Advertisement
Published: November 29th 2011
Edit Blog Post
There is a free walking tour of Sydney which leaves from just outside Town Hall (about 2 mins from the flat) twice a day, every day so we decided to check it out and learn a bit more about the history of Sydney.
We headed to the Anchor at Town Hall at 2.30pm where we met our tour group. The tours were started a couple of years ago by a Sydney student who asks people to make a donation at the end of the tour for whatever they think it was worth – quite a clever idea really!
The first stop on the Tour was St Andrews Cathedral and Town Hall, from here we crossed the road to the Queen Victoria Building (QVB) where we met Islay the talking dog – the Ozzies have made a statue out of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite dog and have also made him talk – kind of bizarre! But he now stands proudly outside the QVB, talking to any passers-by. We then made our way inside the QVB where we learnt that there are 2 clocks on the 3
rd floor of the QVB where a beheading of Charles 1
st takes place on the hour,
every hour. We also saw the QVB Christmas Tree which spans the full 3 levels of the building and is adorned with 144,000 Swarovski crystals – now that is my kind of Christmas Tree!!
From here we walked through the underground malls of which there seem to be hundreds in Sydney – they were built to get people to work quicker without clogging up the streets and to avoid the rain (yes it does rain even in Sydney), but they’re now mostly filled with shops of all kinds. We came out on Pitt St to see the Westfield Sydney Tower with the revolving restaurant and bar, which takes 1 hour to do a full circle, and we learnt a few tips from our guide about how to get the same views for a lot less money.
It was then across to Hyde Park and up to St Mary’s Cathedral, which was only just finished before the Olympics in 2000, despite the founding stone being laid in 1868. It is still the largest church in Australia, although not the tallest.
We then made our way down Macquarie St, past Hyde Park Barracks, the Sydney Eye Hospital, The Mint.
Parliament House and The State Library to Martins Place, where the Museum of Currency and Notes is based. We walked from here to Customs House where we went inside to see a miniature scale version of Sydney city built beneath a glass floor.
We walked across Darling Harbour, past the Museum of Contemporary Art and up Argyle St to The Rocks where we wandered through the alleyways learning about how the area was to be torn down and high rise flats were to be built, but the builders of Sydney protested for several years until the Government gave in and decided to restore the standing buildings rather than build High Rise Flats. We passed a couple of pubs all claiming to be the oldest pub in Sydney, before stopping for a break at the Rocks Markets to get some refreshments.
It was then onwards and upwards to the top of the Rocks to see the only piece of public land where anyone could farm their sheep in Sydney, and back down under the bridge, passing the only public urinal in Sydney which is actually right under the path that the bridge climb takes so hundreds of tourists pass
over it every day and it doesn’t have a roof! We then walked down to Dawes Point which gave amazing views of both the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. And we learnt that the architect who designed the Opera House was a Danish man, who won the honour of designing the Opera House through an International Competition. However he didn’t get to complete his design as a new Liberal Govt elected in the 1960’s questioned the amount he was spending and stopped payments to the Designer and a new architect was elected by the Govt. The Danish man left Australia and was not even invited to the opening of the Opera House in 1973.
That was the last stop on the walking tour, so we headed back towards the flat checking out Angel Place on the way – this is a small laneway joining Pitt and George St, which had all different kinds of bird cages hanging above the street and bird songs playing from the cages. We also stopped by to watch the beheading of King Charles in the QVB as it was coming up to the hour.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.194s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 16; qc: 48; dbt: 0.123s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Paul
non-member comment
Caught short!
Loving the updates - sounds brilliant and you're getting to know your way round. But....where's the picture of Sydney's only urinal?