Well, we finally got around to setting up this online journal. We've been in Australia for just over a week, finished our tour through Sydney and now we're in Brisbane.
The plane ride was down here was absolutely terrible. The first two flights were perfect, short plane rides and short waits. Unnfortunately, when we got to LAX the tables turned. We found out we had a nine hour wait instead of the six that we thought. Our solution to the long wait was to leave the airport and find a restaurant, which we were assured was not far at all. After about an hour of wandering around amoung the huge buildings and not finding a single restaurant, we said screw it and walked back to the airport. Then we waited for what seemed like a lifetime, and finally got on the plane. Which was a ten hour ride, also terrible. The plane was nice on the inside and we had a lot of room, but ten hours of trying to sleep in the upright sitting position is not a lot of fun. Fiji was pretty for the four hours that we were there, we're excited to go back and spend ten days there on our way home.
Sydney was good, we did a lot of touristy sight seeing. The first day went down to Darling Harbour, which is gorgeous and had an extremely expensive supper in one of its beautiful restaurants. We were still tired and jet lagged from the long plane ride, so we just went back to the hotel after making plans for the next day.
These plans included going to the Sydney Aquarium, which we arrived at shockingly early after not being able to sleep past 6:00am. Lots of really cute interesting animals, we learned about many different types of sharks and critters from the Great Barrier reef. One part of the aquarium included a huge tank with a glass tunnel through the middle of it. This was extremely interesting, sharks and stingrays were swimming all around us in this tunnel. We paid $5 to tour around this tank on a glass bottomed boat, which was interesting. It gave us a view from above on all the fish and creatures we had already seen. We also got to feed some of the fish, and watch them all crowd around the boat as we threw the fish food in. There was a dugong exhibit set up, meeting much excitement from Shannon as she studied them in grade 3. The dugongs were cool we got to watch them eat lettuce and just generally hang out. They were living in a habitat with a giant turtle and some sweet stingrays. We learned how to tell the difference between a male and female stingray, much to our disgust. The aquarium was a good experience, ended by a trip to the gift shop.
After the aquarium on the first day we took a water taxi to the opera house area. The water taxi took us on a trip of the harbour, which was really interesting and pretty. We saw the prime ministers house and learned that for a small fee of $300 you can walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge, something we were interested in but too poor to afford. The opera house was pretty but somewhat boring because if you aren't there to watch the opera there isn't much to do. We walked around the area, which was called The Rocks for a while, looked in some shops. When we were through, we went to the area where we assumed the water taxi would pick us back from and prepared to phone them. Finding a phone seemed to be a bit of a struggle however, as we walked in a complete circle taking us about an hour to an hour and a half to end up exactly where we began, learning that pay phones are apparently in short supply in the business district of Sydney. After this long journey, we had supper and went back to the hotel to sleep.
The next day in Sydney, we shopped the malls for a while, and then tried to go down to Manly to the beach, but learned that the ferries didn't run as late as we'd hoped they would and that we would have to wait for the next day. This we did, the next day bright and early we caught the train to Circular Quay, and from there the half hour ferry to Manly beach. This was gorgeous, but somewhat windy and the current was strong. We went in the ocean (Jenna and Lauren's first time!) a bit before lunch. After lunch when we went back the beach was a lot more crowded, and there was a blue bottle warning out. We tried to go back in to the water for more wave jumping, but our fear of these tiny blue jelly fish looking things got the better of us, after people kept runnning back to shore from the water exclaiming "I got stung!!!". We finally had to leave the beach after we realized that Lauren didn't put any sun screen on, and had turned a pretty scary colour of red. She says she gets weird tan lines from sun screen.... and only puts it on her knees. Well, we guess she learned her lesson. Silly Lauren.
The last couple days in Sydney weren't as exciting, we tired ourselves out on the first couples days. We hung out, tried not to get any more of a sunburn. We were going to tour an area near Sydney called Blue Mountain, but the tour guides warned us that it would be +33 the day we were going to take the tour, and that we probably wouldn't see any kangaroos or much wildlife because they'd be hiding from the heat. We all decided it would be a better idea to do on the way back when it will be a little cooler.
We checked out of our hotel in Sydney and made our way to the train station with our ridiculous amounts of luggage, getting lots of stares and comments about moving in, to which we said "Actually we are! we're from canada!" After struggling with weight in Jenna and Shannon's luggage (we were both ridiculously overweight, had to cram a bunch of stuff into Lauren's luggage) we got our luggage checked onto the train and went to wait in a room for our train to arrive. There were some tiny terrors of children that apparently really liked Lauren. They kept pouring the contents of the garbage can on her lap, and hitting her with everything they could find. She wouldn't stand up for herself, so finally Jenna went and found their mom. Not that this helped much, she seemed to find it kind of funny that her kids were such little brats.
Finally we got on the train, which was really nice. Until the same kids started to scream and cry non stop. Luckily, if we turned our iPod's up loud enough they could perfectly down out the horrific noises coming from the childrens seats. The scenery was nice until it got too dark to see, and then we went to sleep. It was a bit easier to sleep on the train then it was on the plane, but a 15 hour train ride isn't exactly ideal for a goodnights sleep either.
We arrived in Brisbane on Tuesday here (Monday for you guys). We got here at six in the morning, and it was probably already +28 and extremely humid. We had to wait four hours before we could get a room, which we decided was totally worth it to get some air conditioned sleep. After waiting for EVER we finally got to our room and discovered that the "air conditioning" they advertised was a fan mounted on the wall. This did nothing to improve our already dwindling moods. To escape the terrible heat we went in search of somewhere to have lunch that was air conditioned, and after that went to a movie (also air conditioned.) Temperatures here were 33+ yesterday, it was awful for us poor Canadians who left our homes in -30 weather. We tried to convince hostel staff to let us sleep in the air conditioned bar, with no dice. Finally we just went back to our humid hole of aroom and layed half comatose for hours until deciding it wasn't worth it and got up to start a new day.
And here we are! We're going to go look at a house today, we'll let you know how it goes! We'll all be posting our pictures and individual accounts of days on here from now on. Keep checking back! We'll try to update daily.
