Sydney is a hole

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After two days in the Blue Mountains I caught the train back to Sydney. I hadn't been overly impressed with what I'd seen of Sydney from the train on the first day when I arrived, but you can't see much from a train anyway. However Sydney really is a hole. The place I'm staying is all right but literally right round the corner is an overpass with a dozen homeless people sleeping under it. Yet walk five or ten minutes down the road and you're in the city centre with all the nice buildings and tourists pretending the whole place looks like that. On the plus side, the city is also full of white ibis (or "pigeons on stilts" as I suspect the locals probably call them); its kind of wierd walking down the street and coming across an ibis just standing in the middle of the pavement. And the Westfield Mall has a 21-country food-court which does appeal to me. I had been planning on visiting the Sydney Aquarium but the girl at the desk wouldn't let me in for free. How rude is that? She said something along the lines of "oh, we don't do that, but I could give you a 15%!d(MISSING)iscount", which meant I'd still be paying $21 (yes, that's how expensive the aquarium is). Funny thing is that you can get 20%!d(MISSING)iscount coupons from the tourist magazines, so a regular backpacker could have got in cheaper than they would have let in someone from a fellow Aquarium. (For the benefit of anyone not in the loop who doesn't know what I'm talking about, most of the major animal collections in Australia and New Zealand are members of a zoo organisation called ARAZPA, and there's sort of an unwritten agreement that anyone who works at ARAZPA places gets free entry to other ARAZPA places). Maybe the girl just didn't like the look of me. . So there was nothing to write about there. Instead I went to the Australian museum, where the staff were happy to let me not pay. The Museum is awesome. There's a skeleton room, a bird and insect room, a thylacine...all sorts of stuff.

Then I went to the Botanic Gardens. Where-ever you are these are good places to find some easy birds. Here the easy birds are sulphur-crested cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, wood ducks, white ibis, noisy miners...and hundreds and hundreds of grey-headed flying foxes (as of today still the only Australian mammal I've seen).

Next day (today) it was off on a bus trip to Warriewood Wetland Reserve an hour outside Sydney. Not much new here apart for black-shouldered kites and chestnut teals, but it was a very nice wetland. On the way back to Sydney I stopped off at the Dee Why Lagoon which was also quite nice although a little lacking in birds.

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Comments

[Peter Ericsson]

Rail
Nice shot of the Rail......nice to see you on the road again,,,keep up the postings...makes for enjoyable reading......