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I was so spaced out from all the flying and the shock of actually being here when I last wrote that I forgot the best thing...we were sitting on the beach at Manly eating fish and chips and a load of dolphins swam right across the beach in front of us, really close to the shore!
Anyway the next day (Wednesday) Susie and I went to Darling Harbour in the city and got the ferry to Circular Quay, which went under the Harbour Bridge, and went to the Royal Botanic Gardens...it was a very lazy sitting around in the sun kind of day. I took a detour on the way home to see a bit more of the city and book my bridge climb....
Thursday I went back to Darling Harbour to freak myself out with the spiders and snakes at Sydney Wildlife World and then went to the aquarium...Australia's a scary place and you'll understand why when you see the photos... But all that was forgotten later on when I found myself above 8 lanes of traffic and a railway, climbing the bridge! It was awesome, I did it at night so everythig was lit up, the city looks so
great at night. It's unbelievable how much equipment we had to use- you have to wear a grey jumpsuit type thing with huge waterproof trousers over the top, and then you have a belt which clips on to wires while you're climbing up and you have a jumper and a radio clipped on to that, then you have a hat clipped on at the back of your neck along with a head torch and earphones for the radio, and gloves clipped onto the sleeves!
Friday was a weird kind of jetlagged day, I was just so tired all day, and it was raining all day soI guess it's quite good that the two coincided, because it was properly tipping it down with rain at random times throughout the day, I couldn't really do anything! So I ended up going shopping! There is a huge old building on the main street, the Queen Victoria Building, it takes up a whole block and it is full of shops! As you go up, the shops get more expensive on each level, and I have never seen so many shops in one place! Underground, it joins up with train stations and it's just this
ridiculously huge underground shopping centre! And the food court...wow!
Yesterday I made up for the laziness of Friday by walking almost 20km along the north shore of the harbour! I got the ferry to Taronga zoo and had a quick look around, then walked to Balmoral beach which is about 6km and was a really scenic walk. I wanted to get a bus from there but there didn't seem to be many buses so I walked an extra 3km to get to the starting point of the walk to Manly,which was about 9km (and I power walked the whole thing cos I was so worried it was going to get dark!). It was amazing, some of the houses over there are incredible...and I saw a lot of the freaky spiders that scared me behind glass out in the real world... When I got to Manly I sat on the beach for a while and contamplated going for a swim and freezing but it never happened, Ijust got on the ferry! As the ferry was coming in to Circular Quay, it had just got dark, and all the fruit bats from the Royal Botanic Gardens behind the opera house flew over
us! I met one of my friends from school who arrived in Sydney a few days ago, and we didn't even know we were both going to be there until the day before I left England! We went to Kings Cross which is the red light district even though it's a 2 minute bus ride from the centre, and it's where all the hostels are, so that's where my friend was staying. Every building down the main street is either a hostel, a backpacker travel agent, a bar or a strip club! And it's the kind of place where you're waiting for a friend at 7.30 outside the train station on the main street which is full of police on weekends, and an old woman next to you pulls a bag of weed out of her bag and rolls a joint right there on the street! And when we left the bar later on, there were prostitutes everywhere, it's so weird to think that only a short walk away everyone is dressed up and going to expensive restaurants with harbour views!
Not sure what I'm going to do today, I might go to the beach with Susie or do something
else because for some reason I have loads of energy again- not that I will be walking 18km again anytime soon!
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