Australia Day 11 - Sydney

The day started with the same breakfast but with some new twists including a cheese bar, juice bar, and omelet chef – it was a nice change.  We began the day with a bus tour of the city which took us to the Botanical Gardens for an awesome view of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.  We visited Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair where the governor’s wife used to sit and watch the ships sailing out of the harbor for England.  We passed through some of the hamlets surrounding Sydney like Woolloomooloo, drove by some beautiful churches, the art museum, a view overlooking Bondi Beach, the beach itself (where Frank got an unexpected footbath while posing for a picture!).  We went to an opal museum and learned about Australia’s largest gem export.  After lunch we embarked on a tour of the Sydney Opera House which was a great preview for our following evening’s entertainment of Turandot.  

We were on our own after the Opera House tour and Frank and I decided to go to the Hyde Park Barracks, or the Convict Museum, we’d seen during the driving tour earlier that day.  To get there we had to stroll through the Botanical Gardens again which was beautiful (although threatening rain!).  The Barracks was a great museum and I thought it was very informative.  After just finishing The Fatal Shore the convicts were fresh in my mind so this was a great museum to tour.  We walked back to our hotel through the city intent on walking through Darling Harbour of which we’d heard great things.  The rumors did not disappoint and we found this to be a lovely, almost refuge from the rest of the city.  We had some ice cream and a little pizza appetizer while enjoying the view and the water.  After a quick change we were ready for the Sydney Tower Dinner, an optional excursion we’d signed up for.  We boarded the city’s monorail at Darling Harbour only to find out that our exit was one stop behind us, so we got a an entire monorail city tour.  Unfortunately the monorail doesn’t traverse much of the city so it was a bit anti-climactic.  The view from the tower was really nice but we were sitting at tables of 6 perpendicular to the window so only the people sitting flush with the window got a really good view.   It was a buffet style dinner and although the table portion of the restaurant revolved, the area with the food did not so I kept forgetting where the food was that I wanted!  The meal was okay but the conversation was great so all in all it was a nice evening.  The monorail doesn’t run as late as we left the restaurant so we walked back to our hotel, which really wasn’t much longer than the walk to the monorail stop in Darling Harbour! 

A view of Sydney's tower from Darling Harbour