Balmain

Balmain is a suburb on the west side of the Sydney CBD.  We explored the area when we were in Sydney for Christmas, but the suburb has been on our list of places to visit for a long time.  It is snuggled in a nice, quiet harbour.  To get there we took a ferry from Circular Quay but, perhaps because of the shape of the harbour, JB was convinced that we were on the north shore, not just west of the CBD.  There are so many inlets and small bays in the Sydney Harbour that it is very easy for people who aren't used to it to get VERY turned around!  Maybe we are just spoiled by having the mountains to the west for so many years that we just forgot how to gauge the direction!

Houses overlooking the harbour

Australia Post Office

High Street

One of many posh parts

We had a really lovely walk through the high street in Balmain, which was full of smart shops, cafes and tempting bakeries.  Just off the high street there are lots of cottages dating back to the founding of Balmain, which have been kept up in a very "English" fashion, giving the area a very genteel feel.  This area used to have a rough reputation, but it is now a very well looked after neighbourhood and is really quite charming. 

This area really showed us how little we know about Sydney and the surrounding suburbs.  We will definitely make more of an effort to explore the city.  Our next trip there is only 4 weeks away!

Noosa

We have been quite busy with work for the last few weeks, so this past weekend we took a couple of extra days and headed north to Noosa.  This was our third trip to Noosa, but our first time staying right on the beach in Noosa Heads.  It was absolutely fantastic!  We have been to the beach many times but we have never stayed in a hotel that is right on the beach.  All that separated us from the water was a swimming pool (gloriously heated), a boardwalk and the sand.  It was wonderfully relaxing to sit on our deck and stare out at the ocean.  Autumn started on 1 March, but it still felt pretty summery to us.

The weather in Queensland (and much of Australia) has been really rough for the last six weeks.  We had beautiful weather until Australia Day (26 January) and then all hell broke loose!  We had at least three days with more than 80mm of rain, there were floods in northern Queensland, storms on the Sunshine and Gold coasts, and now there is the threat of a Cyclone making landfall on the northeast coast.  We really need to make hay when the sun shines, because you really don’t know how long that sun will last!  (There is a 50% chance, of course, that the sun will shine nonstop, dry everything out and then start the whole country on fire, too.)

The beaches in Noosa have really been decimated by the bad weather.  The point where the sea has pulled away the sand is almost a metre in some places and they are piping sand more than a kilometre from the mouth of the Noosa River to the Noosa Beach.  There is a brown muck that is being sprayed out over the beach and it might not look nice now, but it should save the area from really getting torn apart.

Sunny day on the beach (beautiful!)

Cloudy day on the beach (still pretty good!)

Rainbow Lorikeets relaxing in a pub

Noosa is a beautiful spot and we were really lucky to be able to go at this time of year.  It is extremely popular at Christmas and is the kind of place where people will get up early to drive close to the beach and find a parking spot before 6 am.  Even at this time of year the parking lots were full by 8am on weekends and even on a weekday the main lots looked pretty full.   We have yet to experience Christmas on the beach but if it involves fighting crowds and battling for parking, we will stick with Christmas in the city and off-season at the beach.  The water was about 25C, the air was about 30C and that was pretty easy to take.

Late Summer

This was our first "typical" Brisbane summer (the first two years were nothing but rain) and we can really feel the difference in the temperatures as we near the last part of summer, which ends on February 28 in Australia.  We have been through weeks of temperatures in the high 30s, with high humidity, and have been through downpours, thunderstorms and wind like we have never seen before.  Now that autumn is approaching, the days seem a bit cooler and there are more people out enjoying the end of the summer.  Today we walked all along the river and the crowds seemed much bigger than usual.  We even saw the mounted patrol, something that we haven't seen since we left Calgary!

