The Rocks & Darling Harbour, Sydney

The Walking tour for the Rocks started out at Cadaman's Cottage in the Circular Quay, the smae area that yesterday's walking tour ended. The tour took us through the old part of Sydney, the Rocks. This tour was shorter and was in the evening so it was a bit cooler, I'm glad that I kept my long sleeve shirt from Nepal... not sure why I wasn't expecting the cooler temperatures as compared to Bangkok. Anyway, the tour was pretty interesting as well! We heard about some of the darker history of Sydney from days of Sailors. We heard abou how Sailors would be robbed, kidnapped to be slaves, murdered, and just taken advantage of in general. There were some pretty funny stories about all that, even though it was a dark history. Our guide was great. You can tell that the Rocks is an older area, the streets are narrow and hav cobbles. The buildings are stone and short in comparison to the neighbouring high rises and the alleys are on the dark side. There's one buiding that is raised on stilts so that you can see the old ruins below that were excavated to remove bodies of folk burried there a long time ago. In the rocks district there are 3 pubs competing for the title of oldest bar in Sydney and we walked by all of them. There really isn't a way to tell which one is the oldes, one has the oldest liquor liscense but another has older building materials, so they're in constant competition, which much bring people in so really they all win. We ended the tour by going up to the observatory where we had a view of the harbour bridge and the fair below over the water it was quite pretty. There were more than a few couples enjoying the romantic setting, until we intruided of course.

After the walking tour I tried a frozen coke for Alanna as promised and the white truffle parmesan fries from McDonald's to kill time before Matthew arrived from Melbourne!! It was so cool to see him.

We walked down to Darling Harbour which is quite the contrast from the Rocks. All new buidings, which some interesting architecture, but still quite tame in comparison to some other larger cities like Singapore, or even Vancouver. Seems that Sydney is fairly reserved in their architectural styles. Or would it be moree polite to say conservative? Aside from the Opera house of course. Anyway, we walked around the Darling Harbour and found a place to have dinner, a steak house. Man was it great to have a decent beer, good glass of wine, and amazing steak. What a treat! We had a blast just catching up too, I'm so glad that I get to know my cousins so well. After dinner we walked back to the hostel the long way through Hyde Park, which had a little building reflecting quite prettily off a pond. They do seem to value their green space here which is great! When we got back to the hostel it was almost midnight so we called it quits and went to bed, getting up early to meet Mom tomorrow!!Read more