Sydney

A disclaimer: We tend to always run a few days behind real time while travel blogging, meaning that the first few days of every trip are usually spent finishing up the blog entries from the last trip. As such, our three and a half days in Sydney will be condensed to a single post -- and the specific details may be a little off. Lucky for us we have pictures to remind us of what happened.

Since we'd gotten quite behind on our blogging - and because our late afternoon flight to Sydney was JUST early enough to make a major excursion impossible, we decided to spend our last day in Cairns sleeping in, eating Chinese take-out, shooting pool, and - mostly - blogging.

We did make an excursion to visit some famous Cairns residents, the Flying Foxes (a.k.a. fruit bats).

They mostly hang out in the trees, but they're particularly spectacular when they take wing.

They are most famous however, for something else...take a look, or rather, a listen:

After returning our rental car, we were off to Sydney! We got in pretty late, so we limited our activities to exploring the area right outside the hotel for food options. Ian found some Indian take out (very exciting for him) and we called it a night.

Our hotel was pretty centrally located to many of the tourist attractions, so we set off the next morning on a self-guided walking tour. Our first stop was the Sydney botanical gardens. I'm sure some of the plants were rare, but we really didn't know what was what, so here's a flower:

There was some bird life in the garden as well.

The botanical gardens led to the waterfront, and, therefore, to the star attraction of the city: The Opera House. I'd previously convinced Ian to sit through a performance with me (I mean, come on, it's the Sydney Opera House!), so we purchased tickets to the next evening's performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

After grabbing some lunch at one of the waterfront restaurants. Our clearest memory of this meal was the persistence of the seagulls in stealing french fries. The family next to us left theirs unattended for about 2 minutes, and sudddenly it was a mad cacaphony of wings beating, gulls shrieking, and the restaurant owner shooing. It was pretty hilarious - wish we'd gotten pictures!

After lunch, we caught a ferry ride to Manly. Manly was very quaint, lots of little shops and ice cream parlors and cafes. But mainly, it had some nice walks...

 

....to some great beaches:

 

Ian was particularly taken with the man-o-wars. These guys float wherever the current takes them, and the tenticals can sting the bejesus out of the careless swimmer. I say "these guys" because what you see in the photo below is not one animal, but colony of small, highly specialized individuals coming together to form a single entity.

Even cooler, according to Ian, was watching the crabs play "tug-of-man-o-war":

As the sun started to set, we headed back to the ferry. We'd been told that the sunset from the ferry, with the Opera House in the backdrop, was one of the prettiest ways to capture the iconic Sydney "shot." Here's our best attempt:

It'd been a pretty full day, so we headed back to the hotel.

The next day was our last full day in Syndey, and we realized that we still had quite a bit of souvenir shopping to do. This is what happens on a lot of our trips -- we try to avoid buying too much stuff early on since that means we'll have to carry it all for the rest of the trip -- so family members and friends often get presents from the last stop of the trip -- luckily, Sydney had some great shopping to offer. Even more luckily, the mecca of souvenir shopping (Paddy's Market), was very close to Chinatown.

I decided to stop at a few places for some snacks. This place was apparently quite well known to the locals (I thought the cream puffs were just so-so):

Ian was happy to get some bubble tea.

After filling up our backpack with souvenirs, we headed back to the hotel for our much anticipated evening out. First, there were more Opera House shots:

We had purchased the "Gold Package" for the performance, which included a guided tour of the Opera House, dinner at a fancy restaurant on the waterfront, and drinks before and during the performance. We took full advantage of all of the above. Here are some tour shots:

A dinner picture (we were told this was one of the best restaurants in Sydney)...

 

And a drink picture...

After a great evening out, we still had some sights awaiting us after the performance -- the waterfront was pretty spectacular after nightfall:

And with those last few shots, our Australia/New Zealand trip had come to an end. The next day, we had an early flight out of Sydney back to the U.S. The three weeks had really flown by!

 

Rainforest Night-life

The nocturnal tour started at 1:45pm.  Clearly we were going to get more than just the after-dark experience on this excursion.  Our guide, Adrian, picked us up directly at our accommodations and we drove into town to pick up a 5 more people.  We stole the front seats in the van as the other tourists piled in.  There were a few pairs of binoculars scattered around the vehicle. 

Our first destination was a little residential area to get a sense of how wild-life was coping with the ways humans had changed the area.  Wallaby's actually appreciate the extra grazing land... though the locals aren't particularly keen about letting their lawns get eaten.

These spur-winged lapwings are comfortable enough with humans to build their nests in close proximity to people's houses.  The problem is, that these birds get very defensive if you get too close to their kids, so they'll respond by dive bombing you.

Other birds are more innocuous.  The rainbow bee-eater, for instance, just sits there and looks pretty.

As does this king-fisher.

