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Sydney: Welsh invade Balmain
Posted by daveb on April 20th, 2009
After a couple of downright miserable nights in a very wet national park some way outside Sydney and a further night in a self-proclaimed “International Guest House” my friends Andrew and Mel arrived back from their holidays to their flat in Balmain, just a fifteen minute bus ride from the Central Business District. Hot on their heels where a couple of desperate, ageing backpackers (that’s us) looking for a catch-up and a bit of good old hospitality!
With the addition of another University pal, Katie, the Welsh outnumbered the non-Welsh three-to-two. We celebrated by playing “Taff Wars” on YouTube (warning: hilarious, but containing very rude language), drinking copious amounts of booze and staying up late playing the electronic finger drums
Thanks so much to Andrew, Mel and Katie for the hospitality and fun — missing you guys and gals already!
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Sydney: Bondi Beach bums
Posted by daveb on April 17th, 2009
No trip to Sydney would be complete without smearing an overpriced ice-cream around your chops at Bondi Beach, mate. I’m somewhat surprised and pleased to report the high level of topless activity on Sydney’s most famous stretch of sand. As I walked the stretch, Claire avoided unecessary movement by placing herself on a bench and, as is quite usual in the world of travel, befriended several hilarious Chinese ladies who took great interest in her skin, hair and repetition of the words “thank you”. On my return, each one produced a camera and asked me to record the moment that they met and interacted with what they no doubt believed was a “genuine Australian person”.
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Sydney: Beethoven at the Opera House
Posted by daveb on April 16th, 2009
I don’t need to write that the Sydney Opera House is one of the world’s most iconic architectural masterpieces, nestled between the Botanic Gardens, the central business district and it’s Circular Quay and the equally iconic Harbour Bridge. What better way to enjoy Sydney than to experience the symphonic orchestra performing one of the world’s great classical composers. Most commonly- and incorrectly pronounced “Bate-hoven”, anyone of any classical training (like me) knows that the correct pronunciation of his name is in fact “Beeth-oven”.
To cut a long story short, we treated ourselves to a couple of cheap seats for a one and a half hour’s worth of Beethoven in the grandest of the halls in the Opera House. I’ve got no doubt that the orchestra played the pieces flawlessly. It was just a shame that we didn’t recognise a single tune.
Funniest moment included the shocked an angry audience reaction to a Chinese tourist’s bedside alarm clock going off in the middle of a delicate piano rendition. Cue verbal tuts, tusks and vigorous head shaking. I love the cheap seats, you just never know what’s going to happen!
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Balmain: Backpackers hostel or doss house?
Posted by daveb on April 15th, 2009
With wet, muddy tent strewn across the back seats of our car, we made our way towards the suburb or Balmain, just outside central Sydney. My old university friend, Andrew, and his wife, Mel, had very kindly offered to put us up for a night or two. The timing couldn’t have been better as we’re just been subjected to Sydney’s largest rainfall in a hundred years. In a tent.
Driving central Sydney is a bit of a nightmare for one reason: the toll roads. Having lived and driven through a great many cities, city driving doesn’t faze us in the slightest. After Rome, and to a lesser degree, Dubai, nothing rocks us. Except Sydney’s bloody toll roads. Driving along the toll road is easy enough. But you just try paying them. Firstly, there are no cash booths, it’s all electronic tags. Which is fine if you have one. As with every other tourist in town, if you haven’t made arrangements before you drive through your first toll (and how can you, if you don’t know they exist?) you have to call or pay online after you’ve driven the stretch of road. We had AUD$10 credit only on our mobile phone; which ran out as we were waiting fifteen minutes in a phone-queue to pay the AUD$2 toll. We tried online and, not only is the tolls website deliberatly convoluted, but our friendly internet cafe had not paid his bills and so each page took a couple of minutes to load*.
Worse still, when we got to Balmain I got a call from Andrew. They’d been held-up on holiday and so wouldn’t be back in Sydney until tomorrow. Oh, oh! We certainly couldn’t find the desire to return to a campsite, so instead started to hunt-out a backpackers hostel. Difficulty is, with a car to park, anywhere in the downtown area was definitely out: the car park fees would probably cost more than the budget accommodation. We found the only hostel in Balmain and made a beeline for it.
