Our last night in the rental car turned out to be the coldest one by a long shot. We were freezing in our lightweight down sleeping bags, so much so that we had to huddle up closer to each other for warmth. We woke up to the sound of kookaburras laughing at us and checked the tiny key ring thermometer we have with us; it showed six degrees Celsius inside the car and just one outside of it. Our sleeping bags would have been able to handle that but the problem was that we didn't have any real insulation beneath us. We had been sleeping on Sini's yoga mattress and a couple of folded Ikea blankets which softened the trunk of the station wagon a little, but didn't help to keep us warm.

Teeth clattering we got ready to return the car. We took all of the cutlery and pans and such to the camp kitchen for a good wash and checked that the tent that came with the car was dry after spending most nights outside in its package. We even borrowed a vacuum cleaner to make sure there would be nothing to complain about. Not for the rental place at least, there was one last dead cockroach on the floor that we uncovered while going through our things… After everything was cleaned and packed we took off from our campground in the Blue Mountains, but didn't make it far. We stopped at the Big W and Target in Katoomba to pick up some long underwear for future use.

I had been a little stressed out about the returning of the station wagon to Traveller's Autobarn since the rules about everything involved with the vehicle were very strict. On paper, that is. On paper it said that the car had to be returned tidy and vacuumed, which we were able to do, quite surprisingly. At the office in Brisbane they had told us that the vacuuming isn't necessary, but I wanted to make sure. We were also supposed to bring the car back by three p.m. and no later. We got a bit of a late start and made it later still by going to the stores… I was a little worried if we would make in time or not but in the end everything worked out fine. We took the main road from Katoomba to Sydney which eventually turns into the M4 motorway. We followed that until we turned to M7 towards south and M5 towards east. After merging with the M1 at the airport it was pretty straight forward to take the first exit after the tunnel that goes under the runways and drive to the Autobarn's place. We filled the tank for the last time just before pulling over in the car park and held on to the receipt like we were told to do.

After that it was very Aussie-relaxed. The guy who met with us just went around the car to see that there were no large dents on it and that the tank was about full. Then we signed some papers and it was done. Our extensive cleaning hadn't been for nothing, but apparently it wasn't really necessary. And there wasn't any problem with us returning the gas canister partially empty (we had somehow been provided with an empty canister to begin with), the thing had been settled long ago. Relieved of the tension we said our farewells to the station wagon that had been our home for a little over two weeks. It wouldn't be missed. It got us through all right, but I mean, there were roaches, the inside electronics were all broken, it was uncomfortable to sleep in and pretty ugly with orange Autobarn stickers covering about half of it. There had been no serious problems though and the roadtrip with it had been great.

We had booked a room in a hostel in the center of the city, which was nice in all other respects, but it proved to be very expensive to reach. Apparently taking public transportation would have cost us about $16 per person and would have forced us to carry all of our stuff for long periods of time. We still had quite a bit of food left and we had bought some things from Ikea that were now filling a medium sized bag of their own. We opted for a taxi, which ended up costing us a whopping $54. It was more than we were paying for a night at the Central Perk Lodge. We were a little bummed down by this but luckily when we got to the hostel we were offered a free upgrade to an ensuite room even though we had paid for a shared bathroom. The room turned out to be small but nice enough with clean linens and a bathroom that was separated from the rest of it by a curtain. We even had air-con, a fridge, a water kettle and a flat screen TV. The latter proved a little troublesome with a separate antennae which required us to stand very still while watching anything.

But most importantly, the bed was very nice. It was probably just a normal bed, but after so many nights of sleeping in the back of a station wagon without even sleeping pads, it felt like a cloud. It was wonderful, and warm with two fluffy blankets. We rested for a time before heading out for the first time, neither of us had had a very good night's sleep in the cold. When we finally emerged to the street it was already getting dark. By then it was time to go get something to eat and true to form we searched out the nearest Coles supermarket that we had grown to love.

