The first thing you notice about Sydney is how all the tourist attractions are within about a ten minute walk of one another. And that with a bit of careful aiming, you can get them all into one photo.
The Sydney Opera House looks from a distance like giant sails against the sky, but up close it looks even more impressive. Makes you wonder why they went to that amount of trouble just for opera. I hope they use it for something more sensible sometimes.
The Harbour Bridge is pretty neat too. It’s so neat you can use up a whole roll of film just trying to photograph it from all the different angles, and making sure that you get the whole of it in the picture. In fact it’s so big that they’ve managed to squeeze a whole museum into one of the pylon thingies. Wherein you can enjoy a quite interesting documentary about how the bridge was built, followed by a very boring and over-detailed documentary about how the new Harbour Tunnel was built. Yawn. Sorry guys, the Harbour Tunnel is not an attraction. For Chrissake, you can’t even see it!
The Rocks area is so crawling with tourists that you can walk around and try and see how many people’s home movies you can get into in ten minutes. You can spend the same amount of time searching for a simple kiosk that will sell you a simple drink, before giving up and moving on to Circular Quay.
At Circular Quay, you can try to figure out the ticket machines, then take a ride on a ferry to Darling Harbour, which was built to… ummm… actually, I’m not sure, but I’m sure its better than whatever it replaced. There you can take a ride on a monorail, which mostly involves dredging up $2.50 of change from your pocket to put into a machine, only to get back another (special) coin, which you when have to put straight into another machine. I think I’m missing something.
But the best thing about Sydney for me was seeing that Kings Cross really is a dump, even in daytime. A fine rival for Fitzroy Street here in Melbourne. I still can’t figure out why both of them are tourist attractions.
