I’ve been in Sydney since returning from New Zealand. To be honest, apart from catching up with some of the people I met in New Zealand, I haven’t been doing very much and it feels like I’m just killing time before my flight to Tokyo.
I think I’ve done everything I’d planned on doing in Australia, and seeing as I’m departing from Cairns and have to travel up the coast again anyway, I’ve decided to go back to Magnetic Island for a while.
I’m hoping to do an Advanced Open Water diving course while I’m there, but even if it doesn’t go ahead, I think I’d prefer to kill time on a small island than in Australia’s biggest city!
I’ve been back in Sydney for a couple of weeks now, mostly trying to sort out what I’m going to do for the next few months. I was pretty much set until a few days ago when I tried to confirm new dates for my flights back to Aberdeen (via Tokyo).
It seems that my travel agent has sold me an open ticket that isn’t all that open. I can make changes to my flights, but not the changes I actually want to make! For example, Qantas tell me that the Sydney to Tokyo flight on the date I requested is full, but their website tells me that there are plenty of economy seats still available. Aparently these seats are part of a sale, and not available to customers who have already booked, the end result being that I had to cancel the remaining portion of my ticket, and book new flights myself. To say I’m not very happy about that is an understatement.
I’m thinking my travel agent is mostly at fault here, but I can’t help think that Qantas are being a little unreasonable too.
Anyway, I’m now flying to Tokyo from Cairns, which isn’t so bad as I’d planned to head up that way again to do some diving. Hopefully the weather will have cooled a little by the end of March! As a result of all these changes, I’m planning on heading over to New Zealand next week until the beginning of March.
New Zealand was always a bit of an after-thought on this trip. It was somewhere I really wanted to visit, but dependent on whether I had the time and money to do it. I’ve got a rough idea of what I’d like to see, but no real idea about how long it will take to get around. I travelled from Cairns to Sydney in around seven weeks, so hopefully five will be enough for New Zealand.
After almost 3-months, I’m leaving Geelong this afternoon and flying back up to Sydney. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do once I get there yet, but getting a job is pretty low on the list of priorities at the moment.
I’m flying out to Tokyo at the end of March, and I want to spend some time in New Zealand before I leave, so that only really leaves me with 6-8 weeks in Australia. Even if I found a job tomorrow, I don’t think there would be much point in it!
Instead, I’m planning on heading back up to Magnetic Island to get my SSI Advanced diving certificate, then maybe up to Cairns to dive at the Great Barrier Reef, if I can stand the tropical heat, that is!
Other than that, I’ll most likely just be catching up with the guys that stayed in Sydney. Possibly fly out to Perth to see Martin.
If I can do all that, I’ll have seen more of Australia than a lot of Australians!
Over the last 8 weeks or so I’ve travelled roughly 3000km on the road from Cairns to Sydney; living out of a backpack and only staying in one place for a few nights. Now I’m back in where I started in Geelong and slowly adjusting to things like having my own room, a usable kitchen, and not being charged by the minute to connect to the Internet!
I arrived in Sydney by bus on Thursday evening, and spent the weekend catching up with most of (Sorry, Laura and Bryony) the rest of the OzIntro group who decided to settle there. The highlight of the weekend was the “Opening” game of the Rugby League World Cup between Australia and New Zealand on Sunday night. As a neutral fan, the game wasn’t anywhere near as close as I’d hoped, but it was exciting to see two of the best teams in the world fighting it out against each other! Australia ended up dominating the game and ran out winners, 30 – 6. The next afternoon I flew down to Avalon to be met again by my friend Meg, who’s been kind enough to put me up for a while even though she’s currently in the process of selling her house!
So now that the East coast is finished I have to get back to the more serious business of finding a job and somewhere more permanent to live. I saw a few promising-looking recruitment adverts while I was coming down the coast, hopefully I’ll have some success down here!
Yesterday, the OzIntro group travelled to the Blue Mountains (about an hour away from Sydney) and spent the day walking through the bush.
I arrived safely in Sydney on Sunday afternoon. Just to prove it, I’ll post some photos from around the city.
This time next week (Give or take a few hours) I’ll be leaving Aberdeen and flying off to Australia. I’m staying in Melbourne for a week then heading up to Sydney for a while. I visited Melbourne in August a few years ago, so I have a rough idea of what to expect weather-wise there, but Sydney is completely unknown to me.
After a searching for a while, I found the Sydney Webcam site. It shows four cameras with different views of the city, updated every minute. At the end of each day, all of the still photos captured from the harbour camera are compiled into a time-lapse video and uploaded onto the site. The technical information behind it all is pretty cool too! Well I thought so anyway.
In a little under 2 weeks I’m heading off to Australia for the next nine months or so on a Working Holiday Visa. It’s not my first time travelling down there. A few years ago I spent a couple of weeks with friends around the Melbourne area, and took another week to see Uluru and travel to Alice Springs. This time, after a brief stay with the friends in Melbourne, I’m spending a week in Sydney with a group organised by OzIntro.
Basically, OzIntro help with getting visas, accommodation, health care, and all the rest sorted before you leave home. Organised tours aren’t really my thing, and companies like OzIntro aren’t really doing anything that I couldn’t do myself, but after spending most of my first month in Dublin trying to fix tax benefits and open bank accounts the opportunity to get as much as possible up and running before I leave proved too good to pass up! Another reason is that you’re part of a group of people who all arrive at the same time, and are in much the same position. I’ve been in touch with a few of them already and they seem like a good lot. I have no plans at all after my first week in Sydney (This seems to be a common theme throughout the group!), but I’m sure that before the week is over something will come together!
