Queens of Sydney

People lined every available inch of the central harbourside when the two Queens met last night.

The Queen Elizabeth 2 was due to sail past the Queen Mary 2 at 7pm last night - the first time the two had met in Sydney. During World War II the two orginal ships had met in the harbour.

After the welcome the QM2 had received in her pre-dawn arrival, I anticipated that there would be a lot of interest in this meeting.

But the 7pm ferry from Circular Quay to Manly was more rammed than ever - with people queuing at the wharf from 6.30pm and rushing to the sides so they could watch the QE2 sail into the international dock at the quay.

As we left the wharf at 7pm, people were lined around the quay and all around the Opera House. They stood on the banks opposite the quay and peered over balconies of apartments and bars.

We heard the loud horns of the two ocean liners as they met and then rounded the corner of the quay to see hundreds of boats welcoming the QE2 and watching the historic meeting of the two ships. Small speedboats bobbing dangerously to huge catamarans and pleasure boats scattered the water around and between the two ships.

The QE2 is a smaller, older sister to the QM2 but perhaps more famous if not as impressive. The QM2 longer than the highest tower in Sydney is high.







But the ship is still beautiful. It took us ages to manouevre through all the boats and past the QE2 - but no one cared. Water canons sprayed the ship to welcome her and watch her dock at the quay. There was an atmosphere that something special was happening - not least because there were eight helicopters circling overhead.



The QM2 (below) left the naval base dockland (it was too long to dock at Circular Quay and too high to sail under the bridge) late last night but we saw the QE2 as we arrived for work this morning. How wonderful to be able to sail into one of the most beautiful harbours in the world and have a fantastic city lying right at your feet.

Sydney's best party...

Australia Day cocktails with Dani



Well another week has flown by in a haze of work, drinks, dancing, dvds and sunshine.

To be honest the days are rolling into one another right now. I'm enjoying being in a work routine but it is tiring. But who can complain when they catch a ferry to and from work in the sunshine everyday?

The last week has included a party at the hostel, a night out dancing at The Steyne (has to have been a Wednesday), a barbecue (where else but Shelley Beach) and delicious Thai food which made me homesick, would you believe, for that crazy country. Or as my buddy Paul calls it, the land of thighs.

Friday was Australia Day - a national holiday to celebrate everything good about the country. There were parties everywhere, barbecue breakfasts on the beach and crazy activities such as thong throwing (that's flip flops to us) contests,a record attempt to get the most people on inflatables in a line (inflatable thongs no less) and all sorts of other crazy stuff.

Being a rare day off, we spent the morning in bed and then wandered to meet Steve, who was patrolling the beach on life saving duty, before lunch at Emily's cafe. As it was her boss's birthday the employees and friends were having a sing song in the courtyard outside. A chap with a keyboard, another with a guitar, some awesome singers and songs from Crowded House to The Beatles to Norah Jones and Counting Crows - it was a lot of fun.

Dani and I then went for summer cocktails at a funky new bar a couple of doors away - lychees, elderflower and gin - yum!





The real peak of the week was Sunday - my housemate Emily's 20th. She's Swedish and it is their equivalent of our 21st birthday.

We woke up and bought fresh croissants and french bread from the bakery and ate them with cream cheese and sweet chilli sauce, drinking lattes and bellinis, wearing paper hats made by Danielle and having a dance in the sunny living room.

Then Dani arrived, followed shortly by the Kiwis - Kylie, Anneka and Chrissy, who had brought a penis-shaped chocolate cake. It was complete with licorice public hair, a piercing and sweets in the shape of lips and teeth!

After a few more drinks, we piled into cabs to take us to Greenwood Hotel where Sounds on Sunday is held. We went to a party here on Boxing Day and this was another massive event - Ministry of Sounds tour and Kid Kenobi playing a live set.





We arrived massively early (just after 2pm) as we didn't have tickets, met a load of other friends from the hostel and sat in the sun listening to wicked music, chatting and drinking wine.

Later it picked up and we danced the afternoon away in a courtyard surrounded by skyscrapers of North Sydney. Man they looked amazing all lit up against the night sky (when rather intoxicated of course). It was an awesome night that ended way too soon so we hopped in a ca back to Manly and made a (short-lived) trip to Ceruti's bar. Work was pretty hard on Monday!







Norway and France do the Blue Brothers at Sounds on Sunday

Bushfires, 40C and fine wine

So we decide to go wine tasting in the Hunter Valley this weekend - on the hottest day this summer. And yes we did get caught up in the bushfires...

