Filed under: Wanderlust Magic
Had a fantabulous trip in Down Under from 2nd to 17th December, and I must say it was a well-deserved break well done. I’ve always wanted to visit Australia (in particular that being the must-go of the year for me), and I’m glad that I managed to make it for this trip. 🙂
The whole road trip started at Sydney, and we spent a scorching 3 days there. We flew to Sydney via the A380, which had lots of leg room for each of us but I didn’t get to be in the upper deck. T3 looked very, well, Christmasy, and their attempt at making people feel that Christmas is coming was not a bad one, but somehow I dun feel very Christmasy this year.
Tis the season to be jolly
Landed in the Sydney Airport after about 7 hours of flight, and it was already 7:35AM. Didn’t sleep very well because I was watching Road to Perdition on Krisworld 😛 Went to our backpackers’ accommodation at The Pink House at Kings Cross via the shuttle bus, and we started our exploration of Circular Quay as soon as we were done with checking in. I must say that at the end of the trip we’ve come to realize that backpackers’ accommodation isn’t necessarily very comfortable and price-worthy; there are many other better options given the same amount of money we’ve paid for our 3 nights in Sydney, so I do recommend that you stay elsewhere other than where we have stayed.
Took a shuttle to Kings Cross, where the Pink House stands
Circular Quay was a good 30-minute walk from where we stayed, and it houses the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. On our way we passed by Mrs Macquaries Chair as well, and the beautiful weather provided great phototaking opportunities.
Mrs Macquaries Chair
The Royal Botanic Gardens was HUGE, and very very pretty.
The oh-so-famous Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge
The next day we mai tu liao; we checked out a hell lot of places, which included the very cool Australian Museum, housing an amazingly impressive dinosaur exhibition being the oldest museum in Australia specializing in natural history:
The skeleton of the sperm whale that beached on Australian shores in 1900s, and a lot of dino stuff
Lots of skeletons of various animals, including some really huge fish, the elephant, the giraffe and more
A really cool gallery on the indigenous people of Australia, giving a full insight of the discrimination they had faced since the 19th century
We ventured to Darling Harbour (a bloody long walk) before heading to the Wildlife World to check out the many animals Australia has:
Darling Harbour and Harbourside, where lots of shops and eateries are housed
Lots of cool stuff, including an ant nest, the Madagascar cockroach (eew), locusts, koalas and roos. Oh, we even watched a snake eat up his prey!
We visited the Queen Victoria Building where there was a lovely huge Christmas tree decorated with 15,000 Swarovski crystals (omg) and we obviously didn’t shop in it because it was super atas:
And of course we also visited a few other attractions en route to Kings Cross:
The ANZAC War Memorial (which was closed for renovation), the St Mary’s Cathedral, the Sydney Tower, the Town Hall
Kings Cross is an interesting place to stay in because it is the red light district, and we actually went to check out one of the strippers’ club, which was unfortunately very boring because the girls didn’t do much at all; some were awfully skinny while others were… well, just plain boring 😐 I fell asleep watching them strip; that was how bad it was.
Our last day in Sydney was spent visiting the Bondi beach, and we took the CityRail from Kings Cross to Bondi Junction, before transferring to the beach via a bus:
Kings Cross Station, with interesting ads and a 3-tier train
Bondi, Bondi
Bondi Beach was, well, ok lor, I guess. Nothing much since we didn’t go for the swim (the waters were freaking cold), but we did attempt to walk from Bondi to Bronte Coast, a good 3.5 km but our poor legs had been walking for the past few days and so we didn’t actually complete the walk. 😦 But well we did go for a 2-hour standup comedy at the Comedy Store along Lang Road, Moore Park, in the evening, and it was quite fun watching live standup comedy 🙂
A very enriching 3 days in Sydney, before we head off to the lovely Blue Mountains! 🙂
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bittersweet solitude of a fireflower 
Hi! I’m the Community Manager of Ruba.com. We’re building a website to highlight some of the most interesting places travelers around the world have discovered. We’ve read hundreds of blogs about Australia, and we think that yours is awesome! We’d love to highlight excerpts from blogs like yours (assuming it’s OK with you of course) and to discuss other ways of tapping into your expertise if you are interested. I’m at erin@ruba.com.
Comment by erinatruba February 25, 2009 @ 9:11 amThanks! 🙂