Aussies for two weeks!

Hello hello!

I’ve been really excited to share this post lately as it was definitely the trip of my life, so buckle up for a long post!

In February 2020, me and Sebastian went to Australia! We’ve been wanting to go there for ages and the previous summer we decided to buy tickets and just go. Luckily, my cousin Pedro and his wife Mariana had been living there for 10 years and they were angels for accommodating us, which was also another reason why we decided to go.

I will start by telling our plane-ticket drama. We have always been aware that flying out from Lisbon is not the cheapest, so for longer flights sometimes we look into other European airports nearby. We found some pretty cheap flights to Sydney, with a layover in China, that were flying out from London. The tickets from Lisbon to London cost us each 100 EUR, and the London-China-Sydney flight was 500 EUR. Flights from Lisbon-Sydney usually cost at least 800 EUR, so we thought this was the perfect match, especially since we had a long layover in China that would allow us to visit the city, which is something none of us mind.

But then the coronavirus happened, and our flights were changed one month before we left. Although they were closing borders due to the virus, they changed our flight to go back and forth in China, which didn’t make much sense. After days of speaking to the airline’s customer support, they told us that, due to the situation, the flights would eventually be cancelled, and it would be better for us to cancel right away and book new ones. The cheapest flights we found from London (since we already had our Lisbon-London tickets) were another 800 EUR. By this time, Lisbon-Sydney flights were over 1000 EUR, so we decided to go to London anyway and pay for the new flights. We ended up paying 900 EUR each for the total flights and we lost one day in Sydney since we would leave London one day after we were supposed to. As you can imagine, this was a kick in our plans, but well. We didn’t want to cancel the trip so we decided to do it anyway.

With our new flights, we also had a long layover in San Francisco, which is a city I’ve been wanting to visit for a while! But I’ll leave the details of that for another blog post. We left London at around 16h and arrived at 19h. We spent the night there and flew to San Francisco the next morning, at 11h30. It’s a 10 hour long flight, and with the time difference we arrived in San Francisco at 14h45. We flew with United Airlines - I had never taken such a long flight before in my life, and I was so happy to see the plane had tons of entertainment. We were also super lucky because the check-in lady gave us a whole 4 seat row to ourselves so we could easily lay down and rest (we were this lucky in all 4 flights we took!). We left San Francisco at 22h45 February 28th and landed in Sydney at 9h05 March 1st, so a whole day and a few hours later (aren’t time zones the craziest thing??).

A few days in Sydney

We had been checking the weather predictions and we were prepared for some cloudy and rainy holidays. But we stepped outside the Sydney airport and it was the sunniest day ever and super hot!

After going home and changing to our swimming suits, we headed to the Bondi Beach area. We took the opportunity to buy some sunscreen (the best I’ve ever tried, Australians really have it all figured out - try the Banana Boat sunscreen to have the best protection). We wanted to explore a little bit, so we passed the Bondi Icebergs and walked a little bit until we arrived at Tamarama beach - there are many beaches along the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk, but it was so hot that we stopped right at the first one and enjoyed a few hours catching sun and swimming.

Afterwards, we headed back to the Bondi area and explored the market around there, which is really cool! One of the things we enjoyed the most is that all shops and restaurants look really local. There’s no store chain around like Zara or McDonald’s. We rented some bikes with an app called Lime and headed back home to Rose Bay - if you’re thinking about renting some bikes, I don’t recommend these ones. For starters, my pedal broke. Then, if you’re more than 2 people, asking for an Uber ends up being cheaper and quicker than riding these bikes. I think they are worth it just for the sake of the ride, but not for anything else.

On our second day, we woke up early to visit the Opera House area. We walked from home to the Rose Bay Wharf and caught a ferry boat that left us directly in Circular Quay, which is the port right by the Opera House. This ferry ride is sooo worth it! Ferries in Sydney work just like public transportation and are pretty frequent, and the view of the city from the sea is incredible. We paid for all transportation with Apple Pay using our Revolut account - if you don’t have Apple Pay, you need to buy a public transportation card called Opal and charge it to use it. I think the ferry prices are quite confusing, as I honestly didn’t understand how much each ferry ride is since they wouldn’t charge it right away, but their website has more information about this. Anyway, from my calculation, a ferry from Rose Bay to Circular Quay is around 1.86 AUD (approximately 1.10 EUR when we were there).

We wandered around the Opera House and took some pictures, but we decided not to go inside since there were other places we wanted to visit. We walked through the Royal Botanic Gardens all the way to Mrs. Macquaries’ Chair, which is an amazing lookout point to the city, overlooking the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour bridge.

Afterwards, we headed home for lunch and enjoyed the rest of our afternoon sunbathing. We started by going to Bondi and then headed to Bronte to try out a new beach. If you’ve ever read about Sydney, you probably know that Bondi is a surfer’s attraction and also quite touristy around the area. There were a lot of people at the beach, but the sand area is so big that we had tons of space. Tamarama, the first one we went to, was much smaller and it was a bit crowded (it was also Sunday, so maybe this is why), but still, there was space. Bronte was a bit wider than Tamarama, and it didn’t seem quite as crowded. A fun thing about beaches along this coast is that there is always a green grass field behind the sand area, and it looks like many people prefer to chill there than on the sand!

