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Published: April 4th 2009
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Bus - 1
Hillary keeping busy while waiting for the bus by playing video games. After spending two whole weeks in Sydney, a city which we loved, Kevin and I decided it was time to start checking out the rest of Australia. We bought Mini Traveler bus passes from Greyhound, which would give us 45 days to travel from Sydney to Cairns, up the east coast, and allow us to hop-on and hop-off as often as we want along the way. So, on Wednesday, February 18th, we hopped on our first Greyhound bus heading north to Newcastle! Newcastle is located 162km north-east of Sydney. It is the second most populated city in New South Wales (after Sydney, of course), with a population of approximately 288,000. It is located directly on the coast and has some amazing beaches.
After arriving at Newcastle, we located our hostel, which is about a five minute walk from the beach. I could see the ocean from my room window! After settling in, we had supper at the hostel. As luck would have it, it happened to be all you can eat pizza night! Yay! So, for $6 each, we had as much pizza as we could eat. What a bargain! And we even made some friends. We met a really
Bus - 2
Us on the bus. nice couple from Germany who were in Newcastle to go to the local university for a semester.
The next day, we took a guided one-hour tour of the city on an old tram. This was great, because Newcastle as a lot of historic buildings that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. After this, we walked to a lighthouse (tried to spot some wild dolphins, but no success) and spent some time on the beach. That night, we went to a free barbeque hosted by a local restaurant. Who doesn’t love free food?!? After eating, there was a trivia game. All of us from the hostel were put into teams and tried to answer the trivia questions. The questions were very hard, but our team did fairly well, although we didn’t win. After the game was over, every team had to send one team member to the front with the answers. We all thought they just wanted to collect our answers, so we sent up Kevin. Unfortunately for him, though, they had another challenge in mind. They wanted all of these volunteers to eat a whole onion! If you don’t know, Kevin HATES onions!! Well, he only got about 3
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Leaving Sydney. full bites down when he had to stop. HAHA I lost count how many times he brushed his teeth when we got back to the hostel!
We got up early the next morning and took a city bus to a nearby port, called Port Stephens. From there, we took a two-hour boat ride around the harbour in search of dolphins. We did spot some! It was very cool to see wild dolphins. They are amazing! We then spent some time exploring the little town, before taking the bus back to Newcastle. That night we relaxed and had some of our cheap noodles for dinner. Our bus was the next morning, but luckily our roommates needed to be up early too, because there’s nothing like trying to get up and go with half your room sleeping!
Hillary (and Kevin)
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