Sydney Day 8 - Why Sydney Aquarium Sucks

On Thursday the weather in the morning was too wet to attempt our Spit Bridge to Manly Walk, so we decided to ride the ferries and visit darling harbour, barangaroo and the Sydney Aquarium instead.

So with a later start, a ferry ride,  and the longish walk over from Circular Quay via Barangaroo (with a few stops along the way to admire the view), we arrived at the aquarium with our pre-purchased tickets at around 1:30pm.  Alarmingly, the queue of ticket-holders was huge, stretching way out the door and miles down the wharf area.  It moved fast though so only took us ten or so minutes to get through the doors.  

Only today they looked like this:

After the first section of tunnel we were funnelled upstairs to learn about the resident dugongs which are pretty interesting. They are fed every 15 minutes between 7 am and 7pm, and they require a full time staff of 4 to prepare their trays of lettuce. Each day they each eat around 50kg of the stuff.  Holy lettuce leaf batman, that’s a lot of lettuce. 

Then we exited through the gift shop which really got on my goat.  After all the messages about the evils of plastic waste, and telling us how we should take responsibility to reduce our plastic usage (which I totally agree with by the way), we were forced through a veritable kingdom of plastic crap on our way out.  Here are the plastic keyrings, bagged in plastic for good measure

and everything else was the same old plastic rubbish, being snapped up by eager tourists.. 

If Sydney Aquarium can’t even change their own behaviour (when they witness first hand the effects), what hope is there.  So hypocritical and so lame.

Anyway - after that annoyance, which was frankly sad as much as it was annoying,  the rest of the day was awesome, and it turned out the fastest way home was to go via Cockatoo Island.  So we had a quick explore through the tunnels and industrial ruins while the kids played chess.

Then we took our last ferry back to Greenwich, arriving all the way home in time to get changed and head out for a lovely BBQ at Dulwich hill - all in all a great day, and while I give Sydney Aquarium a 5 out of 10, I give Sydney a 10 out of 10.