Crowds at the market in Southbank

Mounted Patrol

The other thing that we have noticed is that there are a lot more critters coming into the house.  We don't mind the little daddy-longlegs, the geckos or the ants, but a couple of nights ago we walked into the garage (the attached garage) and were horrified to see a gigantic Huntsman spider scurrying across the floor.  It was so big that JB actually thought it was a mouse!  This is something that Aussies clearly don't get too bothered by.  All the Canadians that JB works with freaked out when she showed them the photo of the spider and made all the appropriate and sympathetic comments ("I would die!", "Poor you" and "You should have called in sick for all the stress") but the Aussie she showed it to said, "We were thinking of getting that finish on the floor in our Rumpus Room.  Do you like it?"  Clearly this person has lost touch with reality!

The beastly spider!  (and yes, we do like the floor)

Horrifying!

We sprayed the spider with our Napalm-type spider killer spray and it seemed to do the trick but minutes later when we went back in the garage in hopes of picking up it's corpse, the spider wasn't there!  We can only hope that he has crawled off somewhere, away from our house, and has died.  At least this one wasn't in our bedroom!

Aussie Open

We just got back from four great days in Melbourne.  We had tickets to the quarter finals of the Australian Open, and were lucky enough to see lots of big names (Federer, Djokovic, Williams, Li, and lots more) and some really great matches.

We arrived in Melbourne on Monday evening and had two fantastic days of tennis on Tuesday and Wednesday.  The hardest part was sitting in the hot Melbourne sun.  It was only possible to sit in the sun for about an hour before it was necessary to take a shade break.  Even with being covered as much as possible with light clothes, hats and copious amounts of sunscreen, we were still a little burnt at the end of each day and completely exhausted.  It is a full time job just trying to drink enough water to stay hydrated!  The organizers of the tournament are well aware of this and they have amny areas to get shade and a cool drink.  There are tents where you can sit in easy chairs and be misted by water and big fans lining walkways that spray a mist of water (the most popular brand in Queensland is called "Fog Frogs").   (We're complaining about sitting in the sun, we can`t imagine what it would be like to play tennis in this het!)

Cooling mist from the Fog Frogs

The day matches were very entertaining and really full-on, as there are three matches each day starting at 11 am.  The real excitement for us though was watching the two night matches.  The night matches have a different feel from the day.  The REALLY big names play at night (we saw Djokovic vs Berdych and Federer vs Tsonga).  These guys hit the ball so fast that it is hard to follow with your eyes, we have no idea how the other player manages to hit a ball back at 150 km/h, while running at full speed!  It was pretty amazing to see.

Men's Champion Djokovic

Serving Federer

Night game

Ladies' Champion Azarenka

We arrived back in Brisbane on Saturday morning, just in time for the deluge of rain from ex tropical storm Oswald.  We are currently on a day off in observance of Australia Day (26 January, a Saturday this year) but instead of relaxing at a pub or heading to the beach, all of Queensland, including Brisbane, is on a flood watch.  The northern parts of the state are seeing the worst flooding in many areas in more than 50 years.  We think we will be okay in the city as the prediction for the peak flood level is about 4 metres lower than it was in 2011, but we still need to be on alert. 

In Brisbane we have had 260mm of rain in just four days.  We have gone from burning to flooding in less than a week!  We are really lucky in Milton though, our suburb had all of the storm drains upgraded in the last two years and only the lowest lying areas should be in danger of minor flooding.   Our fingers are crossed that the lower water level predictions are accurate.  We don`t want to go through what we did in 2011 all over again!

Vaucluse

On our trip to Sydney over Christmas we went on a couple of really good walks.  One of them, on Boxing Day when we happened to see the start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, was through a suburb called Vaucluse.

Vaucluse is about 8km from the Sydney CBD.  It is on the southern end of the headlands that form the entrance to Sydney Harbour.  It is a beautiful area of Sydney, with views on the western side towards the Harbour Bridge with the eastern side looking out over the Tasman Sea.  The houses here are VERY posh, with lots of little beaches and places to swim. 

Maquarie Lighthouse, Vaucluse



The path we followed started at the lovely and historic Maquarie Lighthouse, built in the 1880s.  There has been a lighthouse in this place almost since Sydney was founded.  This lighthouse, replacing the original, was erected in the 1880s and is still functioning today!

