If you are an animal lover – or are visiting Sydney with your young ones, the Taronga zoo in Sydney is one spot you won’t want to give a miss in your tour.

The zoo is an extensive affair – with the main zoo, the kiddies’ zoo, a playground and an animal farm to name but of a few of features here. The zoo also has a good stock of animals – including a number of lions somewhere in the zoo.

Taronga zoo also makes a great place to have a moment of quiet and peace on your Sydney tour, as it a considerable distance away from the huge crowds that make up Sydney, and that can feel a bit choking for people who want their peace.

It is not just the animals that you get to enjoy at the Taronga zoo in Sydney. As turns out, this zoo is the ideal place to visit if you are keen to have some post-card standard photos of you taken – with all the background features – including the Sydney harbor bridge, the Sydney house and the wider Sydney skyline that will prove to the folks back home that you were indeed in Sydney.

Getting to the Taronga zoo in Sydney should not be hard – and so wide is the choice of transport means to get you to Taronga zoo (and this includes water means) that you will find yourself spoilt for choice as to how you actually get here. You can, for instance, choose to get to the Taronga zoo by the cable car or by the bus. If you choose to get to the Taronga zoo by water, the simplest thing for you to do will be to catch a ferry at the Circular Quay, and in a short period of time, you will find yourself canoodling with the animals at the zoo. You cannot, however, walk into the zoo – that is – unless you are totally out of your mind.

One thing you will have to put up with on your visit to Taronga zoo is the kids’ screaming. A funny thing with kids is that they love to be taken to the animals alright (they will even beg to be taken to the zoo) but once there, they tend to get a little bit too scared of the creatures – hence the occasional screaming to be heard in various corners of zoo, ironically even in the corners where the relatively harmless animals are kept.

And in between your visit to the Taronga zoo in Sydney, it is hoped that you will find the opportunity to give a visit to one of the Zoo’s fine restaurants – and see what they have to offer in terms of both exotic and traditional cuisine. These cafes can also come in handy if the lunch hour happens to catch up with you while you are visiting the Taronga zoo, or if you are visiting with your young ones and they get hungry while here.

All in all, a tour to Sydney’s Taronga zoo is likely to be a memorable event.

The Sydney open air cinema is another of the city’s greatest attraction – and for lovers of the big screen visiting Sydney, a visit to the Sydney open air cinema often turns out to be the one of the major highlights of their tour. You only get the opportunity to watch a movie at the Sydney open air cinema if you happen to be visiting the city in summer – because for one reason or another, this is the only time when the Sydney open air cinema opens.

Getting to the location where the Sydney open air cinema is located should not be hard. The cinema is located near the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens – just next to Missus Macquaries Chair, a popular spot in Sydney that every taxi driver should be familiar with. But while getting to the location where the Sydney open air cinema is located might be easy, getting into the cinema itself is quite another story – since seat places tend to be quite limited. Indeed, the Sydney open air cinema is considered one of the hardest cinemas in the city to get into and also one of the most expensive. Although Sydney has numerous other great cinemas, it turns out that the Sydney open air cinema occupies a special spot in the minds of movie lovers in the city. And because of the great demand it enjoys, it is advisable that you book your place at the Sydney open air cinema as soon you get to it – because competition for seats at this cinema can get rather hot on some days. And if you are staying a considerable distance from the movie and will not be driving yourself to the movie, you are well advised to make a taxi reservation well in advance (and at least before checking in for your movie) because competition for the taxis can also get rather stiff after a movie at the Sydney open air cinema.

There is much more to enjoy at the Sydney open air cinema besides the movie that happens to be showing when you give the cinema a visit. The Sydney open air cinema, for one, gives you a good vantage point, giving you an unparalleled view of the city and its beautiful surroundings. From the Sydney open air cinema, for instance, you get a good view of the city’s world famous Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Sydney Opera house and much more of the Sydney skyline.

There is a nice place at the Sydney open air cinema that you can buy the drinks to enjoy alongside your movie too. There is even a place you can grab a bite as you wait for your movie to get underway. Clearly, if you want to enjoy the eating and drinking part of your visit to the Sydney open air cinema, you are well advised to grab a table well in advance (competition for these can get stiff at times too) – use it for your drinking and eating, and then discard it for other users to have it before your movie gets underway, so that you can enjoy your movie unencumbered.

Unknown to quite a big number of the thousands upon thousands of visitors who tour Sydney annually, the city is also one of the places where one can get the opportunity to see some of the world’s biggest animals – the dolphins and whales. And if you are an animal lover – or generally a lover of nature – and happen to see either of these animals on your tour of Sydney, such a sighting can easily prove to be one of the major highlights of your tour here.

If you however want to make the sighting of dolphins and whales more than an accidental part of your Sydney tour, the place to visit are the city’s Manly beaches – where both these animals are frequently sighted. As it turns out, Whales are members of the same biological family as dolphins, and the two groups of animals often accompany each other.

If you, for instance, happen to be in and around the Manly waters in the colder months of the year, your chances of sighting a dolphin are indeed very high as they tend to move along the ocean’s shoreline in these months in their search for food, and you can get to see them then. When they really feel like it, whales can even be spotted surfing the waves on Manly’s waters.

Some of the dolphin species to be seen in Sydney include the bottlenose dolphin – which is about 4 meters long, the common dolphin – which can grow to be between 2 and 2.5 meters long, and which is the dolphin species most likely to be sighted surfing on the waves. The Humpback Whale – which can grow to almost 20 meters is the largest whale one can see and it tends to be most migratory, making it less common to sight for someone observing from the beaches. Another whale species to be found in Sydney’s waters at various times is the false killer whale – which grows to between five and six meters –and which while considered a modest sized whale (and the commonest in Sydney’s waters), can still make a fantastic sight.

Unlike whales that tend to be perpetually on the move, some species of dolphins have been seen to hang around the same place for a considerable period of time – and for this reason, dolphins are seen at almost any time of the year in some sections of Manly’s waters.

The specific place in the Manly beaches one is likely to see both whales and dolphins is at the section called North Steyne – which is actually the section at the center of Manly’s ocean beach.

History has it that when the British first made it to Sydney, whales could be frequently be sighted at the Sydney Harbor – which has now been pretty much swallowed by the city’s development to the extend that the whales might find the environment here a bit too choky for them.

Alongside whales and dolphins, Sydney also makes a good place to watch other fantastic sea creatures – including seals, albatross, sharks and squid.