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A disclaimer- Miss Rachel Graham would like everyone reading this to be aware that Mr Thomas Carr has taken over the writing duty and therefore any grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors are entirely Mr Thomas Carr's responsibility.

So after the heat of Melbourne we arrived in Sydney to a rather disappointing day, thankfully dramas at the airport were kept to a minimum after all the excitement of our apple scented bags in Melbourne. Only once did get we get excited when we thought we heard my name over the tannoy, we chose to ignore it and made our way to our airport shuttle to be taken to ‘Du*lux’ hostel in Kings Cross. We were very excited and in our innocence thought that 'Du*lux' would live up to its name and that Kings Cross would the same as London. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake.

It turned out that Kings Cross is a fantastic place to see a certain side of Sydney, however that side mostly involves, kebab shops, dodgy massage parlors and drunk backpackers. Being the responsible mature people that I’m sure you all know we are this didn’t appeal. So like proper adults we stayed in, drank far too much red wine and watched nondescript TV. I turned out ‘Du*lux’ did not quite live up to its name but did have aircon, which we were quite blasé about at the time but that I would kill for now.

The next day we set off to see the sights, this involved a walk through the botanical gardens, which were stunning and a huge contrast to the rest of Sydney, down to the docks where the Harbour bridge and the Opera House are situated. From here we took the slow ferry across to Manley which we had been told was a better beach than the more famous Bondi beach, the ferry journey gave us some stunning views of harbour (see the pics, although as always they don't do it justice.) Once we arrived at Manley we found we could not go swimming, apparently the rip tides were too strong - which has turned out to be a fairly regular occurrence in Australia for us. We are unsure if they close the beaches regularly, or if Rachel and I (please note the correct grammar) are a bit of a curse as most places we turn up at seem to have closed beaches. So after lying on the beach attempting to get a tan in the shade I got rather bored and insisted we head back.

After another 'du*lux' night, our thoughts turned to our next destination - the blue mountains, to once again meet up with my Auntie Penny who had recently bought a house out there. However this made us assess our plans for the rest of Australia and we quickly realised that we had about two and half weeks left and Christmas was fast approaching meaning that everything was likely to be booked up. We spent the next 10 hours organising ourselves, ringing hostels begging them to let us stay over Christmas and sorting out new year on top of that. In the end we came away happy that buses, hostels and trips were booked for the rest of the time we were in Australia and that we were going to spend Christmas in Byron Bay like we had originally planned After all this excitement an early night was in order and we awoke early the next day ready to catch a train into the Blue Mountains

Overall Sydney was rather uneventful (which is most likely why Rachel allowed me to write this entry.)

Melbourne is better!

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