Our trip to
Sydney, what can i say? It was only for the weekend and by Sunday morning we were all ready to head back home. We left Thursday night, driving from the Gold Coast to Sydney on a coach bus...with no bathroom. Unfortunately not everyone understood the concept that if you drink your going to have to use the bathroom. We had to stop within the first 30 minutes...and that was only the first of many, especially when someone sitting in the back puked all over the floor. We had to sit and smell it for the remaining 9 hours.
We finally made it to the hostel, which smelled so bad when we walked in that I contemplated staying at another place. Unfortunately the weather wasn't so great for our first day in Sydney, especially for our walking tour around the city. We walked around seeing different churches, the botanical gardens, and the bench where
Forrest Gump was filmed.
After wandering around, we walked our way to the bottom of the city where the
Sydney Opera house is. We spent time taking pictures and roaming around the inside and in the gift shop. A few girls actually bought tickets to an Opera that night and said it was very entertaining. With the weather not being so great, most of the pictures came out grey, but we still had fun and it was warm with no rain.
We then made our way to the
Harbour Bridge, which is directly behind the Sydney Opera house. Luckily I didn't book the bridge walk because even walking up to the bridge viewing platform was enough of a workout. Stairs, stairs, stairs, and more stairs to the look out location which is said to be half the height of the bridges' total height. Our entire group was up their with us to the platform was extremely crowded and difficult to walk around but we were able to see a lot and get some fun pictures.
We had the afternoon to our selves and were able to walk around the market place, which had the cheapest clothing and costumes, which was perfect for the Halloween cruise! There were about 300 people on our Halloween cruise and dressed up in all types of crazy costumes, it was our group from
BOND, students from
Griffith and random people who bought tickets. It was quite a time.
Saturday was our big trip to the
Blue Mountains. It was a long drive up but really beautiful sights. It was also a lot bigger than I expected, there are small towns, schools and even a college. There's a community so it's not like a national park. We had 4 destinations that we were visiting and had to drive between all of them, gave us all a break from all the stairs we had to climb. We first went to a beautiful look out and then went to visit the
three sisters, which were three large rocks that you had to walk down very narrow steps to, which was very difficult because there were a lot of people that day and the stairs could only fit one at a time. The story was that 2 aboriginal tribes were fighting because the three sisters fell in love with 3 brothers from the other tribe, and so they were set in stone. Apparently the sisters bring good luck if you touch them.
We were told we would be going to a grotto and cliff jumping, but unfortunately that was cancelled due to the weather. Although the weather seemed to be fine. The most memorable part of this trip and probably of all of Australia is that our two guy friends,
"The Ryans" called us and said "were on the Harbour Bridge!" They flew to Sydney for the night to surprise us! We were all so stunned and didn't believe them until we actually saw them later that night. We all celebrated by going to a club that our trip was hosting and had a great time...unfortunately filled with some interesting drama. The boys left early the next day and we packed our things up and got back on the bus to go back to
BOND but had a day full of activities on the way. We first took a ferry to
Manly beach where we were going to lay out and catch some rays but it was very windy and not too warm so we decided to do some souvenir shopping for our families.
We also stumbled upon the cutest 10 yr old who was playing his guitar in the middle of the square and singing a wide range of songs. He was amazing! Definitely going to be famous one day.
Next we drove to
Bronte beach and did the famous long walk to
Bondi beach. There also happened to be an art exhibition going on so there were art works set up all along the walk. It was really crowded as well, made the walk a lot slower. But the sun had come out and there were great places to take pictures. We also got a lot more gifts and I was able to find one for everyone back home.
The beaches were the last destinations of Sydney and to end the trip the funniest thing happened. A girl went on the
Griffith bus to use their bathroom and while she was in there the bus drove off! We were all dying of laughter. Unfortunately one of the tour guides came on the bus and told us that at the last minute he had told her not to do so and had her go to another restroom. But if it had actually happened, our trip would have had the most interesting start and finish!
