It's been already two weeks since we arrived Down Under, but keeping our blog up to date while driving around and camping has proven to be a real challenge. The biggest problem with that is that our laptop has quite a lousy battery-life, so normally it's out of power after few days on the road, otherwise it would be easy to write the blog during our evenings in the tent. We recently bought a car charger too, but unfortunately we can only use it to charge our phones and cameras. Up to now we have been around the most southern parts of this vast country, starting with three days in Melbourne. We loved Melbourne, it seemed like a city with lots of culture and art, and in some parts reminded us of London, especially the St ... read more

Our time on the South Island is already half way through, even more. At the moment we're sitting in the kitchen facility of an exceptionally fancy (for us, that is) campsite, usually we stay at the rather basic DOC campsites, which cost next to nothing, but today we had heard that a cyclon would hit northern parts of the island, and that would mean heavy rains in our area too. Thus, we figured we would get a motel room for the night, but a last minute weather forecast check at the New World supermarket parking lot (they have a good and free wifi) showed that it was a false alarm, so we ended up camping in any case, only a DOC site wasn't available in this town. Camping has become so much nicer since we got ... read more

We've been a bit of a lazy bloggers recently, mostly because we are currently camping around the North Island of New Zealand, and thus have very limited wifi access, but also because we have just been quite busy taking in the wonders of this place. Arriving in Auckland almost two weeks ago truly felt like a return to civilization; after all the Spanish and French speaking countries it was so nice to have English spoken all around us, and being able to easily communicate whatever we need to. And after nearly four weeks of island hopping in French Polynesia, it was a nice change to be in a big city again. We stayed in Auckland three full days, rented a room in the house of a nice and fun Maori lady, Ruth, in a peaceful suburb ... read more

French Polynesia stretches over an area roughly the size of Europe (which we certainly couldn’t have guessed before coming here), and contains god knows how many islands, so obviously we cannot cover it all within three weeks, but we tried to include some different islands on our itinerary. Thus, after the mountainous, green Leeward islands, we hopped on yet another flight to reach the Tuamotu atoll islands, Tikehau to be the first destination. Seen from the plane, the atolls look kind of like sandy rings with palm trees on them, filled with turquois water in the middle. But once you are on them, you can’t really tell the shape anymore, as at least TIkehau is so big that you cannot see the opposite edge of the atoll when you are standing on the beach. So, the ... read more

At our arrival to the Easter Island airport, we immediately got to feel like we have left (continental) South America behind and arrived in South Pacific, as we were met by Keka, the owner of our guesthouse, placing flower leis on our necks in real southern island style :) Keka was great throughout our stay, always asking how we are, offering fruits, and being helpful with anything we needed. Her guesthouse Vaianny was also a very relaxing place; nice garden to sit in observing chickens walking around, good kitchen, peaceful nights, nice people - couldn't have been much better! We met three other couples , who were also traveling around the world taking pretty much the same route as we, from New Zealand to Tahiti to Easter Island to South America, obviously we are just doing ... read more