As I mentioned back in Kuala Lumpur, Eloise has never really been one for big cities. However, on our world tour in 2002 we had a couple of nights stopover in Sydney before heading for the Gold Coast and northern Queensland, and I felt sure that she would enjoy the relaxed atmosphere of Darling Harbour and the waterfront restaurants and bars . It's strange how memories can get warped over time, and I was convinced that I remembered walking along George Street looking in all the shops and had told Eloise that she would be in for a shopping experience not unlike that of Oxford Street in London. Quite where I got this memory from, I have no idea - Sydney has always been altogether more relaxed than London about everything, and there certainly wasn't anywhere even vaguely reminiscent of Oxford Street (although there actually is a street called Oxford Street in Sydney, just to confuse matters). I felt ever so slightly foolish, walking along George Street with Eloise, waiting for the packed shopping areas to turn up and becoming more and more confused. I still have no idea where I was thinking of. In terms of shopping, Sydney doesn't really seem to have any particularly centralised shopping districts - at least, not in the same way as we think of shopping areas back home. Rather, Australian towns and cities usually have a relaxed pedestrianised mall which runs for a couple of blocks and contains smaller shops and perhaps one or two department stores. Serious shopping in Sydney seems to be contained in a couple of indoor shopping centres rather than on the streets themselves, which does give the city a more relaxed feel but sometimes means you can wander for quite a while wondering where all the shops are.

On our first night, I left Eloise to sleep off the flight in our hotel room and went out to get my bearings and find the local store. After wandering around for some time I returned with nothing more than the location of a small 7-11 style convenience store on the corner, and a story about a young man who called across the street to ask me if I knew the way to Paddington and, when I called back that I was a tourist here myself, went on to suggest that I might like to think about getting a hair cut. Apparently everyone's a critic, even on the other side of the world.

One thing that is very easy to do in Sydney is to get onto any number of organised tours of natural attractions in the area, by jumping on a coach at the modern and highly tourist oriented Sydney coach station. From here, if you so wish, you can even embark on a month long tour of the entire country - assuming, of course, you've brought a few sacks of gold with you to pay for such an extravagance. Although the Blue Mountains do sound as though they should be something out of a fantasy novel by the likes of Tolkein, they are in fact a collection of sandstone ridges to the west of Sydney, and Eloise and I got up early on our second day and made our way to the coach station to join a sightseeing tour. The Blue Mountains are not, however,everything they seem. In the well versed Australian tradition of making everything sound as grand as possible in the hope that people will come from far and wide, the only part of the Blue Mountains which has anything to do with mountains is, in fact, the name. What we actually have here is an extraordinarily large plateau into which nature has stamped its mark by carving out gorges nearly three quarters of a kilometre deep.

The small town of Katoomba is home to a number of attractions to which tourists flock waving large quantities of cash, of which by far the most well known is the Scenic Railway. Part of the larger and even more grandly named Scenic World, the railway claims to be the steepest cable-pulled funicular in the world - and having ridden it twice, once on my first tour of Australia back in 1995 and again on my tour with Eloise in 2002, I would be inclined to agree. I have, however, also ridden on a cable railway with a similar claim in the United States - so I usually take these things with a pinch of salt. All the same, if you want to come as close as any normal person is ever likely to come to experiencing G force in an earth-based vehicle, you would do worse than ride the Katoomba Scenic Railway! Originally constructed as an aid to coal mining operations in the nineteenth century, the track runs down the cliff at an incline of 52 degrees over a four hundred metre distance - something which really does have to be experienced. The train trundles down the gorge at a leisurely pace - but you still feel a little as though you may well be about to die, especially when you leave the safety of the station and, after a few seconds, the surrounding rock walls of the tunnel disappear and you emerge into the forest on the edge of the cliff and feel as though you're surrounded by sky and dropping at an alarming rate down towards the bottom of the gorge. It's all an illusion, of course, and the train is being pulled slowly along on a cable, but it can be quite an alarming experience if you're not expecting it.

