How to cover an amazing 2 weeks spent in New South Wales, Australia and do it justice? I thought I’d write a few articles briefly talking about each bit of my holiday with a few photos to illustrate what I’m talking about. For the final article I’ll show a slick slide-show with all the photos I took over the trip.
We arrived first thing in the morning in Sydney and would have to wait until lunchtime to get into the hotel. This gave us a chance to get a coffee from Starbucks and think about where we wanted to go. Lonely Planet guide in one hand and strong coffee in the other, we looked at the options – and it seemed the obvious choice was to go up the Sydney Tower, the highest point in town measuring in at 250m high.
I don’t know if I was expecting Sydney to be bigger, but I was surprised to find that I could see all the interesting landmarks from the harbour bridge north to the opera house east. The view north is right. It was quite spectacular being able to see the whole city beneath my feet.
After that we had a bite to eat and went down to the Sydney Aquarium which was awesome. There were so many interesting fish, lobsters, eels, sharks, seals and even a crocodile (scary things those) and the underwater tunnels were cool – you could see sharks swimming around eating fish.
After a day or two of wandering around, exploring Sydney, light shopping and sleeping off the jet-lag, we decided to go on one of the open-topped city tours. You could hop on and off at various points and really get to see the whole place. It’s interesting to see the mix of old and new buildings right next to each other:
No trip to Sydney would be complete without a visit to the Sydney Opera House. It didn’t look that impressive from our viewpoint but up close you get to see what an amazing piece of architecture it is!
My good lady was a bit sceptical about how big it was so I took the following shot to remind her that it’s pretty big really. I don’t know what sort of enormous building she was imagining!
And looking back along at the city you’ll agree it’s a super-modern place:
All in all I really liked Sydney. It’s a big city for sure, but it’s not a dirty or unfriendly place so far as I could tell. It’s truly a 24 hour city (our time in a hotel in the centre proved that) and yet you’ve got beaches a short distance away (and the famous Bondi Beach of course). And the sunshine helped too. Lovely!