More Sydney

This is my last post about Sydney since I’m no longer living there. I’m now in Brisbane finishing up the last three weeks of my study abroad. It’s funny to think about how soon I will be home again. I’ll have Brisbane pictures up as soon as I can, but I have to go to an internet café to get online here so it’s hard to post often. My last week in Sydney was spent checking off all the sites I wanted to see that I hadn’t been to yet. One of these was the Chinese garden of friendship in Darling Harbour. It had lots of Chinese pavilions and plants and was just a cool place to wander around.
I visited the Chinese garden on the way to the Anzac bridge. This is Sydney’s other major bridge. It’s quite impressive in its own right and is close to the fish market where many people like to get a cheap, fresh lunch.
We found this place a few blocks from our hotel. Doug, Mike, Jim, and I decided we had to try some kangaroo while we’re here. It wasn’t too bad, a little chewy, but worth it just to say we had tried it.
My roommate, Jesse, and I spent a day off from class playing golf near Bondi Beach. We had been looking for a place and time to play since Wellington so when we noticed this oceanside course we jumped on it. The course was not too impressive because it was just a 9-hole executive course and the grass was pretty dry, but we didn’t mind since it had great views and fit our budget.
Look at that swing! Not too bad for not having played in several months. The only ball I hit in the ocean was on purpose. I really wanted to just tee one up and see how far out there I could get it; I think it was probably my best drive of the day.
The last site on my long Sydney checklist was the Taronga Zoo. I had too see the Australian animals that evaded me in the outback. Besides, who can pass up a zoo where this is the view behind the giraffes? The zoo is one of the best places to view the city from because it is one of the very few lookouts where you can see the opera house, bridge, and skyline. There is even a gondola you can ride from the top of the zoo to the ferry so you can really enjoy the view.
I was lucky enough to see the koalas during the one or two hours they were awake each day. They are some cute little guys, although the zookeeper told us they’re not as friendly as many people believe from their appearance. They have very large claws for climbing the eucalyptus trees.
Every year in Sydney there is an enormous gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade. Over half a million people marched in it this year, and the crowd of both gay and straight people seemed to go on forever. It was basically a huge party in downtown Sydney. There were a few to many assless chaps for most of us, but it was an interesting cultural event.
As promised, I returned for more pictures of the opera house on a nicer day.
Many people don’t realize that the major lookout is in the Royal Botanical Gardens. There are a lot of palm trees and other plants just a few hundred yards from the opera house and the metropolis.
Our last day in Sydney was a free one so during the afternoon several of us decided to enjoy the Sydney beaches one last time. This is a view to Manly beach; it and Bondi beach are the two most famous and most visited ones in the Sydney area. We grilled hamburgers, played football, and body surfed the afternoon away before going into the city one last time that evening. So far everyone loves Brisbane, although we’re still trying to gain our bearings and find all the cool places to be. I’ll do my best to post about that before Friday. That’s when I leave for Cairns and the tropical North. It’s time to see the Great Barrier Reef and the rainforest!

Outback

For our second free weekend in Sydney five of us decided to rent a car and drive west until we found ourselves in what we considered the outback.So here we are in the outback. We didn't make it to the red desert areas because it is close to a twenty hour drive, but we definitely made it to a flat, dry, sparsely populated area. It was remarkably like the non-montainous areas of Wyoming with less people, if you can believe that. One of my friends that traveled with me also said it looked a lot like west Texas. We have decided that the US is a good representation of the majority of the planet with all the different land types we have. The good thing is that in the next three weeks I am going to see two things that really can't be found in America, the rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.
We knew we were getting into the deserted areas and away from the city when we saw signs warning us about kangaroos and various other outback critters.
Speaking of road signs, we saw this funny sign and decided we couldn't pass up an opportunity to do an old person walk in front of it. There are some very interesting road signs in Australia; I would bring one home if I thought I could get it through customs.
We picked up some cheap boomerangs in Sydney before we left. It isn't a complete trip to the outback without tossing a boomerang around. I never caught one when it came back, but I did get the boomerang to return and fly back past me fairly consistently.
For dinner we grilled out. We made a lot of steak and potatoes; it actually worked out quite well. We wanted to build a pit in the dirt, but we never made it far enough away from civilization to feel comfortable building a makeshift grill.
We did get far enough out that we decided to camp out under the stars rather than find a town with open rooms for us to stay in. We brought trash bags to put on the ground and blankets from the hotel to keep us warm. We didn't have a tent, but after all we were in the desert and rain and cold were not too much of an issue. This is at lake Cargelligo about an hour from the border between New South Wales and Southern Australia.
to get to the outback from Sydney you have to cross over a mountain range about eighty kilometers from the coast. It is known as the Great Dividing Range or, in this area, the Blue Mountains . They are a pretty popular tourist destination in themselves, particularly the three sisters. The three sisters are a rock formation that you can see from the Echo Point lookout. On the way toward the outback it was extremely foggy and this was the best picture we could get.
We though it would be a good comparison for when we came back on the return trip to Sydney. The three rocks to the right of me are the formation I was talking about. The people in the bottom right corner are on a platform about twelve feet below me. On the first day we came we couldn't even see that; I actually thought it was a sheer drop from our viewing area. The trip to the outback helped me get a feel for a lot more of Australia than you can get just being in Sydney with all of its tourist destinations. I look forward to being able to walk into an Outback Steakhouse and yell at them for getting things wrong. I am currently in the middle of my last week in Sydney, and I will have a post about that before I leave for Brisbane on Saturday. By the way, my friend, Ryan, recently informed me I can set up my blog so poeple who aren't members of this sight can post on it. So if you would like to leave me any messages or comments you should be able to do it without filling out any information from now on.

Surf Camp

For my first free weekend in Sydney I went to a two day camp to learn to surf. Ten of us walked just down the street in Sydney where we met our surf guides. In total there were about forty students and six guides, but we split up into two groups so we could go to different beaches and keep from crowding each other.This was our transportation for the weekend. It was pretty cozy with all twenty-three seats full and a trailer of surfboards in tow. We went to a group of beaches in Seal Rocks about three and a half hours north of Sydney. We stayed in some cabins about half an hour from all the beaches the surf school uses depending on wind and tide.
This is one of the beaches in the area that we surfed. The waves are pretty small in the picture, but by the time we were done with our lessons on the beach they had grown to a couple of feet which is perfect for beginners.
They provided us with all the gear we needed for the weekend. This is Doug and I with our wetsuits and longboards. The bigger surf boards are good for learning, but they're a pain to haul around both on the beach and in the water.
I'm not sure if this is me surfing or not, but we all looked pretty similar. We would usually do a nose dive or get left behind by a wave. When we were at our best we rode a wave for maybe ten seconds and then swallowed half our weight in saltwater. Surfing is pretty difficult and gets tiring with all the paddling, but we all had a lot of fun anyways.
This is all of the Americans at the camp. In the back is Doug, myself, Mike, Mallory, Jim, and Blake. Up front is Adam, Krista, Emily, and Nikki.
At night there was a lot of socializing back at the cabins. There was a pool and a live band on the second night. We also had the largest flipcup game I have ever seen in my life. It was at least twenty people on each side of the table, and we had to go three rounds to decide the winning team. As you can see we had to play with these big cups instead of solo cups. It really should be illegal and probably is in America, but they're are no solo cups in Oz or NZ.
This is everyone in our surfing group minus two of the guides. The guy on the far right was our third guide although you could probably tell since he is the embodiment of the stereotypical surfer. None of us are amazing surfers after one weekend, but it was incredibly fun so the weekend was definitely a success.