Tag: Australia

I had one final day in Sydney. So what can you do on a sunny warm day.
During the ride home there were some suggestions about that, but I also had one more thing to arrange.
I went to get a breakfast at the Macquirie shopping center nearby. The coffee I had on Wednesday was wonderful, so I decided to check if they also had breakfast, and as it turned out they did, they even served it the whole day.
It was fine, and the cappuccino was great again. So I went back to the hotel ready to spend some time in Sydney.
I looked up the Hertz rental address in downtown Sydney as they would not pick up the phone in the airport. I gave up after having gone through two score phone menus again and again. Definitely an answering system gone wrong.
It headed over to the nearby metro station where they sold me a day pass.
The metro took me to Central station and from there I walked over to Hertz and explained my toll road problem. They were very helpful and let me use the phone. I bought an electronic access to the toll roads and was happy to have had it handled within 48 house of driving on the toll road, which is the limit for that here.
I headed towards the park and passed a small pastry shop called Flour and Stone. I had a wonderful apple tart there and a great cup of coffee. I took a little something to go and proceeded towards the park.
At the corner I had a flurry of pigeons landing in front of me. They seemed to expect something of me but I didn’t have anything to give them, so I passed them and went up into the park.
It was as lovely as I remembered, yet the sounds were very different. There was a concert going on, and due to that a part of the park was covert grounds. There was a lot of noise as most of the tones were filtered out by the trees and only the loudest and lowest sounds passed through. 
I paused a bit on the lawn and after that went into the nearby museum. It was not a special museum, but I loved to see the art there. There was an exhibition going on about Picasso, the entrance was free, so I enjoyed the aboriginal art and the contemporary Australian painters collection. I even chanced by some Dutch and Belgian artists. One of the prettiest Pieter Paul Rubens was there and some very old Dutch paintings. What impressed me most though was the Australian painters with historical landscapes and visions into Australians past. The typical eucalypts mingled with brown cows, a very nice compilation of quarry’s and even a scene of a post coach being held up by armoured men.
I left the museum and walked into the botanical garden, one that had impressed me some much eleven years ago. It was still wonderful and though I missed the marsupial I had seen there before, the flying foxes were still hanging from many trees.
I found a toilet and left towards the harbour side of the park. Before clearing the trees I rested under a large pine. It was warm and I was dressed a bit too warm as well, so the shade was nice. I typed a bit of my report there, the part about the Blue Mountains.
When I was done I walked on, knowing that the next stop would be the Opera House. It was there, and. I took some nice pictures. Unfortunately there were some repairs going on, the stairs were being taken apart for some reason. I scaled the part that was not being repaired yet and found many people inside. This held me back a bit, I would have liked to have seen what was playing.
A huge cruise ship was in the harbour, close. It was next to the pier and I was amazed it could get this close to land. I don’t expect many harbours can allow such deep and large ships to actually dock. So I took some pictures of it as it towered out over many of the buildings.
I moved towards the public transport and remembered that the man at the counter had told me that the pass I bought would also allow me to get on the harbour ferry. So I found which ferry actually went around the bay. I bought a bottle of water and entered the ferry that went to North Sydney. It was there for boarding so I embarked quickly and had a wonderful trip around the bay, taking many of the Opera House from the water pictures.
It was time to get back to the hotel. I was happy that my shoes were comfortable enough, but my big toes were hurting a bit, so I went into the metro back to Central and from there took the metro up to North Ryde.
As it turned out, North Ryde was not my exit, it looked very much like where I left, but I found out later that the tubes at Macquirie Park and North Ryde were very similar. I should have paid better attention on where I went on the trains.
My toes turned out to have an indentation on them from the stockings I was wearing. I didn’t have blisters, and I was very happy about that. New boots can take a long time to get walked-in and I just have to watch which stockings or socks I wear in these.
I went down to the restaurant for some dinner. Again it was closed of for a personal function. I guess a company had rented it for a Christmas dinner and I had to stay in the lounge area. I didn’t wanna go out to a restaurant anymore so I took that spot and had an Indian curry (they had an Indian cook)
It was time to go sleep. A long day ahead on my trip to Melbourne.