After we tried for a long time to get a couchsurfer in Sydney and didn’t succeed (understandable cause it was Christmas), we booked a room in an apartment through AirBnb (was indeed cheaper than the worst hostel in Sydney). The apartment was quite central (10min to the CBD) and our hosts also very friendly. They didn’t live in the same apartment as expected, but had an own apartment on the other side of the floor. We realized that it is an apartment with three bedrooms and the renters own the apartment only to make money via AirBnb. Well…
After the first evening at Sydney Harbour and a half crossing of the Harbour Bridge, we fell exhausted to bed. Yeah, a BED, the first real bed since 3 weeks. The next day, the next guests arrived, Irene and Pier from Italy who spent the last 20 months in New Zealand and plan to stay for one year in Australia. We immediately became friends and gave each other hints for Australia and New Zealand, respectively. Additionally we planned to prepare a Christmas dinner together. The next two days we continued exploring Sydney: the Opera House, the Botanic Garden with the Mrs Macquaries Point from which one has a great view on Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Additionally, we participated in an interesting free guided tour in the CBD of Sydney. It turned out again that Australians (generally, but mainly historical interested people) are so proud of their Australian history. The voice of our guide almost cracked when she proudly told us about the oldest still existing building from the colonial days. Believe it or not, it is 150 years old. After we saw a couple of European cities (e.g. churches in Rome being around 2000 years old), we only could smile a bit about her.
Christmas arrived! But nobody of us had a Christmas feeling: Christmas in summer, horrible colourful blinking decoration and NO hot wine… So we decided to prepare Fondue together with Irene and Pier to get at least a bit of a Christmas feeling (in Germany, we always have Fondue for Christmas or NYE). After the necessary big shopping (at Aldi) we decided to make the most out of the rainy weather and went to the cinema before having Christmas dinner. Actually we planned to watch “The Hobbit”, but the release date in Australia was boxing day (26th), so instead we watched “Hunger Games”. The fondue in the evening was the same way as it is in Germany: dangerous but delicious :-). Our kitchen had not the right equipment to prepare a proper fondue, why our Italians bought a cheap fondue set in a second hand shop. Unfortunately it was for chocolate out of ceramic with a candle which is apparently not the best choice if you want to cook with boiling oil… Here a short summary: The oil was either too hot or too cold, why we always re-boiled it on the stove. That means we had to refill the cold oil from the ceramic pot to a regular pot and reversed with the boiled oil. It worked twice before the table caught fire… Ok that’s a joke, but we had boiling oil on the wooden table. That was the point it became a bit too dangerous for our opinions, why we just fried the meat on the stove. Anyway it was delicious as we had different sauces and salad. Additionally, we had wine and listened to Christmas songs. Almost perfect 😉
Finally the weather became a bit better, why we stayed the following two days at the beach. For Australian/American Christmas day (25th December) we went to the world famous Bondi beach. Since we saw all the beautiful beaches at the west and south coast, we were a bit disappointed (maybe we just expected too much). The beach was very active (incl. some Australians dressed up as Santa Claus), but we’re still wondering why it is that famous… Bondi is a city beach, with hotels and all the typical tourist stuff in the background. Even surfer might only come there due to its proximity to the city, because it’s so crowded that it has to be difficult to catch a good wave (However, the waves looked quite well). For the Boxing Day we decided to go to Manly Beach. Some Australians told us before it’s the nicer one of these two. To cut the story short, definitely better than Bondi, but not comparable to Lucky Bay in Esperance as an example. Maybe the best part of Manly is the drive on the ferry through the Harbour in order to reach the beach.
We spent our last two days in Sydney with some organisational things for the NYE festival (buying a tent, organising the drive and the next travels, but have a look on the next chapter). We were also able to watch a firework in Darling Harbour, which takes place every week for the 6 weeks before Christmas. Australians have some weird ideas, but on the other hand Sydney is just too crowded during that time of the year. Every evening another cruiser is arriving, flooding the Harbour and the city with thousands of people (most of them are Chinese, of course). One has to entertain this crowd… Anyway, we were quite happy that we didn’t “have to” stay in Sydney for NYE, even though we missed the world famous firework.
Once again we could experience the kindness of Australians: On our last day we crossed the Harbour Bridge completely in order to enjoy the view on the Opera House from a park on the other side. Soon after we arrived there were 3 Australians and a black-whited Collie (!!!) choosing the bench next to us. Of course, Tobi couldn’t resist to ask them if it was a Collie, even though we haven’t seen this coloration before and we started an almost 1 hour conversation with them. Two of them were twins working as stewardesses and the other one works as a consultant for perfume. Not to forget the ten years old deaf collie. We had so much fun even though we were completely stranger for each other…
Last but not least, we tried to meet our want for some cultural activity, why we planned to visit some of the museums. We gave the idea a miss after the visit of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was apparently written as one of Sydney’s highlights in our tourist guide. To say it calm, absolutely not spectacular. In order to do a first short summarize: Australia is absolutely beautiful, the Australians are super nice and fun but the cities are definitely not the highlights of the country. Whoever may plan a visit to Australia, don’t spend too much time in the cities, it’s definitely enough to visit them only a couple of days!