Our first day in Sydney was mostly a crash, we had been traveling for 30+ hours and enjoyed a shower and some lovely meals with my parents. 

Intent on not letting the travel fatigue eat too much of our time, on our second day we wandered a bit around our neighborhood. Our hotel being so close to the botanical gardens, our walk started through them and we were treated to many beautiful flowers and trees as well as a bunch of birds! Black and white ibises (or “bin chickens” as our Bluey watching nieces informed us), kookaburra, wild cockatoo, and magpies were all quite happily birding away in the park. A particularly interesting piece of flora was a “living fossil” tree. Once thought to have been extinct for over 60 million years, a small grove was found in an undisclosed location by a paleontologist who enjoyed hiking. One was moved to the park for viewing, and if you enjoyed dinosaur documentaries growing up, it is worth a visit. 

Our first art gallery of Sydney was the MCA. Partially closed for preparations for their biennale, we saw their gallery of contemporary indigenous art. After a quick bite, we headed to the library of NSW (New South Wales, not North South West as I was want to call it). In addition to a Shakespeare room and a beautiful reading room, it had multiple exhibits. An eye opening, if at times harrowing, exhibit on wartime reporting was contrasted by an exhibit consisting entirely of photos of, in, and around Sydney over the past 100 years. Dinner back by the hotel closed out our day after deciding to venture into the Blue Mountains in two days time.

We have found that jet lag comes in waves. If on day two, one feels amazing and over it completely, day three will humble you entirely. This all to say we slept in. 

We didn’t waste the day completely, going to the gallery of North South West New South Wales and catching an amazing exhibit of Louise Bourgeois's work. A French born artist whose work deals with motherhood, self, and the human body among other things, the museum had repurposed an old oil storage area to house a large collection of her works. Split between a well lit, prototypical museum experience, and an expansive, under-lit, cavern of a single underground room, the exhibit was exhaustive and exhausting. 

There was also a smaller exhibit on Kandinsky, which featured some of his earlier work (I didn't know he did non-abstract stuff) and a video of him creating a piece. 

The Wollemi pine. A paleontologist recognized it while hiking from seeing fossils from millions of years ago!

This kookaburra did not care at all as we approached. In fact, it stood so still that we didn't even see it until we were feet away!

Living up to their nickname! (Bin Chicken)

Some of her most famous works are these spiders, sometimes freestanding, sometimes perched above domestic scenes. 

A chair made from the wood of a tree Shakespeare planted (allegedly). What a convoluted claim to fame!

The Blue mountains outside of Sydney are so called not for the color of the mountains themselves, but the color of the air around them. The oils from eucalyptus trees (which apparently is a whole genus of more than 700 species?!?) that is suspended in the air causes preferential scattering of short wavelength from plane wave (read: sun hits the suspended particles and blue gets separated out like in a prism and scattered around). 

The town of Katoomba, about 1.5 hours outside of Sydney, has leaned into their perch on the edge of blue mountains. With viewpoints for the famous Three Sisters rock formation and a "Scenic World" with gondola over the forest, the world's steepest railway down into the forest, and walkways and hikes through it. 

A quick lunch at yellow deli (which we realized while we were there is run by a cult?!?!) before our drive home. We opted to stop at the park where the red hand cave is, but had made some errors in our timing. As we drove in, the sign at the (automatic) gate EMPHATICALLY declared that it would close at 7 pm, and reopen at 7 am. Arriving at 5:15 with ~13 miles of what felt like offroading to this urban driver took us to the trailhead in 45 minutes. The trail was a horseshoe, and entry from the closer end to the caves was closed off (I can’t recall if it was from flood or fire damage), so I ran the 1k to the caves, snapped some pictures, ran back, and sped us out of there with 10 minutes to spare. 

A gondola over a portion of the forest below.

Somewhere between 1600 and 500 years ago, some people held their hands up and used pipes to blow colored powder past their hands at this wall inspiring generations of hand turkeys to come.