New Year - Sydney style

KING'S CROSS, SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES - 1st January 2010

Happy New Year! I can happily report that Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge fireworks display is indeed as spectacular as it is bigged up to be - at 12 minutes in length it involves a quite remarkable quantity of exploding metal, and the choreography around the Bridge and the Opera House is pretty awesome.

The hours leading up to midnight were fairly eventful, although not in the sort of way I would have chosen. My Greyhound coach arrived at Central Station on schedule at 11am, and I walked over to the Meriton where Neil, a friend from Pembroke, was booked in (as getting accommodation here over New Year is next-to-impossible, I'd happily taken up his offer of the floor). After several attempts to call his room with no one picking up, and knowing he'd lost his mobile, I left my bags in the luggage room at reception and - armed with the trusty LPG - went exploring around the central area of town - checked out the impressive architecture of the Town Hall and St. Andrew's Cathedral next door to it, as well as the Queen Victoria Building shopping mall - a place so lavish and historical it would do well to be in Knightsbridge or Mayfair in London. Working my way north, I took in the vast facade of the General Post Office at No.1 Martin Place - complete with gargoyles and the imposing statue of Queen Vic - and over at Macquarie Place the cannon and anchor from HMS Sirius, the leading ship of the First Fleet that arrived in Sydney on the 18th January 1788 to establish the first convict settlement.

It was about here that things got interesting. Firstly, the heavens had opened - it goes without saying that when you're walking around a city miles away from your things, and with nowhere to change even if you could get to your clothes, rain is about as welcome as Barack Obama at a KKK Convention. The weather was a side-issue, however, shadowing the more pressing matter that arose when I checked facebook on my mobile and discovered a message from Neil saying that he was now flying back to LA early morning on the 1st, and had therefore checked out... leaving me high and dry (but, ironically, rather wet)!

A few quick phonecalls were made, and soon I was on my way to King's Cross - the backpacker-dominated precinct to the east of the main city centre - where Becca, another Pembroke friend is crashing in an apartment with friends she's made travelling around Australia. Awkward introductions were made, stories of travelling traded, and a few hours later we were all marching off to Rushcutters Bay with a picnic of sandwiches, pasta, crisps and wine (of a particularly cheap, nasty variety), to get ourselves a nice spot to watch the fireworks.

Rushcutters Bay was an excellent find by one of Becca's friends - it's far enough from the main centre that it isn't rammed, and anyone looking at it on a map would assume that the view of the Bridge is blocked by the peninsulas in front of it - but in fact you have a perfect view of the Bridge and the whole city away to the left - allowing you to see all the fireworks at once. We had a preview at 9pm, with the inaugural "Children's fireworks display", but the real deal at midnight was, well, the real deal - as the video below illustrates!



From there it was out to Kings Cross' bars - a typically messy affair - and this morning was not particularly enjoyable. However, with time in Australia running out I forced some productivity out of myself, and went for a long walk around the Botanical Gardens, which provide the best view of the Opera House and Bridge at once, and all the way around the Bay to the Opera House itself. I'll be back again tomorrow to climb the Bridge!

On the way back, and in serious need of some food to settle my stomach, I strayed across a fairly nondescript portable van next to the naval docks at Woolloomooloo (another addition to the "places with ridiculous names" collection), which turns out to be a place of some legend. Harry's Cafe de Wheels have been serving their "Tiger" pies, complete with mash and peas, since 1945, and the walls of the van are adorned with photographs of all sorts of celebrity customers, ranging from Pamela Anderson to Frank Sinatra to Sir Richard Branson. The place is definitely worth a visit, but at the very least the history is worth a read.

Photos... well they'll turn up eventually.

The DAILY ROD's Top Travel Tips:
#10 - The dictum "Beer before wine? Fine. Wine before beer? Oh dear" exists for a reason.