Sydney:
Brash and beautiful, Sydney sits nestled in the sandstone cliffs overlooking Sydney Harbor, basking in its role as a gateway for travelers, a mecca of culture and a playground for tourists and its 5 million residents alike. Host to the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, the city is feverishly sprucing up, renovating its infrastructure and repairing its image as a rough-and-tumble town.
In some ways, though, the city delights in its "bad-boy" heritage. Though the region was populated for 100,000 years by the Aborigines, captain Arthur Phillips sailed his First Fleet into Sydney Cove in 1788, bearing nearly 1,000 exiled convicts from British prisons. Settled as a colony of the crown and named "New South Wales," the country grew as more exiled convicts joined free settlers in forming the basis for the community that would become a major financial and cultural center of the Asia-Pacific region.
Today, Sydney abounds with modern interpretations of its colonial past. At waterfront Circular Quay, where Phillips first lan
