Today is my birthday! Turning 30; same procedure as every year. Now you would expect a pirate to celebrate her birthday at sea or with a bottle of rum. But this year there was a big birthday surprise in store for me..!

A helicopter tour over Sydney! Quite exciting. At first I was a bit anxious that we would fly in one of those Indiana Jones helicopers that are missing sidedoors. That was luckily not the case. Altough I must say that our actual helicopter looked more like a toy or maybe a large grown drone, instead of an actual aircraft. But the pilot told us that there had never ever been an accident (and because everything was paid for, and of course pretty cool) we got in.

In spite of what the pilot told us, that the helicopter would be like a Tardis (from Doctor Who) and bigger on the inside. Maybe he only saw the old shows and the tardis has gotten bigger since the remake, because I do not agree.. To be honest at take off I felt like I was sitting in a bumpercar that was lifted in the air. But: exciting! I got a bit anxious again when we were crossing the sky over Sydney’s business district with its skyscrapers, but seeing the harbour bridge, Opera House and the sea with the sun glistering in it, it made up for everything.

During the flight the pilot (Ross) told us some stuff about Sydney, but I must say I was paying more attention to the input from my eyes than from my ears. What I do remember is that everything you could see from the sky is part of Sydney and that the city holds around 5 milion people. I can also tell you that cemeteries look really weird form the sky – and that it is not just expensive to live in Sydney but to be buried there as well.

The tour took about 20 minutes and the landing in the helicopter was so much nicer than the one we had with the Airbus A380 (which put out its wheels and then just dumped itself on the landing strip)! Watch the whole trip (or a nice compilation af it) right here:

We then moved on to cocktails, thanks to Ype who wired me some money especially for this occasion. Merci beaucoup. And because we found a place with happy hour, we were able to enjoy twice as many drinks! And to top things off we ended the evening in a bar with a nice beer; pirate life. Yarrrrrr!