Sydney, Australia

Sorry for the long time since my last writing, due to various circumstances I haven't been able to write. But I'm here!

Before I write about Sydney, I'll just fill you in on the town where I broke the journey down here, Coffs Harbour. It's (as you might guess) on the coast, a town of about 50,000 people, and a nice little place. If I could surf, I would have found more to do there; however, as I can't, it was perhaps a little too quiet...

The nicest part of Coffs is the creek that runs past the centre and down to the coast. The walk alongside that takes a couple of hours to walk, and leads into parks and the Botanical Gardens (why is it that every Australian city has a Botanical Gardens?).

Anyway, after a bit of waiting around on Wednesday, I caught a bus at 23:00 going to Sydney. Sleeping on buses isn't my strong point, but eventually I did drop off - just before we arrived at a "roadhouse", which are the equivalent of service stations for low-traffic roads (like all Australian roads), at 03:30 for a meal break! What on earth possesses people to want to eat at that time in the morning is beyond me, but anyway, there we were. Rather amusingly, tour operators sometimes include "visits to authentic Australian roadhouses" in their itineraries. Any poor tourist who looks forward to that item is sadly going to be disappointed. Imagine a really grotty petrol station, with a café in its shop, and that's a genuine roadhouse! I shall endeavour to avoid them in future.

Anyway, we arrived in Sydney at 06:30, coming over the bridge, past the Opera House... very scenic, and somewhat surreal to actually be here, somewhere everyone has seen on their TV screens and postcards numerous times. I'm staying with more friends from England here, and it's nice to get out of hostels for a while. I'll be here for 10 days in all, half of which have gone so far, and to show for my time here I have 90 photos already of the Harbour, the Bridge, the Opera House, the city centre and beach suburbs of Manly, Bondi and Coogee. Until I leave I've got some other districts to visit (that is, districts other than the one where there were riots last night...!) and I hope also to take a trip to the Blue Mountains, a scenic National Park only 150km west of the city.

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Signing off...