The Year Goes Out with a Bang

Christmas in Oz might have been lackluster, but New Year’s completely made up for it. The best part is that we left our plans to chance and everything just came together on it’s own.

As with all big New Year’s firework celebrations, people start queuing up at the best spots early in the morning. Dan and Marc, however, still had a lot of the city to see and we didn’t want to waste an entire day just sitting around holding a spot in front of the Opera House or at the Observatory all day.

We decided to go hit the sites and have our trip double as a scouting mission to find the less trampled spots for firework watching and then take our chances.

Everywhere we went near the harbour, the mobs we assembling. Meanwhile, we had a great time walking through the Rocks, got beers, walked over the bridge, and had a lovely day.

Once we got to the other side of the harbour, our plan began to take full shape. The crowds at the base of the bridge near Luna Park were substantially thinner. Our target for the night was set and messages were sent out to the troops with the plan.

In the evening, the troops assembled at our place for pre-gaming. The champagne flowed freely and by the time we set out to battle the mobs everyone was appropriately “hydrated.”

The funny things is that once we managed to get through the crowds in the streets and on the trains and made it to our target destination, we had no problem finding a spot at all. We found a great spot right near the bridge with a perfect view of the Sydney Harbour. Sure, there were crowds, but not of the kind that leaves your humanity trampled in its wake.

The city had set up bars in their sectioned firework viewing zones, so we were good to go on that front too. We didn’t even have to bother with sneaking in and hiding alcohol.

Sydney is the first major world city to ring in the year, so they really try to own it. They have several fireworks shows throughout the city and there was even a citywide theme for the night – they were all about the blue, supposedly to match the blue of the water. To match the theme, they were even going to have blue fireworks – supposedly it was the first time blue fireworks were going to be used anywhere. It’s kind of weird to consider that in the long history of fireworks, they’d never managed to work out blue until so recently, but there you go.

New or not, they definitely know haw to give a good show. The fireworks were truly spectacular, and the show seemed to go on forever. Every time we thought they’d hit the climax, they just kept going and got bigger and bigger.

It was perhaps my best New Year’s to date and it was the perfect end to our amazing stay in OZ.

I got a good chunk of the show on video. I’ve put a way too long chunk here, but even this is only about a quarter of the entire show. You can definitely tell from our screaming and jabbering that we’d had a few by this point.

Just a quick little extra. Before we headed out to see the fireworks, we had champagne at our place. The girls, true to form, were all dancing around. A lot of songs played, but for whatever reason, La Roux's Bulletproof is the one that sticks out to me and will be forever associated with the night for me.

La Roux - Bullet Proof from serkan söğüt on Vimeo.

Fun with Marc and Dan

In the days we had both Marc and Dan in town we had loads of fun, but mostly took them to some of our favorite spots. Rather than go into details about places I've already covered, I'll just show off the pics.


Slideshow 1 - Downtown, Botanical Garden, and the Opera House

Slideshow 2: Bronte to Bondi

And just for fun, here's a little video of a beautiful rainbow lorikeet at the Botanical Gardens:

Marc’s Australian Reign of Terror

Reign of terror might be an overstatement, but Marc did have a rather comical string of faux pas during his stay in Sydney.

1. Mutilated an innocent girl’s hand

In the evening of X-mas day, we headed over to a party at the apartment of some friends from AGSM. Marc and I were sitting chatting with our friend Rose, who'd had a couple of drinks by then. Marc said something funny and Rose went to give him a playful punch in the shoulder. She threw the punch a little harder than she thought and Marc happened to turn just then, so she missed his shoulder and hit his glass instead. The glass shattered. Then, as if in slow motion, the blood began to trickle down her hand.

Alright, it wasn’t his fault and she was a little tipsy, but it was spectacular beginning to his trip. Luckily, Rose was ok . . . although she did need a stitch or two.

2. Traumatized a boy in a McDonald’s Bathroom

After Dan found that last leech sucking the blood from his belly, we all thought it best to do another check and we dove into the bathrooms to conduct full body inspections. Marc headed into the men’s bathroom with Greg on his heels. From the stall, Marc kept talking to Greg, telling him how creeped out he was and describing in detail just how he was going to conduct his full body search. He was inspecting EVERYWHERE, and he said so. The only problem was that when he opened the stall door, Greg was nowhere to be found. He’d left the bathroom and in his place was a very shocked looking 10-year-old boy.

Marc got out of that bathroom fast.


