About a week before our arrival in Sydney, we had a bit of a change of plans. We were originally going to be spending some time in Newcastle with some of Simon’s side of the family, but when we realised that some of them were going to be in China during that time, we decided to rearrange our plans and visit them after Christmas. Where do you go instead? Sydney of course!

To say I had really high expectations of Sydney was an understatement. Simon goes on about Sydney as his favourite place in the World and my Mum ranks it as her second favourite city in the world, after San Francisco. We arrived at about 1.30am on our Greyhound from Port Macquaire. There is something about Port Macquaire and Greyhounds, because we were late arriving and late leaving. The Greyhound was 1.5 hours late. As I said before, we have been really impressed with the Greyhounds as a whole, so we’ll blame Port Macquaire instead (even though we really liked it there). Our driver woke us up to tell us that we would be driving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge soon and seeing the bridge and the Opera House like that at that time of the morning, got me super excited for our few days exploring.

We walked to our hostel, Maze Backpackers. This place is a maze, quite literally. It is the largest hostel we’ve stayed at during our time in Australia and the most disgusting by far. We had a private room quite luckily, as you will see further on in this blog, but the place still stunk and was just pretty nasty. We have been trying to stay at hostels that have a 8.5 ranking or higher if possible. I believe this one was 7.5, but a rearrange from free accommodation for 3 nights with family, to 3 nights in Sydney meant that our budget was tight. Our New Years accommodation was unable to refund us the 3 nights we would be with family after Christmas, so cheap it was. MASSIVE MASSIVE mistake! Let me reassure you, I will never ever book a place like that again. Read on to find out more.

We woke up on our first day in Sydney, eager and raring to go. We walked from our hostel down to the Chinese Garden of Friendship. Simon had been here previously and loved it so we decided to go back, even though it now cost to go in. We spent a good hour and a half walking around and enjoying the beautiful views. It was so lovely to see such a hidden side to Sydney before we went out to see the ‘bigger’ sights.

Our next stop was Darling Harbour. This day happened to be Melbourne Cup day, which is a huge horse racing event. All along Darling Harbour the bars and restaurants were full of people dressed up for a day at the races. The atmosphere was amazing and we wondered around for about an hour before we went to join our walking tour.

We had heard of a company called ‘I’m free’ tours. The company works in a similar way to the walking tour we took in Brisbane, meaning the tours were free and at the end you can donate how much you felt the tour was worth. There was quite a group of us so it was lucky we had 2 guides. Ours was the founder and owner of the company, born and bred in Sydney and fresh back from Bangkok that morning. The starting point of our tour was the Town Hall, which we learnt was originally on the edge of the cities boundary and the site of the graveyard. When Town Hall was being built, they found a lot of remains and even now when they do repair works they sometimes find remains in the foundations. EWW! Across from town hall was a church, surrounded by pretty Jacaranda trees.

From Town Hall we headed to the Queen Victoria Building (QVC) where we found the first Christmas tree of the season (1st November). The Building was beautiful and it lead down into some underground tunnels that connected us to a mall a few streets over.

We walked through Hyde Park and saw the barracks, which was originally built when they realised that all of the convicts that lived in Sydney were running free in the city and causing problems. We also saw the ‘rum hospital’. The city needed a hospital, but there was no funding from the UK to build it, so the Sydney hospital was built by 3 men in return for them having full rights to the sale of rum in the city. Therefore, the hospital has developed the name of ‘rum hospital’.

We saw lots more buildings in the CBD and learnt why the Australian coat of arms has an emu and a kangaroo. Both of these animals are unable to walk backwards, so it was thought that Australia would be unable to go backwards with these animals on its coat of arms. We headed down some lane ways, one had a lot of bird cages hanging down over the alley. We learnt that there has been an attempt recently from Sydney to become a little more like Melbourne and they have been displaying art work in lane ways to try and be a bit more arty. This aviary instillation was so well received that it was installed permanently.

