We’re back to Sydney for a busy 1.5 days. We know…we are crazy to fly this much!

The Bridge Climb!!

Climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge was one of the things Emily really wanted to do in Sydney. We wanted to go on the climb at sunset which can book up so we reserved over 2 months in advance. The only bad thing is that the climb isn’t exactly cheap – and the climb occurs rain or shine…

We really hoped the weather would be good, and it turned out to be wonderful! There were sunny blue skies and 75 degrees.

For those not familiar the climb involves hiking the outer structure of the bridge to the top to see amazing views of the city, the harbor, islands, and the ocean.

It’s actually an easy climb as long as you don’t mind heights. You have a safety tether that moves along with you as you walk up a series of ramps, ladders, and steps. Apparently the Sydney government smartly required strict controls on anything falling off the bridge so you are given all sorts of gear to fully secure all items. You’re not permitted to take anything other than your sunglasses – and they are fully strapped on. You’re given a radio headset, handkerchief, rain/fleece gear… everything you could imagine! Everyone also has to wear the same gray suit, apparently required so that climbers don’t distract drivers below since the gray suit blends in with the bridge color. You will see the suits aren’t too stylish!

You can (for a fee of course!) buy a CD with 8 shots of your climb so a few pictures are below.

Our guide was absolutely fantastic, and the views were incredible! This one can be checked off the bucket list now! 🙂

The Sydney Opera House Again – South Pacific Musical
We think we might be the first people who have speed walked from the Sydney Bridge Climb straight over to the Sydney Opera House in 15 min to catch a show!

The timing worked, and we were able to see the South Pacific Musical. The first time I saw this musical was in 1st or 2nd grade when my Dad conducted the high school pit orchestra for this show!

We were excited we had a chance to go to the Opera House twice as we actually saw it in a different part of the opera house. We’re almost regulars now!

Dining
We had two last fun dining experiences in Sydney. One was a raspberry passion fruit tart at a great cafe recommended by Kristen S that was amazing (thanks so much Kristen!) as well as a nice lunch at an area called The Rocks. The Rocks is a really neat part of Sydney as it’s the original settlement so you can see lots of historical houses and a historical church. We ate on the pier by this area and had a great view.

The only other observation we have on dining in Australia in general has been the time it takes! We generally try to keep meals moving, and we’ve had lunches last 2 hours on weekdays! We were shocked that lots of working people went out for lunch and seemed perfectly content that it took that long.

Now off to New Zealand!

Greetings from Western Australia!

When planning this trip we debated a lot on what areas to visit as we had more places we wanted to see than time available! Ryan had read that Perth was rated as one of the top places to live in the world. Our final tipping point for trekking to Perth is that we realized it was wildflower season in Western Australia. I love flowers so I was really excited!

Western Australia isn’t visited nearly as frequently as the east coast because it’s quite a long trek across the country. In fact, we talked to a couple of friends/classmates from Australia who said lots of people in Australia (including them!) had never been to the west coast. You can’t really drive across the country due to a lack of roads (no interstates here!), and it’s like flying from Ohio to California!

After having explored Western Australia, we are SO glad we bought an extra plane ticket to go here! We had an amazing time! Here are our top 7 reasons:

1. Averages 8 hours of sunshine a day… some say the most of anywhere in the world
2. Strongest economic growth in Australia (thanks to an explosion of the mining industry)
3. Wildflowers in the Spring – amazing!
4. Wild Australia – we ran across wild kangaroos, went miles without seeing cars… wow!
5. The seafood is awesome!
6. Gorgeous beaches
7. It takes approximately 1 minute to walk from the Perth Airport arrival area to the car rental. When you return the car, it takes about 1 minute to walk to the departure gate. 🙂

Here are a few highlights from our visit:

The Pinnacles
When you’re at The Pinnacles, it looks eery and makes you think you’re on another planet! In the middle of a desert landscape are wild rock spires surrounded by yellow sand dunes. The rocks stretch for a 10 km loop and then disappear as suddenly as they appear. Apparently the rocks are made mostly of shell and date back to when the area was beneath the sea. The really crazy part for us was that this park wasn’t discovered until the 1960s. How is this possible?! Wow!

