Sunday in Sydney

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March 27th 2018

Published: March 27th 2018

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2Chawks

Harbour bridge in the morning

Blog 14

Sydney - March 25, 2018 – Weather forecast: sunny daytime temperature of 33°C; overnight temperature of 18°C

We have become somewhat trained to be up early on this tour so I took the opportunity this quiet Sunday morning to go for a walk around a portion of the Botanical Gardens. It is nice to walk around and not be jostled by crowds.

With nothing scheduled for today until our group dinner cruise around the harbour at 5:00pm, we went out with our friends to Sea Life, Sydney’s Aquarium. We opted to walk the 1.8 km over to Darling Harbour; the exercise is good for us.

The Aquarium is really geared for families and today was no exception. The place was crowded, noisy, and unfortunately hot. I think someone forgot that humans throw off a great deal of heat and didn’t adjust the air-conditioners properly.

A unique feature of this aquarium are two separate exhibits both with underwater passages in them. One exhibit featured sharks and their relatives and the other emphasized Dugong, the Australian version of Manatees. The coolest feature was the penguin area,

Clownfish

an area that featured snow to keep the penguins happy. Guests stayed cool while they either took a boat ride through the exhibit or walked past to watch the penguins frolic in their environment of snow and water.

Following our time in the aquarium John and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Australian National Maritime Museum where we had the opportunity to go aboard a number of vessels. During our visit we boarded: the James Craig, a 19^th century cargo 3-masted barque, that has been restored and transformed into a training vessel; a reproduction of HMS Endeavour, the vessel that Captain James Cook used during his voyages; the HMAS Vampire, a post WW2 destroyer. Included in our tour was a unique display called “Action Stations”. This was an audio-visual display that showed what it would be like to go into actual combat on the destroyer against a surface target and what it would be like on a submarine as well.

The final exercise of the day was a dinner cruise around Sydney Harbour. We set out from King’s Pier on Darling Harbour and proceeded out under the Harbour Bridge. We passed

Nemo

the Sydney Opera, Garden Island, turned back at Shark Island and passed under the bridge once again. Two hours later we ended back at the pier and boarded the bus just as it started to rain.

As this was our final event of the tour we said our goodbyes to Heather, our tour manager and eight of our fellow travellers. Ten of us our continuing on to the cruise around New Zealand and before that we have another two days to enjoy Sydney.

Additional photos below

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