2 On the Road: Sydney Harbour YHA

Our lodging while in Sydney was The Sydney Harbour YHA located in The Rocks. You'll learn about The Rocks in my next post.

The hostel's common area continued to the right of the reception desk. First was a lounge area. There was wi-fi throughout the hostel. After the lounge area, was a dining area.

After the dining area was the kitchen. There were two cooking areas on each side and each of them had room for two different people to prepare meals. Refrigerators lined each side of the center.

Non-perishable food items could be placed in cubicles down the center of the kitchen area. All food was supposed to be marked with a name and date of departure. Food that was still good but being left by lodgers could be placed in the free food cubicle. This was also true of the refrigerated foods. I saw lots of food that was still good but had been left in the refrigerators.

One of the four food preparation areas. Each side had a stove, microwave and a dishwashing sink. To the front left there was also a handwashing sink. Everyone was supposed to clean up after themselves and some did a better job of it.

If you put your back to the reception desk, you could see the entrance door with steps leading down to the street level. There was also a two-sided elevator just to the left of the blackboard.

As we climbed the stairs to our room, part of the unique feature of this building became apparent. The YHA is built on stilts over an archeological dig. The main building is the shape of a square but the middle is open to the elements. From here you can see the glass walls of the common area. The reception desk would be on the same level but off to the right. There's a big group accommodation area on the first floor. Our room was on the second floor. We got to the room and discovered it only had one bed. After going down to the reception desk to see if they could find us a room with two beds, the receptionist went up to the room and deployed the trundle bed. Voilà, a room with two beds.

After figuring out how to run the lights, we discovered that our room looked out toward the Sydney Opera House. Our amazing luck that night was that it was one of the very few on which the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was being projected onto the largest sail. This was the only night we saw this.

To the right was downtown Sydney...

and to the left we got a glimpse of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Our luck wasn't so good in the morning as we were abruptly awakened by an alarm telling us to evacuate the building. We quickly threw on some clothes and headed outside. I was lucky I had swiped my raincoat off the hanger on the way out because it was sprinkling and a slight, cool breeze made things even worse. We were lucky that there didn't seem to be a fire. Maybe someone had burnt their toast. Anyway, the fire department reset the alarm and we were allowed to return to our room. Since it was now the time we had planned to get up, we got our breakfast items from the kitchen and had breakfast in our room.

The light revealed that a cruise ship had come into port and partially blocked our view of the Opera House.

During our stay, we both hiked up the steps to the third and top floor of the hostel. Looking at the photo, our room was close to the corner shown. The door to our room could be seen from the reception area. Anyway, over our room was the rooftop patio.

Little better view of everything from up here. On the left is the clocktower where we started our Rocks Walking Tour, which you will hear all about on another post.