Hunter Valley is like the desert. Seriously. Hot, dry, brown and with little shade anywhere. So probably not the smartest idea when it is pushing 40C in Sydney. In Hunter it was clearly over that.




Still we had a lovely day on Sunday. Took us a while to get going (not my fault for a change), picking up people in the van - which has now been named Bruce the bus - and all squeezing in. It was the same group as last week - Michelle, Paul, Dani, Taz, Danielle and Tom plus Michelle's two Irish friends Jan and Karen.




So off we went with the windows down and system up. But with just pure hot air blowing through - it was a sticky but scenic ride over the Hawkesbury River and north to Hunter Valley which is near Newcastle.




We arrived just after midday and headed straight for Peterson's House - the sparkling wine kingdom of Hunter Valley. We'd had some recommendations for where to visit from some friends at work so we had a few places to aim for out of the hundreds of wineries dotted around the valley.

The sparkling wine here was delicious - the house 'gateway' sparkling (just $17.50 - seven quid) was lovely and light and refreshing and they some lovely sparkling reds too. The sparkling Merlot was great - sadly you can only buy these from the cellar door.

Then it was on through the vineyard-covered valley - with views of Mount Sugarloaf and the Watagan Mountains around us - to Hungerford Hill (not so impressed though nice building), Tempus Two (pretty posh and bit snotty - pics below), Brokenwood, Lindemans as well as McGuigans cheeses and a small producers place for tasty olives, cheeses, pates, olive oils and preserves... it was pretty heavenly. Even if it was bloody hot.






Rather hilariously (for us), Paul and Michelle had decided, for some unknown reason, not to wear shoes. This meant they had to hop skip and jump from the van across boiling tarmac and red-hot gravel to the coolness of the wineries.

We weren't overly impressed by the quality of the wines - apart from the sparklies at Petersons and some of the very expensive ones - or by the attitude of some of the staff at the cellar doors. Clearly they took one look at us and thought - stingy travellers.

As my friend Dani noted on her MySpace blog, people here can seem very friendly on the one hand, but incredibly narrow-minded on the other. There can be quite racist attitudes here and there is way more conformity to dress styles and the way of life.

People dress fashionably in town but few seem to go out of their way to wear anything unusual - there may be a hint of hippy clothes but it will be hippy chic, there may be an element of gothic but it will be in smoky eye make-up than an expression through clothes or stark make-up. In short, Sydney can seem a little bland, a little narrow and a wee bit unexciting compared to vibrant cities such as London or Paris.

Of course that's not to say I'm not having a ball. I enjoy my job and it really is a beautiful place to live and work.

Anyway... we left Hunter around 5pm when the wineries were shutting up for the day. After a bite to eat, we hit the road for what should have been a two-hour trip.

But near Hawkesbury River we saw huge queues leaving the pacific highway and then hit massive queues up through the cuttings of Ku-ring-gai National Park.





We thought maybe there had been an accident but as we crawled along we began to see smoke on the horizon and realised there were some serious bush fires ahead.



Danielle had recently taken the wheel so I was upfront with her (luckily not sat on the bench over the engine any longer which was hotter than hell itself) and was stunned by the huge plumes of smoke discolouring the sky.

But once we had passed these clouds of grey smoke, the traffic did not speed up and we remained inching forward. The heat was stifling and we saw many people pulled up on the central reservation and hard shoulder with overheated engines.

Dani, Karen and Michelle jumped out and took a walk along the hard shoulder - picking up people who were also taking a break from sitting in their cars, wandering to see how far the queues stretched or trying to make it to the emergency telephones.


The girls running to jump back in the van...




At our junction, traffic was completely diverted from the highway but we sped up for a while only to hit more queues and to see huge black plumes of smoke and a red smudge on the horizon. We passed frighteningly close to red bilious clouds on our left while passing suburbs on our right - the train track and a line of trees shielding us from the flames and clouds of smoke.

The adjacent freeway to the pacific highway was completely shut and we later learned that noise barriers were burned and that flames had been leaping across the section of the Pacific Highway that had been closed off. More than 900 hectares has been raized and the following day at work we could see the smoke clouds gathering on the horizon.



Trainlines and the highways were closed and people were travelling up to Palm Beach to get the little ferry across the water to get home to the north. It was a thrilling but frightening experience and horrifying to think of the people in the nearby suburbs having their homes threatened with little anyone could do. The helicopters flying overhead waterbombing the flames seemed so small in comparison to the raging fires.



