Change In Plans

Greetings from Melbourne! We arrived this evening after two long days in the car, driving down from Sydney. Australia is an enormous country, and we’ve just traversed one small corner of it.

I will write a post about our drive later. This post is about our last afternoon and evening in Sydney.

On Sunday we had a very nice lafternoon with a friend from business school and his family. Steve and Alison have a remarkably nice lifestyle in Sydney, living a five-minute walk from Manly Beach. After they cooked us lunch on the barbie, and we had a glass of New Zealand wine, we all went for a sunbath and a swim in the ocean. Very civilized. They and their kids seem as happy and healthy and comfortable as can be. They embody all that is good about Australia.

That evening we stayed in a controversial new resort in Manly called “Q Station.” The developers have converted the old quarantine camp -where the Australian health authorities once detained potentially contagious arriving passengers- into a conference facility and cultural appreciation center. It is a little bit like having a boutique hotel on Ellis Island. It is controversial amongst Sydneysiders because it is a hotel inside a park, and the country’s heritage was also somehow potentially jeopardized.

The physical setting for Q Station is off- the-hook beautiful. It is perched on the bluffs above Sydney Harbor, with spectacular views of the city and of the northern beaches and towns. Because Q Station is in the midst of a giant park, the long, low, yellow buildings are surrounded by forests and fields.

The guest rooms are built into the old bunk houses that used to hold scores of quarantined passengers. To give guests a flavor of the quarantine experience, many of the rooms do not have en suite bathrooms, requiring guests to share … just like in the old days. While we were waiting to go into our rooms, India used one of the old communal women’s bathrooms, which had not been renovated yet. Apparently it also had not been cleaned since the facility was used for quarantine (ie, maybe 30 years). She came back disgusted, wondering how far the authenticity of the quarantine experience would be taken.

Our rooms did have bathrooms, but the developers’ desire for us to appreciate the quarantine experience made our whole stay at Q Station a little weird and frustrating. For example, they took away our car keys, effectively stranding us at the hotel in the middle of a huge wildlife area, surrounded on three sides by water. We hiked (a long way) down to dinner in the old dining hall, where we were not given a choice of food. Everyone was served the same dish of bad chicken, bad fish, and bad minute steak. We walked to the windy beach, but got kicked off almost immediately because it was sunset. Being in quarantine isn’t supposed to be fun.

There were several activities advertised on Q Station’s website: an “immersion theatre” production, a late-night ghost tour, a family ghost tour, a history walk. Unfortunately, none of them were being offered on the day we were there. Huh?

We were supposed to be staying in renovated cottages, so that we could all be in the same place, but the renovations are several months behind schedule.

Finally, all of the staff members were absurdly good looking young Brazilians, who spoke little English. I’m not sure how that emulated the quarantine experience, but it made our stay a little weirder.

We were glad that we had only booked a single night at Q Station. All of us were relieved to get our car back and head down to Manly for breakfast.

It did not surprise us (after the fact) to find out that we were basically the only guests on Sunday night. The site is so spectacular, and what they are trying to do has some real merit. They need to work out some of the kinks, though.