Submitted by Brendan Hopkins on the 2018 winter session program in Australia and Thailand sponsored by the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics…
As one of the largest natural harbors in the world, the Sydney Harbor is a major hub within the city and presents the people of Sydney with great economic opportunities. This can be seen by the large number of water taxis, harbor tours and fishing that occur within the harbor. At any given point, there are a massive number of small family boats out on the harbor fishing, either for sale at the market or for personal consumption. We got to see this first hand when a group of us decided to wake up early on one of our free Saturdays to go on a deep-sea fishing trip. By deciding to take a fishing trip that left the harbor at 6:00 AM, we managed to see an outstanding view of the sunrise over the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Sydney Opera House. This unique view is one that the locals that make fishing a regular part of their routine see frequently and may even take for granted, but to us there was nothing else that could quite compare to it.
One thing that Australia is well known for around the world is its unique wildlife, a decent portion of which exists in no other location on Earth. There are the animals that are unlike anything you will find on any other continent, and then there are the animals that whether they look it or not are some of the deadliest creatures around. Luckily, for all of us, there were minimal interactions with these deadly animals. After all, we did stay within the city of Sydney for the entire Australia portion of our program. The flipside of this is that we did not get to see any of Australia’s unique wildlife in the wild either, but thankfully we were able to take a last-minute trip to the Featherdale Wildlife Park on the tail end of our program. We were finally able to see some kangaroos, wallabies, koala bears, wombats and a salt-water crocodile along with plenty of other animals unlike anything you would find in a zoo back home, let alone in the wild.
