Wednesday, October 12, 2005

A Sense Of Scale

A little orientation for my non-Sydney visitors, prompted by Suzanne's comment.

According to Ask Jeeves, it's 63 kilometres (39 miles) from Sydney to Gosford and Gosford is maybe 10k from here. On the fast train it's 1 hour & 20 mins to Central. Which is the main Sydney train terminal. It takes a standard commuter train about an hour to travel the width of Sydney.

From Central you get a 15 minute train round the City Circle. Which is not circular and goes under the 19th century part of Sydney (except The Rocks) to Circular Quay (which is also not circular) and back. And this underground circle comes up onto the roof at the Quay, which is not underground.

When you get off at the Quay and go down to the ferry wharves, you can see the Opera House and the Coathanger (Sydney Harbour Bridge) by turning your head from left to right. Tourists love that. Two for the price of one and an over-priced cafe at the Quay at which to recover from the excitement. Then they go out to the Opera House and take photos of themselves on the Opera House steps with the Bridge in the background.

There's a stack of stats on Australia at the CIA's site. But take them with a grain of salt. If they've got "chief of state: Queen of Australia" then they'll have something else wrong too. For the last time peeps, she's not the queen of Australia, she's the queen of England. As queen of England the Queen is head of the Commonwealth, part of which is Australia.

Okay. I'm off to enjoy the rain and the cool.

2 comments:

Suzanne44 said...

Thanks - stellar description. If I had a faster dial-up connection, or DSL or something modern and up to date like that, I could use Google Earth to look at your part of the world - have you tried Google Earth?

Spike said...

I have not yet tried Google Earth. It'd kill or at the very least maim my ailing comp.

Maybe the library comp's have enough RAM. If they haven't, I can run away :)