Yearly Archives: 2023

Next, we drove to the Katoomba Scenic Railway, an incline railway that was originally constructed for a coal and oil shale mining operation in the Jamison Valley in the 1880s, in order to haul the coal and shale from the valley floor up to the escarpment above. From 1928 to 1945, it carried coal during the week and passengers at weekends. The coal mine was closed in 1945 after which it remained as a tourist attraction.  "The Scenic Railway makes many claims to be the steepest passenger railway, the steepest funicular, and the steepest incline in the world. However the railway uses a winch system and no counterbalancing carriage, therefore it is an inclined lift rather than a funicular." Wikipedia At the entrance... ... and then we move towards the carriage, and find our seats. This is already feeling like a steep angle! Batten down the hatches! We're heading down! Check out this movie... https://youtu.be/Hw7brLT8-HI After arriving at the bottom of the incline, we exit the carriage, and then take a walk along the raised walkway that shows some of the debris from the former mining operation. In the gallery below, click on an image to view it in a larger format. At the end of the boardwalk, we encounter a terminus of the Scenic Skyway: A cable car just arrived, so we hop on... This is a seriously big cable car! Unfortunately, the weather we experienced was not as good as in the above photo. The cable car took us, predictably, to a gift shop, we picked up the bus again, and were taken to Katoomba, where we ate at a very good, Mom & Pop style pie shop, the Bakehouse on Wentworth. To get to the Bakehouse, from where the bus dropped us off, we had to cross a street called Megalong St. That name appealed to my sense of humour! Apparently, Australians love their pies -- we were told that that's what they eat at Australian Rules Football games, and elsewhere too. I ate a Steak & Kidney Pie, and it was very good. A lot better than hot dogs and hamburgers! I went in search of a pharmacy, because I was having cold symptoms (much more about that, later!), found one, and then waited at a cafe, sipping a Long Black, until we could get the bus back to Sydney.

We got back to the hotel from our Blue Mountains tour, and relaxed a little in our rooms. Then, I had arranged to meet Neb again, together with his 10-year old daughter, Alice. They were waiting for me in the hotel lobby when I came down from my room, and they whisked me off to The Australian Heritage Hotel in The Rocks area of Sydney. The Rocks is a neighbourhood of historic laneways in the shadow of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Locals and tourists mingle at the open-air Rocks Markets, purchasing street food and handmade fashions. The area has some of Sydney’s oldest pubs and many of the upscale restaurants have harbour views.  Alice had come up with an interesting experience for me: a Coat of Arms Pizza. Here's the Australian coat of arms: So, perhaps you can imagine what they put on a Coat of Arms pizza... Our Coat of Arms Pizza Kangaroo meat and Emu meat! I thought it was pretty good, and went well with a local craft IPA. Here's Alice and me partaking of it (Neb's taking the photo, but he also partook): Alice is a very impressive 10 year old. She has a great sense of humour, and a surprisingly good sense of irony. I know enough about Neb to realize that he has influenced that. His sense of humour and irony is unique, and he actively practices them with Alice, as I observed several times. I suspected that Alice's mother, Cristin, is also a similar influence, but I had yet to meet her. Alice is also very well-informed. I would often ask her about things, and she continually surprised me with her knowledge of lots of topics. For example, New South Wales, the Australian state of which Sydney is its capital, was having an election, and Neb and Alice had been studying the details, including the issues, and what each political party stood for. She knew and understood a lot about the whole thing. I was very impressed! After pizza, Neb and Alice drove me to a pharmacy, where I picked up some cold medicine, and then dropped me off back at the hotel, and we made plans for Neb to pick me up the next day, after the group's planned Sydney Harbour Cruise.

That morning, I had continued symptoms of a cold, so went down to breakfast wearing a mask as a precaution. Later, I contacted Neb, and suggested that it might be wise not to meet with his family after the Sydney Harbour Cruise, as previously arranged, as I didn't want to infect them. That turned out to be very prophetic! The next day, we started out with a bus tour to view Sydney Harbour. We stopped at a few places, but by that time I wasn't feeling up to visiting them. Sydney skyline, with cruise ship We went to Mrs. Macquarie's Chair... Mrs Elizabeth Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Folklore has it that she used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Mrs Macquarie's Chair is an exposed sandstone rock cut into the shape of a bench, on a peninsula in Sydney Harbour. It was hand carved by convicts in 1810, for Mrs. Macquarie, so she had a comfortable seat from which to view the harbour. This is the stone inscription commemorating the chair. Here's the actual chair: It doesn't look that comfortable, does it?

We had already seen the Sydney Opera House from the outside, but now we were to enjoy a tour, and thus the inside, too. Not only is the outside of the Sydney Opera House impressive from the outside, it really wows on the inside, too: In the gallery below, click on an image to view it in a larger format. Extremely impressive performance spaces, and wonderfully imaginative architecture!