Museum Day in Sydney

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First of all, sorry for the huge delay in getting this blog finished. Believe me, we will finish it, we have so many fantastic bits left!


Day 130-131
13th-14th January

Our time at the Vibe Hotel was at an end. It was time to rejoin the backpacking lifestyle! Thank you mum and dad for that lovely christmas present! So, very very hungover after our fantastic night at the Sydney Opera House, we packed up our things and walked to our next hostel, the Mountbatten. It fortunately wasn't too far away and it was very close to Central Station, one of the reasons we picked it as we wanted to get a train to Melbourne the next day. There's not too much to say about this hostel really, apart from the fact it didn't have air conditioning which was a bit uncomfortable in 30 degree heat! Never mind it was just for one night. So we settled in and started to make plans for the next couple of days. It was time for us to move on and see more of Australia and we'd decided to head towards Melbourne and we'd decided to go by train. It was cheap and it was overnight so we could save some money. So the rest of the day was spent hanging out in an internet cafe for a bit to buy the tickets and do email things and then doing a supermarket shop (including a cool bag to stash everything in) so we could eat that night and make ourselves a picnic to take on the train the following night. That done we headed back to the hostel and relaxed for the rest of the evening as we were pretty tired from our big night the night before!

Our train on the 14th wasn't until the evening so we had a whole day in Sydney before we headed to Melbourne. We had to check out of our hostel in the morning, but fortunately we could store our things at the hostel (for a fee of course!). That done, we headed off out for the day's activities. The night before we'd had a look through the leaflets and brochures we'd picked up since we'd been in Sydney and 2 things had caught our eye. First of all, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition in the Australian Museum. Having taken some amazing photos (if we do say so ourselves), we wanted to see what award winning ones looked like! Also, the Natural History Museum in London is one of our favourite places to visit so it would be interesting to see the Australian counterpart.

We decided to walk there as it was a beautiful sunny day, we also decided to stop and have something to eat in Hyde Park, so we bought some breakfast and settled on the grass for a bit. Hyde Park may share its name with the famous park in London, however one massive difference is that there are lots of Ibis there! They kept coming over to check us out and the food we were eating so Ellory had a great time taking lots of pictures of them.

We found the museum without any trouble and got in the queue to buy our tickets. While we were waiting, there was suddenly a loud roar and to our surprise a dinosaur walked by, followed by a hoard of excited kids! It was an excellent costume and it did make us laugh 😊 we liked the look of the museum already! We liked it even more when we got to the counter to buy tickets, we were asked if we were students, to which we replied, 'no', the guy then said, 'yes you're students' and gave us the discounted rate! Plus the fact we already have a voucher from one of our leaflets, so we got the tickets for less than half price, we were pretty happy with that! We had the normal admission tickets, plus the extra bit for the Photography Exhibition. As that was the main thing we had come to see, we headed for that first. It was amazing! It was separated into categories such as Mammals, Birds, Plants etc and the photos were just wonderful. Obviously we couldn't take any photos of the exhibition itself, however we saw there was a book of the exhibition on sale, it was a complete rip off due to the amazingly strong Australian dollar, but we planned to buy it on our return to the UK. (and in fact we did and it's sitting on our coffee table now!) It's definitely given us both something to aspire to photography wise. After we'd seen the exhibition we had a look around the rest of the museum. It was very similar to the natural history museum to be honest but we loved it!

Our next stop was the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, so after a quick lunch we headed over there. The Barracks was built in 1819 to house the convicts sent over to Australia and as Britain was a large supplier of those convicts, we wanted to check it out. Again we had discount vouchers so after buying our tickets we started to wander around. The Barracks were constructed by convict labour and housed male convicts until around 1848. After this it housed female immigrants looking for work until 1886 and it was also a female asylum for a time during this period. The museum covers all these parts of the building's history. It was really interesting as we walked around as we learned about the types of crimes that had been committed which resulted in deportation to Australia and the conditions the men lived in the Barracks and the punishments if they broke the rules. When it became a house for female immigrants, the conditions were better but i don't think i'd like to live there! On the 3rd floor of the building there was a room of computer terminals. We wondered what it was about and the we found it was where you could search for your family name and see if there was any convict history! We had great fun putting in all the family names and taking pictures of the results! We were both pretty sure there was no history of deportation in either sides of our family however we got lots of results by typing in Griffiths, Gaskin, Payne and Jones!

After uncovering our convict past we realised we had to get back and get our bags so we could get our train. Fortunately we'd made a huge amount of picnic food for the train and it was still safe in the fridge at the hostel. so we grabbed that, and our bags and headed for the station. We decided to check our bags in as we had way too much stuff and it was just easier if we took as little as possible with us onto the train. When the train arrived we found our seats and settled in for the night. The seats were just normal ones, so we were pretty sure it was going to be an uncomfortable night. We were right! Ellory had the aisle seat and the train attendant had a rather large behind and kept hitting him as she walked by! There was also a crazy guy that walked up and down the aisle all night talking to himself and a family opposite us where the mother kept feeding her children sweets, strangely enough they didn't sleep much! It was a very uncomfortable night and we were looking forward to arriving at Melbourne and getting the hell off that train the next day!

love Liz xxx

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