While in Sydney, we booked a grueling, 5-hour tour with Bonza Bikes. We started the ride near our hotel on Circular Quay, in an upscale section of downtown Sydney known as “The Rocks”. It was a warm and sunny morning.
Our guide was a perpetually smiling youth of Philippine descent named Andrew, who was going to college to become a sculptor. Imagine that!
Our small group consisted of a friendly husband and wife team and their two young kids, who hailed from Manitoba and who had been traveling the world for almost a year. Imagine that! And there was a nice retired fellow from Arizona who proudly boasted that he rode hundreds of miles a week on his bike. Everyone was raring to go.
The brochure made our tour sound rather enchanting: “Sydney’s Harbour is the most beautiful in the world, and this tour hugs the harbor to the east and west around stunning coves and over the Harbour Bridge. Meander through Sydney’s most illustrious suburbs and harbor coves, exploring the natural sandstone and pristine waters of Woolloomooloo, Rushcutter’s Bay, Double Bay, and Rose Bay.”
Let’s start with this very important fact: Sydney is quite hilly. It’s flat along the water, but a lot of cool things to see are located inland and involve prolonged, steep climbs, no matter whether you are walking or biking.
The Rocks was the area where the European colony was first settled by the criminals who were the nation’s founding fathers, not unlike America, if you really think about it. And this is where you will find some of Australia’s oldest buildings. Old is a relative term, of course, when it comes to Australia, because the late 1700s represent the start of the white guy show. These first structures were made of a handsome red sandstone quarried nearby, and the architectural style is classic Glaswegian, which makes sense when you realize that most of the lawbreakers sent to Australia by the English crown were my people, those troublesome Scots.
When I asked our young guide, Andrew, why the place was called The Rocks, he replied, “We Australians are not very imaginative, and every building in this part of town was made of rock. So, the name just stuck.”
The old stone warehouses along the harbor have been converted into attractive shops and restaurants catering to tourons and locals alike who make Sydney, Australia’s most popular destination. Canberra might be the capital, but Sydney is everybody’s favorite place to be.
Hulking over Sydney Harbour stands the “Coat Hanger”, otherwise known as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The architects intentionally copied the Hell Gate Bridge in Queens, New York. The Hell Gate Bridge opened in 1916, while the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in 1932. The Hell Gate Bridge is slightly smaller than the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
By the time we climbed up Stargazer Lawn, an impressive man-made, grassy, tree-covered picnicking hill that was hollowed out to make a humongous parking garage underneath, we were overlooking majestic Sydney Harbour and the Barangaroo Reserve, and I was sweating bullets and feeling a bit light-headed.
At that point, our very young and merrily upbeat guide, Andrew, announced, “This next section up to the top of Observatory Hill is really quite steep. It’s the highest point in Sydney and you might want to walk your bike.”
And so, the triathlon began.
From that point on, we walked up all sorts of stairs and hilly streets, through busy intersections, along narrow sidewalks, and across the Royal Botanical Gardens—probably two miles in all. And we cycled another fifteen before the tour was over. It was quite the workout, and it was summertime hot.
The top of Observatory Hill led us up onto the Harbour Bridge. What I liked the most about the amazing structure was the wide bicycle-pedestrian lanes. America usually chooses to save money by not adding a bike path on its big bridges. The American planners, engineers, bean counters, and politicians don’t seem to understand that for a myriad of reasons, bridges should never just be for engine-powered vehicles.
The views from the top of the Harbour Bridge were breathtaking, akin to flying. And for the truly insane, you can pay $50 to climb to the tippy top of the bridge. The climb is not considered very difficult and is often compared to walking 18 holes of golf. It involves climbing stairs and ladders, walking along see-through catwalks, and being strapped into a harness 440 feet above the water with the wind usually blowing 10-20 mph. As an avid golfer, I can say that it is to golf what bridge jumping is to pickleball.
Australia is a nation where regular blokes and lunatics like to poke fun at authority, and the dedication of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 provided just such theater.
As 300,000 spectators watched Premier Jack “The Big Fella” Lang getting ready to cut the ribbon to officially open the bridge, a fascist furniture maker and veteran of World War I named Francis de Groot, wearing his old officer’s uniform and riding a borrowed horse named Mick, rode onto the shiny new bridge and slashed the ribbon with his sword. And 92 years later, the sword is a museum piece, and crazy Francis is a legendary figure remembered for his cleverness and valor.
