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Sydney (actually in New South Wales)
We arrived at the Sydney airport without incident. While Kelly waited
for the luggage I purchased round-trip shuttle bus tickets. We found
the shuttle bus which took us to the hotel we arranged on our last day
in Cairns. The hotel was a bit pricey, but we wanted to stay close to
the harbor since we didn't really know what else to do there.
We weren't that close to the harbor. It was about a 2.5-mile walk
through the city to reach the famed opera house. After being out in
such splendid nature seeing so many animals, walking in a city was a
letdown. It wasn't a bad city, it was just a city. At least we passed
a building that had a neat Australian emblem on its side about halfway
through our walk.
We found the opera house and I tried a couple of artsy shots on its sails.
Nothing interesting was playing that night, or maybe it was just too
expensive, so we didn't buy any show tickets. The opera house was
really 3 buildings all linked underground -- 2 performance buildings
and one reception area. It seemed a little smaller in real life than
in all the pictures I had seen.
The opera house was situated a few blocks from the harbor cruises. We
went to the piers and found one that looked pretty good, but the next
non-lunch cruise wasn't leaving for another 2.5 hours. We found a cheap
place to have lunch and then decided we had enough time to look at the
botanical gardens before getting on a boat. If we missed the boat, there
was always another one leaving in 15 minutes.
The botanical gardens were nice enough. Large grassy areas with huge
trees split by curving paths. An odd sign invited us to walk on the
grass and touch everything. That's a switch. We found a couple of ponds
with some ducks and I looked up and couldn't believe what I saw.
"Are those bats?" I asked Kelly. They sure looked like it. We followed
the mystery creatures to where they were landing. Sure enough, hundreds
of flying foxes, the largest type of bat, were hanging from the trees
and flying around. In broad daylight. A sign next to one of the trees
explained that they were seasonal visitors and that they were ruining
the trees by staying in them. It wasn't just one tree either. In this
part of the botanical gardens we found the bats in many trees, very
awake, and making a small ruckus.
The bats were harder to take a picture of in flight than the terns on
Michaelmas Cay. First of all they were quicker, and second of all only
Kelly had brought her big lens. I just had my small one. After all,
what kind of wildlife would I possibly have to get a close-up shot of
in the city, I asked myself that morning. So even though we swapped
lenses a few times, all my flight shots were pure luck. A few of the
flying foxes had babies clinging to their mothers' stomachs as they
flew through the air between trees. One of the garden's caretakers
seemed to enjoy his demonstration on how to make them all fly at once
by scaring them with loud handclaps.
We left the gardens for the harbor cruise. We paid our fare and boarded
the boat. It was a pretty large 2-story boat with plenty of room for
lots of passengers, but there were only 8 of us on board when we left
the pier. The tour was fairly unexciting. About once every 10 minutes
someone would get on the loudspeaker and give us a single fact about
what sort of building we were passing on the shore. The harbor was
pretty enough, but the tour was slow and the wind was chilly.
The tour wrapped around the bay's coast until it got to the Pacific Ocean
where you could see a lighthouse. Then it came back along the other
side under the Sydney Bridge and around the shopping district called
The Rock. We could see people climbing the Sydney Bridge, an activity
we weren't interested in paying roughly AU$130 for. Then the cruise
returned to its pier.
When the harbor cruise was over, we headed toward The Rock to do our
last bit of souvenir shopping. We didn't find too much. We headed
back to the botanical gardens for one last look at the bats before the
sun went down. We hiked all the way back to our hotel, passing a
superbly sunlit St Mary's Cathedral and collapsed in the chairs at the
bar. We rarely drink alcohol, but this was an occasion to use the 2
free-beer happy hour coupons we got at check-in. We ordered nachos from
the bar and some other hors deuvre from the bar -- that was good enough
for dinner. We retired for the evening.
The next morning we got up and walked around to find a breakfast place.
We found only one that looked any good and wolfed down the food that
took an eternity to cook and deliver. We made it back to the hotel just
in time to see the airport shuttle bus waiting for us. We got our stuff
from the hotel room and headed back to the airport.
We were now at the end of our 3-week honeymoon and also 3 weeks into
the war in Afghanistan. Security at the airport was now very tight for
flights going to America. Not only was our checked luggage searched
and our carry-ons x-rayed, but our carry-ons were searched at the gate
and we went through a final metal wand just before boarding the plane.
We had spent our last AU$10 in the airport on sodas and I found the
long-sleeve Australian t-shirt I was looking for the whole trip. A
large frog mascot in the airport bid us goodbye as we flew 14 hours
back to the US.
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