Sydney, the Blue Mountains, & Yarra Valley
Days One, Two, Three, & Four - Australia & the Great Ocean Walk - 2025
Starting my first visit to my seventh continent off with a bang, I see one amazing sunset in Sydney, followed by a day in the Blue Mountains. Making my way to Melbourne, I head to Yarra Valley before attending the sunrise Anzac Day ceremony.
1. Sydney Sunset #1
The Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and Port Jackson arguably form Australia’s most iconic image.
I’d venture to guess the vast majority of seven continent travelers reach Antarctica last. Having been there,I can tell you it is a rite of passage to have your photograph taken with a “Seventh Continent” flag on the mainland. It’s a huge deal.
Stepping off the plane at Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, there was no such fanfare. No flag, no photographs. And, as far as I am concerned, that was totally fine. See, Australia was indeed my seventh continent (as hard as you and others may find that to believe) but I had achieved a goal I never truly set out to accomplish. Also: I was tired.
Of course, Australia is quite a long journey from my home on the East Coast of the United States and it was two calendar days after I walked out of my front door that I stepped off that airplane. My body and soul transitioned into emergency reserve mode as I walked through the brightly-lit arrival corridor, and I didn’t even think to take a photograph of myself … I mean, it’s not really my style, anyway, but it literally never crossed my mind. I lumbered through immigration and customs and -before I knew it- was somehow on a train headed to the city center. “Is this the right line?” “I think so.” In a rare stroke of planning genius, I booked a hotel for the previous night, meaning I could head straight to bed. Somehow, I arrived to my room, and … well, mission accomplished.
Not wanting to completely torpedo my sleep schedule, I decided I’d wake sometime in the late afternoon and make my way to the Fleet Steps to watch sunset. This turned into a very refreshing 30 minute walk via the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. I found a nice little gap in the trees with a superb view of Port Jackson and set up shop. Passing some time, I spoke with a rather inquisitive student from a local university, whom I assured that I would upload my photos to my website within a couple of weeks (if you’re finally reading this, sorry!)
Before long, the sun got quite low in the sky behind the Sydney Opera House and found its way to become obscured by a massive cloud wall. What followed was one of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever witnessed.
This was the celebration for visiting my seventh continent.
Five more sunset photographs follow.
2. Sydney Sunset #2
3. Sydney Sunset #3
4. Sydney Sunset #4
5. Sydney Sunset #5
6. Sydney Sunset #6
7. Featherdale Wildlife Park #1
Pademelons are marsupials and among the smallest macropods; they are native to Australia and New Guinea.
Returning back to my hotel, I crashed out for the second time in one day. Thankfully, I had to wake up early for a jam-packed day tour to Sydney’s hinterlands. After a drive zig-zagging across Sydney picking up other guests (and a trip across Sydney Harbour Bridge), we made our first stop of the tour: Featherdale Wildlife Park.
This is a small zoo which claims to be the largest exhibitor of native Australian fauna in the world. The primary draws for foreign visitors is the chance to have your photograph taken with a koala or feed marsupials. I’ve mentioned before I do not engage with animals kept for profit, so I declined both experiences. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my allotted hour seeing the animals up-close.
Twenty-four photographs from Featherdale Wildlife Park follow.
8. Featherdale Wildlife Park #2
The southern cassowary is a large flightless bird known for its large casque atop its head and its long razor-sharp claws.
9. Featherdale Wildlife Park #3
The Australian pelican has the longest beak of any known bird.
10. Featherdale Wildlife Park #4
The tammar wallaby has a lot of unique evolutionary traits, such as the ability to drink seawater, as well as color vision.
11. Featherdale Wildlife Park #5
12. Featherdale Wildlife Park #6
The little penguin is -as the name might suggest- the smallest species of penguin.
13. Featherdale Wildlife Park #7
The Tasmanian devil has the highest bite force quotient (means to measure bite strength relative to size) of any carnivorous mammal.
14. Featherdale Wildlife Park #8
15. Featherdale Wildlife Park #9
16. Featherdale Wildlife Park #10
Here are two Pilbara rock monitors; I don’t have any fun facts about them, I just thought they looked neat.
17. Featherdale Wildlife Park #11
The inland taipan is -by a large margin- the world’s most venomous snake; a single bite contains enough venom to kill up to 100 adult humans.
18. Featherdale Wildlife Park #12
Besides humans, the dingo is the largest mammalian carnivore in Australia. Bonus fact: the dingo is able to rotate its wrist.
19. Featherdale Wildlife Park #13
Besides the platypus, the echidna is the only mammal that lays eggs.
20. Featherdale Wildlife Park #14
While they have a reputation as being the “happiest animals” quokkas do not smile due to contentedness; their facial expression is a quirk of their physiology, while their demeanor around people comes from not having any natural fear of humans. Sorry, internet.
