Hello everyone,

We boarded our greyhound bus in Melbourne bright and early on Wednesday 21st September. I'd already booked a pass which allowed us to get on and off where we wanted at various places between Melbourne and Cairns. Our first stop was Sydney and it took around 14 hours (!) to get there. Me and Ryan had a competition going to see who could spot the first kangaroo, Ryan won when he saw a whole load of them in a field. The trip wasn't too bad and I think we've become immune to long journeys now anyway. We passed through Canberra which we decided to give a miss since we'd been told there's not a lot to see there. When we eventually arrived we checked into our hostel which is in the slightly less desirable area of Kings Cross where we saw some very interesting characters as well as many sex clubs and the like. Our room was pretty decent though.

The next day we woke up to some lovely sunny weather (this is Australia after all) and went for an explore. We walked all the way from our hostel down into the botanic gardens, which like the ones in Melbourne are really beautiful. We were amazed by the huge bats hanging from the trees. There were hundreds of them and they were flying around even though it was daytime! As we walked further down through the gardens to the waterfront we got an amazing view across the harbour of the opera house, harbour bridge and the city skyline. We continued to walk around the waterfront to the Opera house where we got lots of pictures of us outside it. I was surprised that it is made up of separate buildings, I always thought it was just one. Next we walked through Sydney cove where most of the ferries to Manly and other places leave from. We headed up to a nice little area of the city called the Rocks for lunch and had a bit of a look around the shops. We found ourselves talking to a Fijian man about didgeridoos for ages in one of them. On the way back we stopped at a shop called the boomerang school where we bought one between us for $10, we're looking forward to trying it out!

On the 23rd we caught the train and bus out of Kings Cross to the famous Bondi beach. We had hoped to hire surf boards there but the water was completely flat so we just enjoyed relaxing on the beach. We did also go for a dip in the sea but we weren't in there long as it was freezing! Although the weather was great for most of the day, it all of a sudden changed and it started raining and blowing a gale so had to muscle our way through the crowds back onto the bus. To be honest although Bondi is a nice beach, there are much better ones in Australia that we ended up going to.

Overall we found Sydney to be a really nice clean city, like most of them in Australia. We had another early start the day after as we had to get up for our next bus journey!

Lots of love,

Jo and Ryan xxx