Jet lag means that days begin way earlier than they ought to. The first activity of the day was to pop off to the cafe next door to write the Day 1 blog post and grab some breakfast (a meal that never happens, for me). The original plan was to have a quick walk through the Royal Botanic Garden and then hit up the Taronga Zoo, but the "quick walk" ended up taking the entire morning and afternoon.
(ok, new misfeature of BlogPress discovered: if you add pictures and then save as online draft to do the picture upload, when you reload the draft, all you see is URLs, not thumbnails. Makes it a little hard to caption pictures properly...)
The Royal Botanic Garden has a lot to see, with plants from all sorts of habitats around the world and random bits of statuary. While wandering through one of he temperate zones, we ran into Brian the echidna and his keeper from the Taronga zoo, treating him to a walk out in the sun. The succulent garden is particularly impressive too.
The Garden extends onto the peninsula just East of the one hosting the Opera House, granting a great view of Sydney Harbour:
After finishing up with the Garden, it was too late in the day to make it worth going to the zoo, so we instead caught the ferry over to Manly to have some fish and chips and check out a famous surf beach.
The last time I came to Australia, I had the same idea, and thought it would be nice to eat some fish and chips by the shore. When I did, a flock of seagulls (the bird, not the band) assembled and, in a coordinated attack, knocked the food out of my hands, cackling merrily to themselves. The Manly gulls are real bastards. This time, we ended up walking all the way up the Corso back into town, away from the shore, to avoid birds...and even then, I had to chase one or two away. Dealing with birds in Australia really makes me hate the people who feed random birds. They're a nuisance.
After eating, we walked along the shore out to Sydney Harbour National Park, before turning around and racing to catch the 4:45 ferry back to Sydney.
Why the rush? Because sunset over the Harbour is pretty nice.
After a quick break a the hotel, we went back out for dinner. Our plan was to hit Mamak, a Malaysian restaurant in Chinatown known for its rotis, but when we got there, the line looked to be about an hour long, so we redirected to a Korean BBQ joint just up the street.
This was the first time I've had duck at a Korean BBQ, and it's pretty good, as you might expect:
Worthy of note: Sydney Chinatown is probably the cleanest, shiniest Chinatown I've ever seen.
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