Down Under in Sydney

So after a sleepless night in Singapore airport and a 6 hour flight I arrived into Sydney late in the evening. Since the airport was offering a door to door shuttle service, I decided to take the expensive option and go with that. Hmmm, not so sure it was the best idea as it drove around the world before getting to my hostel, which I discovered afterwards was the wrong place. The hostel has two locations and the address I was given was, of course, the wrong one. GRRRR - you can imagine I was not a happy camper as I had to walk to the other hostel.

Anyway, finally I found my way and found my bed and fell into it. I only had a day in Sydney, so I spent it wandering around the sites, visiting Sydney Harbour, Darling Harbour, Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, George's Street, ... and lots of coffees to keep me awake. It is quite a spectacular city. Its was a wee bit unfortunate though the weather was dull and the Sydney opera house just didn't impress me as I thought it would.



In the evening I took a train out to St. Leonard's to collect my gear from a friend of Mar's, who had very kindly stored it for us, over the last couple of months. So now with a very heavy back pack, it was back to the airport for another night of hard chairs sleep, before getting on the plane to Hobart. Unfortunately this didn't go at all smoothly. My flight was at 6am in the morning which meant check in before 5am and realistically leaving town at about 4am. I thought sleeping in the airport was the lesser of all evils... What I didn't realise until I got to the domestic airport was that it closes at 11pm for 5 hours. I was furious, what was I going to do. I decided to chance my arm in internationals (a train ride away), luckily for me a section of the aiport stayed open, but you needed an international ticket to stay there. Hmmm, would an irish passport suffice. So they let me stay. But I still had to get back to domestic in time for my flight. The train lines close to and only open at 5am. The first train was not till 520, in the morning. It was gonna be close.....