There's a subway underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge between Observatory Hill and the Rocks.

It's probably about 100m long and has tiled walls on both sides.

And both walls, for their entire length, look like this...



So it's either concerted vandalism (which seems unlikely, as there are CCTV security cameras everywhere)...

...or art.

Actually, I make it nearly seven out of ten...

I'm talking about Tina's list of things to have photos of which she gave me before I went away.

I can tick off...

1. Hug koala or feed a kangaroo - as I did both, nearly, I'm counting that as two points;
2. 3 different combinations of Opera House and Bridge - Yep, done to death (several points);
3. Holding bottle of wine outside Lindemans - Lindemans, yes; bottle, no - was driving - (½ point...);
4... Involved me going swimming, so was never going to happen;
5. My feet in thongs on see-through cable car floor - (½ point again...);
6. Find lucky bronze pig and rub nose... that took until tonight...



...and I still didn't rub its nose, although its shiny nature suggests that nearly everyone else does... (½ point...)

7. Model an Aussie Rules Football Shirt - nope, but did go to see a match (½ point...)
8. A whale breaching - failure. Didn't go whale watching in NZ and not here either. Several hours of being on a boat for three minutes whale watching isn't good value...
9. A dangerous creature encounter - take your pick: crocodile, spiders, snakes, dingoes, Ann from the Wentworth Falls Golf Club... (many points...)
10. Failed because the hire car had to be back by 4...! (That's my story!)

Everywhere you go and everything you do they want to take your photo. They take it, sometimes without your permission, and, by the time you've got back from whatever it was you were doing, they have it there for you ($30).

Sometimes in a souvenir pack ($60).

And sometimes with your photo in the middle of a souvenir collectors' item plate of the sort your Gran used to have with a West Island Terrier or Charles and Di. ($200 - but that was in Hong Kong, so that's really only about £15).

I'm not really sure why they do it with the Jet Boat...



Because you don't get a photo of you actually speeding round the harbour, pulling sharp 360° spins, bouncing over the wakes of the ubiquitous ferries, squinting to see what's happening as the needle-sharp spray makes tiny holes in your corneas and exfoliates your face revealing your skull, squelching uncomfortably from side to side as the water on your seat penentrates both layers of below-the-waist clothing...

What you actually get is a photo of you standing on the jetty in a massive, shapeless red-tent kagoule (waterproof in name only). They don't even put the boat or the Bridge in the background, both of which, as you can see from above, would be possible.

So I didn't buy them.

But I did go on the boat!

(Damn! How will I prove it without the photo...)

Although you can see the two most famous landmarks of Sydney really clearly from many different angles around the harbour, it's increasingly difficult to see either of them the further you move south into the CBD (Cental Business District, as City Centres are known over here...)

The Bridge gradually disappears between high-rise (and in some cases, quite low-rise) buildings...



...and the Sydney Tower, which boasts Sydney's Best Views, only manages to squeeze the Opera House in between a couple of skyscrapers...



But Mrs Macquarie had the right idea...

Mrs Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. He has all sorts of things named after him, Lake Macquarie, Port Macquarie... even Mrs Macquarie. But she did well in Sydney with a point, a road and a chair.

The point is well visited because it has the standard postcard view of the disappearing icons...



Once you have this photo (or one like it with better, bluer skies), then your work is done and you can go home.



So it's a good job it's the last day really...

(There is a "me in front of..." shot - in fact, there are several... and a story...)

The Blue Mountains are part of the Great Dividing Range and only a couple of hours west of Sydney.

They are actually not mountains at all, but a divided plateau of sandstone. As such, the best way through them is over the plateau linking the highest points and not through valleys and gaps like in normal mountain ranges.



You can see the cliff edges and roads across the ridges really clearly.

If you try to get through these mountains by following the valleys and gaps, you just end up with sheer cliff faces in front of you and have to go back. As the orginal colonial explorers found...

