http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Will and Alex/ Travel adventures in journals and photos from Will and Alex en-us Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:03:42 BST Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:03:42 BST A Maori legend has it that long ago a godlike being Tuterakiwhanoa wielded his axe to carve out the landscape of South Island. If you look at a map of the southern end of South Island you might well believe it. Indeed the island's southwestern coast facing Australia and the Tasman Sea does look like it has had an axe taken to it convoluted and narrow inlets seemingly hewn out of the sp http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/South-Island/Fiordland-National-Park/Doubtful-Sound/blog-303585.html The 170km from Omarama to Queenstown take us gently back towards the mountains. The road passes through Tarras a tiny blip on the map which gained worldwide fame well almost as the home of Shrek a naughty merino sheep who was found in 2004 having evaded the shears for six consecutive years and as you might expect looking quite alarming for this fact. The hapless creature having avoided cap http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/South-Island/Queenstown/blog-303359.html Having passed the morning watching playful dolphins frolicking in Le Bons Bay we spend a couple of hours in Akaroa the largest town on the Banks Peninsula and located at the end of a deep inlet that extends all the way to the centre of the peninsula. Akaroa is a gentrified kind of place all cafs and estate agents not too different from your average West London high street then except for th http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/South-Island/Canterbury/blog-302161.html It does not take long at all to get used to the gentle pace of life at Peter's Dive Resort and to forget the cares and woes of home. Which makes it all the more difficult to accept we have to leave. It's been a great privilege to dive Sogod Bay's stunning reefs gliding past its precipitous walls alive with the most extraordinary biodiversity we've ever seen.The timing of our return to Hong Kong http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Philippines/Cebu/Cebu-City/blog-274863.html I'd always thought you needed to be at the airport two hours for your flight so you had time to check in go through interminable security checks do a spot of duty free shopping and walk along equally interminable corridors to your gate. Not any more it seems in this era of the internet. Having been dropped off at the airport a generous twoandabit hours in advance we were surprised to fin http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Hong-Kong/blog-268729.html I can think of worse places to spend a few hours than Hong Kong's airport. Although it opened ten years ago replacing the infamous Kai Tak Airport with its hairraising approach and relatively frequent instances of planes taking a dip in Victoria Harbour after overshooting the runway it looks barely a day old and is an extremely impressive structure. Unfortunately our flight is at half past m http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Philippines/Southern-Leyte/blog-261263.html We rise early and leave our maternity hospital room to have a quick nose through Geraldine's main street a cute mix of craft shops and small grocers. Massive supermarkets are few and far between round here there are fewer than 7 people per square kilometre in South Island compared to 281 on the island of Great Britain and small food shops abound. Is there anything not good about this country http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/South-Island/Mount-Cook-National-Park/blog-229057.html Four weeddestroying sheepchasing and tangelosqueezing weeks later our time in Opotiki and at Te Aranga has come to an end. As well as being good exercise and a valuable opportunity to learn about many facets of New Zealand life these four weeks have also been restful beyond our expectations. After some six and half months of constant movement rarely sleeping in the same bed two nights in a http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/South-Island/Banks-Peninsula/blog-229053.html Christmas was the last thing we were expecting our boreal brains had some difficulty reconciling the month with the weather. But Christmas it was before we knew it. We were fortunate enough to have been isolated from the consumerist hype that has come to typify Christmas at home no jingles in shops from September onwards no television adverts exhorting us to buybuybuy and spendspendspend. Qui http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/North-Island/Bay-of-Plenty/Otara-River/blog-228319.html The day starts with a wholesome bowl of Jim's homemade muesli fuel for the morning of digging grubbing picking weeding raking and pruning we have ahead of us. We're usually ready by eight although one advantage of WWOOFing in this particular household is that timekeeping isn't excessively draconian which is lovely