Vacation Recap Part 2!

Before my memory officially fades, I want to take time to recap, at least to some extent, the Australia portion of our trip.

We left Indonesia on a Wednesday at 4:30pm. There aren't many direct flights to Melbourne, Australia from Surabaya, Indonesia, so we actually had to fly back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is north to head to Australia, which is south. Not to mention, we had a pretty long layover in Kuala Lumpur just to board our flight to Australia, which took off around midnight and got to Melbourne at 11am on Thursday. Needless to say, we were a little bit tired after our overnight flight and basically headed straight to our friend Kim and Will's apartment (after Will so kindly waited for us at the train station) for a shower and some relaxing.

That night, we met Kim and Will for a wine tasting event in downtown Melbourne. It was very classy and a lot of fun, a great way to start off our time in Australia.

Now, seeing as we were all the way in Australia after all, we decided that we should try to see as much as we could. Unfortunately, some of the more famous (and remote) parts of Australia, such as the Outback and the Great Barrier Reef, weren't really in the cards for our 8-day trip, but we were able to squeeze in a trip to Sydney, which we left for promptly at 6am Friday morning. It actually worked out quite well in that Kim had to go to Sydney for the weekend for work, which came with some perks including free taxis, a built-in hotel recommendation with some generous subsidies, and a very entertaining and not at ALL proud Australian co-worker...oh, and Kim having to work all weekend (that was actually a bummer)!

Anyway, we got to Sydney around 10am on Friday and realized we wouldn't be able to check in to our hotel for a few hours, so Taylor and I decided to get right at it and head out to an area I'd heard about called the Cliff Walk from Bondi to Coogee beach. We opted to head to Coogee first to get some fish and chips. We took a bus there and no sooner had we set foot at the bus station than it started pouring rain. Bummer. It would not stop raining for any significant amount of time for our entire time in Sydney but that's neither here nor there.

We did in fact eat some fish and chips in Coogee, despite what this photo shows.

We then attempted to take the 5K walk to Bondi Beach but were thwarted about 1/4 of the way through due to torrential downpours. We decided to head back to the hotel and thaw out/rest up for the evening. That evening we went out to dinner in Chinatown and were later joined by Will who came in after work on Friday.

Saturday actually started out really nice so we rushed out to see the sights as early as we possible could. We managed to take in a good portion of Sydney while the weather was still nice. here are some highlights:

Bats in the Botanical Gardens
A view of the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House

Downtown Sydney
A quaint little area of Sydney known as the Rocks
and Liter beers...always a bonus!
On our way back to the hotel after the beers, we also spotted this iconic Australian image

Saturday night we headed back to downtown Sydney and saw some amazing sights by night. We even found a fabulous rooftop restaurant with views of the harbor.

Even from the toilet, I'm serious, I took this shot from the pot!
Sunday we went to an Australian Rules Football game. I cannot even begin to describe this sport, but suffice to say that it was very entertaining even though the Sydney Swans defeated our new hometown team, the Essendon Bombers of Melbourne.

After the game we grabbed dinner in Sydney with Kim before catching our flight back to Melbourne.

Whew! That was longer than I meant for it to be! I think I'll wrap up this post and resume later with photos/tales from our trip to the Great Ocean Road.