We
wake up amazingly early again and have room service for breakfast. We
zoom over to the Sydney Opera House to get tickets to the daily Backstage
Private Tour. Arriving at the Opera House, we are amazed by the view
of the building and equally of the harbor and harbor bridge. Probably
the most magnificent harbor in the world is bustling with tour boats, shops and
a sunny array of people bustling about. We are able to get tickets
to the tour and meet our charming little guide underneath the building for a
quick photo.
Sydney
Opera House Tour: Over the next our, we have one of the greatest tours of our
lives, viewing all four performance halls of the Opera House and going
up-around-and-backstage of this architectural marvel. The views and
overall architecture is amazing and unreal. Even 35 years after it
was completed, it still seems new, innovative and groundbreaking. The
tour shows us how hard this massive marvel was to build. There were thousands
of designs submitted in the 50s for a competition to design the Opera
House. Aero Sarien (a main judge and designer of the great St. Louis
Arch) had arrived late and asked to pull out submissions that had already been
rejected and re-review them all. As he did, he found the bizarre and rough
sketch of the Sydney Opera House by XXX, XX. The design, however, was so rough
that it did not contain enough detail to build it. By virtue
of the roughness of the drawing and complexity of the design, it
took over 15 years to build the Opera House vs. the original 3 year
estimate. It’s a fascinating story and it resulted in the greatest
architectural marvel of the 20th Century, so says the Pulitzer
Foundation and UNESCO.
Our
tour took us all over the four venues in the building and we got to see an
opera set being built. The acoustics of the Symphony Hall are so
good that musicians do not need amplification for 3,500 listeners. Amazing
room.
Our
photos inside and out are magnificent. Amazing building in every way
with a glorious view of the harbor and it is visible from everywhere in the
harbor too.
We
then head to our hotel for lunch and a flight to Cairns. Cairns is a
remote city on the very Northern coast of Australia where beaches and trips to
the Great Barrier Reef make it a hot spot. It’s a three hour flight
aboard Virgin Blue, again loaded with loud rambunctious kids. We
arrive in Cairns and take a quick taxi to the Pullman Reef Point Casino
Hotel. Cairns (pronounced Kaan) is nice, but NO Sydney. If
feels like Dayton, FL or even Myrtle Beach, SC. No too fancy, lots
of T-Shirt shops, modest hotels and homes. It has a few nice shops,
but the majority of Cairns was built decades ago and feels like it. The Casino
Hotel is rather nice and newer with bright rooms, an friendly staff and 24 hour
services. The Casino next door looks like typical Harrah’s. Then
upgrade us to a corner suite (you should always mention that it’s your
honeymoon when you travel) and it has a nice wrap-around balcony and
floor-to-ceiling plantation shutters. We are rather fatigued by dinner and head
to the Tamarind Asian Restaurant in the Casino. A good, but not
great dinner follows and we now find ourselves to tired to explore Cairns and
we have a 6AM wake-up for our Great Barrier Reef trip in the morning, so we
turn in early.
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