Sydney 2020 [part one!]

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: Realizing I have neither the time nor the energy to write full posts about my two-week trip to Australia, especially when I have already written fairly extensively in my email photo digests / travelogues, I decided the smartest and most efficient move would be to post the content of those five emails here, backdated. The following was posted on Tuesday, March 10 PST, but was originally sent to my email list midafternoon Saturday, February 29, local time in Sydney.]
Day One: February 24 & February 26 Hey wait, that's not Sydney. It's San Francisco! First stop on our way. Our flight left Seattle at 3 p.m. Monday, February 24; landed just after 5:00 in San Francisco. It's been too long since we last did a legit visit in this city—2010, fully ten years ago. They have a new tallest building in their city now: Salesforce Tower, easily visible there in the center skyline shot taken from the plane. Completed in 2018, it has 61 floors and stands at 1,071 feet, surpassing the TransAmerica Pyramid, whiich had been the city's tallest for the previous 46 years, by 218 feet (or the equivalent of about 18 floors). That's the Bay Bridge in the background. Anyway I realize most of you don't give a shit about these details. Let's move on!
We booked all our flights through Australian airline Qantas Airlines (actually pronounced "Quantas," apparently; I guess this company has no time for the letter U), but the flights between Seattle and San Francisco are operated by Alaska. So at SeaTac, we checked in with Alaska—and to my relief, they checked our luggage through all the way to Sydney from there. (We checked two suitcases and brought two carry-ons.) Our Qantas Airlines flight then left San Francisco at 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Monday, February 24 . . . and then landed Wednesday, February 26 at 6:18 a.m. local time in Sydney. I had an entire Tuesday just wiped out of my life! People like to say "time is a construct," except that makes no difference to how confusing this can be—and your position on the planet relative to the position of the sun while the Earth is spinning is not a construct. Does all this qualify as physics? I'm not a damned scientist! All I know is, Sydney is considered 19 hours ahead of Seattle—or it is when Sydney is on Daylight Saving Time, annyway (as it is right now; it's late summer here)—but a simpler way to think of iit is that Sydney is five hours behind Seattle, but on the next calendar date. Or is that still confusing? In any case, if you're in Seattle and want to know what time iit is in Sydney, just subtract five hours. But, if it's February 24 there, then it's February 25 here. Anyway! Add on top of that a 14.5-hour flight from San Francisco, basically chasing the sun, but because the flight left in the evening, that time was spent basically fast-forwarding through all of Tuesday that week, staying on the nighttime side of the planet the entire time. Also they provided us with a toothbrush and toothpaste. And a sleep mask and headphones.
Once we actually touched down at Sydney Airport, it was finally dawn. I got this great shot of a lookout tower that looks kind of like something out of War of the Worlds out my window. And: I weathered this flight with far more easy than I feared I would. Having stayed up progressively later each night the previous three nights at home, so I would at least be sort of used to being up until 1 a.m., I fell asleep on the plane after three and a half hours of flight time just before it was midnight at home; slept for roughly six hours; was up for maybe half an hour to eat a grilled cheese sandwich and finish a movie on my iPad; then fell asleep again and slept for a surprising three hours more. When I woke up the second time it was roughly 4 a.m. Sydney time and I still had two hours left of the flight. Perfect! I never even had time to watch a second movie.
Day Two: Wednesday, February 26 The center tower of the three in this photo is Meriton Suites Campbell Street, where Shobhiit and I are staying, on the 19th floor. We got here at about 8:00 in the morning, after a mercifully efficient customs process at the airport—even including my having to go to the "service desk" because of a photo issue at one of the booths I had to stand in (evidently I must have turned my head just as it snapped; Shobhit had gotten through without incident and I was a little scared there for a second), as well as declaring the packaged foods (Tasty Bite Indian meals and rice pouches!) and liquors we brought with us, because we're all about saving money where we can. I fully expected that declaring those things would mean having some customs agent open our suitcases and search them, but instead we were just corralled into lines through which they just led around a sniffing dog. And then we were off to the airport train station, which was our first experience with a public transit system that is really quite extensive and impressive for a city this size. We were at Central Station, which is all of a third of a mile from our hotel, in hardly any time at all—thanks in large part to the Sydney Airport being not far from the city at all (about five and a half miles from the Central Business District, and about four and a half miles from Central Station.)
