Lonely Planet (the Australian-based guidebook people) has just published their list of the top 10 cities for 2011. Apparently, this is the first time that an Australian city has made the list – and it’s Newcastle at number nine on the list.
Frankly, I’m disturbed. I’ve lived most of my life in Newcastle (the past few years being an aberration), and while Newcastle in great to live in (if you can find a job there), one of the great things about the city is that it’s so close to Sydney.
But, has anyone else here actually visited Newcastle as a tourist destination, to offer a less biassed view than mine?
Can’t say that I have, because as far as I can tell there’s nothing to do there. So how on Earth did it make a Lonely Planet Top 10 Cities list, unless it’s Top 10 Cities None Of Your Friends Have Visited, So You Can Have Extra Bragging Rights?
I don’t know what the criteria were, but they must have been odd, given what was not there: Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, San Francisco – even London, which I’d put near the top of my list.
We’ve been there with the kids. I think we ended up going on a ferry and having an ice cream and that was about all there was as far as I could see. Ninth in the world for what?
Half the description from Lonely Planet is how close it is to other place where you can actually do stuff, like Lake Macquarie, and the Hunter Valley. And then there’s the ‘nightlife, dining and arts’. Quite a few bands do play Newcastle nowadays. The dining would have to have improved a lot over the past 5 years to rank anywhere near world-class.
Newcastle was named after Newcastle Upon Tyne in England, since the first thing that Europeans found there was coal seams coming to the surface. There are no longer any coal mines in the city, but the city is still one of the largest (if not the largest) coal ports in the world, with about 100,000,000 tons* of coal being carried to Newcastle, and loaded onto ships going to China, Korea, Japan, etc. So, carrying coals to Newcastle is really big business.
Yes, that’s one hundred million tons of coal each year.
Only while visiting my brother and sister-in-law, who live between Newcastle and Maitland. But yes, Newcastle has cleaned up its act in recent years. It’s close to the Hunter Valley, of course, but the city itself seems to have been spruced up quite a bit, made a bit more of its history etc. And there are some good restaurants, although I wouldn’t have considered them ‘world-class’. I’m told, although I didn’t visit any, that there are some rather nice galleries as well. I’ll be there again in a fortnight’s time for a performance in the cathedral, and I may have time to look around a bit more.
