A Sydney walkabout

Had my Sydney hotel been located in Paddington or Darlington, I no doubt would have spent the morning lazing around in my room. Which wouldn’t have been so bad. But the Observatory Hotel, as my concierge informed me after breakfast, is “superbly located for a bit of a walkabout. Straight out the door, sir, and in fifteen minutes you’ll be standing on the steps of the Opera House looking across to the Harbour Bridge.”

Well, listen, if your hotel was a fifteen minute walk from the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum would you sit in your room, even if you were operating on less than four hours sleep in the last forty-eight hours? You would not. You would do what I did: Lace up some comfortable shoes, grab your camera, and head out.

The concierge, every bit as helpful as Bennie had been the night before, unfolded a Sydney map and made suggestions: “Just down the street here is the Lord Nelson Hotel which just happens to also be a brewery where you might want to stop in for a Trafalgar pale ale, a lovely quaffer.”

I reminded the concierge that it was not yet 9 a.m.

“Ah, you’re right,” he said, glancing at his watch. “She won’t be open until 11. Pity.”

Right. So, walk down to the Lord Nelson Hotel, go right on Argyle Street, “and soon enough you’ll be standing in front of the Museum of Contemporary Arts. Lovely museum if that’s appealing to you. If not, walk around the quay, do a little souvenir shopping if you like, and right enough you’ll spot the Opera House. Can’t miss it.”

It was a lovely walk. Already the morning was heating up, my shirt starting to stick to my back as I traipsed past the Holy Trinity Church, better known locally as the Garrison Church for reasons that elude me, which was built out of stone from the adjacent neighborhood known as The Rocks in the 1840s, and down hilly Argyle, a pleasant street of sidewalk cafes and boutique shops occupying what once were modest 19^th century houses.

It was such a gorgeously warm blue day that I decided to take a pass on the Contemporary Arts museum (particularly when I saw the legions of school-age children in uniforms lining up on the lawn in front) and continued on past the quay, at the end of Sydney Cove, where any number of ferries and tour boats were gorging themselves on the hundreds of tourists heading out for a closer look at the harbor.

And sure enough, before I knew it, I was on the steps of the famed Opera House, the brilliant sun reflecting mightily off the blistering white concrete shells that rise up like hands held in prayer. The whole scene was so blindingly light that I felt it impossible to really get the full beauty of this building which, like Stonehenge, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the most recently constructed World Heritage Site in the world—so I took the stairs up the Royal Botanic Gardens, just behind the Opera House, and sat on a bench beneath the cool shade of a sprawling Moreton Bay Fig that must have been at least a hundred years old.

All right, time for a confession: When I was maybe 13 or 14, I decided I was going to run away from home and move to Australia. Why? Mostly because it seemed to be the furthest away from where I lived. Which, at the time, was reason enough. And although I didn’t run away—at least not right then—I did become rather fixated on Australia. Until I was old enough to actually do some research into the subject and eventually came to the conclusion that Sydney was just an upside-down version of the place I already lived. And just that quickly I was over Australia.

Over the years, I’ve had many opportunities to visit but I always thought, Why go there? I know what it’s like; I’ve lived in the California version of it. So what a shock to find myself sitting on a bench in the Royal Botanic Garden, listening to the chattering of wild parrots in the trees, staring out at the Opera House and the bridge over Sydney Harbour and thinking, It’s quite charming here. In fact it’s lovely. And I quite like it.

And this, I suppose, is the real reason we travel: To surprise ourselves.