Never mind, their memory lives on in some of the towns which are named after them: Wentworth Falls, Lawson, and several others which I can't remember.

Scenic World is a reasonably environmentally friendy attempt to build what is essentially a limited set of theme park rides in a World Heritage Area.

First you go across...



(The nowdays-obligatory-tourist-attraction-glass-floor...)



And the views are just spectacular...



These are the Three Sisters. They are basically sandstone eroded by the wind and rain of thousands and thousands of years but, as with everything here, there is some Aboriginal Story about how they got their name.



Then you go down...



...on the steepest inclined funicular railway in the world. So steep that the seats in the train are angled back to stop you falling out the front...

(This is a very shaky, out-of-focus shot, but that's because it was bloody scary and I as hanging on for dear life.)

And then you go back up again on some bog-standard, Swiss-built cable car, perhaps second-hand from the ski slopes...



What doesn't fill you with confidence about any of these experiences is that there is a fourth ride...



...a roller coaster which the family who owns the park built down the sheer cliff face.

You're waiting now for the story of the tragic accident which meant it was never used. Sorry, that's not coming. It was just that having commissioned, designed and built it, they realised that the annual health and safety maintenance checks would be prohibitively expensive and mothballed it. The track sits there still as some kind of Scooby Doo Ride to hell. Apparently, it was only ever used once, by the owner's daughters. Rather them than me...

With only a couple of days left to go, all the faffing around and zooming and panning I've had to do thus far to get good photos of indigenous wildlife seemed a bit redundant today.

By leaving Sydney at 7.20am (which was a wrench...), you can arrive at Featherdale Wildlife Park before it opens, before the crowds spook the animals. They have the lot: Tasmanian Devils, all sorts of wombats, birds of many coloured plumage, snakes, crocdiles (see the Flickr photo album for the lot...)

But what you want are your totally bona fide Australian icons up close and personal...

Koala (not bear) whose fur you expect to be wiry, but is, in fact, really cuddly-toy-soft...



Kangaroo/wallaby - not sure I can still tell the difference...



Emu... (minus Rod Hull and a bit too close up...)



And dingoes...



...which look cute as puppies but which carry your children off as adults...

Also on display was this rather oversized joey, which seemed a bit reluctant to leave its mother...



A bit like those five year olds you still see ferried around in pushchairs. Probably eating sweets.

Manly is quite a posh suburb of North Sydney and, along with Bondi, it's a surf centre. It has a harbour coast and an open Pacific coast - a narrow neck of land.



You can get there on one of the many ferries which dart back and forth across the harbour all day and night as a vital link in the city's public transport system. In other places, an hour's cruise on a picturesque harbour would be a big deal, take organising and cost a packet. In Sydney, it's just like hopping on the bus.

And it was great to have a sit down after climbing the bridge...!

You arrive at Manly Wharf (the harbour side)...



...and as manly is also adjectival, there's a real play-on-words theme to the whole place. Manly Sandwiches, Manly Barbers, Manly Dresses (made the last one up...)

The Pacific beach is a five minute walk through the town...



It was getting late, so no surfers, just tourists and seagulls...



...and a great night time view of the Sydney skyline on the way back... My very poor photos didn't really do it justice - so much for the special Nightime feature on my camera - I won't post one here, look on Flickr if you're interested. Meanwhile, a woman next door with a very cheap-looking camera was happily taking the most amazingly sharp, beautifully coloured, reflecting-lights-in-the-water shots. I was tempted to nick it and push her in...

Lisa, our guide up the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was a laugh.

Standing at the top (that's not spoiling it, of course I made it to the top...), she told us how far it was down. 139 metres or 439 feet. "Or 5 seconds", she said "if you choose to go that way..."

Actually the whole Bridge Climb operation is utterly professional. Right down to its little yellow clips, which are the most important safety feature of the climb. They clip everything you might possibly have to take up with you to your fashionable grey boiler suit to avoid you dropping it onto the traffic 5 seconds below. When the guy setting up the climb proposed the idea to the council, who own the bridge, they gave him 96 reasons why it wouldn't be possible.

