Down and Under in Sydney and Melbourne
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2007
1
33
59
Trip End
Jun 2008
Sydney, Australia
Monday, January 28, 2008
After 2 nights on a boat, an overnight bus then an overnight flight we were feeling a little frazzled when we arrived in Sydney from Bangkok. Our first impressions though were pretty positive except that it was raining and after 4 months in Asia everything seemed prohibitively expensive. As we only had a short time (2 weeks) to spend in Oz, we had no spare time to recover from our journey and the sight-seeing began in earnest almost immediately. We spent 2 nights in Sydney mooching around the harbour, traversing the Sydney harbour bridge, strolling through the botanic gardens and scrutinising the Opera House. This was all very spectacular although the drizzle wasn't really helping much.
We then took an overnight bus to Melbourne for another couple of days sight-seeing. We hadn't booked accommodation in advance as is the norm for us expecially when we're vising a large town or city. Unfortunately though we had a lot of trouble finding a room. We must have tried in excess of 20 places. The tourist info office at the train station wasn't much help saying ' I could give you a list of all the hostels but I know for a fact they're all full 'cos of The Open.' The what? Clearly we're not big tennis fans. Anyway quite by chance in the end we managed to find the last remaining available room in Melbourne where we settled for the next 2 nights. We found Melbourne to be a pleasant if rather uninspiring city (again not helped by the persitent rain) and we passed the couple of days wandering around, poking about at the market and sampling the various fast food outlets (they do REALLY nice chips!).
After all this time spent in cities we decided it was time to see some of Australia's beautiful countryside. We'd enjoyed seeing a couple of the big cities but we couldn't help getting the feeling that we'd returned home to the UK and someone had just changed things round a bit and people has started talking with a funny accent. I think the grey weather had rather helped this impression along and we were glad to see that the forecast was improving for our next excursion along the Great Ocean Road. We had high hopes for seeing reportedly some of the best views that Australia has to offer..... Would our hopes be dashed? Would the Great Ocean turn out ot be a damp squib? Were we about to experience a slightly twisted version of a wet weekend in Southport? Find out by tuning-in to the next entry - coming soon...
