Note: The following entry, and others to follow, were written during my tour of Australia at the end of 1998 - please don't send me heaps of email pointing out that it isn't Christmas. I am aware of this.

It's been the season to be jolly for some time now, but the difference would seem to be that the Australians have noticed. Back in the UK, all the shops had already started selling Christmas cards before I left but The Thais, being mainly Buddhist, naturally wouldn't know Christmas if it came up and slapped them in the face with a wet fish. Hong Kong is slightly more prepared and already has all the buildings covered in neon greetings which light up the sky at night, but it's mainly the ex-pat community which celebrates it seriously. So it's really nice to find that Australia has the season's greetings coming out of its ears. It is, of course, slightly surreal that while the weather here at the moment is boiling hot and everyone is walking around in Tee shirts and with surfboards tucked under their arms, the shops are full of snowmen, reindeer and jolly old men in white furry beards and red overcoats.

Australia strikes the visitor as a very different place as soon as you arrive. It appears to be full of places with wonderful names like (and I'm not making these up) Booby Island and Yorkie's Knob, to which tour guides called Kylie will gladly take you to watch real Aborigines doing traditional painting in the outback - Even though you know perfectly well that said natives are probably going to hop straight back into their Mercedes after you've gone and head back to their luxury homes in the Blue Mountains. This might sound slightly cynical, but I should point out that I came here once before on a coach tour in 1995 and learned a lot from speaking to local people - people, I should say, who have to be some of the warmest, most welcoming folks you are ever likely to meet. If there's one thing guaranteed to bring you back to Oz again and again (and there are many others, believe me), it's the people. Friendly doesn't even cut it - I'm sure it's the weather, but it really is so refreshing to be made to feel so welcome by a whole country full of people, especially when I come from the UK where you generally can't look at the headline on a newspaper on a street stall without being asked in a gruff voice "so you gonna buy that then, or what?"

Australia is also full of wonderful creatures that don't resemble anything else on Earth, contains some of the most beautiful scenary you could wish for, and is a country where you have to drive for hundreds of miles to find another living being that isn't fluffy and doesn't greet you by going "baaaa". There is a town I came across on my previous trip which greets the traveller with a sign which reads "Population 250 (2 people, 248 sheep)". They also have a sense of humour second to none here, and actually understand sarcasm as a form of wit which is always a bonus for us Brits.

The Australian banknotes are colourful, to say the least. Each value is a different vibrant colour. Deep red, bright yellow, deep purple - buying something with cash is like an explosion in a paint factory. The notes are also made of a form of plastic with a transparent window in the middle to deter forgery, which is unique in any currency I've encountered but such a ridiculously good idea that I can't understand why nobody has borrowed the idea - screw a ten dollar note up into a ball and let go and it springs back to it's original shape and pristine condition, no dirty wrinkled money here. But of course, everything in Australia has to be slightly surreal in some way so a good idea like this has to come with strings attached. In the case of the Australian dollar (originally known as the Royal back in the sixties until this name proved unpopular), this string is the fact that there has been no coin to represent anything less than 5 cents since the beginning of the 1990s. Now, you might think that this would logically mean that retailers would price all the items on their shelves at values which divide into 5 cents, but no! You will still see items priced at 1.99 or 3.98 or whatever, amounts which you cannot physically pay - it is, believe it or not, left entirely up to the shop whether they insist that you pay more than you actually owe and keep the difference, or round down. Go into a shop, buy something for 4.99, hand over a five dollar note and stand there waiting for your change while the shop assistant looks at you as if to say "What?" I did, it's great fun. There's that good old British sarcasm again...

Christmas in Oz is very tempting. As we flew in over glinting lakes and through clear blue skies, I knew that this was where I wanted to be at the start of the last year of the Millennium. England is on the other side of the world: I am going to get the chance to swim with Dolphins, refer to complete strangers as "Blue" with absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, and generally have a great time slapping shrimps onto barbies.

In Sydney, I caught the free shuttle bus to my hotel, checked in and fell straight into bed. I hadn't slept for 48 hours straight, and the last time I was in Sydney I had managed to get up for breakfast at 6pm and baffle the waiter in the restaurant by eating Cornflakes while everybody else looked at me curiously over their three course dinners.

