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As I write this, it’s 11:10AM in Sydney.  In an hour, the shuttle service will arrive to take me to the airport, where I’ll hang around for a couple of hours before getting on the flight to Sydney.   It’s been a great trip (except for the getting sick part), but it’s time to start getting immersed back into the real world.

The best way to do that is to adjust to Chicago time.   As a result, I ended up only taking a brief nap last night.   7pm Sydney time is 2am Chicago time, and my plan is to try to sleep immediately after the dinner service.   To keep myself awake after getting back to the hotel, I packed and then made a variety of phone calls back to the states.  I also got plugged back into work, and after talking with several people to find out if there was anything that would annoy me when I read my email (there was not), I held my breath and downloaded my email to the laptop.   Surprisingly, there were only 192 emails for 23 days.  I had planned on going through a larger stack of email on the plane, but I could knock off most of the 192 email in a few hours, and by 5am I was done.

After a two hour nap, I cleaned up and headed off to the original Darlinghurst bills,  the restaurant of Sydney’s TV cooking presenter Bill Granger.  I’d seen a couple of episodes of his show while laid up in bed and was impressed by his approach.  He’d made his initial mark with breakfasts, so I thought it would make a pleasant going-away meal.   I was not disappointed.  His main trademark is hotcakes with ricotta and banana, but I’m meh about ricotta, so I went with his other mainstay: a supposedly Jamaican coconut bread, along with a raspberry muffin that ended up being ridculously huge, and an order of bacon.

I’m not sure how Jamaican the coconut bread was, but it was excellent.   For a typical breakfast instead of a “I’m not going to be fed anything but airline food for 24 hours” breakfast, just the coconut bread and some juice and coffee would have been more than sufficient.

After taking the subway over, I splurged for a taxi back to the Hilton.  A couple of last minute shopping items, and after 45 minutes online, it’s time to shut down and finish the last bits of packing.

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And finally, we arrived at the last night. Not sadly, it’s time to go home. But I wanted the last night to be a time of reflection before getting back to the chaos. When I toured Europe alone for a similar length of time in 1993, I spent most of the final evening on a long stroll through some of the nicer parts of Madrid, ending up just off the central square down the street from my cheap hotel for a couple of orders of tapas. It wasn’t a planned walk, it just evolved into a three hour adventure.

Last night ended up being a similar type of night. This is the longest post of the entire blog, so I’ll put the little link here for continued reading ->: Continue Reading »

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I’m not a big zoo fan.  I’ve never been to the Brookfield Zoo in suburban Chicago, and I’ve only been to the Lincoln Park Zoo a couple of times.  I keep meaning to go to the San Diego Zoo, but something always comes up.   But it’s impossible to go to Australia, and not go to a zoo.  I did not go in Melbourne, so my last major sightseeing task for the vacation was a visit to Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.

The zoo is in a fabulous location, on a peninsula almost directly across the harbor from the Opera House.  The easiest way to get there is to take a ferry boat from Circular Quay.  The ferry takes 15 minutes, and drops you off at the southern or “bottom” entrance to the zoo.   As the zoo is on a peninsula heading into the harbor, the elevation changes dramatically across the zoo, with the parts closest to the harbor being at the lower elevations.  To get to the top portion, you can take a Sky Safari (not me, I do not like chair lifts at all), or if you bought a combined ferry/bus ticket, you can take a city bus for three minutes to go the mile around the zoo to the top entrance.

I spent two hours at the zoo, and I was glad I went.  I did not try to see everything, but instead focused primarily on the Australian animals (kangaroos, koalas, emus, etc.) and the elephants and giraffes.  The Taronga zoo is big on their elephants, and are building a new habitat for them this year.  In fact, if you go into the center gift shop (closest to the elephants), you won’t find anything with a kangaroo on it.   But I managed to get some kangaroo, koala, and penguin related merchandise in the lower gift shop.

Getting confused in the center gift shop delayed me just long enough to miss the 2pm ferry back to Circular Quay by about 90 seconds.  Fortunately, it was a beautiful day, and it felt good to just sit and relax at the pier despite the various tantrums being thrown by assorted 2-9 year olds.   A quick ferry ride back turned into a bit of an ordeal as there was a problem with another ferry, and we had to wait fifteen minutes for a different quay to open up.

By this point I was starving, and so I collected a Harry’s meat and veggie pastie from a stand near quay #4, and an order of gelato from the stand near quay #5.   Once I finished those, I took the train back to Town Hall and made my way back to the hotel.

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I overslept this morning, but fortunately the sunlight woke me up at 8:20am.  Today was going to be a very busy day, and I couldn’t afford to start late!

The first stop of the day was the Sydney Opera House.  I had purchased a ticket for the tour for the first Sunday of the vacation, but I was in the emergency room at the time so that did not quite work out.   So today was my last shot at getting in the tour.  I arrived at 9:40am and bought a ticket for the 10am tour.  With 20 minutes to kill, I got a quick breakfast at the kiosk next to the tour meeting point, and then James came along to take about 30 of us on the tour.

