How to cover an amazing 2 weeks spent in New South Wales, Australia and do it justice? I thought I’d write a few articles briefly talking about each bit of my holiday with a few photos to illustrate what I’m talking about. For the final article I’ll show a slick slide-show with all the photos I took over the trip.

We arrived first thing in the morning in Sydney and would have to wait until lunchtime to get into the hotel. This gave us a chance to get a coffee from Starbucks and think about where we wanted to go. Lonely Planet guide in one hand and strong coffee in the other, we looked at the options - and it seemed the obvious choice was to go up the Sydney Tower, the highest point in town measuring in at 250m high.

I don’t know if I was expecting Sydney to be bigger, but I was surprised to find that I could see all the interesting landmarks from the harbour bridge north to the opera house east. The view north is right. It was quite spectacular being able to see the whole city beneath my feet.

After that we had a bite to eat and went down to the Sydney Aquarium which was awesome. There were so many interesting fish, lobsters, eels, sharks, seals and even a crocodile (scary things those) and the underwater tunnels were cool - you could see sharks swimming around eating fish.

After a day or two of wandering around, exploring Sydney, light shopping and sleeping off the jet-lag, we decided to go on one of the open-topped city tours. You could hop on and off at various points and really get to see the whole place. It’s interesting to see the mix of old and new buildings right next to each other:

No trip to Sydney would be complete without a visit to the Sydney Opera House. It didn’t look that impressive from our viewpoint but up close you get to see what an amazing piece of architecture it is!

My good lady was a bit sceptical about how big it was so I took the following shot to remind her that it’s pretty big really. I don’t know what sort of enormous building she was imagining!

And looking back along at the city you’ll agree it’s a super-modern place:

All in all I really liked Sydney. It’s a big city for sure, but it’s not a dirty or unfriendly place so far as I could tell. It’s truly a 24 hour city (our time in a hotel in the centre proved that) and yet you’ve got beaches a short distance away (and the famous Bondi Beach of course). And the sunshine helped too. Lovely!

We spent the last 4 days in Sydney which is a 24 hour city to say the least! Our hotel was smack in the middle of the centre and we can vouch that the place never sleeps - which is more than can be said for us. I think over the last few days we've been asleep more than we've been awake. I reckon it's a combination of jet lag and recovering from work - it really takes it out of you.

Rather than go on about the highlights of Sydney I'll wait until I get home and can upload the pictures - the trouble with my fancy camera is that I need to process all the photos before I can upload them and your average internet cafe doesn't have both photoshop and Capture One Pro installed! One obvious highlight was meeting up with Rosie who's on her world tour just now - she's clearly had a hell of an adventure so far and more to come!

We picked up our hire car yesterday which happens to be one of these huge fake 4×4's that are so popular amongst parents with kids. I'm not sure why we ended up with one as it's about twice the size of anything we need but it does have cruise control and air-con so I'm not complaining! We've come up the coast near Nelson Bay and are staying for the next few nights in a koala-infested forest in a tree house! It's very tranquil although we've not spotted one of these cuddly beasts so far (it is raining so they're probably hiding somewhere). There's a beautiful, quiet beach too that's a mile long and, in true Australian style, is called 'One Mile Beach'.

I've noticed that everything over here is named with a complete lack of imagination. For instance, someone spotted a snake, noticed that it was brown in colour, and named it the 'Brown Snake'. Male kangaroos are renowned for their stink, so they're called 'Stinkers'. It goes on!

Anyway, we're off to continue our quest to find the best cappuccino in Australia - they keep getting better and better and it turns out that Starbucks are at the bottom of the scale here. Later!

Way back in January we thought it would be a nice idea to spend most of December in Australia. It would be cold, wet and miserable in Yorkshire and hot, sunny and relaxing in Australia. Well, it turns out to have been a wise move! It's rained non-stop for days, it's been cold, and apparently it's the exact opposite in Sydney!

Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention we're flying Virgin Upper Class too - which is an even bigger bonus. Not only do we wait for the flight in "The Clubhouse" which is like some futuristic, luxurious apartment, but we get to fly in seats that become fully flat-folding beds. It's a tough life! We're in the lounge just now waiting for our massages (really) and were just sitting next to a rather well known Scottish actor with a fondness for motor bikes. Sadly he was on his way out else I'd have started chatting to him (a lucky escape for him I think).

Anyway, we're off to play pool before our massages so I'll leave you to it. Expect the odd post as we get near an internet connection and I've brought my camera and tripod so I'll have no excuses to come back without a hard-drive full of fantastic photos. Enjoy the rain!