August 12

Slept in until about 8:00 am this morning. After eating breakfast and packing peanut butter and jelly for lunch, Melissa, Amanda and I set off for Central Station in Sydney to catch a train. Our goal was to go to a koala park this morning, followed by the opera house in the afternoon. We bought a roundtrip ticket to North Strathfield and boarded our train as soon as it arrived. It was my first time on a real train (i.e. one used for transport... I'd been on a tourist fall-foliage tour ride on an old train once before), so it was a new experience for me. :) The train felt really floaty compared to what I was expecting, and the ride was really smooth. It was also nice not having to worry about traffic slowing us down like when we take the bus around Canberra or Sydney. In order to get to our destination we had to get off of the first train and board another train in Strathfield in order to get onto the North line. The second train was a couple minutes late getting there, but we hopped on only to realize two stops later that the one we had gotten on was actually part of the western line! Woops. So we got off and went back to Strathfield, got off again, and got on the right train to get to North Strathfield.

We left the train station in North Strathfield and walked to the bus stop that was indicated inthe travel guide as required in order to get to the koala park. It turns out there was a sign saying that buses only stopped here on school days though. We decided to walk down the street until we found another bus stop. We found another one only to read the sign saying that it, too, only operated during school days. We found this kind of weird and disappointing. Melissa checked her travel guide once again and re-read the directions. It turns out that although both she and I had read the directions at least twice each, we had mis-read/mis-interpreted the directions, and were supposed to have gone about 15 more minutes down the line by train to get to the destination we wanted! Oops. We went back to the train station and checked the time-table, then talked about what to do. We decided that since it had taken us so long because of getting on wrong trains by accident and getting off trains in the wrong place on purpose, that we'd try another wildlife park/zoo instead. We decided to go for the Featherdale Wildlife Park which was probably about 30 minutes away on the western line. We estimated we would still have about two hours of daylight after our trip to go up to the opera house afterward.

When our southbound train came, we hopped on, got off at Strathfield, then got on a westbound train headed to Blacktown, our suburb destination. When we were only halfway there we got an announcement over the PA system stating that trains were not running from Granville westward due to track work, and that buses would take passengers from Granville to points westward. At Granville we got off and went to the "rail bus" bay headed to blacktown and waited for the next bus. The bus took about 45 minutes or so to get there (much more traffic than the rail system!), but finally we made it to Blacktown. We took the appropriate local bus from the Blacktown train station to Featherdale then, and finally arrived at our destination.

At Featherdale Wildlife Park we managed to spend several hours exploring the various cages, aviaries, pens, and sections of the park and seeing the numerous and diverse native creatures that were housed there! There were tons of parrots and cockatoos, doves, finches, eagles and hawks, owls, rails, ducks, geese, bowerbirds, blue penguins, herons, kookaburras, frogmouths, woodswallows, and heaps of others. It was really neat to see all these birds, most of them native, up close and personal. I did see a couple of species of wild birds hanging out in the park that were new for me -- the spotted turtle-dove and Australian white ibis come to mind. One of the coolest things was having a bunch of laughing kookaburras sitting around just waiting to be petted by the park's visitors. There were four frogmouths sitting there too, but they were just a bit beyond the railing so that they were out of reach. But I got pictures of them sleeping (they are a noctournal bird that looks like a tree stump).

In addition to birds, there were numerous mammalian and some reptilian species present in the park. Many of the kangaroos and wallabys (of several species) were free-roaming in the park and available to be hand-fed and petted. There were other species of kangaroos and wallaby-like animals in fenced-in areas also. And several wombats, Tazmanian devils, a 15-foot long crocodile, some bats (including huge flying foxes!), and more! We spent some time in the gift shop after we were done being with all the animals and each ended up buying a souvenir or gift or two or three.

We had to wait 20 minutes at the bus stop by Featherdale in order to catch the next bus back to Blacktown. While we were waiting a family of Asian-Americans from California waited with us, and we talked about how riding in buses was weird and almost scary at first because of how they drive on the wrong side of the road, about Paddy's market, about university residences and paying for internet. etc. Apparently the one son of the family was studying at a univeristy in Sydney this semester, and his family was visiting him. Finally the bus came, we got back to the Blacktown rail station, boarded the "rail bus" back to Granville, and after almost an hour finally got to Granville where we boarded the first eastbound train. We looked at the rail map posted in the train and decided the Wynard station was the one where we wanted to get off in order to land closest to the Opera House.

It turns out the Wynard train station, and the one previous to it were under ground. I guess it's kind of a sub-train or something. We got off the train and then tried to get out.. only to find out that you had to scan your ticket for the turnsty thing to let you through. Our tickets (roundtrip) had been scanned twice, and therefore didn't work anymore. Another girl at the train station was having the same problem, and we watched her go over to the security guy and ask him for help. He went over and manually let her out. We followed her lead and manually let ourselves out and climbed upstairs onto the streets of the city of Sydney. Eight trains and 4 buses later we had finally completed our round-trip to Featherdale and were off to see the Opera House. And we hoped to get to it before dark, as it was now late afternoon!

It was only a five or ten minute walk before we were to the harbour and were able to see the Sydney Opera House. We took a bunch of pictures of the Opera House when it was still light, as the light was fading, and after dark. For those who don't already know, it turns out the Opera House was again the result of an international competition, and the winning design came from someone in Finland. It also cost about 100 million dollars more to build than originally planned, and is actually still used today for various performances. We also got a few pictures of the Harbour Bridge. After we were satisfied with these tourist attractions, we stopped by an inexpensive souvenir shop and purchased a few more items. :)

Finally we walked back to the hostel, unloaded our bags and got ready for supper. We went to Scruffy Murphy's Irish pub for their supper special. I got a big bowl of vegetarian "lasagna" (more or less just pasta with sauce and cheese) for only $5. After we ate we enjoyed the no-smoking atmosphere, the music, and parts of two rugby games on the numerous flat-screen tvs that were scattered around. Around 11:00pm we came back and I got ready for bed so that I could rest up for my City to Surf race early Sunday morning!