We had a particularly wild weather day at the Pinnacles. Although rain isn’t typical in this desert, the main road into the park was closed due to flash flooding! Thankfully most of the park could still be walked so we set out hiking. In the course of 1.5 hours, we had 2 downpours, 60 mph windgusts, and 2 periods of sunshine. It was nuts! We have to give a shout out to our awesome umbrellas (soon to be mentioned in our Tips & Tricks!)! Every other person’s umbrella was flipped inside out while ours withstood the wind. The only issue was that the handle of mine actually bent in the wind and had to bent back. Crazy!

The only small issue we had was making it into another national park we planned to drive through. The park entry was down a red clay road that turned into complete mud. Our little rental Hyundai seemed to be swallowed in mud so we had to turn back. This made for an interesting time cleaning up the car before returning it to the car rental… which may have involved a rather interesting paper towel and squeegee clean at the local BP station by the airport!

Indian Ocean
To reach The Pinnacles you drive along Indian Ocean Drive. This is similar to Pacific Highway 1 and offers fantastic deep blue water views and cliff overlooks. We also saw crazy dunes of white sand located hundreds of meters from the beach and across the road. I guess the winds must be a little strong here!

We stayed right on the Indian Ocean and had a great view! This was our first time putting our hand in the Indian Ocean.

Beautiful Wildflowers
Western Australia is known to have some of the most spectacular wildflowers in the world – and we think it’s true! We managed to put almost 1100 km on our rental car while driving several hours north of Perth.

Western Australia has over 1800 varieties of wildflowers, 60% of which are native to Australia. We spent a full day stopping to hike and driving down highways filled with flowers. We didn’t see any other cars for miles and miles so it was easy to pull of the road to look at the flowers and take pictures. We kept finding new varieties even after several hours of driving! Here are some of the different varieties:

The area is also know for having flowers that literally carpet fields and red rock areas. Here are a few pictures of the fields of flowers (can you tell I like flowers?):

Even sheep and cows got to graze in fields with flowers!

Kangaroos!
I wasn’t sure if we would actually see kangaroos, but we definitely did! Our final count was 11! When driving down a small dirt road to look at flowers early in the morning, we actually came across 4 female kangaroos and their joeys. Thankfully we didn’t hit them (we saw several more that were roadkill!), and I scrambled for the camera to get a couple of shots. They are fast!

We also found that the kangaroos aren’t very exciting to local Western Australian farmers. They can be quite a nuisance!

Cottlesbeach, Perth
Once back in Perth, we took the opportunity to see Cottlesbeach, the most famous beach in Perth. This beach is know for its sunsets as you can see!

King’s Park, Perth
King’s Park is the nicest city park I have ever seen. It is set on a bluff overlooking Perth and hosts a wildflower festival every spring. We timed out our visit to be there during the festival and loved it!

Everlasting flowers are a signature of Western Australia

As are Kangaroo Paws! I loved them!

There were so many great flowers to see!

We found a cafe in the park that had awesome mango smoothies and snapper with a great view over the city.

Dining in Perth
We got to try even more fish in Perth. At one point I realized I had had different types of snapper for 4 meals in a row! We also had an amazing dessert – a warm rhubarb almond tart with passion fruit ice cream on top and a light dusting of chocolate cookie crumbs beside it. It was such a yummy combination!

We are now returning to Sydney to finish off a few activities before heading to New Zealand!

G’Day from Sydney, Australia!

This is the first of two stops in Sydney for us. Why two stops? We wanted to go to too many places in Australia/New Zealand 🙂 Our OneWorld ticket only covers 4 Oceania stops so we have had to use Sydney for our base for another stop in Australia (Perth). For now, here’s our first of two posts on Sydney.

We have had a fabulous time in Sydney! Here are a few highlights from our time here:

Sydney Opera House – The Proms
We were excited when planning the trip that our timing worked to see The Proms concert at Sydney Opera House. The Proms is the same concert series we saw back in July in London.

Given Australia’s link to the British Monarchy, Sydney often hosts a finale concert at the same time as London. The finale concert is extremely popular, and the concert consists of British patriotic music (think US 4th of July Boston Pops concert).

We were surprised to see the level of excitement for the concert! Concertgoers dressed up in British colors and several wore British flag dresses and shirts. In fact, we sat in front of the Queen. 😉 Also, people brought in their own streamers and confetti to throw during the concert!

