Photos from 2002 October 10
Today was another day of wandering around Sydney, but I think I took more pictures today than any day so far. I went to the Aquarium, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Zoo. The Zoo is on a hill across the harbor, so I thought I'd start off with an out-of-order panorama shot of the harbor from the hillside of the Zoo. The big version stretches across the whole skyline of the city.	Now, back to the morning. This is a monitor lizard in the platypus tank. I found it amusing that the refraction of the light through the water in the tank made it look like the lizards head was far to the right of its body. The head is a little difficult to see in this shot, what with the exposure level and all, but it's just above the log; you can see a black diagonal stribe between some white patches.	And this is a platypus. It was about fourteen inches long, I would guess, although I am notoriously bad at such guestimates. Definitely more than ten and less than twenty-four. It was a fast-moving little guy, too. Very hard to get a photo of because it rarely stood still out in the open.	Here's the platypus zipping from place to place underwater, so its kind of blurry.
One last platypus shot, this time as it paused to take a breath. I held the camera up and pointed it down so I could try to get an overview of the creature. What an amazing beast.	A lizard I liked. Dont remember what kind.	They had a rather bland seal tank outside. There was a big, floating, pseudo-rock for them to sun on, and there was this ramp, and then there was a lot of water. It seemed rather antiseptic for the poor creatures.	Penguins! Aptly called >Little Penguins<. Apparently the only species of penguin that is in Australia.
I tried to take a picture of one of these creatures in Honolulu a couple years ago; it's a leafy sea dragon. This shot turned out a little better than that one, but they're both in very low-light conditions, so I just could not get a sharp image. Oh, well. Lends an air of mystery to the dragon. :-)	Another attempt to photograph a sea dragon.	Now, this was probably the coolest thing in the aquarium. It was a humungous shark and ray tank with underwater glass tunnels you could walk through. Very impressive creatures. I'm not sure this photo gets across the sheer *mass* of the shark in the middle. It moved very slowly, and that somehow made it even scarier.	Here's a shark and its cleaner, moving right at the tunnel.
There was also a giant sea turtle; must have been four or five feet across the shell.	I was mostly taking this shot to try to get the amazing teeth of this shark; I didn't realize until I got the image on my laptop that I had also managed to get the reflection of a kids face.	This is a Port Jackson shark. It has a tightly pinched-off jaw, unlike the wide-mouth Jaws you're used to thinking about with respect to sharks. It uses those small teeth at the tips to crush shellfish.	Here's what the glass tunnel looked like. The lighting added to the eerie feel of the experience.
Here's one of those massive, slow-moving sharks again. It must be at least three meters long.	They also had some huge rays in there, at least two were over two meters in diameter. One had lost its tail, so it looked like a huge floating disc. I couldn't get a picture of that one; it was always too big for my field of view whenever I noticed it coming by.	They had some internal coral reefs, as well, so I took some photos here. This is pretty much what my underwater pictures would have looked like, if I had had an underwater camera with me on the Great Barrier Reef last week. Except I didn't see any purple sea cucumbers.	I have no idea what these fish are called, but I liked how they looked.
This is a Blue Surgeon.	This is a Foxfish.	Here's another shot of a reef.	A Lionfish.
A bunch of Batfish (going right) and a Unicorn Fish (going left). The Batfish were maybe a foot across, maybe more. Scale is a little tough to gauge through the glass, but they were big.	I found out what that weird shark in Cairns was! A Ray Shark. Not a terribly surprising name, no?	I don't know what the name of this fish is, but it was about four feet long and bright blue.	My feet. There was a tunnel through this tank, and they had the floor also be glass (or plastic; I don't know which). I liked the idea of seeing fish between my feet. :-)
This was the whole tank. The tunnel where I took the previous shot was at the far side. You can't really see it in the murk.	This shark wasn't really having a go at the fish, but it sure looked like it.	After the aquarium, I was planning to wander across Sydney to Circular Quay, where the museum of contemporary art is, but just as I walked outside, the harbor ferry pulled up, and I thought it might be fun to take the water route and see the city from a different perspective. So here is downtown Sydney from the water.	I liked this shot because of the contrast between the old stone building below and the huge glass skyscraper behind.
The Sydney harbor bridge.	Okay, I couldn't go to Sydney and *not* take some pictures of the Opera House. Here it is, as seen under the harbor bridge.	A closer shot, as we went under the bridge. One thing that surprised me was that since today was so cloudy, you could see that the roof is actually more of a yellow/beige color, and just looks white when reflecting direct sunlight.	Here's a wide-angle shot.
