Day 52 - Botanicals, climbing on a famous erection.

Wed Feb 21

We had to be at the bridge climb for 1300 so we were in no rush to get up. So we sorted ourselves out for breakfast, packed up a lunch and walked outside to the bus stop for 0930.

Arriving  at Circular Quay we got off the bus and headed for the Rocks. The Rocks were the poor end of town in the early days of Sydney, this was where ex-convicts would have lived, but now it's famous for the Victorian era terraced houses that are preserved there; there's also an archeological dig that uncovered earlier streets but we didn't find that until later in the day.

Ironwork on balconies are on most of the older buildings

narrow streets just wide enough to walk down

Having explored little bit of the rocks we headed to the botanic gardens to have our picnic lunch. We had a short walk around finally picked place to sit. While  we were eating lunch and we were closely inspected by more white ibis. It’s amazing how close they will come to you without spooking.

After we'd eaten we went in search of the palm house, and also the place where there were supposed to be bats rousting, but we found the cafe first so we had a coffee and a piece of cake, and watched the birds grabbing crumbs from the table, above us a Kookaburra sat on a branch.

We finally found the palm house, which no longer contains palms and we think the bats have been moved on, there were new green houses for tropical plants, including a special tented area for ferns which reminded us of where we've been previously.

We were running out of time, we headed off to the bridge climb and used the overpass to get back to the area around the bridge.

looking down on the harbour from the overpass

The bridge climb was going to be hot so we were advised to remove any outerwear before putting on the jump suits.

The views from the bridge are spectacular, it was hard to have been deprived of cameras, everyone was itching to take photos.

The guide gave us lots of information and answered lots of questions about the bridge. The head phone radios were great, much better than shouting.

Finally we climbed down and dropped our climbing stuff off, and went to select our photos.

We took another walk through the Rocks, this time finding the archeological dig.

Then back to our Airbnb for dinner. We got off the bus a stop early and investigated the local sea water swimming pool.