Thursday 21^st August    Our one week in Sydney is over – we are back in Mackay but it feels as if we have been away for a month……I cannot believe we have accomplished so much in so few days!  Here it is warmer and we are beginning to thaw out – I had forgotten Sydney in mid winter is sunny but crisp during the day – very cold at night.

Our first glimpse of Sydney from the air

My sister met us at the airport and the whirlwind began: we have driven past or visited most of Sydney’s marinas; barbecued in the parks; been reunited with our nieces, their partners and nephew; caught up with friends from 30 years ago; shopped ‘til we dropped (had our credit card cloned – or skimmed as it is called her in Oz – with all the hassle that entails); bought our Cmaps Maxwide which will bring us back to the Mediterranean and paper charts from Mackay to Cairns (which were missing from a previous Rally participant’s bundle we bought); experienced an amazing IMEX 3D reality movie visiting the Grand Canyon in a helicopter; eaten in, eaten out, eaten on the move and sometimes on the run!  We have had a real ‘civilisation fix’.

Apparently one in three Australians develop potentially cancerous melanomas during their lifetime (due in part to the thin ozone layer here, which is even thinner over New Zealand) so with our sunny outdoor existence we thought it prudent to go for a skin check up which proved us blemish free - very reassuring. The quality of Australian medical and dental services is superb.

During this year’s travels we have tramped around every available rainforest hoping to see the indigenous inhabitants and (Galapagos excluded)  apart from a solitary ground frog in Fiji, the odd spider and an ants nest in Panama I don’t think we have seen a thing.  Well we have made up for it in Sydney – Koalas (not bears we understand), kangaroos, wallabies, and so many birds in my sister’s back garden she could open up a twitchers’ paradise.

Koala

Koala asleep wedged into his bed…….

Australian laughing kookaburra (named Boris) who feeds out your hand

Rainbow lorakeets

Cheeky magpie

Sulphur crested cockatoo

In our hearts we had harboured a dream that one day we might return to Sydney in our boat and enjoy the extensive waterways, anchorages and marinas.  The sad thing we found is that Sydney does not welcome cruisers: you cannot live on your boat, get regularly moved on from anchorages and buoys which are prohibitively expensive and everywhere we enquired had a distinct preference for owners of  racing or power boats……….in fact we were pretty much given the cold shoulder. Even the chandlers mainly cater for the ‘racing’ market.   Consequently the marinas are vast ‘windy cities’ devoid of any soul or life and we wouldn’t want to be there anyway……..what a disappointment.  We’ve heard numerous stories from friends about people who had ‘got away with it’ or had managed to get a friendly manager to ‘turn a blind eye’ but 14,000 miles is too far to sail on the off chance that it might be okay.  

Our impression of Sydney (admittedly in just one week) is a thriving (thrilling even), majestic, regimented, controlled, sanitised, politically correct city.  Beautiful, clean, safe but Controlled with a capital C and very expensive.

In the light of this, one surprising revelation was that all the sewage of Sydney’s North Shore gets pumped raw and untreated into the sea at Manley – when questioned what was going to be done about it we understand the answer came ‘we have lengthened the pipe – it is now 18 miles long’ – what an extraordinary state of affairs!

We have come back to some sad news - Keith from Baccus has a medical condition requiring him to return to the UK so he and his wife Susan have left the Rally.  There are only a few yachts left here in the Marina now – most have already set sail.  We ordered a new auto pilot from the States but it has been impounded by Customs because it’s value exceeds their 1,000 AUS $ limit………by 75 dollars!  It will now cost us nearly 500 AUS $ to clear it as we have to employ a ‘customs broker’ for about 150 dollars, pay GST at 10% plus customs duty at 5% and delivery from Brisbane! If we question anything it could delay delivery and hold up our journey beyond the time frame allowed for us to arrive in Darwin to complete our visas (CAITS) for Indonesia……it’s a no win situation.  We also returned to find the engine still in bits, so we won’t know the situation with the re build of our water pump until tomorrow. 

The problem for us in Mackay is the coal mining industry is booming – the Chinese are stockpiling and the ships are literally queuing up to load it – salaries in the mines are climbing, currently 120,000 AUS $ is the entry level salary for unskilled labour – and that’s for four days on and four days off.  It’s very hard to get hold of skilled mechanics, electricians or anyone else to work on the boats as they have all chucked in the towel and become miners! We shall have to see what happens……