Saturday, 14 February 2015

This morning we set off for Bondi Junction by train to do a spot more shopping at another huge Westfield mall and a great super discounted chemist with amazing bargains.  On the way to the train station we saw some unusual looking birds which apparently are called Ibis.

  

After shopping we headed back to the hotel to dump our shopping and head out for lunch.

We caught a taxi from the hotel out to Darling Harbour for lunch where we found a groovy bar and grill called Bungalow 8 right on the waterfront with a great menu.  We ordered a delicious jug of Sangria to go with our lunch.

  

After lunch we took a leisurely stroll along the waterfront for about one minute – suddenly the sun was too much and I had to head for the nearest bit of shade.  Shortly we ended up at some wildlife place and I bought a cap which allowed us to go back out into the sun.  From there we caught a ferry to Circular Quay which gave us great views of Darling Harbour and even stopped at Lunar Park.

  

A surprise bonus of this little excursion was we got to go under the Harbour Bridge and photograph the Opera House again.

Once at Circular Quay we caught a different ferry out to Manly.  We wanted to do this for two reasons:

1. I knew there were great opportunities to photograph the front of the Opera House from that particular ferry and…
2. There is a song called Reckless by Australian Crawl that has the lyrics: “as the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay.”

The ferry was jam packed with people (mainly young surfer type dudes) which seemed really strange coz I don’t remember there being anything interesting at Manly for cool people to do.  I went to Manly when I was 16 and all I remember was an old run down aquarium and a very small almost abandoned fun park.  There was so many people I started to feel a bit like Rose on the Titanic – “there weren’t enough life jackets”.  But we survived and because of all the people it took ages to get off the boat.

Once on dry land we headed for the information centre so I could find out what was going on.  Turned out it was the Australian Open of Surfing.

The surf beach was only five minutes walk away so we joined the fun.

  

Here’s me lovin every minute of it.  We even went for a refreshing paddle in the surf.

Sadly we had to drag ourselves away from Manly and head back to the hotel in time to meet up with everyone for our last dinner in Sydney.

Near our hotel there were a lot of Chinese new year celebrations going on, so we ended up in a Thai restaurant and got to enjoy all the fruit carving, food stalls and dancing on the street.