Sydney. Cold. Hats back on then. We spent three days seeing the Sydney sights. (You can see the bridge from everywhere!) Doesn’t matter how often you’ve seen the harbour, it’s still cool to meander. We did a brilliant walk from Coogee to Bondi Beach. It took us much longer than it should have done because the nice man at the hostel gave us 15 free drinks vouchers and Jonty kept stopping to marvel at the size of the waves. They were 20 feet. I know this because he told me 20 times!! We packed our days full of sightseeing and thoroughly enjoyed the beaches and markets alike. A highlight was watching the Wallabies play the Springboks in the tri-nation tournament at the Telstra Stadium.
After a slight hiccup with the campervan, we ended up hiring a car to start our east coast trip to Cairns.
First stop, the blue mountains. Bloody freezing! You could see your breath! It didn’t help that our hostel did not have heating. We warmed up by hiking for 4 hours through a canyon filled with rain forest. The views from the lookouts in the blue mountains are long. You can actually see the blue vapour lingering over them. The three sisters are a famous landmark that appear on postcards everywhere. Actually seeing them put into perspective their sheer size. I think it’s the size of the drop into the canyon, whatever it is, it’s a great view. We liked the blue mountains.
The next stop was Hunter Valley, this was slightly warmer, largely due to the amount of wine we drank on the hostel’s wine tour! This wine tour was brilliant. It was led by Gordo who had that unbelievable Aussie trait of being able to talk non-stop for hours on end. Despite this, he was funny and informative, which just added to the day. We tasted far more wine than we did in NZ, (good job that we weren’t on bikes this time!). Plus we got to sample different cheeses, olives, olive oils and chocolates-all in all a good day! Later that day we gained a new roommate in our dorm. Mark the German was a secret rock diva, we invited him for one, he stayed on with the locals! The Germans and Australians love their rock. Unfortunately, all of this fun-packed night made him snore louder than Dan Baker. And Jonty spent a long time going mad, shining the torch in his eyes and setting off our alarm, amongst other tactics to try and wake him from his slumber. Thus, to no avail. We left Hunter Valley for the coastal route to Port Macquarie, tired.
Sunshine, dolphins and whales awaited us. We went to the lighthouse and saw a pod of about 30 dolphins surfing the waves, only 10 metres away, it was quite a sight. In the distance we could also see humpback whales migrating north. In the afternoon we visited the hospital. But never fear-we are okay-it was a koala hospital!! Koalas are brilliant-we hope to see more of them. One of them had a joey in its pouch too. We also hope to see some ‘roos, the closest we have got is eating one. We saw our best sunset so far on our whole trip whilst running along the harbour. Nice.
On our way to Byron Bay we had two pit stops. One at the Big Banana where we ate a banana! And the other at the Giant Prawn. Australia loves their BIG things and these are 40ft long models. Random. Next up, we are looking forward to the delights of the big pineapple. Guess what we’ll be eating there!
Byron Bay is a cracking place. It’s not often you can sit on a beach and watch whales and dolphins swim past metres away. The temperature has finally reached shorts and t-shirts point too. We borrowed some bikes from our hostel and had a good day cycling. The rest of the day was spent on the beach.
