We spent a few days wandering around the Patong area of Phuket. It didn’t really impress so much. This is one of the many areas known for being particularly seedy and people constantly hassle you to go to places of such a kind. Not that that is the only thing they hassle you for. It’s pretty much impossible to walk a block or two without being called out if you want a massage or a taxi. On our final day we took a day trip to Koh Phi Phi. This is a series of islands of the coast which are pretty beautiful. Unfortunately the trip didn’t really do the location justice, and you found yourself just being pushed into certain areas and to spend money there. The town on Koh Phi Phi looked pretty cool and laid back mind, but we only had an hour or so there before we headed back to the mainland.

We ended up heading to the islands of Koh Phangan on the opposite side of the Thai peninsular. The Full Moon Party was on the following day and was the only reason we were heading here really. It took a full day of travelling to make it what was only about 400km in the end, transportation is generally really slow in Asia. In Koh Phangan, Rob and I pretty much ended up doing nothing. Both had little motivation and the places we were staying were very much hotel like and lacking the social atmosphere of hostels. We both went to the Full Moon Party but only wandered around for a few hours taking in the atmosphere before calling it a night. We really weren’t interested in it in truth, and neither of us felt like drinking, we were both feeling a bit under the weather.

We left Koh Phangan a few days later and it took a full 27 hours of travelling to get upto Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. Firstly a few hours on a ferry back to the mainland, followed by a bus taking a couple of hours to the train station, then a 12 hour overnight train to Bangkok, followed by a flight upto Chiang Mai. I managed to get some decent kip on the train but Rob really struggled and was feeling pretty rough the next morning from it all.

Chiang Mai was undoubtedly my favourite place in Thailand. The place was a lot less in your face touristy than other places and a bit more chilled out. The hostel undoubtedly helped, they put on a group event in the hostel each evening which gets you talking to more people than usual, that and they had a pretty huge choice of films to watch too! The first evening we headed out to a BBQ, it turned out to be a huge gazebo which had space for a few hundred people with a huge range of food cooked and uncooked. Each table had its own little BBQ so you could cook the meats yourself too. It was pretty cool even if I didn’t really make full use of the all you can eat deal it was.

We had two full days and spent the first one heading around the city. We hired a Tuk-Tuk driver for an hour or so and he took us to a lot of Temples. They are pretty cool, but there are loads here, and once you’ve been in one there isn’t much of a need to see so many more! We then wandered around various areas, markets and malls. Without finding anything particularly spectacular. That evening we went to the night markets with a bunch of people from the hostel. They turned out to be the same markets that we’d seen during the day. After a while wandering around we headed to a bar and stayed there for a while. I managed to get the Grand Prix on! Then one of the chaps, Fabian, knew of a place with live music and a band he saw the other day was playing. He wanted to go, so we all followed. It was pretty cool in truth. First there was one chap playing acoustic guitar. Then rather bizarrely one chap from our group, Patrick, decided to join in with the guy and found some small drums and started adding his own background beat! Then Fabian was also dragged up on stage to play a song on guitar! The second act was a full band and had a pretty cool sound. Playing various covers with a lot of conviction it was very much enjoyed! It was slightly amusing to see a few of our group just not appreciate the music and ambience of the place at all. They wanted to head off somewhere else quite desperately – that’s how I feel at most night clubs!

We spent our last day in Chiang Mai just out of the town. We headed out to a Tiger ‘Sanctuary’. Here they have tamed or drugged the tigers so that you can sit next to them and they don’t mind! There was a big blurb in the hostel about how they’re not drugged. That they’re just raised really tame and really well fed before anyone goes near them. I don’t really know enough about Tigers to know which is more likely. Anyway I’ll tell you one thing no matter how tame they are, putting your head on their belly sets so many millions of alarm bells off in your head it’s untrue! Every instinct is just saying get yourself out of there! We got to go in the area with one size of Tiger and then could look at the others from outside their cages. We headed upto an Elephant Sanctuary next where we got there just in time for a show. They had the elephants playing football, basketball and even painting! It was quite impressive. We went for a short half hour Elephant ride after this which turned out to be something I wouldn’t bother doing again really. That ended up being it really, there was a few other things in the area we could have seen, but we both feeling a bit tired, so we headed back to the hostel. I ended up just chilling watching a bunch of movies for the rest of the evening.

Our last move day was the easiest I’ve had in a while, just a simple 1 hour flight back to Bangkok. The hostel in BK was rather clean but really very soulless and we didn’t meet anyone here. For the last few days of my trip I’ve been rather blasé about it all, with little motivation to do much. You end up doing the same things in all the cities you goto, see the various touristy monuments/palaces/temples/museums, see the odd bar etc, after 7 months it’s all got a little repetitive. For what it’s worth we checked out a bunch of temples on one day and also went in a museum dedicated to the Monarchy of Thailand. Speaking of which they’re a bit stricter with what people say about the Thai king than we are with our royals. For instance the National Anthem is played at 6pm every day in public places and people are expected to stop and stand. Same before a movie starts in the cinema! Also we couldn’t go and look around the palace because we didn’t have long sleeves and trousers on. They don’t even let you rent a gown, it’s suicide to where jeans in the humidity of Bangkok!

We got out of the city on the penultimate day and headed upto the old capital of Thailand – Ayutthaya. Here you have remains of the old capital from the mid 1700s and earlier mingled in with the new modern city. Once again we quickly got the ‘it’s just another ruin/temple’ feeling with many of them looking very similar, and the amount of information on the places you are seeing very limited. The places all seemed a bit spread out, but we had a taxi driver take us to a bunch of places all day although I’m pretty sure at 700 baht (£14) we were paying through the roof – but we saved by only taking a 15 baht 2 hour train to the place and a 50 baht 1.5 hour bus back, costing about £1.30 in total! The ruins made for some really nice pictures though and the weather and air here was a lot more pleasant than in the centre of Bangkok, noticeably cleaner and less humid just there wasn’t much variation in the ruins and it was kinda comparable to going round 6 or 7 castles in a few hours!

My last day was a bit of a lazy one. I tried to do some shopping, but I found myself not really bothered. Regardless of stuff is much cheaper here than home or not. The only thing I really wanted was shoes and sandals, but they don’t do my size in Asia! After checking out some of the non descript up market malls we headed down to Koh San Road and wandered around the markets there for a bit. They weren’t as good as the ones in Kuala Lumpur, but I managed to find a new wallet at least. In the end we got tired of walking around and just killed the last few hours at a bar before Rob had to go his own way. He was taking the night train to Laos that evening. Even though I knew I was going home in just an hour or two it was impossible to comprehend how it would feel.

Getting to the airport took an hour trip on the train, where I made use of the facilities to get changed in preparation for English weather! The airport was quite impressive, clean and very new. Disappointingly it only had really expensive shops in duty free. It was even quite hard to just find some Thai Whisky to use up my duty free quota! The 12 hour flight was pretty easy and I was able to get some good sleep. Then I was back in the UK. My Dad and Brother met me at Heathrow and then we drove back upto Manchester, and with in an hour or so it felt like I hadn’t been away with things seemingly the same and very familiar.

The past 7 months are suddenly just a memory and that’s quite an empty feeling really. Not that I would have chosen to stay away longer. The last month of my trip I was very tired and ready for home. In my time I only stayed in 3 places for longer than about 4 nights and that really drains you, especially with the effort needed to talk and get to know new people all the time, going through the same conversations a lot. That said I did of course see a lot of amazing places and met a lot of great people. And well thank you to all of you who made the last 7 months what they were! I’m sure it won’t be long till I’m off somewhere else but I think I’d be unlikely to go for such a long trip unless I was going to spend a long period of time in one place.

After the initial fascination of viewing the place at night and getting settled into my hostel, I in truth started to find Singapore a little bit boring. Mainly because I didn’t really meet anyone in the hostel and I was wandering around myself. On my first full day I checked out the Singapore Museum, which didn’t really have anything at all in it, and I paid $10 to go into some exhibit it had with odd pieces from various people. It wasn’t that interesting in truth with most of it a little too abstract for me. I braved the humidity and wandered around some of the grand prix track which runs through the streets of Singapore every September. The start straight and pit building is all that remains permanently aside from the odd curb on the side of the pavement here and there. On my second day I checked out Sentosa Island, which it’s slogan proclaims is Asia’s favourite playground. It wasn’t all that much cop in my opinion, but then I didn’t go into the Universal Studios. I went on the luge they had there which had many Asian people pottering down rather slowly who I had to dodge as I went down at breakneck speed! However it was only 600m long and was done in a minute or so, and even with 3 turns on the pass it wasn’t all that much of a thrill. The aquarium area was my next stop which was mobbed out with school kids looking at all these fish in typically small enclosures as you get. They had a dolphin show here too which was a little more impressive, with the dolphins playing with footballs, balancing basketballs and waving at the crowd amongst their array of tricks.

Despite being in the middle of a busy and quite polluted city I’d managed to pick up a bunch of bug bites and on my final full day took a couple of tablets to stop the itching. They knocked me out dead and I spent most of the day in bed, only getting up for an hour or so here and there! An afternoon siesta had become a bit of a habit already in this heat, but this was a little more extreme than that! I eventually woke up a little and headed out to go and find the venue for a Gruff Rhys (lead singer from Super Furry Animals) gig which was on Orchard Road. This road is lined with huge malls and designer branded shops from all over the world as well as huge electronic screens and billboards. However at one junction they had only underpasses and you weren’t meant to cross the road. The underpasses lead into a mall and subway station and I lost my orientation completely. I wasn’t sure if I’d come out on the correct corner of the street or not or if I was heading the right way to try and find the venue for the gig… but well I did eventually! After being boring and getting Fish and Chips for dinner from an Irish pub that was around the corner I headed to the venue. I was in shorts and a shirt, and I felt horrendously under dressed when I arrived! This was a mega posh venue, with little tables and no standing area. An odd place for a gig as far as I’m concerned, but not hugely surprised that’s how they are in Singapore! The gig was pretty ace though, whilst lacking atmosphere slightly with only maybe a hundred people there rather spread out. There was quite a lot of British people, and in particular clearly a few Welsh who were quite vocal in their support! Gruff made full use of various gadgets and devices to make as much noise as possible, with drum tracks added via vinyl at times, and beats by a little ticking pendulum stuck infront of a microphone! Then he got out a bunch of feedback devices to loop back the music over and over itself and then played the air drums too, which added an electric drum! It was all rather cool with some Welsh humour and good use of huge word cards thrown in too. Must admit I haven’t been to 3 more different gigs in 3 weeks in the past as I’ve managed with Frank Turner, Bob Dylan and Gruff Rhys. Although I should be able to top that when I head off to a festival this summer.

I was pretty poor with food whilst I was in Singapore, having way too much fast food and western food. I must admit I’m pretty bad at trying new things out when left to my own devices, but once I met a few people in Malaysia I managed to make up for this and try a bunch of different things. I’m not really too sure what to make of Singapore. I didn’t really like it all that much in truth. It’s this city which exists in little air-conditioned blocks for most of the time. There’s all these shopping malls and it’s all extra modern. But it seemed to lack character. At least the places I went too and admittedly I didn’t really go out and explore that much, with the heat taking such a toll on myself.

