Dec 24- 29

We went back to Sydney since my father visited us in AU for the holidays and since it was his first time in AU we had to do all the main sights and Sydney is definitely the place to go.  You could spend 10 days in Sydney and not be bored.  It was odd being in a very warm climate for Christmas and seeing pine trees (fake) all over the place.  We hopped on a bus our first day which looked like a gaudy Christmas wonderland with decorations in every place possible.  It had bows ton the seats, garland hanging from above head holders, and pictures of Christmassy things on every window.  Everyone who was on the bus was laughing and the driver greeted everyone with a “Merry Christmas.”

We had wanted to reserve Christmas dinner but lunch seemed to be more popular in AU and almost all nice places offered lunch but rarely dinner.  We had lunch on the Showboat for Christmas which was very nice, though there was no show for Christmas.  We got poppers, drinks were included, and we had a wonderful view.  Sydney definitely looks its best from the water in the Harbor.

View from the boat

After our cruise we were surprised that the Aquarium and Wildlife World were open so we went to them.  Both are well worth a visit, and I especially liked the butterfly exhibit where butterflies fly all around you and land on you as well, but they were way too hard to photograph.

Sea Dragon in the Aquarium

In the following days we were tour guides for my father since we had already done mostly everything in Sydney so we sent him to the highlights such as the opera house tour and The Rocks walking tour through historic Sydney.

We also went to the botanical garden which is gorgeous and allows for wonderful views of the bridge and opera house.  When we lived in Sydney we would often go there for picnics on the weekends.  It is a home to many birds and lots of bats which are spectacular at night because they start flying and the sheer volume of them make you feel as if you are in a horror movie

Darling Harbour is a must and there always seems to be something going on such as Chinese New Year, street artists or dragon boat racing.  The Sydney Tower is not so great since other buildings around it seem to be equally tall so the view which you’d like to see of the opera house is much obstructed.  Hendrik and I had been there because we had the Sydney card which is well worth it if you are going to be in the city for a week, not so much if you are only going to be there for a few days.  We told my dad that he had seen Sydney way better from the boat.

Sydney from the botanical garden

As for beaches, I recommend going to Manley beach instead of the famous Bondi.  Manley is much prettier since it is longer and behind it there are trees and a road with surf shops unlike in Manley where you have lots of busy roads and dull pavement.  Unless you are a good surfer, Bondi often seems too rough and is deep while you can stand in the water quite far from shore in Manley and there are usually smaller waves for not so good surfers like myself.  We tried surfing 3 times there and never got the hang of it.  If I every have the chance again I think I’ll take a lesson.  We took my dad to Manley beach instead of Bondi since we did not have time to do both.

Manley Beach

There are always day trips from Sydney, and Hendrik and I have done the Hunter valley tour which is the wine region near Sydney and the Blue Mountains.  We went with Tours-r-us with my dad.  This took us to the Olympic park, which is not that interesting especially if you are not interested in the Olympics.  It turned out to be more of a bathroom break than anything else.  Then we headed out into the Blue Mountains and did the scenic railway, flyway and Skyway which are all part of Scenic World.  These are so popular with the tourists but they are nothing special, but really if you don’t have all day to hike there is no other way to get to the boardwalk and the rail and flyway take you up and down.  The boardwalk is very nice and it is a peaceful walk.  Then we stopped at the famous three sisters, and Hendrik and I did a mad dash to them since we did not have too much time and it looked really cool to be able to go down to them, but really the view is much better from the lookout.

Blue mountains and the three sisters

Near the end of the day we visited Featherdale Wildlife Park which was nice since they let you pet most of the animals including wombats and koalas so there were many photo opportunities.  Unfortunately, the wombats were asleep, but nevertheless, this was a worthwhile stop.

My dad and I with a koala

We left Lake Macquarie early since we had a lot to do the next day. We wanted to go surfing in Manley, since we knew there was usually good surfing there and we hadn’t yet been able to surf on the trip. Miraculously, we made it to the beach without a hindrance through Sydney morning rush hour, but when we arrive there, there were hardly any waves. A few waves would come every 20 minutes. We decided to go for it anyway since we had come all the way out to Manly and we saw others trying too. It wasn’t a warm day and we rented wet suits as well as surfboards and therefore we didn’t get to use our new rash shirts which still had their tags attached. It was a very slow surfing day, and I only caught about 3 waves but never managed to stand. We had to leave Manley by noon and go to the opposite end of Sydney to Kingsgrove because there we had the rest of our stuff in storage.

