Bats!

Adjacent to the Opera House are the Royal Botanic Gardens, a sprawling park in the center of the city. After about an hour, I entered an area with tall trees and thick brush and heard a terrible racket. There must be hundreds of birds here, I thought, some species you wouldn’t want to living next door. But when I looked up it wasn’t birds, it was bats. Hundreds of fat furry creatures hanging upside down in the trees, occasionally flapping their wings and screeching. It is a species called the Grey-Headed FLying Fox, or fruit bats. They are found only in Australia and are some of the largest bats in the world.

As much as I prepared for this trip, the best moments will be the ones where I’m taken by surprise. No one told me I'd see a colony of bats in the middle of a major metropolis. Great stuff.