What the heck is that noise and what time is it?

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We were woken this morning by what we assume were screeching lorikeets! What a row they make when they get going and it was only 5.30am! Don’t they know we needed another 2 hours sleep at least?! Apparently not!
So that was it, we were dozily awake and thinking about our plan of action. We decided not to go to the Blue Mountains today, Tom Tom said it would take us just over 2 hours to get there and we were pretty sure we would hit some sort of rush hour traffic what with it being Monday and near Sydney! Instead we thought we’d go and ‘do the city’!
We caught the bus into Manly from just opposite the caravan park, very convenient, and got chatting to a lovely older chap who now lives at the park since losing his wife a couple of years ago; they’d been together for 59 years. The chap is blind now but gets himself around using the buses and today is off for a hair cut! He knows which his stop is by counting the roundabouts and then there’s a dip in the road just before it. We wished him farewell and hope that we’ll come across him again before we leave.

We got off the bus at Manley Wharf having purchased a Day Tripper which entitles us to get on any train, bus or ferry within Sydney all day. We can now catch the ferry across to Circular Quay, the hub of the Sydney waterways network. It’s pretty quiet today, I guess we’ve missed the rush hour as we didn’t get the bus until gone 9am! There was one very excited passenger on the ferry though, her name was Kaitlin and she was 2 ½ and this was her first ferry ride which she made sure everyone knew!

The weather went through stages today, a bit overcast to blue sky and really warm to a bit drippy! As we approached the iconic Australian symbol of Luna Park, oh, and that big bridge thing and the singing place, the weather started to brighten! Ok, small attempt to dumb down two of the most famous landmarks of Australia - they are pretty amazing and the Manly ferry trip across the water shows them off really well.
We hopped off the ferry at Circular Quay and went for a quick walk towards the Opera House and the Botanical Gardens but didn’t get very far before remembering that the Opera House, for all it’s stunning qualities and amazing landmark vision, looks much better for being a bit of a distance away!! We’re going to come back later in the week to hopefully see it lit up at night which is a fabulous sight and there’s some sort of light festival going on this week so that should make it even more spectacular.

Instead of a walk around the gardens we doubled back and headed for the Darling Harbour ferry! From there it wouldn’t be too big a walk to the Sydney Fish Market where we could get something for lunch as we ate half our sandwiches on the ferry coming across!!
Darling Harbour is fabulous to walk around, you can quite easily while away the hours there whether it’s during the day or in the evening. There’s the fantastic Sydney Aquarium and the Wildlife World and then there’s the National Maritime Museum, all of which we’ve done before so we continued to wander and just take in the surroundings.
What we did do was visit the Tourist Information Centre to ask advice on getting the most out of a visit to the Blue Mountains. A very enthusiastic chap talked us through the various options and we think we’ve decided to do it by getting the train up there and then using the hop on and off bus that goes around all the various different sights. We’ll check out the weather forecast and then decide which day is best to go. Ideally we want to get a really, really, really early start so we can do as many of the walks as possible!

Whilst we were in Darling Harbour we spotted the Crown Plaza which got us to thinking about having a posh night in one of the big hotels whilst we’re here. Apparently the Sydney Intercontinental is amazing and shouldn’t be missed so we might have a look and see what the old points can get us!

From Darling Harbour we went across to the Sydney Tower to take a trip up to the Observatory Deck and look down on the city! It was pretty amazing although we were surprised that the view across to the bridge and the opera house is masked by buildings yet everything else can be seen beautifully! The tower observatory deck is 260 metres above the city streets and Darryl kept saying that he could feel it swaying! Guess what the first thing he looked for was? Airplanes coming and going from the airport! He should have been a pilot really! We spent quite a long time looking out over the 360 degree view, it wasn’t because we needed to get our breath back from the climb up there though as luckily they have a lift!! I’m in two minds whether to do the Bridge Climb one day before we leave but Dar has decided that it’s not for him, although he was quite keen to watch the walkers going up it today so you never know!
Back down in the city streets, the hustle and bustle was in full swing with city slickers, joggers and tourists battling against the traffic and winning! You do see some bizarre sights, one lady had built her home in the alley of a big department store which is sad to see but eye opening all the same. There were plenty of characters around and we’re sure we could have just sat and people watched for hours!

Next stop was smelly Sydney Fish Market! We made it passed the Pyrmont Hotel, the only 24 hour pub in the city and passed the big Casino without losing our travelling fund and made it to the home of fresh lobster, oyster and mud crabs! We’ve now seen live Abalone with our own eyes, know that mud crabs are sold alive, as are lobsters and that it causes a right rumpus if you feed the seagulls, well they weren’t fed deliberately but some poor bloke lost a whole piece of fish to them!!! We had a really good look around the different fish available and were completely un-adventurous with our prawn lunch but it was lovely and we suspect that we’ll go back and get ourselves a feast before the week is out!

We managed to catch the ferry back to Circular Quay from the other side of Darling Harbour, we made it just in time and that meant we caught the next ferry back to Manly. The sun was still high in the sky at this point so we thought we’d try and find a family friend who lives here although the consensus of opinion is that they’re away travelling at the moment. We thought it would be fun to see if we could find the house though! What we found first was a fascinating front garden ‘pond’ a few houses away, it was truly awesome and the coi carp it housed were huge! Once we’d dragged ourselves away from that we found our friend’s house with no problem at all but alas the lights were off and it didn’t look like anyway was home. Not to worry, it was worth a shot! The location of the house is just fabulous, we’d walked from Manly Wharf and it took us 5 minutes to get to the address, from there we walked straight down the end of the road and onto the beach at the other side! Just glorious it is too, a surfers paradise and there were lots of them out there! We sat and watched until the sun had virtually gone by which time we’d lost count of the number of surfers, swimmers, walkers, runners, cyclists and even a girl clearly on her way home from school who dropped her bike at the top of the beach and wandered down into the sea for a bit of a dip! Nice!

We needed some food supplies so ducked in the nearby Coles and then made our way back to the bus stop to head home. “BBQ man” Darryl cooked up another feast with accompanying salad, although I forgot the potatoes so we had extra pumpkin, we’re eating well and haven’t fallen into the ‘lets have a takeaway’ trap as yet!!

And that was Monday! We’ve got the ‘ferry challenge day’ coming up where we see how many different ferry trips we can do in one day, the Blue Mountain tour, we’re hoping to catch up with a couple of friends (Donna and Dan) and also on Friday we’re going to spend the evening in and around Darling Harbour for the fireworks. That should keep us occupied!!

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Comments

[Rita]

Love it!!!!
I am loving following you round oz. Just taking a break from my maths revision and wishing I was on that ferry. My neice is in Sydney partying. Have fun. Rita xxxxxx