Australia Day!

Today was a big fun-filled day!

We woke up early to take advantage of our last day here and at a quick breakfast at the hotel.  While eating breakfast, we planned our itinerary for the day.  Since the Australia Day celebrations were taking place in Darling Harbour all day we wanted to make sure that we stayed in the area.

First stop was the Sydney Aquarium.  It was about 10am when we got there.  The aquarium had many different exhibits.  Some of our favorites were the dugongs, underwater tunnel with sharks and rays, and shark exhibit.   It was a pretty big aquarium and it took almost two hours to get through it all.

They even let you get in a shark cage!  ok, not really but it looks impressive :-)

AM caught this shark earlier in the day

Dugong!

Nemo!

Nice teeth, sir

All that walking around made us hungry so we went to one of the many restaurants on the harbour.  We chose a restaurant called, Blue Fish, because...
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AM wanted to eat kangaroo!

Yum?

AM got the kangaroo fillet served with baked sweet potato fries with a hollandaise sauce.  Bernard had a boring rocket (arugula) and pear salad.  AM gave the kangaroo two thumbs up and ate the whole thing.  She justified it by claiming they were free-range 'roos.

After the delicious lunch and our energy restored we headed to Wildlife World which was next door to the aquarium.  Wildlife World was basically a small zoo of the many creatures and animals native to Australia.  The first part of the exhibit were the various insects of Australia.  There were some really cool insects and some of the factoids they had about them were pretty amazing.

We then saw some of the reptiles, including the deadliest snake in the world – the Inland Taipan.  Luckily, these snakes are very shy and don't really bite humans unless severely provoked.  Australia also has the number two deadliest snake and some more in the top ten.  Actually, Australia has a lot of deadly animals but we didn't get to see any outside of the zoo.

Wildlife World also had one of the largest crocodiles in captivity in the world.  This thing was huge!  The picture does not do it justice.

This guy is really big.  Really.

But it wasn't this big!

Even their birds are dangerous!  The cassowary is the most dangerous bird in the world.  However, it is an important bird in Australian rainforests because it is the only bird big enough to help spread the seeds of 150 different plants.

Big Bird

We wouldn't lie to you

Luckily, Australia also has some cute, cuddly animals like the koala :-)  Koalas are kind of odd though because they only eat the leaves of a particular eucalyptus tree and those leaves are poisonous to the koala!  The koala is actually born without resistance to the poison and their first meal is the feces from the mother which contains the necessary digestive bacteria.  They are also lazy bastards and sleep twenty hours a day.

Awwww

We also saw a lot of the relatives of AM's lunch.

All in all, it took almost two hours to get through Wildlife World.  It was really cool and we found it more interesting than the aquarium.

We left Wildlife World and walked to Paddy's Market which was a large indoor bazaar.  There were shops upon shops sellling everything but mostly souvenir type items.  If you've ever been to Hong Kong, it was much like an indoor version of Stanley Market.

After walking around for a bit, we went into the shopping mall next door to enjoy the air conditioning and a nice iced coffee.  While drinking our coffees, we planned the rest of the afternoon and evening to make sure we would be back at Darling Harbour in time for the fireworks.

The Sydney Tower, which is much like the Seattle Space Needle, was the next stop.  The view at the top was really nice and you could see all of Sydney.  We took in the view for awhile and then headed back to Chinatown for some dinner.

Since it is Australia Day, everyone is very festive and a lot of people are dressed in patriotic colors.  They were passing out free Australian flags and we heard the familiar “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!! Oi, Oi, Oi!!” chant everyanimals, attractions, holidwhere we went.

We ate dinner at a Sichuan restaurant and had some Ma Po tofu and stir-fried jielan veggies.  It was pretty tasty even by Bernard's standards and we were quite content.  There was still about 3 hours before the fireworks started so we decided to check out the Star City casino.

Luckily, there was a light-rail train that went right to the casino which saved us a bit of walking.  The casino was really nice and they had lots of games like baccarat, blackjack, craps, roulette and others.  Most of them had $20-50 minimum bets and were too expensive for us.  We ended playing one cent pokies again and managed to walk away breaking even which was fine by us.

We took the train back to Darling Harbour and found a good spot to watch the fireworks.  They started the show with a parade of sailboats and a light show set to music.  After every one was settled, they played the national anthem and the real fireworks show started.  This show was amazing!  It was choreographed with music and lasted a long time.  We were really lucky because our spot was right in front of the main action.

Catch the finale here

When the last firework had faded, it was a mad rush to the exits!  We were at a standstill for a little while but made it out of Darling Harbour unscathed.  Having been out all day since 8am we were beat but really didn't want our vacation to end.  Unfortunately, we have an early morning tomorrow.