yani's big adventure - day eight

Today could not have been any different from our trip to Sculpture By The Sea last year...

Last year as the only hot and sunny day of our visit, I didn't have a hat and ended up with sunburn all over the place (but mostly on top of my head)... this year was all about rain. Plus I had a hat and didn't need it, and did I mention the rain?

I wasn't sure things boded well this morning when I woke up at about 4am to discover it was raining. Then when I woke up again at 5am, still raining.

Ma and I had decided that we would try and head out by 7am at the earliest, so it was about 6:20 when I wandered down to Ma's room... carrying my hat and my hoodie and my umbrella... I really wasn't sure what to take and what to leave.

In the end, we took it all, and once Ma had finished fluffing around it was almost 6:40, so we headed down to the bus stop... we actually went past the 333 lurking on the side street, and I was hoping that we would have enough time to get down to the stop... the bus driver was wandering about in the bus, then he put the indicator on, then he switched it off. It seemed likely we'd manage it...

And then he took off down the side street, went past us, stopped at the stop for about 30 seconds and then drove off. Bastard! If he'd waited another 30 seconds...

So we had to wait the 20 minutes for the next bus.

By the time we got down to Bondi the weather had cleared a little bit... well, it wasn't actively raining, and we managed to find somewhere to get a coffee at 7:30 in the morning (give or take) without having to trek all the way down Campbell Parade. Mmmmm warm coffee...

Then we traipsed on down to the sculptures.

I must say, I do like this "first thing in the morning" thing at Sculpture By The Sea... I don't know if was just the earliness of the hour, or the fact it was the first day, or the fact it was raining, but other than us and a few joggers/early morning dog walkers, the route was remarkably free of people.

In fact, by the time we got to Mark's Park, I'm pretty sure the Sculpture staff outnumbered the public about three to one.

We spent a good long while in the park (I think we did that last year too, but that was mostly from trying to photograph things around all the people), before we headed back down to the path and went along the Coast Walk.

It started spitting a bit as we made our way around Mackenzie's Bay to Tamarama Bay, so I had my lens cleaning cloth handing to wipe down my camera lens every chance I got.

When we got to Tamarama Beach, we discovered all these jellyfish washed up on the shore. A completely different kind than the ones we saw yesterday, but it was odd to see all these little blue lumps just lying there in the sand.

We got about halfway through photographing the sculptures before the rain really started to get serious... so we wandered up to Tama Café to grab something to eat and wait out the rain under one of their big sun umbrellas.

It turned out to be quite a long wait.

The rain didn't give any indication that it was letting up any time soon so we just stayed huddled under the umbrella trying to stay out of any random drops.

While we were waiting a school excursion full of teenage boys from one of the private schools also rocked up, most of them woefully underdressed in shorts or without jackets. They were not having a great excursion... well, I think they kind of were, even with the cold and the rain, but it was amusing to watch and listen as they sheltered under the other two big umbrellas nearby.

Typical teenage boys though... complaining about the rain, but also running off into it to go look at the sculptures (and occasionally hide in the sculptures).

Eventually the rain let up enough for us to finish photographing all of the artworks down near the water, but as we wandered back to Bondi, the rain came and went, so we had to resort to umbrellas eventually, but still managed to get soaked to varying degrees between the two of us.

We ended up missing a couple of the statues up in the park area, but I either photographed all of the others, or saw them and decided against taking photos.

There was also at least one missing, but I think we saw all the crates for it up in Mark's Park.

I also think there were less works this year than last year, but I'll have to check the book from last year to be sure. There were certainly less works along the Costal Walk for some reason. I also think that it's possible that the works themselves were smaller overall this time around. Again, that's just conjecture, and it could even be down to the weather, making everything look smaller than it really was.

I did have some favourites though...

• Look This Way by Ken Unsworth
• I have been dreaming to be a tree... II by Byeong Doo Moon
• Cover the Rainbow by Hyoung Kwon Kim

The first two are almost situational favourites... I like them, but I think I like them even more because of the positions they were in. The skeleton on ladder piece by Unsworth was really in pride of place, a little like the paint tube splash from last year, and on a good day I'm sure you'll be able to see it from the beach. Moon's stag was equally well placed at the opposite end of Mark's Park, and the weather being so grey that it was hard to see sea from sky at certain points certainly added something to it (although I'm sure it would be equally sensational on a sunny cloudless day, but in my mind there's just something about stags and misty days that go together).

However Kim's multitude of little metal pixies would have been amazing anywhere. It was one of those pieces that the longer you looked at it, the longer you wanted to look at it because you kept discovering new parts to it. The only downside was that it was a little hard to see down on the ground... but if it had been a dry day with dry ground I may have been tempted to get right down on the floor with it.

