The mothership...

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Sydney! Arrived at 7am -declared our Pringles, tea and campinos (cause of the Kangaroo campino plague of 1972) and met up with Pete. All my best laid plans of where to phone for a hostel went out the window when we found a freephone advert for a place that did triples for $60 a night with pickup from the airport called City Resort. It was in Wooloomooloo so it was definitely worth a visit and wasn't in King's Cross - the usual hostel location but also the red light district. It was a bit of a dive but true to their word they did give us a lockable triple room and we didn't get any bed bugs.
We caught a few hours kip and caught a cityrail train (it's more of a bus orientated city but trains are just simpler) straight to the harbour for our first glimpse of the harbour bridge and the mothership (the opera house was Arup's first big project). Ate lunch on the quay side at Rossini's - v nice cheap pizza and foster's which really does taste nicer here!
Caught the Manly ferry (to Manly) which gives you just as good a view as a harbour tour for about a quarter the price. The opera house looked smaller than I had imagined from the boat considering it's got about 5 concert halls, 3 restaurants and 14 bars! Also saw a gorgeous little peninsula called Mrs McQuaries (spelling?) Chair (part of the Botanical Gardens) which was a picture in the sunshine (it was sunny and about 20C although the sea breeze was bracing!). Then - one of our biggest suprises - we saw a whale surface, blow up some spray and vanish with a flick of his tail - we're definitely going to try and see some migrating humpback whales on the way back down the East Coast but this was an added bonus!
Got to Manly (so named because the english bloke who named it saw some manly aborigines there). Took the obligatory photo of dave and pete in front of the sign with obligatory poses. Crazily found a digital photo cd booth and internet cafe on the way to the beach so it was dark by the time we got there. So we sat at a beach side bar and had some Hunter Valley wine and watched the incredible number of joggers.
Caught the ferry back and went to find a hotel (pub) in the Rocks, an area near the harbour. Found one that said it served steak and discovered that you got a raw steak and bbq-ed it yourself on the roof top bbq. Thought this sounded pretty cool so went upstairs and there was a really huge bbq overlooking the opera house. It was empty on the roof because it was under new management and because it was late for dinner so we put the ipod on with the itrip transmitting to the windup radio. We kept having to pinch ourselves to realise we were in Sydney bbqing steak overlooking the opera house listening to REM! Ace!
Then just to top off the night we went to an oom pah pah bar and had tankards of bavarian beer served by men in lederhosen. Hee hee!
Train home (ooh they have double decker underground trains too!)

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