In the evening, feeling refreshed, I thought I'd take a wander and get my bearings and discovered that my hotel is in Paddington and is just down the road from Oxford Street, Marylebone, Kings Cross and Bakers Street. I feel right at home. On my first trip to a local McDonalds, the woman in front asked for a McChicken Sandwich and I could swear the assistant asked her if she would like it to be made with real Chicken. I'm sure this must be some local expression which I do not yet understand, but exactly what the hell is an artificial Chicken?

The traffic crossings in Sydney are interesting. After pressing the button and waiting something like 5 minutes for the lights to change, they give me about three seconds to cross before changing back, hardly enough time for the cars to actually stop. Little white images of people are drawn onto the road at all the pedestrian crossings, and I haven't yet figured out whether this is a helpful attempt on the part of the Australian government to tell me where to cross the road, or whether they are all chalk outlines drawn by the police whenever a tourist gets run over by a bus.

During the night, all hell broke loose in the sky. Thunder and lightening like I'd never heard in my life kept me awake for hours. I was sure I would awaken in the morning to find myself on a different continent with a dog called Toto - when I dared to draw back the curtains to peer out, the sky was alight with the most incredible electrical storm and the road outside was awash. Come the morning, though, the roads were all bone dry, the sun was hot, and there was a bus outside waiting to take me on a complementary city tour for the day. That's one of the most remarkable things about this continent - if you're out and about and it starts to rain, don't let it worry you. The rain will probably be warm, and you'll probably be bone dry and steaming within two minutes of it stopping anyway.

On my first full day in Sydney, I took an orientation tour which promised to briefly show me the sights and then leave me to find my own way back to anywhere I found inspiring. Our driver took us across the famous harbour bridge to Milsons point, from which panoramic views of the harbour and opera house could be seen, and across the Spit Bridge (which, disappointingly, was not crowded with people spitting over the side) to a small district called Seeforth. We drove through scenic Manly, where our driver thought it important to point out the Manly Girls School, which sounded to me like a finishing school for Tom-Boys, as well as showing us the surfing beach at Bondi. I have to say that Bondi Beach impressed me a lot more than it did when I was here in 1995. For some reason, I remember being distinctly unimpressed after what everybody had told me about the place - but it's obviously been cleaned up quite a lot since then and was actually quite impressive. Nevertheless, it's still nothing like the huge mile long strip of golden sand covered in bronzed bodies and surfer dudes that we are led to believe from well edited television, and in my opinion there are better beaches than Bondi even round the Sydney area, but nevertheless I had time to stroll along sweating buckets and doing some western style shopping which I haven't managed to do for a while.

The orientation tour finished with a drive around the inner city including Kings Cross, the entertainment centre and casino at Darling Harbour, Chinatown and various other places which I made notes to visit over the next few days if I got the chance. The tour also included a harbour luncheon cruise at which the driver introduced me to another passenger called Monica (As in Monica from Friends, as opposed to Monica from the Whitehouse, she was keen to point out), with whom I shared a meal and discussed the best places I should see while I am here as it turned out that she had already done most of it and was on her way out of the country as I was on my way in. The captain, with only a massive amount of prompting from us, allowed Monica and I onto the bridge and probably broke every rule in the book by allowing us to take it in turns to sail the boat around for a bit. The captain seemed very much to enjoy us both having small panic attacks every time another vessel or the Sydney Harbour Bridge came anywhere within a mile or so of us.

