Sydney, Australia

G'day! I thought I'd better update you on what I've been doing in Sydney over the past week and a bit...

Initially I had only planned to spend about 5 days in Sydney and then go up to the Blue Mountains and on to Canberra from there, but having recalculated my dates I found I could stay another week, nearly. I'm glad I decided to stay on longer, as I still haven't seen all I wanted to!

Other than the Harbour (which I find myself wanting to photograph every time I go there) there are lots of interesting beaches, suburbs, nature reserves and so forth to see. Bondi, Coogee and Manly are the beaches which I've visited, and very nice they are too. The part that I've most enjoyed, however, have been the "Heads" of the Harbour, right at the mouth of it. North Head (which was reached via a long, hot walk from Manly) is quite good, although you have to stay on the path, blah blah blah... although an Austrian tourist was killed nearby when he was crushed by a rockfall in a cliff collapse. That made me feel slightly nervous about the South Head, which I'd visited earlier that day and where you can scramble all over the rocks. I sat on a large overhanging rock for a while waving at ships to reassure them I wasn't suicidal, merely slightly insane.

The prize for most random event would have to go to this event which I witnessed while waiting for a ferry. If ONLY I'd had my camera ready I could have financed my trip for another week or two, but I was too transfixed on watching a boat properly mashing up a wharf, buckling girders and smashing glass doors... hehehe. As you might expect, my reaction was not totally reproduced in other witnesses, some of whom stood for five minutes afterwards gaping with hand clamped to mouth as if the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had just galloped over the Harbour Bridge. Nobody was hurt, which is good because I can make fun of the event :-)

In about an hour I shall be moving on to Australia's capital city and the ultimate compromise, Canberra. In the 19th century it seems that Sydney and Melbourne couldn't decide which was to be the capital city, and so they decided to construct a city halfway between. All I can say is I'm glad they didn't do the same as Brasil when they named their capital city, otherwise I would be going to "Australiaia".