Our third day in Sydney was a bit more sad since the sun was behind some deep clouds, so we decided to visit the Taronga Zoo. We’ve heard great things about it and it was recommended to us by Mariana, who is also not a big fan of zoos and she said this one was worth the visit. We paid for our tickets at a little stand in Circular Quay, and it cost us 120 AUD for two people, ferry trip included. At the Zoo, we paid an additional 29.95 AUD to interact with baby koalas, which was the closest we’ve ever been to any! This amount includes a photo with the koalas taken by their employees. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to touch or hold them, but I think it was still worth the price since we didn’t get the chance to see any wild ones. The Zoo is really cool, and actually a good activity for a cloudy day (I don’t believe we would have gone if it was sunny). It also has the best view of the city since it is on the exact opposite side of the coast of central Sydney!

By the time we left it had already started raining, so we decided to visit Luna Park, which is a really famous amusement park in Sydney (but it was closed, sadly). We then went back to the city centre and visited the Queen Victoria building, wandered around the Sydney chinatown and walked down to Darling Harbour, which was an amazing plan since we couldn’t go to the beach. I wish we had spent a little more time in Darling Harbour since it has so much to explore, but we just walked around for a while and decided to head back to Rose Bay to grab our swimsuits and go snorkelling at Clovelly Beach. We read that this was one of the best beaches in Sydney to snorkel, so we decided to go and in fact it was quite fun! We even saw a blue grouper, which is a fish we’ve never seen before!

The next day was by far the worst one of the trip. Since we were staying in Australia for two weeks, we decided to take a few days to head to Byron Bay. Since the drive there was 8 hours long, we decided to spend the night at Port Macquarie, which is around halfway there - this way we wouldn’t need to spend a full day driving and would also have the chance to visit a new place. This is the most important lesson I’ve learned throughout the trip: always book your rental car in advance. Since all websites looked sketchy, we thought it would be better to head to King’s Cross and visit the actual car rental place: every car was sold out. That street is known for having a lot of car rentals, so we visited every single one in the street and they were all sold out. Every. Single. One. Not even one tiny car available. This was crazy, and we were not expecting this. And to make things better, it was pouring rain that day and we were soaked. We were expecting to leave in the morning, but it was already 11am and we didn’t have a car. We decided to call the airport and there was one agency called AVIS that still had cars available, but only at 2pm which was already late, but there was nothing we could do, so we booked it. On the phone, they told us the price would be around 250 EUR for the whole rental (about 7 days), with insurance and additional driver included.

We got to the airport and, when booking the car, we realised that you need a translated driver’s license so we would be able to rent it. This is an official document that needs to be requested in advance, and we had no idea since in other countries we were never asked for it. We requested an urgent one online (please mind that we paid around 20 EUR to have it in 20 minutes), and when we received it on our email, it didn’t have the driver’s license number, so the rental agency wouldn’t accept it. The website’s customer service took so long to reply to our messages that we were in the airport for 2 hours until we were able to get the correct license. BUT, to make things better, the lady at the agency’s desk said that the price we were told on the phone was incorrect, and instead we would need to pay around 600 EUR, which was crazy. We ended up going to another agency called Enterprise, paid 400 EUR with insurance and it turns out it is not mandatory to have the translated driver’s license, so this was a huge bummer on our plans, and we were only able to leave the airport on our way to Port Macquarie after 5pm. We arrived right before midnight, so we didn’t get to enjoy anything there. But at least our Airbnb was amazing and the hosts were the nicest. We paid 75.30 EUR for two people, one night. The place was spotless and we even received a visit from the host’s cat in the morning, which made our day!

Our stay in Byron Bay

We left pretty early the next morning and arrived in Byron Bay at 1pm. After lunch, we headed to our Airbnb to change and go to the beach. Our Airbnb was also super cool - it’s not in the best location if you don’t have a car, or at least a bike, since it is still 40 minutes walking from the centre of Byron Bay. It was a small studio, super clean and quiet, perfect for a couple. We paid XXX fpr 4 nights. After changing clothes, we headed straight to the Main Beach, and afterwards we spent the evening exploring the local shops.

Byron Bay has one of the best local markets I’ve been in. Just like the Bondi Beach area, all restaurants and shops look local and traditional, and it’s so refreshing to feel the vibe of the place. Byron Bay is a small town and its main attraction is the beach, there’s not much else to do if the weather is not sunny, and we were so unlucky because during most of our stay there we caught tons of rain.