The tour was supposed to take an hour, but ended up taking 80 minutes as we were fortunate to have the main concert hall empty.   The phrase “Sydney Opera House” is misleading; the facility has a symphony hall, a drama/opera hall, and three smaller theaters.  There is something going on almost every day of the year, including sometimes school groups (it is owned by the state government).

The building is fascinating inside and out.   The two largest halls are completely self-contained wooden structures that do not touch the concrete shell at any part.   We were able to spend some time at the top of both of them, to get a sense of their size.  The building is in dire need of some mobility enhancements, as there are no elevators or escalators to get to the upper levels.   Enhancements are planned, but the total cost (including some renovations to the opera hall) are over A$600 million, so it might take a while.

The original budget in the early 1960s was A$7 million, the final total was A$102 million… they had to run a lottery to help raise funds to cover the difference.  The tour tries to gloss over the controversy around how the original architect got fired, by emphasing that he’s working on the rennovations now and they’ve named a room after him.  But it appears to have been a rather messy situation.

After 80 minutes of covering a significant portion of the complex, the tour ended and I made my way to Circular Quay for a trip to the zoo.

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More photos… the last day’s worth of Tassie photos, and a ridiculous number of photos of Uluru in an attempt to find one or two worthy of an 8×10. Click here to get to Shutterfly.

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A couple of weeks ago, when I was leaving the emergency room, I walked out to the street to hail a cab.  I looked around, and thought “hey, that looks like a nice neighborhood.”   At the time, I didn’t quite realize that I was in the Darlinghurst neighborhood, and I certainly didn’t realize that last night’s dinner destination was in that nice neighborhood.

I had read about a tavola in multiple locations, including a couple of discussion boards and the Qantas in-flight magazine.   I was warned that there would be a bit of a wait as it is a small place, (erroneously) that there were no reservations, and that it would be worth it.   So after a small appetizer in the Hilton executive lounge, I set off for Darlinghurst.

Normally, this would be a long but reasonable walk, but I’m still not quite 100% healthy, so I popped for the A$3.60 for a round trip subway ride two stops from Town Hall to Kings Cross.   It turns out that where I stopped at Kings Cross the last time I was in Sydney, if I had kept on walking, I would have discovered Darlinghurst.   The restaurant was a few blocks down, and as expected, they were full up.  But the hostess was very nice about it, and offered to either seat me immediately if I was willing to leave promptly in a half hour, or take my mobile number and call me when a table was ready in about fifty minutes.  Since I was not in any kind of hurry, I gave her my mobile number and went for a walk.  One goal of my meanderings was to find the restaurant bills, my breakfast stop for Thursday.

After about a half hour, I stopped at the Green Park hotel/bar at the light just down the street, and had a half-pint of Victoria Bitter beer.   I like this half-pint thing, as well as Australian “bitter” beers such as Victoria and Cascade.

By the time I finished my beer, the phone rang, and I walked over to the restaurant.  Most of the seating is at a very long table with french doors opening to the street, and I was given the seat closest to the front.

My meal was very good:  arrancilli risotto balls plated with a spicy tomato-based sauce in a martini glass, a pasta dish with veal meatballs and a thin red sauce that reminded me of a Greek sauce from lamb that goes over spaghetti, a very good Italian wine that was a sangiovese/merlot blend, and some delicious bread with red pepper infused olive oil.   The only fault was that the veal was very lean and thus a little dry, and it could have used more of the sauce.

The total bill came out to A$60 all-in, which I thought was very reasonable and consistent with what I’d pay in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago, or the Dupont Circle section of Washington.   It was a beautiful night, and I contemplated forgoing the return subway ticket and walking back as it was downhill, but I came to my senses and took the quick subway ride back to the hotel and called it a night.

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I love Hilton.  I started to love Hilton when they bought out the Promus holdings back in 2000, which added Hampton Inn, Homewood Suites, and Embassy Suites to the chain.  Before that, I didn’t really have much opportunity to stay at Hilton properties.

Right after the purchase, they had a promo where if you made 4 stays in 90 days, you got “Gold” status for a year, and a bunch of bonus points.   That got me hooked, since it let me cash in some United miles for six nights in London.  Over the last seven years, I have about 275 nights in Hilton properties, and their Diamond status (at least 28 stays each year).   Most of them are the lower-end properties, both for work and for weekends away.   But I’m able to cash in my points for stays at their best urban properties on virtually no notice, with no blackouts.

Anyway, I get to the hotel yesterday and I’m on a lower floor than last time, but other than that I’m not really paying attention.  I get to the room, and it turns out to be a two-room, 1.5 bath, corner suite.  It’s a little smaller than the Park Hyatt Melbourne, but it’s organized much better.   There’s also an Executive Lounge with light snacks, where I had some appetizers before heading out last night.

The only nitpick I have is their mini-bar setup.  It’s one of those really tacky early 80s inventions where if you move anything at all, you get charged for it.   Really… let me move the bottles around so I can stick my bottle of water in there for a few hours.

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I flew Qantas back from Ayers Rock yesterday.  The plane was about 85% full in economy, but business was virtually empty.   Out of a possible 12 seats, there was me, and an older Australian couple who booked a weekend away at the last minute and were shocked (!) to find out that Ayers Rock would be this (!) hot in January.  No!  They yammered about it to everybody they could find, fortunately I had the presence of mind to put on my headphones before they got to me.

