Tasmania: best road sign ever

On our first day in Tasmania we saw this sign along the road to the old prison, about an hour southeast of Hobart. The critter in the sign is a tasmanian devil. They are gruesome looking things. If you do a google search for "tasmanian devil" you'll see numerous images of a distinctly not-cuddly animal. They are viewed fondly by Australians, who are quite upset by a disease that is decimating the population of devils. (That's what they call them.)

A day trip south of Sydney

On one of our days in Sydney, Mike had to work, and I didn't have any interviews, so Dave and I took a day trip south along the coast. Royal National Park begins about 20 miles south of Sydney. It's 132 square miles of rolling hills. As far as I could tell, about 131 of those square miles are covered with eucalyptus trees. Like the Blue Mountains, there are lots of different species. We stopped beside a pretty lake.

Just south of the park, we stopped to get a view of the coastline going south.

Not far from where we took the photo above, we stopped again at a little park overlooking the water. We were fascinated by the sign below. So many forbidden things. I always wonder if signs like this one work very well, because it made me want to do something illegal.

We drove through a series of small towns, looking for a place with water views that Dave could paint. We ended up stopping in Kiama, which has a nice park (with a dramatic spring green tree) and a good downtown (with a great used bookstore) where I could walk around while Dave painted.

Here are a bunch of photos of the bay and coastline at Kiama. The second to the last photo is similar to the view that Dave painted.

Blue Mountains, Sydney

The foothills of the Blue Mountains begin about an hour west of Sydney. Dave, Mike and I took a day trip up there. Katoomba, a town with an overlook that was swarming with tourists, was about two hours from Sydney. The Blue Mountains are a high plateau with gorges that were created by water runoff. The guidebook says they are some of the only mountains in the world that you look (and hike) down into. The first three photos were taken at the Katoomba overlook by three rocks called the Three Sisters.

We drove along the edge of the canyon to Leura, a town adjacent to Katoomba, and had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the gorge.

The next photo was taken from the restaurant. In the foreground is a eucalyptus tree blooming with white flowers. We were there about a month ago, which of course is spring in the southern hemisphere. Some of the eucalyptus trees were blooming with white flowers, some had new growth that's red, some had light green new growth. We also noticed differences in the color of the bark with different species. The Blue Mountains have over 100 different species of eucalyptus trees, and the blue haze that give the moutains their name comes from the oil that is released by the trees. (A note added about an hour later: I finished this post and then went into the kitchen. The hill across the valley from us, visible from our kitchen window, has a clump of eucalyptus trees that are blushed with reddish new growth right now. Spring is probably a month later here than in Sydney. I had never noticed the reddish new growth on those trees. Three weeks of looking so closely at eucaltypus trees around Sydney and on Tasmania has given me a better sense of the variety of colors and shapes I might see in them.)

Dave and Mike hiked down along the canyon from the restaurant in Leura back to the lookout in Katoomba. The next three photos were taken on their walk.

Around Sydney

In this post you'll find some views of Sydney. First, some obligatory photos of the Opera House. We attended a play in one of the playhouses in the lower level, and a concert in the big performance hall. It was fun to be inside the building. Parking, however, was another story. For our first performance at the Opera House, I came in our rental car, a couple hours before the performance so I could walk around in the Botanic Garden next door. In the lot next to the Opera House, for five hours of parking I would have paid $70! I used up some of the time before the performance to drive to the other side of the Botanic Garden to park on the street there.

The Sydney Zoo is across the harbour on a hillside, with great views back to the city. Dave's good friend from dental school and his wife were in Sydney at the same time we were, and the three of them went to the zoo.

Dave took this next photo of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from an unusual angle. You can walk up on the arch of the bridge for $200. Dave decided to pass up that option.

The bridge in the next photo is the Anzac Bridge. You can see the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background. For those of you who remember that Mike spent a semester at Sydney University in 2001, this next photo was taken about a block from where he lived that semester.

The next two photos were taken from right beside the Opera House. Sydney Harbour is amazingly busy, with ferries going to numerous places on the harbour.

These dramatic birds -- ibis -- are everywhere in Sydney.

I took the photo below sitting beside the Opera House waiting for a play to start. The amusement park in the photo is across the harbour. Notice the resemblance between the face in the photo below and the gate to Luna Park in Melbourne (in the entry "Biking in Melbourne").
I wonder if those faces are an Australian tradition.

Jacaranda trees, Sydney

We had been in Sydney once before, in September 2001. We didn't realize that one of the unexpected highlights of being there in late October would be the blooming jacaranda trees. They're native to South Africa, not Australia, but they are so dramatic. In the next photo, the purple blooms are vivid against a tree with the yellow leaves of spring. I took tons of photos of jacaranda trees, and I'm letting you see my favorite ones.

Bondi Beach, Sydney

After six days in Melbourne, we went to Sydney, where we stayed 12 days. One of our first nights, Dave and I went to Bondi beach. I'd heard of it so many times, and I wanted to see it. Right by the place where we parked our car was a bench made of mosaic. Here's a closeup of the bench.

Bondi is a perfect crescent of sand with headlands on both ends of it. Below is the headland to the south, which has a sculpture display on it. You can just barely see the shapes of the sculptures.

The headland to the north is covered with houses, as you can see in the next photo. Note the people looking up to the sky? Do you wonder what they're looking at? Keep going down the page and you'll see what they saw.

We watched the pilot make the E in me, and then he flew away to another part of the sky to make the T. I wonder if the T was the initial of the person asking, or the person being asked. It was a beautiful night to be there.

Biking in Melbourne

Melbourne is set on a big bay that opens to the south. Twice while we were there, we rented bicycles and rode along the water. On the way between the bike rental shop and the bay was Luna Park, an old amusement park. Take a look at the cool entrance gate.

The building on the pier in the photo below is more than 100 years old, and Dave watched movies in a museum that showed people strolling on the pier more than a century ago.

From the front of the building in the last photo you can look to the side and see downtown Melbourne through a forest of masts.

The next three photos show views of the bike trail we rode along.

The bike trail went past a marina. I've never seen boats stored in cubicles on top of each other, so I had to take some pictures of them.