SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
This city of sunshine, good times and friendly locals is fast becoming THE place to go for working holidays. Full of affordable youth hostels, great nightclubs and informal working environments, you’re sure to find a place to fit right in. There are numerous youth travel organisations in the UK that offer Aussie Gap Year packages, complete with orientations and pre-organised job interviews. If you’re a first time traveller, we highly recommend this gap year option.

WHISTLER, CANADA
Ah, the white slopes of the Great North, fresh air, warm fires and lots and lots of skiing. A popular choice for many students, working at Canadian ski resorts is a great way to make money, and it comes with plenty of downtime too – which you can spend on the slopes or even in the bustling city of Toronto. With a great music, art and cuisine scene, this destination is not to be missed by big city loving student travellers.

GIANT PANDA CONSERVATION VOLUNTEERS, BEJING, CHINA
Spend part of your gap year making a difference in China through this one of a kind programme. You’ll be working closely with these endangered pandas and panda keepers and will even have the opportunity to teach English at a nearby primary school. Your weekends will be entirely free, so you’ll be able to visit some incredible cultural sites, including the Terracotta army museum. Immerse yourself in the local culture through various festivals and try your hand at a little karaoke at one of the city’s many karaoke bars. This kind of volunteer programme looks great on your CV too.

Remember: Any gappie adventurer needs to be prepared for anything, so it’s a good idea to purchase gap year travel insurance. That way you’re covered for any journey mishaps that may occur along the way.

Related articles

• Over-55s take more gap years than students (telegraph.co.uk)
• Gap year holidays: live Q&A (telegraph.co.uk)

On the 7th of September 2007 at 5,892 meters, I summeted Mount Kilimanjaro with a small group of friends. Raising just over £12,000 for the Amani Children’s Home in Moshi, Tanzania. It was an amazing experience especially spending some time in the home.

From January to July 2007 I trained to cycle the South Downs Randonnée. The South Downs Randonnée is a long distance bike ride, 100 miles, and is a significant test of endurance as over the drooling 100 miles you also have over 10,000 feet of climbing! I would not recommend this unless you are an experienced off-road biker, but if you are you will absolutely love this challenge.
The Randonnée route travels the full distance of the South Downs Way. It starts at Winchester, Hampshire and finishes in Eastbourne, Sussex. I raised just over £2000 for the Foundation of Infant Death.

I’m still deciding on what adventure I should take next? For the last while I’ve been thinking about climbing Mount Cho Oyo, but this is just too expensive for me at the moment.

Secondly walking the Bering Straight, after reading of several people having issues with entering Russia without going through border patrol such as Karl Bushby who was arrested.

Canoeing the Amazon would be great, but I don’t think I could afford to take enough time off to canoe 4,345 miles. So I would have to downscale it and canoe the Huallaga River which is a more modest 680 miles.

These all sound great, but I’m not living in Australia which make them considerably more expensive to do. So I’m now thinking of something easier to plan and undertake, something like the Kokoda track would be great. But is too short for a real adventure, as it could be hiked in 3 days, it’s 60 miles long.

I’m still thinking the Kokoda Track/Trail would be great to do. It’s a single-file foot way which runs 60 miles through the Owen Stanley Range in Papua New Guinea.

The Kokoda track starts at Owers Corner and then crosses rugged and isolated terrain, rising to a height of 2,190 metres and only passable on foot, and then along to the small village of Kokoda.

If anyone out there is reading this who has walked this I would love to hear from you.

We visited the Garden in true Ming Dynasty style and hired Chinese costume. I was dressed as a warrior and Dorota as a Queen. It’s remarkable that such an amazing place is less than a ten minute walk away and we haven’t been there within the 7 months we have lived next to it.

The Gardens are full of large birds, koi carp and large lizards, it was a great day out and no doubt we will be back!

More info on the Chinese Garden of Friendship:

The Chinese Garden of Friendship’s design was inspired by a traditional Chinese art form dating back to the fifth century. It is the only authentic southern-style Chinese garden of its size outside of mainland China.

The Garden of Friendship is a Chinese garden proposed by the Chinese community in Sydney to celebrate the Bicentenary of Australia.

The New South Wales Government accepted this proposal and funded its construction. The Guangdong Provincial Government of the People’s Republic of China, holding in high esteem the friendship between Australia and China strongly endorsed the project and actively participated in it.

The Guangzhou Bureau of Parks and Gardens designed and supervised the project and worked in co-operation with the New South Wales Darling Harbour Authority to bring the Garden into being.

The Garden is situated in Darling Harbour. Set alongside the reflection of sails and gull-crested waves of water rippling out into the distance, the Garden captures the mood of a forest refuge in the bustling city.

The techniques employed are intricately manifested over the whole area of the Garden, revealing numerous variations within its confined space.

The Twin Pavilion with its linked roof symbolises the friendship between Australia and China, the Tall Triple-eaved Pavilion reaching up towards the clouds provides an excellent site for listening to the sound of moving water while resting against the railing.
The Double-Sided and Through-carved Dragon Wall depicts two dragons frolicking in the water, racing to fetch the pearl.

