We were both incredibly excited about heading to Sydney because it meant seeing Kate and Tim, almost a year after they moved down under. Kate and I had a suitably emotional reunion at the airport, complete with Love Actually style running and hugging.
We spent our first evening catching up and seeing first-hand the super-premium lifestyle these guys are now enjoying over here. They live in a 5th floor penthouse flat, complete with a balcony that stretches the length of the apartment with incredible views over Sydney's CBD, and his and hers rain head showers. We were seriously impressed, and after 2 whole weeks of backpacker hostels since our stay at the Four Seasons, we were very much looking forward to enjoying a bit more luxury, albeit only for a few days.
Sydneysiders, as they like to call themselves, appear to be even more fitness-obsessed than their Melburnian cousins. Everyone we saw was running or heading off to a tennis lesson or going to yoga or swimming in the open-air pool. Little wonder when you consider the weather and the scenery – both James and I attempted the local 5km running track, which loops around the Opera House and gives stunning views across the harbour. With scenery like this, it's hard to find an excuse not to exercise.
The Harbour itself is pretty incredible – I wasn't quite
prepared for how impressive a sight it is. On our first evening in town, Kate and Tim took us down to the Opera House for drinks and a wander around. By night it's good, but by day it's even better. The combination of the Opera House and the Bridge is a pretty special one. The Bridge was built in the 1920s (it finally opened in 1932) to connect the northern business district to the centre of town, and the Opera House was designed in the 1950s by architectural competition-winner
Jorn Utzon, who has actually never seen the place completed – owing to 'creative differences' he walked off the project during construction. Across the way are The Rocks, the original site of Sydney town. Formerly these slums were rife with drunkenness and disease, but they have been transformed into a super-premium shopping and dining district, largely for cruise ship passengers.
So far, Sydney was looking like a pretty great place to be. But it gets even better. Sydney is within spitting distance of countless incredible beaches. On our first morning we took the ferry across to Manly, which gave us more amazing views back over the harbour. Manly is less than an hour away from the CBD by boat, and this is by the way, many people's COMMUTE to work in the morning. It feels like you're in another world, or at the very least, on a long weekend's holiday. No wonder everyone in Sydney is so cheerful. At Manly's heart is its surf club, which on a Saturday afternoon was filled with children learning to become lifeguards, and parents either in the water helping to teach them or looking on proudly from the sidelines, latte in hand.
We spent the following morning at the famous Bondi Beach.
In our heads it was a separate beach town near Sydney, but in fact it's very much part of the city itself, and only 20 minutes from Kate's place. Despite the cold weather, we decided we couldn't let the opportunity of swimming pass us by, and so the 4 of us stripped down to our bikinis and ran into the freezing cold water for a splash around. It was pretty refreshing, I must say!
Sadly Kate and Tim had to go back to work at some point, and so James and I spent a couple of days exploring the local sights solo, of which there are many, it must be said. We really enjoyed the MoMA museum – James was still feeling a little starved of modern art, even after Melbourne, and this definitely filled a hole, especially as the Biennale was still being shown. We also scared ourselves silly at the Aquarium, getting up close and personal to sharks, stonefish and blue-ringed octopus.
One of the highlights of our stay (and it must be said, of the trip so far) came right at the end of our sojourn in Sydney, en route to the airport. Courtesy of the lovely people at James's work, we were able to book ourselves a private helicopter flight over Sydney Harbour. Considering neither of us had ever been in a helicopter before, we were both remarkably calm about going up in the air in little more than a small tin bubble. Whilst the initial feeling of taking off was a little odd, this was quickly forgotten as we became absorbed by the views. We flew over the Harbour Bridge, around the Opera House, up to Manly and then back down along the coastline, passing Bondi en route. James and I couldn't stop grinning at each other.
We spent the day diving on the Opal Reef – a popular spot on the outer fringes of the Great Barrier Reef - having caught a high-speed catamaran out from Port Douglas with a company called HABA. Diving in Australia is big business. In Thailand on Koh Tao, our boat was twenty feet long, had 4 instructors and 8 divers. HABA's cat was about 60 feet long, had 25 divers, 75 snorkellers and 3 instructors. And a buffet lunch.
