Australia, part 2

So we just spent a lovely day in Sydney, doing all the quintessential Sydney things…

I stripped naked in front of the opera house and got a fantastic Butt and Scarf photo. We strolled through The Rocks, a collection of the oldest buildings in Australia. We took the ferry to Manley, Sydney’s beach town, and walked around. The ferry back home was after sunset, so we got to see the spectacular Sydney skyline, complete with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, all lit up.

One amazing thing I didn’t discover about Sydney on my last trip here is the AMAZING variety of bird life here in the inner city. There are magnificent green parrots, little parrots about the size of a small pigeon but splotched with reds and yellows and purples and blues (rainbow lorikeets), and LARGE white cockatoos with yellow head feathers…EVERYWHERE. The little lorikeets all alight on this one type of flowering shrub, and they drink the nectar of the flowers and get drunk. They’ll fall to the ground and stumble around, swawking loudly. Wayne says that sometimes they’ll fly right into buildings if they’re drunk enough. The big white cockatoos screech and land on people’s chimneys. It’s so strange to see these birds that Americans pay $2000 and $3000 each for…just as common here as street pigeons.

Lunch was fish’n’chips, which didn’t agree with J-P. He’s now holed up in the hostel trying to get control of everything. I’m going to stroll about the seedy district where all the backpacker hostels are for a bit and then hit the sack. We have a long flight tomorrow to Perth (5 hours…not long compared to the flight here from LA! But just as long as a New York-LA flight.)