Underground Movement

The other afternoon I got to do something pretty unusual, I went for a tour in the Tank Stream under the city of Sydney.  This is something we have wanted to do for ages, but never had the time, or managed to get lucky in the ballot for tickets.

The Tank Stream was the source of fresh water for the first European settlers and now it is about 4 meters under the city and not readily accessible to the general public. So we rocked up at our assigned time at Australia Square( which is a Harry Seidler building, which is actually round!)

I love Australia Square, the building is so modern even after 50 years and it has a very swish restaurant at the top ( called O bar) where you can have a drink or a meal and the whole restaurant revolves 360 degrees, a great way to see the city sitting down! We went there for dinner a couple of years back when Vivid Sydney was on.



Anyway back to underground, we had to get into gear, gumboots, hard hats, hi viz vests and safety harness, attend a safety briefing and watch a video on the history of the tunnel and then we were off!

Safety briefing 

dressed to go!

Down a ladder and then we were below the city, It was quite low and we had to be careful not to bang our heads, there was quite a lot of water as there had been a bit of rain yesterday ( so much so that they had to cancel yesterday's tours, too dangerous).





The whole thing was done by convict labour, and you can see the pick marks where they were working at the sandstone. They kept to the original course of the stream which has meant that the sandstone has not weathered too much.

Our Guide was Yvonne, who is an archeologist working with Sydney Water so has conducted this tour 400 times! I thought how amazing some people's jobs are that they get to do stuff like this!

Yvonne our tour guide showing us the tunnel ahead

the tour only took in  part of the tunnel that was fairly easy to navigate we went up to the Ovid tunnel which is much smaller and narrower you can see a picture below, I declined to go in and have my pic taken, it was just a bit too confined!

The tour took about 1 hour and 15 minutes all up and it was really cool to be under the city and hearing the traffic over the man holes above.

So that's another thing ticked off my to do list, what about you have you ever been on a cool tour in your home city?