We booked our fights with Thomas Cook and were pretty pleased with the price and the service they provided – except that about a week before we came away we noticed that they’d managed to arrange our flights so that we were due to leave Sydney twenty minutes before we would have arrived.  As a result we had to sacrifice a day in New Zealand and stay overnight in Sydney – at their expense.  They booked us into the same hotel in Darling Harbour that we’d stayed in when we visited Australia a couple of years ago, so at least we knew where we’d be staying and could plan a little bit of exploring for yesterday afternoon.

We mulled over whether to take a boat over to Manly or to catch the bus to Bondi Beach, but in the end decided to join the thousands of  kids (anyone between the ages of 16 and 36) showing off their tans on the golden sands of Bondi.  If anything’s guaranteed to make you feel your age it’s to sit on the beach in the middle of  a sea of suntanned flesh trying to hold your tummy in for a couple of hours.  To add insult to injury, as we were sat there a young guy who was going surfing asked us to keep an eye on his possessions – he said that we looked ‘trustworthy’, which I reckon meant that he thought we were too old to be dishonest!

We booked a shuttle bus from the hotel to the airport this morning.  I think that the driver must have been a tuk-tuk driver in another life – if you’d think that traveling at 500mph at 35,000ft over the ocean in a thin steel tube would be more dangerous than to be driven though Sydney by a suicidal Russian you’d be wrong!