Having spent Christmas and New Year in Sydney, we didn’t only do alot of drinking, partying and sleeping on the beach - we also did some sightseeing in between as decribed in my earlier post. Most of our days started at a leisurely 12-1pm oweing to the fact we didn’t come in until around 4 or 5 which help us deal with the expense of Australia by missing breakfast and heading straight for lunch.

After alot of searching we finally found the van we would be travelling in, initially named Sooty. It was a Ford EconoMaxi van from 1991 with a new yellow paint job.

Looking over the van took longer than we thought which didn’t leave us with very much beach time in Manly. we jumped on a ferry across to Manly, a recommended route since it gives a stunning view of the opera house on its own or with the city backdrop.

Following that we arrived around 2pm for the afternoon sun, unfortunately the clouds had started to roll in and there was also a strong breeze which didn’t make it a very comfortable experience so instead we played cricket on the beach, a warm up for us to go to the SCG the following day.

On our penultimate day in Sydney we just had to watch a game of cricket in the SCG. It just so happened Australia and South Africa were playing. Getting to the game was really easy and there was very little crowding on the way alot easier than going to watch some of the sporting events in the UK. The stadium was pretty full and we had awesome seats really close to the cricket field and we could even drink during the game.

The whole place had an amazing atmosphere with enterainment on the field and from the crowd.

Towards the end of the day we saw some really long beer snakes, created from all the empty plastic beer cups.

Though security quickly put an end to them by escorting the people involved out of the stadium. After the game we looked at the queue to get back to town and instead grabbed a taxi back to Coogee for about the same price the bus would have cost.

On our last day we packed up our van we all our bags and tried to bring some organisation to the caos we had created with our huge bags. At first it looked like we were going to have problems fitting everything in but after a bit of reorganisation everything was in. Following that we went into town to attempt to go into the Aquarium after the queues put us off the first time.

In the evening we left Kev and Anna in their posh hotel and headed out of Sydney over the Harbour Bridge towards our first stop, Newcastle.