Sydney - we are back again

27 Feb (Day 33): Having left the ship in Melbourne, Victoria we fly to Sydney, New South Wales and have just over a day to explore before we catch the Indian Pacific train to Perth. We arrived at our hotel in the centre of Sydney in the late afternoon today and whilst Ray had a snooze I went and explored a little. I explored some of the shops and found a nice small café for coffee and cake! 

In the evening we had a pre-dinner drink in the hotel bar and then made our way to a restaurant with excellent reviews in the legal buildings of Sydney, which I'd managed to get an online booking for. Great service and lovely food but very noisy in a tiny space so we didn't really relax over dinner as we couldn't hear each other speak. Maybe a sign of being older but I reckon the noise levels were much higher than most people would cope with, shame really. 

We had got caught in a shower of rain as we made our way to the restaurant but this is the first time we had been out in rain in the entire holiday so far. We had only seen rain one day whilst we had been in Blairgowrie during the first week and one day whilst at sea but neither time had we been out in it. There would only be one more day of rain for us to experience and that time we were out in it and did get wet! This time my trusty 'London' umbrella at the bottom of my handbag, used when I used to catch the train into the office, worked well enough for us.

28 Feb (Day 34): Today was our day to explore Sydney and we decided to do it on foot. By the end of the day we had each walked over 11 miles and seen Sydney in many different ways. We walked through the shopping areas and looked at the range of shops we found there. We moved from small, mostly Asian food, outlets through chemists and clothiers to exceedingly high end designer emporiums with doormen. Something for everyone here. There were also a number of indigenous folk living on the streets which we hadn't seen before and a large number of young Chinese business folk walking hurriedly from one place of business to another. Quite a different feel from Melbourne and other central areas. We walked towards the port area and made our way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. As we were walking along the first part of the bridge we looked down to see a building built in a beautiful wavy shape. A very expensive build I dare say! We continued along the pavement that crosses the bridge and went up the stairs to the museum of its construction in one of the bridge pylons. There was a good view from the top of the pylon of the opera house, the harbour, the traffic crossing the bridge and also of a group of people mad enough to walk up and over the bridge - not for us! 

After the museum and the film about the bridge construction we descended the pylon and continued along the pedestrian walkway across the bridge itself to Milsons Point on the north side. We found a lovely café here to sit outside and have lunch in the sunshine and watch the cricket scores as England somehow lost a match to NZ that they should have easily won! Only 7 runs to get and wickets in hand and they lost it! 

We walked a little on the northern side of the bridge, down through a park to get a ferry back across to The Rocks, the part of Sydney Harbour where the Opera House is situated. By this time we'd taken so many photos of this building from all sides, angles and lighting conditions that we didn't need any more so we took a different route back to the hotel. We had an early booking for dinner so changed, had a drink in the hotel bar and continued the walking theme of walking to a restaurant someone on the cruise had recommended to us. It was a rotating restaurant on the 47th floor of a building and we'd booked the meal so that we started in daylight at 6.30pm and finished after nightfall at 8.30pm, seeing the views and light change as we ate. The food was top end, the service ok but all in all worth the expense of a nice treat. We finished with a walk back to the hotel to prepare for boarding a train the following day.

01 Mar (Day 35): At breakfast we heard other people talking about some issue with the Indian Pacific train. By this time we are rolling with the punches as we'd had changes to itineraries (NZ to Aus for cruise, Port Douglas stop dropped due to cyclone, booked trip changes on the day) and  weird things happening (coach driver reversing into car for instance) that this was just another thing but what did it mean? Nobody saying very much but we heard something about a coach. We had a limousine booked to pick us up as we had upgraded our accommodation aboard the train to Platinum so thought maybe it didn't refer to us. We went down, with our luggage, to meet the car to be told that we needed to go back to reception level and book our luggage in there instead. Nobody quite knew what was happening but we skipped a huge queue in the hotel lobby, checked our luggage into the very helpful Indian Pacific staff who informed us there had been a medical emergency onboard the train the previous day and that the train had missed its slot to arrive into Sydney station. As this train is 37 carriages long it is not something you can squeeze into the timetable so we would all have to be coached out to where the train was stationed in the Blue Mountains. Ah-ha, here's where the surprise visit comes in!

More photos from Tuesday 28 February