Australian National Maritime Museum

As expected, our part of town was a little more awake than yesterday (Sunday). JD turned his nose up at most of the suit-inhabited, ground-floor-of-office-buildings cafes and coffee spots, so it wasn’t until we got back across to Darling Harbour that we found somewhere suitable. We ended up in Pancake On the Rocks (almost certainly part of the Pancake Parlour group) as options were still limited, and the boys were getting antsy (it was after 10:30am).

We then considered the options for the next few hours, until it was time to return to the hotel to collect our luggage, and then on to the cruise terminal. The guys were interested in touring the boats with the Maritime Museum, but I was a little wary given the price ($65/family) and our limited time. We then considered the Aquarium, but for the four of us, we’d be up for $120. Suddenly, the boat tours were looking far more attractive.

And they were interesting.

White ensign, flying on HMAS Vampire

First up, we went through the submarine, HMAS Onslow.

Entering the torpedo launching room

Built in the mid-sixties, it was decommissioned in the mid-nineties. The recommended life span is around 30 years or so, due to the metal fatigue from the stresses imposed by the water pressures of diving and surfacing. Unlike US and UK subs, there’s no hot-bunking here – each sailor has his own bunk. They’re six foot long, not more than two foot wide, and there’s less than two foot of clearance.

I bitch about my kitchen, but it’s a touch more spacious than the sub’s one, which has to feed the sixty-odd souls on board three times a day.

That's it. That's the whole of the kitchen.

The bathrooms are a touch crowded too, but then you’re lucky to get a one minute shower once a week anyway. And if you’re out for ten weeks (the upper limit), it would get pretty whiffy by the end of all that. It would take a very special person to be able to endure all that – I think you’d have to be certifiably mad to volunteer, but you’d have to pass their exceptionally rigorous psychological testing to be considered.

Through the periscope (much easier with the naked eye than a point-and-shoot camera)

Next we went around the HMAS Vampire, a decommissioned Destroyer. It was positively palatial after the sub, complete with a hospital, and sizeable kitchen.

The hospital (Jos recognised the bandage packs on the gurney from his Day Z experience)

JD can almost reach the engine order telegraph in the engine room ...

While bristling with guns (and destroyers are all about the guns), none of them would have been especially accurate (per JD).

They're not Cher. And that's okay with me.

Loose lips sink ships

Ky on the bouncy chair in the bridge

We saw, but didn’t board, a Vietnamese fishing boat, called Tu Do (meaning 'freedom'). It was used to smuggle thirty odd people from Vietnam to Australia using little more than a page torn from a child’s school atlas and a compass. It reinforces the perils that people are willing to risk when fleeing their country, and makes our treatment of those lucky enough to survive that long and arduous journey so shameful.

Tu Do (mid ground), with the Endeavour on the other side of the jetty

Finally, we boarded a replica of the HMB Endeavour, James Cook’s ship that ‘discovered’ Australia.

Down the hatch ...

A converted collier (coal ship), it was not an especially people-friendly ship – two of the decks used the cross-beams from the former cargo hold as the basis for the floors, leaving less than four foot of clearance for more than half the floorspace.

Yes, they're sitting. And yes, that's the clearance for nearly half the ship

And the sailors spent three years on that ship, bent at the waist like they did on floor 7½ in “Being JohnMalkovich”.

JD, bent at the waist

(Interestingly, an article in the news digest provided on board this morning says that they found a skull in Taree, NSW, of a European man born ca. 1650. Which kind of puts pay to the idea that Cook was the first European to set foot on the country’s east coast (in 1770).)

We had a quick squiz at the East of India exhibition, looking at the rise and fall of the United East India Company, important to Australia in its early years, as it was much quicker to get stuff from India than from England. And then we walked briskly back to the hotel to collect our bags, find a cab, and get out to the terminal.