In honour of the tenth anniversary of my trip around Australia and New Zealand, I am re-publishing articles originally published elsewhere. It looks like this is the final article in the series and I’m feeling sad about it. I’ve been having fun re-living my travels. The good news is that with this being in writing, I can re-live it at any time. Plus, I’ve got all the pictures. Enjoy!
After visiting Perth, I flew across Australia to spend one more week in Sydney. I’ve been here before, but I felt that I had to see it one more time before I left Australia. I don’t love Sydney, but I like it better than I did the first time I was there. The good thing about Sydney is that you can go there many different times and not do the same thing twice. There were some things I did again, however, such as walk through Hyde Park, window-shop in the CBD, and check out the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. In addition to all of these things, I checked out a festival in Darling Harbour and enjoyed a raucous St. Paddy’s Day in a local Irish pub. Thanks to my friend Catherine from my tour of New Zealand, I saw some cool outdoor bars in Sydney. She was concerned I wasn’t meeting a lot of nice people in Sydney, so she made sure that I met some. There really are lots of nice people in Sydney. We were surrounded by office-types enjoying after work drinks and I felt like I was in Toronto. The two cities are quite similar I think, especially in the wealth generating areas (lots of corporate head offices).
I went to Bondi again, but something different that I did was to do the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee Beach. Bondi is nice, but I like Coogee better. There are a few smaller beaches between these two big ones, and they’re all different and Swimming at Coogee is exciting when you’re trying to avoid bluebottle jellyfish and stingers, but it was a rather big wave that took me out. I was standing in water up to my knees and a wave came along and knocked me over. Don’t worry, I was neither injured nor bothered….but talk about getting sand everywhere…wow. The weather in Sydney was really good too. I had some nice naps on the beach….love the beach.
Something else I did in Sydney was to do a more in depth tour of “The Rocks” area of town. It’s heavy on the convict history, but now is more of a “rich” area with cafes, pubs, and shops. The day I visited, there was a big market on. I liked the market. They had some cool stuff there.
I did my fourth Australian winery tour as well. I visited the Hunter Valley and some of the smaller wineries there. We got an early start, and since 8am is a bit early to start tasting wine, we went to a beautiful national park first and then we tasted wine at some of the boutique wineries in the area. There are nearly 200 wineries in the Hunter Valley, but we didn’t have time for all of them because it was just a day tour. That was a fun day. It was a pretty good trip to Sydney and lots of good times. The next time I see Sydney, it will be to go to the international airport to catch my flight home.
LIVE FUNNY! with Kathryn Reichheld 