From the outside, it looked like a closed-down shop front on the high street. Squiffy was convinced that the place must’ve shut down a long while ago, but we rang the doorbell anyway. No answer. Ho hum, we walked away. Fifty paces later a shout came from behind and we turned to see our hosteller shouting us back to her door. After a bit of tooing-and-froing at the door–she wanted to know how much we had to pay and we wanted to know how much her rooms cost–we convinced her to show us a room before we talked about price. We were lead upstairs to a veritable rabbit warren of corridors that must have stretched out over three shop fronts and continued back from the high street for some distance. It wouldn’t be unfair to describe this place as a doss house. There were two or three communal kitchen/sitting areas and all of them was full of near-horizontal, lounging long-term backpackers and their associated mess. We were shown one of the four-bed dorm rooms, in which only one girl resided but nonetheless had slept in every bunk and dispersed her belongings across every level surface — including the floor. Seeing our faces, the young manager asked me “have you ever stayed in a backpackers before?”. “Many times. Globally”, was my best tongue-bitten answer, when I really wanted to say: “Many times. Globally. But never one this bad.”
Needless to say that we made our polite excuses and left. We found a more expensive, but still cheap by city standards, “International Guest House” and plonked ourselves there instead.
* This is not the first time that I’ve told an internet cafe that I won’t pay for shoddy service. I find it remarkable that every other punter just accepts terrible internet service. A certain someone close to me paid-up in an African internet cafe whilst simultaneously told the cashier that “it didn’t work, I couldn’t load a single page”. This was moments after I had told the feller that his internet didn’t work so I wasn’t paying. Squiffy got her money back in full. It was at this point everyone in the cafe perked-up and also started to complain that they hadn’t been able to load a single page either. Is this me being unreasonable? Would you pay for a hotel room that you can’t get into or a hire car that doesn’t start?
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Manly Ferry: Heaven in The Rocks
Posted by Squiffy on April 14th, 2009
So, you’re aware of my plans to take Dave on the ferry from Manly, to arrive in the heart of Sydney, Opera House one side, Harbour Bridge the other, all the while the sun sparkling off the harbour waters. Well, it didn’t quite happen like that.
The day we chose to go, it had been raining on and off all day. As the weather was predicted to be like this for the rest of the week, we decided to go anyway. Somehow, we left it later than planned, and it was dark when we boarded the boat. As the rain had ceased for the moment, we plumped for a seat on the outer deck and settled in for the ride. Two minutes into our journey, the swell from the rains caused the boat to plunge from side to side and water came gushing over the deck, and narrowly missed drenching us. Time to go inside. This was not the pleasant sunny trip I had planned. Despite the rain, we were determined to return outside for the last few minutes, which would allow us the view of Sydney by night. And spectacular it was.
We wandered around the harbour in the rain and headed towards The Rocks entertainment district. It seemed pretty quiet, most sensible folk were tucked up in their cosy homes whilst we wandered the wet streets, looking for somewhere to stay warm and dry. And there it was. Heaven. Right there in The Rocks.
The soft glowing light from the Guylian Chocolate Shop, with a sign on the door that read ‘Yes, we are open’. If not Heaven, it certainly was a haven. Big comfy chairs, chandeliers and marble. And the most indulgent hot chocolate you could ever wish for – they put real Guylian chocolate in the bottom. We drank slowly, looked longingly over their cake display and then headed out into the wet night for the slightly calmer ferry ride home.
(And, may I add, both felt quite sick for the first hour following our posh choccy drinks! – DaveB)
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Manly: Eight Years On
Posted by Squiffy on April 13th, 2009
Eight years ago, I lived in Manly, a beachside suburb ‘seven miles from Sydney and a million miles from care’, for four months. One of my travel goals was to visit my former home, and take a ride on the Manly ferry, the boat service connecting the town with Sydney city centre. I was keen to show Dave the place I used to live and hoped he’d love it as much as me.
When we arrived it was a perfect Manly day – warm and sunny, the beach was busy and the surfers were out. It didn’t take long to locate my old studio apartment on Pine St and it looked as I remembered. We were fortunate that a guy was renovating the flat next to mine, and invited us in to have a look around. All the flats are the same layout, apparently they used to be flashy hotel rooms in the ’60s. I found too, the pub where Matt and I won $1000 in a pub quiz. I can still remember our astonishment!
