Australia 9/2/2019 - 9/22/2019

Tuesday, 9/10/2019 - WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo and Queen Victoria Building with Carmen, Drinks with a Harbour View with Sue and Katie

Today was the day that we would get to meet our internet friend Carmen in real life! We first met Carmen through Michael Palin's travel web site over ten years ago. She was living in Switzerland at the time, but has since moved back to her native Australia. We contacted her when we booked the trip to Sydney, hoping that we could finally meet up in person.

Two days ago, we made plans to meet up at WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo today at 10 a.m. Carmen recommended it as it is a lovely little zoo that specializes in Australian animals, and has a convenient downtown location in Darling Harbour.

After eating breakfast at the hotel, we left shortly after 9 a.m. to make sure that we had plenty of time to walk to Darling Harbour. We didn't yet have our bearings in the city, having just arrived last night.

It was a beautiful sunny morning as we followed my phone's GPS to Darling Harbour. At a liesurely pace, we arrived just in time. As we approached, we saw a woman standing by herself across from the zoo entrance and wondered if it was her. She waved us over and we happily introduced ourselves.

It felt like we were old friends even though we were meeting for the first time. Our personalities and senses of humor are very similar. We were even wearing similar floral blouses! Craig would later say that she could have been my "sister from another mister."

We stood chatting for a while, and Carmen presented us with some lovely gifts from her 13 year old son Nic (mini stuffed koala and kangaroo, plus two opera house keychains). Thank you, Nic! What a sweet thing to do! She said that he was disappointed that he couldn't join us, but it was a school day.

We could have stood there talking forever, but we realized that we should probably get into the queue for the zoo. Even though I had pre-booked tickets online, we still had to wait in the long slow queue. But that was ok, we could continue our conversation.

There are three attractions at this same location: WILD LIFE Sydney, SEA LIFE Sydney, and (incongruously) Madame Tussaud's wax museum. As we entered the zoo, passing by a life-sized wax figure of Michael Phelps in a Speedo totally creeped me out.

This zoo is not the sprawling outdoor campus of the Perth Zoo. It is enclosed and self-contained, leading you through corridors and into various open-air paddocks.

As we entered, they photographed us in front of a greenscreen for souvenir photos.

We walked through a corridor to the outdoor (but covered by netting) butterfly garden. It was really warm and humid out there, and the butterflies were feeding from bright plastic feeders. It was cool to see them extend their long tongues to suck out the nectar.

The zoo allowed you to get up close and personal with the animals, who were either in an environment encased in glass windows or in open air paddocks.

Being a school day, there were numerous field trips of young children visiting the zoo. It was really funny, because they were incredibly excitable (and incredibly loud!) We probably saw more nocturnal animal activity than we normally would, simply because the kids were so loud that it woke them up!

We saw a "tassy" (Tasmanian devil), who seemed a little bit more relaxed than the one at the Perth Zoo.

We also saw some animals that we hadn't really seen at the Perth zoo. There was a wombat named Ringo who was asleep in an underground burrow. The burrow had one edge against a pane of glass for observation. We were amazed at how large he was; for some reason we had always pictured them as being smaller. We took a moment to remember our deceased friend and colleague Tom, for whom a wombat was his spirit animal.

There was a tank of platypus. Carmen told us that they are very shy and difficult to see in the wild. Even in the zoo, they tend to hide. However, there was a zookeeper knee-deep in water cleaning their tank, so this caused them to be a bit more active and visible than usual, luckily for us. In fact, there were so active that it was hard to capture them on camera as they whizzed by.

We saw the deadliest bird in Australia: the Southern cassowary. We had never heard of this bird before. It is similar in size and stature to an emu, but it has three toes, the innermost of which has a razor sharp 4.5 inch claw. It has a blue head with a horn-like brown casque, and it has two red wattles. It is like a modern-day velociraptor. Although they live in the rainforest and are in fact vegetarian, they will not hesitate to kill a human if they feel threatened. They can easily disembowel a human with their claws. Cassowaries are found in the Daintree Rainforest of northeastern Australia (Cairns area) as well as Indonesia and New Guinea. The cassowary is related to the New Zealand kiwi, having had a common ancestor 40 million years ago.