The walk took us all along the coast line which, while breath-taking, is extremely treacherous and it is in this area that the worst non-wartime accident in Australia occured.  The ship Dunbar crashed against the rocks here in a storm in 1857 and only one person out of 122 people survived.

Vaucluse Coastline

Vaucluse Coastline

This is an older part of Sydney and there are lots of beautiful parks and viewpoints throughout the entire walk.  We were even lucky enough to walk past a nudist beach with one extremely un-shy man, more than happy to look up at everyone on the pathway above him.  He was clearly not concerned about sun exposure!

The coastline had beautiful views but the wind was constantly howling (as one would expect at this time of year and right on the water) so we were pretty happy that the last part of our walk took us to a little inlet called Parlsey Bay.  It was a lovely little beach (although there was a rather disconcerting shark net), surrounded by beautiful houses, with beautiful clear water and not a breath of wind.  It was a wonderful way to spend Boxing Day and it is a walk that we will definitely do again.

Parsley Bay

 

Aussie News

The blogger page won't allow us to upload any photos at the moment, so we will give you an update on the news out of Australia.  You'll just have to use your imagination until we get our photo problems sorted out!

The big news right now in Australia is the weather.  This week was the second anniversary of the devastating floods that cut across Queensland.  Those flooding events followed intensive rainfall throughout the spring and summer.  Now, two years later, rainfall has been less than normal, and there are fires burning throughout the counrty.  Many of these fires are caused by lightning strikes, some are caused by sparks from vehicles and a few are deliberately lit.  Any arsonists that are caught are in serious trouble with the law and are lucky to be in police protection!  In addition to the fires, they are expecting a massive tropical storm to wreak havoc in Western Australia. 

Right in Brisbane we are free of fires, but we have had two weeks of highs over 30, with humidity over 50%.  Some days it feels like trying to move around in a sauna!  We have finally had to join a gym so that we can walk on a treadmill for some exercise.  It has been weeks since we have walked to or from work, and the forecast is for more of the same this week ("cooling" is considered anything below 30, so we might have a cold day of 29C this week, but we will have higher humidity, so it is not really any better!)

In 10 days we head to Melbourne, where in one week they will have a temperature range of 20 - 40C...and that is sometimes all in the same day.  We will be watching tennis, so hopefully the roof is closed and the air conditioning is on!

Happy 2013!

We had a great trip to Sydney for Christmas and returned to Brisbane to celebrate the New Year.  Sydney was a great place to spend the holidays, but it really doesn't have the weather that Brisbane does.  Something has gone wrong with us that we now find 20C cold!

Christmas is really lovely in Sydney.  The city is decked out in Chrtismas trees and lights everywhere and the David Jones department store in the CBD had a fantastic series of automated Christmas themed scenes in the windows.  Even without snow it was very Christmas-y.

Decorated Tree in a square near Circular Quay

Some of the David Jones window displays

We tried to see a couple of new areas in Sydney and we were lucky enough to be walking around Watson's Bay on Boxing Day, which is one of the premiere viewing points for the start of the Sydney to Hobart race.  We had no idea that we were in such a great vantage point, it was just dumb luck!

Looking out over Watson's Bay towards the CBD

The start of the race (all the boats with sails are racing)

The Sydney to Hobart yacht race was started in 1945.  Yachts of different sizes leave the Sydney Harbour at 1pm on Boxing Day and race to the Hobart Harbour, 1170 km to the south.  It gets kind of confusing, becuase the speeds are given in knots and distances are sometimes said in nautical miles and sometimes in kilometres.  Landlubbers like us can't quite follow exactly how fast the boats are going or how far away they are, but we do know they go really fast.  The winner of this year's race, Wild Oats XI, took only one day, 18 hours and 23 minutes.  There are different categories of boats and there are hadicaps for the different categories.  Wild Oats XI ended up winning the entire race, both outright and with the handicap.

This is our last day off before we head back to work tomorrow.  It doesn't matter what you are doing, where you are or how much time you have off, the break is never long enough.  Luckily we are off to Melbourne in just 3 weeks, so we won't be waiting too long until we get our next break.  Happy New Year!