Sun, 2/16/25 Sydney

Day 42 - Sunday, February 16th, 2025 – Sydney

When we looked out the balcony window, we could see downtown Sydney and the Harbor Bridge. Mary got a nice picture of this as this ship came in this morning.

Because this is a new leg of the trip, everyone had to get off the ship in Sydney. It didn't matter if you were going on a tour or not. And this included all staff. It didn't directly bother us because we had the tour scheduled. The other extra step is Australia requires an extra form to be filled out. Not a huge deal. We got up early. We had breakfast delivered to the room. Neither of us ate much. We were out the door and on our way to the shore. It was perfectly clear out. The temperature had to be in the mid-60s, but there was a pretty strong wind off the water which made it cool. We got out of the ship and did the back and forth over the ramps down to the cruise terminal. We got to the Australian Border Patrol and Mary handed him the passports. He then asked for the declaration forms. For about a minute and a half Mary frantically searched her bag for these forms. For whatever reason she put them inside of a different set of papers so she couldn't find them. Finally, she found them and to my relief the Australian guy approved us and we were gone. He was not very friendly. Maybe that's in his job description. Anyway, we went outside and tried to find a spot in the sun. Mary had called the driver, and he said he was about 20 minutes away. This was 830. Mary bought a cup of coffee for me and a cup of tea for her, and we found a bench in the sun. If you see the picture with the silver “O” we sat right near that. It was in front of the Museum of Modern art. The “O” reminded me of the bean in Chicago (one of my favorite spots in Chicago), although on a much smaller scale.

At about 9:15, we finally see his van pull up. The driver, John, and his wife, Bee, jumped out of the van. They were very cheery. They laid out what the plan was going to be. And then he asked Mary what else do you want to do. What has become a routine for us now is Mary's looking for postcards, stamps, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and possibly Monster Energy. He makes note of all this and we get in the van. Much like the vans in New Zealand, I am strapped down to the nth degree. This is not a problem. We pull out and drive maybe 5 minutes. He stops the van and says this is a perfect picture taking spot. We get out of the van and walked maybe 300 or 400 feet towards the harbor bridge and in the distance we could see the Sydney Opera House. We moved closer to it and took some pictures there. We spent about 20 minutes there taking pictures and just looking at things. We got back in the van and drove around Sydney for about 30 minutes. John pointed out a few things, but it was not a true tour guide tour. We're somewhat used to the tour guide providing history and fun facts. John didn't do that. I'm sure Sydney has a ton of history. It looks a lot like Chicago. Obviously, the palm trees are a giveaway that it is not Chicago, but it is a big city. I would have to say it is cleaner than Chicago. I did not see any homeless, which to me is suspicious. All big cities have some homeless. We drove through several neighborhoods so we saw a wide range of conditions. Anyway, we ended up on the opposite side of the bridge, so we were now looking at it from the opposite perspective. This was kind of cool. We got out and took some pictures.

Eventually we pulled up to the Opera House. With security as an escort, we make our way underneath the Opera House. We got out of the van. We walked into the building. There we meet our tour group. There were about eight of us. Our tour guy was a young guy. He first takes us to where all of the scenery is kept for the different venues. There are actually 5 or 6 event spaces in the Opera House. The main ones are the concert hall and drama hall, I think it's called. We went into the concert hall and it had 2700 seats. It didn't look like it would fit 2700 people, but i believed him. The seats on the main floor made airlines seats look like recliners. These seats had to be about 6 inches across and with no space in between. There was a guy there practicing his clarinet. The sound was amazing. We were probably a good 200 or more feet from him and it was loud and clear. The acoustics in there were near perfect I imagine. We were not allowed to take pictures in the main concert hall. We did get pictures of these secondary event space. I forget what it's called right now but you can see from the pictures it's much smaller. Probably only 600 or so seats. With that many event spaces they pretty much have an opera, concert or show of some sort always going. Plus, there were hundreds of people in various tour groups wandering around. We learned the history of the Opera House. It was finally completed in 1973 after years of political battles. The original architect was kicked off the project and never saw his work completed. The other thing that our tour guide pointed out was that there was an architect for the building and there were architects for each of the event spaces. These were all different people. I guess it makes sense but I just never thought about it. The tour lasted a hour. Of course we wandered through the gift shop. Mary did find some postcards she bought. Other than that we did not buy anything.

