Asian & Antipodean Adventures - Part IV

 

After the food tour we dropped into the Sydney Brewery tap room for a cold one, classic craft beer vibes, friendly staff, good food and tasty beer, couldn't want much more TBH. Sydney was clearly quite keen on it's craft beer, there were a several breweries in the city, and most of the pubs/bars we tried had some kind of craft offering, probably a higher percentage than most UK cities. As previously mentioned there was even a brewery down the road from our hotel in "The Rocks"; while there I snapped a picture of their beer board (see below)

"Aussie Draught" was simply a Pilsner style lager and the prices were similar to London, i.e. the conversion from Australian Dollars to Sterling is about 2-1 so the top beer on this list is around £7 a pint. We also had a little day trip out to a town called Manley, a beach town located around 45 minutes away from downtown via a regular ferry. The town itself was a little scruffy (think Blackpool but with Sunshine) but the beaches were pristine.

The photo above shows the town beach, really clean and well life-guarded the water on the right hand side is the Southern Pacific rather than Sydney Harbour, it looked really warm and inviting but unfortunately I didn't have my trunks with me! We walked around the headland to another secluded beach where there was a well known beach bar/restaurant; we sat in the Sunshine eating delicious fish tacos, drinking a nice cold XPA and watching beach-life in full swing, if you are a fan of beaches and the surf life-style you could do a lot worse than living here!

Just around the headland from our hotel was a place called "Darling Harbour", this inlet used to be called "Long Cove" but was renamed bay in 1826 by Lieutenant-General Ralph Darling who was the Governor of New South Wales at the time. Today its an entertainment hub and borders onto the Financial District of the city, very modern, lots of restaurants and museums along with a large sea-life centre and aquarium etc. we spent a whole afternoon walking around with a stop for lunch.

Pretty soon it was time to move on, we'd had 5 days in Sydney and loved it, the weather was good, the food and drink various and tasty and the people super friendly but Melbourne beckoned our last day arrived and we hopped in a taxi to the airport and a short flight down to Victoria and it's capital city, more about that in Part V.

Asian & Antipodean Adventures - Part III

 

On our third day in Sydney we headed out to the Surrey Hills suburb for a food tour, it's a district that's kind of like Camden or Peckham in London, expensive but still with a bit of an "edge", lot's of pop up restaurants and hipster bars a good location for a little food tour! We met up with our guide and discovered that she wasn't Australian at all but a French lady who had married an Ozzy and settled in Sydney, this was quite good as I reckoned that French people know a thing or two about food and she was originally from Lyon, probably the food capital of France! 

Anyway, we had a nice walk around in the sunshine, stopping off at 8 different locations to try typical Sydney fare. I think it's fair to say that the main thrust of the food there is "fusion", a melding of different food traditions from the various waves of foreign immigration that have built the city over the last 200 years. For example in the picture above (left to right) we have prosciutto (Italian) layered on top of a donut (minus the sugar) with herbs and Tapenade, a nice lunch bite! Then we have deep fried Courgette flowers (kind of like Tempura) finishing with custard tarts with Pistachio nuts a mix of Portuguese and Greek influences.

The tour was a big success, we had great fun trying the different dishes, the guide was interesting and knowledgeable and the weather was kind!

Next up was a boat trip out to Manley, a small town on the edge of the harbour facing the South Pacific Ocean, there's a few shops there and some wonderful beaches. With a regular ferry into Circular Quay (downtown Sydney) that only takes 40 minutes it's also a commuter town. We visited on a Saturday so the place was packed with people, the weather was great and the beaches full of folks enjoying the weekend. We walked along the coastal path to a beach-front restaurant where we had some great seafood and a couple of ice-cold craft beers, idyllic!

On our penultimate day we walked around to Darling Harbour, the financial and entertainment district. We visited the aquarium and had some cold ones in one of the many harbour-side restaurants, the place was buzzing and full of Chinese people attending some kind of conference. After a final dinner in one of the French restaurants in "The Rocks" we slept soundly and awoke to packing up our suitcases and heading to the airport for a flight to Melbourne, more about that in part IV.. 

Asian & Antipodean Adventures - Part II

 

We arrived in Sydney early in the morning and couldn't properly check into our hotel so we left the bags there and headed out to explore. We were staying quit close to the Harbour and so the most obvious walk to take was down to the water and along the footpath surrounding the wharf. I snapped the classic view of the opera house as we walked past (above) and then the harbour bridge a little further round (below) It was quite surreal, having seen these landmarks hundreds of times on TV and in magazines etc. to see them in the flesh didn't seem real, it was a lovely day too and quite warm even though it was their Springtime and temperatures can get as low as 10-15 centigrade.