Like a true entrepreneur, he researched and solved all 96 points of objection and that's why you can climb the bridge today.

One of them was the dropping things. Glasses, hats, handkerchiefs, fleece, radio, headsets (with special bone induction headphones - you don't put them over your ears, they rest on your cheek bones)... the whole lot has to be clipped on for dear life.

Then they have to clip you onto the bridge and you practise this before you get out there on a bit of scaffolding'n'ladders they have rigged up in the reception building. It's done using a bloody clever bit of equipment actually - a little rotating mechanism of cogs and gubbins which means that you can't become detached from the high tension steel safety wire which follows you round the entire route.

A couple of bits are ladders and they show you safely how to get up and down them. When you are actually out on the bridge, she calmly tells you over the skull-vibrating headsets that the real ladders take you up between lanes 7 and 8 of the traffic. (And between two express train lines on the way down.) She's so reassuring though, that you don't worry.

Here's a photo I took later from one of the bridge towers, which show a little of the route you take... (You'll have to zoom in to see properly...)



You can't take your camera up on the real climb because you might drop it. I think they could find some ingenious way of yellow-clipping it to you so that you could, but then they wouldn't be able to overcharge you for the official photos they take... Of course I bought them - I'm probably never doing it again!





It's a real sense of achievement - you even get a certificate!

But your legs don't half ache afterwards...

Everyone who comes here gets a photo which looks something like this...



So the big Sydney Opera House Challenge is to try and get something a bit more angular and experimental.

Here are my attempts...









Marks out of 10 please.

Essential Opera House (Possibly) Facts:

• The architect who designed the iconic outside was removed from the project and didn't design the inside. As a result, it's fairly ordinary inside. I read that on Wikipedia, so it might not be true.
  
• The roof tiles are self-cleaning.
  
• They are still fairly dirty - they don't look white when you get close up.
  
• You can actually touch the roof...

As you can tell...



...I am now seriously worried about doing this.

I'm going to publish this before The Sun publishes it, which makes it a proper journalistic scoop.

I've been avoiding the Olympics while I've been away, as I would have done had I been at home. However, it's been widely debated in the press and on the TV here how Team GB has managed to do so well.

Letters to the press have focussed on how we could only get so many golds because we are four countries put together as one and, if you take away the golds won by Welsh and Scottish athletes, we Whinging Poms haven't exactly set any kind of standard. Although, we have been third for the entire fortnight. On the last day, it transpires that we haven't even managed to come third properly...

Anyway, the fact that we have beaten Australia really has not gone down well. In the interests of harmonious Aussie/British relations, The Sun has decided to twist the kinfe and had a big lorry-poster knocked up and drove it round to various Sydney postcard locations. Here it is outside the Opera House...



The official photographer is in the foreground and I guarantee that you will see something very similar in The Sun tomorrow.

The driver actually had to get in and move the advert round the roundabout so we could get past in our sightseeing bus...



Please cut it out and save it for me...

When you book accommodation from the other side of the world, you're never quite sure if it's going to be in a convenient location...

In Sydney, Mantra 2 Bond Street is perfect.

5 minutes walk from about everywhere...



So get ready for Sydney! Here I come!

...while we upgrade your highway.

The final push to Sydney!

The road gets better on the final stretch - just a couple of hours' drive and much more scenic. Views of the huge lakes and the beautiful hills you go through north of the city.

In many cases, you literally do go through them...




... there are long stretches of road where a cutting has been blasted through solid rock, leaving another wall of solid rock as the central reservation. A further cutting takes northbound traffic. It all makes for quite scary driving and is part of the upgrade work they are doing on the highway generally. Bypasses and dualling, new bridges and junctions. If I come back in five years it might be an easier drive...

But look! We made it...



