After an overnight bus journey from Melbourne, we arrived in Sydney bright and early and checked into a backpackers. We were starting to get really weary of hostel life at this stage (at the last one we stayed at in Melbourne we shared a room with a strange man who slept on top of his covers in small red pants, and were serenaded at 2am by some bozo doing animal noises) but this one was reasonably painless.
We covered off the main tourist attractions in a couple of days: Sydney Opera House, Bondi Beach, ferry to Manly, which were all pretty good (in fact I found the Opera House more impressive than the last time I saw it) and hired a car to travel into the Blue Mountains, about an hour away from the city.
We stayed in the town of Katoomba in a hotel/hostel which was stuck in the Christmas of 1972. The decor had never been updated and the Christmas decorations never taken down. It's possible that the washing up liquid bottle (refilled with soapy water when it ran out)and the tea towel in the kitchen had been there a similarly long time. In our room there was a classy framed illustration of a girl with her nipples poking out. The best bit was the room labelled as the 'Games Room' which didn't actually have one game in it, except for a dart board which had been mostly destroyed (probably in 1972).
Nevertheless it was well located close to the 'Three Sisters' rocks and some really good walks down the mountains and through the rainforest. The views were beautiful, with the blue mist floating on the horizon earning the area its name. We accidentally wandered off our 'moderate' walking track and onto a 'hard' one, which became obvious after a lot of puffing and panting and painful thighs. It was a good workout though.
A highlight of Australia, we really enjoyed the secenery (and the cream tea) for a few days and headed back to the city to get another overnight bus up the East Coast.
We were staying in Noosa, a lovely little seaside town just North of Brisbane. My friend Mags' parents have moved there and we were staying a night with them. It didn't take too much to see why they had chosen to spend their retirement in that area.
Then it was down to Brisbane for a few nights and onto a plane to carry us away from Oz and onto New Zealand.
