Sydney

The Avonmore Hotel we’re staying in is a self-styled “boutique” hotel. This means “little”, apparently, and “not large enough to have a dining room”. For breakfast, we headed out across the road to Café 169, where Nicola had a breakfast “trifle” which appeared as a kind of knickerbocker-glory concoction of yoghurt, fruit and granola. I had smoked salmon with poached eggs and toast, with no quotation marks.

Nicola headed off for her conference, and I went back to the hotel to prepare myself for the day ahead: finding out how Sydney’s public transport system worked. Many of Sydney’s buses no longer accept cash payment – we’d seen buses with “pre-pay only” on the side on our way in to the CBD last night. A quick chat with the hotel manager sent me off to the correct bus-stop, pausing along the way to buy a mybus ticket, which you can use for 10 journeys. That should see us through until Sunday, I hope.

I took the bus all the way in to Circular Quay, and then went and had a look around the Opera House, taking pictures of it from every conceivable angle:

It came on to rain a bit, so I headed to a café for a quick coffee and read of the Sydney Morning Herald. Afterwards I wandered down into the CBD and followed all the city folk until I found a suitable lunch venue in a warren of interconnecting passages that link up Pitt Street, Hunter Street and George Street. There is fast food of almost every nationality available, with a lot of different Asian cuisines - far more than in London or in Wellington.

After lunch I walked up to the Botanical Gardens, via the Library of NSW, which has some impressive decoration on the floor:

The Botanical Gardens contained the inevitable ibises, and weird-shaped trees. Walking up to the tip of the gardens is Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, where Mrs Macquarie used to sit and watch the ships go by. I took more pictures than is entirely reasonable of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, then pestered some tourists until they agreed to take a picture of me.