It was definitely a culture shock. Having spent over two weeks in Australia we thought we had gotten some sort of a grip of things. True, we had been in small towns for the most part, but we had spent the one day in Brisbane also. But that had been a Sunday. This was Sydney on a weeknight, busy with businessmen marching home from work and picking up something to eat along the way, with joggers moving around in a blur and everyone fending for themselves. Once inside in Coles we quickly realized that we couldn't stop to look at things, we were required to just grab and go. If you stopped you risked being trampled, people were even walking in the escalators! Gone were the times when we could stop a complete stranger to ask them how to work a can opening mechanism we weren't familiar with (we actually did this in Maleny). Everyone was in a hurry and there were only three kinds of people: people dressed in suits, people dressed in tights and hipsters. We were none of them. Out in small town Australia we had belonged, once on a campsite we would take out the same kinds of camping table and chairs and start drinking similar boxed wine as everyone else. We could ask directions from anyone and G'day everyone. Not so much here. The peace and quiet of the national parks were gone. This was a different kind of jungle.

It really wasn't as bad as that, but the contrast to the rest of our stay in the country was massive. We didn't buy anything from Coles in the end, we just escaped with our tails tucked between our legs. After that we made our way to the nearest Domino's pizza to get a taste of the familiar. We had been in two different Domino's in small town Oz, surely this one must be just like them. It kind of was. The menu and the look was the same but when I presented them with my foreign credit card which makes the machine ask a lot of questions (Credit/Debit, Savings/Cheques/Credit, Pin Code…), they just rolled their eyes and pushed it to me with a grunt. We picked a corner to wait the necessary 10 minutes and tried to be inconspicuous. They seemed to be eyeing us strangely, even though I had done my best to help them at their work by providing my name as "Thomas" instead of the actual spelling. When we finally got our pizzas we took them back to our room to enjoy with a grainy version of the Mythbusters, but somehow it didn't taste as good as it should have. Something seemed to be missing, and not just of the pizza, but of the city.

Discovering Sydney

We slept great on the cloud that was our bed and woke up surprised that we weren't covered in bed bug bites. I had squashed an unsuspecting little insect in the evening and it had burst in a red splash which made me think of it as a bed bug. If it was, it seemed to have been the only one. We had our breakfast in the small communal kitchen and set out to explore the city. We started walking towards Hyde Park without any specific plans other than the three suggested walks in a free pamphlet. We ended up starting with the Australian Museum that charged students an entry fee of $8 per person. They had an exhibition of the indigenous peoples' art and culture on the first floor which we obediently went through although it was pretty tiresome to read all of the signs. At home they have just as much text in museums but it's only because they say the same thing in Finnish, Swedish and English… The overload of information didn't reach any further though with most of the pieces needing a little more clarification, in my opinion. They had a ton of different animals, bones or stuffed, but only a few had more than their name on the note beside them. The reconstructed dinosaur skeletons were magnificent of course, but my personal favorite was the diprotodon, the largest marsupial (pussieläin in Finnish) ever to have lived. It was the size of a rhino and apparently looked like a creature the sand people from Star Wars could ride. My second favorite animal was a peculiar bird, the only flightless parrot in the world. It was mainly just because of its name though. It was called the kakapo.

After the museum we tried to get into the Saint Mary's Cathedral but they were holding a mass there so instead we went to Hyde Park across the street. It was surprisingly small but well-kept I guess. We had some snacks there later and sure, there were a lot of rats there, but they were all very well behaved and clean, not at all like the ones we saw in India that could infect you with the plaque just by looking at you. We continued west to George St. and followed it south past Queen Victoria Building and the Town Hall, all the way to Hay St. From there we went in to the Paddy's Market, an Asian market in Chinatown, which felt surprisingly authentic. We bought a couple small souvenirs from there, as well as a pile of fruit for a lot less than what we were used to paying in Australia. We also picked up a free carry bag from the market office, just because it was free. With the shopping done we tried to get into the Chinese gardens in Darling Harbour but they were closed for the day. We walked a little in the harbor, passing Madame Tussaud's and the Sydney Aquarium and Zoo. We also checked out the Imax theatre with the world's biggest screen and thought about seeing the new Avengers movie there, but the tickets were over $29 per student! It would be cheaper to buy in blue ray when we get home than for one of us to see it now…

