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Sydney: Getting all Manly

Friday morning we’re up and about at 8am. Our first post-flight sleep has gone pretty well for me – I got all the way to 7.30 – and slightly less well but still not too bad for Erin, who woke at 4. I’ve got a slightly weird adversarial relationship with my body (as demonstrated by the walking last week!) where I ignore what it’s telling me and force it to do stuff anyway. It’s not really a good thing but it does work out quite well for handling jet lag; I’m declaring victory already, 24 hours in. Timezones, you will not defeat me!

So, yes, we’re up early. Today is our only full day in Sydney together so we want to make the most of it. Erin, awesome as she is, has planned for us to do a scenic hike around some of the coastline near Sydney – the Manly to Spit Bridge Scenic Walk. It’s supposed to be quite nice, roughly 10k, with some excellent views. I love walk-/hike-type activities so I’m all up for this. (Note for later: this was Erin’s idea!)

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After a quick instant-porridge breakfast (un-pictured because, well…) we’re out the door and on our way. We’ve not got a Sydney transport card thing sorted yet (remember this for later…) so we end up doing an unplanned 2k walk to the harbour, but we’re soon on the Manly ferry. Short trip, nice views.
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It doesn’t take us long to get oriented after arriving in Manly Harbour and then we’re off along the trail. Right from the start the views are excellent, although it wasn’t long before we were beginning to question the walk rating of “easy/medium” – it was pretty tough going, especially in the heat! Most of the trail was through a national park around headland and there was quite a lot of up and down long series of steps through the forest. Nice views though.
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We got to the half way point already fairly tired. We’d ascended quite high and I optimistically said that surely the rest of the way would be mostly downhill. Well, technically I was correct – on average the rest of the way was definitely downhill as we ended up back at sea level – but the contours of the trail meant there was a lot of descending followed by climbing. There’s nothing worse than having an easy downhill section that you just know is a prelude to an even steeper uphill section! I was still appreciating the views, though; also, we disturbed many many lizards who had up to then been happily basking. I like lizards.

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Our small breakfast and temporarily running short of water didn’t really help – Erin was definitely wrestling with dehydration for a while until we were able to refill – but we did make it to Spit Bridge eventually!

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We collapsed into the very well-placed restaurant at the other end. Judging by the waiter’s knowing question (definitely with a side of sanity-doubting) about whether we’d just done “the walk” I think it might have been pretty obvious we’d died along the way somewhere. The food was exactly what we needed – fish and chips for Erin, smoked salmon sandwich and chips for me. Resurrection food, for sure!
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Unfortunately, we weren’t done yet. There was a bus stop right outside the restaurant but it was an express stop where the buses stop but don’t sell tickets. Remember when I said earlier that we hadn’t sorted out Sydney travel cards (Opal)? Yeah. That definitely bit us now. The nearest shop that sold the cards was 2km away, almost directly up an extremely steep hill. You can imagine our joy when we figured that out but we didn’t have a lot of choice. It takes us about 30 minutes – the food has reinvigorated me but Erin’s definitely (and understandably) still struggling – but we get there and then bus back into the city over the impressive bridge. Amusingly, the 20-minute 7.5km bus trip was quite a bit shorter than what we’d already traveled that day, but my suggestion that we should have just walked it was met with a look of disdain for some reason. Yeah, I know, I didn’t understand either.

The rest of the day is recovery time; back to the hotel for a bath for Erin, I found a comfy armchair in a coffee shop to do some reading in.

Much later we head out to dinner; certainly not going to match the heights (see what I did there?) of last night but I’d done some digging around and made a reservation. It was BYO wine so we brought along a nice sparkling to go with the Mediterranean/Italian meal. The food was quite nice: a mixed Mediterranean starters sharing plate, then two different kinds of chicken (mine was cumin-crusted, delicious) with various bits for mains.
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Unfortunately service was weirdly poor, even when the restaurant was almost empty at the end of the night. It took quite a while to attract a waiter to give us the dessert menu, and no luck at all actually ordering from that menu. We give up and decide to go elsewhere. A good choice, I think, because we ended up at a chocolate cafe! Black forest cake for Erin, chocolate fondue for me. Marshmallows were invented for this. Mmmmmmm!

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Crawl back to the hotel, fall into bed. Long day, but good!


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