bye bye Sydney

We're leaving Sydney sundaymorning! After one and a half week of getting ourselves organised and running around in and around Sydney and it's beaches we're ready to start our journey to the south of Australia. Sundaymorning we'll be taking the train out of Sydney and towards the Blue Mountains, a national park with impressive sights (so we've been told...) and some nice hikingroutes. We'll be staying there at least 2 days on a campingsite in the middle of the park. Really looking forward to that. After that we'll be heading for the Australian capitol city Canberra, and then on to Melbourne. From there we'll be only a short flight away from Tasmania.

Feeling a bit broke for the moment though... A few days ago I had to cough up 1200 australian dollars for a greyhound busspass. It's a good investment though. With that busspass we can use the greyhound busservices to get anywhere in eastern and central Australia (also plenty of places in the outback). We decided after long deliberation that buying a car would be too much of a risk (extra costs for services and fuel, braking down in the middle of nowhere, crashing it fresh from the carsalesyard, stocking up on 100 liter of water when we drive through the nowheresland of central australia, ... and not to forget: driving on the left :) ). At least with the busspass we're guaranteed to get back in Sydney in time to catch our flight back home... and in one piece. We'll probably rent a car once in a while just to explore the areas and national parks around the cities.
Another thing that cost us loads of money was our tent... We bought it with a major discount, but it sure didn't feel like it. It's a good one though, and it is sure to keep us dry, warm and protected for the next 9 months and long after that.

Anyway... the last few days we did stuff like sitting on the beach, going for a swim (well... not really swimming... more like riding the enormous waves the ocean throughs at you), walking around sydney and it's impressive parks, taking a harbour CRUISE (sounds impressive huh? The Jetset is our standard :) ), going to the zoo (only to discover that practicaly all the animals were sunbathing and not moving an inch all day... even a massive mountainlion looks boring when it's snoring...), walking around Watson's Bay (where the first colonists arrived) and it's oceancliffs and just generally getting stuff done (registering for taxfilenumber, getting our australian bankcards to work, keeping an eye out for work in the area of Melbourne, ...).

Great, my internettime in this internetcafe is just about finished, so I'm going to have to cut this update here. Keep those emails and comments coming, it's nice to hear how things are going back in Belgium.