When travelling around any country it’s hard to avoid the biggest city, and Australia is no exception.
Not that anyone would want to miss Sydney of course, what with the beaches, bars, bridges and all, but many people inevitably spend longer in ‘Sin City’ than elsewhere, especially at the beginning or end of their trips.
Some may say Melbourne has more culture, but no Aussie city has as many people, or looks as good as Sydney, making it a great place to hole up for a few months.
Which is lucky, as generally there are plenty of decent jobs up for grabs, especially if you stick to the centre, according to Roopa Patel, sales manager at Geoffrey Nathan.
She says: “There are greater opportunities in the city due to travellers being in the heart of the Sydney CDB, where there is an abundance of roles.”
However, travellers should be warned not to get too cocky. Just because there’s more jobs in Sydney, it doesn’t mean you’re going to just walk into a position – after all, there are also more people looking for jobs than elsewhere.
“There are a wide range of jobs that pay very well for the right candidate,” says Patel.
But she warns: “Sydney is a very popular city and is extremely competitive like any other major city.
“At this time of year there are more candidates than job roles so candidates need to consider updating their resumés thoroughly.
“It’s highly competitive around this time of the year in Sydney.”
That said, once you land a job you should find the rates of pay “very promising” and you might find yourself tempted to stay in the city longer than you expected.
As Patel says: “Working in Sydney exposes you to a great social networking lifestyle and while job roles for people on a working holiday visa are similar across Australia, Sydney just has a better view.”
February 25th, 2008
While trying to drive across the Simpson Desert, LIZZIE JOYCE and her partner were forced to hitch a ride with some dodgy truckers.
Early one January morning my boyfriend Dan and I set off on our trip across three states, covering 3,000 miles on what would turn out to be the best trip I have ever done, not to mention the most dangerous. We were attempting to cross the Simpson Desert on our way to Alice Springs from Sydney. We were fully prepared and set off in our 4WD loaded with equipment, including 60 litres of water, a double swag, a laser beam,
and an Epirb signal.
After 10 hours of driving, watching the landscape turn from highways and tall buildings to red earth and eternal horizons we glided past an old mining town called Cobar, stopped for a wee and drove on through, thankful that this ‘Hicksville’ town was not our destination. But while driving at an average speed of 120km per hour, the trusty car (which I was assured had “just had a full service and was made for driving across such terrain”) was disintegrating and the entire wheel was about to fall off.
Ugly mothertruckers
Suddenly, the brakes started to fail and smoke started pouring out the front passenger tyre. We were 120km from the last town and with at least 100km to the next, Dan decided we should drive on (without brakes) and see if we could make it to our destination. Luckily it didn’t last long anyway as the car stopped in defiance and we were forced to pull off the road in the middle of nowhere. Within minutes two semi-trailers driving in convoy by brothers, pulled up to offer us help and I’ve never been so glad to see two spectacularly ugly truckers before in my life. Freaky Brother One then began to undress me, with his eyes, almost frothing at the mouth at coming in such close proximity to someone of the opposite sex, while Freaky Brother Two was pretending to be a mechanic and baffling Dan with his bullshit. It was turning into Wolf Creek.
Nothing could be done with the car, and we had no choice but to accept a lift from Freaky Brother One to the nearest roadhouse 13km up the road. But then he said there wouldn’t be enough room in the cab so Dan should travel with his brother and I should hop into his cab by myself. By this point I was close to hysteria and there was no way I would be getting in that lorry by myself.
So we both hopped in with Brother Number Two. Dan settled in the middle of the very spacious cab which had enough room to house a small Albanian family! Relieved to be on our way to a phone box and in relative safety, (even if we were in being driven by an axe wielding maniac I had enough faith that Dan could knock him out if it came to it) I thought it would be plain sailing from here. After a couple of minutes on the road Brother Number One starts becoming agitated – he thinks he has lost his keys as he can’t use the radio to contact his brother. He pulls into the side of the road and asks me to hop out to see if he had left them in the door lock. This forced me into ungraceful acrobatic maneuvers in order to hang myself out the door and reach round to grab the keys, with freaky brother one more than enjoying the view of my ass in the air. The keys were there, so off we set again in stilted silence.
Roadhouse blues
Finally we caught sight of the roadhouse and saw our escape was only minutes away and we made a sharp exit from the freaky brothers. Good riddance!
The roadhouse turned out to be a petrol pump and a shop that was about to close. They had a phone though and we arranged for a tow truck to pick us up and take us back to the nearest town… Cobar (the Hicksville town we drove through scorning) where we would have to wait for the next three days for the car to be repaired. How ironic that the town we were laughing at turned out to be our refuge.
So we skipped the Simpson Desert and took another route to Alice Springs where we arrived two weeks later with the biggest smiles and the best memories!
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