I was looking forward to heading upto Malaysia anyway, and I took a bus upto Melacca the morning after the Gruff Rhys gig. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from the bus, but it turned out to be pretty nice. We managed to get through customs quick and easily enough despite having to queue for a while. Once on the Malaysian side the bus made a bunch of rest stops along the way, but never stopped anywhere with an ATM. I was pretty hungry but never able to buy anything to eat! There was only one other western chap on the bus (Moritz) and once we arrived in Melacca he asked if I had any idea where I was going. I had a hostel booked but no idea how to get there. He was happy enough to split a taxi with me to get there. The taxi was pretty useless and just dropped us in Chinatown rather than taking us direct to the hostel. Fortunately Moritz had a lonely planet map which allowed us to figure out how to get to the hostel a little easier! The hostel I’d chosen for Melacca was Ringo’s Foyer. After reading reviews on hostelworld they all mentioned how the guy who runs the place, Howard, is a bit of a character and brings the entire hostel together for meals in the evening. That evening was BBQ night on the roof top of the hostel. It was a pretty good evening and brought maybe 12 or so people together. As is usual beer + roof top hostel means a broad range of interesting discussions and in a few hours I’d got to know a load of people more than I ever managed in Singapore.

I was pretty lousy at doing things the next day. After wandering around Melacca on my own at about 11am looking for something to have for breakfast and failing to find anything I liked other than an ice cream I headed back to the hostel and chilled for a while. I bumped into James who I’d spoken to a bunch the previous night and we went for a Pizza Hut for lunch! It was maybe half the price of the UK costing me £7 for a large pizza and a coke. Then after spending more time chilling out at the hostel I headed over to the otherside of town to find a bar that would show the Football that evening (Arsenal v Man Utd), I went with Moritz, James and a British couple Daniel and Julia and just spent all of late afternoon and evening in the bar. They were doing some odd deals like buy one beer get two free! That said they weren’t so cheap at about $40RM or £8 for 1 beer. They did have (dark) Erdinger and Hoegaarden which was rather pleasant though! Anyway the football turned out to be not so much to write home about! As for Melacca itself, it was an interesting town for a couple of nights, but not hugely amazing. The street markets along Chinatown were quite interesting and there was some historical old buildings and fort remains you could walk around, but suffering from travelling fatigue I didn’t bother checking them out which I feel a bit bad about. Also I was amazed to see Tescos (next to Ikea…) in Melacca! Apparently it’s quite common in Malaysia. Moritz seemed to have a similar itinerary to me throughout Malaysia, so we decided to travel together making things a little easier. He’d just done Vietnam before Singapore with his girlfriend for a month or so before she had to go home. We’ve done the entire of Malaysia together in the end, heading our own separate ways as I headed into Thailand.

Next stop was Kuala Lumpur. We had a bit of difficulty finding the hostel as I hadn’t downloaded all the information I needed to my phone to find the place! It’s taking a bit of getting used to not being able to just go on the internet on my phone and find out where things are which I’ve very much got used to over the past few months. We eventually found the hostel and then headed out to McDonalds for lunch. Since I’ve been in Asia we have to eat every meal out as the hostels don’t have kitchen facilities and not being the biggest fan of having Asian cuisine on a daily basis at least I’ve found myself having far too much fast food. Moritz kinda agreed that he’d had too much as well, so after that we decided no more fast food until we left KL, well aware that the next few places we went after wouldn’t have any either. The humidity was a bit of a killer in KL and before we could really head out anywhere the heavens opened, which meant we just chilled in the hostel for a while. I got talking to a couple of other people as well, and later we all made plans to go out. Peter who was on a brief holiday from Dubai and Jess who was just embarking on the start of yearlong travels in Asia, along with Mario who we’d managed to accidently follow from Melacca and then later followed onto Cameron Highlands without even trying too! Then there was Jay who took a fond liking to Peter who inturn found that a little uncomfortable! Once the rain abided we headed out to a restaurant that the receptionist at the hostel recommended. It was still drizzling with rain and we got pretty wet on our way there, we arrived at this quite posh place wondering if they’d let us in. It turned out to be really nice, we split 4 dishes between us and then all had desert too. It all came to less than £8 each! That said Peter insisted on paying more than his share of the bill making it even cheaper. We finished the night of at a bar nearby after for a drink with each having a different cocktail, I had a Caipirinha bringing back memories of Brazil!

Once again I found myself struggling with rather itchy bites and that night and took a couple of tablets to help. This meant I slept for absolutely ages and then felt really groggy the entire of the next day. We checked out Little India and Chinatown areas of KL. Each with loads of stands selling various goods. The ones in India were generally Indian goods, the ones in Chinatown were imitations of big brands on the whole… or the B-Grades from the factories that make the originals. I took a closer look at the wallets they had the next day with a view to replacing mine which is currently falling apart, but found defects in pretty much all of them and at £9 they’re not particularly cheaper than a non-branded wallet you can buy back home so didn’t see much point. Maybe when I’m in Thailand and about to go home I’ll get one anyway. After wandering the various areas I headed back to the hostel feeling very tired and managed to sleep on and off for most of the afternoon.

That evening we took another recommendation from the hostel for dinner. This time it took us through the Mall area of KL. Here there are many different super malls as big as the Trafford Centre but built up rather than out within a few hundred meters of each other. Just why there are so many so close I’m not sure, especially as each place seemed to have the same shops as the next on the whole! The restaurant we were recommended was alright, but in truth I didn’t really like much of the meals we ordered. They were all once again things I’d never tried though, so it’s good to try new things, but I think I’d have been happy with just the Chicken Curry to myself rather than trying so many things. Attempts to go to the Cinema after that were aborted by our inability to find a movie that looked interesting. The Cinemas here seem to have a mixture of Asian and Hollywood current action movies and they’re all in a variety of languages/subtitles too. Instead we checked out another mall on the way back which actually had a theme park inside including a rollercoaster!

By the next morning most of the other people we knew were leaving. Jess headed upto the Cameron Highlands which was our next stop, we’d catch up there and Peter was heading on home that day. The Batu Caves was our main destination for our final day in KL. These pretty big caves are rather touristy though, even though there is no entry fee. There’s a huge statue next to them, then quite a lot of steps up to the caves which you walk through and then into a sinkhole. There was also lots of monkeys around scavenging off the scraps of food people left lying around or didn’t hold onto tight enough! We head lunch in the mall beneath the Petronas Towers and took a few pictures of the skyscraper afterwards. That evening we headed to the ‘City Tower’, which is a telecoms tower which you can go up for views of the city. This is cheaper and easier to get tickets for than the Petronas Towers. It included tickets to go on an F1 Simulator. Which turned out to be F1 Championship 2002 for the PC setup on the easiest possible setting with the brakes not even really required. Which meant it kept up the record of every Racing Simulator at a venue I’ve tried not being setup correctly at all! We went up the tower and waited for the sun to go down and for it to go dark. This is generally the best time to go up these places as you get day pics and night pics as well as a sunset. Although I’ve yet to see the sunset in Malaysia due to rain clouds and pollution you never see it go down. We managed to find a steakhouse for dinner which was very good, made half so by a really nice garlic butter. I did a little last minute shopping before heading back. The destination for tomorrow was the Cameron Highlands and the next few stops after that were out in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to buy some hiking trousers with zip of parts to make them into the shorts. With the amount of bugs around you actually want to wear pants and a long sleeved shirt in the Jungle despite the crazy heat and humidity! That said I couldn’t find any and had to settle for some khaki pants I found in, erm Debenhams!

The bus we took to the Cameron Highlands followed the highway for a while before taking a tight twisty road up the mountains which often looking far too narrow for this big bus. However we managed to make it there in one piece. The small town we were staying at is at an elevation of around 1400m, and the climate was very noticeably cooler. I liked that a lot! We stayed at Fathers Guesthouse which was a nice little place.

We took a day trip around the Cameron Highlands which was pretty cool if a little bit long and tiring. There was maybe 15 or so people on the trip and we were split into 4x4s that could carry about 8 people. The headspace was really limited in the back and I managed to take the front seat for most of the trip. We drove through a tea plantation which was rather picturesquely situated along the rolling hills on the way to the top of the mountain peak we were heading up. The views weren’t all that great from the top, despite there being a tower we could go up to get a better vantage point. The amount of haze and pollution was once again rather noticeable in the distance. We had a short walk through some of the jungle nearby and the guide explained a bunch of the plants around the area which can be used for medicinal purposes and allow the natives of Malaysia to live off the land. There’s only around a few thousand of them left. The tea factory for the plantation we saw previously was our next stop. After feeling rather sleepy on the bus drive down the rather strong smell of tea in the factory really woke me up! I enjoyed a really good cup of tea as well as a rather good scone with jam and cream after the tour in the café. The tour motored onto a Butterfly Sanctuary next. They had more than just Butterflies here though with various bugs, reptiles, snakes and more on display in different areas. These made for some pretty cool pictures!

After a lunch stop we were taken to pretty much every type of possible thing to see here including a local market, a rose garden, a museum, a temple and finally a Strawberry Farm. The farm had a café where you could buy pretty much any food combination you could possibly want with Strawberries! I had a waffle with ice cream and strawberries which was really good, even if a little much more than I really needed to eat! I really enjoyed the Cameron Highlands, the weather was much more manageable than everywhere else I’ve been to in Asia so far, and a very well put on tour if just a little bit too much crammed in to the time. The hostel was nice and chilled out which really tied it all in very well.

Taman Negara is a 160 million year old jungle/rainforest in the heart of the Malaysian peninsular. I spent a couple of nights here in the stifling humidity and heat. It turned out that the climate was just too much for myself and Moritz to take and whilst there are many treks around here a couple of kilometres to the canopy walk was enough for the two of us. We did also take a night safari on our first evening also with Jess who arrived a night before us who we’d meet up with again at the Pehrentian Islands. We managed to see a bunch of rather unimpressive birds, a python at quite a distance and a few what are best described as Leopard Cats, i.e. cats that have Leopard spots. We tried to arrange to leave earlier looking at taking the night train and other options, but they just didn’t pan out, and in the end I was happy to watch the Grand Prix and the Football at bars around the place.

I finished up my time in Malaysia in the Perhentian Islands. I had initially intended to goto Penang on my way upto Thailand, but after arriving at the Perhentian Islands I knew I wanted to stay for a while. Moving every couple of days gets tiring and this seemed a decent place to chill. The islands weren’t quite upto the standard and as clean as those in Fiji. There was quite a bit of litter when you looked around behind buildings etc and generally not quite as well maintained as it could be, but it was still very nice. However it was very easy to waste time here, lazy sleep ins during the morning, chilling out in the water or beaches. I’m struggling to remember what exactly we did. There was some kayaking and checking out the larger island which didn’t actually seem as interesting as the one we were staying on. On ours there were more cafes and little shops, so you didn’t have to eat at the same place all the time. Rob who I’d met at Fraser Island and Brisbane also met up with here for the last two nights. He was heading up the same way as me and caught up after being a few days behind. We decided to travel together through Thailand. On Friday morning Moritz and Jess went their separate ways from us and we headed upto Thailand not really sure where we’d end up that night. But that’s for the next entry.

I arrived at Hobart airport on my way out from Tasmania with nothing firmly booked for that weekend. It was my Birthday that coming Monday and was very keen to spend my time with people on a tour rather than in a hostel, where you can know loads of people one day and then the next they’ve all gone. I phoned up about a bunch of tours for Fraser Island, this is some 4 hours north of Brisbane by bus. The camping one I really wanted turned out to be sold out, but ended up on another tour where you stay in a lodge starting a day later. I got this all sorted before boarding my flight out of Hobart, then booked the bus upto Fraser Island whilst passing through the transit centre on my way to the hostel after landing in Brisbane. My accommodation for the evening was the YHA hostel in Brisbane which turned out to be really nice, however rather soulless. It had my two pet hates when it comes to hostels, too many people living there on a longer term basis and lots of very small tables which makes meeting people that bit hard at meal times. It’s a crappy excuse really that I should get around mind. I had dinner at the downstairs bar which was pretty good food for the price, in Australian standards at least. I knew that early the following week I’d have to do nearly 2 weeks worth of work for back home. This seemed a pretty good base to do it all from.

