Farewell Middle Earth

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So, we are now in Australia and it is time to say farewell and goodbye to middle earth. Before we do we can’t go without giving some thoughts on the last month.

Campervans

Kiwis love their campervans, and it is a great way to tour the country, providing you have the right one. They vary in shape, size and facilities ranging from the 5* hotel on wheels with gold plated taps to the tiny van without proper cooking facilities and seem designed with hobbits in mind. However to make you feel like they are still special they are decorated in wild and wacky ways from Alice in Wonderland to spaceship company with all the vans named including Yoda, K9 and even Spock. However we decided to use the more traditional route of hiring a car, it may have been old enough to earn its own driving licence but it got us through the best part of 5,000km.

Hostels

The hostels we stayed in were on the whole pretty good but several shared the same quirk of the shower head being at shoulder height ... Even for Jan

The German Invasion
With the Poles having moved to the UK the Germans have decided to move slightly further afield ... New Deutschland. The may as well rename the country as over half the people in the hostels come from the fatherland. Whilst there it seems like a bad WWII movie replacing "Ve have vays of making you talk" with "Ve have ways of not letting you talk!" Nearly every time we wanted to use the phone to call either South Africa or the UK there was one on the phone, and not for a short 10 minute conversation, we are talking the best part of an hour.

Sandflies

New Zealand is simply a spectacular and stunning country; however the only problem we encountered was the insidious, evil, and simply nasty sandflies. They have no respect for personal spaces, not only travelling into sleeping bags and up trouser legs, but even biting people on the bum when they want to use the toilet!

Thank You

We also can not proceed without thanking Liz and her family for their hospitality in Auckland and advising us as to a route throughout the country.

Well that’s it until next time when we'll start to mention our Australian travels

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