Outsmarted!

There it suddenly was! The car I spent all of last year trying to hunt down.


I was at the Smart Energy Expo in Darling Harbour. Hyundai was there, showing off its Ioniq range of electric and hybrid cars. My old car was on its last legs last year, and I'd been extremely keen to try out the plug-in hybrid version.

It was much touted as the first 'affordable' such car. The (smallish) battery gives it a range of 60km or so using (perhaps free solar) electric energy from your home power point. This covers most journeys you normally do. You don't need to worry about the limited range though, as it also has a hybrid petrol engine, so you can happily set off on long journeys too.

The trouble was that it was always a few months away from being launched in Australia. The date kept getting put back. Replacing my old car was becoming daily more urgent. Eventually I had to settle for a rival Toyota Corolla.

So I asked the Hyundai salesman whether his car was indeed available now. Guess what? It's still a few months away! The story was that the right-hand drive versions are so popular in the UK that they're struggling to service that market, and we just have to keep waiting.





I was at the expo to help out with the Solar Citizens stall. Solar Citizens is a voluntary community group of solar energy users and enthusiasts. They mount campaigns such as the 'Fair Price for Solar' one which had some success last year when electricity companies were persuaded by the regulator to increase the feed-in tariffs they pay. There's pressure to reduce them again now, I heard, because wholesale electricity prices have been coming down, thanks in fact to the massive take-up of household solar! So the campaign goes on.

Darling Harbour reimagined

Mind you, I didn't imagine it was going to look quite like this. In the last few years they've knocked down the old Exhibition Centre at Darling Harbour and the old Entertainment Centre. In their place have arisen three new buildings.

It's all a bit confusing. They're all part of the International Convention Centre (ICC).


There's a new entertainment centre, presumably a concert hall - I haven't been there yet, but should make the effort. I failed to get to the last one ever during its 30 or so years of active life, after all.







And an exhibition centre and a conference centre too. Can't remember which is which, and the ICC website amazingly can't be bothered to tell us. Or even what ICC stands for. Fortunately there was a young lady on duty there the other day who was able to enlighten me.

Fiesta! (and Sydney sizzles)

It was the Darling Harbour Latin American Fiesta at the weekend, and the place was full of  party music and South American dancers - fabulous creatures with scanty costumes and heavenly bodies!



No wonder the buildings were melting in the sun!

A Maritime Endeavour

Sydney's National Maritime Museum is usually worth a look. It has its permanent stuff, but also special little exhibitions that can be quite interesting. Then it has its collection of floating exhibits, which I'd somehow never got round to exploring.

The special little exhibition the other day was 'East of India', about trade links between colonial India and Australia. There was a lot of it, because the early Australian colonies were six months away from Britain, but only six weeks from India. So where was the obvious place to supply them from, especially after the near starvation of the early years?

As for the floating exhibits, how could one go past The Endeavour, or more accurately the Endeavour replica. As replicas go, it's the most faithfully replicated such ship around, according to the volunteer guide. The timbers are Australian rather than British, but the size, shape, colour schemes: everything is spot on, I was told, because the original plans had still been available to work from.

You have to mind your head as you walk around the rather small vessel, the original of which had been converted from a coal carrier with a crew of 12 into a world-circling expeditioner with nearly 100 on board. They'd had to put in an extra deck between the top and bottom ones to house the extra people, and for a fairly large section you actually have to bend double to navigate it. Most of the crew in those days were probably quite short, but Captain Cook, and expedition sponsor and naturalist Joseph Banks were extremely tall men, even by today's standards. If you've seen the movie 'Being John Malkovich', you'll remember the scenes in the low-ceilinged floor 7½. It's worse than that on the Endeavour.

You get to see the whole ship, and get a fabulous feel for what it might have been like on that first three year voyage. Banks had the best living quarters, and these days, when the ship's in port anyway, it's all decked out with his botanical samples.