Day 12: Sydney
January 13, 2007
Seeing as this was my last day in Sydney... I had to try and cram in as
much touristy shit as humanly possible. I started the day by
walking the cliffside/coastal path from Bondi Beach to Coogee. It
took about 3 hours to get to Coogee and back on foot... but the views
along the way were amazing and well worth the hike. After my
walkabout... I had a shower... then hopped on the 389 with the intent
of taking it all the way to Circular Quay in downtown Sydney.
Along the way, the bus stopped directly in front of a Ticketek Office
and a random thought popped into my head. Within seconds I was
off the bus and in the ticket office inquiring about tickets to the
Australian Open. I'm not much of tennis fan... but I remembered
seeing that the Oz Open would be going on while I was gonna be in
Melbourne. Bottomline... I ending up scoring some groundpasses to
the opening day of the event and at that point I was thoroughly looking
forward to my first professional tennis Open. With my impulse buy
out of the way... I strolled over to Darling Harbor to see what there
was to see (I really should think about creating an itinerary
sometime). I wandered around the Restuarants/Shops for a bit
before I stumbled upon the Sydney Wildlife World and Sydney
Aquarium. I'm a sucker for cute/fuzzy animals... so I bought a
ticket to each venue, grabbed a single scoop ice cream cone (just like
all the other cool kids were doing) and went to check out all the
critters. After satisfying my urge to view native flora/fauna...
I continued down Darling Harbor... cut over to the Sydney Fishmarket
for a while... then ended up at Paddy's Market (fyi... this was a long
ass walk). All this damned walking was making me thirsty, so
after Paddy's I cut through Chinatown to George Street and stumbled
upon Scruffy Murphy's. I'd been to Scruffy's in Phuket... so I
decided to drop in and see how the Sydney version compared to it's Thai
counterpart. I downed a pint and tried to figure out the cricket
match on the TV for a bit... then I figured "why stop now?"... and thus
began my self guided pub crawl back to Bondi Beach. After
Scruffy's, I caught the train up to The Rocks and hit several pubs
there (including Fortune of War... "the oldest pub in Sydney" where the
original convicts used to get pissed). After my drinking tour of
The Rocks... I hailed a cab to King's Cross. King's Cross was
sort of dead... so I only had a pint of Toohey's before heading back to
Bondi to call it a night and prepare for another long day of driving.
