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Cheap Olympics
Cheap Charlie · October 2, 2000

I'm down under at the Olympic Games. On the way in magazine after magazine and newspaper after newspaper I have read about all the top restaurants in Sydney, all serving great food at top dollar. I have also heard about the outrageous prices being charged for hotels in the town during the Olympics.

I decided to check out what was affordable and what doesn't end up costing an arm and a leg in Sydney. I'll start with the biggest bargain just in time for the Olympics and for the near future - the Australian dollar. It is only worth .55 to .60 per US Dollar. That means a hotel costing A$100 is only about US$60. That makes almost everything a bargain in Australia right now.

When I arrived at the airport with no hotel room for the night, I was sent to the hotel reservations desk. Now in most airports, you want to avoid them at all costs. You are about guaranteed to pay a hefty premium for your room.

However, in Sydney, the reservation center specializes in space available rooms that have been recently released by the hotels. Here, rooms are a bargain. I ended up with a room smack in the center of town, in a three-star hotel, for only A$104 or about US$60. I couldn't complain. So there is lesson one-use the airport hotel reservation desk if you arrive without a reservation. They may find you a bargain.

On the plane the arrival video described a special travel pass for Sydney that costs about A$83 for three days and of course more for longer periods. A flight attendant told me to forget about that pass (you should forget about it too) -there were much better bargains available from news agents in town.

I stopped at the nearest news agent and asked about the travel passes. They explained that there were basically two types of passes-one based on the number of trips over an unlimited time and the second based on unlimited trips during a fixed amount of time. I decided on a one-week unlimited pass for A$28 good on buses, trains and ferries. This pass covered most of the central are of town. A travel pass reaching further into the suburbs costs A$36. All a better bargain than the travel pass touted on the airlines films.

OK. My Sydney trip was moving along well. I had a hotel room and a travel pass to get around. Now for a quick lunch. I wandered out of the hotel and found that Sydney has a number of wonderful food courts. These food courts vaguely resemble those found in malls in the United States. However, the food is not McDonalds, Burger King and KFC. Here the meals were Malaysian, Indian, Japanese, Greek and Italian. They were a delight, cooked will and served on china with real silverware. A main course such as stirfry beef with vegetables over rice plus a soft drink cost only about A$7 or less than US$4.

I stopped in at several restaurants as well in the Woolloomooloo section of Sydney. In case anyone is heading to Sydney here are particulars. At Il Puntino, 41 Crown Street, they served wood-oven pizzas or pasta with wine for less than US$10. The owner, Tony, is first generation Italian and full of fun.

The next night, again in Woolloomooloo, I headed to the Frisco Hotel at the corner of Dowling Street and Nicholson Street just off the water. Upstairs the restaurant served massive portions of fish and chips as well as other entrees such as kangaroo and beef and fish all for about US$8-10 each. The prices for good food in this town are amazingly inexpensive.

In the next I'll talk about the free things available in Sydney during the Olympics.

Charlie Leocha is the Boston-based author of Travel Rights: Know the Rules of the Road and the Air Before You Go. Cheap Charlie appears every Monday on this site. E-mail him at cheapch@aol.com or access his Web site.