Waterfront

Saturday, 15/09/2012 - 93 A.D.

Tim and I slept fine in the spare room at Cass and Tim’s and Napolean didn’t try anything in the night. Napolean (or simply just “Po”) is the cat. After breakfast we took a taxi out to Mrs Mcquarie’s Point, although we came close to ending up on the other side of the city when our taxi driver tried to take the tunnel under the harbour. Don’t think he did it on purpose, just think he was new to the job (he sounded like he’d just got off the plane yesterday). We got out of the taxi just across the water from where Russell Crowe has an apartment, which kick-started a discussion as to who was the biggest fool between him and Shane Warne. Sorry, Shane, but the locals think it’s you!

We’d come to Mrs Macquarie’s Point because it’s supposed to be the ideal spot for viewing the opera house and Sydney Harbour Bridge. The weather was a little cloudy, but the sun shone through every now and then. It was definitely a day for two layers, but the slightly irritating kind where you keep rolling your sleeves up and down, never able to settle on the optimum temperature. Looking through the zoom on the camera, it was possible to see the people walking over the top of the bridge, something that we would not be doing (sorry, adrenaline fans!)

Walking further towards the harbour, we searched for a pond that we’d seen the day before from the Centrepoint Tower. Apparently said pond contains eels, which become a nuisance so they are thrown (presumably by rangers) into the harbour in the hope that they will swim off towards the ocean. However, I’d read somewhere that eels have an unexplained knack of returning to the pools where they were born, and Cass claimed that it was sometimes possible to see them wriggling across the grass from the harbour waters and back into the pond. However, on this occasion we did not see any wriggling along…in fact, we weren’t even sure if we’d found the right pond!

The Sydney Harbour bridge has the longest span in relation to its width, allowing for two rail tracks, a walkway, a cycleway and eight road lanes. Its nickname is The Coathanger on account of its rounded shape. We wouldn’t be walking across it in any shape or form today, though it was good to stand and stare in a sunny spot out of the wind beside the opera house and talk about music (very little opera was discussed though). I found the design of the opera house up close surprising because in the shots from the distance you can’t see the million or so Swedish-made ceramic tiles that adorn the outside of the building.

 After we’d reached consensus on who was currently the greatest Australian band in the world, we headed towards George Street, which is the central shopping area of the city. Here we came face-to-face with a march by hundreds of very angry muslim extremists, protesting about the recently-made film in America which slanders The Prophet. All ages were present, waving fists in the air and chanting beneath banners, some of which were in Arabic, some of which were in English and not worth repeating in this blog. Okay, so that film does portray an anti-Islamic bent, but what has that got to do with the good people of Sydney? It was quite an unsettling sight, but it didn’t stop me wanting a Macdonalds. However, when we came out of the food court, the police had set up a barricade to stop the march going any further along George Street. Inevitably the shouting increased, the dogs barked, some kind of gas was fired, objects were thrown and everything turned rather nasty. One policeman was taken away with blood pouring down his face. Apparently the leaders of the march were appealing for calm, but it fell on deaf ears. We were a good few metres away from it all – enough to see what was going on without getting caught up in things. Cass and Tim assured us that it was not typical for Sydney. Anyway, it made the national news here, not sure if any of you caught it on worldwide bulletins.

As the afternoon drew on, Australian Tim had to retire due to a migraine, but this left the remaining trio with the option to take out the Sri-Lankan passes once again to gain free entry to the Sydney Aquarium at Darling Harbour. Fortunately there was no more cloak-and-dagger involved because you simply swiped your pass at a turnstile without anyone there to eyeball your picture. Unfortunately the camera struggled to take pictures close up, but I was able to get some decent shots of the bigger tanks and the sharks were especially good…

…the penguins were alright as well…

…so was the sawfish…

By now it was late afternoon, time to think about checking into our next port of call – the Y Hotel on Wentworth Avenue. Tim and Cass had been amazing hosts, and they even gave us a ride to the hotel, which was actually a part of the YMCA…make that the YWCA. It was quite apt really as we’re almost halfway through this great adventure, yet it all began back at the YMCA in Manhattan. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that Sydney beats New York, but it’s up there with the best places we’ve been to so far. And although our room in the YMCA had been quite basic (if you can remember that far back!), the establishment overall was to a good standard. Same went with the YWCA here, although we’d booked a quadruple room, hoping against hope that we wouldn’t be sharing with anyone. No, we weren’t, yet we still had the strange situation of two people in a room with four single beds…

…so I dumped all of my stuff on bed D and decided I’d sleep on bed C. Tim will be using bed A for sleeping in and bed B as a work space. In a weird way it works, yet I couldn’t imagine the thought of four blokes sharing this living space! Gotta love those Young [Peoples’] Christian Associations!

Having missed a couple of days-worth of blogging, we had plenty to catch up on, so we hammered our keyboards before bed.

And then at some point in the early hours I turned 35 down under.