It is a surreal thing to take a picture with the Sydney Opera House in the background. It's an icon I've seen hundreds of times in pictures and on TV, and I used it as a symbol of where I was headed in my farewell presentation at Canon. To be here after travelling round the world is a great feeling.First impressions of Australia and Sydney are a bit mixed. Probably the “mixed” part came a lot from our choice of where we stayed for the first night, a backpacker hostel in the centre of the city. You paid for towels, took your sheets from reception to cover
your battered pillow in your tiny room, went to the dirty showers and toilets with water (hopefully it was water...) all over the floor and slept with the airco thrumming away to keep the humid temperature under control. Not a great start...The city itself has a nice vibe. It is more of a “real” city than we found anywhere in New Zealand, with older buildings and busy shopping areas rubbing shoulders with business and hotels, plus the whole Australian “no worries” attitude. People dress very casually despite the business going on (although seeing people in a suit is a real surprise – we are so often in traveller environments where shorts and sandals are the standard) and the conversations you have and overhear are peppered with “how ya goin, mate?”, “sweet as,”and the all-purpose “awesome”.
We headed for the harbour in The Rocks district
where the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour bridge sit. It's amazing to be near these places so far away from home, the kind of things I thought I would never see. Later we headed to the park and were already introduced to some of the amazing birdlife they have here, as a few long-beaked birds wandered around the sleeping tourists and locals, pecking away at the bushes and grass. We spent a few minutes reading all about the spiders and snakes which are not uncommon in the countryside – I hope I never come face to face with a redback or huntsman spider – the one small and venomous, the other huge but mostly harmless (since watching “The Giant Spider Invasion” in my early teens, I admit to suffering from a bit of arachnophobia...)We took the ferry across the harbour to Manly where Nicki's
friends, Wayne and Nathalie live. All around the bays you see luxurious houses and plenty of yachts. I read this morning that one area close to the city is now the 9th most expensive in the world, and it's no surprise. The whole area is stunning – what a place to live.Wayne and Nathalie had travelled for a year in a camper van and spent some months in Australia. They enjoyed it so much, they decided to come back here when they had the chance, and they live a two-minuet walk from an amazing beach with huge rollers bursting in (I loved the signs all over the beach saying “beach closed – dangerous surf”, ignored by the obsessive surfers we saw in the distance). We had barbecue on the balcony of their lovely apartment, and with a 7km journey to work plus the sun and sea, life seems good for both of them.
Equally, they have adapted to the less positive aspects of life here. They showed us a movie clip on their iPhone of a huge Huntsman spider – wider than the circumference of a pint glass – on their living room wall. As we went to bed, Nathalie noticed I had put my shoes outside (to
protect Nicki from the smell...) and she said “I'll give you some newspaper for your shoes – you might get a shock tomorrow morning, you never know what might crawl into them”. As I stood on the balcony and stuffed the newspaper inside my smelly boots , cockroaches scuttled off into the grass, a standard annoyance here.As we made our way back to the city, we met a woman from Los Angeles on the bus. She mentioned that her biggest worry about sleeping with the doors open is “waking up with a possum sitting at the end of the bed”. They are beautiful little things but the possum population has exploded and they are considered a pest here, apparently swarming over inhabited areas in search of food with no hesitation in going through people's kitchens if given half a chance.
Finding a place to stay has been a challenge as the city is booked to the gills, thanks to the Gay Mardi Gras starting this weekend. We spent an hour looking through every affordable hostel and hotel we could find and finally landed at a Formule 1 outside the city – positive luxury in comparison with our last place and a good base from which to launch this part of the journey.
