3 April 2011 - Lane Cove National Park, Sydney, NSW

This evening’s routine has been upset by the end of daylight savings, as everyone’s is each year when this occurs. We also spent time chatting with Andy and Larissa on Skype, this time just on audio; it does seem to make for better reception. In fact communication wise, it has been a busy day. My parents rang me on my cellphone as the ferry was making its way to the wharf to pick us up this afternoon, and our telephone conversation was all too brief as a result. It was however so nice to hear their voices after the many weeks we have been gone from Tauranga.

This morning, because of the change of the clocks, we were packed up and out the door toward the station soon after eight, even having “slept in”. The night had been a little disturbed, first soon after I fell asleep, by a visiting possum and her baby. Chris was alerted when he found a strange woman outside our caravan taking photos with a flash of the twosome; the mother was climbing the aluminium poles to our awning and the baby was climbing the tree adjacent. The second commotion was a group of larrikin campers whooping it up around the camp at some ungodly hour. However neither kept me awake for long.

We caught the train to Hornsby, the suburb at the end of the route we have taken so often over the past three weeks. Hornsby has appeared on the list of train destinations on the station screens, but was undiscovered by us until today. Stepping down from the station, we found ourselves immediately in a mall, surrounded on two sides with a large Westfield shopping centre, connected by sweeping curved pedestrian glassed overpasses. In the centre of the mall is a fountain, or rather a huge sculpture, or more accurately the largest water clock in the world. On initial acquaintance it appears to be a collection of steel perhaps fashioned in an abstract Juan Quixote, as we have seen somewhere before, but on closer observation, it is nothing of the kind. It is quite wonderful and was well worth the train ride even if only to see that.

We wandered around the busy shopping centre for about an hour, treated ourselves to morning coffee and eats at the French Bakery, and then caught the train by the North Shore route, back down to Chatswood and on to Wynyard in the city. There we changed for Circular Quay, and found ourselves on time for the ferry to Taronga Zoo.

Camp Curlew

The Zoo is housed on a point protruding in to the harbour on the north shore, and is obviously very popular gauged by the number of families and tourists crowded on to the ferry. The trip took just twelve minutes, and unlike the rest of the passengers, we set off west along the shore with a view to walk the shoreline as far as…. we wanted to.

We stopped at Camp Curlew for lunch and sat enjoying the most glorious view of the harbour, glistening in the sun. Camp Curlew is the site of a camp that was set up by a group of Australian painters between the years 1890 and 1912, where they learned and polished the art of painting “en plein air” (outside) following the fashion of some of the impressionist painters in France. Among those painters who became very famous are Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, whose work we have come across in several galleries since we have been here.

We walked on around the bay, Little Sirius Bay, and then into Mossman Bay. There we lost the walkway, and spent the next half hour or so wandering in a confused manner up and down hills in Mossman, until we came down to Cremorne. There the path became obvious and we walked along the shore below the houses of Sydney’s illustrious or at least rich. The views over the harbour which changed as we wended our way around the bays and headlands, sometimes toward the bridge and sometimes toward the southern shores, were consistently superb. Again after we left the walkways on Cremorne Point Reserve, we were left seeking direction, and had to ask help of a local jogger. Over Kurraba Point and heading down and north, we suddenly found ourselves in Hay Street which ended abruptly and fortuitously at the Neutral Bay wharf.

We rested for the half hour until the scheduled call of the ferry, and soon were back in Circular Quay, on the train firstly to Wynyard, then to North Ryde.

It was kind of sad to leave the ferry, train and station for the last time, or at least until we visit Sydney again. Our third weekly public transport tickets have expired. We have had the best value from them, in fact quite amazing when you consider all the bus, train and ferry trips we have taken over the last three weeks, and some of considerable length. It is a wonderful system and we are glad that we were made aware of the system on arrival at our camp.

And so we trudged our last trudge up Plassey Road and in to camp, pulled our shoes off and found ourselves caught in conversation with our neighbour, Lance, who had introduced himself to us late last week. His wife, Uta, and he have recently returned from living in Europe, subsequently spending six months travelling around this land of his birth and now going through the process of settling in Sydney and seeking work. They are lovely people, and as so often when one is transient, one meets people as departure is nigh, and that contact is all too brief. There is a very tentative arrangement for a get together tomorrow however the provisos for both parties may rule it out.