New South Wales & Australian Capital Territory

I've now been here in Aus for about 6 days, feels like longer with all the things I've already seen & done!

The flight was rather uneventful, Qantas staff are amazingly friendly & helpful and the food was par for airline food.  I arrived at around 14.30, flew through immigration, baggage claim & customs, with just a brief pause for shoe cleaning, since I'd been in Africa & there was still some dirt on the bottom of my trainers.

Arrived in Umina (Central Coast) around dinner time and after that I basically just went straight to bed.  Woke up the next morning and we went to the Australian Reptile Park, were we got to see spider milking, which is just to collect the venum from the spiders & they save it to send to the labs for it to be made into anti-venum.  Apparently the only place in Aus which does it - pretty cool!  We saw lots of other Australian wildlife as well, a few photos from the reptile park just down the road from Kaylie's house, click here.

Following day, we got manicures & pedicures, which were much needed after 41 days in Africa!!  Now my fingers & toes look fabulous - in case you were wondering ;-) We also did a bit of shopping for things like an Aussie sim card, Havaianas (flip flop) and planning for the next few weeks until dad arrives on April 2nd.

On Sunday, Kaylie & I drove to Canberra in Australian Capital Territory (ACT) to see a few things there, on our first day we visited the Australian War Memorial, which was super cool.  It's a nice large building, with an eternal flame & tomb of the unknown soldier, along with a museum filled with planes, boats, photos, models, and stories of all the things the military has been involved in since they first became a country.  We also stopped in at the tourist information centre and found out the Monday was Canberra Day so everything would be closed for the public holiday, so we decided to head out to Kosciuszko National Park and Eucumbine Dam for the day, which are both actally in New South Wales (NSW) just on the other side of ACT which is soooooooo small.

All in all we drove about 520km.  We left Canberra and headed straight to Thredbo which if you look on a map means we passed Cooma (where we grabbed some lunch)and Jindabyne (which I call Junebug, cause it's easier to remember & spell!) You can check out our photos from this trip by clicking HERE We took the chair lift to the top of the highest mountain in all of Australia where it was just 8C, but luckily no snow, since I was just in jeans, trainers and a tshirt.  On our way back from visiting Mt Kosciuszko, we decided to take a small side detour so we could also visited one of the many SnowyHydro Dams which were built many years ago.  The dam we visted was only 52% full, cause as most of you know, Australia has been in a drought for quite a few years now.  It probably would have been more impressive to see it at full capacity, cause right now it just looks like a lake at the bottom of a hill (lol).  We ended up back in Canberra around 6pm and were looking for a place for dinner, we thought the mall would be a good place to find something, but as it was a city holiday, everything had closed at 5pm, except for the cinema, so we decided to go and see Valentine Day and eat our dinner of popcorn and pepsi (LOL).  The movie was amazingly not nearly as bad as I was thinking it might be.  Has anyone seen it?  Did I also mention I saw The Blind Side, which I really really liked & since Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for it, I'm glad I've seen it, since I'd not seen any of the other movies which were nominated or won awards, oh wait, that's a lie, I saw Julia & Julia on my plane ride, but had to watch it like 3 times to see it all, cause I kept falling asleep during it.

On Tuesday, we went to visit the Royal Australian Mint & saw how their coins are made from a really cool viewing deck which is above the production floor and after that we went back to the visitor's information centre to find out if there was anything to do in NSW on the way back to Umina (which is north of Sydney by about 50km).  We learned that Fitzroy Falls was just off the highway & apparnetly just as popular a tourist stop as Ularu (Ayer's Rock) so we made that quick stop by there to check it out and it was pretty darn cool!

Today is Wednesday and it's a "preparation" day.  Tomorrow we fly from Sydney to Alice Springs for 4 days, then take the Greyhound bus down to Coober Pedy (Mrs Toste this stop is JUST for you!) where the opals are minded and then bus it again to Adelaide, where we'll spend a day before picking up a hired car and driving down to Melbourne via the Great Ocean Road.  I think that will take us 4 days and then we've got 2 nights in Melbourne, one of the days of which we'll go to Ballarat for some gold mining (wish me luck).  Then we'll go and visit my friend Anne Winterson's mate Beth for 2 nights, she lives 1.5 hours north of Melbourne in a rural area, which I think is on a river, before flying back to Sydney for a few days before dad arrives & I start part two of my Australian adventures with him!