G'day! This is our last day in Sydney. We pick up the camper van tomorrow and head out into the wilderness!

Sydney has been nice, and very hot. The hostel is nice enough, nothing fancy but it's clean and the facilities are good - what more can you ask for? We are getting woken up every dawn by flamin' cockatoos though. They seem to be roosting in the trees just outside our room, and blimey do they make a racket!

We'ce ticked a few things off the tourist list:

* We climbed the Harbour Bridge, which was tiring but worth it. It takes around 2 hours to get up and back down, but that's with time to take in the views and pose for photos.

*We've had a tour around the Opera House, which was really interesting. The inside of the House is even more striking on the inside and we could have wandered around it for hours. During our tour they were setting up for a gig, so we got to sit in on a bit of the sound check for Belle and Sebastian!

*We've marvelled at the bats in the botanical gardens. There's dozens of them, and at dusk they all wake up and take flight across the city. They're flying foxes, so quite big! I think they have abuot a 3ft wing span. They're a big tourist attraction, but because of the damage they do to the trees, they're actually trying to deter them from roosting in the gardens.

*We've taken a ferry out to Manly Beach for some much needed r and r. Just your bog standard white sands and crystal clear waters, nothing special ;-)

To round the week off, we're going to see The Barber of Seville at the Opera House. They were doing a special deal for people taking the tour today, so we've got front row circle tickets which would normally go for over AU$250 for a mere AU$50!!

We've also now got our visas sorted for China, after answering all kinds of questions and making two trips to a nearby internet cafe to print out various documents. The Chinese don't make it easy to get in!

As I said, we get the camper van tomorrow. We don't really have much planned out for the time we have the van. We're going to Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road, but there's a lot of Australia to cover between those points so who knows where we'll end up!

Wish us luck!

Lindsay and Chris