Another interesting bird on display is the satin bowerbird. The male collects blue objects to add to its bower-like nest to impress females. Carmen says that she used to wonder what was happening to her blue clothespins. They disappeared, while other colors remained on the clothesline. It turns out that a bower bird was stealing them!

We saw 2 month old emu chicks, as well as brown cuckoo doves and brightly colored lorokeets.

We never cease to be amazed by the sheer number and variety of marsupials in Australia. In addition to the usual suspects of koalas, kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, wallabies, wombats, and quokkas, the zoo also housed many that we were unfamiliar with, including the bilby, the rufous bettong, the red legged pademelon, yellow-bellied gliders, feathertail gliders, and the spotted-tailed quoll.

Amphibians and reptiles at the zoo included white lipped tree frogs, skinks, night skinks, Scrub Python, Boyd's Forest Dragon, frilled lizards, the Centralian knob-tailed gecko, and the golden tailed gecko

The tiny spinifex hopping mouse hops like a little kangaroo. It is so efficient at retaining every bit of moisture from its diet that its urine is actually solid!

When I booked our tickets, I had also booked a photo with a koala. The zoo does not allow you to touch or hold the koalas. Although this used to be the norm, koalas can contract human illnesses, so most responsible koala stewardship programs no longer allow physical contact. Not to mention that koalas also carry chlamydia!

But for $25, the zoo allows you can enter the koala enclosure and get your photo taken next to the koalas. We went up to the rooftop koala enclosure, which is right next to a cafe. I showed our tickets to a person working at the cafe counter, and they gave us each a wristband and gave us a number. We were third in line, and they told us it should be about 10 minutes.

We wandered around and looked at the koalas. We were actually called sooner than expected, as the party directly in front of us was late. We entered the enclosure and hung our coats and bags on hooks.

The photographer had us stand on either side of a koala sleeping in a tree. She took a variety of shots with her camera, and we were allowed to take photos with our cameras as well.

The koalas were sleepy when we were in there; it was adorable to see a mom cuddling her 10 month old baby in her arms while they slept. We found out afterwards that today was the first day this little cutie, named Kalina, made her public debut! What great timing! Baby Kalina was born on November 12 2018. There were several other koalas in the enclosure, and we got to take up close and personal looks at them.

When our time was up, we exited the enclosure and went to a kiosk to get our photos. We scanned our wristband, and after several attempts (for some reason the kiosk didn't like me), our digital photos were loaded and we were able to select three to print out.

We checked out an exhibit of creepy-crawlies, including the huntsman spider, the Sydney funnel web spider, and the Australian tarantula. Goliath stick insects were quite large, and the ants with fangs looked terrifying. The giant grasshoppers live up to their name.

I looked outside and could see that some of the koalas had woken up. I went out to snap a few more koala photos as they snacked on eucalyptus.

We saw ghost bats, which are endemic to Northern Australia, and also a common yabby (crayfish) and a giant rainforest snail.

Last but certainly not least, we observed Rocky the saltwater crocodile. Approaching his tank, there was a TV monitor which showed a peaceful swampy area. There was a motion sensor, and when it was triggered, a huge crocodile exited the water and snapped its jaws in your face. The screams that this elicited from the field trips of schoolchildren were really funny.

Rocky the saltwater croc is over 30 years old, weighs over 800 pounds, and is over 13 feet long. We first saw him from above, where just a little bit of his snout and his eyes were visible above the water line. We then descended to below the water level, crawling through a passageway and standing in a plexiglass bubble to get a good view of him. It really drove home the point that you can never tell what is beneath the water's surface. His massive bulk was nearly invisible from the surface. It was hot and claustrophobic in the plexigass viewing area, and as we started to get sweaty, we exited.

We exited the zoo via the gift shop, where they showed us a souvenir booklet they had made with the silly greenscreen photos that they took when we arrived. It was cute, and for $25, I thought it was fun. The money goes to support the zoo's conservation programs, so we were happy to buy the booklet. It also came with download codes for additional designs, some of which are very campy and hysterical.

WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo with Carmen

After exploring the zoo, we headed outside to the Pyrmont swing bridge across Cockle Bay. We wanted to get something light for lunch, but the Darling Harbour area is undergoing major construction. Carmen said that the type of lunch places that we were looking for had all moved out of the area, so she suggested that we walk a short distance to the Queen Victoria Building (QVB) to eat at the food court.

