As great as the chorus performance was last night, today’s city tour was a bust. We rode around town in a van with a half-dozen other tourists. The guide stopped at a park and a couple of viewpoints and told us some stories about the history of Sydney, but if I hear about Governor Phillips and the 11 convict ships, I’m gonna choke. That’s not the guides fault, I suppose, and maybe we’ve just got gethomeitis, but it didn’t work for me. Other than the stops it was difficult to see anything and to appreciate what we were seeing.

Our guide did drop a few interesting tidbits. Metropolitan Sydney has 300 Km – 180 miles – of shoreline. It’s a big bay with lots of nooks and crannies, giving it a seemingly impossible statistic. There are only 57 private homes in that entire stretch. Sydney is blessed with lots of public parks and, I think he said, over 50 swimming beaches. It’s a good place to live.

Twenty nine years ago, after several mass shootings, the Australian government appropriated enough money to buy back everyone’s rifle and other firearm capable of holding more than two cartridges. Possession of such a weapon now is treated as an act of attempted murder, with a fourteen-year prison sentence. Since the buyback was put in place, spanning 29 years now, Australia has had zero cases of gun violence. He hastened to point out that direct comparison with USA isn’t appropriate, given the different histories of the two countries. Australia has never had gun-slinging cowboys, nor has it had revolutionary or civil wars. Australia just rolled over and played nice with the Brits.

Christmas isn’t as big a holiday as it was when he was a kid (I’d guess he’s 60). He says that scandals in the Catholic Church have decreased attendance. Further, Australia has had a big influx of Buddhists and Muslims from Asia and the Middle East. Parents have complained about Christmas in schools. Times they are a changin’ in Australia as everywhere else.

Sixty five percent of Australia’s federal revenues come from royalties on mining production. That means they can be generous when it comes to providing education, health care and pensions.

The tour ended in The Rocks, a neighborhood right next to our hotel in the Circular Quay. This whole area – Circular Quay and The Rocks, is where Governor Phillips set up the first penal colony in 1888. For the first two years or more the convicts and their guards alike lived in near starvation conditions until they figured out how to grow crops. Virtually none of the convicts had any practical skills such as farming or construction, so the going was tough. Now, it’s a place of tourism. The average visitor probably consumes enough calories in a day to feed a convict for a month. We’ve each been good for two convicts for a month.

We toured the Rocks, a fairly compact neighborhood and, as is our custom a) got an ice cream cone to hold us until lunch time; b) bought souvenirs to take home to the Fam and c) went back to the hotel for a 30-minute nap. After the nap, we hit the Executive Lounge here at the hotel for cookies to complete our lunch. Sufficiently fortified, we caught the ferry across the bay and almost to The Gap – the entrance to the harbor from the South Pacific. Our final destination was the beach town of Manly.

Manly is indeed a beach town – think Old Orchard Beach, Maine. T-shirt and souvenir shops, fast-ish food restaurants and lots of kids parading up and down the sidewalks and the beach. Being old folks, we found a comfortable bench in the shade and watched life pass by. An old guy sitting next to us did Sudukos. The next old guy on the beach read a newspaper.

Back across the bay we went, and back to The Rocks for dinner. Having no plan, we found Le Foote, advertising itself as serving mideastern cuisine with a modern twist. Judy had a very nice pork dish and I had Barramundi, a South Pacific fish. The waitress apologized that today’s catch produced 500 gram filets – that’s more than a pound. I gulped, gave it my best  but couldn’t eat the whole thing, no matter how good it tasted. “Nice try,” complemented the waitress.

We’re back in the hotel, pretty much packed and planning on a 6:30 AM alarm, breakfast in the Executive Lounge, and an Uber at 8:00. Flight time is 11:50 AM. We change planes in Houston and get to Tampa at 3:18 PM the same day. It’s actually 18.5 hours travel time but the International Date Line gives us back a day.

Judy has put together another video, this one dealing with our time at Uluru. Here’s the link:

https://judyrick.zenfolio.com/australia_videos/hcb496d10#hcb496d10

So, this is the last blog posting for this trip. If I think of it, I’ll make a posting confirming our safe arrival, but don’t get concerned if I forget. ↓

Thanks for traveling with us and we’ll look forward to posting again when we start our trip to Antarctica January 31, 2024.