Sydney

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Arrived in Sydney on Sunday and got the train to Kings Cross where our hostel is. The hostel seems really nice its called The Jolly Swagman. We had a look around Kings Cross and as it is Easter Sunday we bought eachother easter eggs :D

On Monday we took a free walking tour around Sydney, we saw the town and the main shopping centre, the Queen Victoria building, Hyde Park and ended up and Circular Quay seeing the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Seeing the last two really made me feel like I was in Australia! We took a ferry ride to manly beach and had a stroll along the lovely beach here. There's a lot of sports going on on this beach like volleyball and watersports like jet skiiing and such. We headed back to the harbour for 6 and did another walking tour of The Rocks area. This is the place where the first settlers landed in Sydney, and it was home to the many first convicts. It was a very interesting tour and slightly spooky to be taken down a lot of little dark alley ways at night.

Chatted to some guys at our hostel tonight. One guy Eric is very random. He said he needed a hair cut and actually got me to go out on the street and cut his hair, he didn't seem to care what it turned out like so I just did it! I cut quite a lot off and it looked pretty bad as I was going along but the final result actually looked OK! Pretty mad and random though!

We went to the Blue Mountains on Tuesday. We took a cable car across the gorge and saw the "Three Sisters" a rock formation with an aboriginal story behind it of these three sisters whose father turned them to stone! Lovely! Down in the gorge we went for a walk around the rainforest. We then took a train back up, which was the steepest train in the world at 52 degrees!!! And it was pretty freaky how steep me were going backwards and could see a huge drop below us. When then went to Wentworth falls and hiked around the waterfall which was pretty cool and I got some amazing photos. last stop was "Edge Rock" a rock which jutted out with a massive drop below it. You could just go to the edge and there was nothing beneath you for miles! We then went back in the bus and stopped off and the Sydney Olympic Park and saw the olympic stadiums before taking a ferry cruise back to Darling Harbour. Darling Harbour looked really nice at night and has lots of lovely looking restaurants which were very tempting!!!!

On Wednesday we went to the Botanical Gardens on our way to Circular Quay. The gardens are lovely and there is a beautiful rose garden with roses of all different colours. The roses reminded me of my nan as she used to always have roses in her garden 😊 We saw the government house which is a really nice building and ate our picnic under the trees in the rain on a bench outside it. We then went to escape the rain inside the Opera House, which is actually nothing special on the inside and spent waaay too much money at a chocolate shop! We then walked all the way across the harbour bridge and back! There is a great view from the bridge and we wanted to be able to say we had walked across it. We then caught the free city bus to China Town and had a look around Paddy's Markets. At the market which was massive, I bought a new pair of sunglasses, new earphones as mine have started crackling and a cable to be any to put more music on my MP3 player.

In the night we went on a bar crawl (to one bar) with our hostel. Anwen and I went with a guy Chris who works and is staying at our hostel and had a good night with him. We got a voucher for one free drink, which was a horrible tasting wine and the switch to vodka cranberries for the rest of the night, and probably had a few too many of them!!

Went to Torronga Zoo on Thursday, it is a nice zoo but I was so tired from the night before I barely had the energy to go round it! Me and Anwen went around separately and then I decided to head back to Sydney earlier as I wanted to change the cable I bought yesterday at the markey before it closed as it turned out it was broken. Our phones choose this great opportunity to just stop working and I was unable to tell her I'd left! I tried everything to contact her...calls, texts, pay phones but they wouldn't ring international numbers and even went into a travel agent and got a calling card but that still didn't work. Nothing would work. So I just swapped my cable after searching everywhere for the right stall again and headed back to the hostel hoping she'd be there! She wasn't but she eventually turned up and luckily didn't wait for me and miss the last ferry back!

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