Sydney

We had to take apart the whole van and luckily there was a lot of storage space under the bed which we utilized to the fullest and we were able to fit at least three times as many belongings than we had currently with us. We thought we would be even slower than we had been previously which was about 100km/h. We always joked that even if we wanted to speed we couldn’t. We could drive with the pedal to the medal and the van would not go faster. It was like cruse control. Going uphill was terrible because it would slow down drastically and we had to down shift so it wouldn’t stall. The engine would growl and the speedometer would slowly decrease and if there was a passing lane, cars would be passing us. Sometimes on rare occasions the van would have its good days and it would get up to 130 km/h which was even above speed limit. We kept trying to figure out what cased the sudden surge of speed, opening the water tank, full gas tank, air conditioning, but nothing seemed to do the trick. And now when we were so heavy the van had a good day. We drove down to Wollongong and briefly walked around the town, beach, and lighthouse.

We had to keep pushing further south and crossed the state border to New South Wales and therefore only had a brief stop in Byron Bay which reminded me of Noosa. I was getting a bit bored of the beach-small-backpacker/tourist towns at this point because they all began to look like each other. It was over-run by run down campervans and tanned people in slinky clothing. I didn’t mind only spending a few hours there and moving on. A little further was the town of Ballina. There’s nothing there so they built a restaurant right next to the main road but to attract patrons they built a giant shrimp on top of it. This big thing was sadly one of the more impressive ones.

We stayed at Lennox Head that night and then continued south towards Coffs Harbour, but we didn’t quite make it there since we stopped at a campsite before Coffs Harbour.  We spent the rest of the day skipping rocks on the beach, jumping on the jumping pillow, and trying to make friends with a few resident wallabies who were less friendly than the ones at the zoo.

Jumping pillow

Coff’s Harbour is home to the first of Australia’s big things, the big banana. It’s located next to a banana plantation and also now an amusement centre which contain an artificial ski slope, an ice skating rink, tobogganing and a monorail tour of the banana plantations. We didn’t do any of the activities or buy any really tacky souvenirs shaped like bananas, and you name it they had it in banana shape and color.

The Harbour itself is really pretty and there is an island, called Muttonbird Island, which is connected to the harbour by a manmade breakwater so everyone walks to the island and has a short hike around it, which is well worth doing. A real-scale model of Captain Cook’s ship the ‘Endeavour’ made the scenery even more beautiful and ironically we had seen the same ship in Sydney in Darling Harbour. It is a museum and we wanted to go in because we didn’t visit it in Sydney but the exhibit only opened the next day and we had to be in Port Macquarie by then.

So I have this website dedicated to myself because my boyfriend wanted a website for our new facebook application ( weSocial ) which everyone should use, but anyway, it was buy one and get one free for domains so ta-da clementinevitek.com is born.  (I just wanted people to know that I didn’t go out of my way to buy my domain name, because that’s too egocentric)

Several weeks ago I went to a trivia night at a pub here in Sydney and the question was ‘name the most eastern point of Australia.’  Of course I and my team had no clue since we aim for last and the host came around and said “You’ve probably been there.”

Then I said “I’ve never been out of Sydney.”

“You’ve never left Sydney?” he asked in disbelief.

Hendrik gave me an odd look and said, “You weren’t even born in Sydney.”

“Oh right.”  Well the point of the story is that I’ve been sucked into Sydney and I feel like I’ve never left.  While Sydney is a gorgeous city to look at living in it is just plain blah, and I have been here way too long and I’m finally leaving. Que in travel blog, so yes this is where it is supposed to start.  My travels and adventures.  So maybe I’ll come back and start the whole travel blogging thing, but don’t hold your breath, put on some scuba gear instead! (Yeah, I am aware how lame that sentence is but I don’t feel like pushing the delete key) That’s what I’m gonna be doing the day after tomorrow in Cairns!

Until then…