Sydney and the Blue Mountains

We’re baaaack!!! It’s been a while. Not sure anyone is still reading this, but we do it for our own memory-keeping as well, so we’re going to pick up where we left off. Since our last blog from Australia (it’s been almost a year and a half since this happened), we’ve had another brief summer in New Zealand, Steph spent a month with her parents in Montenegro and traveled to Italy solo (didn’t know that was possible), we’ve spent a summer in Colorado, some family time back in Georgia, a quick stay in Vegas, and most recently yet another summer in Queenstown. So we won’t be having blogs on most of that stuff, but I’m going to try to quickly get us up-to-date as we are about to board a plane to Singapore for a month-long adventure in SE Asia! We are sad to leave our friends and the beautiful life that we have in Queenstown, but excited to be moving on to new and different things. But first, let’s go way back to Australia. We last left you in tropical Queensland, and over the next month we’ll be going full circle…

Our commercial flight from Cairns down to Sydney was a travel highlight in itself. First you get a birds-eye view of the Great Barrier Reef - which is almost as spectacular as seeing it from the water. Then as we came into Sydney we had a great view of Sydney Harbour and it’s two famous icons - Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House. It’s probably not as stunning as Rio, but Sydney is certainly one of the prettiest big cities in the world. And to my chagrin, that beauty came at a price. I figured going into this that Tokyo would be the most expensive place we’d visit, but thanks to the strong Aussie dollar, Sydney easy takes that mark. We paid $60 bucks to stay in dorm beds. Most other places you’d get your own room for $20 or $30. Anyways, it was the end of our trip so we weren’t too concerned about the money and just decided to enjoy the 10 days we had.

The first couple days in Sydney we basically just wandered around. We were there during what I call Oprah-mania - there were signs up everywhere, it was all anyone talked about, and they even had a big O on the Harbour Bridge. One day as we were walking past a nice hotel downtown, there was a red carpet out with aboriginal dancers along it. Everyone seemed quite excited, which I don’t see why since it was only the stinking audience arriving. The audience! Not even Oprah herself was making an appearance and they brought out the red carpet? They do realize these are just ordinary Americans that just happened to be in the Oprah audience at the right time? 

come on, people

Sydney has lots of cool stuff to see for walkers like us - the botanical gardens with it’s many cockatoos and fruit bats, Sydney Harbour at sunset, art museums, and the Christmas decorations were up with as much effort as anyone in the southern hemisphere is going to put in. You can pay an outrageous fee to climb the Harbour Bridge but Steph found us some free passes to climb one of the support buildings for similarly good views.

the church had a strange but cool light show displayed on it at night

suckers

If you are a dedicated blog reader you may remember Simon - our Irish friend who worked with me on the river and we lived with us our first summer in Queenstown. Simon was living in Sydney at the time so we took the Manly ferry out to visit him and get some beach action in. There are of course very good beaches in Sydney - we didn’t make it to the famous Bondi Beach, but Manly is supposed to be better anyways. The problem I have with these beaches is that they set out these flags that swimmers must stay between. If you ever watch Bondi Rescue on TV you’ll understand why - dumb tourists who can’t swim just go right out in rip tides and have to be rescued - but still it’s pretty lame. I spent the whole afternoon being whistled at by the lifeguards for having one foot outside the flags while Steph (surprise!) laid on the beach.

Sydney is cool but we had another week left and Steph wanted to see some koalas. From our research, the best place to see koalas in the wild is on the Great Ocean Road - west of Melbourne. Even if you’ve seen a map of Australia you may not realize - that is a long stinking way from Sydney. Us not being too averse to road trips, we hired a car and headed west. First stop was the Blue Mountains, for which Simon tagged along (he had to call in sick to work and made up this really strange story about an infection from a bug bite, but it worked!). The Blue Mountains are maybe an hour or so outside Sydney and is a really great area for hiking and sightseeing. They look kind of like a smaller version of the Grand Canyon, only in a more tropical setting so they were covered in eucalyptus trees. We didn’t time to do much hiking with only one day, so we mostly drove around to different viewpoints and did a couple small hikes. Maybe the most memorable stop of the day was at the visitor center. We’ve been to many National and State Park visitor centers in our day, and they all try to give you an overview of the landscape, it’s geology and of course the flora and fauna, usually with some stuffed versions of the local wildlife. The Blue Mountains visitor center had all that but also took it a step further, with an unexpected number of stuffed animals that bordered on creepy. Where it got really weird were the bags of animal bones that were sitting around. Hey, I found the skeleton of a rabbit in the woods, what should I do with it? No, no, don’t leave it there, put it in a bag and bring it to the visitor center!

Bridal Veil Falls

I'm telling you, creepy

Told ya..

After our fun day of sightseeing, Simon hopped on a train back to Sydney and Steph and I continued west. The koalas are calling!