Monday 1st January 2007

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a fantastic New Year's eve!

We have spent the last couple of days seeing some incredible things as has become the norm for us on our travels at the moment. We have visited the famous Taronga Zoo, also known as 'the Zoo with a view' due to it's spectacular views back across to the Sydney harbour. We got there by ferry as we have a travel pass that allows us a week's unlimited use of buses, trains and ferrys. The zoo was excellent and is home to some truly big animals including a Komodo Dragon, a Salt Water Crocodile (known as Salties to the locals), some Asian Elephants and also rarely seen animals including Platypuses and Wombats. We spent a good couple of hours there before heading back for the harbour on the ferry.

Saturday we watched a 3D film at Darling Harbour on the worlds biggest cinema screen, the LG Imax. We decided to watch an animated film called Open Season and had to wear some pretty rediculous looking glasses to get the required 3D effect but this was no bad point really as the effects were incredible and the film is really funny! Rob, you should definitely check out as it features a bear as the main character and made us think of you dude!

Yesterday was our most incredible day here yet! We got to Sydney harbour at about midday and found a brilliant spot on a garden wall with a great view of the opera house and the bridge. To make the 12 hour wait more bareable we had stocked our day bag with a healthy selection of crisps, picnic bars, apples and 2 large bottles of Coca Cola mixed with rum! 12 hours sounds like a long time to wait for some fireworks but the time went pretty fast as we had our books with us and fully charged iPods. There were also some street performers around the area where we were sitting who were performing some pretty cool tricks as well to keep us all entertained. At 9 o'clock there was the early performance of fireworks for the kids, as midnight is pretty late to keep the little nippers awake till unless they've had a fair dose of M&M's. These fireworks were pretty special but were told to expect much more for the fireworks at midnight due to this year being the anniversary of the harbour bridge and we were not disappointed! 5 minutes before the stroke of midnight a ship lit up with green lights appeared from under the bridge and then minutes later the sky above the Opera House was alight with the biggest fireworks we have ever seen, shortly followed by an explosion of fireworks from the bridge and then to top it off more fireworks being fired from the skyscrapers lining the harbour, with their roofs being lit up with neon blue light! These lasted for 20 minutes accompanied by dramatic music and were nothing short of breathtaking, truly worth the long wait! After this we spent a few hours in a heavy metal bar that we had managed to get tickets for, had a few drinks and then finally got back to our hostel at 4:30 in the morning.

Today we got up late and have walked around the botanic gardens that fringe the city centre and saw hundreds of wild fruit bats hanging in the trees, which was a pretty strange sight as they're really big!

Our plan for the next couple of days is to get our working visas sorted out and also to see the aquarium on Darling Harbour and Kerry is currently being convinced by me to do a bridge climb across the harbour! At some point we are going to check out famous Bondi beach and also Manly beach which we are told is a much nicer beach but the weather here is going to be stormy for a few days apparently.

Hope that you are all well and we will update you again in a few days with more of our adventures!