Another day of sightseeing today – our last day in Australia – before packing our rucksacks ready for them to be thrown around an aircraft hold (or is it on the tarmac they do the damage?). Whatever, we had a great last day.

The sun shone. The sky was kind-of-blue (when the clouds parted). And we all got sunburnt! You’d have thought we’d have learnt by now. We walked across the Botanical Gardens to the Opera House, then took a ferry up the river to gawp at the wonderful waterside houses that grace the shores of Sydney Harbour. It gave us all a chance to rest our legs, and think about how lovely it would be to live in a city like this, with great views across the water. Shame that we don’t have the money to buy houses like that in England – or even in Sydney, where a harbour side penthouse recently sold for A$15,000,000 (around £6M!).

We wandered around the harbour side, and stared at the opera house and the views. We watched the hundreds of people climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge (next time…). We paused by the Opera House and asked somebody to take our photo in front of it. Sadly, the Canadian who took it didn’t really have an eye for a photo – he took a close up of us, and left out the Opera House completely! So we asked somebody else to take a photo (phew!). We watched some aborigines playing didgeridoo with the harbour as background. It was an uplifting ending to a great 3 months in Oz.

And then we went back to the noise of the city, and the bustle of the train stations, and dust of the underground, and the squalor of Kings Cross (where our ‘private hotel’ is), and the spell was broken. Who cares, in a years’ time we’ll remember the highlights of the day, not the rest!