Blogs from Oceania - page 7759

*Day 1: Arrived in Dunedin Fri eve with my plane landing in the middle of a field full of cattle, bit like home. I tracked Dave down at our hostel, the Kiwi Nest,and went for a nice meal. This was after I realised my aussie mobile doesn't work overseas, and had trekked around town, which included a visit to the wrong hostel the otherside of town! Twas fun. *Day 2: Walked up the steepest street in the WORLD and went to a cool music store where I bought lots of tapes for the tape player in my car, which doesn't work:(. Then we left Dunedin and took the Taieiri Gorge train + bus to Queenstown. Lots of great scenery, and a crazy busdriver who had the gift-of-the-gab followed. She had some great stories, one was ... read more

Whoohoo! ---A definite exclamation of celebration. I finished my last day of official duty social work and I am happy to report that TMC (The Magdalene Centre) is still functional and in one piece! Shortly thereafter (my final hours as duty social worker) we flew to Melbourne for the long Easter weekend. The Green House hostel provided accommodation for our two night stay in the city. It was in a good location but very impersonal and unclean-unlike the world renowned Backpack Oz. I wouldn’t recommend it. Nevertheless, we had a good time touring the city. We found that Melbourne folks are not as friendly as the individuals in Adelaide. This could have something to do with the fact that Melbourne is a much larger city and moves at a quicker pace. Granted, population estimates from 2001 ... read more

Well, we're finally all packed and ready to go!! So now we enter that long wait until the airplane leaves - it's 1:15am, and I've got 6 hours before I have to leave for the airport. True to form, I have decided to stay up all night. Why? Well - I have this theory about jet lag. I figure that if I start acting as though I'm living in another timezone before I get to the timezone, then when I get there, I'm already acclimatized and hence no jet lag!! Catherine has a theory too, but it's not complimentary to me and hence I won't share it with you all. But it revolves around the concepts of maturity and wisdom and the lack of it :) 'Tis very exciting to see our backpacks all set up ... read more

Kalli and Kirby do Australia!!!... read more

Another amazing miracule or the amazing luck we have all the time: we are renting a car from a very "cheap company". There aren't much guarantees for what you get. So when we called Saturday morning to say we are coming for the car they only had a small 2-door Suzuki. We have so many things, food etc, how would we manage? We could choose to wait till noon, maybe they'll have more cars but we decided that since there are no guarantees we better take what they have. By the time we reached the agency 1/2 hour later, a bigger car arrived! We couldn't believe our luck, or in fact, it's amazing how much of it we have here all the time. On Saturday we drove north from Wellington to Wanganui. There were two main ... read more