After much saving up and a bit of organisation me and Sparks were off once again to meet our Antipodean cousins. There is a reason for the title of this thread and it goes something like this:-
After a pre-holiday visit to Grego, my niece and new nephew, Grego asked if we would like to take my 4 year old niece with us to Australia. She's a lovely, sweet little girl with great capacity for being a little tinker at times. A little tinker she was, that day, and Grego had had enough. I said that we would take her to Australia and leave her at the zoo with all of the Koalas, Wombats and Wallabies.
"What's a 'Wobbly?' demanded the little princess......
We tried to stifle our laughter and explain what a Wallaby is but I'm afraid that the laughter got the better of me, hence, the title of this thread......It still makes me smile.
Australia is a place which I have never really had a particular desire to visit. The truth is that I really didn't know that much about the place. We rarely see Australia on the news and my earliest realisation that Australia is actually there was from watching Skippy the Bush Kangaroo on the telly as a child, and later, listening to the strange accent of Rolf Harris 'can you tell what it is yet?' Over the years, I formed an opinion that Australia was sun scorched, dry and not very interesting. Soaps like Home and Away gave the impression that everybody spends their time on the beach surfing and that there was really little else to do.
Recently, I started reading up a bit about Australia and found a varied history and interesting wildlife. My desire to visit this place grew.
So we set off on the 28th December for our long flights. We had an overnight stay in Hong Kong before flying into Sydney. We finally arrived on New Year's Eve, first thing in the morning. Our hotel room wouldn't be ready until the afternoon so we ditched our bags and went for a long walk.
Our first port of call was Darling Harbour where we sat at a cafe with coffees and a big breakfast. The sun was shining and it was so bright on our tired eyes. The breakfast was massive, in fact, all the portions of food that we had were massive, but with thick meaty bacon and runny eggs it was just the tonic. I have to hand it to the Aussies......they aren't afraid of a proper runny egg.
After breakfast we went to the tourist information centre and bought some tickets for the Explorer Bus. This bus takes you to all of the major sights and you can hop on and off wherever you choose. We got off the bus at the Harbour Bridge and decided to walk across it. We got part of the way across, looked to our right and there it was...... The Opera House.
The Opera House isn't just a place of entertainment, it is an icon. Built on the site of an old tram shed and designed by a pretty much unheard of Danish architect Jorn Utzon, the Opera House presented quite a challenge to its builders and financiers. The problem was its' roof.. Nobody realised at the outset that the roof would be nigh on impossible to build. The project was supposed to take roughly 6 years to build but it took about 5 years to work out the principles of how to do the roof. In total the project took about 14-15 years and an appeal fund was set up raising money for the Opera House. The Opera House Lottery raised the balance of A$ 102 million as the final cost... The architect Jorn Utzon never got to see his finished design, he was dismissed in 1966 after a change of government. Today, the Opera House is one of Sydney's main tourist attractions. You know you're in Sydney when you see the Opera House.
Here are some pics of Darling Harbour and the iconic Opera House taken from Sydney Harbour Bridge..