After reminiscing, I took Dave for an afternoon stroll along the beach, where we bought expensive ice-creams (they don’t seem to sell cheap ones these days) and sat on the wharf watching the people to-and-fro from the city.
We planned to take the ferry the next day. I wanted Dave to have his first view of the Sydney skyline from the water, as it’s the best way to capture it all in one go. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans….
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Sydney: 100 year storm (and we’re camping)
Posted by daveb on April 10th, 2009
I don’t believe it. You’ll recall that we drove through almost every brutal Australian heatwave from Perth to Melbourne a few months back. So hot–and thus so difficult to sightsee and camp–was it that we threw in the sweaty towel at Melbourne and flew ahead to New Zealand. Where it rained. A few days ago, we returned to Australia to pick-up where we left-off and I’m pleased to announce our arrival in Sydney — one of the top five cities that we wanted to see on our travels. And it’s bloody raining. Hard.
As the newspaper clipping indicates that we’re being subjected to a “one-in-a-hundred-year rainfall”. I needn’t remind: we’re camping in a tent. For two days I thought that the canvas was going to collapse and we were going to get drenched. I’m certain that these cheap Aussie (Chinese?) tents aren’t tested in wet conditions during the design stage–why would they be, it never rains–and I find my self having to get out of my sleeping bag to poke a finger vertically in the centre of our ‘porch’ to disperse the pail of rainwater collecting in the fly sheet a few x- and y-axis inches from our heads.
Inside the tent, we’re still only damp. Unnecessarily going outside is out of the question. So hard is the rain, that last night I had to usher a racoon out from our porch; poor blighter was only trying to stay dry and snaffle a bit of food. The communal camping facilities, toilet and outdoor kitchen, are as you’d imagine — muddy and slippery beyond belief.
Worse still, this morning we packed the tent away. Yes, is was still raining and yes, the tent was absolutely filthy. In a stroke of genius, Squiffy donned her bikini and I followed suit (with my bathers, that is). No point getting our clean clothes wet and dirty is there? The tent’s fly sheet was way too muddy to fold up and bag. Had we had done this, the relatively clean inner-tent would have been ruined by the storm. Instead of packing away the tent in a calm, controlled and methodical fashion we laid out our car’s sun visor across the back seats and literally threw it in. No doubt our car’s going to stink of wet, muddy nylon for weeks to come, but that’s not our concern today. Today, we just want to get out of this campsite and into our friend’s apartment a half-hour’s drive away.
A teary Squiffy has described this morning as the “worst day of travelling, ever“. Travelling’s not all milk and honey: spare a thought for us as you sit on your comfy sofa, drinking hot chocolate, watching your flat-screen TV whilst the rain hammers down outside*. I’m thinking of setting up a charitable fund to provide emergency housing for us when we hit our next “freak, one-in-a-hundred-year weather abnormality”. Anyone care to donate a fiver? (Cue abusive “at least you’re not working, you ungrateful blob”-style comments below…)
I’m convinced that these storms are a result of global warming. And there’s more to come.
* As a point of note, my mother comments that it hasn’t rained in Wales in over three weeks to date.
(The gallery photos were taken on subsequent days.)
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Blue Mountains: Australian campsite whinge
Posted by daveb on April 9th, 2009
Ratty. That’s how I’d describe my mood this morning. For the second or third night in a row, neither Claire or I have had a decent night’s sleep. The night before last, we suffered an slow-puncture in our airbed. So slow was the leak, that we didn’t even notice until the following morning when we awoke in the back of our car lying directly on the folded-forward seats and boot space. We spent the day complaining of bad backs.
Several hours of driving and one bicycle puncture repair kit later, we bedded down on our newly air-tight mattress for a decent night’s kip in the Blue Mountains. Unfortunately, one inconsiderate Aussie camper decided to conduct a telephone call at two o’clock in the morning at the top of his voice and our night’s slumber had been broken in two. To the campsite populations’ rescue, an outraged tenant put a stop to the caller’s shouting by, erm, shouting louder.
