Sorry we haven't updated this for a while. Our time in Australia has mostly been spent looking for jobs, with the odd trip to the beach in between of course!

We only stayed in Sydney for 4 nights as we didn't really like it that much. Its so big that its just not at all personal and its dirty compared to the cities in New Zealand. It didn't help that our hostel was a dive full of drunks! Once you've seen the opera house and the harbour bridge thats pretty much it so we were ready to move on. We spent the last 2 days there on Coogee beach and then Bondi beach (Which were both nice) then headed for Newcastle on the bus. No, thats not the cold place up north! its just 2 hours north of Sydney.

We needed a job at this point pretty urgently so were a bit concerned when we found a bit of a ghost town when we arrived! The hostel was really nice though so we decided to do our best to get work around here. Luckily we got the cleaning job at the hostel which gets you free accomodation for only 2 hours work. We then spent our afternoons searching the papers or walking the streets looking for jobs. We got lucky fairly quickly with a telemarketing job. The hoours, loacation and pay were all very good, the only problem was we hated the work. We had to sell holidays by cold-calling people. The guy in charge's only motivation was "keep dialling" or "we need more sales". We didn't meet the targets and got sacked after a week (we both got 5 when we needed to get 15!), we lasted longer than a lot of the new people! We also got 1 days work at the carnival with the local gypos for Australia day. We were working on the games stalls and conning people out of their money.

We have managed to fit in some leasure activities in here as well. We headed to the local nature reserve (Blackbutt) and saw Wombats, Possums, Kangaroos, loads of birds and even got to stroke a Koala. We been to the beach quite a bit, its only 1 minute away so it'd be rude not too, you can borrow bodyboards for free from the hostels so we've tried that out. We've been to an open air cinema, seen bats flying around at night (and cockroaches crawling about!). We saw some dolphins from the shore and canoed down a (murky) river today, which scared Tish at times a bit. We've also watched every film in the hostel because its rained quite a bit while we've been here.

We move on tomorrow to a town called Dungog to work for a landscaping and fencing company helping out somehow. We are sad to leave here but we'll be back for a couple of nights after working for 3 or 4 weeks before heading back up the coast.