Australia: Kangaroo Adventure

Introduction

Recently, I've been travelling to so many places, yet I've been too lazy to write a blog post about any of them. But this time, I finally gathered all my energy, while spending thousands of dollars on Claude Opus 5.5 to vibe-code. On the bright side, my English has been improving exponentially. Since the AI uses difficult words and I'm expected to keep up with them, I've started to recognize words that were beyond my level, like sanctimonious, epiphany, blasé, and many more C1 to C2 words that have easier B2 equivalents.

I initially picked Australia because I didn't want to apply for a single-entry visa to South Korea. Getting a multiple-entry visa there requires me to visit South Korea several times first (and each time, I must apply for a single-entry visa), and it's not cheap. It wastes my time. Considering my tendency to travel on weekends, or even to go somewhere just for a transit, Australia became my priority destination: if I visit it more than twice, I qualify to apply for their multiple-entry visa.

So, seeing a Thursday to Sunday window to travel, I picked Australia. I was trying to travel there economically, so I picked a transfer flight via Manila, which only cost me about 2,000 HKD, and a flight home via Papua New Guinea. Having no fucking balls, I decided to cancel my PNG flight lmao.

There were multiple reasons, but mainly, knowing that my appearance is too androgynous, I was kinda scared that I would get harassed really badly there.

September 30th 2026: The Flight To Manila

The flight was delayed, so I decided to delay my trip to the airport as well, assuming I was already checked in, even though my boarding pass wasn't printed yet. When I arrived, the officer seemed reluctant to let me in. But after I told them the flight had been delayed, and "pretended" not to have seen that the boarding pass needed to be printed on the spot, they told me to run to the gate. Lmao.

I was a bit panicked at first, but since they had handed me the ticket, "It's super fine," I thought. I jogged a bit, skipped the queue —haha I'm sorry, chat—, and ran to the gate. Just so you know, Hong Kong International Airport has two terminals. HK Express flights are assigned to Terminal 2, where you do everything, except that passengers then have to go back to Terminal 1 after immigration and the bag check.

Anyway, HK Express is really good, and the flight to Manila was really nice as well. My attention shifted to this OBSBOT Tail 2 camera that I had recently bought but bricked two hours after trying it. Gosh.

I kinda spent some time enjoying the cabin food. I got myself a pistachio latte and the chocolate banana egg waffle, which tasted pretty good. It took a while, though, and I wonder how they made it so crispy.

Entering Manila Airport, I managed to sneak through the queue real quick, even though I had some problems filling in the arrival form, which requires an account, a login, and decent internet —which the airport didn't have. Anyway, I managed to fill in the form —thanks po!— and made my way out of the long queue —leaving so many Chinese tourists confused—. The officer didn't allow transfer passengers to go out and check in outside, but somehow I managed to rizz the officer —hell yeah, SEAblings power!

Checking in was so chill, and the schedule was actually pretty loose. I had plenty of time to go around. I queued normally at the Cebu Pacific international counter, checked in with no questions asked, and got into the waiting area for the flight pretty easily. While waiting, I think anyone with a sane mind and 500 Philippine pesos would do what I did. Yes, order some local food.

Filipino food is one of my favorite cuisines in the world: hearty, tasty, full of protein, and made with love. I got myself something called the Royal Meal B from Tapa King. According to the banner, the dishes were: Beef Tapa, Boneless Bangus, Longganisa, Garlic Rice, and Fried Egg.

Perfect, I know nothing about all of them. This food must be good.

It was. I had a good late-night dinner. In front of me were three aunties travelling to Tokyo on a business trip. Filipinos are the sweetest people ever: funny, cheerful, and they always pass my vibe check. We talked about food, Trip.com coins, the floods in Thailand, travelling while still young, and much more.

The flight to Sydney was super sweet as well. It was a big A330-900neo, which has awful seats. I sat in the middle row, on the left side. The middle row has three seats, and the middle one was empty.

On my right was a sweet Australian-American DJ uncle whose mom lives in Palawan. We chatted a lot about travelling and how DJs find gigs —he himself works with an agency, but told me he's going to retire soon.

He borrowed my pen, and I also helped light up his form while he was filling in the immigration arrival card. I spent the flight sleeping and waking up in a super shitty half-conscious state. Somehow, I managed to finish my Anki as well —holy fuck.

With about two hours left in the flight, the sun was rising, so yes, I knew I would have a hard time adjusting to the time here —spoiler: not really. I managed to spend the whole day going around Sydney like crazy, on sleep deprivation.

October 1st 2026: Are you sure, Hock?

