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.

Expand, Contract (36)

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention. The final edit of David Chart's Transhuman Space: Wings of the Rising Sun went in a few days ago. This should be an interesting addition to the Transhuman Space setting. I don't think that David intended it to play too excessively to western stereotypes about Japan, and I'm trying to keep that impulse under control myself, but ... well, the convention demo scenario I'm sketching out to tie up with it will have the tagline "Transhuman Space Meets Anime (with a hint of Supermarionation)".

Anyway, I should get back to the project proposal I'm trying to pull into shape now.

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 of the Red Centre

When you're on a three-week trip-of-a-lifetime to Australia - like ours of last October - there are some things you feel kind of obliged to do. So on the 22nd, we flew from Sydney to Ayer's Rock.

(Note: For convenience, I'll refer to the actual darn great lump of rock in the middle of the Outback as "Uluru", and the modern developments around it - with the airport and the resort/hotel complex - as "Ayer's Rock".)

Actually, in retrospect, it's possible that we were so determined to take in all the big stuff in or around that area that we didn't commit quite enough time to Uluru itself. We only got at all close to it once, briefly, on the last day of the trip. But as the photos should show, we saw it plenty. It does one thing. It sits there, geologically. It's a simple sort of object, but it has presence. It's hard to sum it up beyond that, but there's a reason for its fame.

The other oddity about our trip was that we happened to get there in the wake of quite a bit more precipitation than the Outback usually sees. We didn't catch significant amounts of rain ourselves - although one barbecue dinner got moved indoors - and it was still hot, but there was a bit more cloud and haze disrupting the legendary Outback sunlight, and the pictures may show a bit more green than most that you get from that region. Still, we got plenty of sense of desert.

Anyway, we got an early flight out of Sydney, arrived in the afternoon, checked into our hotel (in the admirably low-profile and appealing resort development), grabbed some lunch, and then got on the coach for our first bit of touring - a trip to Kata Tjuta (also known as Mount Olga to the first European explorer to sight it from a few miles away, and hence casually referred to as "The Olgas" by every visitor who gets closer and realises that it's more plural than singular). This, to save people some Googling, is geologically a sort of twin to Uluru, a few miles away - but where Uluru is resolutely monolithic and resistant to erosion, Kata Tjuta has fractured and broken along vertical lines of stratification. Hence, we got to stroll deep into a red-rock cleft between towering cliffs, then turned around and ambled back. It may not sound like much, but you've got to understand the sheer alien-ness of this scenery.

Oh, and did I mention the heat, too?

Then we got back on the coach to head back to watch the effect of the sunset light on Uluru. First, though, we got to see one (1) feral camel from the coach, and paused for another chance to contemplate Kata Tjuta in the distance. Anyway, the (cloud-filtered) sunset effect was pretty cool.

Then we had the scheduled barbecue that mutated into an indoor buffet - in our own hotel, as it turned out. But it was actually rather good, with a chance to try some weird local crustaceans and so forth.

The next day involved an early start (and, fortunately, a reasonable chance to doze on the coach); we were heading for King's Canyon, which may not look very far on the map, but which is in a noticeably different ecological zone. Around Uluru, the only grass you get is spinifex, and the only thing that eats spinifex is termites. Head north-west, though (a long way round, due to there being a dry lake thing in the way), and you get country that's one notch more verdant; there are even wild horses living in the area, as we saw from the coach and in captivity at King's Creek Station, where we stopped for breakfast.

As we approached King's Canyon, the tour guides began describing options. Basically, one can either take a wlak around the rim of the canyon - mostly unshaded, in scorching heat, though with a chance to see a waterhole at the head of the canyon called the Garden of Eden - or one can wimp out and take a lighter stroll up the floor of the canyon.

We wimped out.

Well, mostly. We did take an option to climb half-way up to the rim for a bit of view and to see how it felt. But it was clear that the guides were seriously trying to dissuade too many people from trying the rim walk who were going to pass out half way and need the attention of a medical helicopter. And did I mention the heat?

We were bemused, though, to see that the party setting off for the full, nigh-dangerous walk seemed to consist largely of assorted Asian tourists who looked less well dressed or equipped for it than we were ourselves. Was this a face thing, I wondered stereotypically? Anyhow, we left them to it after going up and down the partial climb (good for a view, some boasting value in its own right), then headed off with a guide into the canyon floor. Which was, I should say, well worth it; the whole canyon has the feel of an oasis in the Outback desert, mingling eucalyptus trees and other local flora with great fragments of orange rock fallen from the walls. Although the paths have been cleared and smoothed enough to make this a fairly comfortable exercise, there's some definite sense of primal Australia to be had, and an awareness that one is on ... well, not another planet, but definitely the other side of one's own planet.

Then we got back to the coach, and went off to wait for the rim-walkers. Which was where the one drawback in this tour schedule appeared. Our tour had inevitably taken less time than theirs, and the place we ended up waiting was King's Canyon Resort, which doubtless serves the purpose of providing accommodation well enough, but is otherwise a bit uninspiring - there wasn't a huge amount to see or do (unless one was prepared to pay the serious cost of a 'plane flight round the area), and the lunch options were kind of limited. Basically, a couple of hours of high-temperature thumb-twiddling ensued.

Ah well. We eventually got to make the return trip to Ayer's Rock, complete with another comfort stop at Curtin Springs Station (with an emu to admire - hey, proper Aussie wildlife!), and a chance to be confused by Fooluru. (Uh, Mount Conner - a mesa that resembles Ayer's Rock enough from a distance to befuddle careless visitors.)

Which left us back at the hotel complex with the evening to ourselves. So after a bit of a look around, we strolled through the big, magnificently red open central area to the viewpoint in the middle, and watched dusk fall on Uluru and Kata Tjutu in the distance. Then, in due course, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner in one of the swisher restaurants around the place, including a sampling plate with kangaroo and emu meat. I guess it was kind of just as well we'd seen both on the hoof by then.

And then, on the 24th, we had another fairly early start, to go see Uluru by sunrise (slight haze in the sky still notwithstanding). Which trip ended with a coach run round much of the perimeter of the thing, so we got to say a respectful farewell.

And then it was back to the resort for breakfast and checkout, and on to the airport for our flight back to Sydney - with a last view of the scenery from the plane. So I guess we packed a fair bit in there.