Ferry to Manly for the day.

After a relatively lazy morning of sleep and laundry, we hop on a series of trains to board the ferry at Darling Harbor, destined for Manly Beach. We take the slow ferry and pass a small rocky outcrop just outside the harbor called “Pinchgut,” where miscreant sailors were left with a single loaf of bread for … as long as their overseers felt like leaving them. Hence the name. And we pass other small islands — Clark and Shark, to name two — and arrive after a half-hour’s cruise across a few bays with relatively low swells.

Manly is beautiful and touristy, the wide main drag named “The Corso” lined with shops and pubs and aboriginal art stores. Its harbor, though we only see a small portion, stretches 20 kilometers inland to some old sandstone munitions warehouses. The prevailing totally bogus story about Manly is that Captain Cook named it that because the shore was lined with large imposing aborigines when he arrived. “Manly,” he said.

We walk through town — Cynthia has to be dragged from a store where she finds a $800 aboriginal painting intriguing — and turn right when we get to the beach, which is littered with beautiful people except for the 80-year old really gelatinous Greek guy in a thong. (Some sights are not worth seeing.) We walk along a beachside path beneath multi-million dollar homes with lots of verandas and glass, watching the swimmers and snorkelers and a few surfers (not really the best beach for surfing) and two rock lizards about two feet long who must have taken lessons from the kangaroos in the Grampians because they have the same “hurry up and take a photo while my heads arched and I’m looking my best” stare.

We walk back and have a long lunch at a pub and get on the ferry back to Darling Harbor. David G. sits outside, right up front, and is drenched by the first serious swell the ferry hits, but he perseveres and the soaking is worth it as we pull into Sydney’s harbor with the bridge towering over us on the right and the opera house sailing away on the left. A gigantic cruise ship, the Sun Princess, is being towed out from its birth so our ferry has to sit in the middle of the harbor for an extra 15 minutes of photographic joy.

David W. And Gay return home while Cynthia and David G wander into The Rocks, but David’s heart is not really in it because he’s caught Cynthia’s cold. But we do find the plaque that commemorates Jack Mundey. Mundey was the secretary of the New South Wales Builders Laborours Federation when he was arrested and carted off the street in 1978 as he and others had begun the “green ban” in “the battle for the Rocks” when the NSW government wanted to tear down most of the buildings. He eventually became the chair of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW from 1995-2001.

David G and Cynthia get a few trains back to Arlington station in Dulwich Hills and David W. And Gay serve up another lovely meal and we all pack into bed since we must rise early and go to the airport, bound for Fiji.

Another day of cruising in Oz.