Melbourne to Sydney

Feeling slightly sad, we left the YHA Oasis in Melbourne early evening on Christmas day to catch the overnight Greyhound bus to Sydney. After staying for 6 nights, the cosy hostel with its helpful staff, good facilities and friendly guests had really started to feel like home and it felt strange to leave it all behind again. We also left the hostel with a pretty bad hangover. For the first time in 3 months, we actually got really drunk on Christmas Eve.

It all started pretty low key (although frankly, it never really kicked off either). We went for a cheap Italian meal with Sven, a Dutch guy we got to know pretty well in the train from Perth to Adelaide and had bumped into on several occasions since. After the meal, we decided to go home and have a few beers in the hostel garden before going to bed. For the first time in 5 days, it had stopped raining so we thought we may as well enjoy being outside.

Whilst sitting outside, we got talking to this Irish guy, who had big carton of cheap red wine and the most annoying Canadian we have ever met. The guy was like a walking encyclopedia with verbal diarrhea and just wouldn’t stop spraying us with completely irrelevant facts. It didn’t matter what we were talking about, every conversation would be interrupted by one of his completely uninteresting monologues about some fact. So I guess we just kept on drinking the red wine to dull our annoyance. In the meatime, the Irish guy was getting drunker and quieter, occasionally just mumbling ‘Bullshit!’or ‘Who cares!’ to the Canadian guy. We were then joined by two German guys, who were also getting pretty fed up with the Canadian guy whilst polishing off a bottle of vodka. So when our verbal tormentor finally decided to go to bed, we just had to stay for a little longer to enjoy his absence and talk about how annoying he was. By the time we went to bed it was 3am and we were both pretty plastered. We paid for this the next day, especially as we had to get up and check out by 10.

Christmas day turned out to be a nice day, despite the hangover. For the first time in days it was sunny and reasonably warm. The hostel had organised a nice Christmas brunch, and then we left to meet Garrett and Andrea, the two Canadians we had met on our outback trip, and Andrea’s brother, who had invited us for a lovely seafood x-mas dinner, with an abundance of garlic prawns, mussles and salmon. Satisfied and stuffed, we left their place to pick up our stuff at the hostel and head to the bus station.

The bus trip passed reasonably well and fast for a 12 hour trip (nothing in comparison to a 45
hour train journey). Despite the fact that it was Christmas Day, the bus was surprisingly full, but we managed to both secure a double seat. This allowed us to sleep pretty comfortably until we got to Canberra at 4 in the morning, when more passengers got on and we had to revert to our original seats.

Upon arrival in a very quiet Sydney at 7:45 in the morning, we found out the hostel was only a 5 minute walk away from the bus station. Considering we have managed to collect quite a lot of luggage in the last 2 months in Australia, this was a very welcome surprise. We got a little shock when the girl at reception first claimed that our original reservation had miraculously been cancelled by another hostel (where the hell were we supposed to go when every place in Sydney has been booked up for 5 months already?!), but thankfully this turned out to be a mistake.

Not being able to access our room until noon, we decided to explore the Sydney and headed towards the famous Harbour Bridge and Opera House, which are both amazing sights. Sydney is by far the most photogenic city in Australia we have been to, and I’ve already taken at least 50 pictures of the skyline, bridge and Opera House from different angles. After a long orientation walk through the Rocks, Circular Quay and the beautiful botanic gardens, we headed back to the hostel to don our swimming gear. We caught the bus to Nielsen Park, which the Tourist Information had recommended to us as a place to get a good view of the harbour and a nice swim.

After an exciting bus ride with a chaffeur who seemed to be under the impression he drove a Ferrari (where had this happened before?), we arrived at the most crowded beach ever. Even Scheveningen on a hot summer Sunday afternoon offers no comparison, it was unbelievable. We managed to secure a tiny patch of sand and stretched out to enjoy the sun and our picnic lunch.

The next day, we found the best (and only?) bargain in Australia: for 38 dollars we purchased a travelcard that allows us unlimited access to all buses and ferries in Sydney for a grand total of 7 days! We decided not to wait any longer to explore the harbour and got on the longest ferry trip we could find, 1 hour to Parramatta with a superfast rivercat boat. Just to give you an impression of the distance, in the colonial days the trip from Sydney to Parramatta took 1 week! Parramatta itself is a pretty boring place with nothing to visit except for a supercheap supermarket that sells local produce, but the ferry trip was really cool. In the evening, we were invited by Caroline and Laurent (two old colleagues from CFS Brussels) for a BBQ at their lovely flat. After 3 months away from home it was so nice to see some people I knew from before and we had a great evening.

On Friday we took it pretty easy, as I was a little bit slow due to the drinks from the night before, but in the evening we walked to Darling Harbour and got on ferry to Circular Quay just before sunset to once again see the beautiful skyline and takes lots of pictures. Today we took another ferry (gotta get our money’s worth from the travelcard) to Manly Beach, which was nice, but completely overcrowded. In fact, the whole of Sydney is completely crazy with tourists, which is a little overwhelming at times. We have been warned that there will be around 2 million people around the Opera House area from as early as noon on New Years Eve, and that areas will be closed off when they become full. Not being a great fan of crowds in any situation, but especially not after nearly 2 months of relative solitude, we’re hoping to find a more quiet spot a bit further away from the center, where we’ll have a good overview of all the fireworks, which is promising to be amazing.

For the next couple of days we want to visit Paddy’s Market, the Sydney Aquarium, take a bus or walk across Harbour Bridge (as actually climbing the bridge costs more than $200 p.p. at the moment), take another ferry just after sunset, and maybe (if we have the courage) go to the probably even more crowded Bondi Beach (you just gotta see it). Let’s see how much of that we’ll really get done.