As is the case in Kuranda, of which I will be writing later in the book, visitors to the Blue Mountains can travel one way on the railway and return by cable car on the originally named Scenic Skyway. Already offering a death defying but beautifully peaceful journey across the gorge and over the Katoomba Falls, the latest innovation to the cable car system has been to completely replace all the old cars, originally installed in 1958, with a state of the art 84 person cabin. The new Skyway apparently boasts an electrostatic glass floor which has the disturbing habit of becoming slowly more transparent as the cabin makes its way across the gorge, until many of the passengers are seemingly defying gravity and hovering in the air above a two hundred metre drop. It was often difficult to get people of a slightly nervous disposition to ride in a cable car before - if you have friends like this and want to persuade them that a ride on the Katoomba Scenic Skyway is a great way to spend the afternoon, it's probably best not to mention that there won't appear to be a floor to stand on by the time you're half way across!

At the base of the railway, it's possible to follow a winding walkway along the cliff face and through the forest to the base station of the Skyway. This walk takes visitors across the Katoomba Falls, where many stand along the bridge and look over the edge and get ever so slightly wet. Along the way, you can even stop off for a sip of Blue Mountains spring water at the Blue Mountains spring. And after the descent on the railway, a relaxing walk in the forest is probably just what most people need.

Not content with scaring the willies out of tourists by plummeting them down the gorge on a 52 degree incline or taking the floor away while they're innocently making their way across it on a cable car trying to enjoy the waterfall, by the time I returned to the Blue Mountains in 2002 Scenic World had also spent millions of dollars on creating their latest attraction - the Sceniscender. This is not, as the name might suggest, any sort of activity which involves sending scenic postcards, but rather an altogether more spectacular way of descending from the shop to the bottom of the gorge two hundred metres below. Hence the name - a contraction of "Scenic Descender". The Sceniscender claims to be the steepest cable car in the world in the same way as the railway is the steepest funicular - it really does seem as though Katoomba has something of a penchant for getting people up and down as fast as possible.

The most famous natural attraction of the Blue Mountains is probably the so-called Three Sisters. The guides, always happy to tell tall tales, will tell you the story of three sisters - Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo - who entered into a forbidden love with men from another local tribe. In the battle that followed, the tribal elders usedgreat magic to turn the sisters to stone to protect them from the fighting - but then the elders were killed in battle and nobody else knew how to turn them back. Unfortunately, so-called Australian dreamtime stories abound in this part of the world and it is sometimes hard to know which ones are actually based on Aborigine belief and which are totally made up for the tourist industry. General consensus has it that this one is almost certainly made up, not least of all because no explanation is given as to how exactly turning somebody to stone would increase them in size to that of a sandstone monolith several hundred metres tall.

I've always wanted to have the time to just walk around in these places at my own pace - to park up and spend the day wandering the forest trails, looking out for wildlife hiding in the bush and exploring everything the area has to offer. Unfortunately, the main problem with Australia is that everywhere is so incredibly remote and the only real public transport outside the cities are the Greyhound Pioneer buses which run from city to city without stopping along the way - so the only way to get to places such as the Blue Mountains without hiring a car is to join a tour, which always means being back on the bus after a couple of hours. In fact, the Blue Mountains is part of a larger World Heritage Site and is surrounded by National Park land - so you could quite easily park up the car and spend the best part of a month getting hopelessly lost in the forests and come out of it not having even seen a fraction of what the region has to offer. Instead, those of us with limited time on our hands usually end up seeing what we can on a limited day tour, walking along a boardwalk with dozens of other tourists, pointing at things which millions of other people have seen before us and saying "Ooh" in a convincing voice. They say that just one lifetime isn't enough to see everything the world has to offer - I would take that a step further and say that one lifetime isn't even enough to see what Australia has to offer.

