To avoid decompression sickness you can not fly within 18 hours of multiple dives so after my last dives on Sunday I drove up to Sydney and met my parents who had spent the day wondering around the Rocks, Botanical Gardens and Opera House area. We checked into a very busy hostel right next to the Domain in a great location. The only problem being that I had the car in the city and the nearest off street parking wanted $56 for the evening, night and next day. I wasn’t into paying all that so we got in the car and drove to the Cruising Yacht Club to have drinks and dinner than found some parking on the street outside the hostel that was free after 10pm.

We drove over the Sydney Harbor Bridge to the Toronga Zoo. My mother is not into Zoos as she feels sorry for the animals even though I explained my view that many were rescue animals that would have died in the wild or they were there and this meant they weren’t being hunted to extinction. I wanted to go to see the Southern Ocean Exhibit in particular they have a Leopard Sea pair – no other institute in the world has these animals in captivity. The two at Toronga were found washed up severely mal nourished on the shoreline within a week of each other and confounded the trainers/vets by surviving and flourishing in the zoo. They would like to release them back into the wild however; the countries who govern the Antarctic will not let them do this for fear of introducing non native pathogens into the Antarctic. The trainer did not believe in the logic and so she says discussion are continuing!

There were great views from the zoo across the water of the bridge and the opera house.

After the morning at the zoo it was off to the airport to fly to Auckland.