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Sydney, Australia
Because the truth you might be running from is so small, but it's as big as the promise, the promise of a coming day
A spring morning in Sydney, home to unquestionably the nicest city harbor (or possibly “harbour”) on earth. This is the view towards Bennelong Point from the gardens of the Domain, as the bridge, iconic opera house and suburbs stretch toward the sunny north.
I've been to many cities with nice, easily accessible downtown gardens, still nothing quite prepared me for the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Domain. Maybe it was the palm trees, maybe it was the springtime flowers, maybe it was the wild, vocal parrots making the gardens sound like Jungle World at the Bronx Zoo. Its otherworldly feel made it hard to believe that I was deep inside a city, even a city as gracious and perfect as Sydney can often be.
Contiguous to the Domain, this was my favorite stretch of parkland, an allee of spectacular gum trees conveniently connecting my damn fine hotel with the damn fine harbourfront.
The more graceful than I thought it would be Sydney Harbour Bridge is a bridge that spans the, well, Sydney Harbour. This is the view from the south pylon of the bridge, a view that costs about twenty times less than the very well publicized BridgeClimb(tm), as disappointing an experience as I hope to ever feel and truly the only thing about this trip I did not enjoy. It sucked. It took three hours and fifteen minutes of boredom, overtraining, views less spectacular than this, and annoying guides to walk the unexciting, danger free bridge posing for pictures so that BridgeClimb(tm) could try to sell them to me later. The walk was without any redeeming factors and truly a waste of time, I can't recommend against it enough.
On the right side of the bridge are two fascistly organized groups (one near the bottom, one nearing the top) ascending the bridge as unsuspecting clients of BridgeClimb(tm).
After emptying their pockets of all objects, dressing up in an unattractive jumpsuit, passing through a metal detector to confirm that they are carrying no cameras, strapping on a pedestrian radio and headset and wasting 45 minutes learning how to climb a ladder, BridgeClimb(tm) victims head out on their walk, strapped onto the bridge by a cumbersome harness and not realizing that they will never be able to retrieve the time they are about to waste posing for pictures they are expected to buy.
The Harbour Bridge, in all its angled grace, as seen from the extraordinarily pleasant esplanade linking Circular Quay (pronounced "circular key") to the opera house (pronounced "opera house").
Sydney is all about the harbour and the bridge and the gardens and the opera house, and if you take all that away, the rest of the city (other than The Rocks) is fairly non-descript as proven by this picture.
So just how non-descript is the rest of the city? Sydney was the location for The Matrix, the trippy Keanu Reeves movie all about a perfect, fake, nondescript city in a dystopian future with killer FBI agents and a lot of martial arts. I did not (necessarily) see all of that during my time in the city, but I guess I was not looking for a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries., a world where anything is possible. Where we go from here is a choice I leave to you.
If you don’t take a boat and get out into the harbour, you’re missing all that Sydney is about. From Circular Quay, boats go to exotic destinations like Darling Harbour (probably named after the Peter Pan kids or the Mets ex-pitcher), Barangaroo (probably named by a drunk guy) or Shark Island (where the sharks run wild).
As close as you can get to a koala (in a reputable facility) without actually purchasing one, the Taronga Zoo allows visitors who wish to shell out the extra two Australian dollars the privilege of entering the Koalas protected environment. Nervous zookeepers stand at the ready with vicious electric prods, for one day one of these sleepy, furry creatures may wake up and violently attack zoo goers, although it's far more likely that they would probably just yawn and go back to sleep again.
A short, scenic ferry ride from Circular Quay, this is Sydney's much acclaimed and terribly nice "zoo with a view." Pictured here is the bird show, where raptor birds fly free over a startled and worried audience- where are the guys with those electric prods when you need them?
