Sydney's Temporary Contemporariness
Trip Start
Nov 08, 2003
1
28
74
Trip End
Oct 22, 2004
Sydney,
Australia
Saturday, May 22, 2004
After our stint of campervanning in the mountains we arrived in Sydney ready for some hardcore big city action. Our taxi dropped us outside the Altamont Hotel on the Darlinghurst Road, booked through an excellent website called wotif.com, that sells cheap last-minute hotel rooms among other things, with our mod-room with all mod-cons setting us back just under $100 that equates to about £40, a bargain for this part of town.
We were a stones throw from the cosmopolitan(?) neighbourhood of drunks and prostitutes called Kings Cross and a javelin throw from Sydney's all-star main attractions, with the café society of Darlinghurst right on our doorstep.
Not before checking what TV channels were available, we set off into a warmish evening in search of some good old Aussie tuck and ended up in Sinatra's, a nice garishly decorated Italian restaurant for food that ends with a vowel
A Self Portrait
.It had been a long day, so after eating, we headed back to our swish establishment to see what TV down under had to offer. All will be revealed once we've completed our exhaustive research.
8/4
With Easter weekend looming we woke early to sift through our compost heap of clothes and bagged the worst offenders for a trip up to the local launderette, and although the clothes could probably have walked there themselves we took them nonetheless.
After a stop-off at a greasy-spoon for a fry-up en-route (spot the hyphenated word), we headed towards the city centre along William Street, catching the odd glimpse along the way of an enormous, semi-circular, iron bridge in the distance, whose name escapes me at the moment, but I'm sure it rhymes with Kidney Barber Fridge. Anyway, today was a window shopping day, so Sydney's tourist traps would have to wait 24 hours.
The city's main shopping district is based around Pitt Street, King Street and Castlereagh Street and as we flitted around the various malls I couldn't help noticing the local Sydneysiders
Channel hopping in the Altamont
. This may come as a shock to my fellow Brits but . . . they're just like us.
My pre-conceived notion that I'd be surrounded by hulking great rugby players with sun-bleached hair and Kylie look-a-likes with cute . . . well, cute everything, proved sadly unfounded. This was London with sunshine and an accent.
After coming to terms with the shock, we stocked up on a few long sleeve tops for the Winter and walked home . . . with people who looked just like us.
After picking up our newly softened clothes we headed back to the hotel with a six-pack of Hahns beer. That's one of the best things about this country I've noticed already, you can't buy a four-pack for love nor money so you're forced to down six beers in an evening, shouldn't be too long now for the beer belly to start 'showing'.
That evening we ventured into another imaginatively titled restaurant. After last nights Italian in Sinatra's, what better place to have a Chinese meal than at Fu Manchu's
Dive dive dive
. Why didn't they just call it Mao Tse-Tung's and be done with it?A common occurrence in Sydney are non-licensed, BYO eateries, i.e. Bring Your Own, so while our duck was being plucked and cooked, I popped next door to the Bottle Shop for a cold white (for Bottle Shop read Off Licence).
9/4
After a couple of nights in the Altamont, we packed and went over the road to another hotel for a change . . . and wished we hadn't.
L'Otel sounded the part, looked the part and cost the part, but on entering our room, sorry, strike room . . . our cupboard, we realised why they were flogging the room on the cheap. It was the smallest room we've ever, ever, ever, stayed in. It was so small the TV was hanging from the ceiling and the bathroom was in the wardrobe. About one foot of space surrounded the bed with the room and all furniture decorated in pure white to try and give it an airy feel.
Down in one
We dumped bags and shot out heading through Kings Cross and into the wealthier surroundings of Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay where locals sunned themselves in local parks in the Good Friday heat.
From there we jumped on a 311 bus, complete with a friendly, helpful driver, now there's a novelty. We jumped off at Circular Quay in Sydney harbour where cute little ferries bob off in all directions to the Sydney suburbs and were greeted with a full-on view of Harbour Bridge for the first time and a short walk around the corner led us to the Opera House. Our hearts fluttered and our bottom lips quivered. Two defining sights in a traveller's life and both had to be taken in simul, simeul, simuletani . . . together.
