Ah yes, but the Blue Mountains are a lot closer for a Sydneysider than Collingwood Ont (presumably Ontario Canada).
And it doesn't take much imagination to go for a bit of a bush walk and leave all of those Niagara-fallers behind. If you do the "ruined castle" walk, for example, once you leave the Scenic Railway/Katoomba behind you are likely to only meet a couple of people all day. Plus there are plenty of quieter places in the Blue Mountains outside of Katoomba and Leura.
while in Sydney I visited manly for life of me no idea why the hype. nowhere near as nice as port douglas or daintree. manly is typical tourist set up. you can tell its populated by the monied gentry though.
Poppa, seriously, are you just taking the piss? Of course Manly is nowhere near as nice as Port Douglas - it's in the middle of a large city.
You will need to buy an Opal card to travel the system, but its good in a way, that it recognises after about $15 of trips a day, the rest is no extra charges.
But you do need to tag and tag off every time you get onto a bus/train station, as in other parts of the world.
I had to pay $10 for buying the card, even before any trip charges are added onto the card, ie, value for travel.
You can get back any trip value you don't end up using.
A lot of paper based tickets have been removed from sale, and a lot will slowly disppear over time. There used to be a tough cardboard sort of ticket that covered all a single days travel on public transport in Sydney metro and nearby zones, but thats gone now.
Opal is the only way now, to save money while travelling.
www.opal.com.au
Sometimes too, you will also travel with the riff raff of life.
Just to clarify, $10 is the minimum travel amount you can put on the card when you buy it, the card itself costs nothing.
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