Travel Notes — Australia, Disney Land California, Big Island Hawaii — January 2013

DISNEY LAND — Grand Californian Hotel at Disney Land is 30 minutes from Long Beach airport and a $50 taxi. That airport has undergone major renovation. Make reservations for dinner or anything else before you arrive. Room was OK with the worst water pressure I’ve seen in a shower before. In the morning, go right out lobby door into the California Adventure park where you get head start before the thundering hordes (people at the hotel started lining up at 6:30am and we went out at 7:30 based on having gotten up real early since we had just flown in from the East Coast); we went on Soaring before 8am and right onto the Car Race at Car Land (the equivalent of Test Track at Epcot), the two biggest attractions. Note that if you don’t get a fast pass or go onto Car Race by 9am, you’re out that ride for the rest of the day. We went on Goofy’s Flying School rollercoaster 3x in a row, which is what you can do there at 9 in the morning. Jeremy loved (and Elizabeth hated) the Hollywood Hotel Tower of Terror with the big elevator that goes up and down over 15 stories and shakes a lot. By 1pm we were done in the park and Jeremy loved building your own car (instead of a bear) at Ridemasterz in the Downtown Disney area just near the hotel. Save the water flume for the end of your visit since you get soaked but be consoled that the hotel entrance is right near it. If you stay at the Grand Californian hotel, you don’t need any monorails or anything else to get around. Had we not stayed there, we would not have finished the park by 1pm which was necessary since it was Friday afternoon and we needed to be in LA by 4pm for sundown.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA –(This was our second family visit; our first being 2 years ago at year-end. You can check our older notes from 2 years ago to see impressions that were more relevant to us 2 years ago.) Virgin Australia is a 14 hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. Their upper class product is probably the best on that route. Premium economy is not worth the extra money; you get very little for it. We arrived Christmas Eve to a very well functioning Sydney airport which anticipated the crowds and doubled its staff for that day. Our kids arrived well rested which was good considering the flight arrived at 6am Sydney time. We just had to try and keep them up all day, swimming in the pool at their grandma’s house and walking around in the nearby Westfield shopping mall at Bondi Junction. We stayed at the Meriton which is an apartment hotel above Bondi Junction. It is a great place to stay with indoor pool, good gym, washer-dryer and kitchen in your room, great location, nice rooms and harbor views if you request them.  On Christmas Day it rained and everything was closed; that indoor pool was a real life-saver. It is summer here and the summer fruits are delicious in Australia; the mangoes are especially yummy. The children like watching the children’s BBC TV channel; the shows are much more intelligent and engaging for little kids than Disney or Nick Jr. I think they also enjoyed watching Australian Rules Football or “footy.” Darling Harbor is a great attraction in Sydney and has restaurants, a Maritime Museum, a mini-zoo, and the nearby Power House museum. Wildlife Sydney is a pleasant walk-thru zoo with all the major animals of Australia present. You can take pictures with a koala bear and do the site in 90 minutes. In the department of everything you wanted to know about photos with koalas, be warned that these marsupials (they are not bears) sleep close to 20 hours a day and probably have their eyes closed, and you are not allowed to hold them for the photo. The Power House museum is a good children’s science museum about 15 minutes walk from Darling Harbor with an outdoor playground, Wiggles exhibition, and a great big room with a locomotive made to look like a train station. Also right next to the harbor is one of the best outdoor playgrounds anywhere. We went there twice during our ten day visit. The Maritime Museum has a lot inside and outside; we enjoyed the special Pirates exhibition and went aboard a submarine and a warship.  Kids from age 7 can shoot water guns outside (the minimum age limit is strictly enforced). There are several kosher places in Bondi including a new dairy place with an excellent bakery. Pita Mix is a meat place close to Rose Bay neighborhood; go with chicken here. Beef and lamb in Sydney are not very good in the kosher department.

The Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney are a lovely place to have a picnic; I got takeout from David Jones department store. They have a choo-choo train that goes around for about 20 minutes and gives a nice tour of the grounds; you can catch it right behind the Sydney opera house along the water.  The Sailors Club is a good restaurant at the marina in Rose Bay section of town.  One should make sure to visit Doyle’s takeout for fish and chips along the Watson Bay area of town with great sunset views over Sydney Harbor with the city in the background. The line for takeout is intimidating but the food comes out rather quickly. There is also a good playground there and a two minute walk up the hill offers a great view of the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Watson Bay also has a beach and casual and fancy places to eat such as Doyles Restaurant, the Tea Garden and Dunbar House.

Karen and I escaped for an evening to the Shangri-La hotel which is one of Sydney’s better ones. The executive lounge puts out a great spread at dinnertime and the buffet breakfast in the hotel is excellent. Food is the hotel’s best point. Executive Harbor rooms have really good views. The location is up on a hill behind the Four Seasons which makes it a steep walk, and I found it very annoying to try to get anyone in the hotel to ever answer their telephone extensions.  If I had to choose between the hotels, I would do a coin toss. Location and gym go to Four Seasons; food and lounge to Shangrila.