The next day I took the bus up to Hervey Bay, which is the mainland town closest to Fraser Island and was then picked up the following morning for my tour. The weather was unfortunately rather overcast, and it stayed this way with heavy rainstorms frequently passing through for the first two days of the three day tour. The first day itself was rather underwhelming after coming from Tasmania. I think the weather contributed too that though. We saw a couple of lakes and had a walk through what is left of the old growth forest. There was heavy logging in this area right upto the early 1990s. This contrasts largely with the Mt Field old growth trees I’d seen a few days before in Tasmania. The tour was all inclusive and they did actually provide all the food you need including a ready supply of various snacks you may or may not want, which surprised me a little. I’m used to these things not giving you enough food. That’s not to say the quality was particularly great mind.

Fraser Island is a tourist attraction and world heritage site because it’s purely made of sand. Yet it has great forests growing over the majority of it as well as lakes, crystal clear water in many places and some quite stunning sand drifts. On our second day we headed out to 75 mile beach, which is the highway on the island. There are no tarmac roads on the island, except in the few resorts there are around the island and a 4×4 is required to get around. We did at one point see a crazy person trying to pull a caravan up these crazy twisty steep inland roads. We squeezed past and didn’t get to see how that turned out for them. The weather was still poor on the second road, and I was a little tired after having some beers the previous night. The starts are really early here, but you get back to the resort at 4 or 5pm and then have little else to do, and as there was 10 or so of us on the tour and most of us in the same lodge we just ended up drinking a bunch each evening. We saw Indian Head which is a rock head where James Cook spotted land on Fraser Island. He thought the entire Island was just a peninsula actually. We also saw a shipwreck which has been slowly rusting away and falling apart since it sunk some 60 odd years ago. In the evening we got the beer on. It was my Birthday evening, and I knew the next day people would split up and Hervey Bay looked pretty quiet. That said aside from consuming much alcohol not a great deal happened, except I bought everyone a B52 shot. Not really how it’s meant to go on your birthday but as long as everyone has a good time that’s all that matters. And of course I had a couple bought back for me. Unfortunately the bar was shut by 11pm. So I wandered upto the top of the hill at the resort in an attempt to find cellphone reception, and phoned my parents. My brothers were both just home from Uni too. I only got about 15 minutes of my phone card and got cut of mid-sentence too. But well it was nice to talk to them, almost on my birthday.

Next morning I was a little rough I must admit. Counting back it was a bottle of red, including breaking into my Merlot from Tassie, drinking it out of a mug.. classy, a good few shots and a good few pints. Then we had to drive on tight twisty banked roads. I must admit I was fearing the worst. Turned out I was fine, but one of the girls wasn’t. She found herself the but of many jokes for the remainder of the morning. The weather was vastly improved for our final day on Fraser Island and in my slightly hungover, slightly still drunken mood everything looked really ace. We headed out to a look outpoint over a huge sway of sand dunes with a lake at the side. It looked really nice. We walked on down to the lake and took a dip in. For the first time on the trip it felt like we didn’t have enough time in a certain place! We then walked on down to the beach before we headed onto a buffet lunch. We made just the one more stop at another lake that day. However unlike the other places we’d been we were the only people here and I really liked that. Its nice to feel like you are the only people around exploring some place, when there’s hoards of people around it loses the edge a little for me, you don’t get the feeling your going to some special untouched place. Oh I was a little bored on this lake mind though, so I made a sand car to fill the time. It was definitely awesome.

The sun was setting by 6pm now, and it was going down as we took the ferry back over to the mainland. It was a nice sunset too actually, and just a really calmed chilled out ferry ride. Nothing amazing, just really chilled out. We were dropped off at our hostels and then arranged to meet up later for dinner. Turned out the place the girls had arrange to meetup for dinner was absolutely miles away, and took us a good half an hour to 40 minutes to walk there. Rob, from Chorley who I’d got on well with the past few days was as knackered as myself, and we both just wanted to grab some food and call it a night really. That didn’t happen though, we met up with the others and fortunately managed to find a bar still serving food to grab dinner. We wandered around looking for a liquor store so we could just drink on the beach, but no such luck. We got a taxi back to near to the hostel and had one more beer before the night petered out.

The next day I headed back to Brisbane and started my 12 night stint at the hostel there. I had to work for back home as Reiza Studios project neared completion. I was working most days breakfast to bed and it offered an snapshot of going back to reality. I ended up just working in the common room in the hostel, it was pretty quiet by day so it was easy to do that. Fortunately I bumped into a few old friends whilst there as I had just shut myself off, and the hostel not being the most social I didn’t really meet many people even though faces became familiar. Rob ended up down in Brisbane despite talking about going north. He kept umming and arrring about what he’d do next, and didn’t leave Brisbane till after I did in the end. Then I bumped into a chap called Ben who’d been on the Stray Bus with me in New Zealand. So they provided some company for some of the time, and then Chris from my roadtrip through the outback arrived in Brisbane at the second weekend. Working at a hostel is quite difficult and tempting not to do other things, especially as you can see people sunbathing and heading into the pool out the window. That and the weather, I guess Manchester’s perennial grey weather is actually not a bad thing when you stuck in an office all day, but Brisbane had maybe 9 or so really lovely days whilst I worked, and then of course the weather went downhill as soon as I finished. Good to know somethings don’t change.

After my last day of work, and an afternoon finish I had a pretty big evening planned. I was off to see Frank Turner that evening which I was mega excited about, and support was coming from Isaac Graham who had his album for free download on his myspace which I was getting into quite a bit. First of all though Chris and myself went out for a bit of an afternoon session. Hitting up the Belgian beer café, where a pint of Hoegaarden set me back a cool $15… didn’t know it was that much before ordering. Needless to say we headed off for somewhere a little cheaper after that. Chris has his passport stolen when we were in Darwin, and for some odd reason had sent off his Drivers License to get his new passport. Which I didn’t really understand. This meant the only ID he had was a laminated photocopy of his passport! This meant getting into places was rather hard, and he’d not been allowed into a place the other night. I was pretty concerned he wouldn’t get into the gig. We had to basically find bars that weren’t IDing too that evening. We managed to go to the wrong place when trying to find the venue. Google Maps once again proved itself unreliable! Anyway we eventually find the venue, and Rob who was meeting up with us later and queued upto get into the venue. Chris went first and he was in two minds exactly how to work the getting in. Of course they were IDing but somehow Chris managed to get past the first check okay, then he had to get stamped and his ticket as the ticket booth, they started questioning his ID but stamped his hand, he just took the ID back and scampered in and hid in the toilets fearing he might not be able to watch the gig. It was quite amusing, as it all worked out okay. As for the actual gig? It was pretty amazing. The venue reminded me of Moho Live back home a lot, you know kind of run down and not the best sound ever but it didn’t really make a difference. The support was provided by Jen Buxton and Isaac Graham, and both got to come on again with Frank. The viewing was pretty poor so videos and pictures weren’t great, but there was a bit of crowd movement going on which I joined in with towards the end! After the gig the night wasn’t done, although I was pretty knackered. There was the small matter of an FA Cup Semi Final at Wembley between two Manchester clubs. I stayed up till 4.30am to watch that when I had to be up the next day at 9am. The less said about the game the better.

My final week and a bit in Australia was making it down the coast to Wollongong to see Bob Dylan. I stopped off at Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour and Newcastle along the way. I wanted to do a bunch of things along the way, I ended up doing none of them. My first evening in Byron Bay I pretty much slept. The weather was bad and I couldn’t be bothered doing much. The second day the hostel put on a walk to the Lighthouse which was pretty cool. On the way back I rather surprisingly bumped into Pierre who’d been around Tasmania with us, I got his number and said we’d meetup later, but I pressed the wrong button whilst walking away and it cleared! I couldn’t find him at his hostel either. I ended up going out to the local backpackers nightclub with people from the Lighthouse walk that evening. Which was fun for a while, they had a musical chairs game going on which was fun to observe, you know the one where you can keep playing if you take a piece of clothing off… Then it had much a dancing ontop of tables and the like. I got bored after a while and called it a night.

Coffs Harbour was the next stop. I wanted to do a downhill bike ride at the nearby Dorrigo National Park, but this wasn’t possible due to a lack of signups. So it didn’t happen, then I pondered Golf or Go Karts, but the Golf dresscode was a little too strict, and I just ended up finishing my Tasmania blog entry instead. The first evening we did go for a Pub Quiz with the hostel. There was two hostel teams and unfortunately we lost, but it was good fun, despite feeling really very tired. I went for a wander around the Harbour on my final morning which was nice.

The bus to Newcastle ended up being a good two hours late, although we managed to make up some time in the end. I got chatting to a chap who was in the Army back home whilst waiting. He’d been off stationed in various places including Belize and Afghanistan, had been training in Canada too and seen a bunch of things there. It was interesting to hear his stories, but I get the feeling he wasn’t saying so much. I arrived in Newcastle late Thursday and had heard that apparently everything shuts on Good Friday in Australia, which rather surprised me as I had no food! I wandered around and saw the beaches on Friday morning which were really nice, then headed into town which was pretty much dead, with little more than fast food chain stores open. I enquired about gokarting at the local track, which was open. I took the bus out too it, but decided against doing it. The track was pretty crap and there wasn’t a single person there. I got the bus back before my single 1 hour ticket expired. Amazingly I bumped into Pierre again in my hostel and ended up heading out for a beer with him. He met a bunch of people he knew from the hostel in the bar. The place shamefully shut at 10pm on Good Friday! We ended up scrounging all the alcohol we had left at the hostel and heading down to the beach for a while where drinking games ensued until we were dry. Which didn’t take long. At the end of it all I was in bed by 12.30!

So next day I headed on down to Wollongong to see Bob Dylan. I was meeting up Amanda to see this, a friend who I’d met originally back in Vancouver in 2009 and also metup with her over the New Year. She also had a friend coming too, we went for a few beers and food around the corner from the venue before heading on in. We paid a lot for the tickets and the seats ended up being quite a bit further back than we were expecting, but we were right in the middle on the far side facing the stage and could see pretty well, even if it was a little bit far away. Bob was on a little bit earlier than I expected, I was sure there was going to be another support band. Before the gig I knew his voice was shot, but I was hoping there’d be an atmosphere and everyone singing and it’d all be cool. Didn’t really work out that way. He sang really quickly and stuffed the words so he could regain his breath before the next line. Then just wait for the music to catch up. It was really disjointed and even when you tried to sing along it was really hard. I got the lyrics up at one point and he was sort of saying the right words just not in time! He also played a lot of newer songs rather than his classics. But then many of his older songs I don’t think he’s physically capable of singing anymore. Amanda absolutely loved the gig, and I really wanted too, but I just couldn’t. I’ve seen some really cool gigs whilst I’ve been away, Belle & Sebastian in Rio where the audience was just amazing, The National in Auckland where I had the euphoria of getting in for free and then Frank Turner back at some tiny little venue with only a few hundred people there at most. This was a big soulless venue seeing a shadow of a great man. But it was what it was. And even though I didn’t enjoy it, I’m glad I’ve seen him and its ticked off, hopefully I can see some of the other oldies and they’ll be better.