We wandered around the Circular Quay for a while trying to take it all in, then began to stroll in the direction of the bridge through The Rocks area, otherwise known as the Old Town, where you find the first houses built in Sydney.
After a quick bite to eat in Wolfies overlooking the Opera House and a swift pint in The Australian Hotel, we began our traverse of the bridge, dodging joggers and power-walkers as we went
Fish and anemone at Sydney Aquarium
. Above us were groups of grey boiler-suited Bridge Climbers who had each paid over £50 each for the opportunity to scare themselves stupid for the sake of an elevated view of a building that Clive James described perfectly, six nuns in a rugby scrum, and they weren't even allowed to take a picture. We'd pushed our budget far enough over the past few weeks so we settled on ground-level views.We finally made it over to North Sydney after what seemed an age, although stopping every 10 metres for a photo of the opera house didn't help. Nestled close to the bridge was the funfair Lunar Park, with it's maniacal clown's face entrance and stunning views back towards the city and the chance for some arty shots of the SOH framed under the girders of the bridge.
As we crossed back over to the south we picked up the pace and went straight to a tourist kiosk selling SeeSydney cards. For a sum of $109 each (£45) we'd get free admission to all of the city's sights with just a small fee payable for the more expensive attractions for a whole two days. Seemed worth the money if we could fit everything in in 48 hours.
That evening we took a seedy stroll through Kings Cross to Potts Point for a commendable curry at the 'Curry Down Under' restaurant before popping around the corner to buy a couple of tickets for an interesting looking play at the Darlinghurst Theatre called Sixty Six Minutes - Short Plays About A Big City, for the following evening
It's behind you!
.10/4
It was the first day of our two-day sightseeing extravaganza so we were off early not before booking another couple of nights back at our favourite hotel, The Altamont, back over the road.
We bussed it into town and walked 15 minutes into Darling Harbour, Sydney's number two harbour behind Circular Quay. Saying that, there would be a whole lot more to keep you amused around this little bay.
Firstly we stopped off at HarbourJet to book a Wet 'n Wild trip around the Parramatta River that morning. Being one of their more expensive attractions we each paid a $10 surcharge, but it would be worth it.
We arrived at 11 and were shown to two rear seats in the back of a 75km/h go-faster striped yellow and blue speedboat. Six more tourists took the front seats next to and behind the driver, who shuffled everyone around to balance the weight
Just in case you'd forgotten where we are
. This looked serious. Raincoats were offered but refused. A bad move on our behalf in retrospect. The driver led us through the hand signals he would be doing: sharp lefts and rights and 270-degree spins. A rollercoaster restraint came over our heads as we cruised at a sensible speed out of the harbour. As soon as we were clear of the harbour walls our driver put his foot down almost through the bottom of the boat as we lurched backwards from the acceleration.
To a soundtrack of loud American rock, he began by bouncing on the wakes of larger boats trying in vain to perform a perfect back-flip, then he started terrorising bewildered sailboats as he zig-zagged around the busy river. Suddenly he performed a manouevre he hadn't warned us about and a manouevre we hadn't thought was possible. He braked.
The back of the boat went 45-degrees into the air and a tidal wave swept over the front seat passengers and straight into our faces. It all happened in slow motion, but in an instance we were soaked to the skin and the laughing stock of the drip-dry tourists at the front in the dryzone.
Look where I am mum aswell!
There was no let-up as his fingers circled the air, ending with a point to the right. A clock-wise spin was imminent which was our cue to hold on tight. Once again a soaking ensued, this time from the side with the added benefit of disorientation. Well that really got our adrenalin rushing and for the next thirty minutes we did a great impersonation of a bundle of clothes in a washing machine as our driver spun, braked and veered his way around a rush-hour of a river.
