Tag Archives: Travel

Watson for today, then?

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Friday 20 September 2024 – Acting on a suggestion from the friends we met last night, we decided that Watsons Bay would be a good destination for an excursion, particularly since the weather outlook was so good – sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s.

So we headed for the ferry and queued up

to get on to F9 on the B side of Wharf 2. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the public transport available around Sydney is organised. There’s no need to buy tickets; one can simply “tap on” and “tap off” using a credit card or, in my case, my phone. The trains are double-decker, the ferries seem to be very competently operated and the services have suited us very well on our short stay here. The ferry ride out of Circular Quay offers, unsurprisingly, some great views of the Sydney skyline

North Sydney

and, of course, its iconic structures.

Jane noticed that there were people climbing the bridge,

something that she and I did when we were here last, in 2001. Nice to see it’s still going; and they’ve added the aboriginal flag at the top of the bridge since our last visit, unless I’m mistaken.
Many ships leaving Circular Quay will pass a Martello Tower built on a small island:

Fort Denison, a former military site which is the most complete Martello Tower in the world and has been a museum, tourist attraction, restaurant, and popular location for wedding receptions and corporate events. It’s now closed for conservation work, apparently.
Watsons Bay is an attractive place

with a great view back of the Sydney skyline.

One of Sydney’s great attractions is a restaurant, Doyles, known for its seafood generally and its fish’n’chips specifically. The Watsons Bay location

is the original one, dating from 1885. Another attraction is the heritage trail which starts at Camp Cove (a place, not an over-theatrical chap) and leads up to South Head, the southern jaw of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. It’s a walk. So we went for it. Obviously. It takes you past some of the nice houses there,

and behind a cannon, which is pointing, for some reason, back at Sydney.

The furthest point of the trail, about a kilometre from the start, is Hornby Lighthouse

with the old lighthouse keeper’s cottages beside it.

One can also see how narrow the gap is that leads into Sydney Harbour. North Head – the upper jaw – is really quite close.

The lighthouse is a good, photogenic location. It’s therefore catnip for today’s generations of phone camera wielders (mainly, today, from the far east),

who seem to find it intolerable should a photo not include themselves. In many cases, quite an inordinate amount of time is spent organising poses (e.g. staring (nautically? pretentiously?) into the distance or pointing at the top of the lighthouse as if surprised to see that it has one). This specific posing seems to be a cultural thing among oriental tourists, and I wonder what will become of all of these images. Instagram, I suppose; the idea is that other people should see the photos. I doubt that, once posted online, the images will ever be seen again by their originators.

Grumpy? Me? Bloody right.

We had wanted to continue our walk down the other side of South Head rather than just completing the heritage trail loop. Trouble is, there’s a fucking great military establishment in the way, HMAS Watson,

and they clearly take a dim view of people wandering past their buildings. So, back towards Camp Cove it was,

which at least gave us the chance to take a coffee stop. From there, we cut across to the other side of the head. There’s clearly a military link here, since (as well as the naval base there) the road passed an armoury, an “Officers Quarters” building

and what we think were once gun emplacements.

There was some wildlife action along the way: Jane spotted a kookaburra

which really was sitting in an old gum tree; a couple of remarkable ants nests;

an engaging pair of blue wrens (male and female)

and a bunch of sulphur-crested cockatoos,

who were pretending to be sea birds perching on the cliffs and

inspecting tourists for food value.

We also spotted this dove

which, coincidentally, is a Spotted Dove.

The wrens and the cockatoos were at Gap Bluff, which has a small National Park area and also provides a couple of great cliff views.

There’s a historical memorial there, too;

the anchor belonged to a ship, the Dunbar which was wrecked on nearby rocks

in August 1857. Only one of the 122 aboard survived and the anchor was recovered some 50 years later and placed as a memorial to the others. The wreck was the catalyst for the creation of the Hornby Lighthouse and its survivor, one John James, went on to become the lighthouse keeper there.

Further along from Gap Bluff is the Watsons Bay Signal Station,

first established in1790; a permanent guard would watch out for arriving ships, raising a flag both to give them a sign of the new location of the settlement, and to notify the colony of the imminent arrival of the long awaited ships. Amazingly, the station has remained in permanent use from that date and has thus maintained its role for over two centuries, and from the same building for most of that time.

Near it is a lighthouse, the South Head Upper Light, also called the Macquarie Lighthouse.

Its site is the longest serving lighthouse site in Australia, with some kind of navigational aid in place since 1791 (sadly not sufficiently effective to save the Dunbar, though). The lighthouse shown above was completed in 1883 and is still fully operational. Next to it is the lighthouse keeper’s cottage

and in front of it, complementing the formal informational plaque on the lawns, is a much more informal tribute.

One could have carried on walking the cliff path, but we turned back to the bay to catch the ferry

back to Circular Quay, whence we walked towards the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden. On Circular Quay there are some plaques in the ground celebrating well-known Australians; we recognised a couple

and I suppose this one

must be the one originally dedicated to Rolf Harris.

The Botanic Garden is a large, pleasant park

with some remarkable trees

The tallest palm tree I’ve ever seen

and a few quirky sculptures.

