Sydney

We got to know Sydney from the driver's seat of a very large minibus. At 18 we worked at G'day Backpackers, a youth hostel in Kings Cross, collecting new arrivals from the airport and, after dark, running pub crawls round the bars. It was the experience of a lifetime. The nights out, we gather, have changed a lot since, under rules that have been hard on the bars, but the friends made then have kept us going back; some now live there. We have never stayed in a Sydney hotel, only with friends or in hostels, which is an awkward thing for a hotel site to admit, so the hotels here are ones we recommend, not ones we know.

Much of a Sydney day happens on or near the water, and every budget has a way onto it, from a chartered boat into the bays the ferries never reach to the simplest of all, the Manly ferry from Circular Quay. Twenty minutes or so later it lets you off in a proper Australian beach town. The surf is great, and the cafes would be worth the trip without it.

Walk through the Royal Botanic Garden to Mrs Macquarie's Chair, a bench cut into the sandstone by convicts in 1810 for the governor's wife, who used to sit there watching for ships from home. An hour or two before sunset the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge are both in front of it: she chose well.

Woolloomooloo deserves an afternoon. There is plenty going on round the old naval dockyard, good street food included, and the Finger Wharf is the longest timber-piled wharf in the world. Harry's Cafe de Wheels has sold pies by the dockyard gates since 1945, so the afternoon ends there: a world-record wharf, and the thing to do there is eat a pie.

Where to stay comes down to how much quiet is wanted. Bondi and Coogee have the backpackers and the hip crowd. The northern beaches run on up to Avalon with far more peace, and some of them are remarkable. Our favourite is Mosman and Crows Nest, where grand houses step down to little harbour coves and keep the city across the water, which is a fine place to keep it. Go in spring, September to November, when it is mild, at its driest and ahead of the summer crowds.

For dinner, Catalina is on the harbour at Rose Bay, a fish restaurant the McMahon family has run since 1994, its curved dining room giving every table a view. The seafood we had was as good as the setting, and afterwards the evening carries on down onto the beach.