Australia, Day 9

Today was our last full day in Sydney (and Australia). We had another busy day, and we were already pretty tired to begin. First we started with a walk to the opera house. We had a tour, but only got to see a couple of the rooms. There was some pretty interesting history surrounding the design and construction. The architect left the project midway and never came back to see it completed, even though he lived a good while after it was finished. I found a good book about it in the gift shop... I'll be ordering it on Amazon. 

 

 

 

Then we took a water ferry and headed to Taronga Zoo. We took a short detour to Fort Denison located in the middle of Sydney Harbor. It was a fort built to guard the Harbor, but took too long to build, so it never really became anything more than a landmark. It was a nice place to take pictures of the opera house (you know, in case our other 300 pictures don't turn out...).

 

At the zoo, we took a gondola to reach the top of the hill, and then worked our way down to see the animals. Nothing too interesting, but the giraffe exhibit had a pretty good view. I took a picture of a chameleon for Emma. Pascal from Tangled is a chameleon, so we'll see if she makes the connection. We finished the zoo with a rather odd presentation by a local aboriginal man, we did get to pet a lizard which was somewhat interesting.

 

 

 

 

We finished up with a dinner at the Australian Hotel located in "The Rocks" district of Sydney. It was recommended by our guide for its local pizza choices. Me and Joe had a crocodile, mushroom, olive pizza and Rachel had a cheese pizza. We walked back and stopped at the Sydney Eye which is a huge tower/observation deck in the middle of the city, similar to Seattle's Space Needle. Surprisingly, it was one of the only places that didn't offer good views of the Opera House. Rachel got a good shot of Hyde Park which we walked through each day to get to our hotel. 

 

Tomorrow we leave at 6:30 AM to go to the airport and fly to New Zealand.