G'Day Mate!

We're now in Sydney and are really excited to be here for Christmas and New Years!

We arrived at our lovely apartment in Darling Harbour dropped our bags off and immediately went for a walk around the Darling harbour area. The harbour area is so nice and there are loads of places to eat out or just stroll along the wharf. We chose to stroll along the wharf and take a good look around. The fact that we were really excited to be in Sydney we went for a walk to the Harbour bridge and to the opera house. Rhi and I, both love it here after only a few hours.

Christmas eve, we went for a walk into the city and just looked around all the shops. The weather was good and it was really warm walking around, so we jumped into a café and grabbed ourselves a milkshake to cool down.

Later that evening we went for a walk around Darling Harbour and it was packed, there were people everywhere wearing Santa hats, carol singing and finished the night off with a wicked fireworks display to celebrate Christmas. We both really enjoyed ourselves and got into the spirit of Christmas.

Christmas Day!! We got up at sometime before 7am, it was pretty early but we headed for Bondi beach. We got to bondi and it was pretty busy already, there were a few people wearing santa hats. It was pretty weird being on a beach and wearing board shorts and bikini (phil was wearing board shorts and rhi was wearing a bikini, just to clear it up), but definitely a real highlight of the trip so far. For Christmas dinner we made ourselves pancakes and washed them down with orange juice, slightly different from a traditional Christmas dinner.
For the rest of the day, we relaxed, cooked ourselves steak and watched the
film 'Elf', all in all a good but different Christmas day.

Boxing Day, we went shopping in Sydney, unfortunately for us I think the whole of Sydney and more decided to do the same thing. It was chaos, there were queue's everywhere, people queuing for shops, queuing for food. I guess it had something to do with the boxing day sales. We ended buying nothing and just wanted to get back to the apartment.

For the rest of week, we visited Manly. Spent most of the day on the beach, Rhi sunbathed whilst I spent a good while in the sea. We left the beach and did a little of shopping in Manly. We're definitely going to return to Manly another time and spend a few nights there.
We also walked up one of the concrete pillars of the harbour bridge, this gave us an excellent view of the city, opera house and the whole harbour area. We spent one evening at the Sydney Aquarium. It was great to see so many different animals, most of which we had never even heard of! The aquarium had lots of different areas, including a great barrier reef complete with clown fish (nemo's)! This area was our favourite and we cant wait to visit the great barrier reef for real in a few months time.

New Years eve. We went to Tarpien precinct in the botanic gardens, which has a great view of the opera house and more importantly the harbour bridge. The park opened at 10am, we arrived at 10.30am and there was already a huge queue. There was just over a thousand people in the precinct by the time we got in. we found a good spot and immediately laid out our towels and kinda spread out our bags a bit to mark our territory, by this time we were pretty relieved as we had found a good view point of the Harbour Bridge and the fact that we got away with smuggling in some vodka for later. The precinct filled up quickly and people were sitting anywhere and everywhere there was a free patch of grass. After sitting around chatting to a few other people, 13 hours flew and the new years celebrations were underway…..

….WOW! The fireworks were amazing and didn't stop for about 10-15 minutes, the bridge fireworks were spectacular and the fireworks lit up the whole of the harbour area. It was definitively worth sitting around for 13 hours and an experience we'll never forget.

We finished off our Sydney adventure with a trip to the SCG, to watch Australia take on Pakistan at cricket. We had a really good day out and loved the cricket, unfortunately the bars didn't sell any cider!

Next, we're off to Melbourne!