We sloshed out the boat bedraggled but buzzing, and Soph began to wish she hadn't worn her lightest, whitest skirt today, and a quiet, sunny corner had to be found to dry off to avoid arrest for indecent exposure.
Next on our whirlwind tour was the National Maritime Museum. With not a long and great seafaring history, it was a maritime museum with a difference. A lot of the exhibits were celebrating the evolution of the surfboard and glass displays showed bathing costumes through the ages.
Granted, it made a nice change from the fishy-fingered heroics of your common or garden museum but . . .
Look where I am mum!
Cue Dambusters music once more . . .
When we were sinking our chorizo-chomping neighbours from the Iberian Peninsula in their speed-challenged overweight galleons, Australia wasn't even invented.
. . . and fade out.
Moored in the harbour by the museum was a soggy slice of modern day Aussie might. The submarine HMAS Onslow, a claustrophobic's worst nightmare, but really interesting nonetheless, staffed by submarine fanatics with tons of facts and figures, even some that were interesting and over a precarious walkway was the HMAS Vampire, a destroyer that was a little less claustrophobic.
Across the substantially less famous Darling Harbour Bridge was the Sydney Aquarium. It was predictably busy but we glided through the turnstiles flashing our backstage passes in true rock star fashion.
They had obviously planned it to get better as you walked through because the first tanks weren't a patch on Langkawi's in terms of weirdness of fish, but as you progressed and entered walkthrough tunnels full of seals, sharks, manta rays and turtles it came into it's own. We wandered through massive tanks stuffed to the gills (no pun intended) with man-eaters and the final tank was the piece de resistance, a Great Barrier Reef display, with live coral and a couple of thousand species of fish (no exaggeration) putting on an underwater firework display
Pint of XXXX please landlord
. After 15 minutes we finally snapped ourselves out of our trance and headed back out into the harbour for a very late lunch. Fish and chips, where God was obviously looking down on us, punishing me not with a fork of lightening, but with a foreign object somewhere in the fish that cracked one of my molars in half.Spending far too much time eating, we legged it to the Powerhouse Museum but with an hour til it closed we decided to come back the next day, opting for a bus back home.
That evening we walked to the Darlinghurst Theatre once more to see the play, Sixty Six Minutes, and after a few sparkling wines we took our seats in the front row of a very informal theatre. Six short plays followed performed by about six actors in rotation, and all had a very American theme and all were very funny in a sad kind of way. The adjective escapes me, maybe it's laconic?
We walked home via a Portuguese burger joint called Oporto for a Bondi Burger . . . a hamburger with beetroot!
11/4
Once again we were up early for our second days sightseeing, not before checking back into the Altamont, and from a room the size of a cupboard we found ourselves in a six bed family room
Post Jet Boat ride
.We rushed into the city by bus and then jumped onto a very iffy monorail to Darling Harbour, an obvious rush job for the Sydney Olympics. It connects the shopping district to Darling Harbour and not much else, and is separated into very small compartments from which there is no escape as we found out in sharing one with the family from Hell.
We finally got to the Powerhouse Museum a little after the doors had opened. It had a lot to live up to with a name like that, but it did so comfortably.
Four floors of diverse exhibits were spread over the area of Monaco (aaargh, taboo subject for a Chelsea fan), and a large proportion were interactive with mice to click, buttons to press and puzzles to handle. This is how museums are meant to be, with hands-on exhibits that keep you interested and wanting to learn more, instead of shuffling past glass cases full of priceless artifacts. A life-size cockpit of the space shuttle provided an interesting walkthrough and a room of fascinating immigration stories left you wanting to emigrate. In all, the museum has a total collection of 380,000 items collected over the last 120 years with only a fraction actually on display.