The sun was shining and the sky was blue as we walked toward the iconic Sydney Tower Eye, which is adjacent to the QVB. The QVB dates back to the 1890's, when it was the city's central produce market. It is designed as a series of arcades with stained glass windows and a huge central glass dome with a copper exterior. We entered and found ourselves in an architecturally magnificent historic high-end shopping arcade, similar to GUM in Moscow).

We headed straight for the subterranean food court, as I was quite peckish after our adventures at the zoo. There were food stalls representing cuisine from all over the world, but we were all craving ubiquitous and delicious steak pies. (Why have these things never taken off in the U.S.?) We each got a pie and a soft drink at Muffin Break and sat at a table in the food court chatting while we ate. We talked about anything and everything, as if we had been life-long friends. We are kindred spirits and are so happy that we finally got a chance to spend time together "in real life."

Our table was next to a Chinese noodle stall which caught Craig's attention. Had he seen this first he may have opted for it instead of the pie. He said that we may need to come back here for dinner, and I knew he was serious.

When we had finished lunch, Carmen kindly offered to give us a tour of the building's highlights before having to head back home to the northern suburbs. We took the escalator up from the underground food court and walked along the ground floor.

As we walked up one of the grand staircases to the second level, we noticed the beautifully elaborate stained glass windows. There was a piano in one of the areas surrounded by archways, and as we walked around, random people took turns playing the piano. These people were not playing "Chopsticks" or "Heart and Soul"; they were playing intricate classical pieces, which added to the already sophisticated atmosphere of the building.

Carmen pointed out that there are two elaborate oversized clocks hanging from the ceiling of the building. We looked at them from the second level, and then Carmen had to catch her train back home. We were so grateful that she came downtown to spend time with us today. It was a lovely introduction to her city, with a personal touch. Thank you, Carmen! We had such a wonderful time!

Craig and I continued to explore the QVB, walking around the various levels, inspecting the impressive central glass dome. Carmen had told us that at Christmas time, they set up a massive Christmas tree under this dome. From the top level of the QVB, we could see the clocks in detail, as they were now basically at eye level.

In the northern wing hangs the Great Australian Clock. A series of horizontal dials track local hour, minute, date, and day of the week. Above the dials, vignettes of figurines depict important events in the colonial history of Australia (e.g. Second fleet landing, 1790). Below the dials, cameo paintings depict various Australian landscapes. Captain Cook's ship circumnavigates the clock, marking the passage of seconds.

Weighing 4 tonnes and measuring 10 metres tall, it lays claim to be the world's largest hanging animated turret clock. Expert clock maker Christopher Cook, in consultation with historians and indigenous, took 4 years to build the clock with its installation arriving in June 2000. It had a final cost of $1.5 million.

The clock aims to tell the story of Australian history from both European and Aboriginal perspectives though the use of 27 paintings, 33 picture scenes, 867 light bulbs and over 130 hand carved figurines with a number of these items being animated. Significant events depicted include the arrival of the first fleet and the crossing of the Blue Mountains as well as the terrible massacre of Aborigines in Tasmania and the Stolen Generation.

The Great Australian Clock also includes 32 smaller clocks showing major city times as well as the 23 carat gold coated dome, doors and numerals.

- www.historyofsydney.com

In the southern wing hangs the Royal Clock. It was created by Neil Glasser in 1982. It looks more plain than the Great Australian Clock, with fewer noticeable bells and whistles. The top resembles Balmoral castle, and below it are the four dials of Big Ben. But every hour on the hour (unfortunately we did not witness this ourselves), the clock puts on a show; accompanied by a fanfare, it displays animated historic tableaux where Elizabeth I knights Sir Francis Drake and King Charles I loses his head.

We had been walking a lot and needed to rest our feet, so we went back down to the food court and sat at a table. It was a great people-watching spot. I posted some photos to Facebook and Instagram.

We had been hoping to meet up with my friend and colleague Sue (who heads up my employer's implementation team in Australia/New Zealand) while in Sydney. Today was the best time to do it, as it is the only day that we do not have structured activities planned. She and a New Zealand implementation specialist named Katie had some meetings during the day, but had told me that they would get in touch when they were free.

