When I said goodbye to Jordan in the
Sydney airport, I greeted another partner-in-crime, my then-boyfriend, James.
(We’re still in touch, and still friends!) He had been to Sydney before but
didn't get to see much of the city the first go-around, so because he was eager
to see numerous things and I had spent most of my trip-planning on Jordan's
time, I agreed to follow his lead on the itinerary.
I’m admittedly a history nerd, so
skip to the next red bit if you find history boring.
However, before we jumped into the
tours that James begged to do, we spent an afternoon with my pal Gina during
her layover between Auckland and Perth. We three wandered around the harbor and
made our way to the Maritime Museum, where we climbed aboard a sub, a battle
ship (HMS Vampire), and a replica of
the HMS Endeavor. Endeavor was the ship that Captain James
Cook sailed while exploring Australia and NZ during the eighteenth century, and
its small size shocked me. After seeing the living conditions—even though it
was one of the best during that time—I have a lot more respect for those sailors.
The next day, James and I did a
hop-on/hop-off bus tour that wove through the city and also went out to the
nearby beaches. I enjoyed hearing some of the stories, I liked the freedom of
the bus service to determine our own schedule, and I loved getting to visit
Bondi Beach, but I much prefer exploring on foot. We did this as part of a tour
one night (through the Rocks), but mostly did so on our own. During the Rocks
tour, our guide told us about the shady past of The Hero of Waterloo, one of
Sydney's oldest pubs: in the nineteenth century, young men were shanghaied by
transporting them directly to the docks through a tunnel in the basement. After
that tour, we stopped in and asked the bartender if he'd show us the
passageway, and because it was a slow night, he agreed! We descended a narrow
wooden staircase and went through a musty storage room, and there was the
opening to the now-bricked-in tunnel. An old chain on the wall added to the
eerie effect.
Other places we saw included Hyde Parkand the Hyde Park Barracks. The latter saw many uses during its 200 year
history: a prison, an immigrant processing center, a women’s home, and a
government administration office. Now it exists as a museum in various phases
of restoration to recognize each of those phases and the many lives that passed
through it.
Non-cultured readers pick up reading
here:
We also went to Chinatown and wound through the maze of stalls in a
market; we went to an underwhelming history museum; we stood slack-jawed in the
Queen Victoria Building, a nineteenth-century shopping mall; and we walked
along the Circular Quay numerous times. We also went to the top of the SydneyTower, which does provide aerial views of the city, but Auckland’s Sky Tower
easily wins in comparison.
I enjoyed Sydney not only because
it's a nice place, but also because I got to calmly absorb and enjoy it. After
a jam-packed two weeks with a relentlessly side-splitting cough (ask me
sometime about “gees linctus”), I finally recovered and got to meander through
a vibrant city with good friends. I even went for a relaxing swim—but in an
indoor pool since every horrible sea creature known to man lives in Australian
waters. “But we don’t know about every marine animal yet, and in fact more
are constantly being discovered,” I hear you thinking. The worst ones will always
be in Australia. Always.
When my time in Australia came to an
end, I flew on to the next leg of my adventure: Samoa.
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