My main objective was to get Mrs. Macquarie point and something called Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This Macquarie name keeps cropping up. Major General Lachlan Macquarie (born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century, hence the ubiquity of the Macquarie name.

He was married, as we can infer from the naming of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,

an exposed sandstone rock cut (by convicts in 1810) into the shape of a bench. Folklore has it that Elizabeth Macquarie used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built, on the instruction of Governor Macquarie, between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.

By this stage we were getting a trifle foot- and back-sore, so decided to return to the hotel. We diverted for a quick look into The Calyx,

to see if it would sell us some beer. Sadly, the café is just a café, and coffee wasn’t going to cut it for us, so I took a couple of valedictory photos

and we headed back to the hotel, past the Conservatorium of Music, which has the least music-related architecture I think I’ve ever seen.

Thus ended a very pleasant day’s outing; ample justification for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. Before we retired for the night, for amusement, I set a timelapse going to cover the comings and goings of the ferries at Circular Quay, which we can see from our hotel room. I hope you find it as engaging as I do.

Tomorrow we leave the city proper to spend a few days with friends who live to the north of Sydney. I have no idea what this means in terms of photos and verbiage on these pages; you’ll just have to keep an eye out to see for yourself, won’t you?

Arriving in Sydney

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Thursday 19 September 2024 – Stop Press! Virgin Australia managed to get us from Canberra to Sydney without buggering us about! Another Saab 340B flight, uneventful except for a very lumpy descent into Sydney (possibly the most turbulence I’ve ever experienced in an aircraft), saw us on the ground, met by our driver and transferred in very short order to our hotel past a bit a street art that I don’t yet understand.

Our room wasn’t ready, of course. It was only midday by this stage, so this wasn’t a surprise. Official check-in time was 3pm, and so, having handed in our bags for safekeeping, we had three hours on our hands, the sun was shining and the temperature was warm. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Actually, this was very convenient, as it gave us a chance to find out about a couple of transport options – train and ferry – that we would need to use over the coming days. The train bit was easy to understand, but the ferry timetables and destinations much less so; the map said that ferries that we were interested in taking went to one destination, the timetables insisted they went elsewhere. Our puzzlement was evident from our body language, which attracted one of the local Redcoats – volunteers patrolling the area to help bewildered tourists.  It was nice to chat to him, but less comforting to know that he, too, found the ferry information confusing.

It was good to re-acquaint ourselves, after nearly a quarter of a century away, with Circular Quay, probably the principal tourist area of the city.

An aboriginal chap regaled us with chanting

as we walked along, heading for The Rocks, with its jumble of older buildings

and its views back towards the city,

Circular Quay,

and over to the iconic views of the city: harbour bridge

and Opera House.

It’s a very photogenic area, looking towards Luna Park fairground and North Sydney.

We could also see Sydney Tower, which was called Centrepoint when we visited it on our last trip here.

The date of that visit is memorable:  twenty-three years ago, we’d just emerged from three days on a luxurious train journey from Brisbane, entirely insulated from the affairs of the world. It was a shock then to find out that the unexpected extra security measures in place for our visit to the tower were a consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers, which had happened just the day before.

We stopped for a bite of lunch and then headed back to our hotel, the Intercontinental, where our room was ready. The view from our 21st floor room was excellent,

but we had little time to enjoy the view as we had to get ready to go out for a late afternoon/early evening rendezvous with an ex-colleague friend whom I hadn’t seen for many years. We had agreed to meet in Newtown, a short train ride away.

Although it’s close to the city centre, Newtown is not a place where you’ll find lots of tourists.

It’s, erm, “vibrant”; lively, and a bit scruffy, and – at least for the bit we walked along – practically wall-to-wall eateries and drinkeries.

Our rendezvous was at the Newtown Hotel

which is a splendid building with quite a noisy interior (with a few artistic touches)

and a balcony, where we could sit and have a drink.

It was a good venue for meeting someone I hadn’t seen for many years and her husband, who we met for the first time.  We had a grand chat for a couple of hours before they had to go for a family event and it augurs well for the next few days, where – here and in Brisbane – we’ll be meeting friends we haven’t seen for some while; it’s rather nice to be able to indulge ourselves with travel and simultaneously keep in touch with friends in far-away places.

After our drinks, we pottered back to the station

past reminders that not everyone is as fortunate as us

and, having taken one last look at Luna Park, now illuminated in the dark,

turned in for the night. We have nothing formal organised for the morrow, but our chat this evening has given us one good idea for somewhere to go that looks like it could be an interesting excursion. Come back and find out where that was, won’t you?

Spring Surprise in Canberra

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Wednesday 18 September 2024 – Given that we had the day all to ourselves and that the weather outlook was decent, I doubt that many of my loyal fans, such as you, dear reader, will be surprised to learn that we went for a walk. Of course we did.

