Wonder of Oz!

It's December. Where is it summer, where people speak English and it takes only one flight from SFO? The solution to this puzzle - Australia! That's how our 3 week vacation "down under" started. I did the routine tour book reads and found out Australia is a 'BIG' country much like the US and it can take days driving from one city to the other. Sydney, and the Great Barrier Reef were the only things we HAD to do, anywhere else was just a bonus. With this in idea, we booked our tickets for 21 days - with 7 days in Sydney, 4 days in Tasmania(our bonus leg) and Brisbane(this was the closest big city to the Reef from Sydney). It was exciting to think it'll 7 days of city life, 4 days of wilderness, and another 4 days of beach vacation - all in one! We wanted to keep the whole trip as flexible as we could without planning everything to the last detail. We decided to book only the first 4 days of our stay in downtown Sydney and then take it as it goes.

Our flight was for the 29th of Nov , a 13.5 hrs non stop from SFO. We reached on the 1st of Dec. losing 30th Nov. from our calendars somewhere mid air. Our Qantas (short for Queensland and Northern territory airline service!) flight service was exceptional - loved their spacious toilets, video on demand and frequent supply of snacks, fruits, drinks etc etc. It felt like the airline bug hadn't hit them and made us feel air travel is still a luxury in some parts of the world.

We had a good start, and the flight landed in Sydney at 8 in the morning. Immigration was a breeze and we picked up our luggage and walked out of the airport to smell the city. To me it seemed like we had landed in Chennai on a 'not too hot' sunny day! We bought our tickets to a shuttle that would take us to our hotel. We waited and waited and waited until the driver thought it was enough people in the van (with 2 of them squeezed with him in the front) and thus began our 25mts drive to our hotel. At first glance it seemed like I had landed in a place somewhere between the UK, US and India. The roads were narrow, the houses were small and intimate and the cars were big and small, of every make and model from the ubiquitous Toyota's, to the Hyundai's and Peugeot's! We reached our Apartment hotel, gave them our bags for storage (since we were to early for check in) and took to the Sydney streets. M took out of his favorite pocket map (He esp. loves the compass in it...I don't complain given my direction sense!). We headed down straight to Darling Harbour. It was a lively place, lots of people for a Tuesday afternoon. This place had everything - theatres, restaurants, an aquarium cum wildlife exhibition of some sort, a ferry station, bars and coffee houses and all by the water . After all this it didn't seem like our 14 hr flight journey would go in vain!

We took in the sights for a while, got a caffeine fix and walked back to our hotel. On our way back we stopped over at the Queen Victoria Building. This one was a mall that rose upto 4 floors and had the exquisite collection of shops, so exquisite that I couldn't read most of the shop names. That's when you know two things - you don't have to bother getting into any of these shops and also feel good about window shopping because you are in a majority. They had a Christmas tree going up through al the floors and it was studded with real Swarovski crystals(~10,000 of them or some crazy number like that!). After this star studded spectacle we decided to walk back to our hotel. We rested a while in our room, made some quick observations on how things are different from where we came like..... M and I had had a discussion about how water drains in the counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and I was not going to beleive it until I saw it. When I did, I couldn't notice the water draining in any one particular direction. After some screening on snopes.com, I found out that it's a very popular myth...but the myth is busted!

We spent the evening by the Opera House. It is an imposing structure on the water with a great view of the Harbour bridge. It's structure as is believed by a lot of folks is based on the sails of a sail boat is not really true - courtesy of the book "Down Under" by Bill Bryson. This is one entertaining and hilarious book about his experiences in Australia.

Rest of Sydney continues in my next post....