After a couple nights in the Hunter Valley, we spent a few days in Sydney before leaving for New Zealand – and will spend a few more in Sydney before heading to Japan. Once we dropped of the rental car and dropped our bags at our hotel, we went out to explore Sydney some more. It’s pretty crazy walking around in shorts and a t-shirt and sweating but seeing Christmas decorations everywhere! But we are soaking up the heat before we head back to the northern hemisphere and winter.
We wandered through Hyde Park on the way to a beer shop (shocker for us, I know!) and stumbled upon the ANZAC Memorial (https://www.sydney.com/destinations/sydney/sydney-city/city-centre/attractions/the-anzac-memorial) – it pays homage to all Australians who have served in the Defense Force. ANZAC stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps – the photo in the middle is the Flame Room and has an eternal flame and 3 flags – the Australian flag (middle), the New Zealand flag (left), and the New South Wales (NSW) flag (if you’re not up on your Australian geography – Sydney is in the state of NSW). ANZAC day is April 25th – coinciding with the Gallipoli Campaign, where over 8000 Australian soldiers were killed. You can read a bit more about that here: https://www.army.gov.au/about-us/history-research/traditions/anzac-day.
We continued on through Hyde Park to a place called The Oak Barrel that Chris read had a good selection of Belgian beers. They did in fact have a decent selection. They didn’t have a bar to drink them at per se, but the guy pulled up an extra chair to a small table in the back and we got to enjoy a couple of beers in the shop!
We continued on our walk around to Darling Harbour, King St Wharf, and Barangaroo. Seemed to be a pretty swanky area with upscale hotels and bunch of bars along the wharf – every single one of them had Aperol Spritz umbrellas. We still haven’t figured that one out.
We kept walking around to the Lord Nelson Brewery and Hotel (Sydney’s oldest continually licensed hotel and Australia’s oldest pub brewery; https://lordnelsonbrewery.com/discover). We had originally looked at staying here but were concerned about the noise being above a brewery – glad we made that choice because it was quite boisterous! They had good beer so we sat at the bar and had a pint before moving on.
In the end we walked close to 5 miles in that loop. We needed to do a long-ish run the next day for the marathon the following weekend so we made it an early night and headed back to our hotel. We had wanted to do the Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk so we decided to do it as a run instead – I wasn’t expecting all the stairs involved but it was a beautiful run. The weather was great and the scenery was unbeatable. We came across a couple of these pools (the one in the picture is the Bondi Icebergs Swimming Club but we saw a few similar places along the coast). We also came across a pretty cool cemetery – turns out it is a state heritage cemetery that opened in 1877 called Waverly Cemetery (https://www.sydney.com/destinations/sydney/sydney-east/bondi/attractions/waverley-cemetery) – can’t image a better view for your final resting place!
After our run, we headed back to the hotel to clean up then made our way to Marrickville to check out a few breweries (there are a bunch in this area). It also happened to be close to the airport so we got to do some plane spotting too as planes came in for landing over the area. We checked out 3 breweries – Kicks, Pickled Monkey, and Mixtape (Mixtape was my favorite).
On our last day in Sydney for this portion of the trip, we did a guided tour of the Sydney Opera House. We walked down toward Circular Quay and saw the hugest cruise ship (Anthem of the Seas – it apparently can hold 4000+ passengers) – crazy!
We walked through the Royal Botanical Gardens a bit before our tour since it’s right next door. It also had some pretty amazing views of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.
We headed in for our Opera House tour. We actually bought the tour & dine ticket – after your guided tour, you can pick from one of three restaurants in the Opera House (they had specific menus for this) – it included lunch and a drink. We chose the Opera Bar and sat outside for great harbour views while we ate. The tour itself was fantastic! We got to see inside both of the main concert halls – the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing Siegfried from Wagner’s ring cycle in the largest of the concert halls and then also got to watch the Australian Ballet rehearsing for their show that night. Very cool! We also learned a lot about the architecture and materials used for the building itself. The design is intended to look like sails, and Danish architect Jørn Utzon won the design competition. Although due to some politics involved, he didn’t end up finishing the project (you can read more about that here: https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/our-story/utzon-departs-the-house).
It was also apparently designed without much thought to acoustics, etc – that was an afterthought. Oops. (for my Walter Reed peeps – kinda sounds like building an entire new hospital building without asking the clinical folks about how we use the space! I guess we’re not alone there). The tiles on the outside consist of over 1 million ceramic tiles from Sweden (1,056,006 tiles to be exact) comprising 1.62 hectares of surface area, the 6200 square meters of glass came from France, and the steel came from Australia. It’s an amazing building and obviously an iconic part of the Sydney skyline.
I wanted to see a show in the Opera House and it turns out the Australian Ballet was there for a week – they are based in Melbourne and apparently are only in Sydney about 2 weeks a year. So I got a ticket for that night! Incidentally I got a pretty good discount for the ticket since we had done a tour – and I also learned my new favorite word when the lady told me I was getting a *cheeky* discount. Chris had no interest in the ballet so he went off sightseeing and then met me back at the Opera House after the show. I managed to get a pretty amazing sunset view from the balcony at intermission. Sorry – no photo or video inside the concert hall so nothing to share there 🙂
The next day we headed off to Queenstown, NZ for the marathon. Stay tuned for more on that part of our trip and for more of Sydney when we return.