A temporary exhibition showed a celebration of Australian sporting success over the last century with a DVD of Australia beating England's C team at football taking centre stage. Sad or what? Yet there was no sign of a certain major rugby tournament that had taken place not 6 months earlier. Short memories or what? And supplementing the sporting exhibition was a live improvisation show featuring three of Australia's finest amateur dramatists
Round of applause for Sydney
.We could have stayed all day but we had places to go, so back to Circular Quay we headed for a tour of the Opera House internally. Our guide got off to a slow start by showing us an Airfix model of the whole caboodle and as he stood there with a quizzical look on his Woody Allen-esque features he finally announced:
"Well, what can I say, it speaks for itself doesn't it?"
Well thanks a lot.
But after a few minutes warm up he got into top gear with some genuinely funny anecdotes and we were led around various parts including the drama studios, the concert hall and the opera house itself. It was large and impressive as expected with a lovely 1960's concrete feel to it. Now for the educational bit: Designed by Danish architect Joern Utzon, it was finished in 1973 and took a total of 14 years to build. The roof is covered with over a million Swedish ceramic tiles and looks in need of a good scrub down from where I was standing.
Time was waiting for no man or woman so we hightailed it around the harbour for an hours boat cruise around Sydney out to the mouth of the Parramatta and back
Rush hour in Sydney Harbour
. Under cloudy skies we cruised past the Prime Minister's holiday pad, buildings of historical interest and most importantly one of Russell Crowe's million dollar properties, no photos were taken though for fear of him snorkelling out to us for some fisticuffs.Back at the quay we got a bus back to the ranch and after a quick sloosh down we were back out into the meanstreets of Sydney. It was time to catch up with our skinny-dipping buddies, Brad and Katy, who we had met in Ko Phangan a couple of months earlier. After a quick Thai in a box at the not-surprisingly called ThaiInABox on Oxford Street we made our way towards a bar in Paddington called The Fringe. They once again led us astray with a night of drunken excesses along with some friends and cousins of theirs, ending up in a debauched hell-hole of a bar called The Courthouse, and most of its clientele had obviously seen the inside of one. We walked in to the strains of Meatloaf at full blast with loose ladies dangling off the knees of career criminals. The only thing missing was someone being thrown through a window onto the street. We all did a swift U-turn into the Kinsella Hotel a few doors down for pints of Toohey's before calling it a night in the early hours.
12/4
Soph woke the following morning with no recollection of our final pub or the walk home
Soph at Coogee Beach
. The little party animal.After seeing all we wanted to see in the city we hopped on a bus heading towards the coast for a stroll along Sydney's famous beaches. En-route we passed Randwick racecourse and being Easter Monday a procession of bright frilly fillies and Aussie blokes in borrowed suits with wraparound shades made their way into the course.
A half hour bus ride later and we had arrived at a town with a very English feel to it, Coogee (pronounced Cudgy), but enjoying a very un-English warm and windy day. A curve of Victorian buildings overlooked a small crowded beach which in turn was overlooked by a posse of red and yellow skull-capped lifeguards, who refreshingly didn't all look like extras from Baywatch and a few hardy souls braved the waves and sharks.
We sat for a while watching the world go by before setting off on a walk northwards along a paved and wooden walkway hugging the coastline. It was predictably busy with tourists and jogging locals alike as we looped around Gordons Bay and reached our next destination, lovely Clovelly, an odd narrow beach that was deeper than it was long, with a saltwater swimming pool built virtually on the beach
Soph getting interactive at the Powerhouse Museum
.After an eerie walk through the resting place of many famous Australians, Waverley Cemetery, Bronte beach came next, a small crescent of sand backed with a grassy park full of free barbeques, as was the next beach, Tamarama, where apparently the beautiful people go, and try as I might I couldn't see anyone to match that description, apart from a certain lady by my side even in her hung-over state (that compliment should see me in her good books for another month).
We walked onwards under increasingly cloudy skies, homing in on arguably the most famous beach in the world along with Copacabana and Clacton, and rounding a corner it came into view, Bondi.
From a cliff top at the southern end of the beach we surveyed the scene. The temperature had dropped and a chilly wind had cleared most of the sun worshippers leaving the beach free for wet suited surfers to spring gaily towards the surf with board wedged in armpits. A promenade of shops of various architectural styles lay set back along the length, the majority of them offering beachwear or food.
