January 7, 2004

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 harbourside penthouse recently sold for A$15,000,000 (around £6M!).

We wandered around the harbourside, 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!

Our last night in Australia called for a special meal – and after three months of seeing it on the menu, I decided that I should try one of the "Bush Foods". At the café of the Aboriginal centre in the Grampians they offered a 'triple treat' of Kangaroo Steak, Emu kebab and Crocodile burger – but it didn't seem right to be munching away on man's friends (well, even crocs have friends, like little Bob Irwin!) in the middle of a National Park, where even taking a leaf from the ground is an offence.

But now we're back in the city, sensibilities have been left behind, so it was just a case of choosing which cute, furry, Australian animal to eat! I feel sorry for crocodiles, because they've got to live with Steve Irwin hanging around and wrestling them. And emus just don't look like the kind of bird that you'd get a nice kebab from. So kangaroos seemed to be the ideal candidate – to Australians they are a pest, and they're definitely not endangered, as we've seen them all over the place (remember Pambula campsite and Anglesea golf course?).

So I sat down to dinner at Krave (the best value café we found in all our time in Sydney) and ordered the kangaroo steak. I didn't know if I'd expected anything special, but what I got was a steak – just a plain, simple steak that could have been beef, lamb or any other kind of 'normal' meat. It tasted just like anything else (although, I must be honest, that my mind was dominated by the thoughts of Skippy rather than having a meat-gourmet mindset).

And if I hadn't known it was kangaroo, I guess I wouldn't have thought any more of it. But as it was kangaroo, I was a bit intrigued – after all, it's a bit like eating horsemeat in England – there's nothing wrong with it, you just don't do it. Anyway, back to Skippy. A little bit of research turned up the Aussie Meats Guide to Kangaroo Cuts, which contained this lovely diagram showing where the cuts come from – to help your imagination, I've drawn on where my rump steak came from!

So there we go – I've enjoyed a nice kangaroo steak, didn't choke on it, and positively enjoyed it. (Oh, and the girls had pasta!)

It seems a little unfair to end on that note, but it's where our Australia diary finishes...