No more sleeps, my big adventure part one has begun! After what seemed like a mammoth journey we arrived in Sydney! We left Heathrow Terminal 5 at 9.35 on Wednesday 12th April and after 2 flights (13 hours to Singapore and 8 hours to Sydney), 4 meals and a rather large number of films we arrived at Sydney airport at 5am Australian time! From here we headed to the taxi rank to get ourselves a lift to our first hostel. On the journey we drove through Sydney city centre and saw the Harbour Bridge in real life for the first time!!! We arrived at our hostel the YHA Sydney Harbour, The Rocks at about 6.30am and dropped off our luggage as we were unable to check in until 2pm! Feeling all ready for our new adventure we headed straight down to the harbour to soak in the views. In typical Tomlin traditional we took a little bit of an extended route to end up where we wanted but we got there in a shortish amount of time so all was good. Upon arrival at the Harbour we took in the views of the Opera House, Harbour Bridge and the absolutely massive cruise ship that had docked. After taking photos of the bridge, harbour and opera house from as many different angles as possible, we headed to the Botanical Gardens to make a plan for the day! While on our way we spotted lots of different birds including parrots and the Australian magpie (which in case you were wondering is totally different to our magpies at home)! At this point the only people who seemed to be up and about were runners - so I have no excuse to not get some training in (unfortunately)! At approximately 8.30 we headed to Tourist Information and then took an extended sight seeing tour along George street to the Town Hall, St Andrews Cathedral, the Queen Victoria building to name a few. From here we headed to Darling Harbour and went to visit the home of Dory - the Sealife centre! In here we saw many of the characters from Finding Nemo and Finding Dory. My favourite was the dugong who came to say hello and posed for a photo and the clownfish playing in the anemone! While at the sea life centre we became intrepid explorers and went on the penguin expedition - this wasn't quite what we were imagining! We got on a boat not dissimilar to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disney and we were then plummeted into temperatures of less than 6 degrees and taken on a tour of the different penguin colonies! Which was actually a pool of penguins swimming and then a couple playing in the snow and then the ride was over! Not really quite knowing the point of the ride we then got off and walked around the penguins before ending up in the gift shop! After our trip to the Aquarium we then went for a spot of lunch consisting of calamari and chips and admired all the lovely and expensive boats docking at Darling Harbour. After lunch we took a casual stroll back to our hostel in the heat via the Barangaroo reserve and a number of wrong turns. By the time we reached our hostel at 2pm we had walked much further than we had imagined and had achieved and seen a number of different locations along the way! Once we got settled into our room we spent the rest of the day planning our next few days and trying to keep ourselves awake as not to go to bed at 4pm - which even by my standards is a little bit too early!