A Trip on the Harbour

One of my favourite trips whilst in Sydney is to take the Manly Ferry from Circular Quay, where Sydney was founded in 1788, to the beach-side suburb of Manly. Perhaps these photos will show why. The quay itself has office towers to the south and a string of apartment blocks to the east - I would really like to own one of those! And the second photo shows one of the many other ferry services which fan out all over the harbour from the terminal.

Just north of the apartment blocks is one of the world's most recognisable structures, the opera house, which has lost none of its magic over the years.

And then comes Fort Denison, which was part of the penal facilities of the original settlement before assuming a defensive role protecting the city from attack by marauding foreigners - not that it actually ever performed that role.

Nearby is Garden Island, the naval dockyard, though rather smaller than the equivalent I saw a couple of weeks before in Plymouth.

And, receding into the distance, Sydney's impressive sky-line.

The harbour is home a large number of marinas and other louder and faster water craft like this one designed to get its passengers wet.

And Manly is a pleasant place to amble around on almost any day. Even in mid-winter the temperature was 21 C, as warm as any day I recently experienced in mid-summer in south-west England. Of course, in summer Manly beaches would be crowded unlike this Saturday in winter. But even in winter there were people swimming and surfing because the sea temperature is still warmer now than the English Channel is in the northern summer. That's because the water off-shore is coming southwards from the warm Coral Sea.

Just as we started our return trip, the sky clouded over and the weather became threatening as a cold front approached from the south-west - in fact this weather event was to dump a lot of snow on the Snowy Mountains to the south-west. Here we are leaving the cove at Manly heading west and I loved the cloud-scape.

Perhaps this cloud-scape is even better! Fortunately, it didn't rain during our trip and we arrived back at our Adina apartment unscathed.

And what would be a trip on the harbour without a picture of the coat-hanger, to the top of which Max had climbed the day before - our present to him for his 10th birthday. That was a mere trot for him having done New Zealand's testing Kepler Track at Easter - a three day walk through the mountains of Fjordland on the South Island.

AS