And then there were two !!

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And that was that. Our time in Sydney was almost over. Rosie, Phil, Lee and I basically started making plans for leaving Australia and the next stage of our journeys. Rosie and Phil were heading off to New Zealand for a fortnight, then back to Melbourne and would be heading back to Ireland in October via Hawaii and Los Angeles and Lee and I would be making our way home via Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Africa and then to the South of France to meet Lee’s parents for a fortnight and have a nice two week rest from all this travelling. We were having a huge amount of mixed feelings about leaving Oz because we’d been here so long it had kind of felt like leaving home again. You get used to getting up in the morning, putting on shorts and t-shirt and then going to work. You get used to the mind-numbingly boring state of politics in the newspapers and the fact that if anything is happening outside of Australia, you have to be on the internet to find out about it.

We hadn’t left yet of course, there was still the small matter of having a leaving do for Rosie and Phil to take care of. Lee and I offered to take them out for a dinner at a local bar that does rump steak and a beer for $10 so we thought it would be nice for the 4 of us to head out for a nice civilized meal together. Rosie and Lee had met up earlier in the day as Rosie and Phil were staying at our house for the night before they flew to NZ . Rosie had finished up with her work and Lee was off, so they had started on the wine (no goon as it was a special occasion) early doors so by the time I had gotten in from work, they were having a right old time of it and putting the world to rights. Phil was out for a few last-day pints with the boys from his work so I joined the girls in a couple of glasses of Pinot Grigio to kick the night off and to give Rosie her leaving present as Lee and I had made up a wee photo album of their time in Sydney and we decided that Phil probably wouldn’t mind if we gave it to Rosie instead. Rosie and Phil’s pal, Lee, also came round to the house for a few drinks and said he’d be joining us for dinner and it looked like Fran was heading out to join us later on once her shift at the restaurant had finished so there was going to be a few of us out for the night and our idea of a nice quiet, civilized dinner was rapidly disappearing into the distance. By the time Phil bounced twice on either side of the door on his way through it from his “few drinks with the boys”, it went completely out the window.

It must have been about half ten by the time we’d finished our dinner as Fran had joined us and you could tell she wasn’t up for heading home any time soon and to be honest, neither was anyone else. Our little party headed to the bar/club next door and carried on the evening from there. It went a bit hazy after that, but not before Rosie sprang one last surprise on us. You could tell something was going on on the dance floor as the girls were all gathered in a circle but not dancing, and then all you heard was them all screaming and cuddling. Rosie and Phil were getting married in August 2009 and Rosie had asked Lee and Fran to be bridesmaids at her wedding. To be honest, all bets were off after that. Our “quiet” wee evening finished at around 04.30, and Lee made an absolutely Herculean effort and got up at 05.30 to make it into work for 7am and do a 12 hour shift. Respect to Miss Brown, I don’t think anyone else could have done it.

Rosie and Phil had also suggested to us that we take a walk from Coogee to Bondi Beach, a trek round the coast that takes about an hour to do and is suposed to be well worth the effort as it takes in about 4 or 5 different beaches along the way and the scenery is pretty spectacular. Lee and I headed out to Coogee about 2 in the afternoon and had a walk on the beach and headed off towards Bondi. Rosie and Phil were right about the scenery too, it's amazing watching the waves smashing up against the rocks and all the surfers are out in force. You even get the odd flypast from a pelican if you're lucky. We'd gotten about 45 minutes along the coast and we weren't seeing any signs of Bondi though so we stopped and asked a coupkle walking their dog where we were going. Turns out when you get to Coogee, you go left when you get off the bus. We had gone right and were heading in the opposite direction. The scenery didn't seem quite as nice on our way back though as we were too busy bumping our gums about which way was north and which was east and why wasn't there any signposts saying "This way - Idiot !!". So once we got ourselves back to Coogee we made it to the coastal path that heads round to Bondi and at the end of the beach there was a memorial so we stopped and had a look adn it turned out to be in memory of the people that were killed in the Bali bombings a few years ago. It appeared that there were a large amount of people from Coogee that were killed and this was for them. We headed off further round and got to Clovelly and by this time the afternoon sun was heading for the ocean and we managed to stop at the cliffs and watch a magic sunset and got some photos and by the time we'd left Clovelly there was not a chance in hell of us making it to Bondi. We did manage to make it to one of the weirdest cemetries we've ever been to though, not that we making a habit of going to cemetries of course, but this just appeared out of nowhere and the coastal path ran right through it. There were thousands of massive tombstones and quite a few crypts as well and it was really spooky to wealk through it as the sun was going down. As we suspected as well, by the time we had got to Bronte Beach, the temperature had dropped by about 10 degrees and we were starving so our big Coogee to Bondi walk ended with us throwing in the towel and climbing on a bus back home.

After that, Lee and I began searching for things to do that weren’t going to cost us an arm and a leg and one night Lee phoned me and asked if I wanted to meet her at her work and walk back home across the harbour bridge. We had bought a new camera and when Lee wants to take pictures there’s not much stopping her to be honest, and where better to get some piccies for the album than on a nice evening above Sydney Harbour ? I don’t have the patience for photography, if I take a photo and it doesn’t work, I move on and look for something else to take a photograph. Lee is different, if a photo doesn’t turn out right then she’ll wait around until the photo IS right. You know those wildlife photographers that will sit under a rock for 4 months to get a photo of a lion blinking, that’s what Lee is like with her camera. A walk across the harbour bridge won’t actually take you that long to be honest, it’s not as big as it looks on TV and should take about 7-10 minutes to cross it. It took us about half an hour. If we stopped once for a photo of the Opera House, we stopped a hundred times while Lee waited for the traffic to stop vibrating the bridge enough to get the shot she wanted. By this time, the weather had decided to take a turn for the worse and a storm came roaring across the Harbour. Now there's nowhere to hide when you're walking across the Harbour Bridge, there's nowhere to shelter or anything like that so ywe just had to get the head down and plough through it. Within about 3 minutes, the pair of us were ringing wet and Lee was still snapping away at anything that moved. There might be plenty of things to do in Sydney on a budget, but the chances of you staying dry while you're at it are slim !!

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