I ended up heading back to Canberra with Amanda for my last few days in Australia. I hadn’t particularly planned to go back but was kinda invited and there wasn’t anything in Sydney I was dying to do. Amanda had said she was playing a birthday party gig on the Sunday, but only told me later it was a 4 year olds birthday party! Ah well it was all good fun, and it was the daughter of one of her friends who I’d met last time. Canberra itself was fully kitted out in autumnal colours and it did look really very nice with all these different shades of red and brown. On Monday it was initially suggested that we go see the dawn service on Anzac Day, but that ended up being a little too much effort. We just spent the majority of the day in the pub, where I observed and eventually took part in what’s known as 2 up. This is a game where three coins are thrown up in the air and which ever has two heads up wins the game. Its only legal to play it on Anzac day, because you just bet with random people in the crowd and probably more importantly there’s no money made by anyone out of it. I watched for a while and ended up having a go at what turned out was the last game. I managed to completely forget if I had heads or tails but managed to win, and retired with perfect stats and $10 better off! We headed on down to the Phoenix Pub that evening which had a bootleg session on with a bunch of pretty cool acts on which we caught. I enjoyed that more than the Dylan gig. The pub had sofas all over the place and was completely packed and had a very homely atmosphere about it when that busy. And then that was it for Australia really.

This morning I caught a 9am 3 hour bus to Sydney Airport and now I’m on my flight to Singapore. I have 4 and half weeks in Asia before I’m heading home. I’ve been really looking forward to Asia and the past few weeks since leaving Tasmania have held little amazing or things that have got my pulse racing and overly enthusiastic about places. That’s not to say they haven’t been nice places, just nothing amazing. I’ll probably be spending 3 days in Singapore to get my bearings and figure out where I want to go and then I’ll head up through Malaysia and to Thailand. Gruff Rhys is also playing in Singapore on Friday, so I reckon I’ll head on down to that. I’ll try to spend more time in Malaysia than most I think as I heard really nice things about the place, with it a little less touristy than certain places in Thailand. Anyway, that’s all for now, till next time ciao.

Itinerary

1. Manchester Airport 4th November 2010:
Leave on an aeroplane for Sao Paulo via London Heathrow.
2. London Heathrow Airport 4th November 2010:
Short stop on way to Sao Paulo.
3. Sao Paulo 5th November 2010:
Spent until Monday 8th November 2010 in Sao Paulo, went to the Brazilian GP, visited Senna’s Grave and went Karting.
4. Lencois Paulista 8th November 2010:
Monday 8th November 2010, overnight stop at Lencois Paulista
5. Londrina 9th November 2010:
Tuesday 9th November 2010, arrived in Londrina, Renato’s hometown. Spent evening and next morning there.
6. Curitiba 9th November 2010:
Long drive down to Curitiba, catch last 5 minutes of Manchester derby. Good night out, met up with the chap who sat next to me on the flight from London to Sao Paulo.
7. Florianopolis 11th November 2010:
Morning in Curitiba, car broke down costing us an hour. Drove down to Florianopolis but got there late and didn’t see much.
8. Rio de Janeiro 12th November 2010:
Flight to Rio, went to Belle and Sebastian gig and up Sugar Loaf Mountain. Dragoman trip started here on Sunday evening.
9. Paraty 15th November 2010:
Trip started and we spent 4 days in Paraty, with Caprinhas and lovely Beaches.
10. Pantanal 21st November 2010:
A day and two half days at an eco-farm in the Pantanal with all kinds of wildlife on view.
11. Bonito 23rd November 2010:
Two days in Bonito, one packed with Snorkelling and Bird watching, the other relaxing doing bugger all!
12. Foz do Iguacu 27th November 2010:
Two days at the amazing Iguacu Falls
13. San Ignacio 29th November 2010:
Tour of the ruins of San Ignacio Mini, an old Jesuit Mission.
14. Buenos Aires 1st December 2010:
Enjoyed the sights and sounds of BA. Dragoman trip finished for me, but continued on for many others on Saturday.
15. Montevideo 10th December 2010:
A few nights in the Uruguayan Capitol.
16. Colonia del Sacramento 12th December 2010:
A few nights in the colonial town of Colonia.
17. Sydney 16th December 2010:
A few nights in Sydney to orientate myself once getting to Australia.
18. Canberra 18th December 2010:
A very brief visit to Canberra whilst on an Adventure Tours trip to Melbourne.
19. Thredbo Village 19th December 2010:
A short walk up to the foot of the tallest mountain in Australia, and made snow angels in the middle of summer.
20. Wilson Promontory Park 20th December 2010:
Kangaroo and Emu spotting at the most southerly tip of mainland Australia.
21. Melbourne 20th December 2010:
Arrival in Melbourne where I’ll be spending Christmas.
22. Sydney 28th December 2010:
Ten days in Sydney including a day trip out to the Blue Mountains and also seeing the New Year fireworks.
23. Blue Mountains 30th December 2010:
A Day trip out to the Blue Mountains in Katoomba.
24. Canberra 7th January 2011:
Heading back to Canberra to spend the weekend with a past travelling friend.
25. Auckland 12th January 2011:
A few nights in Auckland including an amazing The National concert.
26. Hahei Beach 14th January 2011:
Start of Stray Bus travelling around NZ. A chilled out afternoon with BBQ and Beach.
27. Raglan 15th January 2011:
Lots of alcohol and partying in Raglan.
28. Maketu 16th January 2011:
An amazing Maori cultural night in Maketu where I learnt the Haka.
29. Taupo 17th January 2011:
Kayaking and chilling out in Taupo.
30. National Park 18th January 2011:
Just chilling out at the hostel due to bad weather.
31. Wellington 19th January 2011:
Brief stay in Wellington on my way to South Island. Plan to do it properly on the way back up.
32. Abel Tasman National Park 20th January 2011:
A rather cool 28km, 7 hour day hike.
33. Barrytown 22nd January 2011:
Infamous party night for the wrong reasons.
34. Franz Joseph Glacier 23rd January 2011:
Amazing day hike up the Franz Joseph Glacier.
35. Makaroa 25th January 2011:
Crazy Karaoke Night in the middle of nowhere.
36. Wanaka 26th January 2011:
Three chilled out nights in the lovely picturesque town of Wanaka.
37. Queenstown 29th January 2011:
Three alcohol infused nights in Queenstown.
38. Milford Sound 1st February 2011:
Stunning scenery at the Milford Sound, unfortunately without the weather to match.
39. Stewart Island 2nd February 2011:
Three lovely chilled out days on the beautifully rugged Stewart Island.
40. Dunedin 5th February 2011:
Brewery Tour and Night Out in a wet Dunedin.
41. Mt Cook National Park 6th February 2011:
A rather wet Mt Cook represented a good chance to catch up on sleep.
42. Christchurch 7th February 2011:
Four nights in Christchurch, mostly just killing time.

The flight over from Melbourne was with Tiger Airlines who are the real budget airline in Australia, comparable to the likes of Easyjet or Ryanair. However it didn’t feel unduly a budget flight and there weren’t any issues with the flight, aside from them insisting that I had no more than 7kg in one bag, so I put my laptop in my food bag for a few minutes and then put it back in my backpack once I walked away from the check-in counter! The shuttle from Hobart Airport drove us around in circles around Hobart city centre for about 10 minutes dropping off everyone else before letting us get off! We met up with our prospective new road trip mates at the hostel, there was Pierre from France and Angie from Canada. We chatted for a while and explained how things work, and no one changed their mind about coming. We headed out to the Tourist Information centre and picked up a bunch of leaflets before going for a beer and then some food. We’d meet up again in the morning to go pick up the car and hit the road!

We got a good deal on the car, $400 for 8 days for a Station wagon. We ended up asking Angie too drive as well as she was on the wagon! The car was rather old, from 1997, and unfortunately once again an automatic. It felt quite a bit more on edge compared to the one I drove down from Darwin, which is to be expected with the age I guess! We were out pretty quick from the rental place. After a supplies stop we headed towards Port Arthur. Only a short 100km drive away from Hobart it’d make for an easier first day at least. The weather was bad though and there were sporadic heavy rainshowers. We stopped at a few places along the way and the way the waves were smashing in on the rocks and cliffs was really impressive and rather mesmerizing. After these stops we made it over to Port Arthur and ate lunch under the only shelter we could find as the rain lashed down! Then we went onto waste a good hour or so debating where to stay that evening. There was no hostel style accommodation nearby but we had the option to stay at a little self-contained bungalow for $150 a night for the 4 of us. The others were umming and ahhing about it, but I was sure it was the best option. Things were made more complicated by Pierre quite wanting to do the ghost tour there that evening, where the rest of us just wanted to walk around the grounds at twilight instead – this was cheaper than normal admission. Eventually we ended doing that and taking the bungalow. Port Arthur was a convict detention centre back in the mid 1800s and you can walk around what remains of the old town. There was some tough prison conditions there back when it was initially set up but the place was meant to rehabilitate people who supposedly had bad mental conditions. There have been many reports of ghost sightings here around the various remains and they ran ghost tours in the evening, but only Pierre was really keen on doing this, we ended up just walking around the grounds on a cheaper evening pass before the place closed. There were some really well preserved buildings, but quite a few of them are really in a bad state due to a series of bush fires which ravaged the area back in the late 1800s and also general neglect before the place became a tourist attraction. There is also a memorial for the massacre that took place here in 1996 which tragically left 35 tourists and members of staff dead and 21 injured.

When we eventually found our accommodation for the night we were mighty impressed with it. It ended up being the nicest place we stayed with most nights of an arguably worse standard! It had set the bar high though, with a lovely little bungalow and between the four of us it worked out almost cheaper than some of the more expensive hostels in Australia! That said we did have a power cut for most of that evening. Fortunately we’d managed to cook dinner before, but to be honest sitting up and chatting and playing cards under candle light was far more fun anyway.

The weather the next day was still pretty bad with it raining most of the time. We managed to catch a break in the weather as we visited the ‘historic’ town of Richmond. This has both the oldest bridge and Church in the entire Australia! It was a nice little town, which very much felt like a little country English town, with various shops selling random antiques and woodcraft pieces. We head up on the east coast then heading towards Wine Glass Bay. We stopped for lunch in Triabunna, where the women at the information centre told us the road further up the coast was closed and that we wouldn’t be able to get to Wine Glass Bay. We were a little unsure what to do and pondered booking accommodation in Swansea, the last town before it closed. In the end we just decided to risk it, not really wanting to stay in Swansea as that’d put us quite a way behind where we wanted to be. As we drove up the coast the skies began to clear and it became really pleasant and we were treated to quite a few picturesque rainbows. We stopped off at a couple of nice little beaches and also Spike Bridge, which is as the name insinuates – a bridge with a lot of spikes on it. We passed through Swansea with no signs mentioning the possibility of the road being washed out, so we drove on. In fact we kept driving and never saw any sign of the road being closed, although there was a little water on the road in places. We made it to Coles Bay which is the town near the Freycinet National Park. We took a walk around some of the cliffs in the area that evening.

The next morning we were up and away early to do a walk between the Hazards and down to Wine Glass Bay which is one of the picturesque places most people go to in Tasmania. It was really very windy as made the walk up and down to the bay and then headed on down to the beach. We headed down to the beach for a while before following our footsteps back up. We stopped off at the viewpoint for a second time on the way back and retook all our photograph’s we’d taken there 40 minutes earlier, as the sun had decided to show its face and make the entire thing look so much nicer! Along the route we got a few close up encounters with Wallabies. Including just as we were leaving the car park where we spotted one and managed to get in with a few metres of it as it was munching away at some plant. We made our way up the coast through the towns of Bicheno and St Helens as we headed up to the Bay of Fires. By this time the weather was really nice, complete blue skies and really warm, putting the bad weather of the previous days firmly in the past. The beaches at the Bay of Fires were very white and very isolated too, with no one else really around it gave me that special feeling that we’re the only people exploring this opposed to when you find a beach absolutely jam packed with people. The name is because the rocks around the area have a very red appearance and offered a rather nice contrast to the white beaches.