I won't go into details here about the sights and sounds of Sydney, as I will be doing that elsewhere in this book - but one thing worth mentioning is that I did manage to take the opportunity of catching up with someone I met out here on my previous trip. Sherry is the cousin of a friend of mine back home, and during my 1999 trip I had met up with her briefly and she had introduced me to some of the sights, including the beautiful Victoria Building - a place full of domed ceilings and stained glass, which would probably have been even more impressive if it hadn't been for the fact that somebody had decided to turn it into one of those walk-through shopping centres where every little olde-worlde shop sells clothes or gadgets.

In 1999, I had phoned Sherry upon arriving in Australia and arranged to meet her outside HMV, which turned out to be in the basement of a shopping centre in Pitt Street Mall. As I had, at that stage, absolutely no idea what she looked like, I was understandably worried that I would be spending a large part of my afternoon making a fool of myself by walking up to complete strangers in the centre and asking if they were expecting to meet a friend of their cousin back home in England. As it turned out, I only had to endure a strange look from one person that I did this to, who obviously thought I was on some sort of blind date, before Sherry came marching out of the crowd and explained that she had known immediately exactly who I was because the camera bag hanging from my shoulder had "tourist" written all over it. Although not literally, of course. We had lunch in one of the larger food courts Sydney had to offer, and Sherry gave me some pointers as to where I should be heading during my stay in Australia and what I should and shouldn't spend my time seeing. She also told me how refreshing it was to be able to have a conversation with somebody who understood the British sense of humour, and it got to the stage where she was almost thanking me every time I said anything mildly sarcastic, something which I really hope didn't say too much about my conversational skills! I made a note to try not to say anything too sarcastic to any Australians just in case they didn't understand my sense of humour and I should find myself leaving the building quickly via the window.

On our last night before moving on to the Gold Coast, Eloise and I called Sherry up and arranged to meet at a waterfront restaurant on Darling Harbour for a meal. I hadn't eaten on the harbour before, and it seemed to me like spending an evening at one of the more up-market riverside venues in London. After the sun goes down, Darling Harbour is quickly surrounded by lights as a myriad of cafes, restaurants and wine bars open their doors to everyone from students looking to get drunk to well dressed diners out for an expensive meal. As the moon glints on the water and ferries continue to come and go from the many docks surrounding the harbour, seats are brought out onto the pedestrian walkways around the waterfront, and by seven or eight o'clock the place is a hub for the night people of Sydney. There aren't many places where you can enjoy a meal while watching the ferries come and go, and then take a stroll around the harbour, stopping to watch street artists painting portraits for tourists and entertainers keeping the crowds entertained with juggling and magic before walking home through the Chinese gardens.

From the extensive menu which was brought to us on a forklift truck, I erred on the side of caution and chose the fish and chips, picking it on recommendation from the waitress. It was delicious, but alas, as is often the case in Australia, I am unlikely to ever come across the exactly the same dish again. You see, one thing you can always be sure of down under is that "Fish and Chips" means a different thing wherever you go. Back home in England, if you don't specify what you want when ordering fish, you'll probably get Cod. On the other side of the world, you pretty much get whatever the particular restaurant feels like serving you - I honestly don't think I've ever had the same thing twice. Often, you're greeted on arrival by a poster the size of the wall displaying all of the hundreds of fish available across the continent and pretty much cross your fingers and hope for the best. My favourites,since you ask, are Red Snapper, Barramundi and some delicious but nevertheless unidentifiable nuggets of fish which Eloise and I got from a small fish shop in New Zealand where the owner strongly resembled Joe Mangle from Neighbours.

We left the next morning on a coach heading towards the Gold Coast. Eloise didn't know much about the continent and we wanted to plan our itinerary as we went along. I had made plans in advance for accommodation in the rainforests of northern Queensland, but apart from that, we were very much playing things by ear for the next few weeks. As we headed for Surfers Paradise on a coach full of happy travellers, we didn't even know where we were going to stay when we got there...

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.