Mark and his bag

Since returning to the UK after our 'big' trip we've been getting more and more restless - so, to keep our sanity and our spirit of adventure alive action was taken. After years of being my pillion Gill passed her unrestricted motorbike test, we went out and bought two motorbikes (a Suzuki Bandit 600 for me and a Kawasaki ER 5 - 500cc for Gill), and we used them! Two days after Gill passing her test we set out on a 1250 mile round trip through Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, the lakes, Scotland (up to the Isle of Skye) and back down. Camping all the way, it took 8 days and we had a excellent, incident free(except Gill dropping her bike once on gravel, and her bike breaking down on Skye) holiday. We'd recommend it! Mark and Gill ... read more

It is frustrating, and some may say ‘annoying’ that our up-to-date entries are less than current; so… Let’s skip one and get a little more current! For the past 9 weeks or so we’ve been staying in a small village (in NZ it’s a town) for one reason and one reason only - SNOWBOARDING. The title says everything, as with our stay in Bright and the Paragliding we’re sticking with our ‘tried and tested’ method for adopting new hobbies. We’ve never snowboarded before but thought buying two sets of second hand boarding equipment and a couple of season passes to a ski field would be a damned good idea. It was! We’d never been near a snowboard (or a real ski slope for that matter) before we went into a Nelson shop and bought our toys, ... read more

It finally came to pass that paragliding and Bright was ending. We had many flights in many directions. Gills farthest straight line distance was 25 kms which took 2 hours, she then made it back to our camp in record time by being offered a lift all the way back by the owners of the field in which she landed! In fact she arrived back in plenty of time to receive my ‘please come and get me’ phone call after my landing. I wasn’t lucky enough to get offered a lift by the land owner but as the flight was 56 kms straight line (96 kms by road and nearly 4 hours by air!) it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. As Gill and I aren’t competitive in the slightest she was more than happy ... read more

This is a brief entry to fill in the New Year gap left by the previous blog. After this we can get reasonably up to date with our current experiences - ones which over the past few months have followed very similar trends, but more later. When we arrived in Melbourne, and finally navigated the city the way we wanted to (the map we had was out of date and used some different road names), we went to the information centre and found a number of camp sites to phone around. We ended up staying in a place called Williamstown, outside the city - but commutable. Obviously the main point about this blog is our New Year celebrations, which were good, but a little about Melbourne. It’s a nice place! The city has a good feel ... read more

Without meaning to reduce this great nations variety and beauty, we have to admit that without keeping note of the where’s, when’s and why’s we find it difficult to tease apart the different areas and cultures - although they are similar in theme. Each of the small towns along the way have left an impression - be it small in some cases and negative in others, and these have all helped us to see the bigger picture of how all the fragments form the whole. From small town miners with attitudes belonging in the 1870’s, toppless/strip bars belonging in the 1930’s, nuclear test zones belonging in the condemnation of history - to the plight of the countries original inhabitants ferociously dragged into a modern lifestyle, one which they weren’t in anyway prepared for and one which ... read more