It was only after listening to several other frustrated campers unzip their tents to make a run across noisy gravel track for the communal toilet blocks, that we realised just how ruddy cold it was. It’s funny how it’s possible to sleep all night long in a hotel room with ensuite bathroom without ever feeling the need to use the bathroom until morning, whereas in a camping environment it’s a near certainly that everyone on the site feels the need to relieve themselves part way through the night (including us). It’s also funny, just how loud the zippers on sleeping bags and tents become after dark. Certainly loud enough to keep you awake just as you were drifting off since the last zip was opened. I digress.
It was freezing. It had been very hot during the day and, although at slight altitude, we hadn’t seriously considered that it might get cold at night. So cold was it, in fact, that neither of us got another wink of sleep that night. We were cuddled in sleeping bags which are supposedly rated down to minus sixteen degrees Celsius, wearing thermal pyjamas, socks, gloves and woolly hats and we were freezing.
We spent the rest of the night listening to drunks argue in the street.
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Canberra: Parliamentary tour in the Capital
Posted by daveb on April 8th, 2009
We’ve left Victoria and have entered the state of New South Wales on our way to Sydney. Along the way, we stopped off in Canberra, Australia’s capital which itself resides in its own territory; the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Many travellers skip Canberra altogether, writing it off as dull, but I wanted to visit the Parliament Building so we set aside an evening and a morning in the capital. The evening was mostly spent eating Turkish pizza (which was very nice, thank you) and complaining about how awful most city campsites are — Canberra’s no exception.
The next day, we drove right into the centre of the capital and followed Kevin, our parliamentary guide, on a tour of the mostly subterranean building. I found it interesting to note the strong links with the British Parliament. For instance, the colours of the two ‘houses’ match those of ours back home: green for the house of representatives (The Commons) and red for the senate (House of Lords).
Even though we were reliably informed that Canberra has a wealth of other time-worthy tourist attractions, we were keen to hit the road and head towards Sydney where we both have some old friends eagerly awaiting us!
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Beechworth: Ned Kelly and Premier John Brumby
Posted by daveb on April 7th, 2009
Our last stop in the ‘Garden State’ of Victoria was Beechworth, a goldrush-era town made famous by the apparently infamous Ned Kelly. I say ‘apparently’ because, I’m afraid that I didn’t have much of a clue about who he was.
In the impressively-stocked local confectionery shock, we bumped into Mr. Brumby and his security entourage and journalists. As with Ned Kelly, I didn’t have the faintest idea who Mr. Brumby was so I asked a policeman.
“Are you serious?”, said the shocked officer.
“Erm, nope. We’re tourists and just arrived in town”, I blushed.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t get the accent. He’s the Premier of Victora; the Head of State”, the officer explained.
A snappily-dressed young man appeared and thrust his hand into mine, introducing himself as the Premier’s chief secretary. He explained that the Premier was in town in a push to increase tourism in the recently bushfire-struck region and, seeing as we were international tourists, would we mind having a quick chat with the Premier. Even though we were kind of busy buying confectionery, we agreed to a short televised chat…
In a flurry of excitement, the TV cameras rolled and the press photographers snapped away, the Premier introduced himself:
“It’s a good job you’ve met me: I’m the top man”, he opened and looked at me, “so what brings you to Beechworth?”
In a moment of catastrophic PR, Blabber Mouth Bartlett opened his mouth and began to roll-out the well-oiled “well we flew into Perth, drove to Exmouth, where it was too hot, then drove the Nullarbor, where it was too hot, then got to Melbourne, where it was too hot, so we flew to New Zealand where…”. The cameras sighed and drooped. The Premier turned to the cameras and blamed me for the weather and looked to Claire to provide a better sound bite about the town and the state Victoria. Which she did, expertly.
Naturally, I spent the whole day regretting not delivering a shorter, sweeter, more intelligent sound bite and ‘Sound Bite Squiffy’ spent the rest of the day calling me ‘Blabber Mouth Bartlett’ and giggling about my hopeless PR campaign. With a bit of luck, the TV crew used only the images, with the newsreader talking over the top of my useless verbal diarrhoea.
What a klutz I am!
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