Down Under Day 5: Cairns

Today was a travel day, so there's not an awful lot to report. We left the hotel just past 7 to catch our flight to Cairns (protip: the Virgin Australia Airpass is really good if you have three or more flights in Australia, because it's cheaper than the fares you'll find on VA or Jetstar using Kayak, and it includes a checked bag too. Win.)

Sydney airport

Sydney CBD (downtown, in American)

Reef islands off the Queensland coast as you approach Cairns
Cairns itself is fairly sparse -- it's very much a tourist-focused town, and one that's used as a base camp to go to other places. Tons of hostels, travel agencies, cheap restaurants and pubs, but not much in the way of sights. Pigeon Forge, TN, came to mind, but that's unfair; Cairns isn't offensive, it's a transit point. Curiously, Cairns has no beach, just a giant mud flat:

As a consequence, they've built a large pool, with some sand by the side, and a walkway by the shore named the Esplanade:


Since there wasn't a whole lot to do (and I'm dodging a cold), we got lunch at the mall, and watched Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In 3D. Aww yeah.

Down Under Day 4: Sydney

A couple days ago, I opined to my brothers that Circular Quay was Sydney's version of SF's Fisherman's Wharf. I was wrong; that (dis?)honor belongs to Darling Harbour, a massive collection of food courts, tourist traps, and a couple of gems.





We briefly considered visiting the Aquarium, but couldn't stomach the $35 entrance tickets right after we'd just been to the zoo. At no point did we consider visiting the wax museum. Lunch was surprisingly generous portions of Chinese food from the lunch special menu at the Dragon Boat restaurant in the Harbourside shopping mall. We followed lunch with a visit to the adjacent Australian National Maritime Museum.

Omar and EJ opted for the conventional $7 entrance ticket granting access to the internal exhibition galleries, which had some pretty interesting exhibits about ships, including indigenous art, water speed record-breaking boats, and a boat made of beer cans:







A lighthouse lens from New Zealand







I think the world is ready for a "6 catfish moon" shirt.







This one is perplexing. The flag has 44 stars. The caption says 48, but also says that the flag dates from 1908...when there were 46 states. Wat?


Unlike the other two, I went for the $25 "big ticket" that also included admission to the ships out in the harbor. Because we were short on time, I skipped the tall ship, but did check out the gun destroyer HMAS Vampire and the submarine HMAS Onslow. Probably the coolest things I've seen so far.



Vampire was nicknamed "the bat"





Torpedo tubes on Onslow



beautiful design on a submarine? Cool. (oxygen generator)

After I got off the boats, we walked across Sydney to have a quick look at King's Cross. I get the sense it may be more interesting after dark. There's a cool fountain, though.




One thing King's Cross was certainly good for was a proliferation of cheap kebab joints, which provided dinner -- the first döner kebab of the trip!




Why didn't we hang out at KX at night? Because we had tickets to the Sydney Symphony, of course. Great sound in the Opera House behind the players, as they performed symphonic dances by Brahms, Dvorak, and Rachmaninoff.

Down Under Day 3: Sydney

Today ended up being (relatively speaking) a pretty lazy day, with only two major sites visited; we spent a lot of time in the hotel sitting around reading.

Our morning stop was the Sydney Observatory, which was the first (and for some time the only) time standard in Sydney. It looked like a lot of the exhibits had recently been redone, as the general theme (other than history) was the recent transit of Venus, and observations of past transits from Sydney. Hands down for me, though, the coolest things in the Observatory were the orreries, mechanical arrangements showing the orbits of the planets and the moons. Exposed mechanical intricacies are pretty sweet:






After the observatory, we grabbed some quick sandwiches at a deli by Circular Quay and boarded a ferry over to the Taronga Zoo. There was a bit of walking involved here, as you can't buy student-discount tickets on the Sydney side of things, and the ticket station at the base of the Sky Safari gondola (which carries you up to the top level of the zoo) was closed. A short hike up to the lower entrance to buy tickets and back to the base of the gondola later, we were flying above the elephant zone to the top of the zoo.




I made the same mistake here as I did last time - thinking that the zoo closes at 5 rather than 4:30 - but we got to see pretty much everything in our just under 4 hours. Wouldn't have hurt to have had a little more time, as we were a bit rushed towards the end. The reptile exhibits are pretty awesome, and we got to see feeding times for some pythons as well as for the tigers! Unfortunately, no platypus showed up, neither outdoors nor in the indoor tanks.




















Omar and EJ acquitted themselves well on the return trip, where I gave them a 5 minute lead from Circular Quay and challenged them to get back to the hotel on their own. After some more reading (Stephen Jay Gould's Eight Little Piggies for me, Game of Thrones for Omar, and some iPod games for EJ), Meat Fest 2012 continued apace, with dinner at Churrasco, a Brazilian BBQ a block from our hotel. I'd say the beef isn't quite as good as what I had in South America, but the lamb...oh man, the lamb. So good. The restaurant had a pretty legit chimichurri sauce as well, and their take on fried bananas was different and good. They were lightly breaded, sugared, and fried with some cinnamon, making them like a churro with a banana rather than bread center. Great cheese bread too!

