To get from Canberra to Syndey, we booked onto the early train, which left at 6:37 am, necessitating at 5:30 am wake-up call. Now, most sane people fly between Canberra and Sydney, and anyone else with half a brain takes the bus, which is much faster than train and cheaper. But no, we took the train. Here's why:
When we got to the station, it was still dark outside, and cold and clear. We could see a slim line of pale light just starting to illuminate the eastern hills, but towards the west it was starry. Venus was sparkling, and we stood outside the train before it left to watch our breath freeze in the air and say one last goodbye to Canberra. Once we started moving, we got some breakfast from the cafe car and took it back to our seats to watch the countryside roll by. The tracks are very old and there's only one set, meaning that only one train can run at a time, and only quite slowly at that. But once we got outside the narrow space around Canberra and the hills started to fall away, we got to see what we'd come for: kangaroos. And I mean hundreds of them, scattered throughout the hills, in twos and threes and little knots, grazing in the rising sun. The best thing was when the train startled them into hopping away, and we could see their silhouettes bounding across the top of the hills. In the valleys between the hills, a thick fog had settled on the ground, giving the landscape a sleepy, ghostly feel. It took about half an hour into the trip for the sun to rise fully up through the fog, scattering red light across the eucalyptus groves and casting long shadows on the dewy ground.
I watched the 'roos until I couldn't stay awake any more, then dozed until we hit the outer Sydney suburbs. We arrived at Central Station around 11:00, and took a cab to our hotel, the Kirketon, to drop off our bags. The Kirketon is just down the street from the Altamont, where we'd stayed at the beginning of the trip, and we stopped back in to say hi to innkeeper Alan and his dogs one more time. Then we got a proper breakfast at Latteria: creamed spinach / tomato / mozzarella paninis, plus some coffee. When we finished, it was still too early to get into our hotel room, so we took a stroll around the neighborhood and bumped into a lovely farmers' market with food stalls down in Kings Cross. Despite having just eaten, Michael got a breakfast paratha from a Malaysian food stall and devoured it with glee. (Okay, I helped. But only a little.)
After wandering around the market and stopping into The Artery to pick up our painting, we were able to get into our room. The Kirketon is a little too hip for the likes of us --- dark gray painted walls with plush red carpeting, mirrors on everything, LCDs in the stairwells playing clips of old Charlie Chaplin movies --- but it's a good place to stay for a few days. Not longer, though; the rooms are really small and there's barely a place to open up the suitcase, let alone unpack properly. But unpacking wasn't really on our minds, since the early morning departure was still taking its toll, so we had a nap instead.
In the afternoon, we walked down to the Harbour and around the downtown area a bit before coming back to the Surrey Hills neighborhood for dinner. Michael had found an intriguing-looking Indian restaurant with a very veggie-friendly menu, so of course we had to check it out. Holy cow (pun intended), it was awesome.
The place is called Guru. The chef, Opel Khan (how's that for an awesome name?), was trained in classical French cuisine. So the food is basically Indian/European fusion, something that I've really never seen before. Most upscale Indian restaurants are still serving the same stuff as you can get at any lunch buffet, only with fresher ingredients and more complex sauces. But this was something new entirely. We had the Vegetarian Journey: a 5 course degustation with 3 palate cleansers, plus wine pairings. Nothing like a splurge to make you forget the end of vacation is nigh, eh? Here's the menu:
Amuse-Bouche
saffron and cumin veloute
Deconstructed Samosa
cubed potatoes, lentil batter shell, fresh garden pea curd, pear chutney, red pepper gel
NV Jed Blanc de Blanc from Uco Valley, Argentina
Baby Pimento
stuffed with basil mousse with tomato-basil sorbet, butter tuille, baby beets and tomato confit in mustard seed oil
2007 Fermoy Estate Semillon Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, NZ
Palate Cleanser
salted lassi foam with pistachios
Wild Mushroom
with poori mille feuille, sweet corn crepe, carrot and turmeric emulsion
2006 Konrad Pinot Noir from Central Otago, NZ
Saffron Kofta
with baby spinach, raisin compote, pistachio milk
2007 Alpamanta Malbec from Argentina
Pre-Dessert
chai-spiced poached pear
Chocolate Marquise
with coconut bavarois, pistachio kulfi, chickpea dust
2007 Innocent Bystander Moscato from Yarra Valley, VIC
Super super super yum. The chef himself came out towards the end of the meal to ask how everything was, so we told him it was brilliant and couldn't wait for the cookbook. He even signed two menus for us to take home when we asked him if we could have a copy of what we'd eaten. And then we strolled --- slowly! --- back to the hotel.