Eventually, we made it to the main sights up at circular quay, The Rocks, The Opera House and The Harbour Bridge. The area was very busy, but in a good way. I have said this to Simon a few times before ‘Nothing ever looks like I expect it to’. Sydney was exactly the same. The Opera House was more creamy in colour than I expected and its position to the harbour wasn’t what I thought it would be. The Harbour Bridge looked more industrial, but none of this was bad. Just different. We walked through The Rocks, which was the area in which the first settlers built Sydney. Effectively, it’s the birthplace of Sydney. We zoomed through this area on the walking tour, but plan to do another free walking tour about The Rocks area when we return to Sydney at new year.

The last stop of our tour was with a perfect view of the Harbour Bridge and of the Opera House. We learnt that there was a worldwide competition for the design of the Opera House, which was won by a Dutch architect. Unfortunately, the project ended up costing more than expected and it was decided that the best way to tackle this problem was to not pay the architect. He quit and returned to the Netherlands, never to see the Opera House completed. It’s still not completed internally to the standard he planned it to be. We were told that many houses in The Rocks were destroyed so that the Harbour Bridge could be built. These people were evicted and given nothing in return. Apparently, the people in area call the Harbour Bridge as the ‘coat hanger’ and don’t view the bridge that favourably. Despite a little bit of a dark history, both of these monuments are still unbelievably impressive.

After our tour we hung around for a while longer, admiring the views and the cruise ship that was in dock. This cruise ship was MASSIVE and we are looking forward to it not being there at new year as it dominated Circular Quay. We walked back to our hostel, cooked dinner and settled in for an early night. We had 2 more busy days planned.

The next morning we woke up and got on the bus to Bondi beach. Bondi is probably the most famous beach in Australia, known primarily for its surfing culture. We arrived quite amazed that such a beautiful beach could be only 20 minutes away from such a large city. There was a lot of street art along the promenade of Bondi, which we enjoyed whilst having a coffee and a juice. We then set off on the Bondi to Coogee beach walk.

There was a 2 week art installation all along the first portion of the walk and along with that came A LOT of people as well as a lot of VERY naughty school groups. I will touch upon my feelings about school children in Australia a little here and a little in a future blog.

Here are a few observations I have made

1. A lot of school children are out of school during school hours. I’m really not sure why, but we often see kids walking around in uniform in groups at about 1/2pm in places that wouldn’t just be for a lunch break.
2. Kids are taken out of school quite a lot for outdoor activities which is brilliant. We saw a large group of teenagers having a PE lesson on the beach at Bondi, playing football, rugby and just messing around in the sea.

3. All school kids are required to wear hats when out in the sun. I’m not sure if this continues to apply for secondary age kids.
4. Most groups of kids are pretty rude in terms of swearing and the way they are around members of the public. On the radio over here there is no censorship. We were listening to the radio earlier and the presenters swear, the songs are not censored and therefore it doesn’t surprise me to hear some awful things coming out of the kids mouths in front of the teachers.

Yes… this is a flip flop vending machine…

Sorry for the side chat there… Once the art installation ended, the walk was beautiful and peaceful. We ended up in Coogee, which I preferred to Bondi and had a subway for lunch. There is a very good chance that this is where everything went wrong. There is also a very good chance that it went wrong way before this at the dirty horrible hostel. We will never know. We got on the bus and went back to the hostel, having a few hours to relax before we headed to Darling Harbour to go to the Hardrock Cafe for dinner. I fell asleep, was pretty cold and woke up feeling ‘special’ to say the least. I managed to walk to Hardrock, sit down, and then very quickly told Simon that we needed to leave. The next 36 hours or so is a bit of a blur. Lets just say I wasn’t very well. We had to bail on our trip to the Blue Mountains the next day and we spent the day with me recovering in the hostel, hoping I would be ok for our flight to Melbourne. We thought Simon had escaped the dreaded ‘food poisoning’ (which is what we thought it was), but he decided to develop the illness on the plane to Melbourne. We didn’t have a fun 3/4 days in total. We’re pretty sure now that it was Gastro enteritis rather than food poisoning, but I guess we’ll never know. We were both gutted to miss out on a full day in Sydney, but are happy that we will be returning at new year. We just know that we will have to make up for it then. It’s going to be busy!!!