To start, I ate kangaroo.  Last week we had it in the dining hall for dinner one night.  It was just a kangaroo steak and it tasted a lot like regular steak, but we had it with a berry glaze sauce.  It was surprisingly good!  In the last week, I have also tried sticky date pudding, which is a very common Australian dessert and Tim Tams, which are cookies that are more addicting that Oreo’s. 

 This last weekend got off to a very eventful start.  Wednesday nights are pub nights at college, so pretty much everyone goes out.  I made the mistake of staying out until 3:30 am when I had to get up at 5 am to catch a flight to Sydney.  Needless to say, I over slept and missed my flight.  A few hours of crying to the lady that works at the front desk and a lot of money later, I was on a flight to Sydney. 

Since Allie goes to University of Wollongong, which is about an hour or so from Sydney, I had to then take a train all the way out there.  This meant taking a short train from the airport to Wolli Creek and then an hour long train from Wolli Creek to Fairy Meadow.  By the time I finally got there, I was so excited to Allie and Craig at the train station.  It was like the next best thing to being home.  Sadly, I didn’t get to see much of Fairy Meadow since Thursday night we just went out to dinner and hung out in Allie’s apartment with some friends and Friday we caught the train back into the city. 

In Sydney we checked into our hostel and then went to go see some of the big sites.  We walked to the harbour to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.  We then went into China Town to have dinner, but it was crazy cause all through China Town were people selling things.  This was at night, when it was dark, there were tables of clothes, jewelry, watches, all right down the center between restaurants. 

On Saturday, Craig left to go home around 11 and Allie and I began our adventure.  She has this Lonely Planet travel guide called Walking in Australia with all kinds of hikes throughout Australia.  There is this one hike in Boudi National Park outside of Sydney, in Killcare, that we decided we wanted to do.  We had called to check out the bus times and they said there was only 2 buses heading out that way on Saturday and that there was only one back into the city, but that we could catch a cab or walk a ways to catch a different bus.  So Allie and I took a train to Woy Woy where we got on a bus heading to Killcare.  We asked the bus driver if he went near Putty Beach, where our hike started, and he said he could get us pretty close.  The driver went outside of his normal route to get us close to Putty Beach, but as we were getting off the bus he told us that there were no more buses heading back that day and that a cab would be around $50 and handed us a map of the area.  Allie and I are both thinking that we would get to the entrance to the national park and there would be some sort of information center that would help us figure out a way to get back.  After walking a ways down the beach, we realized that there was no information center and we didn’t have the number for a cab company or anything.  We wandered into a camp grounds and found a sign with some numbers on it and started calling some information numbers trying to find a way back.  At this point, we are both already a bit hungry because it was now 2 o’clock and we hadn’t eaten since 10 am.  We had also assumed there would be some shops or something near the entrance where we could get some food, but again, we were wrong.  After finally calling the non-emergency police number and asking them for the number for a cab, we scheduled a cab pick up at the entrance to the park at 7:30 pm, even though we didn’t exactly know where the entrance was. 

Already a bit hungry, we set out on this hike.  It was a really amazing hike, but it was basically an endless staircase.  There were areas where the stairs were so steep, it was like impossible to get up and some places where it was hard to even see the path.  In one place we lost the path for a little while.  The hike was called the Coastal Walk, which was completely appropriate since every little while the path would take us to the cliffs looking out over the water and then back in to the forest.  One of the places along the hike was called Maitland Bay.  It was one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen.  It was kind of hidden and seemed as though most of the people there had gotten there by boat. 

It took us 2.5 hours to get to the “end” of the hike.  However, this meant that we then had to walk back the way we came.  We were so hungry and tired that we basically sprinted back.  Somehow, we made it back to the start in 1.5 hours.  We were so hungry at this point and we had over an hour before the cab was coming that we just started walking out towards where we thought the town might be.  We wandered aimlessly through a neighborhood for a while until we ran into a few guys and asked them where the nearest place to eat was.  Luckily, it was just down the street.  At then end of the street was like 2 restaurants, a liquor store (bottle-o as its called here), and a post office.  Both of us ordered a Cajun-chicken burgers.  They were probably the best burgers I have ever had.  It was Cajun-chicken, tomato, lettuce, beets, pineapple, and a ranch type sauce.  I would never have normally tried all those things together, but it was so delicious.  When the cab came to where we were, we were so relieved to find it was only a $27 ride, not $50.  After another hour train ride from Woy Woy to Sydney, we were both so exhausted that showered and basically just went to bed. 

Sunday was beach day and I was so excited.  We went for a run and did a little bit of shopping before hand, so we didn’t get to Bondi Beach until after 1pm.  Bondi has to be one of the most crowded beaches I have ever seen, except maybe in Hawaii.  The waves were huge and there were people everywhere.  It looked so much like a movie to me.  There were the lifeguards everywhere and the surfers off on a separate part of the beach.  Allie and I were in the water for a while even though it was freezing cold.  By the end of the day, we were both super exhausted again. After Allie headed back to Fairy Meadow, I pretty much went straight to bed to make sure that I wouldn’t miss my flight in the morning…