Jane had, of course, done her preparation, and so we had a general sense of which direction we would head out in without actually having any real knowledge of what we’d see. I’d read and heard that Canberra is an odd place because of its provenance – a city custom-built between Sydney and Melbourne, to shut down the late 19th-century arguments the two cities were having about which should the capital of a newly-federated Australia. Canberra was formally declared as the capital on March 12, 1913. This is going to be a long enough post without my going into its location – where aboriginals had lived for 21,000 years – or how it got its name; its Wikipedia entry is a good source for those seeking details.

I have to say that in the initial stages of our walkabout, the place did feel weird. Looking at the street layout, it’s quite clearly a confected city.

City Centre streets
Government Area streets

It has many architectural flourishes and artistic touches which don’t quite gel into a place with a soul. It’s interesting to walk round, though.

The first place we explored was City Hill (centre of left map above). It’s not much of a hill, but it’s been planted with conifers and a sodding great flagpole, flying the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) flag.

On the hill’s periphery, there’s the Canberra Centenary Column

which contains a time capsule containing 100 representative items of Canberra’s history. A lot of thought has been put into alignment of things.

Wanting to walk around the city, we found our way to City Walk in the hope that it would be helpful in shaping our strolling. To get there we passed the Melbourne Building

which, completely unsurprisingly, given Canberra’s provenance, is opposite a mirror image of itself called the Sydney Building. Both buildings have a nice cloister along the sides

and the Sydney Building even has a Tardis halfway along one side,

though quite why I’m not sure; a couple of locals walking past it were puzzled – clearly not Whovians.

Although most of the people we saw seemed perfectly affluent, it’d clear that not everyone is comfortably off.

Generally speaking, the buildings in that area are functional, rather than photogenic

but we passed many artistic installations of various sorts as we walked along.

Pavement mosaic
Road crossing

We found murals in a couple of places

though there were many unofficial additions to the originals.

There were also many floral touches.

OK, I’ll confess: we did have a specific objective to include in our walk, as the hotel receptionists had told us about it when we checked in. We were lucky enough to be visiting Canberra when Floriade, the biggest celebration of spring in Australia, was on. There were pointers to it all over the place

and so we made our way to Commonwealth Park to see what it was like. It was lovely. If you like tulips, it was positively orgiastic.

There were some non-floral artistic touches on display

An entry into the Gnome Knoll competition

There were various stages (yes, there was a Tulip Stage among them); on one of them, a bunch of kids were singing

to an audience, who were sometimes joining in

each in their own key, of course.

There were many retail opportunities

the most striking of which, for us as UK residents, was

Christmas items. Perfectly normal here, of course, but I don’t associate celebrating spring with celebrating Christmas, so I was a bit startled.

One retail opportunity was, however, right up our street.

so we popped in to try a few samples.

After Floriade, we turned our steps towards what is pretty much the city’s raison d’être – the government centre. We could see bits of it across the lake from Floriade.

Our route there took us past the Cook Memorial Globe

beyond which we could see that, sadly, the Cook Memorial Jet (i.e. fountain) was not operational today. The globe is a detailed piece of work, showing the routes that Cook sailed in his explorations from Plymouth

and around Australia.

The Government Zone has many imposing buildings,

National Library
Treasury

and, of course, the Parliament Building on Capitol Hill (which is not much of a hill either, to be honest)

with its very dramatic, though somewhat leaky roof.

OK, it’s not really the roof, it’s just a, erm, well, how would you describe it? [ An over-the-top flag holder? – Ed ]

We did go up on to the real roof, from where we could see the old Parliament Building

with a bloody flagpole in the middle of the bloody view (grrr!). A further piece of designed city alignment here – as you can see, the route from old to new Parliament buildings aligns exactly with the peak of Mount Ainslie.

The inside of the new Parliament Building is quite impressive,

(I sneaked a look through an open door and saw that there was a massive piss-up on the cards in the near future)

and, outside, the alignment and symmetry continue.

We had passed by the Old Parliament Building on the way to the New One, but its rather lovely garden was full of schoolkids on an outing. In fact, I think that Wednesday must be National Schoolkids Visit Government day, because there were several parties of schoolkids all over the government estate. However, they’d left the gardens by the time we passed by going back, so we could see (and smell) the fantastic wisteria that was blooming there.

We saw some birdlife in and around these gardens.  One bird I saw walked like a pigeon, but Jane thought it couldn’t be one because of its crest.

Google Lens showed us that there is, after all, a (rather alien-looking) bird called a crested pigeon. Sulphur-crested cockatoos were in abundance – probably loathed by the locals, but for us a lovely sight. We spent several happy moments stamping around after them to try to get one to show us its crest.

Hurrah!

And so, some 11km later, we arrived back at the hotel, having had a very engaging walk around Canberra.  Yes, the bits we saw felt a bit odd, because it’s a confected city, but it was very interesting to see it; and Floriade was lovely.

We only have the one full day here. Tomorrow we travel to Sydney.

Well, we might.

Virgin Australia, who have managed, in ways both large and small, to bugger us about for every flight we’ve taken with them so far, have warned us that high winds are expected and this might affect our travel.  Listening to the wind whistling round us on the sixth floor of the hotel, I wonder indeed what outrages outages we might expect tomorrow.