Sydney. Does any city possess two landmarks more instantly recognisable than the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House? Two connected surprises. First, they are better and bigger than postcards suggest. Second, they ain't just for show.

The nicest way to approach Homebush Bay is to take the bustling little green and cream ferry from busy Circular Quay wedged between the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and putter gently under the bridge and down the Parramatta River.

Sydney. Strangely this scribbler had always been a landlubber before coming here, the first footfall on a wobbly gangplank prompting Olympian feats of vomiting, yet in Sydney the water defines the land and every time you look at the harbour you are drawn towards the bank, towards the water.

The irony is that here you have more reason to fear the water than practically anywhere else on earth. The jellyfish will undo you with one passing kiss, the goblin fish totally lack the cuteness their name suggests while the reputation of sharks needs no advertisement here.

Great gangs of these horrors wander the waters waiting for the unwary. Rule No 1. If it isn't on your plate with a wedge of lemon beside it you should be fleeing from it, screaming. For this reason the wonderful Sydney aquarium, in (simply wonderful) Darling Harbour, is like a fishy chamber of horrors for some athletes. During the triathlon, which takes the fit and the foolhardy right into the murk of the bay, the athletes will be guarded by divers armed with stun-guns. Just in case.

Anyway, the Parramatta is a slow doodle of a river and you criss-cross through the sleepy mangrove swamps till you get to the little jetty at Homebush.

Stadium Australia and the Superdome and the sheer-banked bleachers of the aquatic centre reach towards the blue winter sky, but the shapes and the great knolls of earth all around give the whole complex a natural feel. It belongs here somehow.

Homebush will be the cog of the Games. Just 14 kilometres from the business area of downtown, but slap bang, its promoters say, in the geometric centre of the immense sprawl that is Greater Sydney, it is a truly Olympian achievement. Since whitey relieved the Aboriginal owners of the site, it has been home to farmlands, racecourses, abattoirs and an industrial waste dump. That carelessness has been rolled back, the wetlands and their abundant species have been revived, 15 of the 28 Olympic disciplines will take place out here, and the athletes will live in the most environmentally friendly Olympic Village the Games have ever seen. The village, which is being run by Monaghan man Maurice Holland, will be the world's largest solar-powered community and has been built to include 650 permanent dwellings, many of which have already been sold to private purchasers for occupation after the Games.

After the Games, more building will be done bringing the number of houses to 2000. Retail shops and a business centre will be added and the initial population will be 5,000, a suburban community with the world's greatest sports facilities on their doorstep.

Maurice Holland's legacy will lie at the centre of an immense parkland development which will become a feature of the area. Near the Olympic Stadium lies, what for the want of another phrase, is an immense hole in the ground, a cavity that's depth and circumference suggests that the nearby stadium was prised whole from here. This is the Brickpit and is one of the centrepieces of the new park. If you have seen the last of the Mad Max films - the one with Tina Turner in it - you know all you need to know about the strange interior of the brick pit. The movie was filmed inside this big hole.

Elsewhere great swathes of land are being landscaped and festooned with cycle routes and footpaths. A water recycling system will irrigate the wetlands which will provide sanctuary for 160 types of bird species. Eventually, the park will stretch over 1,000 hectares and if they can get rid of all those athletes' syringes, it will be beautiful. And larger, they keep telling you, than Central Park in New York.

At its centre, of course, will still be the Olympic legacy, the massive infrastructure laid down for use in two weeks this September. If Sydney Harbour will be the signature look of these Games, well Stadium Australia at the heart of Homebush is sure to emerge as a star also. The biggest Olympic venue ever built, the design is awesome without being oppressive. The clever use of space, curved lines and natural light give the place such a homely feel that the resident rugby league club are already asking if they can move out again, their opponents just love playing there so much.

Tonight the stadium plays host to one of its last big occasions before the Games, the Bledisloe Cup Game between Australia and New Zealand. The capacity crowd of 110,000 will be guinea pigs for the organisers, swooshed in and out on the rapid rail system installed for the Games, watched as they queue at the 100 food and drink outlets, studied as they negotiate the 18,000 steps inside the stadium. The merest hint of a glitch will bring an avalanche of solutions.

Nearby is the 17,500 capacity Aquatic Centre, already the most visited of all the Olympic sites and the hottest ticket for the Games, the baseball stadium (15,000), the international athletics centre (5,000) where track athletes will warm up before their events, the Superdome (18,000), the hockey centre (15,000), the Dome (10,000), the tennis centre (10,000), and a series of pavilions which will hold sports like handball, volleyball and pentathlon. Everything spanking new and ready to roll.

Back down river, the city of Sydney bides its time, waiting to become the next great star of the Olympics. Wisely, several of the events have been set for downtown in Darling Harbour where the city will showcase its perfection. The Opera House and the Harbour Bridge dominate everything, of course. The Opera House is fine and lovely, with its billowing roofs and teeming plazas, but Sydneysiders risk the social fate of their convict ancestors if they announce one more time that in fact the trademark design does not mimic the spinnakers which play in the harbour but represent segments of a sphere.

Paraboloid segments, mate. Better than the Opera House anyway is the Harbour Bridge, one of the world's great spans. It sets out the ambition of the city it serves by being freakishly bigger than it needs to be, looming 10 stories above the deepest part of the harbour, its great arc rising another 10 stories still. The whole thing is a conglomeration of six million rivets and just four bolts and it hovers majestically over Circular Quay before disappearing towards the grease-painted gaudiness of Luna Park, the amusement park which guards the sedate northern suburbs of Sydney.

The Irish Echo published a lovely yarn last week concerning the bridge. An Irishman is said to be the only person to have fallen off the thing, preserving himself by throwing his toolbag ahead of him to break the surface tension of the water and then hugging himself tightly as he went feet first into the harbour.

His acuity might yet prove useful to some of the (needlessly) embattled organisers of the Games. The SOCOG offices lie in a nondescript building in Jones Street in the Ultimo section of the city, surrounded by the faculty buildings of the local technology college. SOCOG is Paranoid Central just now, its inhabitants convinced that the building and the institution is under siege from the pack of ravenous dingos that comprise the Australian media.

The embattled attitude is silly but understandable. The Aussie media like nothing better than chomping down on the soft calves of officialdom and, anyway, Sydney has always been a little dubious about the Games and the process therein. Even during that memorable week in September 1993, when the Aussies pulled off one of the great upsets of Olympic politics and eclipsed Beijing's seemingly inexorable claim to the Millennium Olympics, the bemused Mayor of Sydney, Frank Sartor, confessed with some distaste that his team had gone every day to the brothel de Paris and sold themselves for Sydney.

Ironically, Sydney's efficiency maybe its own worst enemy at present. With everything finished and ready to go for almost a year now, there is no sense of beat-the-clock civic scramble about the place, just the sound of fingers drumming and anxious hands brushing the white linen tablecloth flat for the umpteenth time as they wait for the guests to arrive. In the drawing-room there are curmudgeons counting the cost and inconvenience.

There has been plenty of both. SOCOG used up the last of its contingency funds some time ago and a needed a $140 million Government hand-out. A public just getting grudgingly accustomed this week to a VAT-style tax on goods and services is antsy about freeing anymore of its tax dollars to prop up the $3.1 billion-plus Games budget.

Inevitably, the IOC bidding scandals have taken some of the fragrance away from the Games, as has the glorious brass neck of some of those involved in the bid. John Coates, the Australian IOC member forced to resign in high scandal season, is persisting in asserting his right to carry the Olympic torch during the Bondi Beach section of the relay to the stadium.