Sydney

05/02/13 – We landed at Sydney Kingsford Smith the next morning and we quickly realised we had left Asia as we were charged 15 aussie dollars each to leave our bags at the airport for just 8 hours.  We’d have spent about the same in a whole day in Laos, Cambodia or Thailand and now even a bag of crisps was costing about 5 aussie dollars.  To our amazement for a city of Sydney’s standing, there was no direct bus to the city centre from the airport, so we’d either have to take a cab or pay 32 aussie dollars for a return by train.  We asked around a bit, and the minibus mafia were telling us they were the cheapest and only way into the city.  Then we saw a bus pull up and we asked the driver if we could take a bus.  He told us to get on and we could change to another bus near some shops (where we could also grab an almost affordable breakfast, yes Asia really has recalibrated what we perceive as value for money).

Eventually, we made it into the city centre, where we were shivering a little bit as the temperature was a fair bit cooler (24 degrees) than we’d grown accustomed to.  We took a stroll around Sydney, which was weird as everybody was speaking English (well, sort of) and lots of streets and places had familiar names but in different areas.  So our day might sound pretty much the same as if we were describing a typical day in London: “We took the bus, passed Waterloo, stopped near Hyde Park and walked down Liverpool Street and browsed around some shops on Oxford Street”… at the end of the day, we could have gone back to Neptune street but we went to the airport instead to catch our flight.

We also wandered past a statue of Queen Vic and into the Queen Victoria Building which was originally and now is again a shopping centre.  Inside we admired the interior and waited until 11am to see the Royal Clock (in the shape of a castle) strike the hour, with its fanfare sounding and trumpeters appearing from the turrets at the corners.  On the side there were sculptures of English historical scenes rotating every few seconds.

Then we walked down to the harbour past the Museum of Contemporary Arts (with a big concave mirror sitting on the lawn outside) and took in the vista of the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and a huge cruise ship that was docked in Circular Quay.  We took a picnic from a supermarket and lunched on the lawns in the botanical gardens, accompanied by some colourful birds who were after our crumbs.  We were after a bookshop for an Australian guide book.  A new one would set you back a cool 50 aussie dollars, so we opted for a second hand one at a tepid 7 dollars, a saving that went some way to recouping the money we’d spent on our luggage.




This was only a quick one day stop in Sydney, as we were taking a flight to Darwin that evening.  It may seem silly to go from Bail (which is just a few hundred km from Darwin) to Sydney and then back to Darwin, but this was driven partly by economics and partly due to us not having a detailed itinerary when we booked our RTW tickets).  So, it was back on our bus combination back to the airport, and the International terminal to pick up our bags.  Our flight to Darwin was leaving from the Domestic terminal.  Again, no public bus between terminals, just a private company doing shuttle buses for 7 dollars for a 5 minute journey (previously 7 dollars would have taken us the length of Laos)… would we ever be able to adapt back to life in the western world?  Luckily we wouldn’t have to just yet.  First we were off to the Northern Territory, where things were just about as remote, wild and smalltown as you can get…