Sydney

After the Blue Mountains we headed for Sydney with a decision to sell the van. We had found accommodation in a suburb outside the city center called Strathfield. It wasn't a hostel, it was a modern 3 bedroom flat that had been converted into smaller rooms but still had plenty of space and decent facilities like underground secure parking, swimming pool, sauna and gym. We spent one week here going into the city center each day and heading to the backpacker area known as Kings Cross to sell the van. Unfortunately Kings Cross isn't as good as it used to be as there once was a car park dedicated to backpackers selling their vehicles but this is no longer the case. Instead the owner has set up a website that you have to pay $30 for a months advertisement.

After one week only 2 people showed any interest and 1 chose another vehicle at the last minute over ours and the other person wasn't offering the amount we were looking for. We later found out that it was just a really slow week for selling a van and there were plenty of bargains to be had. The only thing we had on our side was time as we didn't have to sell the van straight away.

We had initially planned to take the van to Tasmania as we had already booked and paid for the ferry, however since we were passing through Sydney we thought we would try and sell it as we didn't want to add another 5000km onto the total the van had already driven. Unfortunately we were unable to do this and considered staying in Sydney to sell it and mising our ferry to Tasmania. After having a think about it though we decided that we didn't want to miss the opportunity to go to Tasmania and decided to head for Melbourne to catch the ferry. It was just our luck that within one hour of arriving in Melbourne we received 2 phonecalls enquiring about the van. This got worse as throughout our time in Tasmania we received daily texts, phonecalls and emails about the van!

We didn't get a chance to see any of Sydney apart from a brief visit to Bondi Beach to put some posters up in hostels and a wrong turn which sent us over the harbour bridge where we also seen the opera house whilst having a full-scale argument about who told who what way to go!