Sydney is super British-coded. That was my first impression. I was able to use my credit card for public transport, which let me board the train straight to Central. They use a system called Opal. They do have Opal cards, but it takes credit cards too. Wow, so convenient. Immigration was super easy too. So easy that I forgot to ask for an entry stamp —later, while browsing about this on the Internet, I realized you can just ask the officers to stamp your passport. I eventually got my passport stamped when I was leaving Australia. Phew—.

The station is nice. Before I even reached the hostel where I was staying, the only thing on my mind was: what should I do after I land? Should I go eat right away?

I explored so many things to do through Google Maps and Grok Bot. Yeah, Grok Bot, you didn't read that wrong. Even before the flight, I was already on the brink of a vibe-coding addiction.

Why, you ask? Because it's fun. I had already subscribed to Claude Max myself, and set up NordVPN and an RDP-able desktop through Tailscale so that I could access my PC from my MacBook in Australia.

Anyway, why is this becoming the main topic of this section... Arriving at my hostel, I intended to just drop my things off and get some brunch. They wouldn't let me in yet, obviously, I thought. Right? ... Right???

No, they did. I got my room on the 7th floor, room 714, bed number 2. It was pretty nice, everything was clean enough for me to stay, and I checked the toilet; everything was fine. I put all my stuff in my room and headed straight to the brunch place.

The trains in Australia are very fancy. They're two stories, like a double-decker. Why don't we have this in our country?

I think it makes so much sense to stack the cars.

I had brunch at this place called Two Good Eggs.

Thinking back, did I really make a good decision going out for brunch while I was so sleepy, when I could have just gone to my room?

Maybe excitement filled my body so much that I forgot how sleepy I was.

I got their signature Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon. One thing I noticed is that there are so many Indonesians in Australia. There was one right there, and I lowkey wanted to speak to her in Bahasa Indonesia —girl, sorry, your accent was too obvious—. But I held back, as she was speaking English. A normal English.

After brunch, the only logical thing to do is go back to the hostel and sleep, right? ... Right??

No, I decided to get some fizzy water and walk around town. I stumbled upon so many pride flags on the streets and on public and private institutions. I walked to the Australian Museum and looked around there. There was an exhibition called Bloodsuckers. It explained blood in general, the history of vampires, leeches, mosquitoes, and many other blood-vores.

Wandering around the museum, I could also see dinosaur remains(?) —or were they just fossil replicas? How could I know. There were many life-sized animal figures as well, and some history about the people who used to live on the land of Australia(?) Maybe the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

At this point, I was so sleepy. As a normal person, I think it would make sense to go home and call it a day, right? Wrong. I went to the harbour and planned my way to Taronga Zoo! Crazy? Yeah, call me crazy. If I wanted to visit all my destinations, I didn't think 80 hours would be enough. So while I'm in Australia, why the fuck would I sleep? Right? .... RIGHT?

I got myself an ice cream near the bay. I think I got Golden Gaytime and chocolate. I took the ferry to Taronga Zoo, and for the first time, I saw the bridge and the Opera House up close. It was really beautiful.

When I arrived at Taronga Zoo, I was kinda tired, but super excited at the same time. I mean, I'm definitely gonna see a kangaroo, I thought. I went around the zoo and saw so many animals. The gorillas stole the show, though. Kangaroos, emus, wallabies, red pandas, tigers, spiders, you name it. They also have a mini Indonesia, where they literally cloned Indonesia, complete with a warung, signs, and a fake restaurant.

From there, this time I truly headed back to the hostel and did my laundry. On the way, I bought a long sandwich. While waiting for the laundry, I took an hour-long nap. Surprisingly, waking up was so refreshing.

Even crazier, after doing my laundry, I still went to Chinatown, spent some time at Coles, their famous supermarket, and got myself some Japanese abura soba and some desserts. I stayed out until a bit late and slept at around 12 AM Sydney time.

What a day. The room, however, sounded like four of those diesel generators. Such fucking loud snores lmaoo.

October 2nd 2026: The Blue Mountains

A while back, I booked a tour to the Blue Mountains. I really like day tours for a few reasons. The main one is that I want to go to places that aren't quite right to go to by yourself, yet are still within reach of the city I'm visiting.

The Blue Mountains tour was supposed to be a sunset trip, so it left the city a bit late, hoping to see the sunset at the end. The weather was not very satisfying, though. It was cloudy and rainy all the way. I woke up a bit late that day and had to take care of some business, including checking whether my agents were still building the app I wanted. I got some pistachio chocolate for breakfast. We made a short stop at a local town, where I met a local Chinese couple: the wife, from Cambodia, can speak Teochew, and her spouse is from Mainland China.

