the gardens so we strolled round to it. It is a mighty impressive set of buildings. We all most had to pinch ourselves to check that we were really there! There was a big screen set up just in front of the Opera House which was showing the Australian Open so it was a buzz with people coming and going watching the tennis. We stopped and sat down on the steps for a short while and just absorbed the atmosphere, which was great. It was Sydney festival week and we went into the Opera House to check out what was on. We had wanted to go to one of the shows, but everything was a little on the pricey side so we thought we’d give it a miss. We wandered around the rest of the harbour area, found out that crisps were ridiculously expensive, in fact everything was expensive, in some ways Sydney was more expensive than Japan.

After realising that you would need a second mortgage to enjoy Sydney as we had

enjoyed Southeast Asia we headed back to the hostel for something to eat. Rob cooked and we had an early night as we were both feeling happy but drained.

We had decided to stay in Sydney for a week as we thought there would be plenty to do and see but due to the extreme cost of the place we were wondering if we had made the right decision. We knew we had a lot of stuff to sort out and buying camping equipment was one top of the list. Fortunately this is one area that Australia is cheaper than the UK. We headed to the camping shop street somewhere just near to the central shopping district. There were a good 4 or 5 camping shops so we kept our fingers crossed and hoped we would get ourselves sorted out. We had decided to buy a tent and accessories as we knew hostel accommodation in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the US would drain our resources fairly quickly. We also thought it would be