Australia

Sydney

My flight arrived in Sydney at some stupid hour in the morning but by 9am I found myself in a café eating breakfast on the docks at darling harbour. It was then that it hit me that I was in Australia, and that I had finally made it to the other side of the world! I couldn’t help but grin (and giggle to myself a little bit). There is no doubt in my mind that the couple on the table next to me questioned my sanity. I spent the morning pottering (one of my favourite words, thank mum) around darling harbour. It’s a really nice area, lots of waterfront shops and cafes, a park and a number of tourist places such as the aquarium.  I then spent the afternoon on a tourist bus! How exciting is THAT lol the open top ones that you get in york and London: they are actually quite good as you can hop on and off as you want! It was this way that I got to the rocks, where at the weekends they have a really nice market quite like Covent garden and to the bridge and opera house, which for who knows what reason made me think of an armadillo trying to curl into a ball! Struggling to stay awake I managed to see the fireworks being held before I collapsed back at my youth hostel. (when I first arrives at the hostel in the morning, I looked at the notice board and every other post said “contact bruce” at the bottom, I found this very amusing at 6am after only 2 hours of sleep).

The next day I met up with a friend from school charlotte, and after a fail running embrace (we decided that a busy city road was not the safest of places) we decided to get one of the ferries and visit some of Sydney’s beautiful beaches. I have to say that commuting to work via ferry sounds a lot more tempting that the train! (and their underground trains haw 2 stories). We had a lovely trip around the harbour on the way to Wentworth bay, were there was a yummy fish restaurant which you can take away and sit on the beach, I have to give tit to the Aussies that they have modified British fish and chips damn well! We spend the day catching up on the beach and walking up to “the gap” which is a big cliff with some great views.

The Blue Mountains

The blue mountains national park is only a hour or so out of Sydney, with the protected area being about the size of wales! A VERY early start meant they we got to see some grey kangaroos (and a joeies :D) hopping around and foraging in the bush. Then spent the day on a trek around to see many waterfalls in the park including Wentworth waterfalls and the 3 sisters rock formation. The aboriginal stories for the creation of the 2 sisters are really interesting, but all involve them being turned to rock by their father either to protect them, or because he is angry with them.

The end of the trek involved going down the 1000 steps carved into a rock face that miners uses to travel up and down daily. I have decided that the British health and safety standards regarding steps is a necessity for me! Luckily, instead of climbing them back up we took “the world steepest train” (aka the old mining cart) back up the mountain. It was definatly an experience going up, backwards at 52 degrees, kind of the opposite of the pepsi max big one (and obviously not quite as fast!

On the drive back to Sydney and radio was on and to my surprise Alice Cooper is a local radio DJ (I still find it strange that a man is called alice)! He seemed a quite a fan of the rolling stones and had a good little chat about mic taylor (I guess this demonstrates that I am my father’s daughter).

So I am off now to try and find a boomerang for jobo with my remaining dollar (he has to be awkward and ask for the odd shaped large present) and tomorrow is the flight to Fiji! And I am getting impatient to start now. My first few days will be spent in one of the town arranging the logistics and plan for data collection before I get out to the “field” which is actually the Pacific ocean at the weekend! Eeeeeeeee :D