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AUSTRALIA:
Sydney & New South Wales road trip searching for kangaroos
The Down Under, literally on the other side of the world, Southern Hemisphere: Australia is a far away destination, a long journey starting with a 20-hour flight towards a parallel universe, where everything is different.
A huge continent, made of big cities and wide deserts, incomparable coral reefs and endless beaches; a Country where you can spot colorful and bizarre animals, rare exotic plants, where habits, idioms, timetables and lifestyles are completely different from ours.
Let’s be honest, a journey to Australia is not an easy one: 14.500 km away from Italy, the flight is quite expensive; but if you have the chance, visiting this Country will change your world and life perception forever.
That is exactly the reason why we travel, isn’t it?
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Our journey started with a direct flight from Roma Fiumicino airport to Sydney, the first one from Italy operated by the Australian company Qantas: 21 hours of chill, movies, documentaries, books & late night snacks.
The arrival leaves us breathless: from the window seat it seems that we can almost touch the beautiful Opera House with its white sails, surrounded by the sea.
Where to stay in Sydney: we chose to stay in the heart of Sydney, the CBD (Central Business District), at The Grace Hotel - perfectly located with wide and comfortable rooms & daily minibar re-fill included in the room price!
Getting around Sydney: buy an Opal Card, a ticketless ‘pay-as-you-go’ system that covers the entire public transport system in metropolitan Sydney. It is not a weekly or daily pass, you only pay when you ride a train, bus, and ferry with no limits over the weekend at the max daily fee of $ 8,40!
DAY 1
First stop: the Art Gallery of New South Wales has a beautiful art collection with free admission, also including Italian artists and an interesting area dedicated to the Aboriginal culture.
It’s time to enjoy one of the most iconic views of the city and the bay, so we reach Mrs Macquarie's Chair viewpoint: surrounded by lovely gardens with colorful parrots flying around, you can take memorable pics of the bridge, Opera House and the city skyline from here. Mrs Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie who governed New South Wales between 1810 and 1821. According to legend, she spent a lot of time sitting on the rocks and gazing out to sea spotting ships that were sailing from Great Britain into the harbour. It was one of her favourite spots to relax and soak up the panoramic views so the chair was carved out of a sandstone rock ledge by convicts in her honour. Today it is part of the amazing Royal Botanic Garden, our next stop.
The Royal Botanic Garden is a free admission 30-hectare park, a huge green lung hosting flowers, plants and trees from all over the world, rare and exotic animals - especially birds.
Walking around the park is a unique experience, located in the heart of central Sydney’s cultural district, overlooking the Opera House; you can relax near little lakes, sitting under the shade of a tree, on a bench or inside a coffee shop.
The politeness, civilization and opportunities offered by this city just left us speechless.
We’re now headed to one of the most recognizable symbols of Sydney and all the Australian continent itself: the iconic Sydney Opera House, located on a little peninsula in the middle of the bay. Do you know its story?
It all began in 1956 with an international competition promoted by the Australian Prime Minister to design a new theatre; about 230 architects joined the competition from all over the world, including the unknown young Danish architect Jørn Utzon - who had never been to Australia before, but won it! After studying the bay map, he thought about a structure made of shells to represent a big ship entering the city harbour with a lovely and harmonic shape.
The new theatre had to become the new landmark of the bay, not getting lost in it, perfectly blending into the surrounding landscape. Well, mission accomplished: the theatre is absolutely amazing!
lunch stop: if you want to have one of the best burgers of your life, go to BAR LUCA
In the afternoon we went to the vivid Chinatown, full of lanterns, red doors, shopping centres and markets where to buy souvenirs, clothes and street food along the main street, Dixon Street. Chinatown is part of a bigger neighbourhood, known as Haymarket, which also includes Thai Town and the area around Sydney main train station. It’s a colorful and always crowded area, perfect for an afternoon or evening walk if you’re looking for low cost shopping and Asian kitchen.
In the evening we casually bumped into a Winter Festival - in August! - at Darling Harbour, with any kind of food trucks, live music, fake igloos, huge snowflakes and we opted for delicious falafel.
DAY 2
We started the day with a morning walk inside another green lung of the city: Hyde Park is the oldest and one of the most popular Australian parks covering an area of 16 hectares and providing wide open spaces to the citizens who love walking, running, have a picnic, read a book during their lunch breaks before going back to work inside one of the skyscrapers nearby.
We visited St. Mary’s Cathedral, which is the main place of worship for Christians in Australia: its high spires and Gothic architecture make it visible from a distance, located in the heart of the CBD district.
The Central Business District is the heart of the city, where Captain James Cook first landed in 1770.
It can be divided into 2 areas, the Northern one with Circular Quay and the Botanic Gardens and the Southern one with Chinatown, Hyde Park and the main train station, Sydney Terminal. George Street is the main street connecting the 2 areas.
We visited the Australian Museum - with free entry - including a huge collection of Aboriginal artefacts, dinosaur bones, interesting scientific discoveries and a detailed reconstruction of Australian fauna and flora.