Down Under Day 2: Sydney

Jet lag means that days begin way earlier than they ought to. The first activity of the day was to pop off to the cafe next door to write the Day 1 blog post and grab some breakfast (a meal that never happens, for me). The original plan was to have a quick walk through the Royal Botanic Garden and then hit up the Taronga Zoo, but the "quick walk" ended up taking the entire morning and afternoon.
(ok, new misfeature of BlogPress discovered: if you add pictures and then save as online draft to do the picture upload, when you reload the draft, all you see is URLs, not thumbnails. Makes it a little hard to caption pictures properly...)
The Royal Botanic Garden has a lot to see, with plants from all sorts of habitats around the world and random bits of statuary. While wandering through one of he temperate zones, we ran into Brian the echidna and his keeper from the Taronga zoo, treating him to a walk out in the sun. The succulent garden is particularly impressive too.




The Garden extends onto the peninsula just East of the one hosting the Opera House, granting a great view of Sydney Harbour:

After finishing up with the Garden, it was too late in the day to make it worth going to the zoo, so we instead caught the ferry over to Manly to have some fish and chips and check out a famous surf beach.

The last time I came to Australia, I had the same idea, and thought it would be nice to eat some fish and chips by the shore. When I did, a flock of seagulls (the bird, not the band) assembled and, in a coordinated attack, knocked the food out of my hands, cackling merrily to themselves. The Manly gulls are real bastards. This time, we ended up walking all the way up the Corso back into town, away from the shore, to avoid birds...and even then, I had to chase one or two away. Dealing with birds in Australia really makes me hate the people who feed random birds. They're a nuisance.

After eating, we walked along the shore out to Sydney Harbour National Park, before turning around and racing to catch the 4:45 ferry back to Sydney.


Why the rush? Because sunset over the Harbour is pretty nice.




After a quick break a the hotel, we went back out for dinner. Our plan was to hit Mamak, a Malaysian restaurant in Chinatown known for its rotis, but when we got there, the line looked to be about an hour long, so we redirected to a Korean BBQ joint just up the street.



This was the first time I've had duck at a Korean BBQ, and it's pretty good, as you might expect:




Worthy of note: Sydney Chinatown is probably the cleanest, shiniest Chinatown I've ever seen.



Western steak culture is healthy? News to me.

Down Under Day 1: Sydney

14 hours and 40 minutes is a long flight. So long that once you've slept more than you should reasonably sleep, you wake up, it's still dark out, and you still have remaining about the distance from SF to Chicago. Exit row seats are pretty clutch here. Best realization on the flight: the Economist app is brilliant on the iPad 3, because the screen resolution is as good as print, and you don't have to carry around the paper.

Having learned my lesson last time, we ate our jerky on the plane and had no hassles at customs. A quick train ride later, we were in the heart of Sydney. Accomodations in Australia, including hostels, are quite a bit more expensive than in South America; rather than paying $15-20 per person per night in a hostel, you can expect to pay easily twice as much. That means that when you have three or more people, even a pretty nice hotel amortizes to the same cost as a hostel. Long story short, this is our view:



Not bad, eh?


We were able to check in early and catch showers before heading out for the day. Hotels in Australia charge extortionate rates for Internet access - ours offered wifi in the lobby for the low, low rate of $15/hr. So, we hit up the cafe next door for breakfast and free wifi. Also, we found the most interesting man in the world shorn and selling coffee:


After breakfast we visited the nearby ANZAC memorial in Hyde Park, and then wandered up through The Rocks towards the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the lookout from the pylon over Sydney.


ANZAC Memorial, Hyde Park

The pylon lookout charges a reasonable $15 to climb up and get a great view, and includes an informative tour through the history of the construction of the bridge:


Additional ones are required.




Another beautiful day in Sydney






After the bridge, we walked through Circular Quay towards the Sydney Opera House and took the tour there. It was my second time on the tour (the first for Omar and EJ, obviously), but I still saw new things -- this time, we got to see some of the behind-the-scenes areas where they store and set up new theater sets.



After the bridge, we got lunch at the Australian Hotel. Funny enough, this was the same place I first got lunch in Sydney two years ago. The pepper kangaroo pizza is still there, and still good. We then walked through Circular Quay towards the Sydney Opera House to wander the grounds and take the tour. It was my second time on the tour (the first time for Omar and EJ, obviously), but I still got something new -- this time, we got to see some of the behind-the-scenes areas where they store and set up new theatre sets.



Sydney Opera House concert hall




Dinner was Italian and promptly followed by jet-lag-induced slumber.

Location:Sydney, NSW

Down Under Day -1: test post

This is a test post to see if this new blogging software does what it says on the tin. We're off to Australia shortly.

The United Club in the international terminal in SFO is a joke. They'd like to ask you for $50 to come into a space that not only doesn't have it's own wifi -- it doesn't even have access to SFO's free wifi. I thought it was meant to be a place for important business people to get things done?

Location:SFO