And a special mention also has to go to "The Yearning" by Margarita Sampson for all those cute yet slightly unsettling little yellow "slugs".

Normally I wouldn't single out pieces that I disliked, but there was one piece that was so incredibly pointless and annoying that I would very happily have pulled the plug on it myself given half the chance.

"(Windtraces)" by Kirsty Beilharz & Aengus Martin was a set of speakers set into the side of the rock wall at Tamarama that produced this hideous, amelodic, irritating, grating, unnecessarily amped up cacophony of ear bleeding aural garbage. If it had been presented at about 25% of the volume, then maybe I could have spent a little time with it, but it bellowed out across all of the other artwork in the bay, bouncing off the far wall and just intruding on every single moment we spend on Tamarama Beach.

And if the people who work at the beach go insane in the next three weeks and rip the stupid thing down, I wouldn't blame them in the slightest.

Given the rain, we didn't bother buying a catalogue until we got back to the very start of the walk in Bondi, but we'd also intended to buy the 15th anniversary book... however it turned out that they didn't have any at the Bondi tent. Which is both understandable, and a little annoying.

But I knew that they had them at Mark's Park, so I immediately knew that I was going back to Mark's Park as soon as I got Ma settled somewhere dry.

The somewhere turned out to be Moo Burger again, since it was close. As well as leaving Ma behind, I also left my bag and my very damp jacket behind and legged it with just my umbrella.

I also ended up going the overland route instead of along the coastal path, I'm not sure it saved me any time, but it was more straightforward and there were less people.

But by the time I got back to Moo, book and bonus calico bag hugged safely to my chest, I was a wee bit shattered. And by "wee bit", I mean completely. I don't know if it was the early morning, or essentially missing breakfast apart from a coffee, or getting wet/having wet jeans, wet socks, wet shoes, or the sea air, or the extra walking back to the park, or what... but I was shattered.

I couldn't be bothered wandering any further down in order to get lunch, so we stayed at Moo (which was essentially empty anyway) and had a much more restrained Classic Cheese Burger, fries and a MOOteaser milkshake.

All this, and it was only noon.

By the time we'd finished lunch, and looked at some of our photos and whatnot it was nearly 1pm, so we started to head out to the bus stop. But Ma saw a 333 so sailing past, and it was cold out and we both had damp jackets so we were going to turn around and stay put, but decided we may as well go up to the bus stop and wait there. Just as we left the café and got across the street, a second 333 went flying past us.

We were not blessed with Bus Luck today in the slightest. Possibly because we used up all our Bus Luck on Sunday.

Eventually a bus did arrive and I half dozed my way back into the city.

By the time we got back my jeans were mostly dry apart from the cuffs at the bottom, so I threw them in the dryer in the bathroom. By the time I'd done a bit of pottering around they were well on their way to being dry, so I wandered down to Ma's room to grab her hoodie to throw into the dryer along with my own as well as to try and work out what to do next.

Neither of us could really think of anything... we were both completely out of energy/enthusiasm.

So we kinda just sat around in her room for a while umming and ahhing about what to do for the afternoon and what to do for dinner and what to do tomorrow and the like. We really didn't come up with a single plan and spent most of the afternoon just chilling out.

Once all the clothing was dry (and I was impressed with the dryer, it really didn't take very long) we ended up having our usual "apart time" for about an hour before going off for dinner.

Since it was late night shopping we ended up going back to the Westfield Sydney food court... this time to Crust for some very tasty pizza. Although it does appear that a large number of meals in the food court come with rocket salad covered in balsamic reduction.

We also stopped off at Top Juice afterwards for a chocolate covered strawberry... actually that's another thing that seems to be very hot in Sydney right now... great big tasty chocolate covered strawberries. We had one at The Rocks Market on Saturday, I saw them downstairs in the David Jones food hall, and Top Juice has them, and I think there might be another place in the Westfield food court that had them.

After a little wander around other parts of Westfield, we called it quits and headed back to the hotel. Actually, we detoured down to the harbour because I thought there might have been an opportunity for some sunset shots of the Opera House, but by the time we made it down there the last of the sun had vanished, plus the whole western side of the quay was taken up by another massive cruise ship. So instead we sat down by the water watching all the arty/urban/hipster types head off to the opening of to the opening of Outpost on Cockatoo Island.

And now all I have to do is pack my bags, work out what the hell we're doing tomorrow morning, and that's pretty much stumps, as they say.

Our longest holiday yet, on the cusp of being over. And it's going to be a little bit of a shock going from 22C here to 30C back home in Adelaide.

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