Today I went with my new friend Martyn, a Brit who on Monday took his first plane ride ever — from Heathrow to here. (Martyn doesn’t like to go halfway.) We did a walking tour over the Bridge, around the House, through the Botanical Gardens and to grandmother’s house some other spots around the city. Then we went to the Sydney Aquarium, where I snapped the shot above.

It’s an atypical time for the aquarium, as the most popular exhibit isn’t of the 2.5m shark pictured above, but a 4cm clownfish that you could see in many a fish store.

The motivating force is Finding Nemo, and though it doesn’t even come out in Australia for another week, the aquarium has several Nemo-related items, including a large inflated Bruce the Shark right on top of the building.

But that doesn’t go far enough, at least if you agree with the Sydney Morning Herald. The Herald believes that the movie should have been used not only to drive “Sydney-siders” to the aquarium, but even inspire tourists to holiday here. It seems like a no-brainer: it’s the #1 film of the year, and Disney/Pixar has already given its blessing for use the film for tourism promotion.

Yet I haven’t seen a single tourism-related promotion.* Which is a shame, because people will go to Dyersville, for heaven’s sake.

* Meaning before I got here. Of course they could be running wall-to-wall “visit Australia and find Nemo!” commercials on Travel Channel right now, and I wouldn’t have any idea.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2003 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Travel.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.