[Originally sent as email travelogue, Tuesday, March 7, 9:09 am Pacific Standard Time, from Los Angeles International Airport. At that time it was 3:09 am Australian Eastern Daylight Time in Sydney—the time my body had gotten used to.]

Friday, February 24

Quick note on timing for this trip: We went to Sydney two different times, three nights each on separate consecutive weekends. Friday-Monday February 24-27 was timed for the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade on Saturday the 25th; Saturday-Tuesday March 4-7 was timed for the Sydney World Pride March across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Sunday the 5th.

I have already sent emails detailing our time in Brisbane, where we went first; then Kangaroo Island in South Australia, which we did after our first weekend in Sydney; and Adelaide, where we spent the last three nights of the five in South Australia between the two weekends in Sydney. I just waited to send combined travelogues for both weekends in Sydney, this one focusing on the many non-Pride-related things we did.

For instance: where we stayed at a different hotel each weekend. The gray tower in the center-background of the above shot is Meriton Suites Campbell Street, which happened to be where we had stayed for our first visit to Sydney in 2020 (that one being a consecutive six nights), and was where we chose again for our first weekend this time around. This had to do with both the location, just three blocks or so from Central Station; its relative proximity to the northwestern beginning of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade route at Oxford & Liverpool Streets, half a mile away; and crucially, the inclusion of a kitchenette.

This is the back side of Meriton Suites Campbell Street, taken from a very narrow street just a block or so away and looking up at it—this was the side from which we got our view. As you can see, this building is in an area with several other buildings quite densely situated together, but given my deep love of tall urban environments, that hardly did anything to dampen my satisfaction with it.

Even better: after having gotten a room on floor 19 in 2020, we actually managed to get a unit on floor 31. We were much more proactive about requesting higher floors this time around, emailing each hotel in advance to make the request (invariably they said they would make note of the request but could make no guarantees) and then also requesting in person at check-in. I was beyond happy with the floor location of this unit, even though "floor 31" is misleading: this is one of those hotels that skips certain floor numbers in their numbering, with buttons going up to 39 even though the building only has 32 floors in reality. That's a 7 floor difference; subtract that from the "floor 31" we were on and that actually put us on the 24th floor. (That also put us on the 12th floor in 2020.) Whatever, either way it was still 12 floors higher than we had back in 2020! I was delighted, and so was Shobhit. This was the highest hotel room we got at any of the places we stayed in Australia.

Saturday, February 25

Our very first destination once we got settled into our hotel was very similar to what had been destination #1 after settling into our Sydney hotel in 2020—that year, we went straight to Sydney Tower, basically their version of the Space Needle, notably taller (1,014 ft vs 605 feet, and still the tallest tower in Sydney, ever since construction in 1981) but nowhere near as beautiful (but then, what observation tower is as beautiful as the Space Needle? none!). Anyway, that already having been done, there was no need to return there, although of course I still took plenty of photos of it this visit.

So where did we go first this time instead? Crown Sydney, which had been under construction when we were in Sydney in 2020; was finished later that same year; and now stands as Sydney's tallest "building" (which technically excludes observation towers like Sydney Tower), at 890 ft (271.3 meters) tall.

And check this out: not only does the Crown Sydney building have a public observatory, but it is free! I could hardly believe it, in spite of its built-in limitations and challenges: you can only sign up for timed-entry guided tours to the Sky Deck, occuring only between 6:30 and 9 a.m. Saturday through Wednesday each week, with slots only opening for the following week every Monday.

As you can imagine, especially given the time difference when I was still in Seattle, I spent a lot of time checking to see when I could book this. When I managed to secure two slots for the 8:30 a.m. tour on Saturday the 25th, I nearly pissed my pants with excitement.

Crown Sydney, which is a mixed use building with both residential and hotel units, does the same shit with floor counts as the Meriton Suites does: the Sky Deck is supposedly on the 83rd floor; the building has 75 floors. Eight floors difference! So really the Sky Deck—which is surprisingly small in size (there were maybe 10 people in our 8:30 tour group) and faces only to the north—would thus actually be on the 73rd floor or so, being a few stories from the top.

Not that I'm complaining! The observatory is 820 feet (250 meters) above the ground, and as you can see, the view was absolutely spectacular. It was totally worth the effort of getting secured timed entry slots, and even of getting up early enough to be there by 8:30.

