Welcome to the next chapter, now with added flora, by request! We've also had an extra dose of fauna but I'll get to that in a bit. Hope you all liked the sydney photos, there are more to add to that folder because we got some great shots in the last couple of hours. So even if you've checked the Sydney folder, have another look.

Australia is almost over, time is flying so quickly. Without doing the maths half way is any day now (not sure we'd want to know anyway). It feels very strange to have finished things that we've planned and talked about for so long. As a whole Australia has been a fantastic place to visit, one of those places that you never really hear a bad story about. The people are amazingly friendly, in bars for example people waiting at the bar will just start a conversation while you're waiting, ask you how your day was etc ... if that happened in the Uk you'd think they were a sandwich short but it's normal out here. When we've been lost there's always people willing to help, one guy even gave us directions in Melbourne when we weren't lost (he may well have dropped a sandwich somewhere).

We've got something to add to our 'things you might not know about oz' list, drive through bottle shops! You literally drive up to the off licence, which will have one wall completely open and a parking area (there's two lanes, browsers and express). In the express lane a guy will run out take your order, run round the shop to get it and pop it in a brown paper bag. The whole thing is done without you getting out of your car. There are some fairly obvious arguments against them (You can imagine the front of the Daily Mail now!) but in the UK you can drive up to one and put the booze in your car, if you were going to drink and drive geting out of your car isn't much of a deterant.

Think Melbourne was the last blog so we've done Sydney, Newcastle and Byron Bay since then. Sydney was nice but surreal. To be looking at 'the' view of the bridge and opera house that you've seen so many times was a strange experience. It seemed familiar but like we weren't really there. There were areas of Sydney, as there are every where that were very pretentious, we just happened to end up in these in Sydney, if you're gonna charge $150 for shoes fair enough, but don't call it a market!! The areas of Sydney further out like Manly and Watson's Bay were really our kind of places, lovely park spaces, nice independent shops and because of the shape of the bay lots of these areas have amazing views of Sydney CBD.

We spent a couple of days on the beach and cliff top walks around Bondi which is only a couple of minutes on a train out of the city. A lot of the sea photos on the blog come from Bondi. The big thing about Sydney is that all of this is so close. It would be like living in London but Devon and Cornwall being 10 mins on the train away. The rainy pics are from the Blue Mountains. It did clear for a time in the morning so we got some of the famous views but it rained a lot of the time!

After Sydney we caught the bus up to Newcastle and spent the night with some friends from the UK who are working over here for a year. It was really nice to see some familiar faces and to instantly have local knowledge without reading the Lonely Planet for a couple of hours and getting lost. They recommended a little nature reserve called Black Butt that turned out to be one of the best things we've done. For the princely sum of $0 (compared with Australia Zoo's $54) we saw Koalas at eye height (we'd only seen them high up), red and grey roos, emus, wombats as well as birds like cockatoos and finally some kookaburras! For a further $3 we got to stroke and feed a koala, if you have a look at the pictures you won't find a more genuine smile than the one Steph had touching the Koalas. She couldn't stop grinning and we only just got out without buying one.

The Greyhound bus pass we bought in the UK has worked out really well, we've done two over night trips now and they work out really well because we save a nights accomodation although they're not so good for the old back! Our last overnight trip got us into Byron Bay where we're currently sat. Our hostel is like no other we've ever stayed at. It's like a hippy commune, we're back in the tent but the camping area is a free for all like a festival, just find a bit of ground and put your tent up! The whole thing is bringing back Glastonbury memories. We had a beach day yesterday and borrowed body boards from the hostel/commune (The boards were free so staying with hippies does have advantages) but even for an Estuary boy like myself the surf wasn't up to much.

We're off to Brisbane tomorrow morning for a whirlwind two days. We were going to go to Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin's place) but it's $54 each and when thought about it we've seen crocs, koalas, roos, wombats and eagles most of which have been in the wild so we're gonna give it a miss. After Brisbane we've got 4 days in Rainbow beach and Fraser Island 4x4 tour before one night back in Brisbane (possibly catch the Aussie Rules game that's on that night) before flying out 8am on Sunday 3rd to Christchurch.

Hope everyone backhome is safe and enjoying your summer, well warmer weather.

Lots of love

Greg and Steph