After spending 4 months in Sydney (and as lovely as our flat is), Jo and I had been thinking that it was time to move on. We have been trying to find someone to take over our lease for our flat (we had a 6 month lease), so that we can get on with our travels. We placed our ad in the paper on Wednesday, on Thursday someone confirmed with the landlord that they wanted to move into our flat, with us to move out on Saturday. As you can imagine, with just 2 days to get our exodus and travel plans prepared, it was a pretty manic period of getting everything sorted - but somehow we did it.

Before finally leaving Sydney went on a trip with Melanie and her friend Hayden to the Blue Mountains (which we still hadn't gotten around to doing). It was a lovely little trip to finish off our stay in Sydney with, taking in the magnificent hazy forest views. I write this now as I'm waiting for our caoch to Camberra - we're stopping there for a couple of days (and saying hello to Julie Lovell) before going on to Melbourne & Cairns & Barrier Reef and all that, before leaving for our Jaunt around South East Asia. I'll be sad to leave Sydney (and our lovely little flat), but also glad to be getting on with the rest of our journey.

It's so odd to be living out of a backpack now after spending so long living in a civilised manner(ish). Currently we're expecting to get back to jolly old England at the beginning of April.

Hope you've had a good Christmas and New years. The Christmas weather was somewhat subdued over here, so I can't boast about that too much, but New Years was very exciting. We (me, Jo and Mel) went over to Blues Point in North Sydney (http://www.sydneynewyearseve.com/harbour_vantage.htm) at 3:30 pm to stake out a good viewing spot. The 8 or so hours flew by (ish) but I was thrilled that we had such a good spot on the foreshore with fantastic view of the bridge and Operah house. The fireworks display may well have been the best I've ever seen - here's a pikkie of what we saw: http://www.sydneynewyearseve.com/2002/media/mz0364a.jpg

I've finished working at WSPA (for the moment at least) and have been working for a pharmecutical marketing company doing follow up phone calls to people on a trial medicine, to ask them a number of questions about how they're doing. Its pretty interesting stuff - you never know what the person who picks up the phone is going to be like.