thedelhibells: Sydney aka Honeymoon Part 3

Read Part 1 & Part 2 to know how we began our honeymoon journey with Karva Chauth & a trip to Gold Coast.

We landed in Sydney at 8 AM and headed straight for the hotel. The check-in was uneventful, for which I was truly grateful. Yes, we’d requested an early check-in in advance! Lesson learnt! The hotel was nice…

But we didn’t want to spend a moment indoors. We needed to set our body clocks straight! Gold Coast had seen us living in our own time zone (sleeping through the evening!) which was neither Indian nor Australian standard time. I was determined to make sure we didn’t hit the bed till atleast 9 PM, so we headed straight out of the hotel.

We took the 2 minute walk to Darling Harbour, in search of a food joint.

Darling Harbour is an entertainment & shopping district, which has some really great places to eat at as well. The IMAX theatre (apparently the biggest one in the world), the aquarium, show boats and everything else is all right here! It’s got a great view of still water (it’s literally a harbour.) You could spend 2 whole days just roaming around this place and you still wouldn’t have seen it all.

We finally came across a lovely Italian joint…

where we hogged on the most delicious pasta!

We also bought tickets to watch The Amazing Spiderman 3D that same evening at IMAX…

…and it was the best idea ever! The movie started at 7 PM, which meant we HAD to stay awake till atleast 9 PM. Honestly, it was hard to stay awake because sleep had really started to hit by 7, but thankfully we were in a massive theatre watching a 3D movie in a most surreal way. So we did good, and managed to stay up till 10.30 PM that day! FYI, the IMAX experience was truly amazing. This is the first one either of us had been to, and it was AWESOME!

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The next morning, we got dressed to go to Blue Mountains. On our way up, we stopped to visit a zoo, and finally we saw some of the animals Australia is famous for!

A crocodile…

Some penguins…

A koala bear…

And a kangaroo!

Although the kangaroos looked kind of dirty, which is SO different from what they show in that Australia tourism ad on Indian television (“it’s like lo-uve…for the first tiiime!”) – how come that kangaroo on that beach looks so freakin’ clean?!

Then we continued on our way up to Blue Mountains. What’s that, you ask?

See the mountains in the distance? They give off a blue-ish look. Yeah, that was Blue Mountains. It was no great shakes, honestly. Then we did the only thing you can do at Blue Mountains – get into a cable car, ride the steepest incline train in the world…

and take a scenic walk…

…which was probably the first sort of romantic thing we did on our whole trip. It was romantic upto the point where my husband scared the daylights out of me by making me believe a spider was crawling on my shoulder! He was just joking, of course. But gah! Romantic moment was safely out the window by then.

By the time we got back from Blue Mountains, there was just enough time left to grab a McDonald’s dinner and head back to the hotel.

The trip to Blue Mountains is a bus ride away from Sydney, and the tour generally lasts an entire day. You will get an option to take a ferry back to the city about mid-way through your ride back. We stuck to the bus, but I’m sure the ferry would make for a beautiful journey back as well.

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Day 3 in Sydney, we took the city tour, which took us to a ton of different places which made for picturesque backdrops. One of the stops was the much-hyped Bondi beach.

We had 30 minutes to look around, and guess what we did? No, we didn’t even step onto the beach. We found a shop selling really nice “Bondi Beach” clothing, so we spent all our time trying to figure out what to buy for who. We shopped throughout the trip for our entire family btw. Yes, we’re that couple. *sniff sniff* On the bright side, those Bondi Beach tshirts and sweatshirts were seriously good-looking & totally worth the time spent there (you can buy the same clothes from a shop at Darling Harbour as well, which we realised only later)

We finally reached the famous Opera House, and the tour was a ton of fun! Getting to step into that iconic building, learning all about it’s architecture was actually quite interesting!

And then we went to the aquarium in Darling Harbour and Sydney Tower Eye to catch breathtaking 360 degree views of the entire city!

NOT.

I fell sick 😦 Not really sick, but sick enough to not finish the rest of the city tour. We spent the rest of the evening visiting a doctor and getting some much-needed rest.

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Day 4. I woke up feeling much better, and to make me feel even better, we headed off to shop! We went to George Street and Circular Quay (as far as I remember). For lunch, we ate at a food court in one of the malls. We did spot a very authentic Indian cuisine serving stall, but I reminded my husband that our itinerary said we’d be enjoying an Indian feast for dinner that night on a showboat, so how about we eat some Chinese instead? He reluctantly agreed, but not before he got some masaledaar chaat into his system!

We were quite excited about this showboat thing, but we had no idea what we were in for. We walked the distance from our hotel to the boat (which was anchored at Darling Harbour), and it was such a beautiful walk.

It was a cool evening, and storm clouds had gathered. The sun was just about to set, as we made our way onto the boat.

It was a typical show, where ladies in show-type clothes (that are more “show” than “hide”) sang and danced. Honestly, the show was only mildly entertaining, and we started to get bored pretty soon. As for the Indian feast we had been looking forward it, it was a total let down. It tasted like the chef had just taken some frozen pre-made Indian food packets and heated them up. No wait. Correction: I wish he had taken some pre-packaged Indian food and just heated it up! It tasted just so wrong.

With a bummer of a dinner, and a show that was far from scintillating, my husband & I started to look around the boat. We were sitting inside, at a corner table close to the windows, and we noticed the beautiful Sydney skyline pass us by through the windows. Without having to say it to each other, we both stood up & made our way to the boat’s deck outside. Once we stepped out, the cold air instantly hit us. I drew my sweater closer to myself, trying to keep warm. The show music drowned into the backdrop as the doors closed, and all we could see were the city lights in the distance. We were on a boat with so many other people, yet almost alone on the deck. I’ve got to be cheesy now and admit to one thing – this was the most romantic part of our whole journey. I mean, where something external like the ambience added a whiff of romance to the air.

Want to know what else made the ambience so freakin’ romantic? The views!

I still think back about this day and can’t help but feel all warm & fuzzy inside. That’s one perfect moment, on the side of that boat, that I’ll never quite forget.

Once again, it was just as I had imagined my honeymoon to be. And as if it hadn’t been a perfect enough evening already, it began to rain as we walked back to the hotel. I wish I could tell you we got ourselves under one umbrella and walked all the way back gazing into each other’s eyes, oblivious to the world outside. But the truth was, we made a run for it! And almost tripped over each other trying to get indoors quickly! 🙂 Still, it was the perfect way to end the Australian leg of our honeymoon.

Up next, Singapore!

For the rest of the stories from my wedding (Pre-Wedding Shoot, Sangeet, Wedding Reception, etc), go to thedelhibells series.