Our second full day started with some laundry as Sini washed a machine full for $3 and used the dryer for another $3. After a very late start we tried our luck at selling our Lonely Planet South East Asia on a Shoestring, the latest edition and in great shape by the way. None of the second hand bookstores in Australia had been interested in buying it, which seemed strange to us since a lot of Aussies travel in that direction. We finally found a bookstore that was willing to take it off our hands, but only by trading it. I had picked Bill Bryson's Down Under (I finally found it!) from the shelf and the clerk was suggesting a swap with that one. It was worth $7. In another bookstore they were selling our book unused for $45 and ours was in just as good a shape. Our major problem with selling used guidebooks was probably that we got too good of a start with it. In Nepal we bought their Lonely Planet used for 1450 NPR and sold it later even more used for 1000 NPR, which was phenomenal. Still, going from buying this book for about 40 AUD to selling it for just seven didn't feel like a good bargain. We refused but took the other book anyway, reducing its price to $5 by giving away our very worn The Lost Continent by the same author.

We then went to see the Saint Mary Cathedral from the inside and found it to be quite nice, similar to most larger catholic cathedrals. With that one checked we felt like it was finally time to do the thing we dislike the most about traveling (and I think we're not alone with this one): sending postcards. We had bought a box of twelve cards for $2 the previous day and later found out that they were actually made in China and had writings on them like "Thanking of you"… Anyway, we found a post office and went to buy some stamps, only to discover that they were $2.75 a piece for Europe! Seriously, so sending a dozen postcards to Finland would cost us $33!

Well, to all those who think that they were among the twelve chosen, here's what the cards would have said, had we sent them: Terveisiä Australiasta! Meidän matka on mennyt hienosti, ollaan jo yli puolen välin. Ollaan koettu ja nähty kaikkea tosi hienoa, täällä Ausseissakin ollaan mm. paijattu koalaa ja kengurua ja syötykin viimeistä! Huomenna Uuteen-Seelantiin, jonka jälkeen alammekin taas lähestyä kotia. T: Sini ja Tuomas". And Thanking of you.

With that done, or rather not done, we continued with the big hitters. We walked through the Royal Botanic Garden to the Mrs. Macquarie seat and lookout to view the famous Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge at the same time. It rained some again that day, as it had on all the days we'd been in Sydney, and the weather wasn't the best now either. It was cloudy and the little sun we had was right in our lenses so we didn't get very good pictures and had to actually look at the sights, which is always tiresome for me. We took a closer look of the opera house first and found it to be a lot smaller than we'd expected. It seems to always go that way, doesn't it? The only popular sight I can think of that has actually been bigger than expected was the Eifel tower which is usually depicted as a key ring and is actually hundreds of meters high and covers the area of a small town. Returning to the opera house now, it also wasn't as white as we'd expected. From up close the tiles look like they would be home at a bathroom built in the 1960s, they were somehow brown and even dirty looking. Sini tried to clean them some but couldn't reach very high…

From the opera house we continued to the harbour (damn you Word, if I want to spell it harbour I'm going to write harbour, stop autocorrecting me!) bridge via the Circular Quay. Turns out the bridge is not only very long, it is also very high, even on the normal pedestrian path. You can also climb to the higher lookouts, but that costs money and hence is out of the question. We got a good view of the opera house even from the normal height, or at least I did. Sini couldn't clean all the tiles of the seashell-like building and could hardly see it from the bridge due to the surprisingly high wall. We walked the length of the bridge to the other side to view both of the sights from that direction and also to check out the amusement park there. The latter was closed but I guess we didn't miss much, it didn't seem that spectacular. And the giant clown face whose mouth we used to enter the empty park was creepy.