3. Laughed at a kid in public

On our tour of the Jenolan caves, there was a little kid that kept joking around and being loud in that oh-so-endearing way that little boys have. At one point, the tour stopped in a big cavernous section and the tour guide was trying quiet everyone down so she could continue talking. Just at the point that silence was achieved, a loud fart ripped through the silence. The sound came from the general direction of our young friend.

Marc cracks up laughing hysterically . . . everyone else remained silent. A minute later, Marc comments that the kid is so funny – he loves that obnoxious 4th grade humor. Making fake farting noises in a silent room is so classic.

It wasn’t fake. Poor kid walked of that cave looking quite sheepish.

Jenolan Caves and the Blue Mountains

Our little group’s next day trip was to the Jenolan Caves and the Blue Mountains. This is a pretty popular tourist destination since it’s an easy drive out of Sydney. A lot of times people will make this a weekend trip, however, given that it was the Holiday season, everything was booked, so we packed it all into one day.

We got an early start on the road, but since our car was pretty no frills and had no hookups, we were forced to listen to the radio the whole way. By now, Greg and I were used to Aussie radio and its limited variety, but it was all new to Marc and Dan and by the end they were begging us to please keep the damn thing off. Complaints about the radio were only exceeded by their constant frustration with limited access to the internet in the house. Again, this was a phase Greg and I had already passed through, but it was new torture to our two techie friends. Since my internet access stick was the only one with gigs left on it, they’d pretty much commandeered my computer and I rarely saw it again before the end of our stay in Sydney. But I digress. Other than the complaints about the super repetitive pop radio and its constantly static-ey reception, we had an easy early morning drive.

We spent the first half of our day in Jenolan where there’s a network of caves around which they’ve created a bit of an underground theme park. They offer a variety of tours to see the different caves that you can pick from depending on your level of comfort and adventurousness. Given my fear of heights, we went with the basic tour, but they do have some pretty cool sounding tours that involve crawling through small spaces and up and down ladders into caverns.

I had to hold on tightly to rails even when just walking on the built-in bridges. However, all those stalactites and stalagmites were quite impressive.

One of the bigger caverns known as “The Cathedral” is sometimes used for events like concerts because of the excellent acoustics. They did a little demonstration of lights and music, which was simultaneously cheesy and kind of impressive. Note Greg’s excellent camera work complete with special effects:

Here's the slideshow of our morning:

In the afternoon we made our way to the Blue Mountains. The famous rock formation in this area is the cluster of the Three Sisters.

The mountains really do look blue as you look off into the distance.

Leading a away from the viewing platforms there was trail. It runs along the cliffs and has some very pretty views.

We followed up to a small waterfall and spent a while climbing up its rocks.

Greg might have nearly lost his wedding ring and slipped on his bum while retrieving it, but we had a great time splashing around. And the best part . . . no leeches this time!

After we got done goofing around, we headed back along the trail just in time to see the sun set over the Blue Mountains.

And here's the slideshow:

And here's a random little add-on. In our travels we came across this bird call a few times -- I just thought it was kind of crazy:

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The Royal National Park and the Attack

On December 27th, Dan, our third and final visitor arrived.

I had my visitors on very tight schedule. I’d plotted out every day, from Carolyn’s arrival through our last day in Sydney, in order to maximize everyone’s time. I wanted make sure everyone of our three visitors got to see what they needed to see, but that no one had to deal with too many repeats.

This meant that there was no downtime for Dan after his long flight. I have to give him credit, he was a trooper. We picked him up at the airport, brought him home to drop off his stuff, and then piled everyone back in the car for a day trip. We took a small detour to pick up Alex, and then we all headed out to the Royal National Park.

Greg and I briefly passed through the Park on way back up the Grand Pacific Drive, but we’d hit it at dusk and weren’t able to spend much time there. What we did see of it we found charming and were anxious to see more.

We hadn’t done much research on the hikes beforehand, so we headed right to the visitor center on our way in. A seemingly nice park ranger gave us some recommendations on a couple of hikes, and she even marked them on a map for us. Getting advice at visitor centers had worked for us up until this point, so we had no reason to doubt this ranger now.

Our first hike of the day was lovely and a great variety in scenery. We started near a beach and wound our way up through hills fill with trees and plenty of rocks to scamper on.

Eventually, the trail opened up onto sandstone cliffs that jutted out dramatically over the ocean. There were some spectacular formations and patterns in the rocks. Plus, the views were so pretty that we ended up just hanging out here for a long time. Some of us even took naps.

Alex was all tuckered out.

