Tag Archives: Australia

Momos Down Under

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We’ve been eating our favorite snack food while traveling in Australia and New Zealand the past several weeks. 

It’s not chips, burgers or pizza, although these are plentiful. No, we’ve been eating momos — the Nepalese dumplings you see in the photo here.

In Sydney, we ate at The Momo Hub, then at Falcha Hall. As soon as we arrived in New Zealand, we ate at Kathmandu Mo:Mo in Christchurch, then at Mela in Dunedin and The Himalaya in Queenstown. 

If you’ve never tried momos, you don’t know what you’re missing. They’re delectable dumplings stuffed with flavorful ground meat or vegetables You buy them either steamed or fried, dip them in sauce and eat them with a fork or your fingers — one or two bites per momo. Our go-to order is a plate of 10 or 12 steamed chicken momos, which we share. 

Momos are ubiquitous in Nepal and have been gaining popularity elsewhere. You can find them in most U.S. cities. In India, some fast food chains now specialize in momos. I think it’s only a matter of time until momos become as common to the American food scene as tacos or ramen, which were considered exotic not so long ago. 

Here in Australia and New Zealand, which both have significant numbers of Nepalis, momo shops have also been a great place for us to meet people and learn about their lives. The above photo shows Champa with a Gurung family we met in Queenstown. The owner, Satya Thapa, is on the right. That’s him cooking in the next photo. 

The following photo shows a young woman who moved recently to Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, to help her brother launch a Nepalese restaurant featuring momos. They were yummy. Like everyone else we met, she was surprised when I placed the order and chatted in Nepali, which I learned years ago while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal.

We’ve also been eating local foods, of course, as well as this region’s famous beer and wine. However, we did skip the kangaroo meat. 

I know it’s odd to write about Nepal’s national snack food while we’re touring Down Under but there’s never a bad time to eat or talk about momos. I’m dreaming of the day when someone opens a momo shop in our hometown of Durham, N.C.

For now, I’ve begun researching where to find the best momos when we arrive in Auckland in a few days. 

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Scenic Sydney

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I’ve visited some beautiful coastal cities — Rio de Janiero, Venice, San Francisco, Cape Town — but none captivated me like Sydney.

Its famous harbor, flanked by the iconic opera house and bridge, bustles with ferries and sailboats. Locals and tourists from across Asia and the world fill its shops and restaurants. Street performers, gardens, museums and other attractions compete for attention.

The Opera House seemingly changes shape depending on your vantage point.

We just spent nine days in Sydney and filled almost every hour with something interesting. Here are some highlights:

We met this koala at the Taronga Zoo, a quick ferry ride from the Circular Quay beside the Opera House.

A walk across the Harbour Bridge offers a great view of the city.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has diverse collections in a distinctive setting.

The Sydney Barracks tell the stories of convicts who helped build Australia.

An extensive, easy-to-learn transit system uses ferries, trams, buses and trains.

We fed kangaroos and met other residents of another zoo, the Sydney Zoo.

Manly has popular beaches and hiking trails. We traveled there by ferry.

Perhaps the most famous beach hike is the Bondi to Coogee Walk, where we saw swimmers, surfers, volleyball players, body builders and lots of people just enjoying the day.

This crowd was among the million people awaiting the start of Sydney’s famous New Year’s Eve fireworks.

We visited the Blue Mountains, where we saw the famous Three Sisters rock formation.

This concert of Beatles music rocked the Joan Sutherland Theatre at the Sydney Opera House.

Australia’s state libraries, like this one in Sydney, offer museum-quality exhibits.

The Museum of Contemporary Art is adjacent to the Circular Quay and The Rocks, the city’s oldest neighborhood.

Boats are everywhere in Sydney, including at this harbor near Watsons Bay, where we went hiking.

The Australian Museum offers an excellent introduction to the country’s natural history.

It took some adjusting (but only some) to celebrate the holiday season in a summer climate. This scene is at St. Mary’s Cathedral.

A highlight of our Sydney trip was visiting with Nepali relatives who now live there, including our nephew Manohar, with Rukshana.

This wall hanging, like the image at the top of this post, is among the Museum of Sydney’s artwork from the Coomaditchie people.

Artistic Adelaide

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Adelaide is known for several things — beautiful churches, wineries, festivals — but what I’ll remember most about it is the life-sized sculpture of a mother breastfeeding her baby at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

As you can see, it’s not quite a human mother. What gives the life-sized piece by Patricia Piccinini even more power is its placement beside a traditional Virgin and Child by William Adolphe Bouguereau. 

Here are the two works together, each offering a different vision of motherhood. 

Now consider this Rodin sculpture placed beside Ricky Swallow’s meticulous carving of a skeleton from lime wood.

I found the juxtaposition strange and wonderful. Likewise for the presentation shown at the top of this post. 