Once we'd toured the neighborhood near Cairns, we started out for the rainforest.  We stopped for afternoon tea at Lake Barinne surrounded by a small patch of preserved forest.  The jam and crumpets were delicious!

 Ming got excited by the flowers around the tea house...

 ...so many pictures were taken.

A duck got into the line of fire...

Before long, it was time for our first short walk around the lake through the rainforest.  The long skinny vines in this picture are called "wait-a-while", because they have sharp, spiney barbs which will catch on your clothing (or another plant, or whatever), pinning you (or it, or whatever) in place.  If you looked closely at the picture of the van, you'll also no that it was the name of the tour company we were using.  Oddly, they were quite early when picking us up.

 Fortunately, there was a path through the forest so we didn't need a machete.

When vines did cross the path, I just bent them out of the way, like this:

Sometimes I had to tie them into knots, so they wouldn't disturb future tourists.

The next spot we stopped is a place I like to call turtle lake.

That's not it's name... that's just where we saw some turtles.  The presence of turtles is probably the least remarkable thing about this lake.  Adrian explained how the lakes around here were formed gigantic volcanic craters millions of years ago.

Finally, we made a mad dash to the platypus pond before dark fell.

We stood along the banks and waited for a platypus to surface.

The platypus, for the uninitiated, are crazy animals.  For starters, with the echidna, the platypus rounds out the grand total of two types of monotremes in existence.  So, here we've got another egg-laying mammal that uses electro-location to stalk its prey.  That should cover the minimum crazy-animal classification prerequisites.

The water-mammal niche they fill has necessitated a few more adaptations including webbed feet and a bill.  They have great vision and great hearing, but use neither underwater, as they have a single eye/earlid, of sorts, which covers both while they are swimming.  Oh yeah, and their venomous.  The venom won't come from a bite, however, but from the next-most obvious place: a spur on their ankle.  All things considered, the platypus probably takes the strangeness cake from the echidna.  You can see most, if not all, of these anatomical anomalies in the following picture.

Ok, so we didn't get as close to the platypus as I would have liked.  The black speck there is definitely a platypus, though, since it's the only thing in this pond (except for a duck), which makes a bow wave like that, indicating horizontal movement along the surface of the water.  Since that's not a duck, it's decidedly a platypus.  Here's a closer look on an anatomically incorrect replica... though size-wise it's not too far off:

Night had fallen and there were no more platypuses (platypus? platypi? platypotamuses?) to be seen.  It was time to move on to the truly nocturnal portion of our tour.   We drove to a walkway that meandered a few hundred meters into the rainforest before popping out a little further down the road.  I was excited to see what lurked in the woods at night on the underside of the earth.  We each got our own flashlight (er, sorry "torch") as well, so this was gonna be great!  My excitement evaporated when we ran into this guy:

I'm not a spider person.  Granted, this Huntsman spider is relatively harmless to humans, but that doesn't mean I was keen on finding out exactly how "relatively."  We moved on.  

Our guide motioned us over to a few vines along the path... or so I thought until I followed them up with my spotlight to a gigantic mass of tree and twists of vine.  This strangler fig has practically demolished the trees that once supported it, and now it bares its own weight.  

We wandered on, each of us lighting up a different tree in hopes of catching a glimpse of the nocturnal mammals that hang around in the branches to munch on leaves without fear of being spotted... well, except by us.  Here's a possum we caught by surprise.

We made it back out to the road and hopped back in the van to drive to another night-walk location to look for more animals in the trees.  It was quite tricky to spot these guys, since then they were often pretty far back in the foliage.  Ming made a good find with another species of possum shown here:

At one point, the group got separated into two by 20 meters or so, and the group ahead of us gave a whispered shout to come quick.  By the time we got there, however, the creature of interest, a tree kangaroo, had disappeared.  So as a substitute, I'll use this picture of one I found drawn on the side of a bus.

As our walk (and night) was winding to a close, we stopped for a night-cap.

Driving back to Cairns was interesting, even if we were getting quite sleepy.  As we drove through some farm country we wooden fences along the road.  It seemed like every fifth or sixth fence post was a little higher than the rest, and when we slowed down to look, this is what we saw.

We must have seen 15 owls as we drove along that stretch of road.  The coolest animal, however -- and this might just be my opinion here -- was one we didn't see until the van pulled into the driveway of our guest-house.  That's where we met this guy:

This was easily the longest snake I'd seen in the wild.  I'd say it was between two to three meters.  The ball pythons my brother and I owned as a kid only grew to 1.2 meters.  The longest black rat snakes we saw outside our house were probably 1.5, and the longest ever recorded (making it the longest in North America according to Wikipedia) was 2.6.  Anyway, this snake was long... not particularly thick, but long.  What's more, it was about half the size that it would eventually get... if it didn't get run over by a vehicle first.  It narrowly missed ours.  Or vice versa, I suppose.

A good end to a good day.