Next I hopped on the monorail at Darling Harbour and took it over to the center of downtown, at the base of Sydney Tower, a very tall tower with a shopping center at the base and restaurants and an observation deck at the top.  I took the picture below from the monorail station, and you can see the tower in the background, looking very gold-colored.

This is the view from the observation deck looking north.  You can see the Harbour Bridge, and just above it the cove that is right in front of my hotel, with a bunch of sailboats moored there.

This is looking roughly northeast.  The water on the distant horizon is the Pacific, and the land that is farthest away from me stretching from the left to the center of the picture is Manly.  The opera house is just out of the frame to the left,  and the large green area is part of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, which are really huge, you could spend an afternoon exploring them.

The picture below is looking east.  I thought it was neat because of the visible shadow of the tower.

Once I had finished at the observation deck, I rode the elevator back down and then walked back to Circular Quay to catch the ferry to Manly to meet a colleague for dinner.  Below is the ferry terminal.  There are five docks, and on the left you can sort of see the electronic timetable that shows the time and dock number of the next ferry to each destination.  To the major destinations, the ferries seem to run about every 30 minutes for most of the day, and every 45 minutes during off hours.  They run from roughly from 6 am until midnight.  Very nice system!

This is a picture of the ferry that was coming back from Manly, as I was riding an identical ferry out to Manly.  As you can see they are quite large, holding about 1,100 passengers max each.  The inside is very clean and quite nicely outfitted, but I spent most of my time on the trips I took sitting outside at the front of the ship.