Our rather long day continued as we now head inland and made at stop off for some free cheese tasting and an ice cream. The landscape had changed from beautiful remote beaches to the rolling hills and countryside inland. Pierre said it reminded him of Switzerland. We headed off the track a bit to check out the St Columbus Falls. There was a rather impressive amount of water coming over the falls due to the rain fall of the past few days. As we headed out from here we found a camper van stuck in the mud and had slid off the road somewhat. We tried to help them push the van out of the mud and onto the road, but probably only helped get it stuck more! We couldn’t really pass at first, but after our efforts there was space for us to get past! A couple who were there went to look for help, but didn’t return after half an hour, so we went past and went to ask for help too. We sent a nearby farmer up to help them and headed onto Launceston. We ended up running quite a bit later than we intended and it was going dark quickly. We didn’t get into Launceston until gone 9pm, and then whilst Angie was trying to park the we had a little bump. I’d warned her there was a post she was going to back into, so she went forward to try and re-adjust. I got distracted by another car trying to go into the car park, and then she went back into the post. The rear brake light was broken and there were scratches all over the paintwork. It was late though and there wasn’t much we could do about it then. Angie was clearly very upset over it though. Pierre and I grabbed Pizza from the local Italian close to the hostel which was reputably the best Pizza in the town. The owner was quite adamant about this too, however I must say the base wasn’t the best I’ve ever tasted and it left a little to be desired!

The next morning we took a proper look at the car and tried to figure out what the insurance meant. We called the car rental and let them know about it and tried to figure out what it all meant but didn’t really get far. We found out once we got back to Hobart that they take out enough to cover the cost of the repairs from your credit card then you have to go and claim it back of the insurance. We headed out for a walk around Launceston and upto the Gorge which was really quite impressive with huge amounts of water hurtling through it. The water was really high in Launceston and there had actually been flood warnings for that morning that we’d been completely oblivious too. This type of thing and being out of the loop of the news always makes me nervous whilst travelling! After spending the morning in Launceston we headed on upto the Tamar Valley region and I passed on the driving duties back to Angie was we made our way around a bunch of wineries. In the end we went to 4 wineries and must have tasted at least 5 or 6 different wines at each. I ended up buying myself a rather nice Merlot as a present for myself for my impending birthday. After we finished we headed over too Burnie for our night stop. As we went the back of the car went from rather rowdy to then all falling asleep! Burnie was quite an industrial town and nothing more than a night stop, and also chosen because it has a point you can go and see Penguins come in during the evening. Marisa had wanted to see them at Bischeno however the tour wasn’t running there due to bad weather, so we made the effort to catch them here instead. They took their time to show their faces mind and it got rather cold. In the end we managed to find one hiding in the bushes right near the path. He was named Archimedes!

Now along the northern coast we headed further along to Stanley the next morning and headed for a walk up ‘The Nut’ which reminded me somewhat of The Great Orme in Llandudno but nowhere near as big. The path up was really very steep mind, in a way that pictures don’t at all capture. It served as a decent warmup for our hike up Cradle Mountain the following day. I had cravings for Chips after heading down and for a sea side town it was quite some effort to find a chip shop! The others wondered where I had gone, it turned out to be a good 10 minute walk to the place which I thought was round the corner when it was explained!

We called in at the town of Penguin on the way back towards the road down south. They had a market on here which the girls wanted to look around, but I was fairly nonplussed about it. The town also had plenty of cheesy penguin paintings and statues littered around the place!

We made our way down towards Cradle Mountain after this which was our destination for the night. Along the way we stopped off at Guide Falls, which were quite nice, before taking a bunch of rather fun C roads which rather unexpectedly turned into an unsealed road as we made our way over to the main road. This road then snaked its way through the Hellyer Gorge, which never offered a view point of the entire valley, but we had a nice little walk down by a river. We pushed onto Cradle Mountain after that and made it to our accommodation by 6pm. I’d wanted to watch the Australian Grand Prix, but we were in the middle of nowhere and on the road when it was on, so I had to let that one pass!

Pierre, Marisa and I headed out into the National Park from the accommodation after arriving to go and take a look. It was getting close to dusk and the weather was quite nice but there were a few clouds around. We got to Dove Lake which is the main viewpoint if you don’t want to go walking too far, and the top was obscured by clouds. But the water was extremely calm and we were getting excellent reflections along the water. We went for a short walk around the area and the clouds cleared and the water calmed even more as it approached dusk, and I managed to get some absolutely stunning pictures with a range of lovely purple lighting in there! We headed back to the accommodation, and dark now we had to be careful for wildlife. Driving along I spotted something at the side of the road and slowed right down to see what it was. We’re pretty certain it was a Tasmanian devil, it ran off into the bushes before we could get a proper sight. Then just as we headed out of the national park, and the speed limit was raised from 20 to 40kmph, a Wallaby just sprinted out right infront of the car. I had pretty much 0 reaction time, but slammed on the brakes on as fast as I could. It did a few summersaults and then limped off. It seemed to be a glancing blow and hopefully the thing was okay and will learn not to run out infront of cars now! There wasn’t any damage on the car either, which was my first concern much to Marisa’s annoyance!

The next we started early to do a day hike up to the top of Craddle Mountain. This was quite an amazing hike, and up there with the ones I did in New Zealand. It was helped by the fact we had stunning weather. Not a cloud in the sky for the majority of the day, and I was really wearing completely the wrong clothes for this with big heavy Jeans and spent most of the day sweating my ass off! We took the free shuttle from the visitor centre leaving the car at a safer place than in the middle of nowhere and started the walk from Dove lake, taking quite a steep climb upto Marions Lookout. This actually covered over half of the 600m elevation climb in the first 45 minutes of walking. We then followed the plateau down to the foot of the actual peak. The walk became steep quickly and then ceased being a walk and more rock climbing! For the most part it wasn’t anything too difficult, but it wasn’t exactly easy and it slowed down the pace a lot. It’s always easier to climb up these things too when you can’t see where you could fall down! We eventually made our way to the top and collapsed in an exhausted heap for a while! The views at the top were really excellent of all the surrounding mountains. We headed back down slowly, well extra slowly in my case I’m never great and climbing down rocks and the like. I did my best to loose my water bottle down a gap in the rocks on the way down. I managed to retrieve it but the cap had broken off. The lid eventually broke properly a few days later and I had to buy a replacement. We headed back a slightly different way via Crater Lake, and offered a nice little spot to chill out for 15 minutes or so.

We managed to get finished and refreshed by 4pm, and we pushed on once again making it to Strahan a couple of hours later. Once again the roads were so much fun to drive, which was good because I’d have been struggling if the roads had been straight and boring! I’d suggested eating out that evening which everyone had said yeah if we find the right place. Of course that’s much harder said than done. There’s only a few places in Strahan and we didn’t really find anywhere, then when we went to the supermarket it was closed! We ended up at the Chippy and taking it back to the hostel in the end!

We only had two days left on the road trip now, and we spent these trying to see as much as possible. The nice weather deserted us for more autumnal quite overcast and really chilly at times weather for the rest of the trip. We headed upto Hogarth Falls for a short walk and then drove onto Queenstown. This was a mining town that hard a historic railway station. The train was the only way to access this town for a very long time even when the rest of Tasmania was connected by roads. We headed on for here stopping at Nelson Falls on our way through to Lake St Clair. We headed out for a walk before dark with the others hoping to see a Platypus. I wasn’t really bothered and thought it really unlikely we would so walked back alone to cook dinner. Of course they didn’t see anything. That evening I finished off my bottle of Jim Beam, just for the sake of it really. There was a rather nice fire room at the place we were staying though. And we spotted a couple of Wombats whilst we were there. The sky was also rather spectacularly full of stars.

On the final day of the road trip we headed back to Hobart to return the car. Along the way we almost ran out of fuel because I was a little careless with checking where we were going and didn’t want to take a 3km detour for fuel! We just about made it to the next gas station, don’t really know how much fuel we had left but the fuel light was on red for a long time! We then headed on down to Mt Field National Park where we took a walk, saw a few more waterfalls and some really rather huge trees. It was insanely cold at times and then really warm at others. We then took a drive upto Lake McKenzie, which was this windy narrow path and the weather really was very cold here. The guy at the information centre said it might be snowing there before we headed up, I was a little surprised, but not when I got to the top. The view wasn’t even that good either! We cruised on in to Hobart, dropped our bags of at the hostel and headed off to return the car. We had to clean it first and took it to one of these self wash places. You put a dollar in then you have like 90 seconds worth of high pressure spray, or soap or whatever option you choose. Having wasted a huge amount of money last time doing this, I was determined to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible this time! After lots of frantic running about we managed it on about $6 rather impressively! We left the car near the rental place and headed back.

Marisa had a friend already in Hobart so we eventually headed out with him to try and find somewhere to eat at like 9pm. Pretty much everywhere had stopped serving food and we had real problems finding somewhere to eat. We eventually found a restaurant to eat at. Most of us had Pizza which in the end turned out to be really small, burnt and generally crap! Especially as this place was rather expensive for our backpacking budgets with the cheapest thing coming in at $20! The evening I felt had been slightly soured by the fact that I’d found out that the rental company had took $1000 on my credit card for the damage, and for obvious reasons I wanted this switching to Angie’s card as I wasn’t driving at the time. Marisa and her friend stayed out after dinner but the rest of just headed back, generally absolutely knackered from a rather exhausting but fun 8 days!

It wasn’t quite all over there though, as at 7am in the morning I got a text from the rental people that apparently I’d left the car in the wrong place! I’d kept the keys as I wasn’t sure where they wanted me to leave them and they wanted me to move the car! Angie and I got up and went to move it. Then we ended up walking around a few garages asking about the car damage just so we had some kind of idea about how much it’d all cost. In the end we went back to the rental place once the office was open and got it all explained to us, and the money switched onto Angie’s card. I actually ended up making £20 out of it due to the change in currency exchange rates! We split the $100 excess charge four ways and left it to Angie to fill out the paperwork. After running around Hobart from 7am, I got to my shuttle pickup point for 10.30am, and headed out to the Aiport and on off upto Brisbane.

Tasmania was easily my favourite part of my trip in Australia, and I whole heartedly recommend it for people travelling Australia. The changes in scenery and different places you can go are so diverse in such a small space. You do very much need a car to get around, and I’m glad I didn’t try to do it on the bus. It’s also a lot less setup for backpacking, and its best to find people to travel with before leaving Hobart. I saw a few people hitchhiking too though, but I’m not sure how many people they meet, the hostels were often very quiet and we didn’t meet many people there. However you definitely need at least 2 weeks to see everything properly though, as we were very much rushing a lot and could never take quite as much time as we wanted.

I had a rather busy Monday in Adelaide. It was actually a bank holiday for some reason, no one I spoke to really knew why though. Anyway it meant I was able to park the car on the street for free, so I didn’t mind! First port of call was the library to print out the forms so that I could attempt to claim back £800 I’d had taken from me by Go Rent a Car whilst I was in Buenos Aires. I’d hired the car for work to go and do some recon at the race track there and handed it back fine. However they still processed the safety payment and then in February they took a further £300! I wrote a letter explaining the situation, and printed out all relevant emails from Renato who’d been trying to follow it up for me, and also the forms my parents had scanned and emailed me before filling them in. I sent them all express mail the next day back home. Then I managed to meet up with Max from my South America Dragoman tour, which was very cool! We went to a coffee bar and chatted a while and talked about the tour, and what we’d been upto. It was really cool to catch up and find out how things had gone, and talk about how things were perceived whilst we were on the trip too! After that meeting I had to hurry back to the hostel to meet up with my 3 new perspective road trip mates! We walked to a park and sat and chilled and spoke for a while there, explaining the basics of how things work etc, and making sure everyone was okay with it. Half way through I had a text from another girl interested, I asked the others if they were okay with 5 people as I knew it’d be rather cramped in the back, but it was upto them. They said sure, so then another German, Laura joined up with us once she managed to walk across town.

