Sydney, Sweet Sydney

After 3 long days of bus riding I have arrived in Sydney unscathed and with minor disappointments.

My bus trip is a whole tour thing that goes up the east coast and it promotes a "hop on and off" system where you can get off at any of the stops it makes and catch another bus on a later day. It's pretty good because we get to go to some touristy places and some other not so known places. All in all the actual ride itself was terrific.

The group was pretty small. We started with only 8 people when we left Melbourne, so that made making friends a bit easier then expected. It was a pretty good mix group as well. We had a Girl and 2 guys from England, one Scottish guy, an American, 2 German girls and myself. It was fun being the only Canadian. For the first bit of the trip we just called each other by our countries. I was Canuck until we got around to introducing ourselves properly. The American guy was kind of keener. He kept trying to impress everyone with his vast knowledge of the universe. Whenever he wasn't around our tour bus driver even made fun of him. We dubbed him Captain America in the end.

The first night was spent at a camp site up in the great dividing range. It was fucking cold. We did a cool night tour with a 4WD jeep and a big spotlight looking for animals. We also reunited a baby lamb with it's family after it had escaped from it's pen and couldn't get back in. Got to see a crap load of Kangaroos and even some Wombats. Played some more pool as per usual and tried chatting up the German girls a few times. They both didn't know much English so the language barrier was a bit of a pain, but they did very well considering I can't speak English properly. They both stayed back at the camp for a few days so they wouldn't be on the bus in the morning. Dang, down to 1 girl between the rest of us guys? That was fun.

The second day was to take us out to Canberra. Learned a lot about the history of Canberra which I'm not going to repeat here. If you're interested in it you can go get a book on it. I must say that I found it rather stupid that the government spent over a billion dollars in building their new Parliament building and filling it with 200 million dollars worth of artwork. Plus it has 3000 rooms, most of which probably don't even get used. I think they are just trying to show off or something. Pfft, lousy government. Spent the night at a very cheap hostel and then went out drinking with our bus driver and the rest of the gang. A fun time was had by all. At one point Kirsten (the English girl) said she wanted to go ask Captain America something and he had already retired for the night so she needed my room key. I put it down and in my drunken state completely forgot about it. Scottish (Sandy) convinced me that I had lost it and should go around asking people for it. So I did. I went to the people sitting at the table where we were before, I went to the bar and even asked random women. Convinced that I wouldn't get my key deposit money back I shrugged it off and didn't care too much after drinking some more. In the morning Captain America gives it to me saying that Scottish passed it off to him. We all had such a good laugh about it.

Today was the long trip from Canberra to Sydney and thankfully we were given 2 more girls to add to the trip. Not just any girls though. Young, Cute, Danish girls. I have now discovered I'm in the wrong country. I need to be in Europe. They had the coolest names too. Medda and Gidda. This morning I was at that point which I call Drunk Over. It's between being drunk and having a hang over. I took quick steps to start talking with Gidda the whole trip. I had her teaching me her language for a bit, but sadly I can't remember much of it. Stopped off at the usual small towns and hung out with the Kangaroos and so on. Got to Sydney this evening and 3 of us are staying in the dodgy end of town. Tomorrow I'm moving on up to a new Hostel more in the city center. The cleaner side of town. This place will do for now though.

That's the last 3 days in a nutshell.

Worst part of the whole trip so far is that I can't get my camera battery charger to work. So my camera battery is about to die and I need to find out if I can just buy a new charger out here for it. I have the Canon number for New South Wales and I'll have to do some calling to find out what I can get. There goes more money. I should be happy that it's the worst thing to happen.