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We left Hawaii a few days ago now, been a little lazy with updating this. We stayed in there for a week and both of us loved it. I have to say that it wasn't exactly what we expected, but it was still awesome. We arrived in Hawaii on Thursday the 22nd June, and it was easily the longest day of my life. From midnight New Zealand time to midnight Hawaii time took 45 hours! We crossed over the international dateline on the way, and the time difference meant that we arrived in Hawaii about 11 hours before we left New Zealand, crazy stuff. The first thing that we did in Hawaii was go to the beach, our hostel was definitely not the nicest we have been to... but it was only one block from Waikiki ... read more

Our time on New Zealand's South Island has been mainly spent on buses. We really didn't plan this leg of the trip particularly well. Two weeks is not long enough to try and do an entire country. We have visited Christchurch (1 night), Queenstown (3 nights), Franz Josef Glacier (2 nights), and Nelson (1 night), in that time we have had 3 days which haven't involved bus journeys, and 4 days which were spent almost entirely on buses (two 8 hour trips, one 10 hours, one 6 hours, and then a 3 hour boat to the north island). New Zealand is having it's worst weather for 60 years! It's snowing where it's never snowed before, roads everywhere are closed, there's a few cities without power, and it's just generally been cold and wet. And, if that's ... read more

Josh and I are now qualified open water scuba divers! We have a license to go 18 metres underwater, took us 4 days to get that bit of paper, and they were up there with the best days of our trip. The first 2 days were a little surreal, had to get up at 6.30 to get to school at 7.30, that was savage, and not what you expect to be doing on holiday... so all you back home having to do exams and revision... i felt a (very) little bit of your pain. The theory part basically involved learning what all the instruments did and how not to kill yourself while diving (the tutor, Mike's most commonly used phrase - in a dutch accent - was "don't do ______, or you will die"). Once all ... read more

On Wednesday Josh, Sam, and I left Brisbane for the day to go on a tour of Moreton Island. It was amazing. We were the only people booked on the tour so the guide was basically our personal chauffer for the day, brilliant. Moreton Island is the 3rd biggest sand island in the world, and it is pretty spectacular. We started the day off by heading to the dunes and doing some more sand boarding... it was much better than last time, the dunes were bigger, boards were faster and we were allowed to stand up on them as well! We combined with another tour to go down in a pyramid, we got put at the bottom, and basically ate sand all the way down... the tour guides found it hilarious, I looked albino after that ... read more

Well, we have certainly experienced mixed fortunes over the last few days... some of the best and worst weather, spectacular scenery, and unbelieveable displays of incompetence. I'll begin with the positives. The last couple of days have had great weather, Josh, Rob, Sam (Rob's army mate) and I spent today on Manly beach (we had planned to go a few days back but it was raining). Manly was much nicer than Bondi beach... Bondi was too touristy while Manly was a lot quieter, much easier to find room to move. Josh and I got up at 4 this morning to watch Barca beat Arsenal in the Champions League, unfortunately the TV cut out over Lehmann's sending off (really gutted to miss that but was delighted when we worked out what had happened!!). Another highlight of our ... read more