After our 6km invigorating walk we made our way onto the hallowed sand and approached the rough sea hesitantly expecting a Great White to launch itself out of the waves and carry us off for an English takeaway
Soph in a shark infested tunnel
. With that in mind we dipped a big toe into the briny and immediately sloped away, not turning our back on the shark-infested waters for a moment, but we could now say we've been in the water at Bondi, and needless to say, by the time we get home our story will have been exaggerated into a surfing and shark dodging tale of epic proportions. If anything, our cliff top walk proved a great hangover cure from the previous nights excesses.We spent the rest of the day wandering around Bondi town until dark then jumped on a bus back to the city and dinner that evening was from a TravelPodder recommended ultra-snazzy burger joint across the road from us called Global Burgers. Soph had a New Yorker hamburger and I opted for a Wellington lamb burger, with a side order of rosemary and lemon spiced chips and sweet chilli sauce. Each burger weighed about a kilo and were five inches tall and we can safely vouch for these burgers as the best we've ever eaten. A Big Mac will never be the same again.
13/4
It was our last full day in Sydney and although we could have stayed another week we felt it was time to see some more of the country, so on our way into town we stopped off at a travel brokers called Getabout Oz to try and organise a campervan
Surfer chic on Bondi Beach
. A young Russian girl called Ivana greeted us and explained how their company could organise all the campervans we'd need for the whole of Australia at cheaper rates than going directly to the van rentals. We gave her our list of dates we had worked out for the coming ten weeks and after an hour and a half of discussions and ringing around the various firms she came back to us with some really cheap deals that compared favourably with our first rental with Britz.The whole procedure seemed to be more intricate than an invasion of Iraq, but at the end of it all we had organised vans for Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Alice Springs covering most of the country and our little Russian Ice Princess had been really helpful and hardworking in getting us some rock bottom rates. After handing over a 20% deposit we set off towards the city for the last time and our last museum for a while.
Overlooking Circular Harbour is Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art and once more in we ventured intoxicated by the word contemporary, and an hour or so later out we ventured struggling to come to terms with most of the exhibits. See what you think of these little works of 'art':
A video of a bus shelter somewhere in a London suburb;
Pages of a diary pinned to a wall with scribbled notes on cars most often used by suicide bombers;
A ping-pong table; and
A 50 metre stretch of blue tarpaulin representing a swimming pool
The HarbourJet boat
.This is just a small selection of the kind of (obviously) drug-fuelled nonsense that can be found at your local contemporary art gallery. It'll be a cold day in Hell the next time you see us in one of these establishments again.
Freshly confused we headed a few miles out of town by bus to an apparently arty area called The Glebe. We wandered along it's main street, Glebe Point Road, seeking a laidback bohemian vibe of (fine) art galleries, cafes and boutiques but only found a few kebab shops and a Chinese takeaway. There wasn't a lot to see but maybe that was because it was a dreary Tuesday afternoon after a Bank Holiday weekend and everything and everybody were probably busy back at work.
After a quick coffee we set off back to the Darlinghurst Road to pack our bags and have some dinner. Another visit to Global Burgers was on the menu but was quickly quashed as we stood outside suicidally staring at a 'Closed' sign. How can a burger joint be closed on a Tuesday? Superb food, shame about the opening hours.
We settled for a Thai takeaway back in the hotel room while we pored over pages of highways, byways and freeways trying to plan a 12 day route from Sydney to Melbourne beginning the following morning, the topic of our next Pod
Two guesses where we are?
.The Contemporaries
xx
Footnote:
The eagle-eyed readers out there will no doubt have noticed the travelogues are running about 5 or 6 weeks behind. The reason being is that obviously we're motoring around Australia at the moment with not a lot of quality chill time for writing, plus the fact that whenever we stay at a camp site with a TV room Aussie reality TV shows can be addictive to say the least.
