Sunny days in Sydney
Sydney was our first stop in Australia so the first few days, especially for me were spent battling jet-lag. As with any westbound journey it wasn’t too bad, we just ended up waking up before daylight and going to bed after an early dinner.
I don’t know if it was because it was the first leg of our trip, but we didn’t enjoy Sydney as much as the other cities. We found it to be a little harder to navigate. Even once we figured out the train system, we continued to have trouble even getting to places we’d been before. It was great exercise but a little tiring on the legs and draining in the heat. We also found it harder to find places to eat. I would definitely recommend staying in the Circular Quay or Darling Harbor area since that’s where most of the tourist destinations are. We stayed near the Darlinghurst area across the street from the Anzac Memorial so while it was easy to get to a train station, we usually didn’t want to go back out to where we were after we came back to freshen up before dinner.
Our favorite spots:
- Pink Peppercorn. Laotian restaurant in Darlinghurst. It was a short walk from our hotel and was recommended by one of the guidebooks. We really enjoyed the lamb kabobs which were cooked and seasoned perfectly and we had a delicious coconut curry with chicken. Ian loved the fragrant rice which went perfectly with both of the dishes.
- The Cantina. Tapas place in the Darlinghurst area. They had an early bird special
- Sculptures by the Sea. Sculpture exhibit from Bondi to Bronte beach. We were fortunate to catch it because it goes for only about 2 weeks from the end of October to mid-November. Many of the installations were built into the rock areas along the walkway but there was also a park right before Tamarama beach that had quite a few additional sculptures.
- Open market at the Rocks. On the weekends only. Fortunately my brother gave us a heads up about this because we were only in Sydney for 1 weekend day. The shops close up before 5pm so we were only able to shop for a little bit but we were able to get some nice souvenirs.
Places we recommend avoiding:
- Sydney Tower/Oz Trek. I’ve been to towers and lookouts in other cities I’ve visited and felt like it was a worthwhile experience, but the same cannot be said about the Sydney Tower. For one, it’s not the highest point in Sydney and also they didn’t have placards like most places do to let you know what you’re looking at. We did our best to try to figure it out with our guidebooks, but especially since a view of the Opera House was obscured it really wasn’t worth it in my opinion. As Ian mentioned in his post, Oz Trek was not a good experience for me. I’ve been on other simulators before and been okay but something about this ride made me really ill and I was out for the night.
- Museum of Contemporary Art. Admission was free and for us we were thankful that it was. Neither of us are big contemporary art fans but it is located in such a prime location we had hope. The best thing about it was to see all of the school kids on field trip doing hands on projects with the docents. It seems like they had a really good program for field trips but with the exception of a couple exhibits, it was not our cup of tea.
The only thing we didn’t do that we wish we had done was to go see a performance at the Sydney Opera House. We went on a tour there which was impressive in itself especially since we were able to see some of the ballet people do their warm-up exercises but we could only imagine how much better it would be to see an entire show.
Honeymooning in Australia