John and Bee were outside waiting for us. Instead of getting on the van we walked over to this restaurant area. It was outside We decided to sit in the sun. For the next hour or so we ate and drank. I had tuna sushi. John had salmon sushi. Bee had sushi or some sort to, now I forget what it was. Mary had a chicken sandwich. Beyond that we shared a salmon sushi dish which was weird but good. John also ordered a baked chicken dish with a glaze of some sort. We all had a piece of that. It was good. The most important part, obviously, was the beer. I had a glass of 4 Pines New World Pale Ale. It was really good. It was really refreshing on a hot day. It was fun sitting there in the sun watching people, drinking beer and having good food. I half jokingly said we could cancel the rest of the tour and sit here in the sun and drink beer until the ship left. For half a second I seriously considered it.

Before actually getting to the zoo, we stopped at Saint Mary's cathedral. I did not go in, but Mary and Bee did. I thought to myself this is the first church we have hit on this trip. And when we get up into Europe there'll be 3 or 4 churches a day, but this was the first one so far. I have to say that this church was pretty. Mary's picture do a good job of  showing how large It is.

We got in the car and headed out towards the Sydney Zoo. It was getting into mid afternoon so we kind of had to look at the clock. We decided to only do the Australian animals section. What was really nice is that a volunteer traveled with us and explained every animal we ran into. Pictures you can see we saw Kangaroos, koalas, dingos, an emu and platypus, to name a few. If I remember the volunteer correctly, these are the only two platypus in captivity in the world. I had this conception in my head of what a platypus. What it really is was completely different. It's much smaller than I thought. It only went about 6 inches long. I thought his beak was longer flat and thin. Actually it's quite short and it's more like a straw. We saw them on the ground and in the water. I didn't realize that they actually swam underwater. Separately, I said to Mary I wanna come back as a koala. They sleep 18 to 20 hours a day. They eat one thing. They don't even have to go for liquid because they get all the liquid they need from the leaves they eat. I could see myself laying in the sun for 18 to 20 hours a day resting. That eating thing takes a lot out of you. When Mary mentioned we were going to a zoo, I was less than thrilled it was an option. I'm actually glad we went. I learned a lot about animals of Australia. The tour guide helped quite a bit. They were volunteers so we made sure we stopped and made a donation on the way out. We made it back to the van and John had a surprise for me. While we were in the zoo, they went to the store and bought me a six pack of 4 Pines New World Pale Ale. Probably the highlight of my day - just kidding.

Now the clock was really ticking. Actually, we didn't have to be on the ship until 9:30, but we made dinner reservations at the crown grill for 6:30. It was now a little after 5:00. You should know the routine by now, what's next? If you said T-shirts and postcards, you were right. John drove us to a mall area. I stayed in the car. Mary and Bee went and bought T-shirts. They were looking for stamps but they were unsuccessful group a store vendor pointed them to a different store down closer to the Opera House. They jumped back in the car and drove 3 or 4 minutes and found the stamps. Mary then filled out the cards and the game became find the mailbox. Thankfully, there was one nearby and Bee put the postcards in it. Bee used 35 years old and that's the first time she ever put anything in a mailbox. She didn't even know what a mailbox was until it was pointed out to her. Be because she came from Thailand 15 or so years earlier. In one of the stores Mary happened to be looking for T-shirts . found Monster Energy. She picked up five or six different cans so now I have like 20 in the room. I gotta get drinking.

We made our way back to the ship. By now it was a little after 6:00. We said our goodbyes. We took our goodbye picture. Despite not being real Tour guides, John and Bee did a good job. In a city as big as Sydney you could spend a week and still not see half of it. I think for the five or six hours we were there, we saw enough to give us a good idea of what the city is like. We saw the tourist stops like the Opera House and we saw the rare things like the platypus. Both Mary and I agree that someday we would like to come back and spend more time.

We made our way back up onto the ship. We went by the crown grille and told them that we needed to cancel our reservation. The method was more than accommodating. We just made appointment for the next night. We came upstairs and chilled for a little while. We then went to 14 and got something to eat. I had chicken pot pie and some various vegetables. Mary made herself a ham and cheese sandwich. She also had some vegetables. We ate light. We were back in the room by about 8:00. I stayed up so I would sleep. Mary fell asleep around 10:00. I went up a little before midnight. The ship was rocking pretty good. Another successful day.

Check out the cool time lapse of the ship leaving Sydney. It's at dark, but you can see the ship back up to the bridge before cruising past the Sydney Opera House.