With cricket well and truly off the agenda (til the world cup anyway) we had a few days to see a bit of Sydney and maybe actually venture into a bit of New South Wales. The first thing that had to be done was the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge climb. You're basically attached the whole way to the bridge and its a three hour climb through the structure of it to the very top part of it 150 metres up. Once there you get the most amazing views of the city, especially as we were lucky enough to do it at night, which had two advantages. 1) it made for a spectacular view 2) you couldn't see down. Well worth doing if any of you are ever there and it was the first rung on my ladder to building up the b******s to chuck myself out of a plane from 14000 ft....

On the 11th and 12th January came many emotional goodbyes in Sydney, as first Ryan and Phil and then Nick to go to foreign climes. Not before more than a few 'buccas of course on their last few nights of course. I decided to stay on for another week or so before travelling up to Cairns, mainly for the fish market in Darling Harbour. The extra week in Sydney Scott and I lived it up in a hotel for a few days which made a VERY nice change and we took the opportunity to do a bit of hungover sightseeing and touristy stuff. The botannical gardens of Sydney are stunning and represent the site of the first European settlement. They also provide a perfect view of the opera house with bridge in background and thats where you go to get your cheesy perfect pictures, as you will see on this site! theres lots of information and exhibits in the gardens about the history of british inhabitance of Sydney, some good old fashioned British savagery and Aboriginal tribal culture and its really quite scary and humbling to look up above you at the skyscrapers of Sydney's CBD and reflect upon how much this area must have been transformed in little over 200 years. I guess theres some bits of british history that we get shielded from at school.

On a lighter note another thing that makes Sydney so famous are its many and varied beaches and we did check out Manly and Coogee beaches which are both beautiful and great places to spend a day sunbathing and surfing. The more renowned Bondi is only as nice if you like lots of fag butts and coke cans while you're having a sunbathe. A lot of tourists do the Bondi to Coogee beach walk which is a stroll along the cliff tops by the Pacific Coast taking in 5 beaches. It was definitely worth doing for an afternoon and provided me with probably the most exercise ive had in Australia so far.

With only a couple of days left in Sydney I headed up to the Blue Mountains to see a bit of mother nature after 4 weeks in massive cities. There are some stunning views and great walks round the mountain ranges, i wish id been able to spend a little longer there before going back to Sydney. The famous things to see are the three sisters (group of three adjoining mountains so called because of how three sisters were supposedly frozen there to attain everlasting life i think) and the three naked ladies statues (cant remeber why they're so called, too busy staring at t***). However the undoubted highlights of our trip there were travelling on the worlds steepest cable car (best rollercoaster ive ever bene on!) and watching an excellent kangaroo bout. this is quite a regular occurrence but it was a hell of a fight and its always pleasing to see the little kangaroo win.

So i returned to Sydney for one last night out in the famous side bar and said some more emotional goodbyes (or it might have been a few 'sylatter mates' in a massive last minute hungover dash to sydney airport, i forget which) before moving up to cairns to stay with me old mate mikey boy. hhhheeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!