around the world in 180 days

    For a city, Sydney is a pretty cool place. I’m not all that much of a city person, and Lord knows Anna isn’t, but we’re having a good time here. I think we’ll be ready to leave by the end of the week, but hey, that’s when we leave! Boy, that works out great.

            Part of the reason we’re enjoying Sydney is because we’re staying in an area called the Northern Beaches, which is about 40 mins from city center (or centre, as they write it here). It reminds me a little bit of LA, in the area where Nate lived, or maybe moreso Manhattan Beach, without all the rich people. Collaroy Beach is quiet and calm, but it’s just up the shore from Manly, which, along with Bondi (bond-eye), is the main tourist beach in Sydney. Up here we get the best of both worlds: it’s quiet and not too touristy, but all of the touristy stuff and the best beaches are a 10 min bus ride away.

            That’s another thing that we’re loving about Sydney: we can ride the train, bus or ferry at no extra cost with the weekly transit pass we bought when we got here. Both today and yesterday we’ve ridden on all three. The ferries go all over the place and take you right through Sydney harbour; the bridge and the opera house are right there, and you get the best views you could ask for. One day this week, we’re going to take the train to Parramatta, which is in the far east of Sydney, and take the “River Cat” ferry all the way out to the city center. It’ll be a great view of Sydney’s waterfront and it won’t cost us a penny.

            Today, we spent the morning sitting on the beach at Manly. Just as it started to cloud up, we left for city center and went to the Sydney Aquarium, which was awesome. They had crocodiles and sharks and turtles and rays and seals and all sorts of cool stuff. I guess it isn’t saying much as I’ve been to two aquariums in my life (in Seward, AK an in Maine), but it was the best aquarium I’ve been to. We spent about three hours there and probably could have spent longer.

            We’re staying at the Sydney Beachouse YHA, which gives us our 2^nd taste of a big hostel (the place in Auckland being our first), and this one is much better. Of course, we’ve got a double here, so we’re not in a dorm with 6 other people, but it’s better anyway. There are a few things that we’re not used to, though. At most of the places we’ve been staying, the kitchens are fully stocked, as in, they have cutlery and dishes and everything you need to make a meal except the food. Here, if you want plates and cups and whatnot, you’ve got to slap down a $20 deposit, which we’ve not done because we have our own dishes. Also, because this is a YHA hostel, there are group activities, which the holiday parks we’d mostly stayed at in NZ definitely didn’t have. Last night we tried to get in on a BBQ (but we were too late) and tonight we were asked if we wanted to play ping pong (which we didn’t). They have activities like that every night of the week, although we’ve got enough other things to do that I don’t anticipate participating in any.

            Well folks, I believe I said my piece for this evenin’. G’dnight!

Tags: Australia, Sydney, Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 1:17 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.