Days 110-112: 3/7-9/24 - Sydney (pt. 2)
3/7
If my younger self knew I had gone all the way to Australia and not seen the Great Barrier reef, he wouldn’t have believed it. But Australia is big, and the reef is much damaged since my youth, so we settled for the aquarium in Sydney. Informative, if not aimed at a slightly younger audience, the wide range of displays was a good morning's worth of edutainment. Highlights included: Australian lungfish (who haven’t changed much in 300 million years!), some amazing shark tanks with walk-under tubes, some beautiful rays (including a natural clone created via parthenogenesis in the all female community), and a dugong named Pig that eats 65 lbs of lettuce everyday.
After the aquarium, my parents and I went to Dune II while Kaia did some shopping. We met up for dinner in Chinatown, before returning to the hotel.
A whole area for continuously cleaning and prepping salad for Pig the dugong! Apparently they landed on this lettuce by throwing in pairs of different kinds and seeing what Pig gravitated towards (his natural diet of sea grass is a protected plant and much more difficult to grow).
3/8-9
With two planning calls with future travel meetups, we did some travel planning before and after each and enjoyed a low key day in our penultimate day in Australia.
Not having explored the harbor much, we made our way to the Sydney Opera house. Craze over the apple vision pro had recently hit a peak and as we realized that anyone anywhere (with 3500 dollars plus tax) could just see the opera house, we had to push it further. We had to taste the opera house. Check and mate Apple.
A quick ferry ride across the harbor and walking through a small waterfront park afforded some beautiful views of the city and the opera house.
We stopped off at a zoo in Sydney harbor to see some of the unique animals of the continent before returning to the hotel to pack and have one last dinner there.
We petted a kangaroo!
We saw a platypus!
We saw sleeping koalas!
And an echidna!