Sydney Day 3 - Bad weather and museum visits (Australia Part 31)

When we woke up in the morning, we could hear the rain and thunder outside. So we spontaneously decided to change our plans and have a day at the museum instead of going on a tour to the beach.

We wanted to take the bus, which was supposed to come every ten minutes. After half an hour of waiting at the bus stop in pouring rain, we took a different line and had to walk a bit longer to catch the connecting bus. By then, we were completely soaked. When that bus also didn't arrive as it should, we decided to walk the rest of the way - we couldn't get any wetter anyway...

We made a stop at Paddy's Market, a huge market hall where souvenirs and clothing now take up more space than food.

Five minutes later, we arrived at the Powerhouse Museum with bags full of stuff, which showcases inventions and discoveries of the human mind.

The museum is housed in a former power station, which is where it gets its name. The exhibition topics range from modern design to inventions, space travel, and the industrial revolution.

There is also a section for experimentation, where we could discover physical phenomena through hands-on experiments, along with a few school classes.

Since it was still raining, we then went to the SeaLife Aquarium. There were extraordinary marine creatures in beautifully arranged aquariums. The exhibition was much bigger than we expected, with several tanks and underwater tunnels where you could observe the animals from below.

One of the highlights was 'Pig', a male manatee. After being rescued by humans as a calf, he couldn't survive in the wild alone anymore and now lives in captivity as one of only two of his kind.

In another tank, you could dive with large sharks. But we preferred to observe them from dry ground.

Two enclosures housed penguins: We had already seen the little penguins at the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island, but now we could observe them up close in the water as well.

The king penguins, on the other hand, moved more gracefully and didn't waddle as much as their smaller counterparts.

The rain had significantly decreased by then, so we walked back to the hotel (Who knows if the bus would come...).

There, we read in the news that Sydney had been hit by the heaviest rain in November since 1984, which caused the city's traffic to collapse. In two hours, as much rain fell as in the entire month on average. At least now we knew why we had been waiting in vain for the bus in the morning.