Here are Greg's pics from our first hike:

Eventually, we forced ourselves up and back down the way we came. We had a quick picnic lunch down by the beach, and then drove to the second trailhead. As we got out of the car, we all saw an abandoned pair of sneakers at the beginning of the path and commented on weird this was. Why would someone just leave their shoes on the side of the road? But we just shrugged and kept going.

This hike started as fun as the first. Whereas our morning hike had been mostly rocky hills and ocean cliffs, this was a forest loop. It started out so lovely! There was mix of rainforest and temperate trees and it definitely had that beautiful fairyland feel I love so much. Some people may have been inspired to act out fantastical adventures.

Forest Games. Incidentally, the loud roar in the background isn't some camera glitch -- it's really loud in the rainforest!

There were also some spectacular stumps that had been hollowed out by fires.

All in all, everyone was having a great time. Then about ¾ of the way through the loop, Marc comments that he’s got a weird itch on leg. A couple of minutes later it was still bothering him and he leans over to scratch the itch. He finds a leech sucking on his leg.

‘Eeeeewww Gross!’ yelled Alex and Dan. Greg and I had encountered one once before in Eungella and helped him get it off, but the general attitude was, ‘Sucks for you, dude!’

About five seconds later, we all realize we’re covered in them too. Ok, I only had one, but everyone else had like four or five. The group breaks out into a crazy dance of panic while trying to pull off leeches. Let me tell you, those little guys are hard to get off. You try and pull them on one end, and they seem to be able to stretch forever. Once you do manage to get them to let go, the quickly whip around and latch on someplace else. *

We all run through the final section of the loop to get back to the car, and as we’re all frantically peeling off layers of clothes and inspecting each other, we see that abandoned pair of sneakers again. Suddenly, the sight makes a lot more sense.

Blurry, but you can see how these guys can really stretch.

Greg remained the most calm, having already been in that situation before. As he drove down the hilly road on our way out of the park, he very evenly stated, “Guys, I don’t want to alarm you, but I just found one more on my leg.” Then managed to somehow get it off his leg while continuing to drive, cool as a cucumber. I think I generally held it together pretty well and was able to help the others pull off a couple.

Dan, however, took the Drama Queen Prize. After Greg found and removed his last sucker, Dan commented that he was just happy that he hadn’t found any in the general area between his knees and his belly button. Well, he cursed himself right there, because as we pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot for a pit stop, we suddenly heard Dan yelling from the back seat. He proceeded to leap out of the car and started running around the parking lot, flailing his arms, shouting “Oh, Fuck! Oh, Fuck! Oh, Fuck!”

Sure enough he’d found one right bellow his belly button. We eventually managed to calm him down long enough to get it off.

They're small, but they really can suck out some blood.

The one thing I want to know is, why didn’t that park ranger warn us? A ‘Hey, this is a lovely hike, but you might want to tuck in your pants to keep the blood suckers out’ would have been very helpful.

Here's My slideshow from the day:

* Note: When we got home we looked up the best way to remove a leech, and found out that it is not advisable to pull them off because it can cause them to regurgitate back the contents of their stomachs, and this can include bacteria that can cause the wound to be infected. It is better to scrape them off with a credit card or even your fingernail, essentially getting between the mouth and your skin. Sure enough, one of Greg’s bites – the one from Eungella – did get infected and itched for months afterward. Here's more info.

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Boxing Day at the Zoo

This was my first Boxing Day. I’ve never been in a country that celebrates it for the Holidays. Not that any of us really knew what one does to celebrate Boxing Day, so we figured we’d use it to address the biggest gaping hole in our experience as tourists in Australia– we visited the Taronga Zoo. Luckily, while it was still a little rainy, this time we did not get rained out.

It is much touted, and for good reason. It’s located on the other side of the harbor from Sydney and the principle way to get there is via ferry; so it already feels like you’re being whisked away to a special place.

The set-up is also kind of cool. The zoo is built on a hill and they've used that hill in the zoo's design. Once you disembark from your ferry ride at the base of the hill, you queue up for a Sky Safari that takes you to the top. Right away you get a great view of Sydney and an overview of the entire zoo to get you excited. When you land again, you’re psyched to start your journey back down while wandering through the beautiful animal habitats.

Here are glimpses of the rest of the zoo:

There was one rather comical moment caught on video. By this point, I had become pretty big fan of wombats. They’re just sooo cute! And they had a very cute little guy here at the zoo. I found him particularly adorable because he was scratching an itch and cuddling or playing with a log. Or so I thought. Greg pointed out too late that our little wombat friend might have been scratching a different kind of itch.

Hmmm. Still not sure.

