Day 35 & 36 & 37 - Sydney - Opera House - Harbor Bridge - Harbor Cruise

Monday it was time to say goodbye to New Zealand. We watched the last bit of “The Return of the King” at the breakfast table. I was pretty sad, to be honest. You look forward to it for so long and then time flies by in the blink of an eye.

The activities are planned and certain ideas automatically grow along with them. But then everything turns out completely differently. That's not a bad thing, it's just part of it and makes traveling easy. You say to yourself: I'll do what I didn't do next time! You actually know very well that you will probably never come back. In the end, the beauty is not the individual experience - but the sum of the experiences and impressions collected: the (chance) encounters make life interesting, driving the car is (usually) really fun with the landscapes or the fact that every little mountain hike has its own charm - even if it's not Mount Everest and you almost fly away or freeze to death at that moment. Walks in and around Twizel, in absolute peace and seclusion, are among my favorites.

Ultimately, we always have to remember that we are doing well and that we have the opportunity to just go on a tour like this. In this respect it means: soak up every moment and be grateful.

But we still can't really understand that we're on the other side of the world. We basically don't get much from home and live in our own world here. It is only much later that we will probably understand and process all of our experiences.

There seems to be a lot of land in Auckland right now 🙈. It's hard to believe we were there about two weeks ago 🤷🏼‍♂️.

When we drove to the airport, I was cursing like a pig again. It's always the same when you want to drop off a rental car at the airport: you simply never find the designated parking spaces or the key return points, no matter how small the airport may be 😅. The one in Queenstown is very small and nice - very clear. There is even an “international gate”. They could have just written “Australia” there 😅🙈😁.

An Asian family sat at our table at lunch. They seemed very serious. Suddenly the man put a bottle of Jack Daniels on the table and said to us: “It has to go.” We laughed in tears 😂. I immediately had the café give me a paper cup (they looked at me in disbelief 😅) and then we drank half the bottle 😂. Sensational.

Then we continued on the plane. I am absolutely convinced by Air New Zealand: we received full meals during the short-haul flight from Queenstown to Sydney. First wine, then lunch, then wine again and I was asked if I would like a second drink with it. A life like in the land of milk and honey. The airline has clearly established itself at number 1 in my ranking. As nice as the flight was, the landing approach was not. Since a “hurricane 🌀” was raging in Sydney (at least I think that’s the term the captain used), we filmed what felt like endless loops over the city. At some point he made the landing approach. The plane rocked quite a bit. But everything worked 😁😅.

Entering Australia was super easy, uncomplicated and quick. Unfortunately we didn't get any stamps 😅. We are also very satisfied with the hotel. We have a fairly complete kitchen, so we can cater for ourselves👍🏻.

Tuesday we spent a very quiet day, slept in, went shopping, did laundry and cooked. It was relatively cold, rainy and cloudy. So a kind of couch day was offered.

To be honest, we slept quite late on Wednesday, but we also treat ourselves to that during the week (😁). After breakfast we went to the opera house and then took a harbor tour. The weather was pretty great ☀️.

Good night 😴