We're Here!

After only 15 hours from LA, we arrived in Sydney on Monday morning.
I had forgotten then we would drive on the "wrong" side when we got our rental car, so had to get adjusted to that and then drive in the city! Did pretty well, but have the habit of hugging the left side a bit too much. I'm sure I'll work it out in the next several weeks.
Found out hotel and had two small unfortunate surprises -- we were under the impression that parking was included and that there was wi-fi available. Well, $22/day for parking and $20/day for internet. We chose parking over internet the last few days. Apparently, Sydney and now Cairns are not especially big on free wi-fi! Grrrrr. We had better luck in Vietnam!

That aside, we are having a nice time. After a shower and settling in in Sydney, we tramped around through the heart of the city and down to the Opera House. I think we trudged about 4 miles on Monday. It was cooler, maybe mid-70s and a bit overcast. We had some lunch at a Korean BBQ place that was good and hit the spot.

We walked through Hyde Park, which was quite nice and there's a WWI Anzac memorial there. It's being renovated so we could not go inside. Then over to St. Mary's Cathedral. It has a beautiful wooden Gothic ceiling and small flying buttresses outside. The rose windows were also quite lovely. Onward, we found the Botanical Garden, which started out as a vegetable patch for the first settlers. There were a ton of large fruit bats just hanging around in the trees. It was wild. There are also a bunch of noisy, ill behaved cockatoos and some green parrots, I think.
We strolled down and around to the Opera House then up the Circular Quay. We enjoyed an ice cream at Baskins Robbins.

We decided we were getting pretty pooped, so we took the train back up to our hotel. There's a train, light rail, monorail, buses and ferries. The whole system is pretty cool, but a bit disconnected and difficult to decipher. With some help from the gal at the kiosk and some locals we managed to get 4 tickets.

We had Indian food from the place around the corner from the hotel then promptly feel asleep around 9:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, we had a tour of the Opera House planned and that was very fun. We were the only people on the tour, so we had the guide all to ourselves and she was a hoot. The Opera House is pretty amazing. Since we were down at that end of town, we decided to ride the ferry somewhere and randomly chose Watson's Bay as our destination. I can see why someone would want to live on Sydney Harbor. Beautiful and some amazing houses.

We were up early for our flight to Cairns today, Wednesday. We are going up to Kuranda on the train tomorrow then out on the Reef on Friday. It's been overcast, but humid and warm. It might be a bit choppy on Friday. I hope not too much, though.

So far, I'm enjoying Australia. The pluses are that the people are lovely -- happy, helpful, friendly. The weather is not too bad, if a bit muggy. There's a lot of good food to choose from and much of it is Asian -- Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. The minuses -- it is EXPENSIVE! I don't think any of us expected it to be this expensive. We had lunch and it was $60 US. Ice cream at Baskin Robbins was $22. We chatted up a fellow and asked about places that locals go to that would not cost an arm and a leg, and he was kind enough to make a couple of recommendations. We also met an American expat in Sydney who recommended a Greek restaurant to us, where we had dinner Tuesday evening. It was very good and relatively reasonable. I know that cities can be expensive, but geez this is crazy. At least double what we would expect at home and more than what we'd expect to find in places like San Francisco or Chicago.

Anyway, we are trying to find some cost effective solutions and at the same time have a good time. It seems that once out of Cairns the prices will drop a bit, as this is a big tourist town. I'm looking forward to that.

I will try to post some pix in a day or so.