We had booked a snorkel tour to the Julian Rocks to go see some sea turtles, however since the weather didn’t allow the tour to go on, we rebooked the tour for the next day (spoiler alert: we ended up rescheduling the tour 4 times and the conditions were never good, so the company ended up refunding us our payment) and headed to a beach called Wategos Beach. This beach has such a tropical vibe. Although it was a bit cloudy, we were lucky that it didn’t rain right away and we enjoyed some snorkelling there. The water is crystal clear and we even saw some tiny stingrays!

On the next day, we decided to head to the Gold Coast. We drove one hour from Byron Bay and visited a beach called Surfers Paradise. This area of the city has some real Miami vibes! In the afternoon, we headed to Burleigh Heads and had lunch at a place called Burleigh Tropicana, which is one of the worst restaurants I’ve ever been too (overpriced and the food was clearly frozen).

I have to say that the Gold Coast did not impress me much, and now that I’ve been there I would prefer to have spent another day in Byron Bay - or maybe get some information about nicer areas around the Gold Coast.

On our way back from the Gold Coast to Byron Bay, we decided to ride in the Whian Whian mountains since we read that this was the place in the area where we would have the best chances of spotting wild koalas. We also went to the Rocky Creek Dam hoping to see them, but no luck. We spotted two wild kangaroos and that already made it worth the ride, however it’s sad since we were told that this was probably due to the fact that many koalas died in the December 2019 bushfires.

We woke up the day after to a very cloudy and rainy day in Byron Bay. Since we could not enjoy the beach, we decided to visit the Cape Byron Lighthouse, which is beautiful - we didn’t enjoy it to the fullest since it was raining quite a lot, but we know there’s a trail leading to the most easterly point of Australia mainland that we would like to have visited and it is super popular. We also stopped by a beach called Clarkes Beach as we were told this is also a beautiful place (and it is indeed!).

There were a few things we would like to have visited in Byron Bay, as the Farm and some cafes, but since the weather was not on our side, we mostly visited the local markets, the shops and just a couple of beaches. Byron Bay is a place that I would love to come back to when it’s sunnier and enjoy it to the fullest in the future!

Now, I wanted to take a separate section of this post to speak about Byron Bay cafes: they know how to do it right. These are the most cute and delicious places we’ve been to in Australia. For starters, they all have this boho, relaxed Byron Bay vibe to them, and this is one of the things I loved the most here. My favourite one was Folk Byron - we went there twice because I loved it so much. I had the Green Dream smoothie both times, we tried an açaí bowl, an avocado toast and the best banana bread I’ve ever had! This was right by our Airbnb so we would wake up early to get the best tables - the cafe is super cute, full of plants decorating it and the tables are super cozy.

Another one we loved was Top Shop Cafe. We were in a bit of a rush to go to our snorkelling tour so we didn’t spend time there, but the food was amazing (I had an avocado toast and Sebastian had a breakfast burger). They also have an outside sitting area that allows you to sit on the grass while you’re eating, as if you were having a picnic. Perfect way to start the morning!

We also tried the açai bowl at the Pressed Pantry. This is a cute cafe, however it is quite small and it doesn’t have much variety of food.

Besides these amazing cafes, we also tried a few restaurants, but only one of them was remarkable to me: Betty’s Burgers! This restaurant is right in the centre, near the Main Beach, and it serves some delicious burgers. Besides the main dish, you can also ask for a Concrete dessert, which is like an ice cream made of cookie dough… Delicious!

A few other cafes we didn’t have the chance to go to but would love to try in the future are Combi Cafe, The Byron Bay General store and Bay Leaf!

Back to Sydney

After 4 rainy days in Byron Bay, we headed back to Sydney. We were supposed to stay in Coffs Harbour for the night, but since we wouldn’t be enjoying the day in Byron Bay because it was raining, we decided to head straight back to Sydney so we would have the chance to spend a last full day there. The trip lasted for about 9 hours, and we arrived back in Sydney just in time for sunset and dinner.

The next day, since we were so sad that we didn’t end up snorkelling at Julian Rocks, we booked a snorkelling tour with a company named EcoTreasures. It snorkelled at Shelly Beach, which is near Manly. This was really new for us since all the places we’ve snorkelled at before didn’t have as much sea life as Australia, and we were really happy that we saw a ton of different fish, sting rays and even a tiny shark! Since we were right there next to Manly, we also walked there for a while before we went back to Rose Bay to enjoy the rest of the day.

We enjoyed one last sunset at Bondi Beach and left the next day, and we couldn’t be more sad! Australia is too far away to spend just two weeks there, and since there’s so much to see in that beautiful country it felt a little bittersweet to leave so quickly.

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Overall, this was by far the best trip we’ve ever made, even considering the bad weather. I loved Sydney and Byron Bay - these are two places that for sure I want to go back to in the future, especially Byron Bay if we can catch some sun. I was not a big fan of the Gold Coast, however I believe that it has some hidden gems that we weren’t able to experience.

The next time we go to Australia, I’m sure we will be visiting some new places, and although there are some other countries we would like to visit first, we are already searching for the best ones to go to when we get the chance to travel to Australia in the future!