Our last week and a bit in Oz were spent in Sydney and around Brisbane. Due to rearranging our flights to avoid Papua New Guinea (heard some horror stories and worked out expense) we were no longer going to make it up to Cairns so unfortunately we missed diving on the Great Barrier Reef, which is an immense shame.

Sydney was quite a funky city - lots to do and busy! We did the usual sight seeing spots (as you've probably seen from our photos), visited Manley beach, the Blue Mountains (where we couldn't see or do anything because of the fog, but a nice trip all the same) and met up with a few mates from Asia for a catch up. Jodie (who we met in Laos) took us out for a good night, which included a trip to a gay bar, and was luckily free on our last afternoon in Sydney. Despite the rain she drove us around to Bondi and Coogee beaches for a look. On her way back to Wollongong she also dropped us to the airport for our flight to Brisbane (it was strange to say bye, thinking we might not see her for a very long time!)

We had a bit of a laugh at the airport when we discovered all Virgin computers were down and therefore no flights were supposed to be leaving that night, but because we had no where else to go after waiting there for a few hours things were back on and we managed to get into Brisbane at about 1.00am, enjoying another night's sleep at an airport.

After a couple of days chilling/sight seeing etc in Brisbane (sorry not alot of photos but not too much to see) we headed out to a hostel in a town on the coast called Manly. Not much going on but quite a cute little harbour town. The hostel was cool, with good range of films and huge tv and a bar and was clean - but I got biten to pieces by bed bugs! ARGH! (I was quite happy to leave coz of that!)

For our last few days we decided to go down to the typical east coast backpacker area of Byron Bay where we met a lot of fun Israelis in our dorm - they like to party! We got to see dolphins at sunset just off the beach - very close to all the surfers, I got very excited! No photos though I'm afraid!

Our last day before we flew out was spent back in Brisbane. It was cool to be in a large city as it celebrated Anzac Day and was a good ending to our Australia trip.