The interior of our room. We naively thought "19th floor" would mean we would get a view—what we got was a few of another wall of the building. We could see part of the view in the reflections of the windows across from us, though! This room has other very positive attributes, however. It includes a full refrigerator, a stove, and even a dishwasher; we have already gone to nearby grocery stores a couple of times and cooked several meals at home; just this morning we made delicious egg quesadillas. Best of all, we discovered it even has an in-unit washer and dryer! I guess we could have easily packed only a weeks' worth of clothes after all (as had been recommended to us and we were like, screw that, we don't want to hand wash clothes in the sink!) instead of the full two weeks' worth of clothes we packed.
It was no surprise that this city has several old buildings with clearly British influence. This is the beautiful Sydney Town Hall, finiished in 1889.
Shobhit theorizes that tourism is down due to coronavirus fears: our flight was 1/3 empty (so we got our three-seat row to ourselves, yay!), and we quite easily checked into our hotel room at 8 a.m. We may have gotten an actual view had we checked our luggage in the lobby and waited, but we later just scrapped that idea and went with taking a room we could. We settled in and then headed out to explore pretty quickly. First stop was a high one on my list: Sydney's answer to the Space Needle, their honey dipper-shaped Sydney Tower, at 1,014 feet the tallest structure in the city since construction in 1981. This shot was taken from Hyde Park two days later, but it's the best exterior shot I've gotten of it so far.
One of the many photos I took of the view from the "Sydney Tower Eye," the observatory at Sydney Tower. This is maybe the best shot including a lot of landmarks: the Harbour Bridge at center-right distance; and if you look closely you can see part of the Sydney Opera House by the bit of water seen at far right. There is a separate, smaller skyline for North Sydney in the distance. A new building called Crown Sydney is seen under construction at far left and is already the new tallest building in the city (excluding Sydney Tower itself, which like the Space Needle is classified as an "observatory tower" rather than a building), at 889 feet and 75 floors. The white buildiing in the foreground to the right is MLC Centre, the second-tallest building in Sydney without a spire. (Sydney has bunches of those, in my view artificiially inflating the height of a building, perhaps more than any other city I have ever been in, and I have no idea what accounts for it. Shobhit thinks it's because of the frequency of lightniing strikes, but I cannot find anything to confirm.)
First close-up in-person sighting of the Sydney Opera House! I never tire of looking at this building, it really is truly beautiful and unique. Its status as an icon of the city is well deserved. We did look into taking a guided tour, but they were too expensive. We settled for looking at it from the outside, including taking our picnic lunch—of Tasty Bites Indian meals and rice!—on a bench by the water on the other side of it.
We saw this guy perched atop one of the Sydney Opera House "shells" as we walked past right by it on our way to the aforementioned bench.


I had originally thought we might do this on Thursday, but we found ourselves with the time on Wednesday. When you move inland via the water from Sydney Harbour, it becomes the Parramatta River, and there are ferries that go between the Sydney CBD and the suburb of Parramatta, some 15 miles inland. The ferries take 90 minutes one way, with a bunch of stops in between; just driving in a car takes a bit over half an hour. We initially tried taking the ferry in from Sydney, but when we discovered there was nearly an hour until the next ferry, we switched up the plan and took the train out to Parramatta first instead—a 50-minute train ride. This still proved to be the best idea, though, because just one 90-minute ferry ride was enough, and it was great to have it end with an approach to the city. It started with a departure from Parramatta's surprisingly developed skyline of its own, as seen here.
The Sydney skyline on approach on the Parramatta Ferry. I took several of course, but I like this one with the sailboat in the middle of the shot. (Also to clarify, it was still a while before we reached dock from this point; we still had several stops as well as bypassing the many peninsulas before we reached Circular Quay [pronounced "key"].)
Fun story here! We were making toast while also cooking omelets for dinner, and the toaster kept burning and twice set off the smoke detector. You see that black sticker on the rangehood? It reads, PLEASE ENSURE THE RANGEHOOD IS ON WHEN COOKING. A $1600 FIRE BRIGADE CALLOUT FEE APPLIES TO FALSE ALARMS. Uhhh . . . yikes! We had to call the front desk twice to try and figure out how to turn the rangehood fan on at all; the only reason it wasn't on was because we couldn't figure it out. When I called, the lady at the front desk acted like it was very simple: "Just pull it out." Pull it out?? Huh? So we come back and we're removing the screens under the hood and still trying to find where a switch is hidden somewhere. Then we got a knock on our door. The front desk had sent up a young man to assist us. And you know what he did? He just grabbed that whole metal part of the hood beneath the cupboard doors and pulled it out, like a drawer, which automatically turned on the fan. Ohhhh! Neither Shobhit nor I had ever seen a rangehood operate like this before. Is this specific to this hotel or to all of Australia or what? I know they speak English here but maybe we still should have brought a handbook! The young man was super cute though so that made it all worth it.
