Tour of Sydney & Blue Mountain
Day 13
The next day I went to the CBD again and visited the Darling Harbour. According to the tour guide, Darling Harbour was not as nice as before, and recently went through a massive urban renewal development. Now, the harbor is a large recreational and pedestrian precinct. When I visited Sydney, it was during the school holiday. Therefore, I saw many children and families gathered around the Darling Harbour park as their playground.
This is another view of the Sydney skyline.
Afterwards, my family friend drove me to visit the Sydney Fish Market. The fish market is an actual operating commercial enterprise, supplying fish to restaurants or seafood retailers every day. However, in recent years, it has turned into a tourist attraction.
After, my family friend drove me to try their favourite food, a local dish called the “Tiger Pie”. It is an Australian meat pie with peas on top that can only be found in Harry’s Café de Wheels, an iconic pie cart located in Wooloomooloo.
At night, I went back to the Sydney Opera House to watch a concert performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The show of the night was called “The Matrix: Film in Concert”. It was a very interesting show and quite unexpected. At first, I thought I was going to listen to the orchestra playing theme songs of the movie Matrix. It turned out that the show was to play the entire movie, leave the dialogue on and cut out the background music. At the same time, the orchestra played the entire background music while the movie was showing. I personally think this is a brilliant idea and it certainly entertained the entire crowd. I was lucky to be able to witness the performance because the orchestra only had the show on for 2 days – I managed to watch one of the performance days.
After the show, I was able to capture the night view of the opera house.
Day 14
My family friend was kind enough again to drive me 65 km west to the Blue Mountains. It is a mountainous region that is supposedly to have a blue-greyish tinge. This colour is believed to be created when ultraviolet radiation is scattered by particles emitted from eucalyptus trees. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the Blue Mountains, I did not see the blue-greyish tinge. Based on my family friend’s explanation, wild fire in the Blue Mountains had destroyed many of the eucalyptus trees. As a result, without the particles, there would be no scattered radiation and mountain range would not be blue.
As you can probably see, behind me stands a rock formation with three fresh separate rocks, collectively known as the Three Sisters. The aboriginal legends say that the rocks were originally three human sisters. Due to a major tribal battle, the three sisters were turned into stone by an elder in order to protect them. The elder was killed and thus no one had the ability to turn them back to humans.
