Sydney, NSW
September 15-17, 1997
click on images to see larger versions

Getting There

13 and a half hours from Los Angeles...in the first picture, you can see the screen where they showed the inflight movies (three of them!) At various intervals, the screen would change to a "you are here" map showing how close we were approaching our destination...we could see when we crossed the Equator, when we were over Fiji, etc. Clouds all the way until we dropped under 10,000 feet...looked for all the world like we were landing in a bowl of ice cream.

Downtown Sydney

Looks like a cross between New York City, San Francisco, but cleaner and safer. Great public transportation everywhere - the monorail is like a Disney ride. They take trains seriously here -- must be twenty times more comprehensive than DC's Metro, and instead of tunnelling through the worst parts of town, you get to see some great scenery. People ride their bikes right onto the train, and someone even brought a puppy onboard. They're fast and efficient, but they do make a terrible racket when they gear up to move -- sounds a lot like a Wookie being thrown on the 3rd rail. The bus driver will give you change...instead of feeding coins into a parking meter, you buy a ticket from a kiosk on the street...they drive on the left side of the road, and you can make a left turn on red "with care" -- imagine this in the States...we'd all be dead in an hour <g>.

Featherdale Wildlife Park

Took two trains (30 stops!) and a bus to get to Featherdale, but it was worth it to finally see and touch real koalas. They really are as drowsy as their pictures - at first I thought they'd faked us out with stuffed animals in the trees, until one started scratching. Their fur isn't soft like I expected -- more woolly like carpet -- kind of like sheepskin carseat covers :-) They smell like an old bag of cough drops, but not so much that I wouldn't have grabbed one and stuffed it in my backback if no one had been looking.... They don't look so much sleepy as smugly indulgent, though...they know just how adored and fabulous they are. It really was incredible to see them and touch them up close. Sentient teddy bears...truly unbelieveable.

Oh yeah, the park also had some other animals <g>. They let the kangaroos boinggggg around all they liked, and they'd come right up to you if you had food. They mostly wanted people's leftover ice cream cones.

Katoomba and the Blue Mountains

About 62 miles west of Sydney -- took a double decker bus to get there. Beautiful sandstone cliffs and waterfalls in the Jamieson Valley, and a spectacular view of a giant rock formation known as the Three Sisters. The mountains really do look blue -- a result of the vapor of eucalyptus oil from the trees.

Australian Wildlife Park

More of the incredibly adorable dozing koalas, most of them zonked out in the forks of gum trees, although a few opened their eyes long enough to yawn, scratch, or shimmy their fuzzy little butts *just so* into their selected branches. This apparently required so much exertion on their parts that the only thing for them to do was to hunker into their tree cleft and take a much needed nap. There were a few mothers with babies -- one had two babies clutching onto her, and she had to adjust the three of them constantly. Couldn't really tell who was using who for a pillow :)

Oh yeah, there were other animals there, too <g>. Couldn't get close enough to the albino kangaroos to get a good picture, and the Tasmanian Devil wouldn't pose (or spin and slobber like his TV counterpart), but most of the other animals were interesting, too, and the parrots were gorgeous.

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