New Year's Day - Sydney

After a lazy start and cooked eggs and bacon at our apartment along with an unexpected but welcome WhatsApp call from friends at our local pub who had just celebrated the British New Year, we headed out to explore some more of the city.

We caught the metro couple of stops down to the Town Hall stop. Here we saw the St Andrews cathedral along with the town hall and the very impressive Victorian, Queen Victoria building along with a statue of herself! Even on New Year's Day, most of the shops were open and the restaurants in there were doing a brisk business.

Next we walked along to Darling Harbour, an area which has been extensively redeveloped over the last 30 or 40 years and now is a bustling waterfront location. We paused here for some refreshment!

We carried on walking further up the peninsula to the Barangaroo reserve passing lots of relatively modern high-rise buildings before getting to the reserve itself. Here we found some instant walkways through lots of recently planted Australian plants.

Heading back to the metro station we stumbled across the oldest hotel in Sydney, apparently! We had a pint at the Lord Nelson before getting the train a couple of stops down to the Anzac memorial and Hyde Park.

The Anzac memorial is an impressive edifice which remembers Australian and New Zealand servicemen who have given their service and lives in the war. After pausing here we walked through Hyde Park and then saw the second cathedral in Sydney, St Mary's.

From here, we stopped for a beer and then caught a bus back up to the Rocks area for some food at Sydney's oldest pub, the Fortune of War. Fed and watered we walked via Circular Quay to the opera house for the evenings entertainment, an illusion show called 'Now you see me'. Unfortunately we had our timings wrong so didn't arrive until 15 minutes after the start! The show was impressive though and at half time and at the end we had the chance to get views from inside the opera house over the harbour.

With an early start the next day we headed back to the apartment for a final beer of the day and bed!Leggi altro