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!