Date: 13/1/2022
Trip leader: Chloe Jenkins
I was nervous that the walk today might not go ahead, because all throughout the day it was pouring down rain. The weather report said that the rain was supposed to clear a few hours before the walk though, so I didn’t cancel it, and the weather report turned out to be right. At the beginning of the walk, in Hyde Park, we saw this circular glass thing in the middle of the pavement that looked like it was a skylight. We went over to see what it was, and saw a bunch of names carved in stone at the bottom. I thought that they were people’s names, but looking it up afterwards, they are actually names of places. The walls display soil samples taken from 1,701 places in NSW that were given a place of address by First World War enlistees. If you zoom in on the photo you can see all the soil samples. Embedded in the floor there is another 100 soil samples, taken from battlefields around the world that NSW troops have fought in. The place is called the Hall of Service.
In the Botanical Gardens I told everyone about the freshwater eels. So in ponds in the Botanical Gardens, there are these freshwater eels. The eels actually spontaneously colonize the pools, Botanical Gardens staff have seen baby eels actually wiggle across the wet grass at night into the pools. The pools get drained routinely, but after only a few weeks the pools will have eels in them again. A botanical gardens staff worker told me when I previously went that the eels eat ducklings, so sometimes tourists see an eel eat a duckling and are absolutely mortified and tell the park staff. The park staff say though that there is nothing they can do, the eels always spontaneously come back. We looked for a bit, but we couldn’t see any eels today.
The route: We met just outside Museum station, and we discovered that Museum station has two entrances. So the next time I do this walk I will specify which entrance it is. I discovered that you can’t really see the sunset from the Harbor Bridge, the walkway on it has this tall metal fencing with thick wire and small squares, and there is many lanes of traffic in the way as well. The Harbor Bridge doesn’t have another walkway on it that faces the sunset. Since you really got to get to Milson’s Point park to see the sunset, I now know to start the walk 2 hours and 15 minutes before the sunset, the 15 minutes for buffer time. We ended at Mary Booth Lookout Reserve. We took 2 hours, and the walk was about 8km.
I recorded the route on my Strava and Alltrails, here are the links:
Strava: https://strava.app.link/rlxuKG1UMmb
Alltrails: https://www.alltrails.com/explore/recording/evening-hike-605ff76–66?p=-1
Walk level: Easy
Places to come if late/go if leaving early: Yes
Toilets: Several along the way
Water: Yes
Driving info: Didn’t learn any unfortunately
Ended where we started?: No
Wheelchair accessibility: I can’t figure out how to get to the lift to the Harbor Bridge without taking stairs, but once I figure that out then yes.
