So from Byron we headed back to the Gold Coast Airport for our flight to Sydney. This is the first time I’ve used flying as a mode if public transport in Australia and having booked with Tiger Airways, the Australian equivalent of Ryanair. We are only allowed 20kg of weight each so I dread the bag weigh in at checking as I suspect Zippy has gained a few pounds. Luckily when it came to it together the bags weighed around 35kg so it was all good. It seem a little odd to me that our tickets cost a lot less than say a bus or train and also the fact we don’t need to provide any ID let alone a passport to board the plane. Just a ticket and you’re good to go.
Arriving in Sydney we had failed to book somewhere to stay in the hope that with the literally hundreds of hostels we would be able to get a room or beds for the night. This was a major mistake! After walking around Sydney for 3 hours, we could not find a thing. No hostel beds, hotel rooms or even a room above a pub; everything was fully booked and we were completely stuck. Understandably this lead to arguments as we stress over the idea of having to sleep on the street. Our only bit of luck was that there were track works on the airport train so the service which would normally cost $15 was replaced by free bus to and from the airport. So back to the airport we went since at least they’re would be a roof over our heads and hey, how bad could spending a few hours in an airport be? They’re warm places with big comfy seats right? Wrong!
Apparently, Sydney airport isn’t as busy as we thought and actually shuts for around 4 hours in the middle of the night and therefore security guards move you along as they slowly close off parts of the airport until eventually everyone is shepherded into a tiny corridor. We find our spot on the freezing tiled floor and get as comfy as possible in our sleeping bags. We find a plug and watch some tv on Andrews laptop for a while and at around 3 in the morning I attempt to get some sleep on the airport floor. But true to my life just as I start to nap an alarm siren starts blaring. This alarm would go off roughly every half hour for like 10mins at a time just to make our Sydney experience as awesome as possible. By 7 the airport starts to reopen and by 9 we have a hostel booked for the next two nights. We decided not to make that mistake again.
At this point I’ll point out there were pictures of this oh so fun experience but several days later. Andrew’s camera card was stolen and so these photos no longer exist or if they do they ate in someone elses hands.
So Sydney didn’t have a good start. Airport sleepovers aside, Andrew did not like Sydney the night before due to the number of homeless in the street. I must admit I had completely forgotten about them until we got back but Sydney is filled with beggars and drunken homeless who sleep in doorways, on benches and sometimes in drink induced coma in the middle of the street.
Now that we had somewhere to sleep things were looking up but we weren’t allowed into our room until 2 so we had to dump our backpacks at “Maze” our hostel and jump straight into sight seeing having had no sleep. In the end I took Andrew to Hyde park and we ended up just napping on the grass into the afternoon before finally getting into our very grubby and stuffy room. In the end very little was done with our first day in Sydney but we have a full week for it to get better.