Once we left Auckland we had a good idea of the route we would take to Wellington and a list of must see places and activities to do. We started with a visit Waitomo. Here there is a massive system of underground caves, waterfalls and passages and we were keen to explore. After kitting up in our wetsuits, helmets and lights, our day here was spent abseiling down a waterfalls, climbing up rock faces and crawling in and under passageways filled with water, all this a total of 400ft underground. The entire cave system is littered with stalagmites, stalactites, columns not to mention the millions of glow-worms that light up even the darkest of chambers. This was the perfect start to our many New Zealand adventures. We loved it and were sorry when our day trip ... read more

Brisbane was our next major stop over where we met up with Tony & Joy (another second cousin of Stephen's) for a night. We went out for a lovely meal and drinks in an amazing bar (they don’t have them like this at home) The following morning after sleeping in the TV room at Tony & Joy’s house which is in the Windsor suburb of inner Brisbane we headed south across the border in to New South Wales and on to Nimbin and Byron Bay. We had a little trouble getting the van out of Tony and Joy’s steep yard, it needed the effort of everyone to push the van uphill and with Stephen going heavy on the accelerator but we made it to the edge of the drive way. We had a real oh no ... read more

From Cairns to Sydney our east coast adventure would take just five weeks, we were on a time watch as we had to get to Sydney and sell our van before our flight left for New Zealand on the 25th September. With this in mind we picked out a few highlights of what we really wanted to do on the east coast. You could spend three months alone travelling the length and breadth of this vibrant and jam packed stretch of coast line, there is so much to see and do. If we come back here we would definitely have another to do list. Our next stop after leaving Cape tribulation was much further down the coast, parked up at Airlie beach which is the getaway for the Whitsunday Islands, and we decided to quite literally ... read more

Well, it's been quite a few busy weeks for us. After Christine and Simon left us we stayed in Sydney for a further week job hunting. This wasn't as fruitful as we had hoped mainly due to the competition from other backpackers for short term work but also it was late autumn and the main tourist season in Sydney was over. We decided that over a long weekend to make our way up to Brisbane via Byron Bay and Nimbin. All the jobs we have seen seem to be in Queensland so we thought we would have better luck if we were actually in Queensland. Over two days we made the 800km journey north to Byron bay getting there on the Saturday afternoon. Things were pretty busy here with it being a long weekend and we ... read more

We were very excited for Christine and Simon’s arrival and we were like children in the airport arrivals hall. As soon as we saw them it didn’t feel like we last saw them 10 months ago, it was so good to see them. They stayed at Simon’s uncle’s house (who lives in south Melbourne) for their first night before picking up a little britz campervan the following day. We had a few days to explore Melbourne before starting our journey along the coast to Sydney. We tackled most of the main things we wanted to do in the city on one day starting with the Melbourne Aquarium. We saw a huge range of sea life from sharks to stingrays, and even a penguin enclosure. We really enjoyed watching the penguins; they had their weekly weigh in, ... read more