Monday, 11/1/93, 9:30pm
Another huge breakfast started the day, then off to see the sights on a beautiful day. We bought a Sydney Pass for $50AD each. This pass gives us three days of unlimited use of three different bus systems, all ferries throughout the harbor, and three guided boat tours of the area. Since we’d end up spending at least that much for travel, it was a great deal.
Our first stop on the Sydney Explorer was the outer fringe of Chinatown where there was another outdoor market. We browsed through it for awhile, and worked our way past the monorail. Yes, there’s a monorail just like at Disneyland that runs a loop from the shopping district southwest of the Opera House to/thru Darling Harbour further to the west. From here, we went into the Powerhouse Museum.
Can you tell from the name that it’s an old Powerhouse? It was really kind of fun. They had literally hundreds of tactile exhibits. It reminded me of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, but much more organized and spread out. They had lots of fun things to play with in there.
We jumped back on the Sydney Explorer and went across the Harbour Bridge to Northern Sydney. It was a great place to get pictures of the Opera House. A couple interesting facts about the bridge: The two huge stone pylons are NOT used for structural support, they are merely decoration. All 65,000 tons of steel are resting solidly (I hope) on four HUGE pegs which mount the four ends of the bottom arches to solid cement buttresses. Granted, they are big, thick pins, but there are still only four of them. The top arches don’t even connect to the pillars. They stop about 10 meters short of the pillars. It’s kind of an eerie feeling once you’re aware of it.
We caught the Explorer back to the Circular Quay (pronounced “Key”) and caught a jet-catamaran ferry. It’s a big boat, seating maybe 500 passengers. We took the ferry to Manly Beach (Manly yes, but I like it too!). This is a quaint little suburb to the northeast of Sydney, right on the Tasman Sea. This was our first real contact with open ocean, since Cairns is protected by Parker Press : Page 17 the reef, and Sydney is actually about 10-20Km inland. It was still kind of ‘cheap’ with little $2.00 stores selling junk everywhere, but a little more rural than Sydney. We spent some time walking around, and then caught a jet-cat back to downtown.
It’s been nice not having any real plans, but I?m already looking forward to New Zealand.
Leave a reply