Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Day 64, 65, 66, 67, 68 -Sydney - Monday 19th, Tuesday 20th, Wednesday 21st, Thursday 22nd, Friday 23rd December 2011
Day 64 was a travel day. After getting up at the ungodly hour of 5am, we were on the bus and at the airport by 7am ready for our 9.20 flight.
Today we were flying the mighty Quantas and were quite excited about the Oz airways experience. Sure enough we were greeted by a "g'day mate" and shown to our seats where sat a little screen and a mind numbingly about of films to choose from. The next 9 hours entailed us eating lots of plane snacks and food with a little wine to wash it down, accompanied by no less than 4 films. We watched Crazy, Stupid Love - not bad; then we watched Change Up - quite funny and better than we expected; then we only watched 30 minutes of a film called Midnight in Paris - crap, so we turned it off; and finally finished with a film called Contagion - it was pretty good but we missed the last 20 minute so who knows what happened in the end! Nothing is yet rivalling Horrible Bosses!
At last our plane touched down in Sydney - yay, Australia we have landed! We collected our bags and made our way through a friendly bunch of customs officers and jumped in a shuttle bus bound for Railway Square YHA hostel. Come 11.30pm we arrived and promptly tossed our bags down and got some shut eye in our bunk beds.
Next day, we woke up about 11am to our new surrounds. We were in a 4 bunk share and sharing our room with us was Nikki and Danny - a really friendly couple from Glasgow. We were thankful they seemed so normal and chatty - our fears of sharing with psycho killers were quickly expelled!
Nikki and Danny also gave us some info about Sydney and the hostel including that if you were on a weekly rate you got a free breakfast and also 2 days free internet. Better information than the lady on reception gave us when we checked in. After chatting to Ted on reception it seemed we were also due a refund of $35 - brilliant news.
With our tummies lined with our free breakie of coffee (it's called a flat white and is really good!!), toast and juice, we decided to venture out and explore the sights of Sydney. We literally spent the whole day walking. The main part of Sydney is really walkable so along our way we saw Darling Harbour, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Circular Quay, Sydney Opera House and then finished with a relaxing walk around the Botanical Gardens and Macquires point. As well as this we also noised around the shops and bought some food for the supermarket for our dinners for the next few days. The supermarket shop was interesting; it's been so long since we've been in a supermarket so we spent about 15 minutes just wondering around trying to work out what to buy. Come evening we headed back to our hostel and tucked into our cheese, fresh bread, chicken and salad and bottle of red that we bought with us from India and chatted with Danny and Nikki.
First impressions of Sydney………it's wicked! It's warm (well, it's only about 19 and apparently the coldest start to a summer for 50 years but it's still warmer than home!), the people are mega friendly and the city pretty and easy to get around. It's kind of like a hot London with smiley, friendlier people. We like!
We woke late on Wednesday and just had a lazy day walking around the shops and the town. We were supposed to be meeting my friend Brendan for breakfast but didn't get his email till late and missed him! We also spent some time sussing out the plan for Christmas day and New Year's Eve and getting to know Nikki and Danny. They're moving out Christmas eve to go and stay in a posh hotel for a couple of nights and then moving into another YHA hostel in The Rocks after that; this is a real shame as we've got to know them and they're great. The thought of sharing with others over Christmas is not particularly appealing!
Thursday's weather was not great (we're a bit fed up of hearing about how it's the coldest start to a summer for 50 years - where's the sun!?). We'd heard about a deal to see three of Sydney's sights on a combined ticket which would save us some Aussie dollars. So we booked to go to the Sydney Aquarium, the Harbour Wildlife Park and the Sydney Tower. Plus, we booked this online and saved another $10 - result!! We printed out all the relevant paperwork and headed to the Aquarium to collect our tickets. We were so excited about all the rays, sharks and other Aussie sea life so headed straight in! We worked out that our timing couldn't have been better as 30 mins after we arrived was penguin feeding time and then dugong feeding 10 mins after that. We saw the usual fish, terrapins and baby turtles then got straight to the feeding. It's really hard to look at the penguins swimming, eating and shaking their tails without picturing them singing like in the film "Happy Feet!!" Soph loved it so I might buy a giant penguin suit for when we get home! After that we rushed to the dugong feeding as we wanted a good spot and weren't really sure what they were and were worried that if they were small we wouldn't be able to see… No worries there, they are massive, second in weight only to the Hippo. They started the feed and I thought they must eat tonnes of tuna or live fish etc... Oh no they eat lettuce and lots of it. They are strange looking; they have a tail like the classic mermaid, the body of a gigantic seal and the head of a sea lion minus the tusks. After we did the shark tunnel accompanied with the obvious scary music. We saw a few reef sharks, lemon sharks and a nurse shark - he looks the scariest! All this only took a few hours so we headed straight into the Wildlife Park which luckily enough was right next door. Here we saw some koalas and a little baby koala which Soph took about 100 photos of! We saw loads of animals from a wombat to Cassowary - they look like the raptures in Jurassic Park. Then, at last, we saw some kangaroos!! They were much bigger than I thought they would be, the biggest was about 6ft (about an inch taller than me?!!!). The kangaroos weren't enclosed so you could walk amongst them and also some emu's in the same enclosure. I asked the keeper the classic questions "do they bite, can we stroke them" etc... To which she replied "these are Australia red kangaroos and they are quite docile, however get one kick off these fellers and they will cave your chest in!!" Ah good that the reassurance we were looking for! Next, we saw the Wildlife Parks prize possession - Rex the massive saltwater, killer crocodile! This thing was huge, like something pre-historic. He was one of a pair but the female crocodile was obviously not a looker, because instead of mating with her he ate her - nice! With the wildlife park done we headed back to our hostel but not without a stop at Travel Bugs to sort the rest of our 10 weeks in Oz. They helped us sort our greyhound bus tickets up the eastern coast to Cairns and about 7-8 trips and tours in-between, but not after some light hearted haggling which we scored a few extra bits and some more money off. What we now have booked should take us about 7 week's ish before we fly to Melbourne to see relatives. What a busy day!
We were up early Friday and down at the Town Hall ready for our 10.30am 3 hour, history of Sydney and its sights, walking tour. The tours free - you basically just tip the guide at the end if you liked the tour! Well, we really liked the tour! It covered the history of Sydney as an outpost of the British Empire and also talked through the main sights such as The Opera House, The Rocks area, Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney Tower, The Harbour Bridge, Circular Quay, Martin Place - as well as other bits along the way. The guide was great and it was really interesting so we were happy to tip him $20 at the end of the tour. It was so good, we decided to go back and do the 6pm tour too and drag Nikki and Danny with us! This time we learnt about the history of The Rocks area and the gory stories of murders and gangs.
After the tour, we headed to the night market and grabbed some food from the stalls and wondered around taking in the sights. There was a silent disco in the street - it was hilarious watching everywhere dance in different styles with headphones on and no music!
Next up was beer time! We walked past Phillips Foote and remembered that Mrs Bigwood had mentioned it was a good night out, so we headed in. 4 hours and several rounds later, we were the last out at closing time!
We drunkenly walked up to our hostel and once in, demolished the rest of Nikki and Danny's goon bag of wine (about 4 bottles worth!). Adam was hammered by this point and was getting louder and louder - this was until the reception guy came over and with a stern face said "look, its gone 3 and people are complaining about your noise!" Adam replied "Who complains in a hostel?!" Oh dear! With that we headed to our room.
- comments