Another lovely day (30C and clear skies again) started the right way with a full Australian breakfast at the hotel, hmmm... We walked to the Opera House around Circular Quay to see if we could get a tour. After walking around the base of the building and looking at a Tasmanian contemporary design exhibition in one of the small halls undeneath the main structure we eventually found the ticket office and signed up for the next front of house tour. It didn't start very well, but the guide warmed up after about 10 minutes and it turned out to be very interesting. The construction of the building is a great example of how not to manage a large scale project as it turned out to be hideously expensive (about AUD1bn in today's money), very late (by about 10 years) and massively over-engineered. Still the Australian public payed for it in about 18 months through the Lotto. Excellent!
After the tour we walked back towards the bridge through The Rocks and had a really nice Chinese dim sim lunch on the way. We considered doing the bridge climb, but neither of us was bothered enough to stump up the cash (it's a bit pricey in my opinion at AUD155). In the end we took the cheaper option and simply walked over it on the footpath (after spending a while trying to work out how to find it). We had decided that we would like to go back over to the Opera House to catch the sunset so we headed back over via the hotel for a quick nap (all this eating and drinking takes its toll after a while). Unfortuately it had clouded over by the time we made it round Circular Quay so we hung around for a while and then walked off in seach of somewhere to eat.
In fact we ended up walking for miles back to where we had started from (and ate pizza), but the walk was nice and I saw my first fruit bats in the Botanical Gardens. Cool.