After meeting up with the others I was heading back to the hostel, but half way back I decided instead I’d go walk the Adelaide Clipsal 500 race track. The race was a week later but the track was pretty much setup. It was really cool to wander around and see it all where famous things had happened in the past when F1 races were held there, and considering my job its always useful to walk race tracks! I was completing my lap and I heard MGMT playing at a nearby festival so I decided to go investigate. The walls surrounding the Future Music festival weren’t so great and I was able to stand outside and see the stage quite clearly – I think I got most of their set too! After rushing back to the hostel for some food I headed back with Laura to check out some of the other bands for a while before calling it an early night.

Driving across Adelaide at rush hour the next morning wasn’t fun at all. I didn’t really know where I was going and trying to follow the GPS on my phone but struggling a bit. I managed to pickup Laura eventually, before making it round to Alex and Roxy’s hostel after going round in circles a bit. Before finally finding where Emma was staying, this was a little out of town. The car was completely packed to the rafters and I’d have to get used to not using my rear view mirror. After a short stop at a DIY store so I could fix my falling apart tent we headed off towards where a Kmart was supposedly. A little stressed out about driving roads I didn’t know I was holding the GPS so I could see the map as there was nowhere to hold it in the car. As I was coming out of a junction after the last stop, I get pulled over by a police car. They slap a $280 ticket on me for using my phone. I claimed I wasn’t using it as a phone just GPS – The GPS was still barking out instructions as they spoke to me. But they wouldn’t have it – the ticket says for using hand held mobile device. They said I need two hands on the wheel apparently. Inside I wanted to argue the toss but I knew it wouldn’t get anywhere. I have a month to pay the ticket – till mid-April. I still haven’t yet. What annoyed me more was that Emma had offered to direct, but I refused, mostly so I didn’t have to explain how to use my phone. I obviously let her direct after this. You live and you learn.

By the time we’d eventually made it to K-Mart and stopped at Coles for camping equipment and food shopping it was nearly mid-day. We stopped at a look out over Adelaide on the way out of town before following some winding roads onto the main highway. We stopped for lunch at a lookout point somewhere along the motorway. Glamorous I know! I managed to post my little letter that I mentioned earlier in a small town we stopped in after lunch. But it was nearly 3pm before we started heading off down the limestone coast. This is the coast north of the Great Ocean Road, and we were probably an hour behind where I wanted to be. I’d probably misjudged the amount of kilometres I wanted to do today. My bad luck continued by managing to snap the sun blind on the car clean off whilst trying to swing it round to block the sun out of my right handside window! But fortunately that was as far as the bad luck went. We stopped at a few small towns and view points along the way. And I drove until the sun was going down. One of the leaflets we’d picked up along the way listed camping spots. We ended up staying at a remote little campsite just outside the town of Beachport.

The sites were nestled in amongst the trees and there was a lovely little beach just behind the bushes opposite our campsite. I’d been somewhat unsure about staying here at first. There were no running water or toilet facilities. But the others liked the idea a lot so I went with the flow. We were also meant to pay for the campsite, but there were no envelopes to put the money in so there’d be no proof we’d paid – so we didn’t bother! I had to drive down to the local park to get a lot of water in all the various water bottles we had though. Once we had sufficient water supplies I loved the place though. And was more than happy to crack open the Jim Beam after a stressful day. However Roxy wasn’t liking the remoteness of the campsite at all, and she had her reasons as to why. We tried to cheer her up or distract her, but nothing worked. After dinner we had beach fire which was pretty awesome. That’s what had been missing from my camping trips so far and it makes it so much more awesome when there’s a fire for people to huddle around and talk.

The next morning everyone else apart from me slept in somewhat. I didn’t really want to wake everyone up. The campsite was kinda sheltered so the sun didn’t really come in and wake everyone up, and it was quite cool too. It was 11am by the time we made it out of the campsite, by far the latest start I’d had in a long time! The destination for the day was the Grampians and it proved to be a really long day to get there. We stopped at Mt Gambier where there was a sink hole you could walk down. It wasn’t as impressive as the last sink hole I saw in Brazil, but it was pretty good all the same. Then we headed on for the Grampians. We stopped at the town near the south entrance to find the majority of the park was closed due to flooding in January. Some suggested we skipped it all together but we were close and I really still wanted to go. Close meant another hour’s worth of driving. We didn’t get there till 5pm in the end, and the thing they’d pointed out turned out to be a 20km down an unsealed road, which we weren’t allowed to drive on in the rental car. Well I would for a few km but that seemed too much. We ended up doing a short walk from Halls Gap, which is the main town with in the National Park. We ended up extending this from a waterfall which didn’t have any water going down it! To the top of the hill which offered some spectacular views of the valley. The girls were concerned about walking after dark so we had to head down pretty quickly. We managed to make further savings on our camping that evening by only having 3 people when checking in at the campsite. It was just a normal caravan park now though and lacking the charm of the previous nights stay. That night was bitterly cold and in the morning you could see your own breath. I didn’t help matters by not wearing enough layers and not zipping up my sleeping bag up properly!

We headed on down to the Great Ocean Road on Thursday. We managed to get there in good time and spent three or four hours seeing all the sights. The weather wasn’t great, but it started clearing a little in the middle of the day, but by the time we got to the 12 Apostles – the main attraction that most people rave about it had clouded over again. My favourite part was the Grotto though. It’s hard to explain it but the way the waves crashed in and out and over each other was really memorizing. And if you jumped over a little wall and walked over some rather difficult to walk on rocks you could get pretty close to them as well. I wasn’t hugely impressed by the Great Ocean Road though and it was really touristy with drive for a few minutes jump off and walk around before driving shortly again. I much preferred the scenery at the Grampians, even though they’re not really comparable.

By the time we finished at the Great Ocean Road I was feeling really very tired. The driving was taking a bit more out of me than I’d expected. At first I was really struggling whilst driving to keep awake, but then I saw a road sign that said ‘Twisty Roads next 60km’ my eyes lit up! After 6000km of driving I had an interesting road to drive on for a good stretch! Just as would be the case though I was held up by some guy who was driving really slow and not pulling over to let me by. A bunch of motorcycle drivers came up behind me too, and wanted to get past. I should have probably waved them past and then followed them through when they past the other chap. But I was expecting the guy infront to let me past, but he never did. The Motorcycle drivers got restless and forced their way through. And I had to wait maybe 20km before I could pass the guy infront. And even then he sped up whilst I was trying to pass him! Anyway I enjoyed the rest of the drive immensely. We made our way down to Lorne for our final stop of the trip. I ended up taking a really really early night. As it turns out I had a bit of a cold starting and was absolutely shattered. I was somewhat annoyed that I wasn’t very social on the last full day of the trip.

The next day we cruised on into Melbourne and I dropped everyone off where they were staying and said my goodbyes as everyone went separate ways. Then I went and got the car cleaned – it was filthy! That took a while as I hadn’t really figured out the best way to use the self-wash machines – I spent probably twice as much as was required. Then I dropped off the car and had no problems with them, I even pointed out the broken sun blind. I took me 20 minutes to walk to my hostel, I should have really just jumped on a tram, but didn’t really know which. Walking everywhere brought me back down with a bump really, having had a car for 2 weeks I’d grown used to being able to get everywhere so quick.

I didn’t do much with my time in Melbourne really other than meet up with a few people and try to make arrangements for Tasmania which was my next stop. I’d put another ad on Gumtree saying I was looking for travel partners, and a Canadian girl, Marisa, had got in touch with me. It turned out she was in Melbourne at that point too, so we arranged to meetup that evening and discuss it. She was gonna let me know where to meet but never got in touch and wasn’t answering texts. Turned out she’d had her phone stolen that afternoon whilst she was in her hostel kitchen! We did eventually meet up and she was keen to rent a car and go ahead with it. Despite myself not feeling so well and not really being able to hear what she was saying in the loud bar we were in!

The next day I really didn’t do much at all. I was still struggling with a cold and spent most of the day just chilling out. I managed to get in touch with Callum. He’s my brother Thomas’s friend from School. Communication was kinda convoluted but I called him on Sunday morning and we arranged to meet that day. We ended up renting bikes and heading around Melbourne a bunch. We also did a lap of the Melbourne Grand Prix track. Callum comprehensively beat me though by about a minute and half! It took me 15 minutes to do a lap. I put it down to alcohol, driving and my cold! And the fact Callum is doing sports instruction as a job down here too! We headed down to St Kilda beach afterwards to chill for a bit. We then found ourselves running out of time and had to hurry back to return the bikes. We were 10 minutes late in the end but they didn’t say anything! I met up with Max again that evening for a beer. He’d headed down doing a tour on his greyhound pass seeing similar sights as us a few days later. I also found myself being offered a free ticket for the grand prix the next weekend. However with Tasmania planned I had to turn it down. (I had offers for the Adelaide V8 Supercars race which was happening the weekend I was in Melbourne that I had to turn down too).

I tied up my time in Melbourne on Monday by just getting ready for Tasmania. I met up with Marisa at the library which had free internet. We managed to get a car rental sorted out for only $400 for the 8 days and she was booked onto the same flight as me. She was handling finding other people to go with us for the most part which I was quite pleased with after having had to do it the entire time on the previous road trip. And that was pretty much it for Melbourne. I really didn’t do anything touristy when revisiting it, and ended up just meeting up with a few people, but after the long and exhausting road trip which I covered some 6500km on I was just feeling too run down and drained to want to do anything more. Besides Tasmania was where I really wanted to enjoy, but in reality I had no idea what there was to do!

The deal I got was to take a Stationwagon (Estate car for English folk) from Darwin to Melbourne in 15 days. The first 7 days were free, and the additional 8 cost $39 per day. There is a downside though, the insurance is not very kind. There is a $2000 excess for any kind of incident that happens on the way down. I was not really completely aware of this till I arrived, but by that time I was not likely to say no it’s not happening today – I’m not sure if I even could. Darwin to Melbourne straight on all the roads is about 3,700km, but with the detours I’m making will come in at around 6,000km over the two weeks. To put that into perspective, the direct route is like driving from the top of Scotland to Sicily in Italy! After updating my advertisements to say I had a car rather than looking to share with people I suddenly had my phone light up with messages and calls. I had 5 people firmly interested within a few hours and arranged to meet up with them for a few drinks. Everyone seemed nice enough, and most wanted to go to Adelaide or Melbourne, and one only to Alice Springs. I said I’d take those that wanted to go furthest only which left us with 5 people, which would have turned out to be a bit of a squeeze, especially on some of the really long driving days we’ve had. In the end Peter, an Estonian chap pulled out the morning we were going to leave due to finding out about some friends coming. It wasn’t so much of a surprise in truth and he’d seemed more distant than the other people. The other people were Danielle and Michal, a Belgian and Polish couple, and Chris from the South of England who’d just arrived after 5 months in Asia.

Pleased to be leaving Darwin, we all headed down to the car rental place on the Friday morning to pick the car up. I’d hoped to be out of Darwin by 11am at the latest and on our way getting things sorted. It wasn’t to be like that. Firstly we arrived half an hour early after I got the opening times a little mixed up! Then the car radio had locked itself and decided that it needed a 90 minute reset before it could be unlocked. As such we had to wait around for all that. Whilst sorting out the rental Danielle and Michal went to get a pizza from Dominos whilst Chris went into the office to join me whilst the final few bits of paperwork were sorted. This left all of our bags unattended, and Chris had told the others he’d watch them. About 10 minutes earlier I’d clocked a dodgy looking chap in the garage and I’d moved my bags together with everyone elses just so they were safe and had someone looking over them. Then Chris joined me in the office and said the others had gone to get pizza. I didn’t add it all together at the time and should have. By the time we got back Chris’s bag had gone… After being briefly driven around the town trying to see if they could spot the thief by the chap who worked at the place we had to head to the police station to raise a report. That took a good hour or so, and then by the time we’d been shopping and bought any extra camping equipment needed in addition to the stuff that I rented from the rental company it was nearly 4pm.

