Australia 2005 part 1

Quite a few years ago my family and I had an adventure of a lifetime by going to visit my uncle and his family in the Land Down Under. You will have to bear with me if the details are lacking because it was many trips and many years ago.

My parents started planning the trip about a year before we actually departed. The plan was to visit as much of the country within the month we would be there, as well as spend some time with our family. You have to understand that the trip itself is very long, just by plane from San Fransisco to Sydney was an eighteen hour flight, and in cattle/economy class it was very uncomfortable. This was also before the time of individual televisions on every seat. Either way, when we got to Sydney our biological clocks were 14 hours behind but we had barely slept on the plane and we were exhausted, it was 6am and our day was beginning by my aunt, uncle and the 3 kids coming to pick us up at the airport. My uncle lives approximately an hour south of Sydney, unfortunately the name escapes me right now, but either way it's a gorgeous city right by the ocean. To keep us awake we walk all over the city, mainly following the shoreline which is a two minute walk from my uncle's house.

It was their winter, which meant it was somewhere around 15 to 20 Celsius which didn't bother us being Canadian, but for them it was freezing. For the first week we spend a lot of time at my uncle's house. We did make sure to visit Sydney where we saw all the major sites, we went to the fish market to have some fresh fish and chips, spent almost a whole day at the Sydney Aquarium

We took a guided tour of the Sydney opera house, which was very interesting because while we were doing the tour the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing therefore we got the chance to hear the awesome acoustics in progress. A fact I remember is that the SOH is based of an orange peel.

I loved the Sydney Aquarium, we went through the tunnels which ran underneath the aquarium, there are two tunnels like this one in the typical aquarium with the sharks and stingrays, the turtles and the beautiful fish the other ones you could see from the top and the bottom, was the seal aquarium which was entertaining. We also found NEMO! there was an aquarium full of clown fish and one of them had a gimp fin.

We climbed the harbor bridge, and visited the museum that was all about it. Unfortunately we weren't able to go onto the top because my sister and I were too young, I was 15, Karine was 12, you had to be 16.

My uncle also owns a big plot of land in the south of Australia, 2 hours south of the capital. We spent a few days there, my cousins loved it that week, my family and I weren't impressed... you have to understand that the southern hemisphere is opposite to the north, the more south you go to colder it get, and it was winter... There was an inch of snow on the ground. We visited the huge land by LandRover saw the House which is being re-built as well as the lake my uncle got created so he could fish by damning a stream and getting trout put in. You can say "You can take the boy out of Canada, but you can't take the Canada out of the boy"

On the way back to Sydney we visited the Australian Mint and the Parliament, it's easy to compare their government to the Canadian government.

In addition while in that part of the country we spent time with the tuns of animals at my uncle's house, my aunt breeds golden retrievers, and it turned out her dog sunny had just had a litter, there were also bunnies, birds, fish, mice, and a yabby, which is their equivalent of crayfish.

Every Sunday for breakfast it's tradition that they have a fresh brunch, so my uncle sets lobster traps and brings back the catch, and my cousins go to the bakery to get some fresh buns, we also had peppies which are kind of like oysters found on buried in the sand by the beach. Oddly enough their lobsters do not have claws like the ones we find on the coasts here. One of the Sundays we were there we had an unusual catch in the lobster trap, and octopus, just to say it was delicious.

We also went to a small zoo outside of Sydney where some of the animals roamed partially free, the kangaroos could easily escape their pen and were very friendly when pet, we got to see presentations which allowed us to pet some koalas and alligators and get up close and personal with exotic birds.

Back at my uncles house we had to prepare for the next leg of the journey which invoked us going camping in the Red Center. But that story will have to wait.

So g'day mate, 'till the next adventure!

The pictures seen are: 1. my cousin Jake hunting for shark eggs on the beach, 2. Me in the tunnel of the seal aquarium of the Sydney Aquarium, 3. My dad, my sister and I in front of the Sydney Opera House, 4. My sister and I in front of the Harbor Bridge, 5. My cousin Jake with two birds from the zoo, 6. My dad with a shark egg.