Australia Edition - Day 4

 Day 4: 2/15 - Sydney Harbor 2

Good morning from Sydney! Today is the start of our cruise and we are excited to get onboard the ship and head to New Zealand! Sydney has been amazing, but there is so much to do and the weather has been weird so planning has been challenging. There are things we have wanted to do, but everything requires being outside and the forecast has been completely inaccurate all week. It has been forecasting rain and storms, but aside from some stormy looking clouds and a couple of droplets we haven’t witnessed any precipitation. The weather is very different from back home; when the forecast says rain, it’s typically going to rain. On to the update!

After I sent out yesterday’s update, we got cleaned up and then tried to figure out what we were going to have for lunch. We are in a super touristy area and restaurants in the immediate area are pretty bougie; white table clothes, well dressed waiters, etc. Valerie and I are in hardcore casual mode, wearing shorts and t-shirts and we have no desire to switch to business casual which severely limits our dining options. That is one of the reasons we have been focused on eating in Chinatown as those restaurants are super casual.

After having spent the last couple of days walking more than 10km we wanted to stick closer to the hotel, while maintaining our comfortable attire. It took us an hour researching in our hotel room to find a place to eat and we ended up at the Helm Bar and Bistro. There are so many options, and no dress code indicators on TripAdvisor so it was a challenging process. 

The restaurant is directly under our hotel but it was still a 15 minute walk. We get to the restaurant and are seated overlooking the harbor, and there was some fantastic music playing; great atmosphere. Having learned my lesson yesterday to READ THE SIGNS, I saw you can order and pay for your food directly on your phone, so we scanned the QR code, ordered and paid for our meal. We ordered garlic focaccia bread, pork belly sliders, shoestring fries with aioli, and a pizza with roasted duck, mushrooms, buffalo mozzarella and hoisin. 

The food came out really quickly and I learned a couple of things with this meal. First, I like dill but it doesn’t belong on garlic bread. Second, pork belly is absolutely atrocious if it’s over cooked. Third, I love duck with hoisin! 

The garlic bread was completely ruined by the fresh dill they had put on the garlic bread, it was just too overpowering. I love pork belly, it’s one of those things where if I see pork belly on a menu I have to order it and this was the first time I have ever been disappointed with it. It was so tough and flavorless, really disappointing. A pig had to die for us to have that pork belly and it was disrespectful to the pig. The two “shareables” were disappointing, but then we got the shoestring fries.

I’m not a huge fry guy, they are fine and occasionally I will want a couple of fries with my meal, but these were incredible. Perfectly crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, with this super flaky sea salt. It wasn’t like Maldon sea salt, a little smaller flakes than that. The salt was perfectly stuck to each fry and when we finished the bowl, you could see extra salt at the bottom of the bowl. Phenomenal fries!

After the smaller dishes were delivered we got our duck pizza. It was a really solid pizza. Nice thin crust, a little pale on the bottom but strong enough to hold up to the weight of slices of duck breast. The toppings were hidden by the layer of cheese and there was a perfect spiral drizzle of hoisin on top of all of it. Duck with hoisin has always been a great combination, but this cemented it as one of my favorite combinations. The sweetness of the hoisin complemented the richness of the duck and cheese and the earthiness of the mushroom. I would have liked more duck on the pizza, but the flavors were pretty fantastic.

After lunch, we decided to head down the wharf to the aquarium. It’s a small building we can see from our hotel balcony. We bought our tickets by scanning the QR code outside the building and headed inside. The building itself is a little older and rundown, but still had plenty to see. Most of the exhibits were very small. We started out in the Jurassic Seas section where they had sea life that had been around for millions of years without much evolution. There was a tiny exhibit of sub-Antarctic penguins that live around New Zealand, on the southern side of Australia, and around Manly beach, the only waddle of penguins found on the eastern coast of Australia. FYI, a group of penguins in the ocean is a raft and a group of penguins on land is called a waddle! There was also a small section on sea life found in Sydney Harbour, and a few tanks containing various jellyfish. 

Aside from these smaller exhibits, there are 3 main exhibits at the aquarium that were really exciting. The first was the dugong exhibit. Dugong are Australian sea cows or sea pigs. There is only one in the exhibit and his name is Pig. He was found abandoned at 9 weeks old and rescued by Sea World, eventually ending up at the Sydney Aquarium. He is 300kg or 661 lbs and loves people. During the pandemic he got really depressed not being around people, he lost weight, was really lethargic, stopped eating. The aquarium is right next door to Madame Tussaud’s, so they borrowed some of the wax figures from next door and put them around his exhibit. He immediately went back to normal, eating regularly, gained back all the weight he had lost, and got back all his energy. His favorite person during this time was Albert Einstein, spending a lot of time staring up at him. His least favorite was Lady Gaga, tending to steer well clear of her.

