After the Lighthouse at Cape Leeuwin, I worked my way up the Southern half of Caves Road which is very scenic 120 kms drive in all, with amazingly varied landscapes and fauna. The vegetaion changes every few kms. Heathland here, massive trees trees creating sun dappled avenues there, and then the many vinyards. All delightful on a glorious sunny day as it was. But my main focus was on the caves. There are 120 in all along this coast but I managed two of the larger more popular examples. Jewel cave first with a series of the massive chambers, each with many marvellous calcite foramtions. I'll spare you a geology lesson, but the limestones is very young in geological terms (1.5 million years). That's still enough time for the caves to be created by water dissoving ... read more

Monday was all about Rottnest Island, a limestone and sand island about half an hour by ferry from Freo. No cars - most people bring or hire a bike. I took a pre booked tours, a ride on a wierd little tram thing and walked a bit. It's about 14 kms long so you need some form of transport. The weather was glorious, at least until it was time to go. Rottnest is so called because the Dutch "discoverers" found loads of what they took to be large rats - hence "Ratsnest". But they were not rats at all. They were Quokkas, a proper marcupial and basically a small kangeroo. The first one I encounters was carrying a " joey" in her pouch (sorry no good picture of that). There are about 10,000 of them on ... read more

SC writes: Our last day in Christchurch was, unsurprisingly, damp. We went back to the museum to finish it of and toured the samll trams network, riding the vintage trams. All good fun. The last tram we rode was originally from Sydney, and somewhet ironically it contained two nice vintage adverts for the delights of Manly - our next destination of course. (See pix) Our Emirates flight to Sydney was fine. An A380 full of Chinease and Korean tourists, but lots of leg room and enough time to watch one movie on the gigantic seatback screens. We arrrived early, wizzed through immigration and customs in record time (depite having to declare various bit of wood - souvenirs) and therefore had time to make our way over to the express pick up area where Nik duly collected ... read more

SC writes: Our last day in Queenstown was pretty much rained off. We did drive out about 50 kms to Glenorchy with some great views of Lake Wakatipu and Arrowtown, a ridiculously picturesque village. Both very pleasant BUT we have encountered the infamous, the dreaded, NZ midge. These are tiny flies that bite (and I do mean bite..they draw blood). The bites then itch like fury for hours....very unpleasant indeed. We remembered why we had avoided some places on the west coast back in 1994... The midges! Today we drove northwards towards the west coast at Haast. Again the scenery was stunning and the weather was ok, sunny at times but also a few showers. We stopped at Wanaka on the way, delighful town on the banks of another large lake. A smaller, more chilled version ... read more

SC writes: Our last day in Christchurch was, again, cold and damp. We tramped around a bit but then retreated to: A) The botanic gardens conervatories...warmer and drier. Very good. B) The Christchurch Museum...again surprisingly good....excellent stuff on antarctic exploration C) The cinema. Fabulously luxurious cinema where we saw the latest JK Rowling offering. (The Crimes of Grindlewald). Hopeless - too many characters, too messy a plot, too much bonkers CGI...but it did pass a wet Sunday afternoon. Today we drove 7.5 hours to Queenstown, which we visited 25 years ago! What an amazing drive which we shared. A lot has happened in that time and a lot has changedin Queenstown. It is still a very attractive place with many tourists (including many from Japan). We got here in time for a poke around and supper...it's ... read more