Thursday, January 5th

Thursday morning we met up with Michael Barrett, our tour guide through the Royal Botanical Gardens, which are beautiful and open free to the public. Mr. Barrett has a wealth of information about plants and the gardens in particular.
The first thing he enlightened us about was the extremely large bats that we had already discovered hanging from the trees. They are a type of fruit bat, called a flying fox, which is an endangered species. Unfortunately, the bats are killing the trees in the Botanical Gardens. They have very sharp claws that rupture the bark on the trees and particularly during the mating season, there is a lot of activity causing leaf defoliation, bark rupturing, and the droppings also adversely effect the understory. In an effort to convince the flying foxes to move, extremely loud rock music is played for about twenty minutes in the morning and again in the evening. Evidently, they don’t like very loud rock music. An interesting fact is that flying foxes can live 35 years.
Another pest in the gardens is the Ibis, which is not endangered. Mr. Barrett says it is strictly a numbers game, a lot of birds means a lot of damage.

After our tour of the gardens, we had some free time to find lunch before we met up again for our tour of the Sydney Opera House. Danielle and I found the absolutely perfect place along the waterfront for lunch. I had the salmon and Danielle had tomatoes, mozerella, and pesto. Yum!!! I had a great view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and she had a view of the Circular Quay, where all of the ferries and cruise ships make port. It is the “hub” of Sydney.

Next we had a very nice tour of the Sydney Opera House with Megan. We learned that the design of the opera house was actually in the reject pile when a new person was added to the decision making committee. The design was pulled from the reject pile and eventually chosen, but the architectual dilemma of how to construct it took 14 years. They started building the foundation in 19xx, before they knew how it would be built. The designer/architect, Jorn Utzon, quit in 1966 when the City of Sydney said they would no longer pay him but offered him a consultation position. He declined the offer and returned home to Sweden, to never return. After most of the interior was finished, the City of Sydney did ask Jorn Utzon to design the interior of the lower level, which he agreed to do. Here is a picture of his interior. His son traveled to Sydney to oversee the project, he never saw the opera house complete.