Australia, Australia. Land of adventure, sights, sounds, and animals that are either adorable or deadly or both.
If only I had more than one day here.
I started out with a list of about fifteen things I wanted to see in Sydney, which was just unsustainable. In the end, we settled on a good balance of adventure, architecture, and local wildlife. We started the day at the Taronga Zoo, which was way better than I was expecting. The exhibits are huge and designed to look and feel as much like nature as possible. We decided to spend the vast majority of our time in the Australian wildlife section, because god only knows how many other times in how many other places I've looked at a zebra.
So we started our adventure in the Australia Bushwalk, a super unique exhibit which, once entered, has no interior walls or barriers of any kind. Wallbies, emus, and small red kangaroos roam freely throughout the exhibit and across the walking paths. Guests just have to stay on the paths and not touch the animals, but if an emu decides it wants to stand like six inches from your face it can just go for it.
Did I mention I really hate emus?
I survived the free-roaming emus due primarily to how cute and distracting the kangaroos and wallabies were, so we went to check out some of the other lovely native fauna. There was a very tubby wombat (my personal favorite) as well as duck-billed platypi and a really phenomenal nocturnal animals exhibit. In the nocturnal animals house, there are dozens of creatures I'd never even heard of before and whose names I cannot for the life of me remember, like enormously fat ground-dwelling birds, a mouse that could cling to any surface like a gecko, a little black marsupial with white polka dots, and a ridiculously fluffy possum. There was also another personal favorite of mine, the bilby, which hopped around its enclosure so fast that I couldn't snap a clear photo. In other exhibits, we saw swamp wallabies, a huge variety of birds, the lovable quokka, and a six-foot-tall boomer -- an alpha male kangaroo that I am confident is made of solid muscle.
At noon, we headed over to Wild Ropes, the zoo's high ropes course. You can do the ropes course without going into the zoo and vice versa, but we got a good deal on a combo ticket that allowed us to do a low ropes course, a high ropes course, and visit the zoo. Our instructors were two very jovial British guys who thoroughly heckled us throughout the entire experience. Although it's probably because when they asked how confident we were, we said, "America."
The low ropes course is roughly fifteen to twenty feet off the ground and takes about a half hour. We were fully suited up in helmets and harnesses that were attached to the course itself and could easily hold our full weight, allowing us to rely on them to help our balance, and to stop us from falling more than about six inches if we slipped off the course. Which is common apparently.
The low course was a great time. It was a good challenge, both physically and mentally, without being too difficult. The high course was much more of a struggle. At about forty feet off the ground, I was pretty lucky that heights don't bother me. My issue was more the fact that the structure of my harness forced me to do obstacles in a very difficult way to avoid getting tangled, which I think was kind of the point. We had a great time overall. It took about two hours for us to finish the course, and despite the mockery by the British guys, nobody fell.
After the ropes course, we got lunch and continued our adventure through the Australian wildlife. We didn't buy any photos from the ropes course because we were saving our money for the Koala Encounter. Arguably one of the better decisions I've ever made.
At the koala encounter, you hand over $25 Australian and in exchange, you and three friends (that's $25 total for the whole group of four, which is a pretty good deal) can spend ten minutes getting as close to a koala as you want. But no touching. We apparently were one of the only groups to show up on time all day, and we were rewarded with an encounter with the alpha male koala, about twice as big as all the others but just as sleepy and adorable. He spent the whole time curled up in a ball on a tree branch, occasionally lifting his head and blinking slowly while we fawned over him and looks tons of photos. The Koala Encounter also includes one professional printed photo with your whole group and the koala, which turned out rather nice.
We spent another few hours at the zoo enjoying the Australian wildlife and the 6-day-old baby elephant before getting on the ferry at the zoo exit and heading over to Circular Quay, the port between the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge. I had an Opera House tour scheduled for 4:45pm, so I was perfectly on time. If you're in Sydney and have an hour to kill, I highly recommend the Opera House tour. Normally I don't like wandering around in a tour group with headphones in because it's equivalent to wearing a sign that says "I'M A TOURIST, COME ROB ME," but it was after hours at the Opera House and I felt pretty safe. Not to mention the tour focused heavily on the architecture and engineering of the building itself, which was fascinating to me. The tour started on the lower level in the smallest theater, the worked its way around the outside of the building and back inside to the North Foyer and Concert Hall before ending in the South Foyer. I'd tell you all the neat engineering things I learned, but I'd bore you to death. You do get a discount on some show tickets if you present your tour ticket at the box office though.
After the tour, I met up with friends for a delightful dinner at Searock Grill on Benelong Point and to watch VIVID, a light festival going on this week in Sydney. There are all sorts of neat light effects set up across the city, but my favorite was the digital display projected onto the sails of the Opera House, which moved and shifted into different shapes and colors but fit perfectly onto the sails, never sneaking off the white tiles. By the end of the night I was totally exhausted and more than ready to get some sleep before our final concert the next day.
The final concert was, to be honest, a bit of mess. We played outside on the harbor, which was lovely, but we quickly learned that sheet music and a cool harbor breeze are not at all compatible. But with the help of several hundred clothespins and sheer determination, we put on a pretty good show, and I had a lot of fun. For all but six of the forty-three of us, it was the last college band concert we'd ever play. I'm lucky to be in that six who have little more time.
After the concert, we put away our instruments, changed out of our concert attire (thank god) and went for a climb up the pylons of the Harbor Bridge. For $10, you can get much the same view that the people climbing the span pay $200 dollars for. The scenery is incredible. The sky was crystal clear, the water deep blue, and the Sydney Opera House glistened bright white on Benelong Point. It was the perfect ending to a jam-packed adventure.