My flight was a little better than a corresponding US domestic flight.  The plane itself was a 737-800, and it was almost identical to an American Airlines plane of the same type.  The only differences were 3 rows of business instead of 4,  legrests that didn’t do much, and an in-flight entertainment system.  Qantas makes the effort of loading new videos twice/day with a 15-minute national newscast from one of the broadcast stations.  Of course, their relatively small domestic network makes it easy to day.

Lunch was a choice of either a fish or a salad with lamb.  I took the fish - it was ok for airplane food.  The movie was The Darjelling Express, which looked extremely stupid.

Upon landing, I collected my bags and found the airport shuttle bus service.  The round trip is $22 vs. about $95 by taxi.   Of course, it takes much longer, almost an hour from the time I got to the stand to the time I got to the hotel.

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The saddest thing about wasting Monday night at the Ayers Rock Resort is that I could really use one more day in Sydney.   As it is, my flight leaves at 10:55am Tuesday, and with the time change I will get to my hotel room at about 5pm.   I will have essentially 43 hours left on the vacation on that point, and I’m going to have to go at a furious pace to get as caught up on Sydney as possible.   Completely caught up from the days lost being sick is not going to happen, so it becomes a matter of what gets left behind.

I’ve moved back to the Hilton for the last two days.   The two must-see things on my agenda are the Taronga Zoo and the Opera House tour.   I’d like to get to Bondi, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.  Now that all the restaurants are open again, I’m planning to have dinner and poke around Darlinghurst and Surrey Hills the two evenings that I’m there.   And I have to spend a little time getting myself slowly reimmersed into work on Wednesday and Thursday before breakfast, so that I have something to do on the flight to LA.

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On their guest survey forms, the people at Voyages who run the Ayers Rock Resort ask a question about rating “value for money” on a scale to 10.  My answer is somewhere around -4.   This has been the only truly disappointing part of the trip.  The fact that the Australian government has granted Voyages a monopoly situation at Ayers Rock is a tragedy that just pulls A$50 bills out of your wallet at a rapid pace.

Where should I begin?  I’m sitting in the most posh property, the “Sails in the Desert” hotel.   All the properties are situated along a ring road about 5 minutes from the airport and about 25 minutes from the Rock itself.    They’ve discounted rooms here at the last minute, down to A$350/night from A$442 or A$514.   The buffet dinner is A$58.  A 40oz bottle of water is A$7.

I’m staying at the lowest-end property (excluding the campgrounds), the Outback Pioneer.  My “budget room” is actually a bunkhouse for four that I have all to myself, for A$192.  For that, I get “two star lodge” accomodations, meaning no TV and twin beds in a cinderblock building.   There are three star more traditional hotel rooms, but they were sold out to a Japanese tour group.

To make matters worse, four of the five properties have wireless internet, as does the campground.  The Outback Pioneer?  No, we have kiosks at 10 cents/minute.   So, I’ve been spending most of today in the lobby at the Sails in the Desert, where I purchased a day’s worth of wireless internet.

The lights/AC in any of the rooms (at any property) do not work unless you are in the room.  How, you ask?  Because you have to stick your key into the master power to activate it.   Only the minifridge and clock stay working when you’re out of the room.   So, it takes easily an hour to cool off the room when it’s 102 outside, and even then it never really gets cool.

I’m not too annoyed with the budget room itself.  I wasn’t willing to pay an extra $100 to $250/night for two nights for anything nicer.   Even though it’s a cot setup, it was comfortable, and I can live without the TV.

What I’m really annoyed about is the nickel-and-diming of the property.   I started off in a bad mood when I found out that there was no courtesy shuttle to the cultural center, and that I had five minutes to decide if I wanted to go or else waste all of Sunday night in the room.  If it wasn’t for the grocery store (which they have to have for the campers as well as for the employees), it would be an unmitigated disaster.  I was able to pick up today’s lunch, tomorrow’s breakfast, and some snacks to go with dinner for A$33.   The 40oz water was only A$3.65 instead of A$7 - compared to A$2 at your typical Coles or Woolworths.

Some prime examples of the greed:

• The hotel prices themselves.  I know they’re in the middle of nowhere, but I have to think a little competition could get a Hampton Inn type place in here for A$135/night in the off-season (which is what we’re in right now);
• Deciding that the Outback guests can pay $12/hour for internet kiosks instead of $25/day for wireless;
• Charging a 1% surcharge for all credit card transactions;
• Charging $35 per trip for the shuttle service to the rock, that only runs once/hour;
• $8.43 for a 750ml bottle of water at dinner last night.

I thought my friend Ed was crazy when he did Uluru as an all-day bus tour from Alice Springs (425 km each way).   Given the monopolistic situation here, it isn’t as crazy as I thought.  I still wouldn’t do it, because I think the sunrise tour is the highlight of being here.

While I’m flying to Sydney tomorrow, I’ll put together some thoughts as to how to organize your visit to Uluru in a way that minimizes the pain of the resort.

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