The Sydney Opera House is one of the most popular buildings in the world, with nearly five million visitors yearly and 250 000 on guided tours.
In what is a first for a major tourist attraction in Australia, the Opera House is now offering guided tours in Japanese, Korean and Mandarin.
”This is the beginning of a new era for the Sydney Opera House visitor experience and we look forward to attracting more non-English speaking visitors inside the building,” said Maria Sykes, the director of tourism and visitor operations.
To begin with, the foreign-language tours will run twice a day. Frequency will be added in response to demand.
You can’t imagine Sydney without the Opera House. Likewise Paris and London: they would be inconceivable without the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben.
But it has proved difficult getting visitors inside what’s likely to be among the world’s most-photographed buildings.
”If you see only the outside of the building, you get only half the experience,” Sykes said. ”The tours take you on an extraordinary journey and share the stories of one of the world’s busiest and most prestigious performing-arts centres.”
Danish architect Joern Utzon’s masterpiece, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1973, is already popular with Japanese, Korean and Chinese visitors to Sydney. More than 165 000 Japanese tourists walked along its concrete last year. Koreans were the fifth-largest group of foreign visitors and Chinese the sixth.
The tours are fun. You see the inside, internal workings of a place that stages performances every day of the year but two. Sets, stages and even performers arrive and depart vertically rather than laterally. There’s evidence of a struggle to make the spaces work.
It’s an odd place too. The best views from the building are enjoyed by those who peel vegetables in its kitchens. Going on the tour gives you an idea of what it would be like to be one of the 600 staff. — Sapa-dpa