After a long walk, a couple of coffees and a look around the shops on George street I got a text from the hotel saying that our room was ready and so we headed back to unpack and settle in. I paid extra for a "Harbour View", and it certainly didn't disappoint, the photo below is the view from our room, something that I would imagine would be hard to get bored of.

The scene above shows "The Rocks" which is a small area next to Circular Quay that was the original Sydney settlement, it has a bunch of old buildings, mainly Victorian but some dating back to the early 1800s, and is now a tourist hot spot with plenty of restaurants, bars and boutique shops, I even found craft beer taproom (Endeavour Tap Rooms), somewhere we frequented a several times since it was only 5 minutes walk from our hotel (more on that later). It was a busy area but the vibe was friendly, we had a couple of meals there which were good albeit quite expensive. On one of our evenings in Sydney we didn't feel like a full meal so we visited a little wine bar nearby, we had a lovely bottle of Torbreck Barossa Shiraz called "The Struie" and a cheese platter (Australian cheese was a revelation!), it was singing, pure red fruit forward, classic Ozzy flavours with a slight spice edge, really good stuff, must look out for this producer when I'm back home! I snapped a picture of the bottle for future reference, see below.

While in Sydney we took a tour of the Opera House, I wanted to see what it was like inside and up close, it's an amazing building with a rather sad story of political meddling. The original Danish architect (Jørn Oberg Utzon ) was fired by a politician (Davis Hughes) half way through the build owing to costs overrunning and arguments about the final design, he never returned to Australia and died before he could visit his masterpiece. It's an amazing building, the sail like structures are composed of pre-fabricated concrete blocks and fitted together like Lego (see picture below) all these elements were original and new at the time, a truly unique structure.

The outside of the building is covered in ceramic tiles, a novel solution to the problem of discoloration due to pollution, the tiles are self-cleaning, I snapped a picture of them (see below)

We had some great times in downtown Sydney, good food, wine and interesting tours but after a couple of days we felt  the need to explore a little further afield so we booked a little food tour of one of the suburbs and a boat trip over to Manley, a beach town on the South Pacific Ocean, I'll tell you all about these in the next installment Part III

Asian & Antipodean Adventures - Part 1

I've not been posting lately as we've been away on our travels again... This time Singapore (see above) and Australia, a much anticipated 26 day road trip around Oz with stop-overs in Singers, it was lush! 

We left the UK back in August, leaving the brown dried out grass to head down to tropical, humid old Singapore with our Son and his Girlfriend, their first trip to Asia. However, it was only a one night stop-over after which we'd fly down to Sydney and they headed up to Vietnam (Hanoi) and did their own tour of that country, much like we did back in 2024, we all met up again at the end of our respective touring in Singapore and spent five days there. We'd been before, back in 1999 (pre-kids), so we thought we'd show them around the place before heading home (although it was significantly different and more developed since we were there previously) We arrived home this morning, at some ungodly hour and I have a feeling that today is going to feel like a very long day!

So, this little series of posts covers our time in Singapore and Australia where we visited Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, lot's of miles travelled, much good food, wine and beer consumed and some new friends acquired, it was a hell of a trip, more in part II..

Dead Cat Bounce

Had one of these over the weekend, it's a new IPA from Siren and is made in a "California" style (meaning dry, bitter and fruity) with Citra, Simcoe and Nelson hops. It's a nice beer that kinda needs warm sunshine to be best enjoyed, luckily that's exactly what we had over the weekend so it went down a treat! I'm not sure why it's called "Ricochet", something to do with the last West Coast IPA not selling so great perhaps, like a dead cat bounce perhaps?

Monday Mirth

The old ones are the best ones..

Memories of Vietnam

Thinking back to 2024 and our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, one of the places in Saigon we visited was the memorial to the monk who immolated himself in protest against the pro-Catholic regime running the country at that time, it was a seminal moment captured by an American press photographer who snapped a picture that became famous a thought provoking spot.

Fruity for days

New collaboration between Elusive and Verdant a classic Westy that I managed to snag from the Elusive "Fridge of Dreams" on my way through Finch this week! Very pale and packed full of flavour from the unusual combination of hops added (Nelson Sauvin, Superdelic, Krush and Ekuanot), fruity for days, a nice effort!

So True

Strange how we have to constantly remind religious people of this simple concept (so far as everyone who does not share their particular flavour of faith is concerned) - You'd think that people who believed they had ALL the answers to life's difficult questions would be happy, apparently they're not until you believe their answers too?