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It was a surprisingly long flight to Sydney from Bangkok, around 9 hours. So we were pretty sleepy when we got there and after the bus back to the hostel we just chilled out and got our bearings. It was a bit of a party hostel and we were in a dorm, but luckily it was a 3 bed dorm and not one of the 10 bed ones! We had two different people staying with us over the 6 nights, our first was an Irish man who was in his 40's and fairly patronising, giving us daily tips on how to survive such as; “Did you know that you shouldn't leave things in your room? They'll just get stolen. I take everything with me, i take my passport, my drivers license, my bank cards, my money, my insurance details, my. …” and “Take your clothes into the shower with you and they'll wash themselves.”. Due to taking his clothes into the shower rather than washing them the room had a bit of a musty smell while he was there…nice! Our second roommate seemed a lot better, a french girl around my age who was pretty friendly. So it was a shock to
be woken up by what sounded like a piglet screaming in the middle of the night and find out it was her snoring, one of the weirdest noises I have ever heard coming from a human! Minus the odd roommates, the room was decent enough, we were out all day every day anyway, so it was good enough for a place to sleep.
There's so much to do in Sydney we had a hard time figuring out what to do first but eventually settled on going to the Australia Museum. There was a huge exhibition on photography which took us 2 hours to get round! Loads of amazing photographs of nature and wildlife, and some creepy insects in tanks to practice on including a big huntsman spider! The Museum also had dinosaurs and loads of Australian stuffed animals. It took us all day to get round it and we were pretty tired by the end so it was a cheese sandwich for dinner and off to bed early!
The next day we took the ferry across the river to the Taronga zoo which is by far the best zoo I've ever been to! Huge enclosures and healthy animals,
not like the poor, yellow, depressed looking polar bear in Edinburgh! We got to stand really close to a hungry tiger and a huge lioness. They also had leopard seals, koalas, cheeky kangaroos, an enormous Kodiak bear and Jason's new favorite creature, a Binturong, which is like a big lazy cat/bear! We were at the zoo all day and took the cable car down from the top for a better view over some of the enclosures. We got the boat back across the river and were walking through a big park on the way to our hostel when we noticed what looked like huge fruit hanging from a few of the trees. We went to have a closer look and found out it was actually big bats getting ready to fly out after sunset!
On day three we decided to check out Sydney's sky tower as its meant to have great views of the city. The lift takes you right to the top suspiciously quick and made us pretty dizzy when we got out! Unfortunately it was really expensive so we decided to give it a miss and headed down to explore the Rocks instead. We walked around there
for a while, it's quite a nice area but again pretty expensive if you want to eat or go shopping there! We kept walking until we came across the Observatory and had a look around it. Some cool photos of stars and galaxies and, most importantly, it was free! We then headed over to the Darling Harbor to see what it had to offer and found the Maritime Museum. With it being late afternoon by this time we only just had enough time to go onto a submarine and a destroyer. The submarine was TINY for the amount of people who would have stayed on it and it was quite cool to see what the living conditions on one are like. We treated ourselves to a Thai Dinner that night in a restaurant just across the road from our hostel, not as good as the real thing but it was pretty nice anyway!
By the next day our legs were pretty sore from such long days so we had a bit of a long lie then had a little picnic in Hyde park. Eventually we decided to go to the cinema to see Avatar, which was a good film even.
if it was a bit of a waste of a day! In the evening when we were walking back we went to see what the bats were up to as the sun was beginning to set. There was literally thousands of them all waking up and flying out across the city and we watched them for ages, dodging the spots under the trees as they all seemed to need the toilet at once after awakening!!
On our last day we went to a shopping center to find some warmer clothes for New Zealand! After we had picked up a few pieces we went to the Powerhouse Museum. But by this point we had done too many museums and didn't last very long before we headed back to get our stuff ready for flying out the next day. So probably not the most interesting of blogs for you to read but we had a good time, plenty of other things to do there that we just didn't have enough time for aswell. The only problem with Sydney was how expensive it was! We mainly just had sandwiches the whole time, good for me but not so much for Jason! Money
aside though it was a really great place to stay!
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