Sydney: Return to and Exit from Civilization

No trip to Australia would be complete without checking out Sydney, so we swung back down from the Blue Mountains after a few days to see what this world class city was all about.

Once back in the big city, we indulged in all of the joys a metropolis can offer:  Free museums, fancy meals, fast wireless internet, throngs of people, shopping, daydreaming about what it would be like to have enough money to live in a fat-ass penthouse in downtown Sydney, and humongous mega-hostels (with a movie theater, two giant kitchens, and room for over 500 guests).  The whole mega hostel thing might not have been a quintessential part of the big city experience in, say, Chicago, but in Oz, giant hostels with lots of extras are all the rage.  Travelers, students, and transitional folks from all over the globe lurk in these modern Aussie marvels.  It is fitting that Aussies like to travel so much and that their cities and towns are now riddled with every type of hostel imaginable.  Even as millions of Aussies travel the globe outside their own borders, millions of foreigners (mostly German) shuffle from one sweaty Oz hostel to the next, in search of the best "free" shelf in the kitchens and the poshest (or just least foul smelling) roof-top pool or jacuzzi (with or without a waterfall).  They work for a month or two here or there, then it is on to the next town and its hostel playground.  The best part--not--about all of the hostels that offer movie theaters, pools, game rooms, and more free perks, is that none of them (that we found) offer free wifi or internet.  Guess the discerning traveling masses would rather zone out to a bootleg version of Fast and Furious than save some coin on the hours and hours of internet they will most certainly use...

But we digress.  This is Sydney we're talking about.  Surely there must be more to write about than Australian hostels!  How about our transition from the glorious small towns of Oz to the big, swingin' city?  Well, rural areas in Oz were certainly not devoid of culture - we ate stinky cheese and drank good wine even as we drove through very sparsely populated areas.  But the mish-mash of cultures and surging energy that flow in big cities is hard to get anywhere else.  Watching Sydney-siders swim through parks and checking out the other tourists down by the harborfront helped us get back in the big city groove, which, while not required in New Zealand, we knew we would have to summon soon in Bangkok, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City.


Sydney is an easy city to like, and free museums don't hurt any.  The (awesomely free) Art Gallery of New South Wales had some LOL contemporary art, but also had some real art that made us un-wrinkle our noses and take note.  And Sydney's many and varied neighborhoods were even more fun to explore than its museums.  The food and culture was a bit different in each.  We have definitely found that the most interesting big cities are the ones made up of several distinct neighborhoods with their own flavor.  The flavor we liked most in Sydney was maybe the breakfast we had at Bills in Surry Hills.  At this point you all are probably pretty sick of hearing about the food we ate in Australia, seeing as how it isn't really all that new or exciting.  But the pancakes at Bills were pretty special.  Not too thick, but with enough fluff to give you something to sink your teeth into, these hot cakes were the real deal.  A really delicious, leisurely weekend breakfast at home is one of life's truly awesome things, and moments like our morning in Surry Hills and bfast at Bills help us feel like we are close to home.

Much like Uluru, the Sydney Opera House has a reputation that precedes it.  We were both looking forward to seeing the heralded structure, but weren't really sure what to expect.  Would it wow us like Uluru, or let us down, unable to live up to all the hype?  After viewing the Opera house from the harbor Bridge, various vantage points right below it, and half a dozen other spots, far and near, we decided that it is really a marvelous piece of architecture.  Actually, we came to that conclusion after our first prolonged viewing from the Harbor Bridge.  But as you take it in from other angles and vantage points, the building continues to offer new faces of itself. We could see why people might have hated it when it was first built, as it is awkward in a way, dingy looking up close, and supported by ugly, clumsy concrete at its base.  But the Opera House's genius is in the way it seems to take on a new form from different angles.  It appears to take on new shapes, even as it evokes images of sails with its sharp points and almost fabric-like curves.  We did find, though, that the Opera House was best viewed from the fancy-pants restaurant Aria, which served us up one of our favorite meals of the trip.  We would have had to find work in Oz in order to finance dinner there, but we found that lunch at Aria was enough to make us sing!

Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens and old Observatory on a hill overlooking the harbor bridge were other highlights.

A great big city should provide interesting culture (in the form of art, people, architecture, food, etc.), and Sydney came through on that account.  It's free museums, free observatory, excellent parks and gardens, and distinct neighborhoods were fascinating to experience and explore. But we did find that we reacted to Sydney differently than we did to other big cities earlier in our trip.  We think that we really began to fall in love with the less populated areas.  The unspoiled natural beauty and hundreds of thousands of unpopulated acres in Australia gave us a new appreciation, and taste for life away from the sprawl of the city.  Australia had some really great cities, like Sydney and Brisbane, but the country really captivated us with its scenery, animals, and truly magnificent wild side (which isn't just locals drinking beer at 10:30 in the morning, or ship captains getting so drunk on their own sail boats that they regret their actions among the tour group the next day).

We figured the lure of a more rural land hit us at the right time, since we jumped on an airplane out of Sydney September 17th bound for Auckland: The largest city in a country known more for its live stock than its stock market, and more for its natural wonders than its man made ones!