Champa and I are both art lovers; she is an artist herself. We try to check out local museums whenever we visit a new city. Most have galleries filled with works of specific periods or genres. Adelaide’s museum had those, too, but it also challenged us to think beyond categories, as with this surrealist mashup:

Adelaide’s museum can’t compete with the volume of places like the Louvre, but it impressed us in its own way, as did the city generally. 

Next door, for instance, and also free, is the South Australian Museum, which has excellent displays of natural history and Aboriginal culture. 

Next to that is the State Library, whose historic Mortlock Wing looks like a reading room at Hogwarts.

Further up the street is an excellent botanic garden, now featuring pieces by American glass artist Dale Chihuly placed in strategic locations and lit up at night. 

We also enjoyed Adelaide’s giant outdoor Rundell Mall, decked out for the holidays, and a Central Market filled with luscious produce and specialty food shops. 

Australia’s fifth largest city has many other attractions, which we didn’t have time to visit. However, we saw enough to give it an artistic thumbs up. 


This very red piece is by Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese artist now living in Germany.

Only Melbourne

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Never tell someone from Los Angeles or Barcelona that they’re “only” the second city to New York or Madrid. 

Similarly, as we saw yesterday, residents of Melbourne don’t view their beautiful city as second to Sydney or anyplace else in Australia. 

Nor should they. This city of 5.2 million people is a multicultural gem with vibrant culture and a strong economy. It’s currently fourth in the Global Liveability Index, behind only Vienna, Copenhagen and Zurich.

Melbourne was briefly the world’s richest city, during the 1880s. It served as Australia’s capital, hosted the 1956 Olympics and is the birthplace of movie stars and celebrities, including NBA star Kyrie Irving. 

It’s also a fun place to visit. We began our brief tour with an early-morning stroll through the Royal Botanic Gardens, which are stunning. When we came across some women bicyclists having a picnic next to blooming lotus flowers, I thought to myself, “Wow, I could live here.”

Then we explored downtown on foot, joining a free walking tour, as we’ve done in other cities around the world. Our starting point, above, was the State Library Victoria, with its imposing dome room. 

Another stop was the Old Melbourne Gaol, or jail, where the famous bushranger Ned Kelly was hanged for murder. 

Carlton Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, features the Royal Exhibition Building, which has hosted an international exposition, Olympic competitions and other historic events. It’s near the state parliament building, below. 

Other landmarks included the picturesque Flinders St. Railway Station and St. Paul’s Cathedral, below, and less formal attractions such as graffiti art and shops decked out for the holidays. 

We ended our visit with a tram ride, giving us a final glimpse of this impressive city. 

My Aussie friend Simon has been telling me for years that Melbourne is a great city. Now I can finally reply, “I’ll second that!”  

I just hope he doesn’t take it the wrong way. 

The paving at Melbourne’s Federation Square features inlaid textual pieces.

Strikingly Australia 

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Many of the things I saw after arriving in Australia two days ago didn’t surprise me: its beauty, its diversity, its prosperity, its young people drinking beer at an outdoor pub. It felt like California with the avocado toast replaced by Vegemite. 

At least that’s the vibe I got at Sydney’s Darling Harbor as Champa and I took a long walk to shake off our very long journey from North Carolina. 

Things got more complex when we spent much of the following afternoon at the Australian Museum, which we’d expected to just breeze through. It showed us how Australia is simultaneously, and strikingly, distinctive, from its history to its landscape. 

For instance, its birds. I’m not a bird watcher but I was spellbound by the collection we saw at the museum. There were giant emus and cassowaries, and distinctive kinds of turkeys, hawks and pelicans. I saw my first albatross — not the metaphor, but the actual bird, plus kookaburras, boobies and cormorants. 

Other exhibits were also revelatory, about everything from minerals to kangaroos. At the neighboring Anzac Memorial, we learned about Australia’s military history. We visited Saint Mary’s Cathedral, strolled in Tumbalong Park and ate momos and dal-bhat at one of several Nepalese restaurants near our hotel. 

Not all of it was positive. In one museum exhibit, I learned about Australia’s horrific treatment of laborers from the South Sea Islands, and its complicated, sometimes disgraceful, legacy with its aboriginal population. 

But Australia has also given us Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, scientists, Olympic champions, tennis stars and personalities ranging from feminist Germaine Greer to media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

On its shiny surface, especially what we’ve seen so far in Sydney, Australia resembles the United States. But we’re learning how the reality lies deeper, and we look forward to discovering more over the next few weeks. We’re departing Sydney this evening and will return after Christmas for more local sightseeing and the city’s famous New Year’s fireworks. 

I know all of this is a first impression based on a small section of a single city in a country so big it fills a continent, so I’m looking forward to learning more.

For now, mates, pass the Vegemite.