So the plan had to be rejigged a little and we made our way to Litchfield National Park and decided to camp there for the night. We drove out of the rain in Darwin and into quite a nice evening. We stopped at Tolmer Falls on the way through to the campsite which was as far into the park as we could go in a 2WD car. A lot of the roads up here are dirt roads and most require a 4WD car. It’s also wet season up here meaning that many of them are closed due to flooding too. That evening we camped for the first time and all of us had a few problems, the tent I’d rented needed some diy fixing as one of the poles was broken, and the tents that the others had bought from Kmart weren’t the best for ventilation, or rainproof as it turned out a night later! However we managed to have a steak and potato feast for dinner which was welcome before calling it a night on a hot and sweaty evening. We’d intended to head to a few more places on the way out the next morning but rain put paid to that and with water flowing over the roads in quite a few places we made a quick exit before the water got so high we couldn’t get through.

Our second day kinda set the way for things for the next week or so. Lots of driving seeing a few things as possible along the way. With so much distance to travel at the end of each day I was always very tired, and stressing about several things. Driving in the dark is very much not advised here as they have such a big problem with Kangaroos, at night they won’t get out of the way of the headlights, and the size of the excess on the car insurance makes hitting a Kangaroo even less desirable than normal! After using a garages shelter to sort out the car and try to dry out the tents we headed on down towards Kakadu National Park. The original plan was to be near here the previous night. With bad weather and lots of grey clouds we just stopped at the first viewpoint and headed on towards Katherine instead to try and catch up some of the mileage. Along the way I saw a sign post to some waterfalls which we decided to make a detour too. The place was really nice and you could walk right upto some of the higher falls. We got back to the car just in time to miss the worst of the rain fall. We managed to make it to Katherine for the night stop fine, but not before being interrogated somewhat by the campsite manager, first he thought I was Irish, then he slagged ‘poms’ off for being drunken and loud all the time…

The next two days we had a few interesting stops at Katherine Gorge and Devil’s Marbles on the way down to Alice Springs but most of the time was just on the road getting there. The first day we were really behind schedule due to the few interesting stops taking a little longer than expected and we didn’t get into Tennants Creek until about 10pm and were greeted by quite a thunderstorm, which we’d seen lighting up the horizon along the drive there. Along the way down there we stopped at some nice little hotsprings before making our way down to the Daly Waters Pub. Just before arriving we had to make our way through a stretch of maybe 200m of flooded road which was dangerously close to being too deep and had me sweating a little. But we had little choice really, faced with either go through or turn back for a few hundred km and try again tomorrow! The pub stop was meant to be an early dinner stop but turned out they didn’t serve hot food till later so we ended up just eating our sandwiches outside! The place had some pretty cool memorabilia littered along the walls, and was actually the first McDonalds in the Northern Territory back in 1991 – but only for a day! Our finally attempted stop was for the ghost town at Newcastle Waters, however the road there was completely flooded and put paid to that plan. With the rain thundering down in the evening we ended up crashing in a hostel rather than camping in Tennants Creek that night.

The next day we headed onwards to Alice Springs. Devil’s Marbles was the major attraction enroute. These huge red boulders had eroded down into spherical shapes and was rather impressive. We climbed up a load of them for a while before heading onwards. Back at the hostel there was a day trip to them advertised at $100, I’m not really sure they’re worth that kind of outlay, but if you were travelling on the bus you’d have no choice! After this we briefly pulled over at this town that the Lonely Planet mentioned as having the most UFOs sightings in Australia. I’m not sure what the right word would be to describe the place but town isn’t it. It compromised of a single gas station and a campsite. But then so do most places in the Outback. It was really very tacky with the walls painted with UFO stuff and cheesy signs all over the shop. After this it was pretty much a straight drive down to Alice Springs aside from a brief lunch stop at another random outback town that had another memorabilia strewn town.

Alice Springs is a very run down town, and has a bad reputation with the aboriginals. It’s unsafe to go out after dark on your own and someone at the hostel had been beaten up walking back to the hostel at night. Not that was much concern, I was very tired and didn’t intend to do much other than relax and sleep. The initial plan was to only stay the one night in Alice Springs, but that was thrown up in the air when Michal and Danielle decided they didn’t want to go any further. They’d increasingly snapped at me over seemingly inconsequential things that I’d said over the past few days but I had no real idea what I’d said that had annoyed them. After talking to Chris a few days later it appears I’d said something jokingly on the second day and they took exception to it, but never raised it with me. When travelling I’ve got used to people if they have a problem with something just say and not act childishly but I guess you can’t be friends with everyone and they’d made their minds up. There was no point in wasting energy in trying to change their minds and I just left them too it. Chris and I ended up staying in Alice Springs an extra night to try and get other people to join us. Also he tried to sort out various things Insurance wise and pondered buying a new camera – in the end I just let him use mine and shared the pictures. It turned out he wasn’t covered for baggage loss on his insurance, and even if he had as it’d been left unattended he wouldn’t have received anything. It’s made me pay more attention to my possessions anyway. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to find anyone on such short notice to head down south with us.

Chris and I then spent the next five days making our way from Alice Springs down to Adelaide. Uluru National Park was our first port of call. A good 3 hour drive from Alice Springs we wandered around The Olgars first which were arguably more impressive than Uluru, and chased a few cammels we saw nearby! Well Chris did anyway. On our way in we saw people wandering around with these head mosquito fly nets which were rather amusing. We quite quickly became very jealous though as we found ourselves being followed around by swarms of flies which insisted on trying to fly into our ears! We headed over to Uluru to see the sunset and the shadows and colours change, and we headed back the following morning to see it at dawn too. I’d heard a few people rave about how it changes colours at these times of the day, but it mustn’t have happened quite so much whilst we were there. It arguably looked better at late afternoon. It wasn’t really helped by it being so green around them rather than being a red desert like I’d expected. However they’ve had a very wet season here and it’s just the end of it now, so it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise.

After checking out Uluru in the morning we packed up at the campsite and headed over to Kings Canyon, which was pretty cool. There was a 6km walk marked as needing 3 hours. We managed it in half that! This was more like the red outback that we expected and offered some cool views of the surrounding areas. The walk was really cool and changed scenery quite a bit, although the Canyon was obviously nowhere near as impressive as something like the Grand Canyon. As we headed back towards the main road south we tried a couple of petrol stations to fill up, but they were listed with ‘Opal’ fuel only. We’d been told not to use this though. And we were getting really low on fuel. After checking the final fuel station before the main road, we still had nearly 50km to go before getting there and it was really marginal on the indicated distance to empty. And those things aren’t exactly reliable! I switched driving with Chris and cruised at 80kmph for most of the route, with aircon, stereo etc all turned off – thankfully the weather wasn’t so hot! At one point the distance to empty started ticking down at 1km per 15 seconds or so! But it levelled out, and despite having a road train quickly gaining on me we made it up over the final hill and cruised into the gas station on the corner to the main road! The distance to empty was listed at 5km! We sped onto our overnight stop near the South Australia border after that.

Next morning we left the Northern Territory for South Australia. Our destination for the day was Coober Pedy. Before that we heard about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on the radio. I’d read there’d been an earthquake in Japan the previous night but had no idea of the scale till the morning which left us short of words. One of the concerns I have whilst travelling is that you find yourself out of touch with what is happening in the world, and say if I were in Fiji and there was a Tsunami headed that way I’d have no clue or unlikely to have any warning. Anyway Coober Pedy is known for its mining of opals and all the buildings are underground – just cut out of the rock that the terrain is made from! We did a short tour around a museum which explained the process of mining and how they build the houses which was pretty cool. Then they had the cheesiest video ever trying to promote Opal. We had debated staying in Coober Pedy that night but decided to get a couple hours more of driving on the clock as most things in Coober Pedy shut at 5 or 6pm. Once again we camped in the middle of nowhere, at a campsite behind a gas station and pub.

The next day we had a bit of a change of scenery firstly to the salt lakes of South Australia. We stopped at Hart Lake where you can see the sun glisten of the salt and it offered perfect mirror reflections, pity the scenery around it wasn’t so stunning. This was also the first genuinely very dry heat we’d found since heading starting out. We rolled into Port Augusta and back into civilisation for lunch and to stock up on supplies before heading out to Flinders Range. This was the first sign of a twisty interesting road pretty much since leaving Darwin! And it was all very much to my delight! This big heavy stationwagon handled surprisingly okay around the twisty stuff! It does have traction control though I guess.

We made it to Flinders Range having left the hot dry weather behind with some quite big and grey clouds around. I setup my tent first but Chris left his, slightly scared it’d rain and get wet… his wasn’t so waterproof! We headed out for a drive, dodging paying park fees! The first few viewpoints were okay but nothing amazing. Then as we drove on the rain came down quite hard. We drove through it to the other side where it wasn’t raining. We made our way to ‘The Great Wall of China’. This was where a hill had a ridge that made it look a bit like the real one. We made the climb up this hill to the start of one of the ridges. The views from the top were pretty great and well worth the effort. We then headed back and stopped at a bunch of other view points before heading back to the campsite. Where we found my tent collapsed in a big mess on the ground. The poles were already taped together to some degree and a piece of plastic tubing being used to push one of the poles together. With the help of a neighbour and a great deal of masking tape we managed to get my tent to stay together for the night. Although I was a little unsure when the wind got up if it’d make it through the night!

The next day we made a brief and not hugely interesting stop in the Mt Remarkables National Park on our way down to Adelaide. I ended up driving right the way through Adelaide to drop Chris of at his relatives at the South of Adelaide. I was relieved not to have to drive the next day and was able to park in the centre of town on Sunday night and Monday due to a state bank holiday. Monday was to be spent refilling the car with people for the final leg of this road trip! I’d already covered an impressive 5000km by this stage without incident and had been in touch with a lot of people to fill the car. But more on that in the next entry!

The weather hadn’t cleared in the morning so that dashed any hopes of mine to do a short walk before we left for Christchurch. The weather stayed miserable for the rest of the day too. I’d intended to go out that evening with a bunch of people from the bus, but it just didn’t happen as I got bogged down trying to back up pictures for a friend, and even after finishing off a bottle of wine I was just too tired anyway. The bottle of wine helped me sleep a lot though. I stupidly stayed at Base in Christchurch. Base are a chain of hostels in Australia and New Zealand, and to be blunt, they’re terrible and perfectly sum up everything that can be wrong in a hostel. They’re not clean, you have to pay for internet access, the kitchen is terrible, there’s no good social areas, they have a bar and don’t allow people to drink their own alcohol – which just means everyone drinks in their rooms instead! And the afore mentioned bar? Well its open until 1 or 2am in the morning every night and has the music pumping out on full blast keeping the rest of the hostel up as the walls are paper thin!

