March 7th - March 9th Sydney and Cairns.

On  Tuesday March 7th I climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge while Nancy took a Harbor cruise and toured the Modern Art Museum.  We had dinner at Chat Thai, which was excellent, and the saw the Australian play "Away" at the Sydney Opera House.   We retired to our hotel, the Hotel Russell, which is located on the oldest section of Sydney.  It is an excellent hotel in the perfect location.   We had found out before we arrived it is often counted as one of the worlds 10 top 10 haunted hotels.  That night, a circuit breaker in our room tripped, as we were getting up to notify the staff we found there was water on the bathroom floor and splattered on the bathroom wall, that was not there when we came back earlier, and we did not do it!!!   Very cool.  

 

View of the Sydney Harbor Bridge - if you look closely you will see three groups of climbers, climbing up from the left on the top of the arch.

On March 8th we flew to Cairns.   We took an Ariel tram up a mountain going over a dense tropical rainforest.  At one point we stopped for a ranger guided tour.   At the top we toured a butterfly sanctuary and had lunch before taking a train back into Cairns, past a great waterfall. 

 

Ranger lead tour - note the large tree behind him is actually two trees, one is in the middle and the second one is a tree that actually grows down with lots of trunks.  While it will eventually crush the tree in the middle, not before it's trunk structure has become self supporting.

 

Waterfall we saw on both the cable car and train ride.

 

Butterfly checking the time on Nancy's watch.

On March 9th we took a small group boat tour to the Great Barrier Reef.  We went snorkling twice, for about a hour each time.  The reef had some of the prettiest coral we have ever seen.   

 

A shark that swam under us at the Great Barrier Reef. 

 

One of our boat our guides.   Note the massive giant clam near the center of the picture.