Australia: The America of the Southern Hemisphere
Part I of a three part series, Part I: Sydney is a pretty face.

Sydney Australia is known for great beaches, bars and restaurants. Or at least that’s what it sounds like when you read the articles in the inflight magazine on your way to Australia. The woman who gave me my awesome scissor cut in Melbourne gave me the line “Sydney is a pretty face” because she’s from there and has been living in Melbourne for seven years and Melbourne has A LOT more personality than Sydney.

More on that in Part III: Melbourne has Personality.

To us, Sydney felt a lot like a city in America. But it would have to be a large city on a harbor with numerous ferries buzzing in and out constantly that are dwarfed by gigantic cruise ships (as is nearly everything but the Harbor Bridge), and an amazing Opera House.

The cruise ship is much bigger than all the ferries, hotels and nearly the size of the Harbor Bridge!

San Francisco, maybe? I don’t think they have that many ferries...

It was remarkable the number of boats and how quickly they boarded and navigated the area between wharfs. It was also the place we’ve had to do the most running to make sure we got on to the boats.

I hate running for public transit, including boats.

Watch the gigantic cruise ship sail away from Sydney Harbor. It's nearly the same size as the Opera House.

We visited the Governor’s House for a free tour of the big old place and to get out of the sun for a little while. During the beginning of the tour when we informed our guide we are from the United States, the guide was quick to inform us that the Governor of Sydney is not like a Governor in America. Governors in America are elected and do things. Governors of Sydney are appointed and basically meet with people, for example welcoming head’s of State and they also host fancy parties and stuff.

This bird lives in the Governor's House. Garden.

One interesting story was that Prince Alfred, the son of Queen Victoria and the first member of the Royal Family to visit Australia, was shot during his visit to Sydney and nearly died. He was brought to the Governor’s House and cared for. I guess there weren’t any hard feelings because he was grateful to the people who helped him out and later donated money for a hospital, now called The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, in Sydney. The guide remarked that it would have been really bad if he died there.

The Opera House was amazing and seeing the Barber of Seville was a lot of fun. We totally recommend seeing an opera at The Opera House, the next time you’re in Sydney.

Waiting for The Barber of Seville to begin at the Sydney Opera House.

The part of town we stayed in is called The Rocks. In fact, the hostel we stayed in was literally built over the old slums of Sydney. While waiting for an elevator, you could look at artifacts from the archaeological site where sailors and prostitutes lived and died.

This is inside the YHA hostel were we stayed. The Christmas looking animal sculptures represent animals that lived there back in the day. Not Christmas.

The area was settled in 1788 and the original buildings were constructed of local sandstone, hence the name. The people were left alone to live as poor people do, until the bubonic plague broke out in 1900 and the government decided to get involved with the housing situation there. Fights and demolition ensued and while a lot of the area was knocked down and rebuilt, the slummy artifacts that remain are located in The Rocks.

View of The Rocks from the Harbor Bridge walk. The bright orange building in the center, is where we stayed.

We walked around the area quite a bit, visiting the old pubs with crappy beer and (gag) carpeting!

The Rocks Market was fun to walk through and we had a long conversation with a nice artist / architect Dtsai. We liked his painting style and were admiring his art when he invited us to look at his sketch books. He paints watercolors of the buildings around Sydney Harbor during his lunch break. We talked for quite a while and found him to be inspirational. We also bought some postcards.

Taking inspiration from our experience with beers in Auckland, I thought it would be fun to do a bar crawl around all the old bars (some of the oldest in Sydney) since they were in the neighborhood and we like to drink. It started strong and went downhill from there. Also, beer in Sydney is expensive, and wall to wall carpeting in a historically old bar is a really bad choice.

Lord Nelson Hotel was the first stop on the bad, old beer tour.

The Hero of Waterloo was our second stop on the tour. The beer was just meh.

Wanting to unremember the part where we spent money going out to old bars with crappy beer, we decided to venture out another night but this time look for the secret craft cocktail bars. Success! Bulletin Place and The Barber Shop served up delicious and expensive cocktails! Yay! Ryan even went so far as to show our server how much higher on the Wikipedia page Canon was ranked than Bulletin Place. He made it a point to do so because the server said he’d never heard of Canon and had been out to Seattle.

