First day of the year and recovery is the order of the day. Luckily, the magnificent Hyde Park is no more than a few blocks away from us, and provides everything you'd need to do nothing. Grassy lawns. Bright sun. Utter quiet. Perfect.
Captain Cook even has a statue here commemorating his discovery of Australia - though presumably by discovery they meant that he first found it for Her Majesty. The locals didn't really need it to be discovered, not being in any doubt about it being here, I suppose. Cook, though, must be the most celebrated explorer of all time - certainly in terms of the attachment of his name to countries, seas, towns, buildings and islands. Granted, he was the first European to find Australia, but in fairness, it is quite big. Enormous in fact. Hard to miss even, if your boat got blown off course anywhere in the Pacific or Indian Oceans.
There's a fine view of Hyde Park, and indeed the rest of Sydney from the top of the Sky Tower - an almost identical building to its namesake in Auckland, though the latter stretches further towards the gods. The Auckland version, however, cannot claim to have the highest working postbox in the southern hemisphere, this is an honour reserved for Sydney's sky-scraper. One supposes that there'd need to be a pretty awful queue at your local post office to motivate a vertical journey of 260m to send a letter.
That was today. Not a productive one in any way. Not necessarily really a memorable one. Just a nice quiet day. Sshh.