The entire second half of the concert became a singalong to British songs. I was quite surprised to learn there are words to Pomp and Circumstance, and everyone knows the words! Rule Britannia was also sung several times – I have heard the song before, but didn’t know the words:

“Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!”

We have to say this was the most enthusiastic and ruckus concert we’ve seen in an opera hall! It was a blast!

Taronga Zoo
While we often don’t head to zoos on vacation, we heard that Taronga Zoo is really nice and had a huge exhibit of Australian animals. Locals may not be as interested in the local Australian animals, but we certainly were! We actually skipped over most of the typical zoo animals and spent all of our time in the Australian area.

We couldn’t believe how close you could get to the animals! There were areas where you could go directly into an area with kangaroos, emu, and wallaby – with no gates between you and the animals! The kangaroos here were very calm, but we have read that kangaroos in the wild have been known to attack if they are surprised or scared. The emus were crazy – they paced constantly around the area!

There were koalas – and one was actually awake and moving around so we got some pictures.

We also got to see Tasmanian Devils, which are rapidly dying due to the spread of oral cancerous tumors. We also saw crocodiles (yikes – the ones here can be 10 feet long!), black swans, local penguins, and lots of colorful birds.

The real Tasmanian Devil!

The zoo has a really nice design and reminded us of the San Diego Zoo. You take a ferry across from Sydney and then catch a gondola that runs above the zoo to the entrance. The zoo then runs downhill so you have beautiful views over the Sydney Harbor as well as an easy walk down the hill for your visit!

Bondi Beach
Bondi Beach is one of Sydney’s most popular beaches. Since it’s early spring in Sydney, we weren’t expecting the beach to be very busy. We were surprised to see lots of surfers out in the water! We enjoyed a great lunch at a historic beach club and restaurant called Icebergs that opened when the beach first became popular in 1929.

The views and the food (more seafood!) were both fantastic! We finished off our time with a few kilometers of a popular coastal walk that had a series of rock cliffs and more beaches. It reminded us of La Jolla, California. I also believe that this is the inspiration behind Apple’s Bondi Blue iMacs of the late 1990’s 🙂

Food!
We’ve continued to enjoy the food in Australia! We have both been eating lots of seafood and have had several types we’ve never had before such as King Fish and Rock Fish.

We have also loved all of the passionfruit desserts. We’ve had a passionfruit banana cupcake as well as an awesome dessert called passionfruit Pavlova. It’s apparently a local favorite and consists of a meringue crust with cream that’s covered in passionfruit puree. It was delicious!

After our quick stop in Sydney we are heading to Perth in Western Australia to see the wild flowers and one of the fastest growing parts of Australia.

G’Day Mate!

Our next stop in Australia allowed us to utilize the beauty of the Round the World airline ticket. The ticket is fixed price and allows you to fly anywhere that a OneWorld code share flight is available. As a result you can fly into out of the way, small airports that are expensive to reach for no extra cost. This worked out really well as we wanted to go from Cairns (Great Barrier Reef area) to see Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in the Outback

Getting to the Uluru can be difficult as the most economical city to fly into is located about 5 hours away and involves a long desert drive that is only recommended for daylight hours due to lots of wildlife you can hit on the way! With our Round the World ticket, we were able to fly directly into Ayers Rock, a tiny airport with only 2 gates located about 10 minutes from Uluru. This saved us tons of time and driving!

So what is Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park?
In case you aren’t familiar, Uluru is a huge monolith in the middle of the Outback. The surrounding area is completely flat for hundreds of miles so it’s particularly spectacular to see this huge monolith in the middle of the dessert. It looks like it was just dropped into the landscape! The color of the monolith is also quite intriguing, particularly at sunrise and sunset, because the rock is red and seems to glow as the sun rises and sets.

PB&J
There were no extravagant meals here! There is only one small town area (and by small, I mean really, really small) so the food options are quite limited and not known to be very good. So…. our first stop was at the local IGA grocery store to pick up food for the next 4 meals. We enjoyed classics like PB&J, apples, and granola bars. 🙂

Kata Tjunta
Kata Tjunta, also known as “The Olgas,” is the sister monolith of Uluru. While it is lesser known, we had read that it is often more preferred than Uluru (and we now agree!).