Around there, I got an acai drink, a kombucha, and a spinach meat roll. We saw some wild kangaroos —or so they claimed; they didn't look wild, though. They looked very tame. I asked the tour guide, and he said people don't really keep kangaroos and wallabies as pets here. I also googled it, and apparently these animals have never been domesticated and are dangerous by nature.

We arrived at Wentworth Falls and did some hiking there. The tour guide gave a speech, and we all did the cooee, or whatever he called it. It was very funny, because it's basically a very loud, head-voice-ish scream, while people just reply with an ugly monkey-like scream.

We also went to a place called the Three Sisters, but it was a bit underwhelming. It was raining, and it was so cold around there.

On the way back, I went to Barangaroo, right next to Darling Harbour, to try kangaroo steak. It was so lean and tough. After that, I got myself some gelato. I don't remember what flavors I got. I just told the guy I wanted three flavors, any of them was fine, because it's my birthday today —even though it's not. LMAO.

Back at the hostel, I thought about doing another round of laundry, because my jacket was cooked: it was so wet, smelly, and had a brown rust stain from climbing the stairs at the Three Sisters. But I held back because I still had some clothes with me. Sydney's weather isn't very cold, so going without a jacket tomorrow would still be fine.

I chatted a bit with my roommate. He works at a robotics company somewhere in Shenzhen. I just pretended that I'm from Indonesia and have no connection whatsoever to living in East Asia, so he doesn't know I speak Mandarin and Cantonese.

He told me he wanted to go suffering tomorrow. —It was surfing, not suffering, but well, yeah, I also wanna go suffering—.

Late at night, I tried to take off my contact lenses while I was in the shower. But I ripped one apart —I can't really see, and I can't take them off without a mirror...

October 3rd 2026: Seafood and Rainy Beach

Initially, I was planning to walk from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach. But I'm a sleepyhead, so I ended up spending the entire morning in bed and decided to go to the Fish Market at around 10:30. There, I had a big lunch. I chomped down some sushi, salmon, lobster, and freshly shucked oysters.

I chatted with two locals as well. We talked about CBD, how the fish market is just a scammy tourist place, good places to visit, etc.

There were so many seagulls at the fish market. I had to sit inside for a bit to hide from them birds. HAHAHA.

From the fish market, I walked down to see Sydney's aquarium, SEA LIFE. I saw they had penguins there. I'd never seen penguins before, so I was interested in seeing them.

I bought a ticket for two attractions. It comes in two parts: the entry ticket and a timed booking. The timed bookings are free, and there's one for each of the four attractions that are tied together: Madame Tussauds, SEA LIFE, WILD LIFE, and the Tower. If you buy a two-attraction ticket, you get to enter any two of them, but you also need to pre-book your entry time. The SEA LIFE one was a bit queuey, so I ended up walking to the tower first and spent some time there.

I got to listen to one of the guides there explain the four sides of Sydney, seen from the top of the tower.

After enjoying my time there, I went to SEA LIFE. While queuing, I chatted with a guy and his son in front of me. It was so funny because the dad was very witty. I joined in, and we made the people around us laugh.

Inside the aquarium, they have sharks and this penguin ride. The area near the penguins' nests smelled like shit. They said penguins poop every 20 minutes. That's fkg gross.

Regardless, after that, I bought myself a gay penguin and a two-scoop Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and walked towards the ferry wharf to catch a ferry to Manly, the beach up north.

I didn't do much there —kinda regret it, though; I should've grabbed a light dinner there.

Around sunset, a storm hit, so I caught a ferry back home and did my laundry. There was a bar night held by the place I was staying at. Up until this point, I haven't mentioned where I stayed: it's called YHA Central, a dorm-like place with everything inside lol.

While waiting for the laundry, I did some vibe coding, RDP-ing into my PC back home in Hong Kong. After that, I joined the bar night, and we ate some pizza together before heading out.

I met lots of people there, from Thailand, England, South Korea, the US, Brazil, and many more. It was so fun; we chatted throughout the night and played this card game to get to know each other —I don't remember its name.

We went to a club afterwards. It's called Side Bar, and it's only about 300 meters from the place I stayed.

The club was really good. I met so many people there: the Sesame Street onesie gang with balloon breasts, a cute Asian baby girl, and some drunk Armenian and Azerbaijani guys.

I left at around 1 AM and showered. I had to wake up early the next day to catch my flight.

October 4th 2026: Going Home

It was going to be a very long 10-hour flight. I didn't do anything heavy, just relaxed and headed straight to the airport. I got into a lounge and had some breakfast. I saw some small packs of Vegemite there. I've tried Vegemite before, but I think it's cool that they come in carry-on, grab-and-go packs. Qantas was really good, though. I got fast Wi-Fi and two hot meals. I watched some movies and also talked to a sweet Australian lady beside me.