Sydney in Two Days
The Opera House, Bay Bridge and an Old Prison?
With our three weeks in Thailand over, the next chapter in our journey is a family trip to Australia. We try to go on a family vacation with Yuki’s parents every year; we went to South Korea in 2014 and Europe last year. In fact, almost exactly a year ago we were looking at the Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland.
This year, Yuki’s dad was set on visiting Ayers Rock (Uluru) in Australia. But there’s not a lot to do at Ayers Rock and certainly not for an entire vacation, so we decided that we’d visit Sydney before it and Melbourne afterwards.
We took an overnight flight from Bangkok to Sydney, arriving early in the morning and a little tired. We took advantage of a deal with Optus, a local cellular service provider, to get 1 GB of data for $2/day over a period of 20 days. We were happy to have a data for our entire time in Australia ($40 total for oodles of internet). We tried to use this newfound power of data to get an Uber to our AirBnB apartment, but it didn’t work so we had to get a cab. Once we’d dropped our bags off at the AirBnB, we took the train downtown.
We had to buy single-trip tickets for the first trip downtown because although there’s a free transit card which offers discounted fares, you can’t buy it at many stations. Not very useful or logical. It’s only available from certain supermarkets and convenience stores. Later, we get the Opal transit card and are told that on Sundays, “the maximum fare is $2.60". What does that mean to you? We thought it meant that any trip on Sunday would cost $2.60 or less, but we later realize that it actually means that you will pay no more than $2.60 for the entire day, no matter how much you use transit that day. So we added an unnecessary $10 onto each of our 4 transit cards, which we didn’t need and never used. We also somehow got charged for double this amount on our credit card statement. Grr…
Yuki’s dad wanted to walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge so we took the train across the bridge and got off on the far side. We found a Saturday weekend market under the bridge that we wandered through first before crossing the bridge.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is an icon of the city, but we were not that impressed with it. I was actually disappointed because it is a massive steel structure but there’s nothing very majestic about it. Structurally, it looks like a brutally large compressed arch bridge – which it is – that is too big and heavy. Though the span is probably too short for a suspension or cable-stayed bridge like the Brooklyn Bridge, it seems to me that a truss or a tied-arch would be appropriate. At a human scale, the suicide fence topped with bar wire that curve over the walkway make us feel like we were walking through a penitentiary.
In fact, this fence is so finely meshed that it blocks the view of the city and the only view is through a narrow gap above the handrail — but you have to bend down awkwardly and it’s barely large enough for a camera to fit through.
Once we got to the other side of the bridge, we were all sufficiently hungry to find food. The data plan came into action (as would become typical during our time in Australia) to find a highly rated place to eat. We passed through the historic Rock area on our way to Circular Quay, where we thought there was a free public bus but that had stopped running a few years ago.
Circular Quay is what Sydney considers a landmark of their downtown, and where all of the tourists are directed to. It is the equivalent to Waterfront Station in Vancouver; however, there is one noticeable difference. Where Waterfront Station is close to Granville Street, the Convention Centre, and buses to Stanley Park (i.e. central to most tourist attractions), Circular Quay is only close to the Opera House and many other attractions are far away.
Not understanding the public transit here, we tried to save money by walking 2 kilometres to where the restaurants were. This was an agonizing walk through a dead, empty financial district with barely another soul around. We were all very hungry and tired but there wasn’t even a cheap fast food joint on the way so we had to slog the entire 2 km.
The next day, after a long night of rest, we came back at Circular Quay to walk to the Sydney Opera House.
The sky was overcast and I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Opera House up close. I didn’t realize that the base would be such a massive form of precast concrete panels, though I found it interesting that the floor panels all had long term creep (sag). These panels are held down by what look like countersunk Philips head lag bolts and there’s a gap between each panel. The sails are covered in ceramic tiles that give an odd weight to a structure that was supposed to be lightweight.
I think a large portion of my disappointment with the Opera House is that it’s most iconic when viewed from a distance but up close, there’s nothing interesting to be revealed. I didn’t really learn much about the structure seeing it up close, and we couldn’t get inside to see more of it. Some people were headed to some shows in the building, but we didn’t have tickets so we left and went to the nearby Botanical Gardens where I proceeded to have terrible allergies.
I should have known better, but I didn’t realize that spring in Australia would bring about a lot of hay fever. It might be the grass or something else, but it made my time in the gardens not very nice. I didn’t bring allergy meds because we were slimming down our packs when we left Thailand, but fortunately Yuki had some in her medical bag that I was able to take the next day, saving me a horrendous experience.
We boarded a motorized train that goes on a short tour through the gardens. It is a hop-on hop-off vehicle and worthwhile for getting information on some of the more exotic plants in the botanical gardens.
After our train trip, we went back to Circular Quay for lunch at Hungry Jacks, a fast food burger joint. While we were eating lunch, we decided to take the ferry somewhere. I’d previously heard about Cockatoo Island, so we decided to head there. The ferry system was a bit confusing because the screen board showing the stops for the ferry didn’t correspond with the map nor the true destination. While I was annoyed at the ferry schedule here, it wouldn’t be as bad as when we got to Melbourne — but more on that in the next blog.
Cockatoo Island was wonderful. We arrived late in the day so there weren’t many people around, and we were able to walk around alone. The island was a jail (like Alcatraz) and then became a shipbuilding facility during the world wars. Now it is a free UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I enjoyed walking along the old factory buildings and seeing the old infrastructure. There are a lot of old cranes and booms, as well as flooded dry docks. Most of it is still in good condition, though some of the ironwork has rusted away.
We walked around the perimeter to the campground where people were camping in a field of tents. Then we walked up to the centre of the island, which is an elevated cliff of sandstone. Up top are the old jail cells and a walkway. There are some cliffs that are cut away to show buried storage containers that were carved out of the island. Up here, there are old buildings that people can stay at but Yuki and her mom figured that they were probably full of ghosts from the jail.
We ended with a walk through one of two tunnels that cross the island.
The sunset made the photos all the better. On the way back, we got a view of the Opera House lit up at night.
