I went on vacation to Australia with my friend Shaun. Shaun had never been to Australia before (he'd never been to the Southern Hemisphere before) and I'd been nagging him to go for years, but it wasn't until he met my friends Grant and Marcus from Sydney and they invited him that he actually deigned to go. So much for my powers of persuasion.

I had bought a new camera just before the trip, and I didn't discover until I got home that I appear to have a problem with it - on many of the pictures there is a mark in the same place (near the top of a horizontal image, about 40% of the way across), which I think is caused by dust on the CCD. It shows up most obviously when this part of the CCD is registering sky, and it can easily be fixed by Photoshop, but I haven't had time to do that yet.

The first few days were spent sightseeing in Sydney. As you can see, the weather was beautiful.

We did all the classic tourist things - Bondi Beach, the Opera House, a ferry ride to Manly. We even had our first encounter with Australian wildlife - some large and nasty-looking spiders and a lizard in the bush near Shelly Beach.