We did a lot of walking on this particular Saturday, first walking to Crown Sydney (1.3 miles from our hotel), and then we walked over to the Sydney Opera House (another 2.5 miles because we walked along the shoreline instead of taking the more direct route) to inquire about tour tickets there.

We just happened upon this rather amusing piece of public art along the way: Still Life with Stone and Car by Berlin-based artist Jimmie Durham in 2004, and apparently in this location since 2006.

We did manage to get the tour tickets at the Sydney Opera House, but we had to buy them for the next weekend—thankfully we were coming back! We then made our way through Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden which is directly south of the Opera House, stopping at a few places along the way, including a brief stint here, at The Sydney Fernery.

We left the Royal Botanic Garden, and by chance happened to walk past the Art Gallery of New South Wales, our attention getting caught by these odd giant clay sculptures just outside. Shobhit inquired about price; we discovered it was free; and we thought what the hell, why not go inside?

There appears to have been a much older wing with more classic art in it which we missed entirely, but that's fine; we spent a little while in the modern wing which was packed with a bunch of very cool modern art, such as this piece made of about four shelves rendered into a "tower" with the use of mirrors. Another favorite was an upside-down world map made out of yarn. Plenty of others were very interesting and fun, making a stroll inside well worth our time.

This building, called The Exchange, we did not go inside, but I just wanted to walk by and see it: built in 2019, it now houses the City of Sydney Library. (Note the rainbow flag to the left. This sort of stuff was seen all over town for World Pride, which I loved.) I only learned about it because of a Twitter account I follow dedicated to interesting architecture from around the world.

Sunday, February 26

Beach day! Full disclosure: nude beach day, at a place called Obelisk Beach, located on the south shore of the small peninsula (one of a great many in Sydney) where Cobblers Beach, another nude beach, is also located on its north side—we went to that one back in 2020. This one is smaller and a bit more secluded, but still about an hour of public transit riding to get to (the very same buses, in fact, as those to Cobblers Beach). Our connecting bus didn't seem to be showing up, and a guy from Germany who had also been on our first bus struck up conversation with us while we were waiting, and when he ordered himself an Uber to get the rest of the way, he offered to let us ride there with him, which was very kind. He immediately parted ways with us as soon as we got to the beach, in case you're wondering.

The beach, and spending time in the water there, was fantastic. We even had intention to come back do it once we returned to Sydney for our second weekend, but on the one day that could even be a possible option, we were no longer up for the long transit ride out there, especially on a day when the heat reached 100°F (37.7°C) with buses that may not have been air conditioned. We bagged the idea of returning in the end, and never did any beach wading again after this (although we did visit a couple of beaches on Kangaroo Island). So, our only real "beach days" this trip were the day trip we took from Brisbane to Gold Coast, and this day. Both were still fantastic though.

Saturday, March 4

And here we jump ahead to our second weekend in Sydney, having gone to South Australia (Kangaroo Island and Adelaide) the five nights in between. Our hotel this time had the oddly long title The York by Swiss-Belhotel International, this one chosen for its location all of three blocks or so from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, across which the World Pride March would be going the next day. (We only discovered later that we had to take transit to North Sydney and then march back, as opposed to the other direction, which I had thus far been assuming. This was still a much more convenient location than the previous weekend's hotel for this event, however.)

The York is sort of backward from the floor numbering of both the Meriton Suites and the Crown Sydney: the York did not skip any floor numbers, and actually didn't even start floor 1 until one floor up from the ground floor, which we are not used to in the States; to us that is the 2nd floor, rendering the building 29 floors rather than the 28 shown on the elevator buttons.

This hotel booked us on floor 14, which to my way of thinking is actually floor 15—basically the same height as our fantastic hotel room in Adelaide had been, only with an even better city view, from a nearly as great open-air patio. That's just over halfway up the height of the building, and still gave us fantastic things to see from our very spacious room. Here we're eating pita bread made with a sort of kidney bean stir fry prepared by Shobhit in the room's kitchen (this was actually taken on Sunday at lunchtime).

Sunday, March 5

After the World Pride March on Sunday morning—which you'll read about in my next (and final, for this trip to Australia) email—we spent the afternoon exploring the city a bit more, including the famous Queen Victoria Building, or "QVB" for short, built in 1898, originally designed as a marketplace and currently a block-wide, high-end mall.

