Sydney Observatory is perched on a hill just behind the harbour bridge in the middle of a nice little park that would make a great vantage point to watch the New Year's fireworks. When built it provided a view across the whole harbour and (as we found out on the tour) actually served as a noonday clock for sailing ships back in the day. Now though it has the whole city skyline behind it, providing a good view of the drab 1970's towers of the Four Seasons and Shangri-la hotels. Since we've been fast running out of things to do in Sydney without a car, we tried booking a tour recently after having seen some ads up during the Aroma Festival. Usually this place would be full of kids on a school trips during the day but it turned out to be just as busy on weekend nights causing us to wait another week before we could get a free slot (just as well as the original night turned out to be raining). So on a cold Saturday evening as we walked up from the city we crossed paths with a man in a dark trenchcoat and fedora clutching what looked like a old lantern and leading a group of people behind him - he was the guide for Sydney's ghost tour, and when I overheard him pointing out the particular trees that various people were hanged from I was left wondering if we should have gone on their tour. To start everything off we led outside in separate groups of 20 people and given a quick lesson on what was viewable in the night sky. Our guide was a 60-something lady who'd just completed her degree in Astronomy post-retirement; pretty impressive for anyone. We were then shown around the observatory itself and led up some rickety stairs, one at a time, into the two domes that housed the still in-use telescopes When we got upstairs in the first the guide pressed some button and the whole roof rotated - making everyone feel dizzy - until the thin slit in the roof open to the night sky was showing the moon. Everyone got a quick chance to squint through the eyepiece and the guide repositioned it after everyone's turn. I was a little disappointed that the view didn't seem that much more spectacular than the one through my small plastic telescope I had when I was 10 years old. The other dome housed a much more modern piece of kit - chunky and short, this thing was computer controlled and I thought we'd be able to see what it saw on some of the computer screens in the dome - but we still had to squint through the small eyepiece and just made out some stripes across Jupiter and a few pin pricks of light from a few of its moons. Ace.

The new job forced an extra weeks holiday on me without any say in the matter. So it seems I've worked two weeks and have already had to use up lots of my allocated holidays. With no plans made and no car our options were pretty limited. A tour of the Hunter Valley was on the cards. We squeezed into a mini van outside Sydney YHA and with 10 others drove about 2 hours north of the city into wine country. I've been pretty cynical when it comes to wine and the associated vocabulary - "notes of chocolate", "bouquet of strawberries", "hints of stables??" - but I have to say that I totally got into the mood of it all. Any while I didn't detect any taste other than what you'd expect from grapes, there IS a difference beyond just being red or white. The landscape of there area isn't exactly rural France. It looks like what it really is - a swathe of Eucalyptus cut out of a shallow valley and replaced with an uneven patchwork of vineyards. But it does look nice. We visited three different places, the first of which we arrived at 10.30 and the driver double-checked that no one had a problem drinking lots of wine before mid morning. The vineyard (or winery here) was some faux-Spanish villa built by a retired English guy and it certainly added to the atmosphere (much nicer than the some of the modified tin shacks evident elsewhere). With this place and the next, the owners gave us menus and described the differences between everything we tasted, when and why the grapes were picked at certain times, and all the food that would go well with it. Their enthusiasm certainly rubbed off and the whole experience was pretty enjoyable. The third place we visited was a little bit of a downer. It was in the afternoon, the day was absolutely boiling and everybody had probably drank a little too much at that stage. It didn't help that when we got there we were shown to the basement, looking like an underground German beer hall, and our wine expert was a young American lady who couldn't offer much in the way of useful advice beyond just saying she really like each one. I'm not sure anyone bought anything from that place. On the way back the driver turned on the overhead DVD player and showed us, of course, a wine movie. I thought it might be interesting to watch Sideways but instead we got to see "A Good Year", an awful and boring Russell Crowe flick that must have been designed to put everyone to sleep.