Recently, there was a bitter controversy when they decided to install the Aboriginal flag atop the bridge at a cost of $25 million. That struck the Sydneysiders like a helluva lot of money to put a flagpole up on a bridge. But it supposedly involved some very complex engineering work required to install a new flagpole on the heritage-listed structure, which included replacing existing poles, addressing structural concerns, and navigating aviation regulations due to the bridge’s height, all while working on a live roadway. They eventually took down the New South Wales flag and replaced it with the Aboriginal flag. And I’m guessing pigs will fly before they ever think about erecting any other bridgetop flags to wave proudly alongside the Aboriginal red and black flag with its big yellow sun in the middle.
Aborigines are the second oldest people on the earth, dating back almost 50,000 years, and they never went in for flags. So, the whole bridge fiasco was really just an act of white penance, if you ask me.
On the north side of Sydney Harbor sits Luna Park, a historic, rundown yellow amusement park with a sinister clown’s smiling mouth as the entrance way. It’s creepy cool, but a bit outdated, and we didn’t have time to go inside for some noisy sugar fun.
We continued on through some upscale neighborhoods where the multimillion-dollar homes looked attractively average and unpretentious. We stopped at the official government residence of the lucky fella who runs Australia. It looked like the summer home of the very successful dentist Joe Schmo.
Back on the South Side along Walsh Bay, we pedaled around a vast complex of black and white warehouses that were once pierside warehouses. The waterfront buildings have been restored and are now home to trendy restaurants and the Sydney Theatre Company, where dance troupes and gong bangers hone their crafts in renovated studios and drink craft beer in black slacks and shirts.
And speaking of art, at one of the Dawes Point roundabouts, there sits a truly inspiring installation called “Still Life With Stone and Car”. For the 2004 Bienalle of Sydney, Arkansas-born artist Jimmie Durham created some purebred hillbilly art by dropping a two-ton quartz boulder painted with a smiley face from a tall crane, crushing a bright red Ford Fiesta. And towering above the squashed car are the undulating, defensive sandstone rat walls erected by the city to battle the plague in the 1800s. The past really does mirror the future if you squint your eyes just right.
Our next stop was one of my favorites, Barangaroo Reserve, which was named after an ornery native woman whose husband palled around with the Governor. She refused to wear European clothes, dine out, or have hardly any dealings with the white settlers. She also liked to wear a bone through her nose and paint herself with white clay, a proud and defiant display of her cultural spirit that drove the white society women nuts.
The lovely nature reserve running along the harbor is Sydney’s newest waterfront park, where they have created natural swimming holes lined with large red and white stacked sandstone blocks. The 75-degree, blue-green water is a tributary of the Tasman Sea and home to gigantic killer whales, a myriad of sharks, moon jellyfish, and predatory penguins that will often attack without provocation. A swim in Sydney Harbor may very well be your last.
The Barangaroo area also features an outdoor movie theater offering free weekly movies where you can lie on puffy blue beds. And right next door stands Sydney’s tallest building, the Crown Sydney, which is affectionately known as “Packer’s Pecker” because it was built by the owner of Crown Resorts, James Packer, and it looks like an 890-foot blue erection. The luxury Crown Casino Resort rivals any of the top casinos in Vegas and overlooks Darling Harbour to boot.
The second part of the tour took us up, up, and away again. We climbed through Chinatown, Thai Town, Koreatown, Hyde Park, and the ANZAC War Memorial. By the time we reached St. Mary’s Cathedral on the crest above Woolloomooloo, an Aboriginal burial ground, I was battling heat exhaustion and needed to cool down. Right away.
We had just stopped at the Archibald Fountain, a magnificent Greek Revivalist water gusher made of white granite and adorned with lifesize mythical Greek gods and goddesses. The fountain is meant to showcase the deep bonds between France and Australia. It was like a dream come true. And Inna immediately read my mind.
“You need to go jump in that water. You will feel better right away.”
To the shock and amusement of everybody hanging around the fountain, I waded right up to ol’ Apollo and took his best shot right in my face until my core temperature dropped and I came to my senses.
Andrew said he had never seen anyone jump in the fountain before, and I was equally surprised the fountain wasn’t filled with children on such a warm and muggy day. I mean, the thing is bloody huge and ideal for splashing around.
I was just happy to be back in the game. And I was the only one in our group to complete the water part of our grueling triathlon. There was no stopping me now. It was all downhill through the section of the Botanical Garden known as The Domain on our way to the Sydney Opera House near the tour’s finish line, and it felt really good to be living the dream in a foreign land.
I also learned the most important thing you need to know about Australia. ALWAYS STAY TO THE LEFT! Whether you are walking on a sidewalk, driving on a street, cycling along a trail, or walking up some stairs, keep to the left at all times. Trust me, you will be glad you did.