The QVB is beautiful both inside and out, and once we were inside, early evening on a Sunday, the building remained open but nearly all of the shops, at which we would not have likely done any shopping anyway, were closed. More than one giant clock hung like this from the ceiling, one of them with some oddly detailed dioramas on it.

Shobhit and I discovered the Queen Victoria Building to have five floors total, six if you count the basement level. Four of the floors stretch for most of its length, but as we explored the far ends of it, we found a winding staircase that led up to two more floors, these with rather limited floor space area, comparatively. I found a small window on the fifth floor, facing the green dome at the center of the building and across some of its rooftops—this now being a rather unusual view of the QVB. If you count that dome, it presumably adds at least another three floors to the building height, taking the total to eight.

From the QVB we walked the few blocks further down to Pitt Street Mall, which Shobhit had recently read is the fifth-most expensive mall in the world (its retail rents are the most expensive in Australia). There’s an open-air street mall stretch, which itself does not suggest the most expensive shops in the world, with the likes of Zara or Foot Locker as tenants. But, if you venture inside, you start to encounter far higher-end stores. There’s also a few restaurants, not all of these prohibitively expensive, and we decided to venture into one to share an appetizer. We found a place called Babylon, which had a rooftop bar as one of its seating sections where we shared an order of spinach & feta gozleme that was quite delicious.

We also had Sydney Tower, which stands just above this mall, towering right above us. I took this shot to capture both the rooftop bar and the Sydney Tower reflection in another nearby high-rise.

Monday, March 6

Our final major attraction destination for this trip to both Sydney and Australia: the Sydney Opera House, which was a fairly short walk from the York Hotel. We had tickets already in hand, having purchased them on Saturday of the previous weekend. This was the view on the approach from behind, as opposed to the far more famous view from the waters of Sydney Harbour.

On our one-hour guided tour, which I found to be absolutely worth every penny ($43 AUD worked out to about $29 USD per ticket), we learned that the Opera House has 10 “sails,” each designed as a slice of a sphere, but meant to evoke the sails of ships in the Harbour. Two of the “sails” are much smaller than the others, and they cover the high-end restaurant in the rear of the complex (which we did not eat at; our tour was at 11:30 a.m. and the restaurant was closed anyway), which is the side being looked at here.

The Opera House features six theatres, and two different stretches of the larger “sails” housing the two largest. The smaller of those, called the Joan Sutherland Theater, we were all led inside, and we got to see an empty stage and sit in some of its 1,500 very comfortable theater seats. We were even allowed to take photos in there. Not so with the much larger Symphony Concert Hall, where no video or photography was permitted. I have no idea if that rule is always in place, or just when a symphony rehearsal is underway, as was the case when we went in, being cautioned to be very quiet. It was very cool.

Before we went into the Concert Hall, however, we did get to see its large and empty (except for our tour group) lobby, with its spectacular views of both the harbor and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, beyond its quite vivid “Royal Purple” carpeting.

After the Opera House tour, we had nothing planned for the rest of the day—or the rest of the vacation, really, as this was our last day in Australia, before our last night. We found a place near the Opera House to small glass rectangular block with 3D etchings of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge inside it.

Then, with nothing better to do, we walked back over to Oxford Street where the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade had taken place, and on other days had been occupied by “Pride Villages.” This was our first time seeing it reopened to traffic, and we browsed a few of the shops, as this is Sydney’s gay neighborhood regardless of when Mardi Gras or Pride is happening.

We walked back to the hotel again, arriving at about 3:30, and just killed time at the hotel for the next several hours. I did not want to waste our last evening in Australia having done nothing at all, though, so I suggested we go for one last walk just as the sun was setting. We went to a park maybe half a mile away, Barangaroo Reserve—the same park we walked through after our visit to the Sky Deck at Crown Sydney two Saturdays prior, on our way to buy the tour tickets at the Sydney Opera House.

The sun had nearly set by the time we got there, at about 8:15, but I still got a few last, beautiful photos: one of the harbor toward the setting sun; a couple looking back at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, brilliantly illuminated under full moonlight.

(Click here for next travelogue: Sydney World Pride 2023)