van wyk journeys September 29th, 2019
Today is a big day as we are flying to Sydney to start the last four days on the ground in Australia. Our flight was once again on Qantas and we received good service on the flight. The flight was event-free arriving at 4 p.m. in Sydney. We hopped in a taxi and found the driver full of information about Sydney the bad news is that I don’t really recall much of what was said. We arrived at our hotel one of many Meriton Suites hotels in the CBD and went shopping for groceries at Woolies and for other special stuff at the Bottleshop. Our suite is on the 42nd floor so while dining, we watched the lights come up over the city and chilled.
September 30th – First full day of Sydney
Sydney is a very cosmopolitan city that is growing in leaps and bounds. Melbourne is in close competition with Sydney with some saying that Melbourne is poised to take over the largest city title in the coming years. While I doubt that it will have the same infrastructure as Sydney, meaning the train system, both certainly surpass most major cities in Canada in this area.
I was up early to work on the blog and listen to the construction workers across the road on the 48th floor. Yes, the 48th floor and workers are hanging off the building across the street like they were monkeys. Not for the faint of heart.
Today’s adventure was a planned journey via the train to Circular Quay (pronounced “key”) to check out the cruise shipped loading procedures.
Using the Opal card, the train system in Sydney is far more advanced than that in Melbourne making the trip easy. First, you buy a card at 7-Eleven and load it with $10 or $20 dollars but not $15 dollars. Apparently, there are no provisions for odd dollar amounts. We made for the train about a block away and navigated the escalators and pay gates making it to the platform that takes us down to the Quay. What an amazing treat, clean new cars, quiet, not packed, quick without the jerking of starting and stopping.
We get on the train and off we go making the trip in just a few minutes. Later we walk back to the hotel. At the “Quay”, we head over to the cruise ship terminal and watch as another ship (larger than our ship) gets boarded paying attention to simple things like how the baggage gets delicately handled (not) and being stacked on metal carts for loading on the ship.
From the stern of the ship, we took pictures of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge making note of the lines of people that look like ants making their way across the tops of the spans. At this point, it was raining and very windy, and I wondered exactly what the footing might have been like. I did not notice anyone falling off, so all was good.
Wanting to take a closer look we wandered around several streets and narrow staired alleyways before finding a lift to the bridge level roadway. As luck would have it, it started to rain to compound the high winds already blowing us around. We went as far as the first pier making note of how the people got to the top of the bridge, definitely not for the faint of heart.
While on the bridge deck, we spotted the Canadian embassy and this became a destination for Keith and Diane as a possible place to cast their vote for the upcoming Federal election. But first lunch as the Embassy staff was on their lunch break. Upon return it was quickly determined that voting was going to be a more complex proposition, so the attempt was abandoned.
From here we slowly made our way back to the Meriton Hotel. Joan and Diane went off to get “groceries” while Keith and I started to make our way to a different liquor store where we thought pricing might be more affordable. Along the way, we ran in Joan and Diane so the four of us made our way to a Coles (nice grocery store) and a Liquor Supercenter (much better pricing and selection) which of course was right next door. Eventually, we made our way back to the hotel.
