into Sydney and the end of this excursion

As usual, Tour d'Afrique finds an interesting, slightly unusual, innovative way to set the route for the last day. Today we had some beautiful coastline...

...then up in the hills and forest in a national park...

...across a bay in a small ferry...

...and then some bike trail along the shore in the company of a couple of local folk who had shared the ferry with us...

That took us to the final lunch of the tour and a photo of the group that was there at the time...

Then a bit more riding on bike trails, alongside the Sydney Olympic park area, to catch another ferry that took us to the Circular Quay, only a kilometer from the Opera House where the finishing photo was to be taken.

This part of Sydney is jammed with people, so it was a 1-km walk, not a ride, to the opera house. Jamie and Natalia had flown in from Vancouver, arriving earlier that morning, and we'd hoped the timing would work for them to be there when we got in. So it was great when, just before we got to the Opera, Natalia came running up...

...so here we are with the pair of them in front of the Opera House...

...and here is the group, half of whom rode for two months in Indonesia before starting from Darwin two months ago. For us it was 5500 kilometres of cycling.

Two months... 5500 km... and a couple of hours after this photo, we were on the 25th floor of our hotel, with a great view of the city...



...and the wind-up dinner and a lot of farewells... tomorrow we'll all scatter...

 

 

We're not quite finished... one more blog with some afterthoughts.