Touring with Margaret

In the Sydney lifestyle, every decent day includes 'a coffee'. Which really means meeting with friends at a favorite coffee shop for a latte, a long black, or a flat white, accompanied by a cream stuffed or a chocolate draped pastry and a cheeky flirt with the wait staff.

Driving to Lane Cove to meet Margaret, one Susie's best friends, I was reminded how impossible it is for anyone but a very long time resident to find the way anywhere or survive the trip.  This being an older city, which pushed out from the center willy nilly  and on often steep hills, it has no straight roads.  Being a modern city, it is  laced with freeways which loom up unexpectedly and go God knows where.  In fact a ride to anywhere is a thrill seekers rollercoaster ride.  Your car plunges down a steeply pitched slope, flying past cars which are flying past yours in the opposite direction and ONTHE WRONG SIDE. Let me insert that these are NARROW streets where half a seconds inattention will mean mayhem, the police and the body shop. Half way down you suddenly veer left, then right, then left and up and right again, then you pitch about a roundabout, left, right, left.  Repeat all this several times until you arrive at you destination a mile away.
Margaret steered us first to the Cafe Provence for the obligatory coffee, considerately dropping me at the nearby Lane Cove Library so I could bring my blood pressure down with a quick browse of the stacks.  When I caught up we had a delicious coffee, decaf for me, and then off for a quick inspection of a fine little independent bookstore down the street.  You will begin to see why I like this woman so much.  She is either genuinely book mad or a gifted hostess with powerful intuitions.
( Sometime I have to go on about Australian bookshops and shops in general, but I digress, again).

Our goal for the day, at least one of them, was to go on the water to somewhere.  In Sydney this is wonderfully easy to do.  There are the speedy Rivercats to take you up the shallow rivers to the western suburbs, or the toylike ferries to run you to any of twenty little landings up and down and across the harbor.  Or, for that matter, the larger ferries (1100 capacity) that will take you, for a very small fee, about six bucks, on a nearly ocean voyage out to Manly Beach.  This is what we decided to do.  The day was brilliantly bright and tending to that hazy blue white of the really hot days. We were all accordingly hatted and smeared strategically with sunscreen.  Margaret is from families several generations deep in Australia, and she is a retentive sponge for information.  Since she knows not only Australian and local history, but also movies and actors, Civil War battles, classical and popular music, literature, everyone wants her on their bar Trivia team (another potential digression).  She points out the Swank digs of the Prime Minister, and the posh buildings and grounds of the Governor General next door. I can't help but notice that there is a lack of bristling security about in this dense but ritzy neighborhood of hedges and terraces, and in fact, there is a tiny pier at the base of the PM's residence with a few scruffy fishermen and perhaps a squatters sleeping gear.  Imagine the White House with an arrangement like that.
But we are on our way to Manly Beach, which Margaret explained comes from a comment made by Captain Cook or some other early visitor, that the naked aboriginals they could see on the beach were , er, "manly".

Today, judging from the small bikinis and speedos,  it is both womanly and manly, and also quite kidly.  This is not only a popular destination for tourists, it is a regular hangout for the inland Aussies (pronounced "ozzies") who need beachtime.
The Corso--an avenuse of shops for strolling--is packed, and redolent of sun tan lotion and beer cafes.   The blue rollers push salty, eye stinging waves over the bathers all in a group, like an ocean mosh pit.  This is explained to me.  You are free to swim anywhere on the beach, but if you want to be looked after by the lifeguards, you must swim between the flags.  The guards here are keenly attentive, riding their surfboards at the outer limits of safety and shooing straying bathers back.  We all wait for the biggest waves to catch a ride back to shore.

Only when I had finished my semi drowning, and rinsed off at the convenient beachside showers, did Susie point out the alert for blue stinging jellyfish was out.  Very unpleasant little creatures that, washed up on shore look like used condoms mating with a sandwich bag.  The thousands of swimmers in the water illustrates the casual attitude Australians take toward the painful and occasionally lethal critters that come with this lovely continent.

Blasted by the sun, we retreated by that magnificent ferry to the city's Circular Quay (Key, to Yanks).  This is  the central depot downtown for all ferries, and close to everything.  We were headed to the Royal Botanic Garden, a huge harborside sprawl of magnificent trees, and lawn.  I got to admire the massive and iconic Morton Bay Fig,  with trunks like a crowd of brontosaurus legs and brawny branches that extend over serious acreage. Think the biggest oak you've ever seen and double it.  But I was here to see the bats.

The Garden is a favorite hangout of the Flying Fox Bats, sized like a largish gull or a substantial hawk. They suspend themselves by the hundreds in the blazing summer sun, strange behavior for a bat, to my mind, and fan themselves languidly with a wing as if waiting for the porter to return with a mint julep. They are really waiting for evening and an eerie flight across the city to some hapless orchard. 

By this time I am wearying and footsore, and looking for my own julep.  But in this company, two gorgeous women, I can't complain.

We barefoot on the soft and merciful grass past large and Historic and no doubt Important buildings, but I am no longer able to absorb the facts.  I am grateful when when reach the stately and always surprising Opera House, and yes, the wharf, the bus and finally, home.