Thursday was my last day in the hostel. I packed up my things, and left Pat alone in our room - a room that somehow seemed much larger than it had with all of my, Pat's, Nils' and Raul's things everywhere. I had dropped off most of my luggage at Fleur & Julian's the day before, so that I could walk around town unencumbered today.

After a bit of late breakfast/early lunch I headed to the State Library of NSW, which is housed in a lovely Classical building at the edge of the Domain park. Inside the main reading room, I got flashbacks to the Taylorian Middle Library of my student days: there were books lining all the walls, and a small cast-iron gallery running around half-way up the walls to give access to higher-up books. The whole was topped off with lovely frescoes and artistic details.

On the first floor of the library is an exhibition of Australian photography through time. This went from mid-19th century daguerrotypes up to 21st century digital images, and was really interesting. I had to leave before I had reached the end, because it was time for my yoga class.

This, my fourth class, was by far the best I have had. I really felt I had made major improvements across the board. Yeah, there were still things I couldn't do, but they were fewer than before. And the things I did do, I did better than before. Once again, I felt some emotional energy flowing, particularly in the chest-opening posture where you sit up on your knees, push your hips forward, and lean back to grip your feet with your hands, your head hanging down towards the floor. It's mad!

I caught buses out to Lane Cove to Julian & Fleur's, feeling truly exhausted but also energised by the yoga. I'll most definitely be finding a bikram class in Melbourne. It was a quiet evening, just a few beers and some food, which was exactly what I needed.

Friday was the day all the yoga caught up on me. I was buggered!! I actually had to go back to bed for a few hours after I'd got up and had breakfast and called my sister. The day I spent putting pictures up on my website. There are more to come, but I've managed to put up quite a few - enough to be going on with, anyway!

In the evening, after Julian got back from work, we had a slap-up dinner of fish, chips & calamari, washed down with more tasty James Boag's beers from Tasmania. It was a lovely evening, rounded off when my brother called me. It feels like it's been ages since we spoke, but today at long last (and on this, the tenth anniversary of our father's death) all three of us have in some way been together again.

Saturday kind of didn't really happen. I woke up feeling a bit ill in a crappy sore-throaty coughy way. I was planning on travelling down to Canberra but I just wasn't up to it, so instead I had a lazy day with Julian, Fleur, Natasha & Josef. I did some uploading of photos to my website and played with Natasha quite a lot. Later on, I helped Julian cook a risotto and then helped him & Fleur eat it, washed down with lots of white wine. The Australians have taken a bit of a shine to the verdelho grape from Portugal, the one used to make vinho verde, and I can see why: it's very floral and fresh tasting, and not as heavy as a chardonnay.

I was still feeling ill on Sunday, but I determined not to let myself go back on my self-imposed deadline of leaving Sydney and trying pastures new this weekend. So I packed all my things together (itself a traumatic procedure) into my big rucksack, my little rucksack, my rolly bag and - sadly (because it means I've got too much stuff) but handily (because it means I don't have to leave stuff behind) - a fourth shopping-sized bag donated by Julian & Fleur. Then, after a quick lunch of the rest of the risotto (into which the chillies had infused overnight most pleasingly) Fleur dropped me off at Central Station, and I caught a coach down to Canberra.

After an uneventful journey through vast tracts of relatively empty countryside, just rolling hills with lots of gum trees and the occasional farmstead, I was met at the Canberra end by Dave. We dumped my bags in his car and went for a delicious Italian meal, followed by a quick drive around Canberra's main sights. We stopped at a bottle shop on the way back to his, and I got all excited by the variety of imported beers on offer (we settled on some Samuel Adams from the US, some Kokanee from Canada and some Leffe Radieuse from Belgium). Then we had a few quiet ones and went to bed.

Because it was his last day, I decided to treat Nils to lunch at my favourite Chinese noodle restaurant near Haymarket, the uncommonly good (and aptly named) Chinese Noodle Restaurant. He was duly impressed - well, who could fail to be by the hand-made heaps of heaven they serve up there? - and since neither of us could finish our meal I got to take the remains away in a doggy bag. I left Nils at Central station to make his way to the airport, then headed back to the hostel taking a circuitous route through the northern part of Glebe to see what it was like there.

The sun was oppressively hot. It felt like a brick wall was falling on my head every time I took my hat off. I don't think I've felt such an impact of solar radiation since I first stepped off the plane in northern Madagascar. But thankfully the heat on Sydney's streets wasn't too sticky; that would have been unbearable I think.

So what did I do? I went and put myself willingly into a room that was oppressively hot and sticky, and then did exercise!! My second session of bikram yoga was not quite as cosmic as the first one, but I did feel I had improved on some of the postures. Apparently every bikram yoga class in the world follows the same 26 postures in the same order, so it's no problem to move from one group to another. This will be good for when I go to Melbourne.

Some of the postures feel like they ought to be easy, but they're anything but. The one that gets me is just standing on one leg and holding the other foot. You're supposed to hold this position for 60 seconds, but I'm buggered if I can do it for more than 10! Still, practice makes perfect. And the instructors are keen to point out that even after a lifetime of yoga there's always room for improvement.

I came out of the class and gave Johannes, the Austrian guy I met on the train out to the jazz concert last week, a call to see if he fancied a beer. He did, so I walked half an hour north to Woolloomooloo to meet him there. He lives in a block of flats which has been converted from a multi-storey car park built in the shape of a huge spiral, so each flat is on a slightly different level. It was pleasant to talk with an Austrian instead of a German for a change - I've met so many nice Germans since I've been in Sydney! - and feel my true German accent begin to return to me, along with expressions that leave Germans bemused.

