First, a couple more pictures from my hotel room.

In the picture below you can see the very nice (and I'm sure very expensive) residential neighborhood down by the water in North Sydney.

Monday morning I started out by walking from my hotel across the bridge into downtown.  There were fantastic views from the bridge.  There are some fascinating statistics available on the web about the bridge itself, and about traffic across the bridge.

You can see they're serious about keeping unauthorized people from climbing up the bridge from the razor wire below.

Here's a nice view of the ferry terminal at Circular Quay.  The opera house is off the the left, and the downtown end of the bridge is off to the right.

Here you can see some people starting out on their "bridge climb".  You can pay about $100 USD for the bridge climb, and you go through an orientation talk and get strapped into a jumpsuit, and you get to climb up to the very top of the bridge and back down.  There are more pictures of it below.  I love nice views, so, I probably would have done it for $40 or $50, but $100 was a bit much.

This is the walkway along the west side of the bridge.  In the top left corner of the picture you can see a group of people starting their bridge climb, and up near the peak of the bridge you can see another group.  I was told by a coworker who did this before that you're tethered to a rail that goes the whole way, and once you start it is physically not possible for you to detach your tether from the rail until you get all the way up and back down.  (You could climb out of the jumpsuit of course, but, why would anyone want to do that.)  An amazing number of people do the bridge climb, something like an average of 200 people per day all year round.

Next I went up to the "Pylon Lookout" observation deck, in one of the bridge support pillars.  There was a lot of interesting history about the bridge.  It was built around 1926-1932, around the same time as the Golden Gate Bridge.  It's a metal arch bridge, and they built both halves of the arch out from their respective sides of the harbor (with temporary cable supports) until they met in the middle.  Below is a picture that was hanging in the gallery inside the pillar of when the bridge builders put in the first pin connecting the two halves.

Another picture of Circular Quay, but you can see the international cruise terminal (the building near the center with the white roof), and some of the buildings on the right in the area called The Rocks.

A shot of the opera house from the bridge.

The observation deck at the top of the support pillar had a great view of the people doing the bridge climb.  Below you can see a group starting to make their way up the right side of the bridge.  They'll go up to the top, cross under the two flags to the left side, and then come down the left side.  You can see another group making their way down on the left.