Bondi and the Blue Mountains - 19th Jan

I'd really wanted it to be a nice sunny day for our final swim in the Australian sea but unfortunately when we woke it was pretty overcast.

We knew that for further flights within Vietnam we'd need to reduce our weight from 23kg to 20kg so we'd been thinking about posting a box of bits home. There was a Post Office directly opposite the Youth Hostel and so this morning we headed over and bought a box then headed to the cafe next door for coffee and banana cake. Back at the hostel we filled the box with hats, gloves, the old Rough Guides which we no longer needed and a wallet of leaflets we'd collected on our travels. We then headed back to the Post Office to post it and we'll be seeing it again in 3 months time.

Although the weather was overcast it wasn't too cold and so we stuck with plan A and went for our final swim. Bondi beach was an appealing beach and it was fun jumping the waves one final time.

After the swim we awkardly got changed in the carpark (typically people seemed to appear from everywhere) and went for a walk along the promenade. As it was starting to drizzle we made the fateful decision to visit the Bondi Marine Aquarium which turned out to be the naffest aquarium I've ever been to. You were forced to watch a 5 minute video before entering a single room which had a tank with crabs and a tank with about 6 other fish and a projector showing some divers and snorkelers swimming underwater. You then went into another room where a 40 minute film introduced you to the different sealife in Bondi i.e. just off the beach, in the rock pools and in the deeper ocean. As you can see they anticipated a lot more customers than they were attracting.

We left feeling we'd been to a cinema outing of a very low budget film rather than an aquarium. Next we went for a short walk along part of the “Costal Walkway” from Bondi to Coogee. This looked like a really good walk and if we'd had more time I'd loved to have done it all.

By this time it was 1pm and we had a 2 hour drive ahead of us to the Blue Mountains. We'd seen a nice cafe opposite the YHA and so we went back there for a sarnie before heading in the car. True to form we got the same direction as before “slight right” which we missed and ended up having to drive right through the centre of Sydney. This added a bit more time to the journey but it was quite nice driving past some of the places we'd visited before and it meant we skipped paying a toll.

We finally got to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains for 5pm where we'd be spending our final 2 nights in Oz. The YHA was much nicer than in Bondi. We had our own ensuite room and there was a big lounge with lots of sofas to sit on. We spent some time booking our final 4 nights of the trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and then went out for a Thai Meal.