Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Crossing the Tasman Sea, from Australia to New Zealand

Today is the first full day on board the Westerdam and it's nice to be at sea again after all the preparation and travel time it took to arrive. I have two full days to rest and relax (not very likely with everything that goes on during a cruise), after four strenuous but exciting days in Sydney. In fact, the trip is proving to be quite theraputic--I have been averaging between 18,000 and 21,000 steps per day. And this is less than two months after my left leg surgery and six weeks after the removal of 50 surgical staples.

Brief digression: During surgery to fix my crushed left femur in March 2020, I had a significant number of metal screws and bands attached to hold together all the bone fragments and anchor them to my titanium hip (from Spain 2016). In September, to prevent the spread of infection, the surgeon removed all these pieces of metal, no longer necessary after the bone heals. Since infections in bones can be very dangerous, it is usually better to remove the metal.

But the blog now sails back three days and returns to Sydney before I reach New Zealand.

Sunday, 6 Nov 2022

Another Day in Sydney

I have planned another busy day today, and the bright sunshine that greets me after breakfast is a welcoming sight. I begin the day, after a sleep-in until 9am, with a short walk to Sydney Town Hall, built in 1869, and one of a number of mid-19th-century public buildings still in use. 

While I am taking pictures of the facade, a local woman approaches me with a free ticket to the today-only “Open House” festivities, which allows visitors to see the insides of many historic and contemporary structures in Central Sydney. I accept her gift with thanks and although I will have time to visit only a few of the sites, the ticket also offers free entry to several museums I intend visiting today. 

I hop on a southbound light rail line that takes me to Chinatown, where I visit the first "Open House" site, a community center dedicated to the labor movement in Sydney. In addition to architectural interest, the building offers a vast collection of materials documenting the 20th-century struggle for workers' rights.

The main reason for visiting Chinatown is the Chinese Garden of Friendship, one of the largest traditionally-designed gardens outside of China itself (you may recall I visited a similar garden in Hong Kong on my last visit in 2019—you can link to that entry from the list at the bottom of the page). The garden provides a quiet respite from the crowds of the Darling Harbour precinct.

I ride the tram northward and back to Hyde Park in the CBD. On the northeast side of the park are two important historic sites:  St Mary’s Cathedral (19th-century Gothic-Revival), and  Hyde Park Barracks, built in 1819 to house transported British and Irish convicts and now restored as an historic museum.

Hyde Park Barracks (Below)

Prisoners' Sleeping Hammocks

Next-door to the Barracks are the Mint Museum (1816) and Sydney Hospital (also 1816), fronted by a sculpture of a boar that will be familiar to those who have visited Florence, Italy.

Mint Museum

Sydney Hospital 

My last visit of the day is the Museum of Sydney, which displays exhibits of the city’s past as well as never-quite-completed visions of today and the future.

More panoramic photos--and the surprise arrival of the Westerdam (one day early)--from atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge--in the next blog entry.