And a reverse-angle shot from Circular Quay (which, oddly enough, I did not think to photograph).	Now, the Museum of Contemporary Art was having an exhibit on Italian Art. I have to say, I find a lot of modern art pretty silly in its pretentiousness. A pile of rocks is not art. A pile of potatoes (which was one of the exhibits in this museum!) -- maybe. Still, I doubt if the artists intended response that they wanted to provoke was laughter. But I just can't look at >Venus of Rags< and do anything but chuckle. Oddly enough, I often do like >found art<, if its presented in such a way that I find thought-provoking.	Then, after a quick lunch in The Rocks, I took the ferry over to the zoo. This is the view back across the water towards downtown Sydney.	The zoo is on the side of a hill, so when you get off the ferry, there's a skyrail ride to take you to the top from the water, here. The zoo is huge! Riding over it was a pretty neat introduction.
Here's the first thing I saw when I got off the skyrail. Not a bad start to the visit. This guy was just sitting there, minding his business, not in a cage or anything. In fact, shortly after I took this picture, he jumped down into the pedestrian path and ...	...proceeded to show off. I guess he can afford to. :-)	Another shot of the plumage.	Amazing coloration.
This is a Hairy-Nosed Wombat, as opposed to the Common Wombat I got to hold at the Billabong Sanctuary. I was surprised at how different they looked. About the same size, though.	Some cool-looking birds.	These are the same kind of pelicans that I saw at the Billabong Sanctuary, after my camera battery died. They're *huge*. I mean, at least four feet tall, and with a very large wingspan. I've seen pelicans back home, and they didn't strike me as this big. Either the distance fooled me, or they're different species.	This is a wallaby.
A kangaroo.	A different kind of wallaby.	This is a tree-shrew. I managed to catch it right as it was either scratching an itch or cleaning away parasites or something. Impressive jawspan for such a small creature.	This is a fishing cat. It actually *likes* water. :-)
They had a couple aviaries at the zoo, and this bird let me get very close to it. I'm not sure what kind it is, but it looks vaguely kookaburra-ish. :-)	Here's a headless bird by a waterfall. Sleeping, of course.	Okay, here I went a little overboard, but the next six pictures are of the same subject, because these two were just way, way too adorable. The last one is of the highest resolution my camera can do.	Photo two.
Photo three.	Photo four.	Photo five.	This is the high-resolution one.
This is a Komodo Dragon. It was a very cold day, so all the reptiles were even more sluggish than normal. I have to confess to some digital trickery in this picture. The eye of the dragon is actually from another picture that was a little blurrier than this one, but the eye was actually shut in this picture, and I liked it better open. ILM, here I come! :-)	This is a long-necked turtle, and it sure is!	It kept opening its mouth *really* wide at the passers-by, but only when I didn't have the camera ready. When I was finally ready, he moved his head around behind the branch and didn't do it any more. Highly uncooperative subject.	A cool-looking lizard.
A diamond-backed rattler eating a rat.	This is a Rhinoceros Iguana.	Okay, the pink stuff is the reflection of a little girl in the glass, but the image of the yawning iguana was just too cool to throw out. I don't think even ILM could fix this one. :-)	This is a frilled lizard. Like the comic relief character in >The Rescuers Down Under<, a highly underrated gem of a film.
A >freshie<, or freshwater crocodile. They're much smaller and less solitary than the >salties<, like the one I photographed on the Daintree river.	Yup. A giraffe.	They really are huge. Since the zoo is on a hill, they could have the path for the people near the giraffe head level while its feet were four meters further down hill.	Last giraffe picture.
These guys just refused to turn and look at me. But since they are highly endangered Andean Condors, I just had to take a photo. I wish I could have gotten a picture of one with open wings, as they have about a two-meter wingspan. Huge birds.	This is a Sun Bear. It was incredibly odd-looking. Its head seemed too large for its sleek body. Its face was all wrinkled up like a pug-dog. It was constantly pacing back and forth at high speed, so it was hard to get a decent picture of it. It had really nasty-looking claws.	And here I'm back at the bottom of the hill again. I did get to see the head of a tasmanian devil, but it was hiding in a hollow log, and none of the photos I tried to take of it were at all comprehensible. I did not, however, get to see an echidna. The one at the Billabong Sanctuary had died a few weeks ago, and the ones here were all hiding. Probably it was too cold. I think there's a conspiracy. :-)
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