Yesterday, I wandered down to The Rocks, the old area of Sydney harbourfront, to see if it was as I had left it. All the memories came flooding back as I walked along George Street, through the shopping district to the harbour - Circular Quay was unchanged, apart from a few new hoardings advertising the Olympic Games for Sydney 2000. Circular Quay is where all the ferries go from, backs onto both the Opera house and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and very much represents the modern waterfront entertainment and shopping side to Sydney. The Rocks, on the other hand, is Sydney's birthplace and as such is full of beautiful old buildings proudly displaying plaques dating them or showing off previous occupants. Most, of course, are now occupied by modern shops, chic boutiques and roadside coffee shops - but local planning rules don't allow much change here so the area retains pretty much it's original charm even if you know there's a McDonalds hidden away inside one of these old buildings. The Rocks is very much the side of Sydney that I would like to see more of, it represents the world that is being pushed aside and trampled upon by modern skyscrapers and high-rise apartment blocks. There is a square here, where a band plays at lunchtime to locals and tourists drinking Cafe Late outside coffee shops or browsing the shop windows. Even McDonalds has seemingly decided to pander to local sensibilities, and has opened up a McCafe here where you can buy French pastries and cakes so you can pretend to be posh for a moment while eating your Big Mac. There are only three places in Australia where you do not actually own the land you live on - The Rocks being one of them. Due to it's historical value, the government can technically come along and turf you out whenever they like in the interests of keeping the area looking the way they want it - so it's no good trying to turn your charming cake shop into a nightclub. There should be more places like this, more governments willing to think along these lines and keep these places from being lost - although it hasn't always been this way.

It seems almost unthinkable now, strolling through the cobbled streets, that it was as recently as 1970 that the Australian Government were seriously planning to tear the whole area down and build office blocks - and only an outcry from just about everybody in the hemisphere caused them to instead declare the area as historically significant and move on to some other harebrained scheme. This from a government which, until recently, imposed a blanket ban on buildings over 4 stories within the city for aesthetic reasons. In fact, the famous Park Hyatt Hotel in The Rocks is only 4 stories high, can only accommodate a select few at a time, and will cost you several hundred dollars a night. So there go my plans for a night in the nice part of town.

I strolled around the Quay in the afternoon and looked at the Opera House, although to be honest it does suffer rather strongly from the fact that its image is on every card and every picture of Sydney you are ever likely to see. Unlike the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef, it just isn't one of those places that looks that much more spectacular in person - you really can't say "Ah, but wait until you see the Opera House for real" because it pretty much looks exactly as you had expected it to and can be something of an anticlimax. In the typical surreal style I've come to expect from Australia, the Opera House was designed in 1957 by a Danish architect called Jorn Utzon, who made a few basic sketches, sent them in to a competition and was presumably totally blown away to find that he had won the opportunity to design what would become one of the world's most well known and photographed landmarks. The problem was that this all went to his head a little and his final design turned out to be far more complex than anyone had imagined - it was over two decades before the Opera House was finished, during which time those in power changed and Utzon found himself arguing about his designs with people who didn't like them much. As a result, and also partly because Utzon's original design was too costly and too complex to build as he had envisioned it, what we see today is an amalgam of his ideas and a total redesign of the inside which probably doesn't bear much resemblance to the original vision.

I came back along George Street, crossing onto Liverpool Street and making my way to Darling Harbour. I hadn't realised how near it was to Circular Quay - about a ten minute walk. When I was here a few years ago, my hotel was so close to the Quay that I nearly always took the ferry. Darling Harbour was originally designed and built as recently as 1988, and is the ultra modern side to Sydney. This is where you will find a multitude of shopping opportunities in the Harbourside Centre, a behemoth of glass and metal that manages to dominate an entire side of the harbour and contains a whole level of little Cafes and restaurants, each representing a different country and cuisine. I had hoped to pop in for a Coffee and Croissant in a quiet corner of France, but for some reason the entire complex was closed off and covered in scaffolding and builders drinking tea as is so often the case when I really want to see something - so I strolled into the harbour front park and sat on a bench by a fountain in the middle of a lake, baking in the heat and watching people whiz by on roller-skates. Australia has an amazing way of making you never want to go home.

New on the harbour front since my last visit is the IMAX theatre, and apparently a new multi-million dollar Night-club which has just opened. However, they've obviously spent so much money on the insides that they haven't thought to leave any over to make it visible from the outside in any way, so after spending an hour looking for it I gave up. The guy at my hotel reception - fountain of all knowledge - tells me that the club holds 2500 people and is the place to be seen in Sydney. Always assuming it wants to be seen itself.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.