One minor incident over dinner which I must note: Our waiter was a little less than perky during service. In fact, if it wasn't 7 pm, I'd say he was hung over. Well, these things happen. But in addition to the lethargy, he was doing a terrible job of describing the menu items, often forgetting what was in a dish and horribly botching the names of things he hadn't forgotten, including the wines. (For the record, it's semillion. Seh-mee-on. It's not that hard, people.) Being anal-retentive, I finally got a little fed up when he announced that our wild mushrooms were being served with "mill full, or something like that, I can't remember..." So I helpfully supplied "mille feuille," with all the confidence of my high-school French and a bit of wine to help me along. I honestly hadn't meant to be insulting, since he'd already admitted that he didn't know how to pronounce it, but I'd apparently embarrassed him sufficiently that he didn't return to our table for the rest of the evening. Eep. We got a lovely blonde waitress instead, who did a nice job of explaining the difference between muscat and moscato when it came to the dessert wine, and I've since decided that I refuse to feel bad about it.
On Sunday, we returned to Latteria for breakfast, accompanied by Michael's student Alkistis, who had been at ANU but was visiting a friend in Sydney for the weekend. Then we packed in the highlights for our last day. In the morning, we went shopping for more Icebreaker gear at Snowgum, then strolling through the arts fair at The Rocks, then lunching at Wok On Inn (yet another pan-Asian fast food place that would be fantastic to have here in Philly), then walking down to the Harbour to catch the ferry to Manly.
We didn't particularly want to be in Manly, it's just the the ferry provides you with the best views of the Harbour that $12.80 can buy. This is the lighthouse beside the channel leading out to the Pacific:
And the Opera House, seen from the deck of the ferry:
Here's the best part: On the way into the Manly ferry terminal, the boat pilot called our attention to a pod of dolphins, swimming just off the port side. Cool!
We took a brief walk around Manly, but it was windy and the sun was going down, so we didn't stay for long. After the ferry ride back, we took one last walk through the Botanic Gardens and then headed back to the hotel. Bird sighting from the Gardens: a masked lapwing and her chick:
We had our last dinner in Australia (!) at Onde, the same neighborhood gem just down the road that we'd visited when we were last in Sydney. I know it's been a bit of a food-heavy post, but I just have to tell you what we ate.
We decided to share an appetizer so as to save room for dessert (good move): roasted Jerusalem artichokes on toast with green olive tapenade and radicchio. For dinner, Michael had the same thing as last time, the garlic and tomato linguini with caramelized onion sauce. I saw that they had a gnocchi dish on the menu, but made with rabbit and bacon, so, being the pushy sneed I am, I requested to get the gnocchi but in a different sauce. The chef came through in spades, and I got deliciously ethereal gnocchi in roasted tomato sauce with basil and fresh shavings of Parmesan. Finally, dessert was a generous portion of gorgonzola dolce with dates and a chocolate terrine with light cream. Give you one guess as to which one of us ordered which.
All good things must come to an end, I suppose, so after dinner we headed mournfully back to the hotel room to get everything packed up for our flight home.
On our last morning in Sydney, we went out in style with breakfast at bills: the famous scrambled eggs again, and his signature ricotta hotcakes with honeycomb butter. Come on, we had to have something to take our minds off of the impending airplane food.
I will spare you the details of the 26.5 hour saga of our trip home, but suffice it to say that we made it in one piece, with our luggage and our sanity mostly intact. This was due in no small part to a nice and slightly wet-behind-the-ears gate agent at the Sydney airport: Our assigned seats for the San Francisco to Philly leg of the trip were in the very last row of the plane, right by the bathrooms, and we knew that they wouldn't recline properly because they were up against the back wall. So we'd planned to sweet talk the gate agent into switching us to something better, or, barring that, to spend some airline miles for an upgrade. Maybe we're going soft in our old age, but there's no point in suffering like that for 6 hours, especially not after coming off of a 13 hour flight. The sweet-talking part didn't work too well, mainly because there weren't any other seats available on the flight. (We later found out that this was due to a huge group of Phillies fans flying home after a four-game series in SF. Stupid baseball.) So we decided to bite the bullet, spend the points, and move up to Economy Plus. Luckily for us, the procedure for doing this was so complicated, and the gate agent was so new that he didn't know how to put through an upgrade for two separate miles accounts, and we were just so charming, that he upgraded us for free. Score!
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