Before dropping my colleague off at the airport on Saturday afternoon, we drove to the Sydney Opera House and walked around.

This is a view from the top of the steps on the side of the opera house towards the main downtown ferry terminal at Circular Quay (pronounced "circular key").

This is called Government House, one of the few historic buildings (over 150 years old) I saw in Sydney.

Here is the front of the opera house.  It has 5 auditoriums of various sizes.

After dropping my colleague off at the airport, I drove back to downtown and then hopped the ferry for a 12 minute ride to the Taronga Zoo.

The zoo takes up pretty much all of the land you see in the picture below.  The dock is used for the zoo.  You would not want to climb from the bottom of the zoo up to the top, so you can either take the aerial tram (small gondola cars) or a bus to the top, then walk down.  I took the bus, since the gondolas weren't running due to high winds.

Unfortunately I don't have pictures, but the first couple of things I did were go to a talk by the dingo keeper and then a talk by the koala keeper (the same woman).  The dingos looked much like domestic dogs, but were extremely skittish.  She threw them some meat and they grabbed it and ran to the back of the enclosure.  The koala exhibit was very good, set up so that people could watch them from 360 degrees around their trees.  There were 4 or 5 adults, one of which had a baby clinging to its back.  When the keeper started putting new branches of food into holders on the trees, the koalas actually became pretty active, climbing around and even jumping from branch to branch to get to the food.

Here's a wombat -- very funny looking!

I believe this is a wallaby, not a kangaroo.  It was in a little area you could walk through with gates where you were in with the animals, almost like a petting zoo, except I don't think you really pet wallabies or kangaroos.

These seals were obviously having a very rough day.