It was unusually hot when we visited so we were worried the trail might shut down as it closes at 97 degrees. Thankfully it was *only* 95 degrees so we just made it past the cutoff! Our favorite hike was the Valley of the Winds, which is an 8 km hike that takes you up through the rocks of the Olgas and provides some great views.

We were also surprised and happy to see that there were wildflowers still blooming! It is early spring in Australia so we were treated with beautiful yellow, red, white, and purple flowers throughout the hike. It was great!!

Flies, Flies, and More Flies
The less exciting part about visiting Uluru-Kata Tjuta is that it is notorious for having horrible flies. This isn’t exactly advertised on the tourism website ;), but Ryan discovered it while reading forums about visiting. Thankfully, we read there is a perfect solution – Fly nets that you could buy at IGA! Although these nets look terrible, they were a complete lifesaver. The flies go straight for your eyes and ears so it was quite unpleasant without them. With the nets it was great!

In fact, we paused only a couple of times while hiking to take off our nets for pictures. Once we had the nets off, we took the pictures as fast as we possibly could to get the nets back on ASAP!

Sunset at The Olgas
The Olgas are known for being particularly striking at sunset so we staked out a spot and enjoyed a magnificent view!

PS from Ryan: While waiting for sunset, lots of tourists were standing on this post and jumping off to take pictures. Emily joined in this fun… and this picture makes me laugh 🙂

Here are a few pictures of the rock leading up to sunset

And then here is the rock at sunset – notice the change in color!

Monopoly Pricing 101
The hotels for Uluru-Kata Tjuta were the most maddening of the trip. Our hotel night had the dubious honors of being one of the worst rooms and most expensive rooms all in one!

It’s interesting – one resort company owns all of the properties at the park. It seems that development has been limited and the nearest towns of any real size are hours away so this one company has a complete monopoly on pricing. This results in options that range from Really Poor –> Poor –> Fair –> Average, with average being almost $1000 PER NIGHT!! In fact, the Ritz Carlton in Japan was significantly cheaper than our night in Uluru-Kata Tjuta. 😦

We sprung for the dorm style option that had its own bathroom. Unfortunately these only came in 4 bunk bed rooms… so we could have invited in several friends! Ryan wasn’t too thrilled when he realized that he was too long for the bed but the good news is that the room was decently clean (my priority). They even had a can fly/mosquito killer there for you! Not exactly a value… but hey… limited options gives maximum pricing power!

Uluru
We kicked off our morning bright and early to see sunrise at Uluru. Here are a few shots:

We spent the rest of the morning hiking around the base of the rock and looking at wildflowers. It is not recommended to hike to the top of Uluru for several reasons – It’s an aboriginal sacred ground, you have to hold a chain all the way up the steep face, and the rock becomes dangerous with wind or rain. Today access was fully blocked due to high winds. We were quite content with our base walk!

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After a great morning exporing Uluru, we headed back to the Ayers Rock airport. We were limited to 200 km before a per km surcharge kicked in on the rental car (seemed to be the norm for every car rental here!). We were proud of our utilization… 196 km driven!

We’re now on the way to Sydney!

Greetings from the Land Down Under!

After leaving Hong Kong, we took a direct flight to Cairns, Australia, which is home to the Great Barrier Reef. We were very surprised that you could fly to Cairns from Hong Kong, but it worked out very well for us!

The “Wrong” Side of the Road
After landing in Cairns, we picked up our rental car and hit the road. Since Australians drive on the left side of the road, it was an interesting and comical experience! On the plane I had been mentally walking myself through driving on the left, which way to look when turning, etc. When we got to the lot and started the car, I felt prepared and ready to go. The one thing I had not anticipated was that the knobs for the blinker and the windshield wiper controls would be inverted! We must have looked like complete morons pulling up to stop signs with our windshield wipers going! Just when you thought you had it and got comfortable…. instincts kicked in and suddenly your windshield was getting cleaned again! 😉

The one other fun experience was driving in round-abouts. After having spent 5 weeks in Europe driving, we have become “pros” at roundabouts. However… going through roundabouts backwards was an entirely new experience!

Great Barrier Reef
We heard that a town called Port Douglas (thanks Kristen S!), located about 1 hour north of Cairns, was a bit less touristy and had great reefs nearby so we stayed there. This was great advice!

