Sydney: Eating at Rockpool and Drinking at the Rocks

For our 1st wedding anniversary, Tim and I treated ourselves to a fancy dinner at Rockpool Bar & Grill, set in a cool art deco building in Sydney's CBD (photos below).  Sadly we neglected to take photos of the food before we dove in, but I can sum up: pretty freaking tasty... Tim said his aged steak was the best he'd ever had, our Aussie oysters were awesome, and the passionfruit pavlova we shared for dessert was to die for (and Tim and I are not usually 'light and fruity" dessert lovers).  I found the recipe for the pav online and am planning to give it a go, so expect to see it over at my other site.

 

The following night, our last in Sydney, we walked over to the Rocks for some bar hopping.  Established in 1788, the Rocks is a former portside slum under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but is now home to shops, restaurants and lots of old school, oddly named bars.

We started out at Fortune of War, which claims to be Sydney's oldest continually operating pub, established in 1828.  They have all sorts of documentation on the walls to prove it, including an ancient looking liquor license.  The bar is a down-home place stuffed with tipsy old guys and locals, which is funny since it's sitting across from a Gucci store.  Hmmm.

Our second stop was another historic pub, Molly Malone's Bar in the Mercantile Hotel.  Full of both Aussie and Irish drinkers, it was also where we spotted and failed to properly capture the world's most amazing mullet (see behind Tim in the photo below).  A rippling party of curls in the back, yet all spikey business in the front, it was a sight to see:

While walking around, we found these invasive cane toads, painted and turned into coin purses.  Awesome.  I thought some of my college buddies would appreciate this, having watched the funniest documentary on cane toads back in our college days: 

Our last stop was the historic Hero of Waterloo pub, which we later found out was connected to a tunnel used for rum smuggling and involuntary recruitment of sailors during colonial times.  Now it's a cozy pub with wood fires, live music and lots of beer.

After our mini-pub crawl, we wandered past the docks at Circular Quay and attempted to take some cool night shots of Sydney, somewhat successfully.  Turns out it's hard to take a non-blurry night shot without a tripod.

Sydney Shots

OK, here's a collection of random photos from around Sydney that I wasn't able to categorize...

A shot of the Sydney Tower Eye from street level, as well as a cool old school clothing ad on the side of a building:

 

Me and Tim, sun drenched on the docks at Circular Quay, waiting for the Manly Ferry, Opera House and Bay Bridge in the background:

Didgeridoo players entertaining the crowd at Circular Quay, sounding similar to this video I found:

Triple A also enjoying the sun at Circular Quay while we waited for the ferry:

Cool clouds over the harbor:

Baby Alex can't keep his eyes open in the bright sun, but he's cute anyway:

Drool worthy meat pies with mash, "mushy peas," and gravy at Harry's Cafe de Wheels, a portside Sydney legend originally opened in 1938.  I ordered "The Tiger," depicted below, which was awesome.  I had heard an Aussie chef on TV refer to mushy peas and I thought it was just a poor word choice on his part, but apparently it's a thing.  And they're good despite their unappetizing title!  I have been craving this pie since I left.  This and the sausage rolls I mentioned earlier.

Sydney: Weird Birds

One of the things I found most interesting/amusing/foreign about Sydney is all of the crazy birds they have flying around there.  Their more common birds are not little brown sparrows, but big, exotic and crazy-sounding birds that Americans would be more familiar looking at in a pet store window.

Here are some examples of what I am talking about, although this is only a small sample of what we saw, as I am no birder.  I wasn't able to capture photos of the brightly colored lorikeets and rosellas that flew by us from time to time.

1. Adam called these birds below trash picking birds (for good reason, as they were congregated around the dumpster behind the local pub in his town).  In reality, they are the exotic looking long billed Australian white ibis, which I only discovered after Googling "sydney trash birds."  Crazy.

2. This puffy, not-so-little guy in the two photos below (photographed hanging out at Sydney's beautiful Botanical Gardens) is a kookaburra.  The kookaburra has a strange sounding call- to me it sounds like a combination of a person laughing/cackling and a monkey of some sort.  We heard it a couple of times in Adam's family's backyard while we were staying with them... it made it feel like we were in the middle of the jungle or something, not in suburban Sydney.

3.  These guys below were particularly funny to me.  Roving in packs around the city and 'burbs, these big, white, sulphur-crested cockatoos make a terrible racket- their squawking was pretty intense. Below you can see them hanging out in the trees in Sydney's Botanical Gardens, but also poking around on the roadside on the way to the Blue Mountains:

4.  This little guy below (sorry for the long-distance photo) is the distinctively black and white magpie, which also has a bit of a crazy warbling call.  They're also known for dive bombing people during mating season, which sounds intimidating.

Hunter Valley Wine Tour

Amy and Adam suggested that Tim and I take a mini-bus ride to Hunter Valley, one of Australia's big wine producing areas, a few hours north of Sydney.  Tim and I agreed that wine-tasting was a necessity whilst in Australia (did ya see what I did there?) as we are having a bit of wine withdrawal here in Indonesia (wine prices are exorbitantly high and if you splurge on a bottle, you're not guaranteed to get one that's been properly stored)...  Glad we did the tour, as Hunter Valley was quite lovely and it was nice to taste the wines without worrying about driving ourselves home.

On a tour with Boutique Tours Australia, we got to check out and taste wine from 3 small wine producers (all of which only sell wine from their cellar doors- not to bottle shops or restaurants).  Hunter Valley is known for its Semillion wine, but we drank a whole range of wines, including Shiraz, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Verdelho, among others. Pretty much everything we tasted was pretty tasty! 

Our first stop was Iron Gate Estate where we tried about 10 different wines... ranging from super dry and oak-y to really rich and fruity, to a sparkly wine.  Good stuff.

As you can see, Tim was into it, including trying to shove his nose all the way into the glass and occasionally doing the weird wine gurgle in an attempt to aerate the wine on the way down...

Since it was Australian winter, the vines were pretty bare, but the valley was quite pretty anyway:

They explained to us how they always hand pick their grapes, rather than using a machine picker, as the one time they tried the machine harvesting method (which sucks up not only grapes, but leaves, spiders and other flora and fauna), they ended up accidentally running a rather large blue-tongued lizard through their de-stemmer (below), which gummed up the works a bit. 

The scenery was really beautiful, particularly the hills at Mount View Estate, our second wine tasting stop:

In between wine tastings we stopped at a couple other gourmet food shops for some samples, including the aptly named Smelly Cheese Shop and a chocolate shop that housed this life-sized jelly bean kangaroo below, complete with joey.  The shop had been hit with a "ram raid" the night before... Tim and I had no idea what they was until we looked it up after the fact (it's when thieves drive a truck through the window of the shop and then raid it for money and stuff...), but seemed no worse for wear.

It's hard to see in this photo, but those dots underneath the trees are a mob of kangaroos, chilling and waiting for their chance at wine tasting.... not really though- our guide told us that the 'roos don't mess with the vines.

Our last stop was Ernest Hill Wines, where we had a pretty great host, Clint, who lead us through their tasty wines: