110. Sydney Monorail

I don’t know about you but when I think of the word Monorail what springs to mind is a sleek, ridiculously fast, super efficient, ultra-quiet, Japanese filled, gravity defying, engineering miracle train.

With that in mind, I though it was time that we had a shot on the Sydney Monorail. We’d had seen it every now and again in the city centre snaking between the building and skyscrapers about 10m off the ground. However, trying to find the stations was a bit difficult as they are all hidden on the second floors of various unrelated buildings. Once we did find it we paid for the $4 round trip token and then headed onto the platform.

It didn’t take long for us to realise that our previous thoughts about the monorail were total misconceptions. Firstly the platform was filled with the obligatory fat American tourists, and once we boarded, we discovered the cabins were too. Each carriage was tiny and only sat 6 people (or 2 Americans) and the A/C was on full blast at a setting of about -20C.

We were lucky that we got seats because if we had been standing then I think we would have got off at the next stop. The train slowly pulled away from the platform… and continued slowly, and noisily, round the 15 minute loop. There was no view at all with the exception of an occasional glimpse into someone’s office and although we were above the street and all it’s pedestrians, I couldn’t help thinking that they were walking faster than we were monorailing.

All in all this has probably been the worst and most pointless thing we have done since leaving home. It’s no wonder that the only people on it were tourists. I mentioned it at work the next day and almost in unison the whole department said “You wanna stay away from the monorail – it’s crap!” Hindsight’s a wonderful thing.