I spent quite a bit of time watching this quokka eating a leaf. Totally worth!
21. Featherdale Wildlife Park #15
22. Featherdale Wildlife Park #16
23. Featherdale Wildlife Park #17
24. Featherdale Wildlife Park #18
25. Featherdale Wildlife Park #19
26. Featherdale Wildlife Park #20
27. Featherdale Wildlife Park #21
The little black cormorant congregates in larger groups than most cormorants, sometimes migrating in clusters of several dozen.
28. Featherdale Wildlife Park #22
Fine, let’s start getting the koala facts out of the way: each koala eats up to one kilogram / 2 pounds of eucalyptus a day …
29. Featherdale Wildlife Park #23
… Necessary because they can only take in nutrients from about 25% of what they ingest.
30. Featherdale Wildlife Park #24
When born, baby Tasmanian devils are about the size of a grain of rice.
Perhaps because I misjudged my time, the allotted hour seemed to fly by and I had to rush back to my tour group bus (I wasn’t late, I promise!) where I was presented with a small koala clip as a memento (it now lives attached the monitor this very page was written on.) About an hour later, we arrived in the village of Leura for lunch. If I had to pick one area where this otherwise amazing day tour fell a bit short, it was here: since so many day visitors arrive in Leura around the same time every day, the little cafes on the main street are positively slammed. I could barely get my lunch ordered before I had to head back to the group. My best advice: grab a sandwich at Woolworths Metro, then a take-away coffee and pastry in town rather than trying to sit down for a meal.
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31. The Three Sisters #1
The Three Sisters are 200 million years old columns of sandstone.
Only a few minutes away from Leura’s village center is the viewpoint for the Three Sisters. The weather wasn’t great that day to begin with, but it really deteriorated while we walked around on this stop. I did manage to get some photos between raindrops.
32. The Three Sisters #2
The Three sisters have names: Meehni, Wimlah, and Gunnedoo.
33. The Three Sisters #3
The legend goes that three brothers were forbidden to marry three sisters; despite the decree, they ran away with the sisters and a subsequent battle ensued during which an elder turned the sisters into stone for protection, but was afterwards unable to turn them back.
A few minutes away from the viewpoint is the Scenic Skyway cable car which serves as an entrance into Scenic World. Scenic World is a privately-owned park featuring multiple conveyances which provide transport across, down to, and up from the valley forest below.
34. Scenic World
Scenic World is a privately-owned leisure park in the Blue Mountains that has operated since 1945; it is known primarily for four attractions: the Scenic Railway, the Scenic Cableway, the Scenic Walkway, and the Scenic Skyway, the first cable car in Australia (above.)
For better or worse, the wait to board the Skyway was about 30 minutes; the ride across is not terribly long (only a few minutes), while the walk from one cable car station to the other is only about 15 minutes. Is it worthwhile? If you can get a position along the glass or above the car’s glass floor, I’d say so.
35. Sydney Olympic Park
Originally known as Stadium Australia, this venue hosted both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics.
After arriving in Scenic World, I took the Railway down to the valley floor. Not sure why I’m surprised given the fact that it is classified as a rainforest, but it rained during my visit to the Jamison Valley and -thus- no photos. That’s all good!
I took the Cableway back up to the top of the valley and met back up with my tour group one last time before we made our way to a ferry terminal on the Parramatta River near the Sydney Olympic Park. Here we’d board a RiverCat catamaran for a trip back to Circular Quay in Downtown Sydney.
36. Along the Parramatta River
The Parramatta River Ferry handles approximately 75,000 passengers daily to and from Circular Quay in downtown Sydney.
I got lucky again with a really pretty sunset, this time over the river.
37. Port Jackson at Night
Arriving into Circular Quay, I had the opportunity to take a great photograph of the harbor from the rear of the catamaran (balancing my camera on the back the boat since I didn’t have a tripod).
In an excellent coincidence, I had to catch up with a fellow adventurer from my Antarctica adventure for dinner and drinks in The Rocks. I promise I didn’t overdo it on a Tuesday night….
38. Sydney Anzac Memorial
Opened in 1934, the Anzac Memorial was built in honor of the Australian Imperial Force of World War I.
I had most of the following day to further explore Sydney before catching an evening flight to Melbourne … well, Avalon. Only a couple of blocks from my hotel and right above the Sydney Metro, the Anzac Memorial is a somber tribute to those Commonwealth members who have fought around the world. I then checked out the Australian Museum, primarily for its renowned natural history and anthropology exhibits.
39. Pylon Lookout #1
Opened in 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is the tallest steel arch bridge in the world, standing 134 meters / 440 feet tall.
