Koalas, Shark, Pirates, and Three Sisters

Sorry for the delay-I wrote this 2 days ago, but was trying to add pictures that kept failing...This is a very short, brief way of describing the last two days.  It has been pretty sunny, with short rain showers (around 15 minutes or so), which isn’t bad compared to Minnesota!  I feel for you all!  It was probably around 80 degrees here today.  Yesterday (Thursday) we went to Sydney Wildlife World, Sydney Aquarium, and the Sydney Tower.  Sydney Wildlife World is a really neat mini-zoo right in downtown Sydney.  It is filled with Australian animals.  We got a 4-pass thing that lets us into the three attractions mentioned above, plus another aquarium, for $49.00; this is a great deal.  At Wildlife World, they had all the venomous spiders and snakes from Australia; I didn’t care for the spiders.  They also had kangaroos, and they were the first kangaroos I had ever seen in my life (I think).  They were mostly lying down, and I read that they have no sweat glands; thus, when it is hot, they lie on the ground and sleep.  We did see two of them eating, and got to watch them hop away.  Another big attraction at SWW is the crocodile.  They have an Estuarian crocodile there; they are HUGE.  I think he was around 3 meters long-no joke.  He was cool, but I was glad he was behind a lot of glass.  My favorite part about SWW was seeing the koalas!  There were about 6 of them, and they were adorable!   They were all sleeping in their trees, but one of them kept waking up and looking around.  I think koalas might be my favorite Australian animal, if not my favorite animal ever.

We next went to the Sydney Aquarium.  It was a standard aquarium; lots of different fish and anemones, etc.  This aquarium had dugongs as one of their main exhibits; they are fascinating.  They look kind of like manatees, but smaller.  There were also some enormous stingrays that were fun to watch.  This aquarium also had jellyfish and some gigantic lobsters and crabs.  Amanda and I went up in a glass-bottom boat over one of the exhibits with sharks in it; this was really cool.  We got to feed the fish in the exhibit too.  After the Aquarium, we went to Sydney Tower.  It is the tallest building in Sydney, and it has a great observation deck.  We got to see the entire Sydney from almost 2,000 feet up.  That was awesome!  We took lots of pictures, and then went back down to the street.

That night, we went on a dinner cruise on a tall ship.  For those of you not knowing what a tall ship is, it’s essentially a pirate ship.  This was a lot of fun, and the food was good as well.  That night, we were pretty exhausted and headed back to the room, since we had to get up early the next morning.

Today, we went to the Blue Mountains.  The Blue Mountains are a mountainous region (duh) about two hours outside Sydney, with waterfalls, national parks, and the like.  We had to get up at 5:45 this morning, since we weren’t exactly sure where the shuttle was picking us up.  We started toward the mountains around 7:30 or so, after picking up more people.  We first went into a national park to try to find some wild kangaroos.  We saw 4 of them!  We got to see a mom with her joey outside of the pouch, which is apparently super rare.  We also saw two males bounding around.  I was happy because it was a really neat experience and we were really close!  After that, we went on our first hike.  It was pretty rough terrain, although we were technically on a path.  There were lots of rocks and roots to step over.  One person commented that they were only seeing their feet the entire hike, which was mostly true.  We stopped at a few overlooks to take pictures, which was good.  When we got as far down as we were going, we had to go back up.  Definitely not as fun, since we went down about 300 meters or so according to our guide.  We got back up to the top, and had lunch.  I didn’t eat much of it because it was ham sandwiches, and I don’t like ham very much.  The bananas were good though!  We then went to our second hike, which was at a place called Scenic World.  We hiked down these stairs that were originally the path miners took to work in the area.  There were a LOT of stairs.  I was relieved because we did not have to go back up this time.  Scenic World has a number of means of transportation around, including a railway that had a 52 degree incline.  We took that on the way up.  It was pretty intense; you felt like you were falling over the entire time.  There was some cool information about mine shafts and the different plants along the path, which was interesting.  During this hike, we saw a formation called the Three Sisters, which has an Aboriginal story behind it.  You should look it up if interested because I don’t remember all the details.  We got to take a closer look at the formation after the second hike, which was cool. 


We then traveled back to Sydney, and we went to Hungry Jack’s for dinner.  It seems similar to a Burger King, but not the exact same.  We then came back to the room, and Amanda and I threw in a load of laundry so we didn’t have to do 3 at the end of the trip.  And now I am sitting here typing this blog.  We are happy that the Internet works today on our laptops; it didn’t work yesterday for some reason.

Next up: Opera House, Australian Museum.  Sunday-Sydney Bridge Climb!