I will get to the Asian news in a minute, but first I want to mention the stellar immigration staff in Sydney, Australia. We had a 6 hour layover there and wanted to take the train into the city for a couple of hours. We didn't even think about needing a visa until we were at immigration. A very nice Australian did up paperwork for us in about five minutes to get us a temporary visa so we could visit the city. We took the train to Circle Quay and saw the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge. We walked over [View Full Entry]

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Still alive. In Cambodia. Planning... Planning... Planning... EOT [View Full Entry]

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We fly out of Christchurch early tomorrow morning. We've gotten very comfortable in NZ, and we're sad to leave. But, we are excited for Vietnam! [View Full Entry]

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Hello again! Traveling hasn't left us any time for using the internet these past few days. We'll try to catch up here. The day after we visited Tiritiri Matangi we rented a car (a Nissan Sunny) and drove south to Waitomo for a cave-themed day. We did the very touristy walk-through tour of the Waitomo Caves complete with a Disneyesque boat ride at the end into a pitch black cave with glow worms carpeting the ceiling. We even got up close and personal with some cave wetas, New Zealand's giant prehistoric crickets. After lunch it was time for something a little [View Full Entry]

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We hopped on a ferry boat this morning to go to Tiritiri Matangi island, an open preserve. I am in love with the Takahe (see photo). Takahe are 3x the size of a standard chicken. [View Full Entry]

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After a 13.5 hour flight to Sydney followed by a 3 hour flight to Auckland, we finally made it to NZ. We took the bus into town and found ourselves a hotel in central Auckland--we agreed on relatively cushy accomodation at first to increase our chances of getting a good night's sleep. We had a good dinner and managed to stay awake until 9 PM (no small feat) before calling it a night. We woke up with the sun and decided to go to Devenport, a cute town on a peninsula accessible by a 15 minute ferry ride. At Devenport we [View Full Entry]

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