It was getting dark when we started our way back, just as planned. Both the opera house and the bridge are lit up during the evening and were worth seeing that way. I finally got the shot I was hoping for, which was nice. On our way back to the hostel we tried yet another second hand bookstore to see if they would buy the Lonely Planet but had no better luck. They too would only do book exchange and their Lonely Planet New Zealand was from 2004. Even that was selling for $9 by the way, the first place had a Lonely Planet East Europe from 2011 for $15. They were seriously trying to screw us, the resale value of our book would be at least $25! Back at the hostel we tried putting a note on the fridge door advertising the thing, but to no avail. We ended up carrying it with us even further…

Leaving Australia

The last day in Oz started as any travel day will, with hurrying to reach deadlines. We had till 10.30 to vacate our room and we still didn't make it! Our bags were overflowing from the Ikea things we had bought for the road trip because we were determined that they would be useful in New Zealand also. Luckily we had the separate cover bags for our backpacks, we could stuff our pillows and blankets in the tiny remaining space around the backpacks. In the end the uncomfortable bags seemed to weigh a ton each. That's what happens if you loosen the Velcro on your wallet for even a second, you end up buying new shoes, jeans, long johns, pillows, blankets, towels and a few books… Going ahead of myself, my bag weighed 20 kg at the airport, with a bunch of my clothes and our laptop in my carryon bag. That is way too much…

The rest of the day we spent mostly in the State Library of New South Wales, using their free wifi to do all of the important internet things we had on our list. Seriously, we had thought that returning to western countries would mean an instant improvement in the quality of wifis. It didn't. They charge you for it, or set limits to its use, or it's just really, really slow. It's frustrating, I've been forced to upload these mile long entries in packs so that they appear one-a-day for several days. We didn't get to that this time though, we had to do some less fun things like pay our credit card bills and sign up for the courses at university next fall. It reminded us that we'll have to return eventually…

We had another lunch of the champions at Domino's pizza, washed down with McDonald's softserves, before returning to the hostel to pick up our things. We had booked a shuttle service to the airport through them for $14 a person and were supposed to be on the side of the street at 3.40 p.m. to get to our 7.20 p.m. flight in time. By 3.55 we started worrying and Sini went back in to find out what was keeping the car. The guy at the reception was wondering the same and called the company only to find that it wasn't coming at all. Luckily we were right in front of the King's Cross train (it's really more like a subway) station. We got refunds of the shuttle tickets and went searching for an office for the train tickets but none were open and we had to use the machines. That's always hard. This one charged us the same $14 (student price) per person for the trip to the airport, which was lucky because we only had the cash from our refund. But the $20 bill there was so worn it wouldn't work! We got it swapped in a kiosk and got our tickets, but then we had to carry our bags to the train. They were heavy! We couldn't take the backpack on our backs because we'd packed all of the other stuff around them and it would have taken forever to put them all together again. So we dragged them around through two train rides until we got a trolley at the international airport.

After that we were pretty much done with Australia. We had only been there for a little less than three weeks, but it had been great none the less. We really enjoyed the road trip, we wouldn't have been able to see so much without the car. Out of the places we've been to so far this might just be the one that we are hoping to return to the most. Nepal seemed like a place we could visit again, the same as Indonesia. Thailand is so easy to get to that we'll probably end up there someday. Cambodia seems further away (but really isn't), it might take a long time before we'll return, great as it was. And India… Well, if someone's willing to pay me to go there for a conference or something… Anyway, Australia seems awesome and we've only scratched the surface. It's a place where you're never far from something spectacular, be it a natural wonder or an animal that you didn't know that existed. We encountered kangaroos, possums, parrots and all sorts of other curious things just by walking around in semi-residential areas. Nature creeps so close to you here that it's almost surreal. It's great and we'll be back for more one day, hopefully soon.