Month: July 2008

Week two of our stay in Sydney is at the Jolly Swagman hostel.

We check in on a Saturday morning – that night while eating our dinner and sharing a bottle of Aussie wine – we find out that Saturday nights at the hostel are Centurion night. Which means we get to watch a bunch of twenty-something’s drink a shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes.

It’s not too long before the first contestant is puking in the bushes, but his competitive spirit has him back in the game in time for the next shot. This guy projectile vomits twice more before the other contestants make a new rule that if you throw up 3 times, you’re out. I’ve never been so thankful for my 30-something wisdom before. A few years ago, that coulda been me.

With 6 Centurions left standing at the end of 100 minutes, everyone decides it’s time to hit a nightclub and we go along, wrapped up in the spirit of hostel living.

We’ve got our own room at the Swagman with a sink, fridge, desk and small TV. The shared bathrooms down the hall and are kept nice and clean. We make our meals in the huge kitchen and eat in the noisy dining area, which also sports an X-box. We are located in Kings Cross; a short walk to the grocery store and to the waterfront where we go for our runs along the seawall, turning around once we hit the Opera House. We spend a lot of time in the Botanical Gardens, strolling, drinking coffee, people watching. We discover a new bird or plant or statue on every visit. The birds here are so loud. And we aren’t the only ones who have noticed it – we were talking to an American at the hostel who had noticed it too. The birds here don’t sing – they scream.

On one afternoon stroll we realized how many bats there are. Hundreds and hundreds of them hanging upside down, wings wrapped around their batty bodies, for their afternoon nap while a few glide effortlessly through the sky. They are creepy and amazing.

We discover a store called Dan Murphy’s. It’s sells alcohol at the lowest prices you have ever seen. Rows and rows of delicious wine (sorted by grape variety, not country). Because they are all Australian (with a few from New Zealand and France) all at amazingly low prices. Same wines at half the cost as they are in Canada – with bigger discounts when you buy 6 bottles. I have died and gone to wine heaven. We leave with 10 bottles – seriously restraining ourselves from buying more. I am giddy.

We celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary while we’re staying at the hostel. Not the most romantic place for it but we pack a picnic and stroll through the gardens, eating our lunch on a sunny patch of lawn overlooking the Opera House. Then we go for a drink at the Opera Bar – enjoying the view of the Harbour Bridge on their fabulous patio.

Wanting to go out for a romantic dinner – we search for a one online only to discover that all of Sydney’s “great romantic” restaurants are so overpriced that I know I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my meal. We opt for a funky dimly lit Thai place called The Opium Den instead. It’s not licensed but only charges a $4 corkage fee for BYO so we’ve brought our own sparkling Australian wine with us and have the most delicious dinner with unbelievable service for a very reasonable price. It’s romance on a budget.

For the next three weeks of our stay, we’ve got a furnished apartment rented in Darlinghurst. We’ve rented it from a girl who has gone to England for three weeks. It’s a great pad in a convenient location. The only thing is, she’s dirty. On day two while I’m curled up with a book and a cup of tea on the couch, Curtis emerges from the bathroom in just his jeans and pink rubber gloves exclaiming, “I’ve lived in dorms, I’ve lived in the bush, and that is the most disgusting bathroom I have ever cleaned.”

A few hours later, we’ve done some rearranging and serious cleaning and made it ours. Our nest for the next three weeks.

Some of the highlights include the Bondi to Coogee walk, attending the opera of Don Giovanni (excellent!), having fish and chips in Manly and visiting the Toronga zoo.

We’ve got one week left here before we hit the road in our camper van. Stay tuned….

Two flights and a 4 hour stop-over in Singapore later, we arrive in Sydney. It’s 7:00 am local time (4:00 am Bangkok time) and we haven’t slept a wink.

We wait for our luggage at carousel 4, watching other people’s luggage pass us by. As the heaps of baggage diminish, our apprehension grows. My biggest fear at every airport carousel is that my bag will be the one that doesn’t appear. But alas, there it is, the very last bag to make it’s way down the shoot and around to where we stand. Curtis’s bag is nowhere to be found.

The Singapore Airlines staff are more than helpful – turns out his bag is still in Bangkok and will arrive tomorrow. They give us $100 and a men’s toiletry kit for our temporary loss. His bag shows up the next day.

We exit the airport into the Sydney sunshine and freeze! It feels so cold here after Asia even though it’s probably about 15 degrees. We get used to it after a couple of days and the temperature rises to a nice mild 20 degrees (we’re in jacket and sweater weather now though after acclimatizing to Asia’s 33 degree heat).

We discovered a great website called Couchsurfing which is a brilliant way to travel. People host travelers, giving them a free place to stay and allowing both parties to have a cultural exchange. When said travelers are back home, they become hosts themselves.

Our first couchsurfing experience is with Jessica. She works at the airport so we wait a couple of hours for her shift to end and drive back with her to her house in North Sydney. After a little breakfast, it’s time for a long nap. We wake up at dinner time and Jess has made homemade pizza dough so we make our own pizzas and settle in for a long chat. Our weekend couchsurf with her turns into a week when she asks us to stay on because we get along so well.

She lives beside a National Park so we go bushwalking and start back onto a regular fitness routine of running every other day. Our excuse in Asia was that it was too hot – but I fear our lazy ways might be more of our true nature.

Sydney makes me homesick for the first few days. Everything about it feels so much like Vancouver – the air, the smells, the neighborhoods. It’s my first serious bout of feeling homesick but luckily it passes soon enough. My parents were supposed to come meet us for a few weeks in Australia but their plans changed so I feel the loss of not seeing them for another 8 months.

We settle in comfortably at Jess’s though and have lots of fun making dinners for each other and staying up late watching movies and chatting. We all go whale watching on Canada Day and spot 5 humpbacks, which is an incredible site. They aren’t shy and seem very playful, splashing around not far from our boat – waving at us and everything!

You can tell when the whale is about to surface because you can see a turquoise glow in the water.

It’s very exciting waiting for them to blow and rise out of the water.On our way back to the harbour we also see a pod of dolphins.

We go for dinner and find out that there is a Canada Day celebration on at one of the pubs so decide we must finish our night off there. There are lots of fellow Canadians, the DJ plays only Canadian artists for a few hours, bottles of Kokanee are on special (and get sold out) and they have a contest where people try to shoot a stuffed beaver into a hockey net.

The best quote of the night goes to Jess when she said, “I accidentally touched tongues with the guy while we were kissing the beaver and I had to apologize for my poutine breath.”

A good time was had by all….