Rocks nestled amid bamboos and huts among the hills await the music of lutes to invite in the phoenix. The poetry couplets executed in fine calligraphy are infused with brilliance; their superb composition enhances the vibrant colours of the Garden.

The rivulets and the lights; the trees, rocks, birds and flowers, the setting for viewing platforms by ponds, the shelter of covered walkways and pavilions are all the creations of craftsmen who have extracted the essence of their inherent beauty.

On a fine day when the sun is shining, on a walk through the Garden enjoying the visual delights will leave one amazed at the boundless panoramas. A fondness for it lingers and thought of leaving are forgotten. Here in this Garden generates the warmth of a friendship which will endure for a thousand springtimes.

January 1988

It’s great to watch the film and find buildings we’re passing every day!
So here at Walsh Bay, just outside the excellent “in the mood for Thai” restaurant, Trinity makes a call and escapes from the Agents before the phone booth is destroyed by a truck.

There are some amazing photos over at the Sydney Morning Herald site of the bridge.

It started ok, we walked to Europcar in Pyrmont and picked up our little Hyundai getz which would drive us around for the day. No tom toms were available but I was relatively confident with my homemade maps. Even Ikea started ok it was relatively quiet.

It all started to get rather stressful when we were at the end and trying to collect all the goods. Some things weren’t in the right places, other things out of stock in one place to find out they were somewhere else.

What made the day increasingly more difficult was the fact that we started with one trolley and finished with seven! When there is only two of you it isn’t easy to move around Ikea with seven trolleys. Obviously we were given strange looks from Ikea staff when asking them for help. Yes having to ask for help, and still getting blunt remarks and no help.

After getting all the trolleys through the cashier desk and remaining conscious through paying the bill we managed to get some help with moving our goods to the home delivery counter.

Now we aren’t moving for two weeks so thought we would go there early and buy all our stuff and arrange to have it all delivered the day we move in. IKEA ONLY DO NEXT DAY DELIVERY. Yes that’s right, a small little clause which isn’t in their catalogue. So we had to arrange for the delivery to come to our current one bedroom flat, not good when you have furniture for a two bedroom flat trying to fit into an already furnished one bedroom apartment.

With out anymore boring details, the day ended up with me seeing some poor stupid lady get run over. The car in front of me went straight over the top of her legs/waist. Amazingly she got up herself before collapsing and her friends carrying her. Some misendevours with trying to return the car thanks to all the one way roads around Broadway and Pyrmont to forget to fill it up with petrol. And finally ending the day with our taxi driver trying to rip us off on our trip to the Opera House. As we are both foreign taxi drivers often take us on wild journeys as they think we are tourists! I hate Australian taxi drivers.

This is our roof garden, which we will be able to sit out on and have a beer within the next two weeks. And is only 250m from Darling Harbour. It’s 2800m2 and is on split levels, with a full kitchen and bbq area on the upper half. Perhaps we can have moving in party, I will provide accommodation if you get the flights

I will get some better pictures once we move in, but in the mean time you can check out a few from the M Central site. Click on Living, then Landscape.

Due to my work I have to regularly get taxis around Sydney, and I have yet once to actually make it to my destination without any difficulties. Do I just take it for granted that I’m used to taxi drivers who know where they are going? Maybe it’s my British accent that encourages certain taxi drivers to decide to take me on a ‘tourist’ route to get to a meeting? Or perhaps, they genuinely really have no idea on how to get around the city.

Getting lost, not turning up, turning up late, taking the wrong route, refusing to take you, charging for unnecessary tolls, ignoring the directions you give them and most frustratingly refusing to use their GPS when they don’t know where they are going, I am getting used to, and slowly, very slowly accepting. As I have now learned to just relax a little and without being rude still be assertive enough to refuse to pay the full fare. I’ve never had a problem with the driver for doing this. I have received a couple of honest excuses now when drivers have taken the wrong route, most recently after being picked up from our flat and taken the longest possible route to the Sydney Opera House, I was told “Sorry, I thought you were a tourist”.

Now there are many other websites even authoritive newspaper websites which complain about Sydney taxi drivers. But, what has really, really pissed me off to write this post is the dangerous driving I have encountered. Yesterday I had to tell a driver to stop the car, after he was undertaking and breaking the speed limit to jump a set of lights.

Today I have had a taxi driver refuse to get off his mobile phone whilst struggling to keep the car in the same lane when driving. I had asked him several times to get off the phone to which he ignored me, to later laugh and explain that it isn’t dangerous as he knows where the camera are! I mean WTF! I don’t care if he knows where the cameras are, he was driving dangerously and was drifting lanes.

His taxi number was T2113, and his driver number GR4749. So if anyone from the government happens to read this post, I highly recommend that his plates are removed.

We’ve had a chance to experience Brian Eno’s Luminous – an amazing light festival, taken place between May and June 2009, using several buildings in Sydney to express the art.

It was quite surprising and amazing to watch the Opera House changing colours and never having the same pattern twice. Also there were lots of other impressive places, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and many other light installations; unfortunately we missed lots of them.

Take a Smart Light Walk: http://www.smartlightsydney.com/light-walk/