Thursday, March 5, 2020

march 5th - sydney australia day 1


Today we arrived in Sydney, sort of.  We are at anchor near the Taranga Zoo on the other side of the harbor from the famous opera house.  (Another ship has the good dock near the Opera House.)  As a result, we had to tender into the city.  As before, Cunard hired some much bigger boats to move people ashore quicker.  We were on the big ones going both ways to and from the city.  The boats let you off at the ‘Man O’War Steps’ adjacent to the opera house.  It’s a good location.

Lucky for us we’ve been here before because today was a lousy weather day.  It was raining throughout the day and then in the afternoon the wind came up and it really got bad.  Good news though it was not hot for the first time in many many days!  Because of the rain we decided to go up George Street to the Queen Victoria Building.  This is a beautiful old building they’ve repurposed as a high-end shopping mall.  The shops are all expensive and some are downright quirky.  We had lunch across from a store that sold expensive quill sets for writing (that must really be a niche market). Here are some pictures of the interior.



We had lunch here and you can see from the picture above the dining spots are situated by the open atrium so you are sitting out in the shopping area.  While sitting there I saw two guys coming our way and one of them had a Red Sox shirt and Patriots windbreaker on.  When he walked by, I said ‘I guess we know where you’re from’.  The two of them stopped to talk.  They were brothers, both originally from Connecticut but now one lives in Tasmania and the other in Virginia.  Tasmania is part of Australia, it’s an island south of Melbourne. 

As we were talking, they asked where we were from and we said New Hampshire.  The guy who lives in Virginia said, ‘oh that’s funny I went to college there, in Henniker’!  Unbelievable!  We live in this tiny town in the middle of NH and we run into someone who went to college there…in Sydney Australia.  Small world.

After lunch we walked over to Darling Harbor, this is an area developed in the last 10-15 years.  We hadn’t been there before.  The pictures below show you the area and also the bad weather.  In addition to pedestrian walkways they had a maritime museum (that we visited), an aquarium and some other tourist areas.  It was a very nice area with many condos and hotels right on the water. 



After coming out of the museum the wind had picked up so we decided to take a ferry back to the opera house area, call Circular Quay (quay pronounced key).  Sydney has an extensive ferry system used by commuters and tourists alike.  All in all, the city, like all others we’ve been to in Australia has excellent public transportation.

Tomorrow we plan to take a ferry over to Watson’s Bay, near the mouth of Sydney Harbor, to do some exploring.  To prepare for that we bought an ‘Opera’ card this morning.  This card allows you to take any transportation in Sydney.  You simply tap the kiosk when entering and tap again when you’re leaving.  Since we had the cards it was easy to use the ferry.  This is the ferry we took.  It may have had a novice driver because every dock we stopped at seemed more like a controlled collision…but we made it okay.


In other news, I mentioned before that the Holland America world cruise had changed their itinerary and had planned to go to Sri Lanka and India.  I thought India was crazy because of how difficult it is to get a visa…well it seems like they found that out and now India is cancelled and Sri Lanka won’t let cruise ships in any more (we were there in February).  Instead they are going to be spending more time in Australia!  What a coincidence!

Tomorrow is supposed to be better weather and we will also be docked right next to the opera house and Circular Quay.  Hurray no tendering!

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