Sydney Baby! The Real Australia!
Trip Start
Oct 04, 2004
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57
102
Trip End
Ongoing
Sydney,
New South Wales,
Australia
Monday, December 27, 2004
Strictly speaking we wouldn't have left it to the last minute to find out it can be done this quickly. For some reason I was under the impression that we were flying out at 11am, wrong it was 10am. What made me actually realise and phone the airline to check, I don't know, but I'm glad I did, as if we had missed that flight, we would have been stuck in Tasmania, as all flights were now fully booked for NYE.
We were flying with Virgin Blue, Australia's version of Easyjet. Good ol' Dickie Branson had now made travel throughout Australia affordable to us poor travellers! I have flown with a lot of airlines now, and I must say Virgin Blue has got to be up there with the best, with their gorgeous air hostesses!
It was a relatively short flight to Sydney. It all started to become real when we flew over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House. Yes I had been in Australia for nearly 3 weeks now, but it hadn't felt like I had arrived. We were barely in Melbourne before flying to Tasmania, which reminded me more of New Zealand than Australia. Now we could see the famous landmarks, it felt so much more like I had arrived at what I had been waiting for for years.
It was after we landed and we had collected our baggage that we noticed a few familiar faces.
01. Palm Beach
James (a friend from Southend that we met in Vegas) and Kate another friend from home, had flown over to surprise us. Apparently it had all been booked for 6 months, every one knew at home apart from us, so we were very surprised we didn't find out! The joke was on them though as we saw them before they saw us, so we got to jump on their backs instead of vicer versa!Thankfully James and Kate had hired a car beforehand, so we didn't have to undertake the now ritual, looking lost at the airport and not knowing where to go. Kate had also been to Sydney before, so in no time flat we were at our hostel, 'Wake Up' and unloading our bags. Although Jim and Kate had booked their flights months ago, they weren't clever enough to book accommodation. After much searching they found 2 single bedrooms, which cost more per night than ours did for 5 days! Well we had booked our accommodation many months before! It was NYE, and Sydney does get surprisingly busy around that time!
We spent the day walking around Sydney trying to get our bearings, with Kate as our tour guide. To actually be able to go up to the Opera House and touch the tiles that cover it was an amazing experience. I have seen the Opera house hundreds of times on the television, so to be next to it, just hit home even more that I had arrived in the country that I would call home for the next year!
Thursday 30th December
When you think of Australian TV programmes that made it big in the UK, you would be hard pushed to name 5, Neighbours, Prisoner Cell Block H, Flying Doctors, Skippy and Home and Away maybe?
Well today we jumped in the car and headed north for an hour to visit Palm Beach, better known to you and me as Summer Bay (home of Home and Away for all non TV people!) It was a shame that no one shared my passion for the TV show, all choosing to rather sunbathe than explore with me.
02. Dan and Kate
I managed to persuade James to come along, if not only to take photos of me.Walking down the beach and seeing the wooden posts (that are always on the show), I was quite disappointed to see that they weren't filming to day. I was planning to ask the lovely Bec Cartright (aka Hayley) out for a drink, but it seems like that twat Leyton Hewitt beat me to it!
It wasn't long before we walked up to the holly grail of Home and Away, the famous Surf Club, although a bit disappointing, I did wait my turn with all the other English people, to get my photo underneath the sign!
Before leaving the beach I tried my hand at a bit of surfing. I was surprised that I managed to get up first time, remembering most of what I was taught the previous year in Newquay. All was going well and I was gliding along the wave, until an 'amateur' surfer cut me up on the wave, hitting me with his board and slicing my leg open with his fin. I now have a lovely scar from the cut which should have been stitched - but wasn't!
Being a professional surfer, I battled on through the pain - well it cost $18 an hour, so I wanted my money's worth! Although I enjoyed it, you start to realise how unfit you are after paddling out time and time again to catch another wave. I also learnt a very valuable lesson. Surfers wear rash vests for a reason!