It really is a beautiful zoo. The kangaroo and wallaby habitat is cool in that visitors can walk through it and be near the animals. However, we did see one idiotic visitor taunt a kangaroo to the point that it stood up on its haunches to its full height. For a second, he looked like he was contemplating punching that offending visitor. Luckily, nothing bad happened, but I once little part of my brain thins it would have been kind of satisfying to see that kangaroo get a kick in -- like in a cartoon. Lesson: don’t be a douche bag when dealing with animals.

A little Wallaby, exhausted by a day of performing to the crowds.

The koalas were ridiculously cute of course. The red panda and giraffes were also really adorable, and the bird show is really very cool.

Red Panda


Not sure who is cuter


Awkward, perhaps, but definitely endearing

At 5 we found ourselves deserted in the zoo. We hadn’t heard any announcements regarding closing time, we just looked up at one point and found ourselves alone in the place, as if everyone else had received a memo but us. It was VERY eerie. We hightailed it back to the ferry. Luckily, there was still one there.

At the end, it was just us and the peacocks walking around. Kind of surreal.

We could not let our day end on this creepy note. Plus, after walking around all day, we were pretty hungry, so once we got back to Sydney, Mark treated us to a Peking Duck dinner in
Chinatown.

As it turned out, the girls were going out dancing out that evening. If we’d gone home first, we’d never have made it back out again, so the three of us joined them in our gross state and all. Vanity shouldn’t get in the way of a good time . . . but maybe, it should get a little more consideration next time.

Here are few more adorable animal pics before I sign off:

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Xmas in OZ

Christmas Down Under was kind of lackluster.

We used to joke that all the Christmas cheer was on the CBD free bus, because that seemed to be the place where the city chose to spend it’s entire decorating budget.

Ok that’s an exaggeration. There were a couple of prettily decorated trees downtown here and there, and they did do this cool thing where they projected pretty light patterns onto some of the historical buildings to make it look like they’d been gift wrapped. That said, the Christmas spirit seemed to elude me for some reason.

Now, I’m used to warm weather Christmases. The majority of my Holidays have been warm – Florida, Venezuela, Los Angeles. However, there ‘s something about seeing ads where watermelons are rolled up to the Christmas table to be eaten alongside turkey and ham and all the traditional winter trimmings that we're used to, that just seemed wrong.

Nonetheless, I was actually kind of psyching myself up for the idea of a Christmas BBQ on the beach. We were all ready with burgers and sausages to grill while wearing silly Santa hats with our swimsuits by the surf.

Instead we got rained out.

We tried to make the best of it. Carla and Alex joined us to BBQ at our house instead. Alex brought pumpkin pie and we played Christmas carols.

However, there was still just something kind of sad about seeing Greg huddled beneath the overhang, hunched over the grill to protect our burgers from getting soaked. A little sad, but a little comical too.

What we really drank

It’s time to come clean about something. I talk a good game about all the lovely wine tastings we did Down Under, and that’s all true, but to be honest, most of the time we drank on the cheap. Booze are expensive in Australia . . . really expensive, at least in comparison to here where it’s not heavily taxed and where we have places like Trader Joe’s and Bev Mo. So to come completely clean, most of time we drank boxed wine. Yes, boxed wine . . . and not the new-wave kind that uses the high-tech packaging to better preserve the taste and freshness of the wine. Just boxed wine . . . a lot of which tasted much like slightly alcoholic grape juice. We did find a couple that were ok enough to replace of Two-buck Chuck as everyday table wine. (Stanley's, in the lead picture, was one of the more passable of the cheapie boxed wines.) I know many of you are probably debating even the wisdom/taste level of allowing Charles Shaw onto our table, but hey we're on budget. While I can appreciate a good wine, we have to make concessions for the weeknight table. There, the truth is out.

Alchy grape juice. Beware of sugar shock.

For those who are unwilling to sink to such levels, Australian wineries offer another option for budget conscious – cleanskins. Wineries put out these bottles with minimally marked labels containing only the basic information. It allows them to get rid of excess wine that might not otherwise get used, such as wine produced in the first or last pressing of a batch. This way they make a profit of this wine without potentially damaging the quality of one of their lines. You can actually get pretty good deals this way, but its also kind of a grab bag.

For anyone searching for decent prices in OZ, we found Dan Murphy’s to generally have the best prices. You can do pretty well here. (See lead picture for one day's loot.)

You’ll also find another convenience around Australia that you won’t find around here . . . the drive-thru liquor store. Almost makes up for the higher prices . . . well, not quite but it’s still novel to a wandering American.

Kate shows off the drive-through, a la Vanna White.