A little nap can do wonders. Having had a sort of day of travelling before our nap, we were ready for another day exploring Sydney. Of course, King's Cross isn't the type of place you'd want to spend a lot of time so we headed straight for the city centre and straight for the two most iconic landmarks.

It took about an hour to walk to the Opera House but the walk was worth it. I'd seen plenty of pictures of the place before but in the flesh, so to speak, it's quite magnificent. We took a few photos of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge and found a quayside café for lunch. Unfortunately though, the people at the café decided to ignore us for 45 minutes so we left. We walked from the quay back into the city and found somewhere more reliable to have some supper. On the way we found a Darrell Lea confectionary shop (they sell rather nice soft licorice) and a nice bookshop too. We also booked ourselves into Sydney Central YHA for the following three nights. Finally, we caught a train back to King's Cross to see all the bouncers standing outside the clubs just over the road from where we were staying. It was probably a bit too early for things to get into full swing but we couldn't hear anything anyway as our room was away from the street.

We didn't waste too much time in King's Cross the following morning. We hopped onto a train to the central station and swiftly checked ourselves in to somewhere a bit cleaner and less scary and then we headed out to find a Qantas office to change some of our flight dates. We also collected some lunch from the fine establishments of Subway and Krispy Kreme on our way to the aquarium.

The Sydney aquarium had a huge collection of fishy things to see although I really wanted to feed some of the children there to some of the exhibits. (Unfortunately, we had chosen to arrive in Australia during a school holiday.) Speaking of exhibits, they had some blue (little) penguins, so I've now seen them in daylight. They have a huge collection of sharks and by huge we're talking about both size and quantity.

By the time we had finished in the aquarium, it was getting quite late in the day and we decided to look for a cinema for the evening. The first one that we found was only showing Spiderman, Shrek and lots of Korean and Chinese films but they did help us find a cinema showing films we were interested in seeing. After a fifteen minute bus ride we were in an area of Sydney called Newtown and we had purchased tickets to see Supersize Me. There seem to be a glut of documentaries out at the moment and this one had the potential to be annoying but it ended up being quite entertaining.

We weren't too quick getting up the following day and so it was nearly lunchtime by the time we had walked to the quay. We took a ferry from there to Sydney's zoo and spent most of the afternoon there. It didn't seem to be very well laid out as we had to double back on ourselves several times but we got to see pretty much everything we wanted to. Orang-utans, blue penguins (again), lions, tigers, snow leopards (Claire still wants one), kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, elephants and an Andean condor.

We got back to the quay just in time to catch the final Opera House tour of the day. It's just as spectacular inside although it looks more dated. One day I'd like to go back and listen to something in the concert hall. For this visit, we decided to go for a performance of the Mikado the following day. So that left us an evening to fill up. We went to the cinema again. This time we saw Touching the Void. It made me cringe a couple of times but it was quite good on the whole.

We had to get up quite early the next day. By 8am we had to be in the vicinity of the Harbour bridge, about an hour's walk away. We cheated and took a bus as far as we could and ended up being a bit earlier than planned. And what were we doing there? Climbing the bridge of course. It's not as hard as it sounds. Granted, we had to spend quite a while preparing before we could go up. We had to wear special jumpsuits, safety belts and some weird radio receiver as well as signing our lives away before our guide, Pheobe, took us up to the very top of the Harbour bridge. The weather was a bit cold but brilliantly clear and I enjoyed every second of the climb. I would quite happily go up many more times, if I had the money. The whole tour took us up to midday and left us an hour to eat lunch and walk to the other side of the quay to watch the Mikado.

I've only ever seen one other opera before and I never thought I'd enjoy them but I do so far. The Mikado is a Gilbert and Sullivan comedy opera and I enjoyed it. Being a bit worn out from the bridge climb I did almost nod off at one point though.

We spent the evening doing some laundry and reading prior to our mini road trip tomorrow.