In that same exhibit were 7 eagle rays, all female. These rays were the biggest I have ever seen, they were 10 feet from wingtip to wingtip and 15 feet from nose to tail. In the wild they grow up to 21 meters long! Absolutely beautiful animals. The aquarium originally only had 4 females. They made sure they didn’t didn’t have any males because they didn’t want to have to take care of any more rays. 10 years ago, they found one of the rays, Freckles,  was eating a lot more, getting rounder, and showing general signs of pregnancy, but there were no males to impregnate her. They had planned on doing an ultrasound, but the day the vet was coming to do the ultrasound, they found a 5th ray in the habitat the size of a dinner plate. They did a DNA test on the new ray and on Freckles and found them to be an exact DNA match. It’s not uncommon to see asexual reproduction in some reptiles and insects, but this was the first time it had ever been recorded in rays. They named the new ray Ani, after Anikan Skywalker. Two years later, it happened again but this time with twins, named Luca and Leia. There are now 4 eagle rays in that aquarium that all have the exact same DNA.

Also in that same exhibit were barramundi, a native Australian species of fish. The interesting thing we learned about the barramundi is that they are all born as males. When they reach the age of 3 or 4 they undergo a sex transformation and become females. You will often see older female barramundi swimming with multiple younger male barramundi. (Spent 5 minutes trying to come up with a cougar joke to put here, but I’m feeling a little slow today).

The next exhibit was the shark tank. They had a few different species of sharks, and if you go early you can pay to dive with them. Most of what they had were grey nurse sharks. It was a cool experience, but I think the shark exhibits in Monterey are nicer.

Finally, they had the Antarctic penguin exhibit. This was really cool, both literally and figuratively. They had a small It’s a Small World like ride where you get in a small boat that seats 8 and you get to ride past some penguin habitats. It was literally freezing in there as they maintain Antarctic-like temperatures with snow covered ground. They had a few different types of penguins in this area. We got to watch the feeding of Gentoo penguins. Gentoo penguins are small but really fast in the water. They can swim up to 36km/h or 22 miles/h. They also had some much larger penguins there as well. We learned that while most bird species slowly molt and replace their feathers over time, penguins undergo a catastrophic molt, where they lose and replace all their feathers at once over a couple of weeks. Before their molt they binge eat as they cannot swim while they are molting as they are no longer waterproof.

There were a couple more small exhibits that you shuffle through and then out into the gift shop and back to the wharf. We were feeling pretty low energy at that point and decided to go find a cup of coffee. It took a long time to find a coffee shop. We ended up going back to Tumbalong Park before finding a small coffee shop. We grabbed a couple of Lattes and popped a squat on a park bench and did some people watching while trying to figure out what to do next. It was after 5 at this point and we decided to head back to the hotel, watch the final Hobbit movie and then decide what to do for dinner.

On the way back to the hotel we decided to cross the Pyrmont Bridge and get some pictures of Darling Harbour from up high. We crossed over to the western side of the harbour and back to get to our hotel. We stopped at a convenience store for some water, Coke, and Powerade and then went back to our room. The movie finished a little after 8 and we decided to order room service for our last night. Valerie got the southern fried chicken burger and a small Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream while I got the butter chicken and a sticky date pudding with mascarpone cream. Both were solid dinner choices and once we finished eating we were ready for bed.

We didn’t do quite as much walking yesterday but still walked about 4 miles. It’s been fascinating how much we are counting steps and distance this trip. We are spending a lot of time enjoying the city sights and it’s been much more about the journey than the destination so far. I think that will change once we are on the ship but it has been a pretty amazing time in Sydney.

One of the primary things I have found fascinating is how much Sydney feels like home. I’ve come to the conclusion that the primary reason this feels so comfortable is likely the British influence on their former colonies. Having travelled through the US, Canada, British Caribbean islands, Western Europe, and now Australia and New Zealand, all of the former colonies feel similar. Similar cultures, diversity, foods, the ways cities have been built. France, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Slovenia all feel very different, foreign. I think one of the reasons we love London so much is because of the similarities. Don’t get me wrong, there are significant differences between all these places but the general vibe is very comfortable. It’s fascinating to see how much influence British colonization had on such a large part of the world. 

So, what’s next? We will start getting ready shortly. We have a late checkout of the hotel so we’ll be out around noon. Our check-in time for the cruise is at 1 and it’s a short 15 minute Uber to Circular Quay. We had originally thought about walking, but we learned our lesson on Tuesday about the challenges of dragging our luggage through town.

We are both excited to get on the ship. As amazing as Sydney has been, the amount of choice and not having an idea of what we want to do or where to go has been overwhelming. There has been a lot of analysis paralysis and the cruise will be a known entity and limits the number of decisions we need to make. The conditions on the Tasman Sea appear to be pretty nice, 7-9 ft swells so it looks like we’ll have nice cruising conditions as we cross the waters between Sydney and New Zealand.

I know these updates have been very lengthy and I expect the next few days will be shorter given we’ll be at sea until Tuesday. Hope all is well and love you guys!