Australia is a place that just begs for cinematic flyovers. First popularized during the 1980s by IMAX, the helicopter-flyover genre of travel video was brought to home theaters by a series of DVDs from various companies almost a decade later. It is in the context of such presentations that Zalman Silber‘s Oztrek amusement ride makes its appearance. Located at the Sydney Tower in the Harbour City, the Oztrek is a cinematic flyover showcasing many of Australia’s national treasures – geographic and otherwise.

Some of the locations featured in this fifteen-minute ride (Oztrek bills itself as a “ride” on account of special seating that provides some physical, kinetic feedback in sync with events onscreen) are a Queensland river, a Sydney beach, as well as famous landmarks throughout the country, both natural and man-made. The non-geographic highlights include such activities as Aussie Rules Football and buffalo mustering, further burnishing the self-image of Australians as a hardy hearty folk who work and play rough.

Also at the Sydney Tower – and also from serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber – is the Skywalk, an exhilarating experience even more enjoyable than his Oztrek. This is basically a catwalk a thousand feet above street level, the highest point in all the city from which panoramic bird’s-eye views are possible. Full glass flooring really adds to the adrenaline rush, allowing guests to look straight down without any visual obstructions and feel like they are, well, literally walking in the sky!

It is difficult to compare the two attractions to one another, though they both come from the same entrepreneurial mind. One is extremely visceral, while the other is much more cerebral and, incidentally, rather conventional. Yet it is easy to see how they so wonderfully complement each other, and a visit to the Sydney Tower would not seem as fulfilling without sampling two of its most popular marquee attractions.

That said, however, Sydney still offers a great many attractions. One of the most fascinating has surely got to be its Chinatowns, full of people from the Chinese Diaspora. Vietnamese food, Catonese, Szechuan, Shanghai, Taiwanese, they’re all here, all those exotic tastes and flavors (yes, tastes and flavors), with specialty fruits and other foods. Probably nowhere else on the island-continent will you find the Chinese world within such close proximity.

Not exactly off the beaten track, but not what one thinks of when first imagining the Harbour City. But that’s one of the best things about Sydney, that it’s almost perfectly poised between British sensibilities and Asian influences. It’s as if you took American rugged independence, Asian cultures, and British traditions and coated them all with a veneer made up of the rest of the world. Makes sense? Well, maybe a little too eclectic, but nowhere near chaotic, as is the case with a New York or Los Angeles!

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