Johannes mentioned that he was going to the Opera the next day. I have wanted to go since I arrived, but somehow never got around to arranging it, but here was a good reason to pull my finger out, so the next day I walked to the Opera House and picked up a ticket for that evening from the box office. We met up on Wednesday evening after my yoga class and walked round to the Opera House.

The opera was Prokofiev's The Love For Three Oranges. I have heard some of the music before, but not seen it performed. In fact, this was the first ever opera I have been to see in my life! (All that cultured manner of mine is just a façade.) The costumes were exquisite, and the stage design was striking in an almost drug-inspired psychedelic way: lots of bizarrely shaped translucent blobs and people dressed as cactuses, that sort of thing.

The opulence of the staging almost made up for the lack of memorable tunes. Which isn't to say the singing wasn't any good; in fact I thought the lead tenor, playing the character of the Prince, was excellent. But somehow the music felt disjointed, or patched together, and left me cold. The orchestra played very well however, and richly deserved the applause they got.

It felt strange, after seeing the building so many times from so many angles since I've been in Sydney, to actually be going inside this iconic structure. Strange and also slightly disappointing: at the end of the day, it's just a concert hall, and there are no funky architectural details on the inside except a very high ceiling to remind you of the proud arches overhead. My seat was right at the back of the Circle, as far from the stage as it is possible to be, but the view was almost 100%. All that was missing was the very top of the stage area.

Johannes took me on a bit of a sightseeing walk through town after the performance, and we stopped for a quick bite to eat and a few beers. I was exhausted by the day's exertions, both physical (yoga and walking all over the place) and mental (well, actually yoga again! but also the opera) so sleep came easily to me that night.

Sunday felt strangely Sundayish. I had a sore head - must have been a dodgy pint somewhere along the way, honest - and felt like taking it easy.

But somehow Nils persuaded me to join him for a bikram yoga class. This is yoga in a hot room (37 degrees C) and you sweat like several bastards. It was really good, sort of like a sauna session but with a workout in there as well, and I felt profoundly affected by it. Apparently the moves exercise not only your body and organs, expelling toxins, but also your spirit. I have to say they seemed to do just that: I went through a range of emotions during that hour & a half of bending & stretching, arriving at a sort of serene peace at the end. It wasn't just exhaustion, there was definitely something else there too. I'll go again.

After the yoga we went down to the Botanical Gardens at Mrs Macquarie's Point, and queued up for last-minute tickets to the open-air cinema. Everyone I know has said it is cool, but all the internet tickets were sold out ages ago. We decided to chance it, even when the allotment of standby tickets were sold and we were told there might not be enough returns for everyone in the queue to get in.

There was a German couple from Stuttgart behind us in the queue, and we spent the next couple of hours chatting with them. At one point a bird shat on my foot. I took this to be a good omen, so I didn't mind waiting for tickets. And then we got in! There was amusement for a moment, because in our chats the Stuttgarters had ended up standing in front of us in the queue, and they quipped that if they got the last two tickets they would tell us where to go. And then they did get the last two tickets! Oh ho ho! They of course insisted we go in, and luckily they got another two tickets at the very last minute before the film started.

It was magical, despite the narrow seats, to watch the huge screen slowly pivot up from the surface of the harbour and take up its position between the Opera House & Harbour Bridge on the right and downtown Sydney on the left. There were swarms of flying foxes and cockatoos flying overhead as the sun set over the glittering tower blocks. Soon the stars appeared, and I was thrilled by their apparent movement across the firmament whenever I glanced up at them from the screen.

The film was truly exquisite. It was called the Story of the Weeping Camel, and was set in modern-day nomadic Mongolia. With a documentary's care for accuracy we came to understand the life of a tiny community of people out in the Mongolian desert, with only their sheep and their camels for company. But with a magic surrealism a story of ritual music and miraculous superstition was woven into the film, much like the colourful ribbons that were woven into the camel-hair bridle fitted on the season's firstborn camel colt.

After the film we met up with Simon & Steffi, the couple from Stuttgart, and headed down to the Opera House to have a drink at the bar on the waterfront there. They were playing samba music and there was quite a crowd, so the atmosphere was good. We chatted until closing time and then headed our separate ways, they back to their hostel in King's Cross and we back to our hostel in Glebe.

Monday was the closest I've come to work since shovelling shit for Bruce in the hot sun. It wasn't paid work, unfortunately, but it was definitely worthwhile. I borrowed Nils' laptop to resize some photos for my website; he has PhotoShop, which I haven't found in any internet cafes yet. And to be frank it would have cost me a bomb to do it in an internet cafe: I was busy from nine in the morning until six at night, without even a lunchbreak! Now I have uploaded the images to my webspace I will be able to actually update the website in the coming days & weeks with recent (ie post-September 04) snaps. So look out for those!

That evening I finally got to have a proper chat with Raul, the Mexican guy who has been sleeping above me for almost a week but who is always either asleep when I get in or out by the time I get up. He is an architect in California and has travelled all over the world, so he is an interesting guy to talk to. There's a chance I'll see him again when I go to Melbourne (as I will be doing in the next week or so) because he will be passing through there on his way from Hobart to Brisbane. We sat on the roof terrace for a while, enjoying the cooler air of twilight.

Just as Raul got up to go to bed Nils turned up and dragged me into a game of Yahtzee with some other Germans. It's not the best game in the world, but at least there's a lot of time for chatting while it's someone else's turn to throw the dice. Nils had had a productive day, which is good because it was his last full day in Australia: he left the next day to go to New Zealand for a few weeks. After people went to bed we got out his laptop and my iRiver and looked through (but of course didn't copy because that would be against copyright law!) each other's music collections. Then it was time to hit the hay.