March 28. Sydney.

We sailed into Sydney Harbour at 4:45am and went right past the Opera house. Bucket list item box checked!

We pulled into port for the last time. The ship traveled 3,911 miles on our amazing journey. 

Everyone had to be out off the ship by 9am, but we got up early so we could meet Ben, our Aussie tour guide for the day. (It was no small task getting packed up after 12 nights in our room.)

We drove around Sydney Harbour, the largest and deepest natural harbor in the world. We passed the Sydney fish market, the 3rd largest fish market in the world. Sydney has 250 beaches and we saw a lot of them today, some may say too many. :) 

Greater Sydney has more than 700 suburbs and runs from the coastline to the Blue Mountains and surrounded by national forests. There are around 5.5 million people in Sydney, half are immigrants or children of immigrants. The average home price in all Sydney is around one million dollars, closer to four million in the harbor area.

We learned that Sydney was built by convicts.  Convicts from England couldn't be sent to America anymore after 1776 independence.  England didn't know where to send them but Captain Cook had arrived in Australia in Botony Bay in 1770, so they decided to send 11 boats of convicts on the nine month journey to sail to Australia. They arrived in 1788 and the land was claimed by England, one week before the French arrived. Our guide said if not for America winning our independence, Australia probably would have been claimed by the French and they would be speaking a different language and eating croissants today. 

Our favorite part of Sydney was the old area "the Rocks", This is where 100,000 convicts arrived between 1788 and the 1850s and were forced to work in the rock quarries and cut out the sandstone by hand to build the city. There were many beautiful buildings in this area where you could see the hand pick marks on the sandstone blocks.

We had a glorious visit to the outside of the Opera House. It was sprinkling for about a half hour, which apparently scared people away because we had the place practically to ourselves.

A Danish guy was the architect and he was fired before it was complete. It took 14.5 years to finally complete at a cost 10x the initial estimate. It opened in 1973. It has six theatres, the largest seats 4,700 people. The silicone tiles on the building are self cleaning when it rains... How handy!

We had lunch at world famous (or at least Australia famous) Bondi Beach. We also saw several more beaches around the bay, saw gorgeous houses, heard about some military history, and then headed back to the central business district. 

We got checked into our hotel, Intercontinental Sydney at about 5pm. We were pretty exhausted. We got our traditional first cocktail at the Treasury bar in the lobby, walked around the Rocks neighborhood and got dinner and dessert and then went to bed early.