In part four of his Australian diaries, Michael White heads to Sydney and finds a few surprises along the way. Read parts one, two and three here.
Sydney harbour dominates the city with its instantly recognisable skyline. Photograph: Corbis
When we arrived at Sydney's smart-but-old-fashioned Swiss Grand overlooking Bondi Beach I plunged straight into the surf.
Over three days we swam and ate well, hung out and did the usual tourist stuff. The harbour itself, an astonishing 240km (150 miles) of inlets, all densely packed with waterside flats and houses, remains the star of this lovely place. But lots of other things delight the visitor. For us the nice surprise turned out to be the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Set in parkland, its classical 19th-century façade a touch dutiful, it proved to have been beautifully modernised inside on five floors - ranging from a modest European collection, a vibrant Australian one, Aborginal art, east Asian pottery and a floor given over to contemporary work.
I could have stayed five hours. But hey, the sun was shining and the seafood bountiful. Australian restaurants and cafes have a deplorable weakness for frying the stuff. Wonderful! Steak, prawns and chips are my idea of a good holiday time. The Aussie dollar now stands at roughly three to the pound, making food and hotels feel cheap. You can get a decent room or meal for two for 100 Australian dollars. As for petrol, at around A$1.20 a litre it is less than half the price than at home.
But we had a schedule to maintain. Driving north we soon discovered that the Blue Mountains are neither mountains nor, most of the time, very blue. They are a lovely ancient plateau whose surface has been gouged by canyons with dramatic views. Much of it is covered with eucalyptus forest which burns so well when nature or arsonists give it a chance.
Avoiding the tourist honeypot of Katoomba we stopped at Leura, two hours west of Sydney, a green hillside town full of pretty wooden cottages and shops, as graceful and twee in its own way as any Cotswold rival, except that it boasts canyon views on a scale you cannot see in Britain.
Driving north across the Yengo National Park we wondered at the beauty of forests dominated by a rich variety of evergreen eucalyptus or gum trees.Their barks range from stark and ramrod white to bent and buckled copper-brown or sometimes burned black. Adapted as it is to drought the forest is less dense than European forests and is stunning in the evening light.
Back down on the coast the road slowly acquires the familiar look and commercial feel of Florida: ribbon development, mile after mile of four-lane highway punctuated by towns full of motels geared for the summer tourist trade. The developers are doing their usual best to kill the golden goose by over-doing it. From where we stop, an hour south of Brisbane, we can see the high-rise towers of Surfer's Paradise. From a distance the skyline looks like Manhattan, though close up it is nothing but holiday apartments, boats, restaurants and the sea.
Yet this is a vast country and nothing can detract from the beauty of the beach and ocean. As soon as I can get there I am back in the sea.
