the land of oz

I made it to Australia! I landed in Sydney 3 days ago after many hours in transit - 9 for the flight from Honolulu to Auckland, followed by a 5 hour layover, then a 3 hour flight from Auckland to Sydney plus airport transfers... all in all it was over 20 hours. I also lost an entire day on the way over here - somehow when I woke up on the plane it wasn't the next morning, but the morning after that! Hopefully I'll get it back someday... :)

So far in Sydney there's been a lot of planning going on. It's very exciting! Priscilla and I were looking at either a 6 or 12 day tour to cover off the middle of Australia (Ayers Rock & Alice Springs), and somehow while going through the brochures we managed to upsell ourselves on a 3 week itinerary instead! The guy at the travel agency had nothing to do with it. He was actually kinda surprised when we went in yesterday afternoon to book something we hadn't even discussed with him the day before. This tour will cover more territory - instead of doing just the middle, we'll do the middle from top to bottom, starting from Darwin down through to Adelaide, then Melbourne and ultimately back to Sydney later in June. The major sightseeing in Sydney will have to wait until then...

Packing has been a bit of a nightmare... This is what's stressing me out these days! :) I have one big bag here that's basically a backpack with wheels, plus another bag for day trips. My big bag weighs 4.8 kg empty and the luggage weight limit for part of this upcoming trip is 10 kg, which doesn't leave much room for my stuff! Luckily I have a small fold up duffel bag in my big bag, so I think I'm going to have to re-pack to take only that on this trip. I called ahead to the hotel we're staying at in Sydney later this month and they have long term storage, so I'll drop off whatever I'm not taking on this excursion later tonight, as we fly to Darwin tomorrow... It's funny, I had packing for 4 days of work down to a science - but packing for 6 months of anything really (sight-seeing, beach, outback safari, city/night life, plus potentially some kind of work - I have a working holiday visa) was a challenge. And this tour we're going on now has all of those things in it (except the work part)... and I have to down-size to less than half of what I brought to cover off all of those possibilities. I'm not gonna lie, this 10 kg thing is gonna be a challenge. But I am up for it! Wish me luck...