We continued our CBD’s exploration inside the Queen Victoria Building, a former covered market with 4 floors covering a whole block, today a luxury shopping centre with a unique architecture mixing Romanesque, Victorian and Art Deco elements. There are two big clocks inside the QVB: the Royal Clock is decorated with 6 scenes connected to the British Royal family, while the Great Australian Clock - 10 mts tall - has 33 details related to the Australian history; a massive restoration project made all the details perfect: the colorful glasses, the floors, some stairs dating back to 1800.
We moved to the harbour area in the evening: Darling Harbour is located by the sea, in the heart of the city, where you can find some of the main attractions like the Harbour Bridge and where many events take place, like the annual fireworks at Cockle Bay Wharf.
We suggest having dinner at The Malaya, a delicious Malaysian restaurant with an iconic view on the bay. It’s hard to find a typical Australian kitchen, but you’ll have the chance to try every kind of food from all over the world there, travelling with tastes in a different place everyday.
DAY 3
Have you ever heard of Sydney beaches? Surfboards, sun and the ocean in just 35 minutes away from the city centre, there’s an entire coast to explore! We spent a day on the iconic Australian beaches, starting from the first one - and maybe also the most popular one - Bondi Beach (read ‘Bondai’). And after the big city life, skyscrapers, huge parks, free entry museums, exotic birds and Victorian-style shipping centers, we found another world here - the ocean. The beach is amazing, wide and long, full of guys playing beach volley, sunbathing, just chilling and chatting; groups of surfers looking for the perfect wave, many benches where to have fresh seafood and just watch them surfing in the ocean. We really felt like being in another world, and we actually were: this is the umpteenth proof, we were on the other side of the world.
Bondi is full of life, a place where you can feel on holiday all the year and taste the best ocean seafood at The Bondi Surf Seafood, on the seafront - we had the biggest and most delicious fried calamaris of life and of course eating them in front of the ocean watching the surfers having fun just made them epic!
From Bondi Beach you can start one of the most beautiful coastal walks of the city: from Bondi to Cogee Beach, where locals love walking, running, bringing their kids to breathe the ocean breeze or just to enjoy the view. The first beach right after Bondi that you’ll meet is Tamarama Beach, perfectly set between two coves with great waves.
Then you’ll meet the popular Bronte Beach with its iconic 30 mt natural pool that you’ve surely seen in dozens of symbolic Australian pics!
At this point, you can keep walking and reach Cogee Beach or come back and take the Manly Ferry; it will take you to Manly, a lovely coastal village with a long beach full of surfers and yellow-crested cockatoo parrots. The 30 minute ferry ride will give you the chance to enjoy Sydney from the sea, offering many perfect spots to take memorable pics of the Opera House - and the ticket is included in the Opal Card. Manly is the perfect place for Sundays, summer weekend getaways or winter afternoons by the sea; a place for families, young people, terraced houses and surfboard shops.
Back in the city, we visited another side of the bay: Circular Quay and the nearby historical neighborhood The Rocks.
“The Quay” is the main terminal for ferries and cruises, where many commuters reach the CBD everyday and it’s also one of the best places to take pics of the Opera, especially at night.
Circular Quay is the center of Sydney Cove, the historical heart of Australia where the first British settlers arrived: The Rocks neighbourhood is the oldest area of the city, with its typical red bricks and historical inns, like the oldest one, the Fortune of War, where we decided to have dinner.
DAY 4
If you’re planning a holiday in Sydney, you can’t miss a daily trip to the famous Blue Mountains, a Unesco world heritage site really worth visiting - especially because it only takes 2 hours by train to reach them from the city centre. This huge park hosts a vast mantle of eucalypt forests, whose dispersed droplets of oil combined with dust particles and water vapour make them blue. You’ll have plenty of hiking trails to choose from, waterfalls to see, viewpoints to reach but don’t miss Echo Point where you can spot the famous ‘Three Sisters’, three big rocks with an interesting Aboriginal story behind their shapes.
How to reach the Blue Mountains from Sydney: from the Central Station take one of the trains to Katoomba - better early in the morning and sit on the left side of the train on the upper level to enjoy the view from the windows along the way. Once you get to Katoomba, you can explore the area on your own (planning some trails in advance) and taking the public local buses to move around (suggested!) or you can take the HOHO bus with a $ 49 ticket, that will let you hop on and off at several panoramic points.
The shuttle from Katoomba runs every hour from 9 am but we decided to go for some trails on foot to reach some viewpoints and waterfalls; here are the ones you should not miss:
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Prince Henry Cliff Walk > Honeymoon Lookout to Echo Point - about 40 minutes
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Three Sisters Walk Echo Point to the Three Sisters & return - about 30 minutes
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Katoomba Falls, reach them from station 10
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the Round Walk Katoomba Falls to Ried’s Plateau - loop trail of about 20 minutes to go back to station 10
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Gordon Falls, reach them from station 24
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Leura Cascades, reach them from station 26
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Leura Village, station 28 and then take the train from Leura station to go back to Sydney (about 2 hours)
Back in the city, we decided to try the Indian cuisine: the Malabar South Indian Restaurant in King’s Cross, the neighbourhood loved by the backpackers, is probably the best Indian restaurant you’ll ever have the chance to try in your life; elegant atmosphere, super kind staff and unforgettable meals.
