A HOLY WELCOME TO OZ

On the plane from Auckland (where we had made a 2hr transit stop from Santiago) to Sydney, we found out from our Quantas in-flight magazine that our 3 day visit to Sydney coincided with World Youth Day 2008 - a huge week-long Catholic pilgrimage by 500,000 teenagers and priests, from all over the world, to see the pope - the first papal visit to Australia in 15yrs. This explained why the plane was swarming with Paraguayan kids singing songs about Jesus... it was a long, long flight.

We stayed at Base Hostel, at a great location close to the harbour, which was also swarming with little disciples. It felt like we were on a school trip! However, it was easy to walk to all the sights and we spent a good 3 days wandering around the city (along with all the pilgrims), checking out the obvious tourist attractions, botanical gardens and the nearby beaches at Manly (you've got to chuckle) & Bondi. We hate to say it, but we found Bondi Beach disappointing... probably because of all the hype and maybe because we'd recently been to Copacabana & Ipanema Beaches in Brasil? It just wasn't that impressive to look at, but we enjoyed watching the surfers and getting our toes in the sand again.

A highlight of our short stay in Sydney was hooking up with a great friend of Jesse's, Dan and his lovely girlfriend Monika. We had a great evening drinking beers next to Sydney Opera House, followed by an obligatory karaoke session... Dan, where the hell did you learn to sing like that??

Australia was never meant to be part of our trip but merely a transit stop on our way to Japan. The strange thing is that Sydney in particular felt like we'd arrived in the Orient already - there are so many Japanese residents, workers & tourists and with them comes the sushi shops, food halls & karaoke bars - a nice taster of what we have ahead of us!