Day Three: Thursday, February 27 On Thursday, we did one thing I had originally thought we would do the first day but that got postponed a day whe we did the Parramatta Ferry instead: walk the Harbour Bridge, and do the "Pylon Lookout." This was the plainly obvious compromise when, after months of insisting it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I would do it no matter what, the Harbour BridgeClimb proved prohibitively expensive: at minimum, climbiing to the top of the bridge arch would cost $268 AUD, or $175 USD based on the current currency exchange rate. I'm already planning to do a very similar (and still expensive, but far less so) thing at the Adelaide Oval and don't need to do that kind of thing twice—and besides, you can climb the stairs to the top of one of the Pylons, which are plenty high in their own right (292 ft above sea level; about 128 ft above the bridge's road level), and it is truly a fraction of the cost: $19 AUD ($12.37 USD). With the Pylon Lookout as an alternative option I kind of feel like you'd have to be a moron to take the "BridgeClimb" option. I mean, just look at this photo of Sydney Harbour! This view is clearly spectacuar in its own right.
I had Shobhit take this shot of me atop the Pylon Lookout with the Sydney skyline behind me.
Nude beach time! Shobhit is the one who always wants to find the nude beaches wherever we go: he loves beaches and he loves being naked. After Pylon Lookout, we walked the span of the bridge, and then tried to find a bus from there to Cobblers Beach, pictured above. The bus was taking ages to arrive, though, and luckily we found ourselves in an area with public wifi hotspots (as we are entirey reliant on wifi while here). We then figured out the best option was to take a train one stop back to the south side of the bridge; catch the different bus we needed there; ride it yet again across the bridge, and then out to Cobblers Beach. This is still basically in a park area right next to developed city, but as you can see it's still beautiful. That said, I did not take many more photos after this on Thursday, as I didn't want to be the creep at the nude beach busting out a camera. I did take photos of a bird, and had Shobhit take a few photos of me standing at the shoreline on the rocks by the water. I even posted one of them to Instagram, so if you really want to you can head over there to see a distant shot of me and my barely noticeably bare butt!
Day Four: Friday, February 28 We decided we would finally walk a bit on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, where the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade is scheduled for Saturday night. But, we decided first we would walk through Hyde Park (as mentioned earlier, with the shot of Sydney Tower taken from there) and the Royal Botanic Garden. In the latter park is located this beautiful, castle-like building, the "Government House," which is apparently where the governor of New South Wales lives. Walking not far at all past this, is another view of the land-side of the Sydney Opera House, which is not that far away.
Walking not far at all past the Government House, is another view of the land-side of the Sydney Opera House, which is not that far away.
An old schoolmate of Shobhit's lives in Sydney, as it turns out—he's been here since 2004. But, although they have been Facebook friends for some time (as is typical these days), this was the first time they had seen each other since they were in school together. They last saw each other in 1991. 29 years ago! Shailendra lives in Bankstown, about 12 miles inland to the west; he rode in on a 45-minute bus ride to meet up with us and spend the evening. We had a person nearby take this photo of us all in a park near the light rail station he met us at, where they caught up and we waited for the local bar he really likes, called "Establishment," to open. He bought us both a drink there. This guy has had an incredibly fascinating life, and great career success—including writiing a best-selling book—after having open heart surgery at the age of 24 in 1997.
After our drinks at Establishment, we all walked over to the Shangri-La Hotel, which a guy we had met on the ferry told us has a cocktail bar on the 36th floor. He told us the view from there would be better than it would have been from the "Harbour BridgeClimb," and as you can imagine, I was all about that! We had already earmarked Friday night for going, and so Shailendra just came along and joined us. We all had a cocktail and Shobhit and I shared a cheese plate and an order of sourdrough bread. I truly love the above shot taken from there, but it was a challenge to get it. They would not let us into the "fine dining" area which would have views of the rest of the skyline, but at least from the bar we could see the icons of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. In fact, after I made attempts at my own shots which kept showing reflections in the windows, the hostess took my phone and got this spectacular shot for me. Shailendra also got some pretty cool sunset shots too though. We all went to a nearby Italian restaurant with far too slow service but very tasty food after that. And that catches you all up, for now! Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is tonight, which will probably yield a ton of photos on its own, which is why I am cramming four days worth of photos into this email and the next will cover only two. Only time will tell when I'll fiind the time to write it up, but in spite of my perrennial wordiness, hopefully this will satiate you all for now! Apologies for probably many typos; I don't have the time or the energy to proof, and the i key on Shobhit's laptop keyboard sticks.
[All Sydney photo albums on Flickr here; all overall Australia 2020 photo albums here.]