Sydney & Environs

Time for a major update. I know - we're way behind, but here's the rest of Sydney. BTW - most of the pics have embedded captions - hope you can read them in the full-size picture.

Jumping back to when we were in Sydney. We took an excursion to the Blue Mountains, which, unfortunately, were hidden in rain. Go figure - it's a temperate RAIN forest and it was raining. On the way up, we stopped at a wildlife park and saw some fun critters. Kathy decided that Wombats are adorable and we found that Koalas like to ensure they are well scented with urine. You may notice in the pictures, Kathy isn't terribly close to the koala.

Also, Emu chicks are very inquisitive and love the camera. Put it close, and they run toward the lens! Oh, and we found an inquisitive Joey poking out of the pouch...

We also hit an old coal mine. The upper layer of earth eroded quickly, leaving a steep slope to reach the coal seam. The "railroad" down to the bottom takes only a couple of minutes, but that is because it runs at a 52 degree incline. You get in while it is horizontal and are essentially lying on your back. Once it starts down, you are standing on your feet. Once down, we had a nice walk in the rain forest. I've included a shot of the canopy of the eucalyptus trees.

The guide was a great guy with a lot of local knowledge. He makes some extra $$$ on the side by hunting for opals when he has a tour group heading to the opal fields. He also works directly with one of the original aboriginal tribes and sells their wares - art & boomerangs without markup. Fortuitously, he shared one of the Ngaro Dream Time Stories about kookaburra and the snake (I'll get to that later when we get the shot of kookaburra eating a snake). Picked up a nice one to put on the wall. Anyway - turns out hunting boomarangs aren't meant to come back - it is supposed to hit the prey! Sometimes they are used for fishing as well.

We did finally have some decent weather and took advantage of the 4 hours to head to Manly beach. Beautiful beach with a nice little center that had a jazz festival and markets. We ate our first Aussie meat pie and sausage roll. Pretty good and only $AU 2.50 each. (Note - we've found others that were stale. Locals advise to only buy the meat pies where they turnover quickly and aren't in a warming oven for hours) We wandered along a trail to Shelly Beach (photo is labelled Shelby Beach - oh well) and had a fantastic view of the ocean and also back to Manly beach.

On the ferry ride back to Sydney, rain came again with the time between flash and sound about 0.1 seconds. That means the lighting strike was about 150 m away. Yikes! Luckily, being from Portland, we had our rain gear handy.

After making port, the rain abated (a bit) and we walked through the Royal Botanical Gardens - primarly seeking the not-so-elusive fruit bat...another of Kathy's favorite animals. Thousands of them in the trees--seriously. We have a lot of pictures of rain on my camera lens and fruit bats in the trees. At sunset, the royal guards kicked us out of the garden. First guy was nice and just asked us to leave, but a second one stalked us to the exit. Well, a nice thing about the rain is the reflection on the cement of lights and the possibility of dramatic photos. Got a couple of those, but then at 6:30, the fruit bats took flight. Thousands of them in the air and me with merely a 24 - 105 mm lens. Too bad the long lens weighs so much and is at home (actually, a friend, Braxton, is making good use of it taking pictures of his girls' soccer teams). That picture is taken at f/16, hand-held after sunset. Did I mention I love the light sensitivity of the Canon 5D MII? Why f/16? To make the star on the street light.

Next up...Hamilton Island photos including the Kookaburra I mentioned earlier. To give you taste, here is a sunset from Cid Harbour and a nice video. Funny story about our boat mates afraid of this "big fish!" (Hmmm... trouble uploading the vid. Maybe next time - the internet cafe is closing down now).