Jellsey

9th January 2011 I got a bit of a lay in today as didn’t need to check out until 10am. The bus weren’t leaving until 3pm so had to morning to have a wonder round town; however it was a Sunday so most of the shops were shut. We got on the bus at 3pm and had about a 4 hour drive back to Auckland. Even though it was a fairly long drive I had made a few friends which made the journey fly by. Got into the city around 7pm and checked into Nomads hostel for the night. After dinner we headed to the bottle shop and brought a few drinks to drink to drink at the hostel before we headed out to an Irish bar for some live music. ... read more

7th January 2011 Up very early today for a full day trip up to Cape Reinga which is the most northerly point of New Zealand. The majority of the bus where from the bus that I was on yesterday but we had a few others from the previous day. First stop was Puket Rainforest where we did a small boardwalk through the forest. The main attractions in Puket are the Kauri Trees which are over 2000 years old. We continued up the east coast and arrived in Cape Reinga around 11am where we got off and made our way up to the lighthouse which is on the tip of New Zealand. And from here you can see where the Tasman Sea meets with the pacific sea. After the short break we drove another 10minutes before stopping ... read more

5th January 2011 Arrived in Auckland in the early hours of the morning and got the shuttle bus to hostel. It took me about 3 hours from landing to getting to the hostel! They had 2 or 3 people working at the passport desks and I think there were 3 flights that landed in the space of half an hour! Anyways I checked into the hostel and went to bed pretty much straight away and didn’t wake up until gone 12 the next day. Bit annoying as I only had planned one day in Auckland before I was going up to Piahia (the bay of islands). I then spent a good hour trying to find a super market to get some food for the day before I gave in and brought a subway. After lunch I ... read more

22nd September 2010 We left the hostel around 8am and got a minivan to the Bus station to catch an 8.30am bus to Phnom Penh. The bus stopped twice on the 6.5hr journey; once for a toilet stop and another for lunch. We got off the bus for lunch and were surrounded by little kids trying to sell fruit, drinks and... tarantulas! They were deep fried but they also had some real ones crawling on their tops. Apparently they like to throw the real ones at the tourists to see their reaction; this was possibly my worst nightmare!!! Luckily i managed to avoid both the live and the fried spiders, however some of the guys did try a deep fried one. We got to Siem Reap around 3pm and had just over an hour to shower ... read more

20th September 2010 Another long day ahead! We left the hostel at 4.45 am to get to Angkor Wat, buy our day passes and watch the sun rise. We were fairly early and got seats in the front row, the sun was up by about 6.40am so we then headed for breakfast. Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world and the only UNESCO world heritage site in Cambodia. We went to a few of the smaller temples to start and then headed to Angkor Thom - the last and most enduring capital city of the Khmer empire. It was pretty big and there were a lot of steps! We had one more stop before lunch and it involved a 20 minute uphill walk to get to it, we got to the top of ... read more