Day 11: Sydney

Day 11

Summary: Walked around Sydney (The Rocks, Opera house, Royal Botanical Gardens), flew to Auckland, New Zealand

Sunday, January 12th

Since we were up late doing laundry the night before, we slept in until 9am, got ready, and checked out of the hostel at 10am.  We left our bags in the hostel’s storage room so we could explore Sydney until our flight in the evening.

It was an overcast day, a bit chilly, and we could smell smoke from the bushfires.  It wasn’t terribly strong, it just smelled like a wood stove everywhere you went.  While we were out walking, it started to drizzle, so we hoped that rain was coming down where the fires were as well.  We didn’t mind walking in the rain; we had perfect weather all the rest of the days and I would have felt guilty wishing for sun when New South Wales needed rain.

We walked to The Rocks market where a bunch of vendors were set up with different crafts and art.  We bought a deck of cards that are illustrated with various Australian animals playing instruments.  Stephanie Gray is the artist and her company is called Erlenmeyer.  She sells her art on her website as well; her style is really beautiful!

We walked a little more and found the Sydney Opera House!

We considered paying to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge, a popular activity, but we didn’t feel like spending the money.  It ended up being a good decision because it was so foggy we wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway.

There were several aboriginal Australians playing didgeridoos by the harbor.

I was shocked to see that the roof of the opera house is actually tile!  I always imagined it constructed of huge sheets of white metal or something like they use to build planes.  But up close we could see it was more of a mosaic!

We walked over to the nearby Royal Botanical Gardens and I spotted a wild kookaburra!  I was so excited to see one because we love kookaburras.  It was just hanging out on top of a gazebo so I was lucky to spot it!  Maybe they are everywhere, but this was the first one we saw even though we could hear them on our first night.

I loved the roof design on this pavilion; it reminds me of dragon scales!

We tried to wait out the harder rain showers under trees, but ended up just walking around the rose garden anyway and getting wet.

An Australian white ibis.  They were as ubiquitous in Australia as pigeons in New York City.

When crossing the street in a country that drives on the left side of the road, you need to look to the right before crossing.  Even though I always look both ways before crossing, watching out for cars coming from a different direction is trickier than you would think!

We picked up some lunch at a vegan restaurant called Shift Eatery.  Greg had BBQ jackfruit and I had smoked tofu which were both good, but the brownie took the center stage.  They were fudgy and somehow had a layer of solid chocolate on the bottom – how?  I’m not sure, but I’m still dreaming of them.

We planned to eat our lunch back at the hostel, but they must have been having some sewage backup issues because it smelled really bad.  Greg ate his quickly, and I ate half of mine before we grabbed our bags and called an Uber to the airport.

We got there fairly early for our 6pm flight, but we wanted to make sure we had enough time since it was an international flight.  We checked our bags and browsed the shops for flip flops because Greg left his on the train a few days prior.  He was wearing his sneakers and took the sandals out of his bag to get something else, and ended up leaving them underneath his chair.  Luckily there were plenty of options and his lost flip flops were old and worn out.  They let me take my half sandwich through security so I ate that at the gate.

Since we were on the airport Wi-Fi, we could check the messages from our tour group.  Two of the girls had left Cairns that morning to fly back to the United States and got rerouted to Brisbane instead of Sydney due to the fires.  They were able to get a flight to Sydney later in the afternoon and were still there waiting for their international flight.  As we read the messages, it clicked that they were in the international terminal and so were we!  They walked all the way from gate 9 to 56 to see us!  We chatted with them for a bit and had to say goodbye again so we could board our flight to Auckland.

Our flight to New Zealand was 3 hours, and since you had to pay for movies and my phone was dead, I listened to comedy recordings from Jim Gaffigan and Ellen DeGeneres.  It took exactly enough time!  As we touched down in Auckland, Ellen said, “Thank you, it’s been great!” or whatever they say at the end of a comedy special.  Air New Zealand hands out hard candy as you descend and we figured out that it’s to help you clear your ears!  That was a nice touch!

At the airport, we exchanged some money for New Zealand cash and went to get our bags.  We ended up waiting at the wrong carousel!  There had been two recent flights from Sydney and we had only glanced at the board and didn’t realize it.  So luckily our bags were there all along!  We declared our snacks and used hiking boots at customs and they didn’t have any problems with the food, but they had to disinfect our boots!  There was a little grass stuck to the bottom of our boots from hiking here in the US, so they washed them to make sure no seeds were brought over accidentally.   They have to be very careful with stuff like that to protect their island.

We used a payphone to dial the free number for the airport hotel shuttle.  They picked us up and brought us to the Jet Park Airport, which was much nicer than you would expect for a hotel right by the airport.

We finally made it to New Zealand!

Thanks for reading!

-Rebecca

Continue on to day 12!