DAY 5
How could we possibly come to Australia, 14.500 km far away from home, to the other side of the world, without seeing kangaroos? We didn’t want to see them in a zoo or in a protected area.. we wanted to see them in the wild, free! We read about a beach in particular - Pebbly Beach, about 3 hours and a half away from Sydney by car - where people often see wild kangaroos, especially very early in the morning; on the way to reach it there were some other interesting places to see and the idea of adding another little piece of Australia to our journey convinced us to plan a short on the road trip down to the South, to further explore the New South Wales.
So we rented a car - right-hand drive! - with No Birds company, at the Bayswater Car Rental station - 180 William Street, Kings Cross NSW (corner Dowling St.) and here is our itinerary:
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after about 1 hour drive, we reached the Royal National Park, the second national park for size in the world with 15.080 hectares right after Yellowstone park, to see the National Falls
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then, 30 minutes driving later we reached the Grand Pacific Drive, a coastal road - 140 km long - that brought us to the panoramic Sea Cliff Bridge, a crooked bridge perched on a seacliff
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we kept driving for about 1 hour and a half to visit another national park, the Morton National Park and reach the Belmore Falls, among the most beautiful waterfalls in Australia; we suggest these viewpoints: First, Second and Hindmarsh Lookout to take memorable pics
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back in the car again we drove for 20 minutes to finally reach the amazing Kangaroo Valley, where we first met these lovely animals; a whole kangaroo family crossed the street in front of our car, the mommy carrying a baby inside her pouch. Then we saw other wild kangaroos jumping and curiously looking at us, it was a very exciting experience! But you can also see other wild animals in this valley, completely unknown to us: at the Bendeela Campground we met some super sweet wombats, which is basically a mix between a koala and a teddy bear!
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after a long and intense day visiting parks, waterfalls and looking for wild animals, we finally reached the Jervis Bay (about 1 hour drive); the bay has some of the whitest beaches in the world and we decided to have a walk on the whitest one, Hyams Beach. We stayed at The Huskisson Hotel - we had a date with wild kangaroos on a beach the following day!
DAY 6
Pebbly Beach is a unique beach, completely different from the sandy and long ones of Jervis Bay: first of all, it is located inside a national park, the Murramarang National Park, surrounded by forest and pristine nature; to get there, once entered the park, you need to drive on an unpaved and isolated road, like in a Jurassic Park movie for a while. From our hotel, it took about 1 hour and a half to reach the beach, where we found a little parking area and a grassy clearing down to the shore, rocky cliffs and high waves with a couple of brave surfers in the ocean. It’s winter in August here in Australia and it’s quite cold in the morning; but we suddenly found ourselves face to face with a bunch of wild kangaroos cropping the grass on the beach with little babies inside the pouches and we got closer to take some pics with them. If you get too close, they just freeze themselves and stare at you, they don’t run away. What an unforgettable experience, we couldn’t miss it! We were literally on the other side of the world, far away from home, face to face with an animal we had just seen on TV or in books before and we had imagined this scene many times.
We spent most of the morning there, walking on the beach and taking pics and videos to record those memories, we didn’t want to leave that place!
On our way back to Sydney we stopped in Berry, a little Australian village in Shoalhaven region - Southern New South Wales coast - to have the famous Donut & Cream combo at the Berry Donut Van food truck: a cinnamon hot donut on vanilla ice-cream - it was definitely worth the stop!
We arrived in Sydney in the evening where we decided to enjoy the Opera House, the bridge and the bay under the moonlight for the last time. We had dinner at the brewery Endeavour Tap Rooms, in The Rocks neighborhood.
This was our last night in this amazing city, which really offers everything you can imagine; wealth, civilization and cultural integration is what you can breathe here. You can chill in a park, go to the beach, go hiking in the mountains, surf and meet colorful birds and sweet teddy bears; a few hours away, you can look for wild kangaroos and walk on a white long beach. Thanks Australia, you are even more beautiful than we ever imagined.
FACTS:
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Australia is in the opposite hemisphere, so seasons are reversed: winter goes from June to August while summer goes from December to March. It was quite weird for us being in the middle of a winter festival in August, with fake igloos and snowflakes!
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Australian people have lunch and dinner earlier than us; they usually have dinner between 6 and 7 pm, so you’ll find the kitchen closed at 7.30-8 pm already in restaurants!
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Australian English is called ‘strine’, like if you wanted to pronounce the word ‘Australian’ very quickly because that’s exactly how they speak English! They often tend to shorten words, change final letters and pronounce sounds in a different way! You’ll find it a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but it gets better with time, we promise :) you just need to get used to their accent!
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Australia’s currency is one of the most advanced in the world. The nation’s banknotes are totally waterproof, hard to counterfeit and relatively cleaner because they are resistant to moisture and dirt.
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