Our trip: Australia

As I promised at the end of the last blog, I manage to continue with the Australia leg of our journey in 2011! Yey! I am so lazy it is almost an art form. Although the internet access in Australia is very poor to say the least, oit contributed a lot to the delay in keeping touch. I would strongly recommend to anyone planning to go there to buy a mobile dongle at arrival, could save a lot of hassle.
To start at the beginning though, Sydney is simply the best city we have ever been. It is not as beautiful as, say Cambridge or many other old and proud British ones, but it is very well designed, very, very green and accessible (this is probably the best expression to say how easy and obvious it is to find your way around). Full of young people and life. The weather was perfect all the way and we found a cheap campsite literally in the city, in a national park. Yes, that is how green it is. Right on the first day we invested in a family weekly pass on the public transport, which is another essential I highly recommend to anyone. It gave us access to all the buses, trams, trains and ferries in the city.
The fauna in the park was extremely colourful, the kookaburra in the picture was only the cheekiest. It patrolled the kitchen area and stole food from the unaware. We saw it with a whole steak once!

Sydney is also full of beaches. Even in the not-so -hot spring weather they were full of people, sunbathing, playing, surfing. And some building sandcastle.

Visited the well known sights like the Opera House, the Botanic Garden, etc but also some lesser known jewels like the Chinese Garden and the Powerhouse Museum (the last probably for the ones with children).