Andy Beccy Brown

Welcome to our penultimate blog! New Zealand has proven to be a country of many adventures; we’ve trekked over a glacier, jumped out of a plane, completed the Tongariro Crossing, spent the evening with a Maori tribe, dived the Poor Knights Islands and viewed some of the best and most diverse scenery any country in the world has to offer. Everyone we spoke to before we arrived raved about New Zealand and we certainly will now as well. We’ve had an amazing eighteen days and after only really scraping the surface in the North Island we wish we’d had longer. The last few days we have spent in and around Auckland and were lucky enough to stay with the Dunning Family who used to live round the corner from us. Five or six years ago Beccy ... read more

There only seems to be one question you get asked when you mention New Zealand is on your travel itinerary - are you going to bungy or skydive? For four and a half months Andy and I have been asking each other this very question, and upon arrival in Queenstown the stunning landscape convinced us to do a skydive over Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables. Our 12,000ft jump gave us forty-five seconds free fall time, accelerating to 130mph before the leisurely (in comparison) parachute landing. Brave I might hear you think, but to be honest, once you’re strapped to your professional diver and in the plane there really is no going back - you either go gracefully or kicking and screaming. I’m pleased to say we both did the former; so much so that my diver ... read more

Happy New Year Everyone! Welcome to our first blog of 2010. We too had a festive break (it’s tough work travelling) and are now back-to-business with a blog to cover our last three weeks... Since we last wrote we have covered a lot of ground: travelled around Tasmania for a week; spent Christmas Day in two states; been to Sydney for NYE and started a road trip back up the East Coast to Brisbane with my sisters and Marc. We’ve made it as far as Byron Bay where I’m writing this now. The 1,500 miles we covered in our week in Taz meant it was non-stop and the island deserves a blog in its own right - here goes it in a paragraph. Wrongly so, Tasmania is a place that often gets overlooked when visiting Australia ... read more

Like most people, Geology has never really been my thing and my interest in rocks doesn’t extend past the sparkly, wearable kind. That said anything, let alone a rock, that has its own airport, commands its visitors to get up at 4:30am, divides them over climbing it and has two names must be worth a visit. It was. Ayers Rock, known to the Aboriginals’ as Uluru, attracts people to the middle of nowhere because of the array of colours it turns throughout the day; and from a geological perspective it is an astounding single piece of rock in near complete isolation. To climb or not to climb is the question you face once you’ve watched sunset and sunrise. The traditional aboriginal owners are against anyone climbing as they view the rock as a religious monument. Andy ... read more

Currently there is a large pick-up truck parked about 20m from our hotel room full of girls dancing in the back. For some people that might seem like a dream come true now that I’m an old married man it’s actually quite annoying. So I decided if I can’t beat them or can’t join them, write a blog... Today we arrived on Magnetic Island which is about 275km north of the Whitsundays where we were aboard ‘Mandrake’ yacht sailing round some of the 74 islands that make up the Whitsundays. Our first day sailing we spent pretty much clinging on to the deck due to bad weather (it was either that or go below deck and get sea-sick). Fortunately the sun god woke up early on day two and the rain finally stopped which made the ... read more