Sydney

Though we spent just over a week in Sydney we didn't actually manage to achieve much at all. Unless you count spending far too much money on alcohol and spending days recovering from hangovers as achievements. Despite not sleeping after the bizarre way neighbours night ended (transvestite club, 5 person house party, lost walk through unknown Melbourne suburb etc.), we started as we meant to go on and went out. We ending up eating Hungry Jacks in the early hours... though our meal was cut short by Pete dropping a full large drink on the floor leading to us sprinting out of the restaurant giggling.

The best part of the of our time in Sydney was laughing at how ridiculous Jess is. When we arrived she had a job at a call centre but thanks to our arrival she quit... she just neglected to tell her employees that. It got even better, on our second day, whilst sitting on the beach, Jess refused to answer her phone when they rang her. It got even better, whilst we were staying in Bondi me and Pete got a days work labouring leaving Jess unemployed at home all day completely bored.

As you can see from the photos we did manage to spend at least one day visiting the tourist sights Sydney has to offer. After walking around the harbour, seeing the bridge and the opera house we took a ferry out to Watsons Bay to go for a walk around the nature reserve. What the signs telling you of all the wonderful features of the park neglected to mention was that there would be views over a nudist beach complete with man inappropriately touching himself.

Whilst on this walk we were all talking about how we hadn't really seen that many spiders since arriving in Australia and at that exact moment I noticed that there were about 25 of them just about our heads... Luckily we don't think that they were venomous.

Our only plan for the final day in Sydney was to collect the camper-van that would be our home for the next 2 and a half weeks for me and month for Pete and Jess. On our way to the van depot it seems that me and Pete took or jibes over Jess' employment record a bit too far. This meant that when Pete made one more comment in the office of the van depot Jess turned around and responded with the classic phase “Fuck off Poug, you’re really pissing me off!”. Cue one very embarrassed old lady behind the counter! Anyway we still got the van without too many problems and named it Ange (after Jess' mum so that we could make lots more jokes).

Melbourne

Our very short stop over in Melbourne was all about two things; Neighbours and Formula 1. First was the Formula 1, we spent the whole day watching the support races and looking around the extra entertainment that was put on for the race. The on-track pre race entertainment included a Porsche Carrera Cup race and the Australian national institution that is the V8 Supercars. Finally just before the race began was a low level fly over of a Quantas 747.

When the cars finally made their first race pace pass of us (standing by the 2nd chicane) the sound was absolutely incredible. Something that words cannot do justice, it wasn't just a sound, you could feel the power of the cars as they passed by. We picked a good place to stand for the first lap as this was the corner Schumacher went off at, ended up passing right in front of us (at the end of the video below). As the race went on we walked further around the track to witness them taking some of the higher speed corners and to stand next to one of the straights where, inexplicably, they were louder still.

The other half of our trip to Melbourne was all about Neighbours. We had been told that the street where it is filmed is actually a normal residential street that is actually called Pin Oak Court so we decided to pass on the trip there. Instead we signed up for the Neighbours night at a pub in Melbourne. 

The night consisted of quite a lot of creepy comments made by Paul Robinson and Carl Kennedy (they did have real names but I don't think they were used all night) to all of the girls in the room (males were quite an obvious minority). There was also the surprise addition of Irish Conner to the lineup, who performed a bemusing dance routine to a pop medley. 

The climax of the night was Paul Robinson and the Waiting Room (the band's name makes more sense when Carl Kennedy doesn't have to leave halfway through the night)  playing a load of rock covers to the crowd. 

Other than these two massive events all we did was have a little bike ride along the river using some bikes from a strange vending machine style bike rental store.