Our Adventure to Australia and New Zealand

Part III
Touring on Vacation

:) Comprehensive Guide to Tours: Each hotel we stayed at had a comprehensive booklet of all the tours, and activities in the airport, from the free to the most expensive, with their costs, contacts and all other information. You could take a helicopter flight around the city, climb over the top of the city bridges, deep-sea dive under the ocean, or do a walking tour of the city; it was all available in the book. In Melbourne they even had a Restaurant Tram Tour that visited famous restaurants for a tasting tour. If you had no idea what to do before you went to a country, you could order one of those booklets from each city and plan your own adventures.


:) Great Day Tours—My Thing: The Day Tours we had were very good, and I don’t think you could get the same value by trying to set it up yourself. For example, the Blue Mountains and Australian Wildlife Tour out of Sidney was an all-day bus tour with guided commentary. You were picked up and returned to your hotel and taken on a tour:

• Through the Homebush Bay, site of the 2000 Olympic Games

• Three hours into the Blue Mountains National Park

• A light morning tea and a tour in a township along the way

• A scenic Cliff Drive past the Famous Three Sisters Outcropping and Echo Point

• Have lunch at the Katoomba resort region where we saw an aborigine playing the didgeridoo

• Ride the Railway to the lush hidden valley and explore the rainforest

• Glide out of the valley on the Cableway, taking in the panoramic views of the Jamison Valley.

• Take a ride of the recently unveiled Skyway, a journey 370 meters above the ancient ravines and
dazzling waterfalls

• See the views from Narrowneck and Cahill Lookouts and Megalong Valley

• Visit the Featherdale Wildlife Park where you will get close to cuddly koalas, kangaroos, wombats, dingoes and penguins

• Take Rivercat ride down the Parramatta River



:) Spontaneous Exploring—Ed’s Thing: On the days we didn’t have the guided tours, we had our rail/tram/bus pass and explored the city. This was Ed’s chance to be spontaneous and he really enjoyed it. We took the map and information about the city and explored. We’d suggest one thing we’d like to see; sometimes we’d find it and sometimes we’d find something different that we enjoyed more. We discovered the Chinese Friendship Gardens which I loved, and found so peaceful. We walked all over the Darling Harbour (this is the correct Australian spelling) and got lost several times. We finally found Chinatown and were disappointed with it. I discovered we could walk from our hotel to the Opera House easier than we could take a tram there (Ed begs to differ that it is too long to walk to). We took a Hop-on/Hop-off tour of the City on our own and went to several museums. We enjoyed the celebrations of Chinese New Year and learned how friendly the Australians were to Americans who were trying to find their way around town.




:) Hop On/Hop Off Buses: These were fun ways to get an overview of the city. Each city we visited had one of these buses, and they were a fun way to explore the city in an inexpensive way. We would complete the whole tour and listen to the commentary, then on the second go-around, we would start hopping off to see things. Each bus had two tours—one of the inner city, and another of the outer area. Each tour took about an hour, so you had to start early to see all you wanted to see. A ticket on these, which you could purchase whenever you got on, was usually around $20.00. The blue stops were easy to see, and they came about every 15 to 20 minutes (a little longer on the outer tours) so you never had to wait too long. You could get a one day or two day ticket.



:) Nature Always Has Surprises: A cyclone hit the north of Australia and we congratulated ourselves on missing it—until we got to Melbourne and the tail end of it hit there and dropped seven inches of rain on us in a couple of hours. It caused flash flooding in the streets and flooded the entryway of the hotel basement restaurant where we were eating. The next day we were on a day tour to Phillip Island to see the Penguin March and we got a first-hand tour of the flooded areas around Melbourne, as we were detoured around them. Then we were disappointed in the official penguin parade because we were rained out (but we had already seen plenty of penguins so it wasn’t too bad).



:) Phones Are Handy; Never Leave Home without Them: We were glad we had the phone then as our daughter had seen the floods on the news and called us to see how we were doing; she was worried sick about us and wondered why we hadn’t emailed. We told her about the cost of the internet, and we hope she understood.