December 01, 2005

OzFilter George- Traveling Down Under for the first time and have three days to "kill" in Sydney. (more inside)

There will be three days where my "traveling companion" will be working all day. The rest of the trip will be touristy stuff so I'd like to take those three days and see cool local color things, wacky stores, good small pubs, etc. Oz Monkeys, suggestions?

posted by starrybaby 18 years ago
  • If you're looking at the more debaucherous side of things, I'd suggest Kings Cross
  • What month are you here and are those three days during the week or weekend? What tourist things are already organised - are you going on a harbour cruise, bridge walk, Blue Mountains tour? Suggestions are very dependent on which days you have free. If it's during the week, there are some great old small pubs in the Rocks but it has a lot of tourists there and you may already have some sort of tour organised in which case I'd say go visit some of the pubs in Balmain. Now if it's the weekend head out to Watson's Bay or Manly. Give us a bit more info and I'll make some other suggestions.
  • Go to Circular Quay and get on the Manly ferry. Excellent cheap fun.
  • I visited Sydney a couple times, and loved to go the beaches: Bondi, Coogee, Manly, Curl Curl... There's also a nice botanical garden if you want to get introduced to the local flora.
  • If you are from the N. Hemisphere, this will be a rare opportunity for you to see the stars of the Southern Hemisphere (starts humming "Southern Cross" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash). Highly recommend visiting the Sydney Observatory (once a historic research facility, now surrounded by a city of 4 million). It is just across the bridge from the Sydney Opera House, if memory serves. Very cool place, now part museum and part nightsky tourism. One of it's two domes still has the old original refractor and the other has a modern computer-driven telescope. The night's tour splits in half and switches sides half-way through the tour. There is nothing quite like seeing the skies most beautiful globular cluster Omega Centauri through a historic 150-year-old chain driven refractor! It was truly one of the highlights of my visit down under. Should I see the southern constellations before I die? Make your reservations on a night when CLEAR SKIES are expected!
  • See if you can get involved in a traditional game of "knifey spoony."
  • Discover "Two Up" - an extremely interesting Australian 'game'.
  • Introduce your kids to the friendly and harmless local fauna.
  • get on the Manly ferry That's what I and the wife call "Tuesday."
  • Harbor cruise and bridge walk are the "touristy" things we'll be doing (as well as flying up to see the reef and smacking around Tazmania for 3 days). the three days i have in Sydney are during the week, week after next, actualy. Those nieghborhood descriptions are awesome. I was looking for like "this is why I love this pub" or coffee shop, or book store, or fountain, blah blah, things like that.