Sorry for the Group Email

It was only as we touched down in Sydney that it occurred that we really hadn’t written about it much.

This is a shame, as Sydney might be the cleanest, handsomest city on the planet. Not cleaner, perhaps, than Singapore, but then what can you expect from a city that fines people five hundred dollars for eating on the train?

It’s not just that Sydney has big buildings and a superb skyline, although it does. Its streets are wide and clean; its smaller buildings and suburbs are characterful, friendly and supremely easy to get around. Its buses are punctual and its trains are reliable. And, when you get tired of the city, Sydney’s beaches are clean, plentiful and spacious.

And, when you get tired of all that, you can sit for a few hours and ponder the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

I’m a fan of bridges. When I lived in London I once spent an entire day walking along the Thames. I intended to go home eventually, I suppose, but became addicted to walking to the next bridge. Eventually I took in everything from Westminster to Richmond – a walk of fourteen miles or so, but nothing in London (including Tower Bridge, in my opinion) can beat Sydney’s crowning achievement.

The Harbour Bridge is a record-breaker. It’s the largest steel arch bridge in the world and spans over half a kilometre. It took eight years to build, and an average of two people were killed for each year of its construction.

The result is unbelievably good-looking. The sheer size of the bridge is something: as well as being long, it’s wide enough to include an eight-lane motorway and two train tracks. The crest of the arch is a hundred and thirty four metres above the harbour. To see it in its gorgeous entirety you need to be well away from the bridge itself, and the view is stunning from every angle. It’s an incredibly handsome, strong-looking structure that I could stare at for hours. In terms of early twentieth-century architecture I can’t think of anything that looks better.

(If you can, though, pop a link and explanation in the comments section.)

After New Zealand we were in Sydney for three days: long enough to re-visit our fabulous housemates in Bronte Beach, launder our clothes, and head to the opera.

The opera, we reasoned, was a little like the ballet we visited in St Petersburg in February: if you’re going to go, go somewhere where it’s an icon.

The Sydney Opera House is a building you could identify just from its silhouette. The up-close reality is that, shape aside, it’s not a million miles away from the Barbican Centre: chocolate brown glass and concrete, albeit temptingly-climbable, pleasingly-sloped concrete. Still, seeing the entire building in profile is one of those things that never gets old: it’s a perfect neighbour for the bridge.

The problem with opera – and I’ll hear your accusations of philistinery at the bottom, thanks – is that it’s all in a foreign language. In other media – film, say – this isn’t a problem, but on stage, and particularly when set to music, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re reading surtitles over the actors. And, of course, the words don’t appear in time with the music, which means sentiments which in Italian are lengthy and beautiful, are occasionally rendered in short, prosaic English. I once heard that opera – in London at least – would soon die out if it wasn’t subsidised by wealthy philanthropists and the government. Certainly, there was a good list of corporate sponsors at the bottom of the program accompanying our La Bohème tickets.

The final thing to mention about Sydney – and if you’re there you really should go – is a small chain of Mexican restaurants called Guzman and Gomez. This is the king of fast food restaurants. We stopped in Bondi – one of Sydney’s largest shopping districts – on our way to the airport, and stopped for a final burrito.

I was, if I’m honest, gutted to be leaving Australia. It’s virtually next-door to Asia and even closer to New Zealand. It’s clean, progressive and stocked with friendly people. Its drivers are assiduous indicator users, which makes walking about a pleasure.

As we left the restaurant, our waiter chimed, “See you later.”

“No, you won’t,” I thought. We went to America.

Dave find that being upset about leaving somewhere is tempered when you’re heading to Hawaii. Also I think I made up the words “characterful” and “philistinery” in this article. Complaints to the comments section.

Honesty box

The first draft of this made reference to “subtitles” at the opera. The correct word is “surtitles”, which is the correct term for a translation of a play or opera, projected or displayed above the stage. Live and learn.

Yes, yes, and the accent in “Bohème” was wrong as well. I was doing so well.