To Sydney

Well, we’ve done everything we need to do here at Ayer’s Rock, so we slept in this morning! After checkout, we spent a little time wandering around the resort grounds before one last look at Uluru. It was a cloudy morning which kept things cool. We made our way back to the airport, killed a few hours, and then we were on our way to our last Australian city, Sydney!

Flight was nice, & the descent into Sydney was lovely. It’s a really clean & pretty city. We easily found the city train (and checked emails on our iphones, yay!) and made our way to the Circular Quay station (quay = “key”; this was news to me). The city was hopping as the locals were leaving work and heading to the pubs to watch the big “State of Origin” rugby game between Queensland and New South Wales. This was apparently a really huge deal, we’d been hearing about it on TV for days. We made our way to the Intercontinental and checked in. Our room was way up on the 14^th floor – we were expecting a city view, but WOW! They gave us a harbour view room! We had a beautiful view of the both Harbour Bridge and Opera House. Wowzers.

We had a quick dinner then went out to the Sydney Aquarium. I’m so glad we went, because we got to see two things that evaded us in the wild – a platypus and a big ol’ sea turtle! The platypus was smaller than I’d expected, only about a foot in length. It was more bizarre-looking than I’d expected, and kind of looked like he knew he was strange. I remember learning about the platypus when I was a kid (on some set of cards I had??) and it was neat to finally see one J The turtles were just big gigantor turtles, they liked to wedge underneath rocks and stuff to prevent drifting. Some other highlights included little penguins (KI style!), a huge tank with reef fish, a shark tank that you could walk under, and another walk-under tank with “Dugongs,” big things that looked like manatees to me. It was a very good aquarium, but for some reason there was spongebob crap everywhere. That was a little bit obnoxious.

We made our way back to the hotel and watched the end of the rugby game. Michael had learned the rules over the past 2 weeks so he explained it to me. Queensland won, 24-14. probably a good thing we weren’t out at the bars.

A few times I woke up in the night, and I loved opening my eyes to see the Harbour bridge just outside my window. This city has definitely charmed me.