Sydney Blues
Trip Start
Sep 03, 2004
1
20
44
Trip End
Dec 22, 2004
Sydney,
Australia
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
After 3 weeks of not-so-nice weather in New Zealand, we were really looking forward to getting into the Australian heat. Although only Spring, we'd still heard that Sydney had been having temperatures of around 38c, and boy, were we looking forward to getting the shorts and sunglasses out again!
However, it was not to be! We arrived today at 4pm to a cloudy, gloomy, dark, raining, no, lashing, Sydney. You can barely even see infront of you! We've even had to cancel our Blue Mountains tour for tomorrow and we've also heard that this unusually bad weather is set to stay for a few days - we only have a few days!
Well, I suppose we were due a bit of bad luck somewhere along the way, our trip has been too perfect so far
Bird Eating Spider
. Anyway, I suppose it's still better to be in the rainy city of Sydney than to be sloggin our guts out in the rainy city of Belfast, wouldn't you!?Fingers crossed that the weather picks up, and sure if it doesn't, there's plenty of bars here to keep us entertained for 4 days until it really is time for the sun in tropical Cairns, and the Great Barrier reef :-)
The first real sightseeing we did in Sydney was to head to the harbour to see the opera house and harbour bridge, and to be honest we weren't that impressed. The opera house looks spectacular all lit-up on postcards and on TV, but in reality we thought it looked very outdated with it's 1970's beige paint. It really could do with a good clean and a new lick of paint. The bridge was marginally better, the best thing about it is the view from it, but at the end of the day it's just a lump of metal. Natural beauty always beats man-made attempts.
We then got the ferry across to Manly to go to the aquarium and dangerous creatures collection, God knows why.
It was spectacular seeing some of the things that are in Australia's waters, especially the terrifying looking Grey Nurse Sharks, which are actually very docile and have never attacked humans
Chinese Garden
. The dangerous creatures were something else too, every poisonous creepy crawlie you can imagine lives in Australia, the world's most venomous snake and spider for example. And most of the spiders inhabited residential Sydney, that was us two arachnophobes well and truly heebyjeebied out.Manly itself reminded us of an upmarket Holywood, though we didn't get to the famous Manly beach bacause of, you guessed it, the fricking rain.
Apart from a nice walk along Darling harbour, where we encountered a lot of beautiful looking birds such as the multicoloured Lorikeet, our time in Sydney was pretty uneventful. O'Malley's bar, which we'd heard was a 'happening' place was more like the Beaten Docket in Belfast. Scruffy Murphy's was a bit more lively though, and it did steak and chips for $5, and it was the home of the Sydney No.1 CSC, though we'd got thumped 3-0 the night before :-/
Our last couple of days in Sydney were really just spent passing the time 'til we headed up to Cairns for the sun and heat again, which we hadn't really had since Brasil.
Sydney is a big cosmopolitan city, which isn't really our cup of tea, but maybe if the weather had been better and we'd been able to explore the city properly, we would've enjoyed it more. We didn't even get to re-schedule our Blue Mountains tour because the bad weather didn't pass. We were due to encounter somewhere on our trip that we weren't too fussed about :-/
