To outsiders there is something very entertaining about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. The cities are about the same size and the same age. When Australia federated, Canberra was built and made capital to avoid choosing between the two.
People from Melbourne claim that their city is more sophisticated, intellectual; you know, classy. While we were there a newspaper was outraged to learn how few Melbourne designers had been invited to show at Sydney’s Fashion Week, which of course undermined the integrity of the entire event.
Tellingly, people in Sydney seem more concerned about what the rest of the world thinks of them than anything Melbourne might say: Sydney papers speculated that their Fashion Week may now be the "fifth most important in the world, if not the fourth." But it was a woman from Sydney who made the most condescending remark that we heard: "There was a time when we would never even have considered buying a Melbourne wine."
Me, I like Sydney. It’s partly that Melbourne doth protest too much. ("Sydney hosted the Olympics, but we’ve hosted the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games!" "What are the Commonwealth Games?" asked my American wife.) It’s partly that Melbourne is more European in outlook, and Sydney is more American. But mostly it’s Sydney Harbour, because it is probably the most beautiful harbour - or harbor - in the world.
Harbors occupy some place in the imagination half way between the natural and the artificial. Most are not places of great natural beauty in themselves. A harbor is a tool: a found tool, like a stone with a sharp edge or a long straight stick. Add a little fishing community and a few sailboats and even those of us who can´t tell a spinnaker from a starboard poopsail get all sentimental. Sydney Harbour has all this and is naturally beautiful and seems to go on forever and is topped off with one of the most remarkable buildings in the world.
We walked around Manly Cove, we caught a ferry, and I walked from the Botanic Gardens to the Opera House. But there is no better way to see Sydney Harbour than by climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Click on the image to see a group of people climbing.
There are very few places in the world where someone with no training or experience can climb a structure like this, which was never designed with tourists in mind. When Paul Cave, the founder of BridgeClimb, first proposed the idea to the Roads and Traffic Authority, they wrote back with a list of sixty-two objections. It took him ten years to work his way through that list, but he and his team have been rewarded with more than a million customers since the climb finally opened in 1998.
It takes about an hour to get breathalyzed, walk through the metal detector, suit up, get familiar with the safety lines and other equipment, and practise on a rig that resembles the scariest part of the climb. Once you get out there, it seems almost too easy.
If you want to try this without flying to the other side of the planet, a bridge climb is about to open in the U.S. on the Purple People Bridge at Newport on the Levee, in Newport, Kentucky. From the top of the bridge the promoters promise a spectacular view of the greater Cincinnati area.
Or you could go to Sydney.
