Day 10 – Leaving for Home

Finally, it is time to say goodbye. Today is our 10th day and we are flying back to Singapore. Felicia is sitting on my left watching TV and Elkan on my right playing monopoly on his iPad. Me? Writing this blog on the plane now so I can just post them up when I reach home later this evening at 1130pm.

Not sure if we are going to have another difficult farewell at the transit gate later. I guess not cos there are Tracy and Meijie with us. (And I have filled Elkan’s bag with so much goodies and his IPad full of our holidays photos!) Thanks Meijie and Tracy for taking such good care of us when we were there in Australia. You guys are the best baby-sitters!

Over 2’000 photos and 150 video clips were taken this trip. 20 travel blogs were recorded on the road every day. Life today will be a big contrast tomorrow. Elkan will be going back to school next Monday. And I will be diving into piles of work waiting for me in office tomorrow morning. We had so much fun in the last 10 days. Yeah…this is what I call “work hard, play harder”!

Will see both of you soon. Sleep tight tonight and see you guys in the Aussie Dreamland.

Day 9 – Sydney (Museum and Paddy’s Markets)

Today is our 2nd last day in Australia. Theoretically, it is our last activity day as we will be leaving for Singapore & Hong Kong first thing tomorrow morning. We cancelled the Blue Mountains tour. I reckon the group had enough of wildlife, sea and forest. We decided to spend our last day exploring the city. Finally, we have some “free-&-easy” time.

Tracy went off to meet her Australian friend. We dragged lazybones Meijie to the museum to see more bones! Felicia and I wanted to bring Elkan to see those gigantic dinosaurs skeletons, fossils, rocks and stuffed animals.

The Australian Museum is modern, high-tech and visitor-friendly. Exhibits are well-spaced and designed. There are a lot of digital screens, giant projection walls and tables for kids to interact with the content. It has a rich collection of Australia’s culture and nature gems.

Opposite the museum stands one of the world’s largest cathedrals – the 106m-long St Mary’s Cathedral. Interestingly, it started it’s first service in 1833, works on the cathedral’s spires weren’t completed until 2000! No photography is allowed inside the cathedral. I managed to take a couple of shots before I was caught. Sigh, I would love to show the beautiful Birmingham-made stained glass windows.

Finally, we arrived at the last stop for our trip – the Paddy’s Markets. Armed with big canvas shopping bags, we spent 2 hours, combing this huge 1000-stalls market for souvenirs and food stuffs for our families and friends back home. It reminded me of the old Shanghai’s “XiangYang Markets”. Most of the vendors were either Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysians and Thais.

Unlike the Perth’s Fremantle Markets, I thought Paddy is too generalised and overly-commercialized. It was boring and monotonous. Shops were selling the same things. (The only good thing was the competitions kept the prices low. We got good bargains here.) There were only a couple of specialty shops selling local-made crafts. (Below is another shopping place “Queen Victoria Building” where you get the top luxury premium brands)

Day 8 – Sydney (Paddington Markets and Bondi Beach)

The return bus trip from Gold Coast was longer than our first. The driver took a different inland route (with lots of gravel roads and turns) and that prolonged our ride by another 2 hours. Surprisingly, the 17-hour ride was much more comfortable than I expected. Perhaps we were better prepared (and equipped) this time. Elkan and I slept uninterrupted throughout the bumpy night.

Daybreak - We drew our curtains and saw a golden vast land – meadows, farms and lakes. Dawn is exceptionally beautiful in Australia. A spectrum of colours lighted up at the horizon. Cottons of low clouds changed colours from violet to pink. Silhouettes of trees swayed gently in the morning breeze with threads of sparkling golden light illuminating its intricate forms. It felt like watching the creation of a beautiful embroidery on a silky canvas. We were witnessing the best art show from Mother Nature.

Sydney was all sunny and blue sky. No rain, no gloomy sky and certainly no more volcanic ash clouds. We parked ourselves in a backpacker’s hotel right in the city centre. Due to the strong Australian dollars (AUD$1 = HKD8.45), everything seemed so expensive. Despite the high prices, food came in big and generous portions. To my amaze, the Chinese, Korean and Japanese food were “genuinely” tasty!

After a delicious Japanese lunch, we decided to take a long 45-minute walk to Paddington Saturday Markets to check out the stalls. There were a lot of shops selling handicrafts, paintings, photographs, fragrant oils, clothes, bags and palm-reading services. There were even stalls that were just selling sliced bread-with-homemade jams. That simple and tasty!

The markets closed at 4pm and we headed to another world’s famous attraction. Known as one of the world’s greatest beaches, Bondi offers big white powdery beaches and great swelling waves for surfing. There weren’t a lot of people in winter, mainly tourists like us. There were a lot of shops and restaurants by the beach. By 5pm, the sky turned dark and shops were closing. We didn’t have enough time to check out the Bondi Markets and the Bondi Openair Cinema.

We went back to drop our bags at the hotel. The ladies and kid continued shopping around Chinatown and George Street. Meijie and I planned a boys’ night-out to check out Sydney’s notorious (legalised) red-light district, Kings Cross Road. We told the ladies that we might be back late.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I was expecting to see a raunchier and dodgy street. Most joints were small and looked less vibrant than our very own Joo Chiat street. Two of us felt kinda out-of-place here. We decided to end our long day and headed back to our hotel. (Ha… The ladies weren’t back from their shopping yet,)