A Day of Water

With the arrival of my Mum, unexpectedly fresh and awake (and stinky from air travel), finally I’ll have a full day of legitimate exploration in Sydney. After a stop-off at the hotel so she can shower and I can change out of these hideously greasy clothes, we head out to Circular Quay to see the water. You know, water is water across the world, we drink it everyday, our body is made up of quite a lot of it, the damn stuff falls from the sky, and yet water is the first thing we want to see on vacation.

This particular chunk of water holds a couple of other popular sites: the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. We head over to the Opera House.

We’ve all seen pictures of its lovely white waves overlooking the bay. Well let me be the first to say you’ve been lied to. The roof isn’t white, at least not anymore. It’s the same coffee-stained beige that every other white surface has become after the elements have worn it down. I mean, the Opera House is still a wonder of urban design, one of the Earth’s most picturesque examples of architecture, but it just ain’t white. If white is what you were coming for, save your money.

Then it was off for a lengthy stroll through the Royal Botanic Gardens. Trees, grass, plants, rocks, all that delightful stuff. Very scenic and beautiful to look at, and yet exceedingly dull to write about. It’s a good thing I do have pictures ready yet, because there are some stunners. Expect that last sentence to be have already been retconned out.

We board a ferry and roll out to Manly, an outcropping of land on the north side of the Port Jackson — or as I like to call it, Sydney’s Han. It was a nice little peninsula, faithful to its name, but a whole lot more so once I arrived.

There, we walked a couple of blocks and found ourselves at Manly Beach, which tastes the tides of the Pacific Ocean. This being her first ocean experience, my mother excitedly stripped down to nothing and went cavorting in the water. I did not take any pictures of this; instead, I decided to rub sand in my eyes.

Once the drama had subsided, as it was getting dark and just as we started to casually mosey back over to the harbour, you better believe it started to rain. Like the reverse-opposite fires of Hell, cold water drenched us from above. Add to that our exhaustion, and understand that it was a long, unpleasant trip back to the hotel.

This one’s for James.