I knew after I booked my plane tickets to Australia that I wanted to spend a few days in New Zealand. However, I hadn’t quite settled on which city I wanted to visit. I contemplated flying into the capital Auckland, but it was only after I asked a former colleague that the idea of Queenstown came to mind. Her suggestion was Milford Sound, which is part of Fiordland National Park, with the closest airport being Queenstown. Once I saw photos…
The day after our Blue Mountain trip was another long travel day – we were taking an early morning flight to New Zealand. While it wasn’t my intention to have such long days back to back, it was the only way to fit in everything with our schedule. So our alarms rang at 5am and we were out of the house by 5:45am. Luckily there were a couple of Vietnamese bakeries opened on our walk to the station, so at least…
The first of my two day trips was to Blue Mountain. While there are lots of tours from Sydney CBD going to Blue Mountain daily, the pickup locations weren’t convenient from where we were staying, so I decided early on that I would plan the trip myself. I checked out the train schedule in advance and pre-purchased my Lyrebird Pass, which included the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus, as well as admission to Scenic World. The trip to Katoomba would take around 2.5 hours…
We finally made it to Sydney for our second day in Australia. We started off with breakfast at home, then my uncle suggested we take the ferry into the city via Paramatta. Sydney has such a large public transportation network and throughout my week I took everything from the bus, train, light rail to ferry. As it was a nice day out, we decided to take our time and venture by ferry to see more of the surrounding areas along…
The official first day of my vacation was quite chill. I purposely didn’t plan a lot to give myself room to adjust to the time difference and the change in weather. I packed so many layers on this trip thinking I would be needing it for my time in New Zealand and Hong Kong, when in fact it was averaging 25°C every day. What I really could have used was a pair of shorts! After waking up and getting refreshed, we…