Sydney, May 4 and 5

May 4
Our hotel continental breakfast was quite good with croissants and a very extensive cereal bar. As we fueled up for our day we had a nice chat with a women from Melbourne who loves Taz and has been many times.
I spent almost an hour after breakfast on the internet which is NOT free here. I did get to blog and upload photos to Facebook :-)

We took a short walk to the Australian Museum, with a detour around  St. Mary's Cathedral, due to the mass in progress we did not go inside.
We had high hopes for the natural history museum, especially the sections on birds and insects. It was a bit sad, a lot of their specimens were old, disheveled and  faded which with the birds made detailed identification harder. It also made us want to see live animals rather than dead ones...

On the ground floor there was a lovely exhibit of native aboriginal art, history and culture. I love the patterns, shapes, color and the stories behind the art work were intriguing. The history of the native people here is much like the one in our country, tragic in many ways.
The museum cafe had a very good lunch special, a large bowl of rice with beef satay and a cold lentil and chickpea salad. We ordered one of each and shared. The meal left us sated and ready for a walk to the Sydney Aquarium at Darling Harbour. We went there with the express purpose of seeing the dugongs, a manatee like animal but the dugongs were dugone. We enjoyed the rest of the exhibits, including the huge Tasmanian crabs, the colorful fish of the Great Barrier Reef, the Fairy Peguins, giant sea turtle, Great White sharks etc...
Our walk back to the hotel was long, circuitous and full of interesting sites: large busy streets, old buildings tucked in amongst the skyscrapers and small quite ones full of surprises.
Dinner was a take-out salad for me as Bob was still full from lunch. Another early night for both of us.

May 5
We had decided the night before that we did want to see more live animals and were told about the Taronga Zoo, a very short ferry ride across the Sydney Harbor. We were told that this zoo had great views of the harbor as it was on a hill.
Our plan was to take the first ferry over to be there when it opened.
After breakfast we took a route through the botanical gardens to get to the Circular Quay, where most of  the ferries dock. It was the long way there in more ways than one. It was literally more blocks but also very distracting due to the odd and interesting trees and the birds. We saw three new birds, Sulphur Crested Cockatoos, Masked Lapwings and Dusky Moorhens. These distractions turned our stroll into a sprint to make the first ferry.
We got there with a few minutes to buy our tickets and board the boat. The ride took less than 15 minutes. From that dock we hopped on a bus that took us up the hill to the zoo.  The views were indeed spectacular , in fact Bob insisted on getting " view photos" while the light was so good. It was hard to wait, I wanted to start looking at the animals ;-)

The Taronga Zoo is a very, very good one. The many aviaries helped us to see bird up close with maps of their territories, this will help us withr bird identification on the rest of our trip. We finally saw  Laughing Kookaburras in the trees all around the zoo. While we didn't get to walk with wombats (they were sleeping), we did get to stroll with emus, kangaroos and wallabies. There were little "walkabout" enclosures with these three types of animals just lounging about as people wandered through taking  their photos. Other highlights included the koalas, seeing a platypus swimming in circles in its tank and meeting an animal I had never heard of called a quokka ( a very small wallaby with a rodent like face).

Two sleepy Quokka.

We lunched at a zoo cafe with breathtaking views of Sydney Harbor. Since it was a Saturday boats of all kinds were out in full force. We watched several regattas take place, they had to dodge each other as well as ferries of all sizes, water taxis, yachts and a tall ship of some kind. It was delightfully chaotic and fun to watch.
After over fours hours we were done with the zoo and ready to take the gondola down the hill to the ferry.
Back at the Circular Quay we were lured by the imposing, iconic beauty of the Sydney Opera House. The tour was informative and fun, the history was fascinating and the building and its architecture itself left me speechless. We saw three of the four main performing halls and were so tempted to go back for Mozart's Requiem that night but only standing room tickets were left at $50 a piece.
Back at our room the comfort of our bed called but Bob owed me dinner from a bet I had won earlier in the day. We wandered a bit to find an intriguing place we had seen the day before. The streets looked different.in the dark but our perseverance paid off, on a tiny street corner away from the main drag we found Bar H. It was bustling with customers at 6:30 and we got the last tiny table. The menu was exotic and with help from the friendly waitress we ordered: braised short rib on a sesame leaf, sashimi of kingfish with pickled mushrooms, the Singapore crab special and a dessert of nashi (asian pear) tarte tatin with goats curd sorbet. It was a meal from The Iron Chef or some other food network program. The presentation was high art and the flavors exquisite. I could wax poetic about the intricacies of each dish...another time. I hope we dine there again tonite !!

braised short rib on a sesame leaf

Bird list for the day ( not counting the caged bird at the zoo)
Sulphur Crested Cockatoos
 Masked Lapwings
Dusky Moorhens
Little Pied Cormerrant