Home and away

Sydney is a city of surprises. After a night of thunder and lightening and a deluge on the road outside - branches falling off trees and the road that you'd need a paddle and a canoe to cross - the sun is out and I head down to Circular Quay, the transport hub for Sydney Harbour, to take the ferry to the suburb of Mosman to meet my friend Lynn's cousin Claire and her partner Dave. It's my first ferry trip out into the harbour area and the views back to the city and the Opera House take my breath away.

Claire and Dave have been told I need "walking" so we head up to West Head for a few kilometres through the bush. Only, this bush has been burnt to buggery. It's a real eye-opener to see the devastation of the bush fires at the beginning of the year, and also how quickly the new growth is poking through. The land is densely forested here, it's a National Park, and I find myself easily able to picture what the Sydney area must have looked like when the First Fleet sailed into what is now the harbour. The nature, too, is baffling and you have the feeling of stepping through into a kind of parallel universe where the flora and fauna don't quite make sense. Claire say.s that she had to go right back and start from scratch. I mean, look at these "seed pods". They don't correspond to any kind of pine cone I'm familiar.

We take in the views from West Head and head to the Cottage Point Kiosk for lunch - fish and chips for Dave, the Kiosk's home-smoked salmon for Claire, and a chunky veggie and goat's cheese tart for me, washed down with tasty Bundaberg ginger beer. It's a stunning little cove, and here at the cheaper end of the waterfront, we get to enjoy all the views and ambience of the posh Cottage Point restaurant 20m away, and get a much better view of the rich customers' seaplanes taking off to boot.

We round the day off with a quick run in and out of the crashing waves of Palm Beach, where the location scenes for Home & Away are filmed.

I just make the last ferry home and see the late-afternoon Harbour Bridge climbers silhouetted against the sky as we turn into port. And here's an Australian thing - some of these cherry chocolate bars are printed every now and again with messages and Dave finds the one below.

People are so incredibly warm and welcoming. When I stop and think about it I wonder if I have a bit of a nerve, contacting these people I've either never met before, or who have very loose connections, friends of friends and the like. But I figure that the number of people who travel out here from the UK are few and far between so it's a chance to show off their adopted home. 
As yet, I have not seen much of the landscape, but even in Sydney it is not hard to be swept away by the scale of things. That first night when I was walking through the Botanic Gardens, I felt a knot in my stomach as I got closer and closer to seeing Sydney Opera House for the first time. As I rounded the corner I really did do a little dance.