To get out to the Great Barrier Reef, we took a 2 hour boat trip. While there are sections of the reef closer to the shore, the reef near the shore isn’t nearly as pretty as the outer reefs due to environmental damage over the years.

To see the reef firsthand we spent the day snorkeling in 3 locations on the reef. It was amazing! While the water was a bit cool (it’s the equivalent of early March here), we had wetsuits. While we didn’t look too stylish, we were quite thankful for the warm suit!

We were able to float just a few inches above the reef and got to see incredible fish and the beautiful reef! We even got to see the “Finding Nemo” fish! We had an underwater camera with us so we were able to get lots of pictures. Based on lots of positive reviews, we went with the Sony TX30 camera and found that it works great! Here are a few of the pictures we took:

On our way back to port, a humpback whale and her baby were spotted. It’s whale migration season here in Australia so it was a nice surprise to see whales!

Daintree Rainforest
Just north of Port Douglas lies the Daintree Rainforest. At a point called Cape Tribulation this rainforest actually comes all the way to the ocean and touches the Great Barrier Reef.

While we saw a small bit of rainforest while in Brazil, we really haven’t been in a full rainforest so it was neat to see. We saw lots of neat plants and animals, including a huge lizard (see pic below!), and a tree only found in the Daintree.

Port Douglas
We enjoyed the town of Port Douglas a lot! On our first day we stopped at a local farmer’s market. They had fantastic fruit juices – I had fresh pineapples crushed and Ryan enjoyed fresh mango juice. We also picked up some locally grown oranges as well as macadamia nuts. I absolutely love mangoes, pineapple, and macadamia nuts so this was awesome for me!

These foods also crossed over into several dishes that we had. I had barramundi fish (so fresh and good!) for dinner every day I was here, and I loved the mango, pineapple, and tomato salsas that were used. Ryan has enjoyed the huge tiger prawns frequently served here as well as the kangaroo fillet he ate!

We also found mango sorbet, passion fruit sorbet, and macadamia nut ice cream. Wow!

Cairns
We finished off our time in the Queensland area with dinner in Cairns on the pier – barrimundi fish again!

Other Random Observations from Australia vs. Other Countries
One really interesting thing that we have noticed while quickly traveling around the world is that each culture is very unique and different (this sounds obvious, but is very apparent when you experience this first hand!). It’s been very apparent what different cultures emphasize and where different people put their focus. In particular, we’ve noticed very big differences in trends such as hotel quality, service, cleanliness focus, attention to time/detail, credit card usage, carry on luggage, airport security, and internet availability.

– Across every country the locals we have met have been so friendly to us. In particular, people have been especially nice when we’ve had one to one conversations with them. This has been so nice!

– Lots of things are sold a la carte in Australia (quite different than Europe prix fixe menus!). Here are a few examples:
> Bread isn’t usually included in meals (it’s $8-10 so I’m much less tempted by carbs :))
> Internet is often not free (charged often by min or 15 min increments!)
> Using your credit card almost always results in paying a 1.5% – 3% transaction fee (I haven’t used cash this much in years!)

– Airport regulations are interesting. By now, we’re fairly seasoned travelers. The most interesting for us has been that our flight from Hong Kong to Australia rechecked our bags at the plane and threw away all water that was bought inside airport security gates. While you can’t bring bottles of water through the normal airport security checkpoint, this is the only place in the world where we’ve seen drinks purchased inside security taken away. Our conclusion was that Australia security must be quite high… but we were surprised again. On two flights no one ever asked to see an ID (not at the check-in gate, not at security, not when boarding the plane…) Hmmm….. strange….plus it was September 11th one of the days!

We’ve also noticed carry-on luggage differences. In the US, Asia, & Europe you can generally carry on 10-15 kg plus a personal item. In Australia and New Zealand you only get 7 kg for both items!!! Yikes! Our red bags definitely had to be checked which is generally free (as long as you don’t fly Jet Star).

– We have loved the outdoor activities and scenery in Australia – definitely amazing and some of the best we’ve seen!

– The food is expensive in Australia (bread at dinner is $8-$10, salads and dessert are often about $20 each) but better than expected. The fish, salads, and fresh fruit have been fantastic! Macadamia nuts are also one of my favorites so it’s been great!

We’re now headed to Ayers Rock in the Outback! Bye for now!