Taking the Metro back to Circular Quay, I made my way to the Pylon Lookout for a visit. This is a tower at the southwest corner of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and affords a really good view over Port Jackson, Downtown Sydney, and the adjoining area. It also gives you a close-up view of those folks undertaking the Sydney BridgeClimb.
Seven more photographs from the Pylon Lookout follow.
40. Pylon Lookout #2
The bridge features four 89-meter / 292-foot tall pylons, one of which may be accessed for a view across Port Jackson.
41. Pylon Lookout #3
42. Pylon Lookout #4
43. Pylon Lookout #5
44. Pylon Lookout #6
(It would give me the greatest joy if anyone in this photo were to stumble upon it here!)
45. Pylon Lookout #7
46. Pylon Lookout #8
Returning briefly to collect my luggage, I caught the Metro back to Sydney Airport, this time heading to the domestic Terminal 2. There was an issue with our originally-assigned airplane, and -after about 30 minutes to playing “Musical Gates”- I finally boarded by flight to Avalon.
Getting from Avalon Airport to downtown Melbourne isn’t too inconvenient: first, the airport is so tiny you can go from being on your airplane to being on the bus to Southern Cross Station in less than 20 minutes, luggage in hand. The ride is plenty comfortable and -based on my experience later in the trip going to Melbourne’s main airport- not much longer of a journey. A short taxi ride across the city later, I was finally at my hotel after a very eventful day.
47. Yering Station Winery
Yarra Valley’s favorable climate and soil led to the first vineyards being established in the 1830s; as of 2025, over 85 wineries are open to public tours.
The following day I took a day trip to Yarra Valley to do some tastings at a few wineries, in addition to a visit to a brewery and an ice creamery. Our tour guide was a lot of fun and my fellow travelers made for a great day out! We first stopped at Yering Station Winery, a sprawling estate and Yarra Valley’s first winery.
48. Soumah of Yarra Valley
We then moved on to Soumah of Yarra Valley for another series of tasting and a two-course lunch in the estate’s patio room. We had a great view over the vineyard, which rolled back towards the surrounding hills.
49. Helen & Joey Estate #1
We then moved on to our last tasting at Re’em Yarra Valley at Helen & Joey Estate. After the session, we had a chance to walk the property which features an … interesting statue of a unicorn …
50. Helen & Joey Estate #2
… And a lovely pond with a fountain. Following this, we visited Coldstream Brewery where I had a flight of beer and cider, after which I was feeling pretty good about things!. Finally, we were off to the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie & Ice Creamery; while I didn’t order any ice cream, I did enjoy the break before the drive back to the city center.
Overall, I can highly recommend Dancing Kangaroo’s day trip and will certainly do another one when I’m next in Melbourne!
Excitingly, though, my day was just beginning - I was going to do something I had wanted to do since I was little: see an Aussie Rules Football game. This may be a weird thing for an American to say, so let me fill you in as to why.
When I was younger -sometime in the early to mid-1990s- a broadcast television channel in the New York City metropolitan area would show highlights of “Aussie Rules Football” and I assumed in my ignorance that this was just some sort of Australian version of American football. In my youth, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the rules were, but I do distinctly remember three things from watching these clips: first, several vertical goal posts, which stood in contrast to the two-pronged uprights of American football; second, lots of large flags waving in the crowd, and; third, and most importantly, the referee rather aggressively pointing when a team would score. The situation was made even stranger by the facts that literally nobody talked about this “Aussie Rules Football,” there was not a single book about it in the local library, and -following its disappearance from the airwaves one weekend- it seemed to blip out of existence. Honestly, there was a while there when I thought I made the whole thing up in my head … and I am pretty sure my friends did, as well.
Flash-forward about a decade later to the dawn of high-speed internet and I came across the strangest thing: a certified albeit short clip of this mysterious “Aussie Rules Football” - it was complete with the pointing referee and everything! Vindicated by this, I vowed that if I were ever in Australia, I’d see a match. So it was that I found myself on my way to the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the Anzac Eve match between the Melbourne and Richmond Football Clubs. I still didn’t fully understand the rules, nor did I have a rooting interest, but I still had an amazing experience. And I got to see lots of referee pointing!
51. Shrine of Remembrance
When the Shrine of Remembrance opened in 1934, an estimated 30% of Melbourne’s total population turned out for the dedication.
Given the timing of my trip, I planned on heading to the Shrine of Remembrance for the Anzac Day Dawn Services. The previous day, I mentioned this to a group of folks on my winery tour; coincidentally, they were staying at the same hotel, and they offered to let me accompany them for their trip the following morning. I gladly accepted and was humbled to be able to share in this emotional cultural experience with them.
