April, 2023
Iconic Sydney
A perfect recharge from the go, go, go of Vietnam and Cambodia. What a fantastic city this is! Very much like Vancouver but 2.5 times bigger…and with a much cooler accent.
For us, Sydney was about reconnecting with family and exploring the coastal walks.
The opera house, up close and personal! I always wondered what it was made of…it’s 1,056,000 tiles! It took 14 years to build what is probably one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. The Danish architect (Jørn Utzon) had a vision and it took him six years to noodle the design through his brain to the final result. He started with elliptical and parabolic shapes that just didn’t work and then he had his aha moment: spherical! There are 14 “shells” that make up the opera house and if you took the structure apart and reconstructed the puzzle of the pieces, you would get a perfect sphere.
The coastal walk from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach has the most stunning rock formations. Wind-whipped sandstone cliffs hug the coastline. Six kilometres takes a bit longer than usual when the visuals are so spectacular!
Passing Mackenzie’s Bay and Tamarama beach. This is not a swimming spot; the rip currents would surely ruin your day. But apparently surfers are immune (and maybe a bit crazy). All those black dots in the water are wetsuit-clad daredevils waiting to catch a wave…and presumably hoping to not crash against the rocks.
Caught the start of the sunset at Bronte Beach before heading off to Coogee.
Blissful landscape and hidden treasures oceanside.
Today, the walk from Manly Beach to Spit Bridge. This walk took us through beaches, forests and ancient aboriginal carvings. Interestingly, the carvings are not protected. They are just cordoned off so you don’t step on them but otherwise, their sandstone surface is exposed to the elements, being worn away as time goes on. Maybe like our First Nations beliefs about totem poles...that they are meant to ultimately return to the earth from where they came.
My first opera! And what a venue!
So when we booked the tickets months before, we weren’t at all familiar with the seating plan and didn’t want to pony up the big bucks for the fancy seats. Our seats were at the left edge of the stage. Not fabulous but this was as much about the experience as the show. Suddenly, minutes before showtime, “musical chairs” started and all the people beside us got up and started moving further and further to the right. We followed and followed and followed and ended up just left of centre stage! When in Rome…
The floating stage was set up at Mrs. Macquarie’s Point, with the opera house in the background across the water. You can see it peeking through in the centre of the photo. This first act starts with the wedding between the beautiful and gentle Butterfly and her d*ck of a suitor Pinkerton. I use that term legitimately as that was the crux of his goal in marrying her. The set was three hundred and eighty metres of astroturf covering a rolling hillside with a bamboo forest at the top. Full-on fireworks are incorporated into every show.
There was a 30-40 minute intermission that was a show in and of itself. The rolling hillside was transformed into a cityscape with ghetto-like housing. Two cranes and a lot of people dismantled chunks of the hillside to make way for the housing that was built before our eyes with prefab structures that locked together like Lego. Amazing!
The stage ready for the second act.
And a final walk from Macquarie’s Lighthouse to Watson’s Bay. The cliffs here are beautiful but dangerous. Sadly there are lots of suicide help line signs, CCTV cameras and fences that trigger a signal to police if climbed.
Hornby lighthouse needs a bit of a paint job.
We had a spectacular brunch in Darling Harbour in that pointy building behind us. This whole area has been and is being rebuilt with tons of restaurants and cafés. I first struggled to understand how they stay in business. There are so many and they are pretty pricey. Who can afford to go so regularly? Well, with minimum wage around $28/hour (north of $30 if you’re a casual worker, extra if you work weekends, and then there’s extra stat holiday pay), people are certainly paid a living wage! Not much tipping expectation here. How do the restaurants afford the wages? Well, there’s a few % added to every bill (even just a coffee) if it’s a weekend and a whopping 15% surcharge if it’s a holiday. Customers definitely pay for the privilege of eating out!
My long, lost cousin Sydney, last spotted in Cape Town in 1986!
Our beautiful niece, Rachel, working and living the life in Australia for six months!
My lovely cousin Sandy whose husband was my Dad’s first cousin. Sandy helped prompt this trip when she visited us in Vancouver last summer.
My cousin Alan who is my dad’s first cousin on my grandmother’s side. We’ve been collaborating on the family tree…how fantastic to finally get to meet!
My cousin Janine. We had sleepovers in Cape Town when we were pre-teens. Now our kids are older than we were when we were buddies!
The fauna of Sydney. Forget about those teeny guys running up and down the walls. These water dragons are just hanging out along the hiking trails, catching a bit of sun to warm their cold blood.
And then these colourful Rainbow Lorikeets chirping around the trees, eating seeds from bottle brush looking flowers.
Ibis are like our pigeons but way cooler looking! Seems so odd to be walking around town and seeing these long, curved beaks pecking around the ground for bits to eat.
They grow them big here…this guy was the size of my thumb and not welcome in our room!
Here’s another biggie…thankfully not in our room! I don’t want to guess what she’s left a trail of behind her!
One more very special thing happened in Sydney. Adam’s mom, Erika, has very little extended family. One of her first cousins, Veronica (Vera), lives in Sydney and the two lost touch many years ago. Adam found her last known address and we went to look for her. There was no directory at the building entrance but Adam asked a woman who looked like she lived there. She told us that Vera had moved out a mere month before and they all missed her (she’d lived there for 43 years). The woman gave us Vera’s new address and we packed off to find her. We knocked on her door and when she opened it, Adam introduced himself and said he was Erika’s son. Her eyes went wide and she said “Erika? My cousin?” It was a lovely reunion and the two cousins are now connected by email!