Monday, December 29, 2014

A family trip to Sydney, Australia

Sydney was the first place I visited in Southern Hemisphere.

The Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport Terminal 1 is very busy. When we are landing, we could see airplanes queuing up at the runway, taking turn to take off one by one.

There are a lot of arriving passengers queuing up at the immigration customs counters. Besides the Incoming Passenger Card, we are also required to fill up a Travel History Card for Ebola contingency tracking.

We stayed at Railway Square YHA hostel located next to the Central Railway Station. It is well equipped with a big self-catering kitchen, spacious dining area, laundry room with washing machines and clothes dryers, luggage lockers, and even a small swimming pool. We met with quite a lot of young people from around the world who stayed there too.

You might want to have a nice experience staying in the hostel room modified from train cabins, as shown below. We stayed in double room with attached private bathroom, which is located inside the building, beside the laundry room.


Chinatown is just nearby the Railway Square YHA hostel. The food there is pretty expensive.

We visited Circular Quay, which is the founding site for Sydney. There are several ways to go there from the Railway Square YHA hostel, which we've tried all below:
  • Taking the free shuttle bus number 555
  • Taking the non-free bus
  • Taking the double decker Cityrail train
We joined the I'm Free Tours city walk, guided by a young lady wearing a bright green I'm Free T-shirt. She brought us to various historical places around, which blended nicely with this modern city. She told us about The Rocks history, and the story behind various buildings we visited.


And we saw this sculpture named Still Life With Stone and Car by artist Jimmie Durham, created by dropping a large rock onto the car.


We had dinner at the famous Pancake On The Rocks near the Harbour Bridge.

There was Chuck Close art exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) which we wished to visit, but unfortunately we missed its opening time.

The next day, we went back to the harbour near Circular Quay, and took a ferry to go to Manly. There is nice ice-cream at Manly Wharf Pub and Restaurant.



Manly has nice beaches at both side of the Manly Corso street. We had a nice time at Shelly Beach, which really has a lot of shells on the beach.


This Sydney night view photo was taken from the ferry on our way back to Sydney Harbour. You might be amazed that the ferry has free WiFi service, even when it is travelling in the middle of the sea.


We also visited the Sydney Fish Market to enjoy the fresh seafood there. We went there by Sydney Light Rail tram.



There are a lot of seagulls at Sydney Harbours, near the Sydney Opera House, as well as at the Sydney Fish Market. They are not quite afraid of people close to them.


Another place we visited was Queen Victoria Building, which is a historical building with a historical lift in it. This building is now a shopping mall in Sydney.


We did planned to go to the Royal Botanic Gardens, but in the end couldn't make it.

Our Sydney trip was a short stay, before our journey to New Zealand.

You might probably be interested to also read about:
  1. Applying for ETA online to travel to Australia

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