Sydney Saturday

After an eventful Friday, the consensus was to take it a bit easier today, starting with breakfast a little later than before. Once again, the hotel served up a nice selection for us, but as we gathered to leave, it was drizzling. Still, almost as soon as we walked outside, the rain stopped and never reappeared all day. The plan today was to stroll through the middle of the Royal Botanic Gardens, rather than walking around the perimeter, along the harbor, as we had done yesterday. Eventually we found our way to the neighborhood called The Rocks. We started through, first passing the art museum, then a huge open-air concert ground where preparations were being made for a concert that evening. After passing the Public Library of New South Wales, we finally ventured into and through the gardens.

In the Royal Botanic Gardens

Government House

Eventually, we found our way to Government House, which had been the original official residence of the governor, but decided to skip the tour in favor of wandering around the gardens. Just to the right was this magnificent ficus tree that felt more like something out of the deepest jungles of southeast Asia than an urban tree in the middle of Sydney:

Outside Government House

Finally, we came back to the harbor near the Opera House and arrived right at noon in front of the Circular Quay, where we stopped at an outside bar overlooking the water and the Harbor Bridge, and had our first beers of the day. Eventually, we walked around to the other side of the water for lunch – another outside spot overlooking the water and the Opera House, with a steady stream of ferries and excursion boats coming and going by as we enjoyed the warm day.

Del and I; Sydney Cove

After another long, leisurely lunch (I've drunk more beer in the last three days than probably the last three years) we ended up at a large open-air market in The Rocks, and we poked around there for awhile before heading back to the hotel. Some took a cab, but I walked back, planning to stop at the public library to see an exhibition about the history of the mapping of Antarctica. Afterwards, I was sitting on the steps of the library when Bill and Robbie came by, so we walked together back to the hotel. We regrouped downstairs at 7 p.m. to finish off the last three bottles of champagne that the hotel had given us when we arrived, and left at about 8:15 p.m. for dinner at the Spice Temple, an Asian restaurant in downtown Sydney. The entrance door is essentially a huge flat TV turned on end that plays a video of a billowing curtain, inviting you into a winding staircase that descends into the basement, where we entered this very dark, very hip place. The menu listed some of the most unusual dishes I've ever seen – no sweet-and-sour pork here! My hands-down favorite of all was "Fish drowned in heaven-facing chillies and Sichuan Peppercorns" but the "Hot and numbing dry Wagyu Beef" appetizer was a close second. The Sichuan peppercorns had been described as "mouth-numbing"and they were just that: not spicy hot, but actually tongue-numbing (fortunately, not taste-numbing) in a gingery, peppery kind of way. By the time we polished off one of each dessert, we looked around and saw that for the second night in a row we were closing down the restaurant. It was after midnight when we finally left. As I write this, it's actually about 7:00 Sunday morning, time to pack and get ready for head back to the airport for the flight to Adelaide to begin the real objective of this trip, the Tour Down Under. On to South Australia!