Sue sent me a message inviting us to meet her and Katie at the Shangri La Hotel for a sunset cocktail. This sounded great to us, and we told her we would meet them there. We walked a little over a kilometer to the hotel.It was fun walking through the downtown streets, looking at all the storefronts; things were slightly familiar yet different. A chain of stores called Woolworth's are not the five and dime stores they used to be in the United States. Instead, they are grocery stores. We passed fast food restaurants called Hungry Jack's, which seemed to blatantly rip off the logo of Burger King in the 1970's and 1980's. (Later we would see posters hailing it as the "Home of the Whopper", and only then did we realize that it actually was Burger King, just under a different name.

We arrived at the historic Rocks section of Sydney, and noticed "Gloucester Walk." Since Craig's brother and his girlfriend just bought a home in Gloucester, MA, we had to take a photo and send it to them.

When we got to the Shangri La Hotel, we took the elevator up to Blu Bar on 36. This was obviously a swanky place, and we wondered whether we were severely underdressed. Luckily, it was still early enough that the clientele was dressed rather casually.

As we entered, I spotted Sue immediately (we had met several times at company meetings and we had eaten lunch together over the summer, when she had given me many valuable travel tips for our Australia trip). She and Katie were sitting at a cozy corner. They immediately apologized for not being able to get a window table, which was ridiculous. All of the walls were floor to ceiling windows, and the late afternoon sun shone into our corner.

We were easily able to walk over to the windows to enjoy the view. From here, we got our first views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the opera house (at sunset, no less). It was absolutely gorgeous!

They told us that their boss (my colleague Deb) had insisted that they buy us a drink (thanks, Deb!) Craig got a Three Sheets Pale Ale from Lord Nelson Brewery. I got a Hanami cocktail (Apple @ Raspberry gin, Orgeat, and lemon), which was frothy and garnished with a purple blossom. It was almost too pretty to drink. Almost. But funnily enough, the froth and blossom were still intact when I finished drinking it. My friend Tracy would later tell me that "hanami" means "cherry blosson viewing" in Japanese.

It was lovely chatting with Sue and Katie. We talked a tiny bit about work, and then about Australia and New Zealand. We talked about "Lord of the Rings" filming locations in NZ, and other geeky things. We talked about bungy jumping in NZ in 2004. Katie told us a funny story about how her grandfather had done a bungy jump there, and at the last minute had taken out his glass eye and handed it to a surprised AJ Hackett employee.

We had a wonderful time together in a spectacular location! (And the drinks were amazing as well!) It was surreal to look down at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which we would be climbing tomorrow!

What a wonderful introduction to the city from two different Sydneysiders today! The personal touch made us immediately comfortable. People are always what make trips even more memorable. We are appreciative that Carmen, Sue, and Katie showed us such hospitality today!

We said goodbye to Sue and Katie as they headed to Circular Quay and we retraced our steps back toward our hotel. As we approached the QVB again, Craig said that he had been thinking about the Chinese noodle stall ever since lunch. As we didn't have anything planned for dinner, we decided that this was a good option.

We entered the QVB and took the escalator back down to the food court. We ordered spicy vermicelli bowls from Biang Biang Xian Street Food. We noticed that they also sold Chinese soft drinks. I got a JDB (a favorite of mine since visiting China) and Craig got an Ice Peak Orange Soda. The woman at the counter asked if we were sure that we wanted the spicy version. We told her that we love spicy food, and that when we were in China, nobody could believe that an American would eat their spiciest food. In fact, even the spicy vermicelli wasn't spicy enough, and Craig added additional pepper to it, much to the amusement of the woman at the counter. Nothing is too spicy for Aji Taita the American Chili King, LOL! It was so delicious - easily the most authentic Chinese food we have eaten outside of China.

As we were finishing up our food, a friendly security guard made the rounds, telling all of the patrons that the food court would be closing up, and directing us to a specific exit when we were ready to leave. But he was sure to tell us not to rush. Many things close early here in the Central Business District. Here the food court closed at 7 p.m. We finished our food and returned the bowls to the food stall, as they were already cleaning things up.

We walked back to the hotel. When we got there, Craig checked the minibar. The prices of the beer were comparable to the prices at the bars we had visited, so he didn't feel guilty having a 4 Pines Pale Ale. I posted photos from our day. Then we went to sleep, as tomorrow would be our big bridge climb!

WILD LIFE Sydney Zoo, Darling Harbour

QVB

Blu Bar on 36, Shangri La Hotel