Our First Week Down Under

Sydney struck us as being both one of the most approachable and most closed of cities. There's been plenty written about the place (see especially the very funny first chapter of Bill Bryson's Down Under, which perfectly captures the weird sense that one visits Sydney only to somehow slide off of it, without having really gotten to know anything about it). It's a very pretty, walkable city with that famously beautiful harbor at its heart. We walked around for three days, visiting that harbor, museums, shops, jazz bars, cafes--all the good stuff one counts among the advantages of city living. And yet, we found ourselves footsore but frustrated. Although the sun shone all three days, we couldn't seem to get enough light for our jet-lagged brains. Our hotel room was dim, the lovely, leafy streets around the hotel were shady, the downtown canyons were deeply shadowed in the angled autumn light, and of course the sun sets early down here this time of year. 

The museums were darker than the streets, of course, which didn't help our jet lag, and the best exhibit we saw was, peculiarly enough, a cavernous set of displays in the Australian Museum devoted to the ice-age mammoths of Eurasia, which never set a hairy foot among the marsupials of Oz. 

We eventually made our way down to the harbor itself, where we soaked up late afternoon sun and views of the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge.

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From Sydney, we flew to Adelaide, a city arranged on a tidy grid. We went there to catch the Ghan north to Darwin, and spent only a couple of nights and a day before getting on our train. 

The northern edge of central Adelaide prettily borders gardens and galleries on one side, with bustling city and shops on the other side of the boulevard. The architecture is generally handsome, although again we found ourselves a bit becalmed, walking back and forth between stores and historic sites. After a month in southern Africa, the matter-of-fact hustle and bustle of these familiar-feeling western cities felt almost cool, sterile.

The highlight of the day in Adelaide, however, was the South Australian Museum, with its massive collections of Aboriginal and South Pacific artifacts.

We had a last, quick look at the Aboriginal art in the neighboring Art Gallery of South Australia, and then the museums closed and it was sunset already again in Adelaide. We holed up in our hotel, did laundry, and dreamt of riding the Ghan into the Outback.