(Pre-script: I’m writing this at a kid’s playground while the baby sleeps and the nipper chases around with a load of other kids, and I’m working as fast as I can to get this done before the sprout wakes up, so please excuse typos etc.)
There’s just something really cool about seeing in person a landmark such as the Sydney Opera House. The funny thing is that if you somehow manage to put yourself on the right spot on the earth, there it is, just like it looks on TV or in, ahem, photographs. And just like the Eiffel Tower or the Chrysler Building or Monument Valley, when you stand there and look with your own eyes, you just might get a little chill down your spine. Though we are in full tourist mode here, and while the wife is at the office I’m riding herd on our 6-year-old and toddler, we have been getting around to see as much as possible while managing diapers, bottles, sibling jealously, child jet lag, etc etc.
Sydney Harbor is gorgeous, especially at night. I snuck out after the girls were in bed and took the train down to Circular Quay, a central junction for train, bus and ferry traffic. (You can see it in this photo, just where the blue reflections on the water meet the land.) I walked to the path that leads across Sydney Harbor Bridge. It’s a challenge to find in the dark if you don’t know about the signs here and there directing you to one of two possible entry points. As I walked at last onto the bridge itself, I saw a crowd of security guys in bright yellow vests, all talking on their radios, and wondered if Australia were undergoing a similar crackdown on photography to the one happening in the UK of late. That would sure put the kibosh on my planed evening of shooting the night skyline.
But it turned out to be someone who was trying to climb over the fence, possibly a jumper, foiled before he could end it all in Sydney Harbor. He had grow a jacket over the barbed wire designed to foil those of such intentions, but the security guys were on him before he make it up and over. The bridge has cameras everywhere and for the rest of the night I saw at least one vested guard on patrol no matter which section of the bridge I was on. But there was no hassle from the security personnel as I worked patiently at trying to get a sharp exposure. There is so much vibration from traffic on the bridge that this was quite a challenge. Below the fencing shown above, the only unobstructed view is via a narrow gap about three inches tall, so this shot was taken with the lens resting on a folded up map of the area. My desire to use a long exposure for soft water went unappeased, as anything over a second resulted in too much camera movement.
From the bridge you get a wonderful view of the harbor and many perspectives of the Opera House, which I’d not realized comprises three separate buildings. As a work of architecture, the Opera House is so interesting to look at that I could go and do so every day. It takes on so many forms, depending on your perspective, that it’s hard to determine which is the proper one, but it is very interesting to look at from every angle, and at times it stops looking like a man-made structure and takes on a sort of organic look that suggests it grew out of the water ages ago. It’s fascinating and inspiring to see what people can come up with if set free (and paid) to do so.
On Sunday we took the girls to Manly on the ferry from Circular Quay and for this first time I came to understand just how large the Sydney area is. I thought Sydney Harbor was more or less on the coast, but in fact it is quite a ways to the ocean due to the large number of bays that lie between the capital city and the sea. There are countless bays as the lands wanders in and out, covered in lush rainforest looking foliage or homes with fantastic views. The ferries are busy getting here and there among the sail and powerboats.
The town of Manly actually is on the sea on one side, and on a bay on the other. A short walk from the ferry dock delivers you to the coast and a wide beach full of surfers and sunbathers. We walked toward the tip of the peninsula to SHelly Beach, a much smaller, sheltered bit of sand. Being six years old and a complete nuttier when it comes to getting in the water, E begged to be allowed to get her feet wet. Feet led to “Don’t get your pants wet!” to “Don’t get your shirt wet!” to the photo here:
That’s E with the red shirt. Her mother walked the baby back to the shops in Manly for beach towels while I stood guard. We’d passed signs asking all to help protect the local Water Dragons, and before long one appeared. He stayed up on a stone wall for 20 minutes as people walked past, unaware their heads were a foot or two from this fellow. When someone dropped a piece of bread on the brick walkway, he descended in sudden motion, awkward rear legs staying just ahead of his whipsawing tail. Bread down the gullet, he returned to his blind to wait for the next tourist treat.
I walked along a path that led from the beach over to the coastal shoreline, a rocky affair with surfers riding the breaking waves. I passed this sign, which is pretty straightforward until you notice the oddly-bearded sea weed man in the lower right corner. Who the heck is that guy?
Yesterday the wife went to the office so the girls and I took a short ferry ride to Taronga Zoo, which is pretty darn good as far as zoos go, being set in a plush, rainforest-like setting and well-funded by tourist entrance fees. The animals are well cared for and the entire place is clean and well-managed. It’s still a zoo, however, and not wanting to get too political about animals in captivity, I must say that it suffers the same problems as any zoo I’ve visited that keeps chimpanzees. The chimps were listless and from their body language, miserable. Perhaps it’s just sharing so much in common with these animals that makes me imagine I can tell how unhappy they are, and perhaps I’m wrong. But I continue to believe that chimps simply do not belong in zoos, no matter how great the benefit to human edification.
The bred-in-captivity koalas seemed happy enough, though. We paid $20 for a Koala Experience, which entailed being brought as a family into the presence of two koalas, Darwin and Lizzy, respectively an adult male and a year-old female who had just left the company of her mother. The resident expert was very informative, and we learned that koalas are solitary in the wild, coming together once a year to breed in a violent, unpleasant encounter that often ends up drawing blood. They have very sharp, powerful claws for climbing, and partially for this reason during this experience we were not allowed to touch or otherwise direct the koalas away from whatever the heck they felt like doing at the time. Lucky for us, the two sleeping bears (in fact they are not bears, as pointed out in the comments below!) woke up for feeding time just as we entered their pen, The woman before us got her photo taken with two sleeping koalas.
Other highlights included the Komodo Dragon, kangaroos, wallabies, and the Fierce Snake, the deadliest land snake in the world, one bite from which involves enough venom to kill 100 people or 200,000 mice! Australia has 9 out of 10 of the most deadliest snakes. Cool!
After the zoo, we took the bus to Bondi Beach, which is just south of Sydney. It took about 45 minutes but was quite an interesting drive, as we were able to watch the cityscape change from the urban designs of Sydney to the rural and beach town look of Bondi (pronounced Bond-Eye). Bondi Beach is fantastic, with beautiful Porto Fino style colored homes on one side. The waves were small but there were plenty of surfers and people on shore enjoying the weather.
As we left for the return bus ride, we found a skate park with a large empty swimming pool. The skaters ranged from pre-teen girls to 30-something guys who took nicely to the rolls of helping the younger skaters learn tricks. Several of the older skaters were really good, getting up in the air and often landing their flips and spins. Sometimes they didn’t land, and all wore thick knee pads, onto which they fell and slid to the bottom of the pool when they missed a move.
The manners of the skateboards has mirrored those of literally everyone else we’ve met here in Sydney. Polite, friendly, civil, generous, this is a tourist’s paradise. Sydney does “California” better than California, and it’s probably a very good thing for the locals that Australia is so far from everything else in the world. If it were closer, everyone would come here.
