Cheaper than I am lazy

Or "how I walked the entire route of the monorail to save $5" Sydney is quite expensive for food, transport, and hotel. The monorail was 5 per person one way! We have walked about 10 kms a day!

Yesterday went to the botanical gardens where there were thousands of flying fox bats! As I stood looking up wide eyed with a gaping mouth and local wisely warned me to watch out for falling bat poop. thankfully there are no incidents to report. Plus an amazing assortment of birds; cockatoos, little parrot like birds, Australian magpies etc etc as you can see from the photo. And lovely ponds and plants. We also saw the opera house which is an amazing feat of architecture! And we had a great veg dim sum at Bodhi Restaurant. We went to the Australian Museum as well but I was not that impressed with it. It was mostly filled with taxidermy animals which I hope were collected from road kill or confiscated from poachers! There was an interesting (and rather sad) section on the Aborigines and the invasion and colonization by Europeans.

We took a cab last night to get to this great vegetarian bar/restaurant, Yulli's, that was rather far away but then we walked back. On the way home we cut through Hyde park and saw all these curious possums in the trees along with more of the flying foxes bats. We also walked by a local HIV and social service agency and I was impressed to see they had an after hours needle vending machine!

Today we plan on slowing down a bit as our legs hurt from walking on the cement. We are going to see the museum of contemporary art and check again to see if the Peace Harmony veg restaurant is open yet. A lot of things close for part or all of this week.