Elsewhere, Danielle and I did a few hours in the customer service department at Fairfax on Saturday, we waved farwell to another two friends on Saturday night at Shelley Beach and had a fun night out dancing at The Boatshed in Manly on Friday night.

This week promises the theatre, drinks at the Opera bar and Sounds on Sunday (the daytime party we went to on Boxing Day) this weekend for Emily's birthday, and planning Danielle's 21st celebrations. And work of course...

Camping it up...

The sun is shining, summer is here. So what have we been doing? Camping! Oh and getting horrid colds of course.

Had a stinker of a cold - horrible to feel that ill and not be snuggled up with a duvet - because it's too hot! Danielle and I moved into our flat two weeks ago. It's a bit of a squeeze - there are four girls in one room and officially two lads in the other but we currently have two friends staying with us as well! It's lovely - got a balcony and big living room and the people are great. Unfortunately we can't use the pool or gym as the lads were banned when they first moved in - due to friends of their's 'making out' in the pool. ho hum.

But this weekend, a group of us decided to head for the hills - or more aptly - run to the mountains. On Saturday afternoon, seven of us loaded up Paul's van and bought supplies for the trip...



This is officially the best thing in Australia - drive thru booze shops. Amazing.



The campsite felt a bit Blair Witch when we got there - an almost deserted clearing at the end of an immensely bumpy track and many kilometres from civilisation. What, we pondered, would happen if one of us was bitten by a spider in the dunny? Luckily, we did not have to find out.

Taz had the boy scout skills and got us all collecting twigs - the girls (apart from Dani) gingerly picking our way through the bush trying to avoid anything creepy or crawly which may do us some damage. Once the two tents were up, we lit our fire and cracked open our cider (me), beer (most people), whiskey (Irish Michelle).







It was then time to attempt to cook our food. Suddenly cooking sausages on an open fire seemed a tricky task. Using our best Ray Mears skills, the boys put a rock in the middle of the fire and we flambed our sausages - it was a long, slow process but eventually we all got to eat some sausage sandwich.

It was a great evening, sat around chilling and chatting. Playing 'I've never ever..' and telling stories about where we had been and so on.

Danielle and I slept in the van. We were all up early the next morning and re-lit the fire for some more sausages. This time we had a new method of cooking them - placing the sausage in tongs and resting it at the side of the fire - a quicker way to cook them but it did mean we had to do them one at a time. Crisp sandwiches suddenly seemed very appealing...

We then jumped in the van and headed for Katoomba - site of the Three Sisters (below). It was a beautiful day - hot and sunny and we started a walk around the cliff tops. Taz, Paul and Michelle headed back to the van to drive around and meet us and the rest of us continued on. It was a lovely walk - looking down into the valley, hearing birds calling and walking through rainforest and scrubland.



Dani, Danielle and I lost Tom among a group of Asian tourists but continued towards the bottom of the valley and the train back up. It is the world's steepest railway (52 degrees) and it is pretty scary. The carriages are open, there is nothing to hold you in and you get into it and are almost lying down in the seat so that when it goes almost vertical, you don't fall out. We sat right at the front so we could see the ground dropping away below.




At the top we met the group and headed off to Leura - a nearby town. It's very touristy but quite quaint. It was almost like being in a touristy part of the UK - Bouton-on-the-Water or something. We had a picnic under the shade of some trees on a strip of grass in the middle of the road. we then decided to see where the road took us and directed ourselves randomly - ending up in the middle of nowhere along a bumpy dirt track up into the moutains.

High up, we disembarked and climbed to the top of a flat mountain. It was scorching up there and with no shade - just a withered tree and lots of short, stubby grass and boulders. The view was great though - across valleys of very dry and dead-looking trees to purpley mountains in the distance. Easy to see how bushfires start and spread so quickly.

Then it was homeward-bound for a friend's leaving party. Many of our friends have left in the last two weeks with a large contingent leaving on Jan 6. We lost Christine and Kim, our fab fab fab Canadian friends who went up the coast and the Welshies (including the guy I had been seeing, Gareth) among others.

It was also the day Danielle's father Brian and sister Laura left for the UK. So the Friday night was a big farewell party which began with a lovely meal at the Bavarian Beer Cafe - Dani, taz, Danielle, her father and sister, Kim, Christine and me - before heading out to Cerutti's.





The previous Wednesday was supposed to be Team Canada's last night so we had celebrated at The Steyne in our usual style...