when you're as allergic to alarmclocks as I am.Jim and Julie spend much of http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/North-Island/Bay-of-Plenty/Opotiki/blog-228287.html A little further along the Lyell Highway we come to Lake St Clair National Park which lies immediately south of Cradle Mountain and is where the Overland Track ends or begins depending on which way you walk it. It's pretty late in the day by the time we arrive so we opt for a short walk along the shore of Lake St Clair. Compared to that of its twin park around Cradle Mountain the scenery her http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Hobart/Claremont/blog-151810.html Tasmaniarsquos west coast is at the heart of the statersquos mining industry. Unlike mainland Australia Tasmania didnrsquot see much of a gold rush but what it lacked in gold it more than made up for in other perhaps less exciting but arguably more useful metals. Zinc iron tin copperhellipAs a result of this this part of western Tasmania is crisscrossed rather incongruously http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Zeehan/blog-151596.html New Zealand. Our next destination lies some two thousand kilometres away across the Tasman Sea. Australia seems far enough from home already but this three hour flight emphasises quite how isolated New Zealand is from the rest of the world. It really is a long long way away.We arrive in Auckland New Zealand's biggest city by far and home to a quarter of the entire country's population in th http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/New-Zealand/North-Island/Bay-of-Plenty/Opotiki/blog-136023.html Courtesy of Qantas who serve Byron Bay Cookie Company cookies on their domestic flights making them clearly the world's best airline we are whisked from Melbourne to Sydney in an hour and twenty minutes. Melbourne and Sydney which a cursory look at an atlas would suggest are neighbours are in fact over 700km apart the same distance from London to say Hamburg. The route takes us over the ve http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/New-South-Wales/Sydney/blog-136022.html We're back in Melbourne for a couple of nights. Just enough time to do two things. First to go back to Fitzroy Melbourne's answer to Soho full of cafs and independent shops. We find it impossible not to pay a visit to a fantastic little place on Brunswick Street the Chocolatera San Churro which does plates of delicious fresh Spanish churros served hot with a big bowl of melted chocolate. Hea http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Victoria/Melbourne/Ramsay-Street/blog-136021.html We spend the night in Deloraine's YHA hostel a rather regimented place not quite necessary since we were the only people staying there where the somewhat eccentric owner felt the need to post signs absolutely everywhere of which my favourite was beds are for sleeping in not on. Still the hostel's quiet location at the top of a small hill gave us fabulous sunset views with Tasmania's ru http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Cradle-Mountain---Lake-St-Clair-National-Park/blog-136019.html A drive north from the Tasman Peninsula stopping briefly to pick up some tasty local smoked fish takes us through an uncharacteristically dry part of Tasmania. Brown not green. After nearly a week in the green south of the island the change is quite striking.National park to national park. Peninsula to peninsula. Our destination is the Freycinet National Park which occupies practically the who http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Freycinet-National-Park/blog-123609.html Off the ferry in Kettering we return to Hobart which we cross in a matter of minutes London you have a lot to answer for and head eastwards passing through the town of Sorell where we pick up a large bag of fresh Tasmanian scallops for dinner. Our destination is yet another part of eastern Tasmania's convoluted coastline the Tasman Peninsula. Connected to the rest of the island by the wi http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Tasman-Peninsula/blog-121756.html For such an awkwardly positioned small island Tasmania has had a remarkably cosmopolitan history. The island was discovered discovered by the West that is since an Aboriginal population had thrived there for centuries already in 1642 by a Dutchman of all people a certain Abel Janszoon Tasman. Tasman may have given his name to the island but not until several hundred years later. For ov http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Bruny-Island/blog-121737.html Bass Strait as I touched on in earlier entries is a particularly nasty piece of work. Australia's southern coastline is a treacherous place at the best of times but the Strait's tally of sunken ships is perhaps second to none in this part of the world. The first European to lay eyes on this stretch of water was Matthew Flinders him again... he appears to have given his name to most places http://www.travelblog.org/Oceania/Australia/Tasmania/Hobart/blog-119635.html