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

Comparison of the new Celcom First Basic plan with OPTIMISER and existing Celcom First plans

Celcom has just launched a new postpaid plan for smartphones with voice and data component, which has an OPTIMISER mechanism to provide flexibility for subscriber to use more data or more voice and SMS within a billing cycle.

Under the plan allocation, the subscriber is given a quota of 2 GB Internet data usage, 2 GB Celcom WiFi usage, 100 minutes voice call, and 100 SMS.

Once you have used all of your allocation above, OPTIMISER will automatically adjust to give you complimentary additional quota of either Internet or calls and SMS. You can either get an additional 2 GB of Internet data usage + 2 GB of Celcom WiFi usage, or additional of 150 minutes voice call + 150 SMS.

If your OPTIMISER allocation is also fully utilised, you will be charged 15 sen/minute for voice calls thereafter, and 15 sen per additional SMS. You can also get additional 1 GB Internet quota at the cost of RM15.

Lets compare this new Celcom First Basic plan with the existing Celcom First Prime plan with mAdvance data (probably no longer available for new subscription now), and the Celcom First One 5 GB data plan.

In the table above, you will notice that the Internet data quota increases from plan to plan, starting from 2 GB to 5 GB. When you get more Internet data quota, you will at the same time have less voice and SMS quota as a trade off.

It seems that the new Celcom First Basic plan with OPTIMISER is pretty good if you use more data than voice/SMS, but occasionally might need to use more voice/SMS in a particular month.

Anyhow, the Celcom First One 5GB plan is still the cheapest one if don't make a lot of calls and send very few SMS. I think nowadays we use more Whatsapp, Line and WeChat rather than sending conventional SMS/MMS, don't we?

If you are existing Celcom First Prime subscriber with mAdvance data plan, you can make use of the table above to consider whether you need to switch over to the new Celcom First Basic plan with OPTIMISER, or to stay along with your existing plan.

My SKROSS World Adapter MUV USB

If you travel to another country, it is a common problem that the power socket is of different type from your home country, and you need a power adapter as a converter to be able to plug in your electrical device to the wall socket.

My SKROSS World Adapter MUV USB designed in Switzerland (and made in Thailand) is my handy travel companion that can be used in more than 150 countries with its unique all-in-one sliders system.

It can be used with unearthed 2-pole devices, including charger for mobile phone, tablet, digital camera, GPS, razor, voice recorder, MP3 player, and even my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro multimode ultrabook laptop.

However, it cannot be used with earthed 3-pole devices which normally have higher power rating, such as hair dryer, water heater, etc.

It does not convert the input voltage, and can work under voltage between 100-250 volts with maximum current of 2.5 Amperes (maximum power of 2.5 x 250 = 625 Watts). This means that if your device can only operate with less than 125 volts, and you try to plug it into a 220 volts socket, it will get burnt.

The SKROSS World Adapter MUV USB has a built-in T2.5A 250V fuse, which will break the circuit if the power drained exceed its maximum limit.

The SKROSS World Adapter MUV USB also has 2 built-in USB charging ports, which provide up to 2,100 mA charging power. Therefore, it is capable to connect to 3 devices at the same time, when 2 are charging with its USB ports and another using its output socket.

If you have a lot of devices that need 2.1A or 2.4A fast charging, you can plug in the Belkin B2E027 4-port 2.4A full rate USB power charger to get more full rated USB charging ports.

This adapter comes with 2 years warranty. Its price of RM149 is not cheap, when compared with non-branded alternatives, but you can have more peace of mind using this branded Swiss product.