...and did the iconic drive across the Harbour Bridge. Had no time to appreciate it really due to stressing about what lane we should be in, avoiding going the through the tunnel instead by accident, fumbling for the tolls and preparing for which exit to take at the other side.

(Don't worry - I was a passenger when I took the photo!)



So well done, little car! And fortunately they did take the car off our hands at Sydney, despite all the paperwork implying that we would have to take it back to Brisbane.

Past the banana.

All the way down Highway 1, big flashy matrix signs tell you stuff.

They tell you to belt up, slow down, avoid drugs, take a rest etc. Speed cameras are widespread and very clearly indicated. You get a general sign telling you that they are used in NSW, then you get a sign telling you there's one ahead, then you get another, bigger, sign reminding you it's coming with a speed limit sign so you can't pretend you were confused. Finally, you get a sign telling it's really just here with a reminder about your licence and heavy fines. It's just not possible to come up on one unexpectedly.

Quite how Tina managed to get so many fines when she was living here is beyond me...

Anyway, the point of relating this is that one of the big pushes is to target drunk drivers. With this in mind, it doesn't make much sense to plan a visit to wine country during the three days out of 24 when you've hired a car...

The Hunter Valley Wine Growers Association (or whatever they are called) produce a map showing you where all the vineyards are, encourage you to taste and buy and give you a helpful reminder of how to stay under 0.05mg of alcohol so it's still safe to drive.

Having decided, rather sensibly, that any alcohol at all wasn't a good idea when driving a hire car in a foreign country, it was just a case of enjoying the views...



..and tracking down your favourites...

Another 400km done today, which doesn't seem a lot, but Route 1, the Pacific Highway, bears little resemblence to what we would call a highway in the UK.

Actually, we don't call them highways at home anyway, so that's not a good comparison. Think a badly maintained country A road and you're getting there.

Never mind, we had been promised fabulous views along the entire route. Again, not so. Occasionally you get a glimpse of coast, but for the most part, it's dense forest with the road cutting a path between the trees.

Starting at Coffs Harbour bright and early, a slight detour led us to the town's most famous tourist attraction. Not, as you might think, in a prominent position on the sea front but tucked away a couple of minutes drive along the highway back the way we had come. Had totally missed it the night before because of (a) concentrating on route, (b) not expecting it to be there and (c) it being dark.

However, Tina and Chris had said that I should definitely make sure I saw it...



Good, isn't it?

Apparently the coast is littered with these huge plastic monstrosities and, indeed, we have seen a prawn and an oyster and maybe a couple of others which I've forgotten about. Anyway this is the most famous. Not sure why. I wouldn't make the effort to ever see it again...

Onwards to Port Macquarie for a brief (very brief as it turned out) stop...

Again, a nice beach...



...and an information board telling you how most of the town used to be a prison of some sorts. You're probably best reading about that yourselves...

And back in the car for another few hours down to Maitland - stop chosen because it's a good base to have a look round the vineyards of the Hunter Valley.

Despite not being the tourist mecca of Coffs Harbour or Port Macquarie, it was actually surprisingly pretty. River side walks...



...and Ye Historic Buildings...



...and a really great fish and chip shop - Froggies - just over the bridge.

I spent a while typing this entry the other day and then the computer crashed and I lost it all.

Never mind - here's what I think I was going to say...

The drive to Sydney down the Pacific Highway is a long one, taking us three days with a couple of handy stopovers on the way. The first is at Coffs Harbour and the second at Maitland, in Hunter Valley Wine Country...

On the first stretch, we stopped in at Byron Bay, which is slightly hippy and surfy...



...but has about 1001 places where you could have lunch (but only one where we did) and, it goes without saying, beautiful coastline...



Nearby is the fantastic Byron Bay Lighthouse...



...and - didn't know this until we got there -





Of course, if that particular point is only several hundred metres down a path, then you have to go there just to say you have...

And on the way, we saw Australia's Most Easterly Monitor Lizard...



...which I think they should have added to the signpost.