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
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