Grand Canyon.... originally we planned to rent a car in Las Vegas, drive to the Grand Canyon and then spend a night or two at the South Rim. After calculating the costs for the rental, accomodation, food, petrol and the time it would take for a return trip from Vegas we opted for a day trip instead, and the one we found had it all, airplane, helicopter and some time at the rim itself....perfect!! And the best part of it all? It ended up being a bit cheaper to do this than the road trip would have been. The main reason that we chose this tour was the fact that it would take us all the way to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon which is supposed to be a lot better than the ... read more

Our decision for staying in Hawaii was done quite early on. Flying from Australia to the main land of the US takes around 14-15 hours, flying to Hawaii takes 9 hours.... and it's well worth a small stop! We flew with Air Canada (anything to avoid the US airlines) which turned out to be quite a nice airline with friendly people and movies on demand. On arrival 95% queued up on the "Foreigners" side of immigration where one person was working while the other 5% that went through the "US Citizen" side were served by 4 officers..... can someone explain the logic of that to us? 10min later, another flight arrived, this time it's Air New Zealand.... also filled with non-US Citizens, but still no change. Finally after around 20min, we get another officer to check ... read more

When Suz and I arrived in Auckland the original plan was to stay 1 maybe 2 months and then return to Sydney. But, we all know that it didn't quite turn out that way though, did it? =) 8 months later and the time came for us to leave the country, the only reason we stayed for so long was because we both managed to get good jobs so that we could support our stay in NZ and also save for the next trip. Since the last blog we haven't really done anything so there is not much to tell..... but we will try and make it worthwhile. When we came back in April from our trip to the South Island we both realized that we pretty much had seen all we wanted to see ... read more

Another early morning for us and we were ready to leave Dunedin. It's getting cold to get up in the mornings now, you can tell that winter is on its way (we even slept with the heater on the night before, that's a first for this autumn/winter). After getting lost in Dunedin (Again?!? The town is quite small, how do we succeed?) we eventually found the right highway and headed south towards "Invercargill". The weather was very pleasant to drive in, a few clouds here and there kept the sun out of our faces and very soon we made it to a small town called "Clinton". As we were driving through it we noticed a sign indicating how far it was to the next town "Gore", the sign also told us that this was the ... read more

The day had finally arrived, our trip down south! But first there were a few small things that we had to take care of, first of all the apartment, we realized that it would be better for us to leave the apartment and just get a new one once we returned (we were quite sick of it anyway). We now had to figure out what to bring on the trip and what to leave behind and also where to store our stuff. Luckily my mate Daren from work kindly helped us out (again!) by letting us store a bag (or three) at his place. The saturday before our departure from Auckland we spent on our knees, cleaning out the place and once we were finished we said goodbye to it, handed in our keys and ... read more