I landed to an overcast sky at Sydney international at about 9am, said goodbye to Roosha (sp) and headed to customs. I’d been somewhat wary of the Australian customs for some while, the reason for my nervousness isn’t clear, but I could just feel my heart rate start to increase as I was in the line. Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t “nervous” since I knew that I had done nothing wrong and had nothing to worry about, but I just was a little “tense” as I moved forward. I get up to the passport control and the guy looks at my passport, runs it through the computer and then writes a big “A” on my tourist card and then told me that I’m going to have to have someone else look at it. A woman comes over, takes my passport and leads me to another desk. About 5 minutes later I’m back on my way to customs. I’m queued up in front of the scanners when an officer asks me where I’m coming from and I tell him Dubai, and out of nowhere a different officer comes over and asks me to “please comer over here.” She was nice, and she just asked where I was going, why I was here, and a lot of other questions. She eventually scanned my luggage and thanked me.  I don’t know if I was receiving “special” treatment or just a victim of random checks, but all I know is that my spidey-sense seems to be working quite well.

I got to my hotel at about 1, and decided to head out to get a feel for Sydney. I took a charter bus from the airport which dropped me off directly at the hotel. In the course of taking the other passengers to their hotels I was beginning to feel like I understood Sydney a little. It’s not bad. It’s big, but I don’t really get a feeling that it is too big. The architecture seems very much the way I remember Portland, Oregon. There is a mix of older and newer buildings, the older being from the late 1800’s and the majority from the seventies and eighties.  The streets are laid out in such a way that it’s kind of hard to get lost—always a good thing for me.

My first goal was the opera house. I made it pretty quickly to the harbor and snapped lots of photos of the bridge and opera. I noticed that there is a party atmosphere to the harbor area. It seems that every bar is full of people all having a blast, (and when I think of it, all of Sydney seems to be that way) lots of tourists and lots of natives.

My next trip was to head to take a ferry to one of the cities around the area. I didn’t know which one to take so I decided on Manly City. It was pretty cool, the ferry wasn’t crowded and it was about an hour ride. It appears, at least where I went in Manly that it is a tourist area. Everything was clean, the people were beautiful, there were lots of souvenir shops, it is nestled on a beautiful white beach, and it was very, very expensive; $17 for a shwarma, $50 for a pair of flip-flops, and the best I saw was $6.50 for a 500 ml soda. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful little town.

After walking around for a while I headed back to Sydney and eventually to my hotel room. I was so tired that I ended up falling asleep on the ferry, repeatedly. I thought that I’d make an early day of it and get a fresh start in the morning. So after getting dinner, trying to find a wifi spot, and grabbing some snacks I got back to the hotel at around 6. Unfortunately I was not able to fall asleep and ended up staying awake until about 4 am.

My next portion of the trip is planned. I’m heading down to Melbourne on Christmas day and from there I’ll decide what to do next. I really wanted to go to The Great Barrier Reef, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing that for some time. It’s just too expensive, too far, and too few options for me to feel comfortable having my vacation dependent on being there.