We took an overnight trip to the Blue Mountains which is 2 hours drive from Sydney; they have built a new motorway which makes the driving easier. Lilianfels is a good hotel within walking distance of the most important attractions in Katoomba which is important since parking a car is very hard to do there. We took a bush walk to the 3 Sisters rock formation, the cable car across the valley, the inclined railway which goes downhill at a steep angle, enjoyed several pathways (take the longer ones to get beyond the Japanese tour groups rushing through day trips), and saw an aboriginal show. If you stay overnight, try to cover the Scenic Railway in the morning — it is best to do this at the opening hour and beat all the day-trippers. The hotel is fine but not fantastic (it has moved from Orient Express to Starwood’s Luxury Collection which is a step down), but the rooms are quite pretty and the food was fine. They have an indoor pool and spa, and it is good to make sure you know you are going when you leave the hotel with instructions from the concierge since the signage in the area is not great for people walking around.  The restaurant next door at Echoes, the hotel’s sister property, is a good fine dining establishment with canyon views.

We arrived back at Sydney on New Years eve, enjoyed a BBQ at a friend’s house, and watched the 9pm fireworks from my mother in law’s balcony. Elizabeth proclaimed herself under-whelmed with the 9pm version but staying up till midnight wasn’t happening as the kids passed out by 10.  For those who managed to stay up, it was worth it. The whole harbor gets lit up by a coordinated show of fireworks all along the city’s harborfront. They say about 1.5 million people showed up to watch it.

On my last night in Sydney I went to Doyles restaurant overlooking the international ship terminal across from the opera house and had a nice outdoor table overlooking the opera house and the harbor bridge. Our visit ended with lunch at Watson’s Bay and our very reluctant kids having to leave. Jetstar is the discount Qantas-owned carrier and it offers service to Honolulu; it is a 9 hour flight. In economy they shmush you to bits but business class is also so tight and the food so spicy that it is just worth it to go economy with this carrier. They also don’t let you take strollers to the gate.  Passing past the cabin, I heard one young kid take one look at the business class section who opined “this is the worst business class in the world.” You’d think the airline would figure it out.

In Australia right now, the Ozzie Dollar is worth more than the American Dollar which makes it quite expensive to be a tourist there right now. It is also expensive to live there and the minimum wage in the country is about $18 an hour. It is heavily unionized and not a very competitive place to do business. Nevertheless, I’m from Manhattan and I’m not fazed by high prices and those taxi fares do add up. A family of 4 riding a monorail costs $20 (although everything else also thinks this is nuts and the monorail is going out of business next month). Taxi drivers told me that this year the economy had improved over the past year and that people were out there Christmas shopping.  Interest rates in the country are about 7% and are projected to actually go down. The country is trying to bring down interest rates in order to stimulate the economy and to promote a housing market. Housing prices are very high in Australia although the really high prices are in the exclusive neighborhoods and there are plenty nice things to buy in nearby areas. You can spend $3 million to get a dump on the most exclusive street in Sydney or you can spend $1-1.5 million and get a very nice house with a pool just a few miles away.

Next trip I’d like to eat at Icebergs at Bondi — call ahead of your trip for a reservation and they close during early Christmas holiday. There is a good book called Sydney for Kids by Wendy Preston. It has good ideas for special experiences but most of them require you booking ahead of your trip.

BIG ISLAND OF HAWAII (KONA SIDE) —  30 minute flight from Honolulu via Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 717 jet to the Big Island where Kona airport is a collection of huts, sorta like Koh Samui airport in Thailand. Another half hour $90 cab ride to the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, a stunning property with a killer beach, beautiful art and architecture designed by a Rockefeller. It is a good idea to rent a car here no matter the insane cost (people booked months ahead at $250 a day) or else you are stuck on your resort, although it didn’t really bother us because there was no place within a half hour of the hotel that we really wanted to go and so we stayed at the resort for our 4 day visit. The volcano site is close to 3 hours drive from the hotel and people said the city of Kona was not necessary to see. There is a zip line about an hour away but it is a 3 hour activity and parents probably have to go along with the kids. The hotel is a stunning piece of landscaping and architecture and the whole area between the hotel and the airport is a big volcanic lava desert — its saving grace being that while we were in town for 3 days, the rest of Hawaii had rain with temperatures in the 60’s and we had sun and some wind and 80 degrees. The hotel was a nice resort with a beautiful beach, but nothing great otherwise — food was fine, the beach was great as long as the weather cooperated (the kids loved boogie-boarding), and the luau ceremony was a good night’s fun with the kids. There was no kids camp program though one was advertised and that was a bummer but it was just after New Years Day when we arrived and the place was full of families with kids.  We did a bunch of nothing there but enjoyed getting a tan, going to the pool and beach and riding around the golf course. It is a 9 hour flight from Honolulu back to New York; United’s service is considered domestic meaning you get no food in economy, and in business class there are no lie-flat seats and you cannot order a special meal — they use their oldest planes on this route because too many passengers are using frequent flyer miles to get seats.