After a fantastic New Years we welcomed back Chris and Mandy and took Max out to the park so they could unpack, we babysat that night too and treated ourselves to a takeaway Indian.
We moved onto Newtown, another suburb in Sydney but a bit further out of the city centre and the hustle and bustle. Checked into our hostel 'Billabong' we thought we were in a 4 bed dorm just us 4 but it turned out to be a 6 bed with others and a shared bathroom. This was fine until later that day I started feeling dodgy and just my luck in the worst situation I came down with a very nasty stomach bug, not nice at all luckily it was short lived. Spent a good couple of days staring at the underside of a bunkbed. Missed out on the Olympic park visit which I was a bit disappointed about but managed to get out and see the rocks in Sydney a famous market area and landmark and walked to Sydney harbour bridge. We couldn't really afford the bridge climb but we found we could pay a fraction of the price and climb the pylon which gave us just as good spectacular panoramics over Sydney, so we were happy even after climbing 200 steps.
The 7th of Jan me and Amy spent a day at Taronga Zoo, Jen and Mike had already been and highly recommended it. We jumped on a boat early doors across the harbour and navigated our way around the zoo stopping off for a seal show and bird of prey show and walked with our first kangaroos and wallabies. Saw a Tasmanian Devil, giant kamodo dragon, and very cute red panda. There was lots to see and took us the whole day, was a very good zoo, even though I still get excited about zoo's I don't think it will ever be the same after doing safaris in Africa.
We came back and treated ourselves to a moo burger, very very tasty with halloumi and sweet potato chips.
Before heading onto Coffs Harbour and a bit further up the east coast we found the cinema along the Main Street of Newtown and watched Anchorman 2, very funny, and the cinema was tiny which reminded me of the good old Mallard! This also made the girls chuckle.
We had to get up very early and get to the train station for 7am to get our 9hr train to Coffs Harbour. This was the worst train journey I've ever experienced! Screaming and cursing kids galore! Waking up from a disturbed sleep to a young girl screaming 'I don't want to go, I want to go hooooome!!!!' I felt like replying and telling her to go do that or something paraphrased similarly. We also had a kid behind us that enjoyed cursing, playing with guns on his iPod loudly and 'chatting up' girls/Jen.. To the extent of hugging her and threatening Mike! I was trying my hardest to pretend to be asleep, quite happy for Jen to be targeted!