Tuesday, Nov 20 - Exploring Sydney by Water

Bob & Hil set off on the Ferry

Sydney Harbour entrance

After breakfast we all walked to Circular Quay and bought day passes for the ferries. Hilary wanted to go to Manly as she’d heard it was pretty and at the far ocean end of the harbor. We had been there before when we visited Sydney in 2005 and had just stayed on the ferry for the return trip as it was raining and didn’t look that interesting. Fortunately Hil was smarter than we were.

We boarded the double-decker ferry and got seats up top on the outside deck and set off. The sky cleared and it became quite warm - I was sensibly wearing shoes, socks, and long pants after freezing yesterday! We passed suburbs and beaches, little yellow water taxis and yachts. There was quite a large swell today and we bounced up and down before reaching Manly at the mouth of Sydney Harbor after 35 minutes.

We disembarked and walked across a narrow neck of land on the pretty palm-lined main street which leads to a wide sandy beach on the open Pacific. It must have been school-day-at-the-beach as there were hundreds of kids in


Manly Beach

bathing suits and red jerseys, sorted by age and gender who were learning how to swim or how to use a surf board by blue jerseyed instructors.

Schoold day at the beach

 

  We continued on the Manly Scenic Walkway that continues north along the coast past lovely gardens, a public salt water swimming pool at sea level so it fills at each high tide, cafes and park land. We had to turn back at Shelly Beach as it was getting on to noon, and return to the ferry with ice cream cones for lunch.


Pied Cormorant on a Manly sculpture

We got back to Sydney and waited 45 minutes before taking the river Cat up river above the harbor to the last stop at Parramatta. The ferry went up seven miles past endless fancy houses and condos with boat ramps and thousands of motor and sail yachts. Past the Olympic Village the river narrows and is boarded by a strip of mangrove with industrial plants hidden behind them.

We got back at 3:30 and had two hours to rest up before the evening’s festivities. We put on our fancier duds and walked over to the Opera House which contains a restaurant, café and theatre in addition to the concert hall itself. We had a reservation at Guillaume at Bennelong, a beautiful restaurant set in one of the shells of the opera house and serving pretty exotic food. I started out with a salad of baby carrots and leeks in a mustard sauce with a poached egg, Bob had a fish soup and Hil crab and asparagus puree. They both had steaks for their mains and I had pea tortellini with fava beans and asparagus. For desert I had a wonderful mango sorbet with fresh mango and rice pudding. After that they brought us a dish with chocolate truffles, lemon madelaines, pistachio meringues and passion fruit jellies!

Mango dessert

We walked over to the theatre to pick up tickets that we had ordered several months ago for a play by Tim Winton, an Australian novelist and playwright, called “Signs of Life”. the play was very good, about life in the outback, conflicts between Aboriginals and whites, love and loss.


Ferries and city lights

 


We walked back to our hotel past the ferries chugging in and out of the Quay, glittering cafes, crowds of jolly people. We’re not particularly city people, but even we can appreciate this vivacious, colorful, multicultural city full of people who seem to know how to enjoy life to the fullest!