I’m a Carton and I’m in Sydney but that doesn’t make me Sydney Carton

As I noted in the introduction, it was Monday morning when I arrived in Sydney. I’d applied for and received the Australian EVisa. This will raise a little money for Australia and theoretically expedite entering the country while allowing more comprehensive tracking. (Rather sadly, it also eliminates the old-fashioned passport stamp. And wasn’t it fun showing off your passport stamps?)

I think the efficiency factor would have been successful even with the large crowd shuffling along at the pace of a sea cucumber crawling across the seabed had it not been for a Dutch couple – one of whom seemed unable to complete the immigration form so her birthdate matched the one on her passport. Once I reached the front of the line, I made it through rather easily. I found my way to the Airport Link

and quickly rode the train to Central Station in Sydney’s central business district (CBD). From there it was a short walk to the hotel. (I’ve yet to reach the point where I feel I require door to door airport to hotel service and happily take public transportation and shared rides whenever it’s reasonable.)

Once there, I met a few other Road Scholars and J– our group leader. Road Scholar (RS) had us scheduled for an 11:00 bus tour followed by lunch, a little more busing around the city, something they described as a “harbor cruise,” and finally check-in at the hotel. I had a bit more than an hour to walk / ride around Sydney on my own to try to see one or two bits I’d picked up from Atlas Obscura and that I suspected weren’t on the RS tour.

A brief walk around Sydney

The first was a work of art called Forgotten Songs. It’s in a small side street called Angel Place that’s so small it left even many of the Sydneysiders I asked puzzled as to its location. The artist is Michael Thomas Hill and it was initially installed in 2009 as part of the Sydney Laneway Temporary Art program. Some of these works proved so popular they became permanent installations. Hill describes his work as exploring, “how Sydney’s fauna has evolved and adapted to co-exist with increased urbanisation – inviting contemplation of the city’s past, its underlying landscape, and the sustainability issues associated with increased urban development” and celebrating, “those birds which were living in central Sydney “before they were gradually forced out of the city by European settlement.” I found it fascinating. It looks like this.

But you might find the video in the album link below even more interesting.

From there, I was off to find Trim the Cat – a bit of sculptural whimsy sitting on a window ledge of the Mitchell Library (AKA the State Library of New South Wales). Trim was born on the HMS Reliance in 1799 when Matthew Flinders was sailing to Botany Bay from the Cape of Good Hope. Sometime during that voyage, Trim fell overboard but managed to swim back to the ship and scale a rope to climb back aboard.

Flinders so admired the cat that the pair sailed together on HMS Navigator – circumnavigating Australia on Flinders’ mapping expedition of the world’s largest island. Or its smallest continent, if you prefer. We’ll meet Flinders again later in this journal though not Trim who met an unknown and perhaps grisly end. His connection with Flinders is so intimate that Sydney isn’t the only spot Trim shares with other statues of Flinders. You can find him in Flinders’ birthplace of Donington, Lincolnshire, the Euston Railway Station in London, Port Lincoln in South Australia, the campus of Flinders University in Adelaide, and the Lincoln Cathedral. Here he is in Sydney.

And it’s back to Road Scholar

With these tasks complete, I walked to Sydney’s metro (with its convenient tap and pay option) and then from Central Station back to the hotel. Our group of 20 consisting of five couples and 10 single travelers clambered onto the bus with whisperers in tow and began our circuitous ride to Bondi Beach (pronounced Bun-DYE) where we’d also have our lunch.

If you’re wondering what a whisperer is, it’s a pocket-sized device with a plug-in earpiece. The tour guide wears a headset with a microphone and can therefore speak in a normal conversational tone. I’d used something similar on the Paris to Normandy river cruise and it’s most appropriate with a group of 40 or more. I’m less convinced of its necessity for a group of 20 or less. Nevertheless, although we wouldn’t need them on the bus. our site coordinators and most of our tour guides would use them throughout the next three weeks. The setup looks a little like Tailored Travel shows in the image below.

While she was distributing the whisperers, J told us that Road Scholar intended these introductory tours not as mere time-fillers to pass the hours until hotel check-in. Rather, they’d be both historically and practically informative. In truth, the one in Sydney was the former. It took us to places far enough from our hotel that, even had RS allotted us more free time, we would likely not have had time to visit and to other places we passed so quickly that, unless one has an extraordinary memory, are forgotten soon after the ride ends. This is particularly true when you have a local guide like M whose tendency to take his narration on tangential treks often obscured what he might have started telling us about the location we were passing.

I don’t know if it was the disorganization relative to the Returned Serviceman’s Club where RS had arranged our lunch or whether we’d arrived later than expected but by the time we’d  finished eating we had almost no time to spend on the famous beach itself. You see, we had a schedule to keep and a hill to tromp up to get a distant view of Sydney Harbor and the famous Opera House and Harbor Bridge

before boarding what was really a public transit ferry for a 15 or 20 minute harbor “cruise” to Circular Quay.

Wrapping it up

After that we returned to the hotel for check-in and dinner. This is among the times I’m glad RS had arranged dinner at the hotel. Pushing through a 15-hour time change and our afternoon activities I’d have had insufficient energy to hie myself to a restaurant.

My report of the day wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that although both travel adapters I’d brought indicated they had Australian compatibility, neither did. The hotel was kind enough to lend me one for the duration of our stay but I’d have to find a place to purchase one before we left for Perth. I’d find one near the hotel but this is the sort of information that would have made the orientation more helpful.

We had our welcome dinner in the hotel in what was, for me, the first of far too many hotel (and other included) meals. Like many hotel meals, there’s little to report let alone remember. Most of our meals and snacks were frequent, plentiful, and often forgotten before they were fully digested.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a busy morning followed by one of our few free afternoons. I hope to see you then. Meanwhile, you can amuse yourself with my other photos from the day.