the coach, past the Hydro Majestic Hotel (which we'd seen a week or so before from the train), and down a narrow winding mountain-valley road to Jenolan. Which would just be a striking little Edwardian resort hidden in the mountains, until one discovers why the hotel was built there; the caves. And by "the caves", it turns out we mean "some of the oldest publicly-accessible caves on Earth, possibly as much as 400 million years old, with limestone formations that have clearly been developing all that time".

I've posted a fair number of the photos we took on the tour (which only covered a partial segment of the whole complex - there are several tours available), but it's really very difficult to do these things justice with a camera - it's all underground, with restrained but effective lighting (not many garish coloured lamps, I'm happy to say) reflecting off masses of damp textured limestone. It comes out weird with flash on and grainy and orange without, and it's very hard to convey the scale of the thing. Let's just say there's cave after cave of stalactites, stalagmites, sheet/curtain formations, and bizarre textures, plus some areas of jumbled broken rock for variety. The result is bizarre, almost Lovecraftian at times but strangely beautiful and fascinating.

Then, just after the coach had set out back towards Sydney, the driver announced that, if we didn't mind a brief diversion, there was a place where we'd have a good chance of seeing some wild kangaroos, if we were interested? Funnily enough, on a coach full of tourists in Australia, this didn't need much of a vote. (Cry from the young female British tourists at the back: "Yay for Skippy!") So we pulled over to the side of the road, and the driver took us for a short walk through the woodlands to a clearing with some chalets that are rented out to holidaymakers. And the kangaroos didn't let us down; there was a mob of what I gather were eastern grey kangaroos, sitting or standing around casually grazing and entirely happy to be photographed. (I assume that this group are very used to people; apparently, the species normally avoids humans.) They were even happy to live up to the full stereotype; there was a mother with a fair-sized joey in her pouch, its head sticking out cutely. So our Aussie-experience meter ticked over another notch.

Then, once we'd been back to our hotel, we went out for dinner, strolled past a sight or two, and ended up eating in a place on top of the Customs House by Circular Quay. Eating out on the balcony was a little cool that evening, but the view more than compensated, and the food was good.

 So, yes. Serendipity.