Sydney

We had a great time in Sydney, unfortunately though it rained constantly for the whole of our 3-day stay there which did dampen our spirits slightly. There's lots to do but most of it is outdoors-based and when it rains you have to spend a lot of money to entertain yourself. The first evening was spent in Darlington Harbour with some friends, Sarah and Phil, they showed us around the best bars and we had some amazing mussels to eat. We have decided that the food in Australia is probably the best in the world, they have the best quality produce here and they know what to do with it. It was a great evening and the rain did subside a little so we could take some photographs of the amazing skyline.

The next day we firstly changed from a dorm to a double room because one Scottish guy from Perth had decided to wake the whole room up when he came back to the pub shouting and swearing at 2am. Doubles are more expensive but we've decided that we want our sleep and are too old for this communal thing. After moving we hot-footed it to the famous Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.
Both were as amazing as we had hoped and we took about a billion photographs.

We walked around an area of town called The Rocks which has some small winding streets which are pretty and also gives some great views of the opera house and bridge. Sydney reminded us very much of London, big streets, busy, lots of traffic. However we weren't too impressed with Sydney's transport system, it's pretty hard to get from A to B – there aren't really any buses and the metro system doesn't have many stations in town so we walked a lot, which in the rain is quite difficult.

As we walked back from the bridge and opera house, through Hyde Park, Al pointed to the sky “Oh look”... I stopped and looked up to see Batman flying towards me!!! Literally!! A huge fruit bat, about the size of a small dog with huge leathery wings was flying towards his perch in a tree. We sat and observed the tree which was covered in fruit bats – crazy! You can look at the Sydney sky in the evening and you will see flocks of what look like birds but in fact they are giant bats just flying around! It's pretty spooky and gives me the shivers!

On our third day we had to tackle the Chinese Embassy to get our visa for the next leg of our journey. Apart from paying a rather extortionate fee it wasn't too bad and we managed to get the visa on the same day. As it was raining again there wasn't a lot we could do, so we splashed out on an expensive hot chocolate in the Lindt shop at Darlington Harbour and headed back to our hostel to relax before the evening.

That evening we met up with a friend from London, Natalie, who was over visiting her family. A group of us went out to a brilliant Thai restaurant called Spice I Am. We moved on to a few bars, partying until the wee hours.