Helen and Randall on the road

Early starts both mornings, with pick up by Rod of Coogee Pro Dive  under the Coca Cola Sign of Kings Cross. Friday was a guided group shore dive off Bare Island for Randall and day 1 of the PADI Open Water skills test dives for the Open Water Diver certification for me (I’d already completed my pool dives and theory), then Saturday was the Shark Dive for Randall and day 2 of the PADI skills test dives for me in beautiful Camp Cove the same as the day before:

Randall saw loads of fish and I saw, amongst other things, a baby Port Jackson shark, to the great delight of my instructor as apparently it’s quite rare to see them.

In the evening we went for a wander around Kings Cross. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy:

Seriously, it is a splendid, seething, screeching mass of neon tackiness amongst which we managed to find, on Saturday night, a rather nice Vietnamese restaurant where we celebrated me passing my PADI with a bottle of fizzy booze, all the while being horrified about the price of wine in Australia (Aussie wine costs more here than it does in the UK…WTF???). We also found a Cuban bar with live salsa music played by two Columbian guys:

fantastic retro mixer!

so we drank overpriced Mojitos, attempted to dance salsa (tricky in flip-flops) and talked rubbish to some of the more inebriated clientele.

Arrived at hideous-o-clock so had to fortify ourselves with coffee in arrivals (no One World arrivals lounge at Sydney…pah!) which gave us a chance to buy sim cards and credit.

We wussed the bus ride and took a taxi to our hostel to drop off our bags in the luggage store (on the top floor,  with no lift, obviously) then went for a pootle about:

I don’t know who the purple bag lady is but she’s awfully engrossed in that Lonely Planet guide…

We rather liked this sign, spotted when walking through the park on the way back from the Opera House to our hostel:

An afternoon nap turned into a rather longer snooze than planned so the evening was a bit of a write off, except for sensible food shopping and sandwich making for our early start the next morning, although we did manage to squeeze in a controversial pizza:

I had the Libya, very topical under the circumstances.