Tasty, spendy drinks! See the unfinished wall stuff located to the right? Exposed studs and all.

Dear Seattle friends, you would appreciate the ambiance of Bulletin Place and it’s perfect balance of a half demolished housing project tucked into a filthy alley, mixed in with framed records hanging on the walls, drinks listed on butcher paper and the bird art mural on what remains of the drywall. Oh, and candles.

Our server recommended we visit another bar, which was so secretive we couldn’t find it but he did lead us to The Barber Shop. Also located in a somewhat filthy alley. Note here: Sydney is a pretty face with weird, restrictive liquor licenses. Perhaps because Ryan and I are old and lame, we didn’t notice that most of the bars in Sydney close at midnight. And maybe that’s why when we left The Barber Shop, through the closed front of an actual Barber Shop, it was like that.

The bar was all about gin and some other kind of alcohol that pre-dates gin, genever. I ordered an old gin drink and Ryan had a Vesper and we were both pleased with our decisions. I’m pretty sure we told the bartenders we were looking for some other place and they told us this was that place and then laughed in our faces. They also said Jack Daniel’s Whiskey is the best. Either way, the drinks were delicious and their haircuts were nice.

One day, after running to the ferry, we visited Manly Beach. Manly Beach was a nice place to visit for the day with lots of shops, bars and restaurants and the kind of ocean waves that will kill you. Just standing ankle deep in the water was enough to be splashed above the waist when the rip was going out. Also, there were lifeguards on jet skis driving right up to people’s faces, yelling at them to get out of the water. On land, the lifeguards with megaphones were going over the usual beach script of "NO SWIMMING. BEWARE THE RIP. IF YOU WANT TO GO SWIMMING, SWIM BETWEEN THE FLAGS.” Each time the announcement was made about 50 people got off the beach and INTO the water. It was amazing and sort of hilarious. The waves there are no joke. I saw a lot of ladies think they could just wade in up to their waist and then get sucked out more and crashed upside the head with serious ocean waves. Maybe that’s why the lifeguards were so serious with all their no swimming accept for between the flags talk.

4 Pines Brewery is located in Manly Beach and across from the ferry terminal. We each downed a couple of delicious pints before running again, to catch the ferry home.

We stayed in Bondi Beach for two nights and celebrated Ryan’s birthday with a surf lesson. The ocean was a lot more manageable there.

We also walked along the beach from Bondi down to Coogee Beach and got to visit a lot of different beaches and coves along the way.

Highlights from the Coogee Beach walk:

Then there was the camping in a garbage littered National Park.*
*When compared to the pristine conditions of all the places we visited in New Zealand.

Ok, side note here. We later found out that New South Wales doesn’t invest much towards the upkeep of their parks. Apparently there are only four rangers, two of which are part-time, to work in Royal National Park. It’s a big place. So yeah, it’s a little trashy and the trails are seriously overgrown. But we spent a nice night camping in the woods nonetheless.

Thankfully, we didn't see any snakes on the walk out of the park. Ryan saw one on the way in but screamed and it slithered off.

Not sure how this aligns with the pretty face part, but beneath the makeup, Sydney has a filthy underbelly that involves giant bats called Flying Foxes and lots of cockroaches just hanging out downtown at night. I guess you could say we found what we were looking for, since we did go out at night to walk around and get a sense of the place. And we did choose to walk into the park which obviously had lots of bats flying around, above the trees. All of that seemed sort of magical until the part when one shit on Ryan’s arm and the back of his shirt and while he was standing there yelling I looked at him, looked up at the bats and then started running.

Away.

Away, away.

I think this was before the bat poop incident.

This was after. Also, the Museum of Contemporary Art has some amazing work. We saw a gallery talk while we were there. Fabulous!

Shortly after that, I noticed there were cockroaches all over the place and couldn’t help but sort of gasp every time I nearly stepped on one because the sidewalks were crawling with them. Ryan didn’t like that part and kept demanding I stop doing that. But I was in sandals, and they were everywhere and they made me want to run away, back to the beautiful place that is Sydney during the day time.

NEXT
Part I.B: Canberra the Neighbor’s Kid. It’s fine if he’s there, but no one cares if he’s not.

PS: THEY SELL NITROGEN ICE CREAM IN CHINATOWN!