Anyway Base ranting aside I did manage to do a few things in Christchurch but didn’t really find the place all that interesting. The botanical gardens were nice, but I see botanical gardens in pretty much every city and well not being a huge flower person can’t really tell the difference between them all. I also checked out the Canterbury Museum too, this had quite a few interesting exhibits including a nice one about the Antarctic explorations in the early 1900s. Then there was a gallery you can wander around for free, as well as not being a garden person I’m not a gallery person either. I like to have a story to be told rather than having to figure out your own interpretation! That said there was a pretty cool photo gallery of a New Zealand photographer who took a lot of photographs from around the world from the 60s onto his death in the late 80s. Lots of his pictures were really stunning! They also had another exhibit which was dedicated to showing all the work that has to be done after an exhibit finishes and changing everything around. As I walked into the place I was really unsure if I should even be here as there was no one else around and all the equipment was over the place so much! The next day I did little other than potter about and then goto the Cinema to see The King’s Speech, which was very good. I don’t like days like that though, but sometimes there’s little motivation to go and wander around a city alone. It’s not like there’s much to be done either. Shops are the same all around the world and often I have no need to buy new things or nowhere to put them. Then I guess I could check out some bars, but doing it alone is not something I really like to do!

I made amends for my laziness on my last day in Christchurch though. I took the bus out to the town of Lyttleton. This is about 10km south of Christchurch centre and set in a pretty scenic location. It has a nice little town centre, but around it’s surrounded by mountains and borders onto a little sea inlet from the Pacific. It’s actually in the centre of a 10 million year old volcano where one side has eroded away and the sea encroached. This means there’s a crater walk you can do which is like some 30km long. The town is also the main port area in Christchurch which unfortunately means there’s quite an eyesore in the middle of all this pristine beauty. I took a walk upto an old signal tower which was used early on in the ports life to signal to boats where to go in the port. Unfortunately it was closed due to the recent earthquake but I could chill in the garden area for a short while. Then I took a hike up the hills that surround the village to the top. It was a hot sunny day and it was quite hard work with a 500m incline completely at the start of the walk in the first hour and half or so. The track was pretty quiet and the views were stunning, especially at the stop. Fortunately the gondola also goes up here so this provided a really nice rest stop for lunch to get a cold drink and recharge the batteries ahead of the remainder of the walk. After initially planning to head down to the base of the hills I changed my mind and explored a few other areas along the ridgeline of the hills offering even more views before taking the path down to the bottom of the Gondola to catch the bus back to the hostel.

I’d originally only intended to stay two days but extended it a day in the hope of my towel being brought on the next stray bus from Dunedin. Of course this never arrived when I boarded the bus to Kaikoura. Fortunately I had the foresight not to expect one and took a towel from the hostel instead! Well they kept me awake till stupid hours every night so it was valid compensation! The bus upto Kaikoura was a short journey really and we were there by lunchtime. I was umming and erring about where to stay as there was two options if stray book it, but by the time I’d made my mind up I was the 9th person for one place, and there was only 8 beds! I ended up staying in a different hostel from everyone else then, out of my own choice as the other option looked pretty horrible. My random choice of hostel, Dolphin Lodge was really nice though. It was one of those big house hostels with a small number of people staying and really clean. It felt like a home and they had a pretty awesome cat and a hot tub too! I took a walk around Kaikoura for a while and was debating a longer walk but decided against it due to wearing sandals and being pretty tired. In the end I just chilled out at the hostel all afternoon, I bumped into a chap from Wolverhampton who was on a year abroad in Adelaide for his Geology degree and doing a project in Kaikoura which was pretty cool. We went for a beer in town and played pool for a while, and then I just ended up chilling at the hostel after dinner not doing much at all.

Wellington was my next stop. This meant getting back onto the North Island and we almost missed the ferry as the driver got his times mixed up. Although I’m not sure how true that we would of missed it if we were a bit slower was, it took the thing about half an hour to leave after we’d boarded. The bus driver had managed to screw up the booking accommodation in Wellington and there was only space for about 9 people at Base. Fortunately I’d booked my own accommodation at the YHA. I don’t know where the other 11 people who didn’t have something booked stayed. That evening I hung out at the hostel talking to random people passing the time until the Manchester derby came on. That was on at 1.45am NZ time, and by midnight I was tired and slightly hungover already! I thought the hostel would have the game on but it didn’t so I went to a nearby Irish bar to watch it. I ended up sitting next to some random NZ guy in the bar who spoke so quietly and quickly I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying! The game itself was a typical big game affair, tight and cagey, City should have scored in the second minute and probably shaded the game early on, but I felt we generally controlled the game as it went on were well worth the win with two very good games. Tevez didn’t get a sniff all night. Oh speaking of Tevez that reminds me, prematch whilst in the hostel there was a couple of Argentinians in the group I was talking too. They asked me about Tevez, I said I didn’t like him because he went to City and that he didn’t play well in his last season for Utd. The Argentinian girl told me she wasn’t going to talk to me because ‘In Argentina you don’t speak badly about Tevez’. I found it rather amusing and slightly concerting as the same time!

I only had one full day in Wellington and I only spent a few hours out and about. I checked out the Te Papa museum which is the main national museum in the capital, it had a cool feature on earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and other natural disasters but after that I was pretty much museumed out, I checked out other areas but it was very much in one ear and out the other. That evening I met up with three people from the bus, and we went for a few beers in Wellington. It was a nice chilled out way to spend a Sunday evening before getting an early night cap for the 6.50am pickup time on Monday morning to head back to the National Park.

After an uneventful day getting to National Park and just chilling out at the hostel all day I was booked onto the 8am shuttle to the Tongariro crossing. I’d originally booked the 9am one but due to them over booking I got shifted to the earlier one with a free beer to compensate me! The crossing is 19.4km if you just do it straight and it heads up between a short gap between two Volcanoes, Mt Tongariro and Mt Nguaruhoe. The latter is better known for its part as Mt Doom in Lord of the Rings. I did the walk with a Dutch chap called Edwin who was also on the stray bus. I’d seen him around before on the bus but never spoken to him until the previous night at the hostel. It was nice to have some company on the walk, I’d done the last few walks on my own which is nice too, but at the same time I was very happy to have some company for this one.

The walk was very barren as you might imagine, and at places near the summit it looked a bit like how you might imagine Mars too, except a little less red. The start of the walk was a very gentle incline and we covered the first hour and half without any problem at all. Then there was half an hour of really steep incline which just really knackered me out! Fortunately there was a 15 minute break before the next incline, but once that was done we were pretty much at the top! Quite surprising really. We were lucky with the weather and were able to get a clear shot of Mt Nguaruhoe before the clouds started to encroach. Within 2.5 hours we were at the top of the alpine crossing and if we’d headed straight on we’d have just been heading on down pretty quickly and have had about 2 to 3 hours to kill at the car park before we’d get picked up. So after some lunch we decided to head upto the summit of Mt Tongariro. This was a one hour detour and the climbs were gentle compared to before and only around 100m more to climb. When we reached the summit we managed to get a few pictures before the cloud rolled in. This was as high as we got at 1967m above sea level. The trek started at about 1150m so we’d climbed 800m in total. We had to follow the same trail that we walked to the top of Tongariro back to the main track and we were surprised how much we’d missed on the way up. Whilst walking uphill you often find yourself just concentrating on the next step up and miss the scenery around you!

The initial part of the descent was filled with “skiing” down very rocky and pebbly paths to the bottom of steep hills. This turned out to be the best technique to get to the bottom without going head over tails! Also there was a bunch of rather picturesque lakes split up by the lovely smell of sulphur every now and then! (Smells like rotten eggs for those that don’t know!) After clearing the lakes it was very much a case of getting to the bottom. But infact we’d only just gone a little over half way and already all the interesting sights had pretty much been seen. We walked down a valley where low cloud cut visibility down to a 100m or less. Then eventually it cleared as we found our way onto the other side of the mountain and looking over on the countryside in New Zealand. We had a little debate over if the huge lake was Lake Taupo, which it must have been, it’s the biggest lake in New Zealand and there was no bigger one to be seen! The final part of the walk was submerged in rainforest and we just wanted the finish really. Walking through rainforest isn’t the most fun type of location to walk through. It all looks pretty much the same! We made it back at about 3pm, and then we had an hour and half to kill before getting picked up. That evening I relaxed following the tiring hike with a bottle of red wine and a little time in the Jacuzzi!

My final trip on the Stray Bus was just an express bus back up to Auckland with not much of note happening. It was also exactly the half-way point for my trip. I remember being in this situation when I went to America in 2009 and being a little concerned that I now have more behind than infront. On such a long trip as this that hasn’t really happened. I still have a lot of places to go and a lot of things to see. I can look back on the last 3 and a half months and think I’ll have just as many cool things to do in the coming months too.

On the bus back to Auckland we did have a quiz which my team managed to win, despite the wrong answers being given for some of the questions… James Cook was not the first person to find Australia for instance, however our victory meant a much appreciated free beer in the evening as a prize. I stayed in a different hostel to everyone else from the bus which meant I was quickly separated from them. The hostel I stayed in was highly rated, and it is pretty nice, but small. You also get free wifi and breakfast which is a rarity in these parts of the world! I ended up going out for a few drinks with some people from the hostel that evening. It seems like a lot of people here stay for a long time and are over on working visas. This means that there’s less of a party atmosphere than you get in some places, which is probably a good thing really. We just headed over to a cool little bar across the road from hostel had a few drinks and a nice quiet evening.

I spent my last full day in New Zealand by checking out another Volcano. Rangitoto Island is home of Auckland’s most recently active Volcano, with its last eruption coming some 600 years ago. Auckland is unique in that it has a scattering of about a dozen extinct volcanoes all with in close proximity of each other. They’re not huge things though, at most about 250m high. At the port the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship had docked. It looked kinda cool and a few people back at the hostel when they heard about it wanted to go and see it. With my distain for cruises I was none too fussed about it. After a short 20 minute ferry journey I was at the Rangitoto Island. Then it took only 40 minutes to walk to the top of the mountain. There was a lot of big volcanic rocks along the way, and apparently only 200 years ago there was very little vegetation here, but now the terrain is pretty much covered with trees and shrubbery. At the top there were of cause rather nice views of the entire of Auckland and I couldn’t really have picked a nicer day to go too. I only had a few hours before the last ferry headed back to the mainland, but I managed to make time to go and check out the ‘Lava Caves’, which were formed during the eruptions and kinda cool. I didn’t do much in my last evening in New Zealand, I was exhausted in truth so just chilled at the hostel.

So that’s New Zealand done. I’ve very much enjoyed my time here and now have Fiji to look forward too. This is my holiday from travelling really! Whilst still staying in dorms, I’m staying on resorts, I don’t have to cook any food and it’s all gets paid for in advance. I won’t be doing too much other than reading a book or two and chilling out. Hopefully the weather is good, it’s presently the rainy season there!

So I guess I’ll start at Queenstown. The place is renown amongst travellers for its night life, especially as when coming down the west coast there really isn’t much of a town from Nelson onwards which is at the far north of the south island. I intended to do a little more than I actually did, but in the end my stay just turned into going out and drinking a lot for the 3 nights I was there. In my defence I’d just come of the back of an alcohol free chill out time in Wanaka. The town itself is quite picturesque and kinda reminds me of Banff in Canada. The scenery around is really rather nice too, infact it’s very nice but I think Wanaka had the slight edge on it in terms of natural beauty.

You can do a bunch of extreme sports in Queenstown with loads of bungee jumps on offer and Stray did its best to sell these to us. There was no way in hell I was doing one though. Aside from cash not being flush enough to throw away over $100 for a few seconds of exhilaration, it’s really not the type of thing I’d enjoy. I mean I don’t even like rollercoasters! One of the chaps who was on my bus did some downhill mountain biking which looked really kinda cool and did peak my interest a little. But once again the activities are all so expensive here, $150 for a few hours of downhill mountain biking. We hired bikes for half a day for $20 in Wanaka, now they were no way suitable for downhill mountain biking but well we found some pretty big road hills to go down fast and that’s enough really!

So instead I probably swindled nearly $100 away on alcohol and nearly another $100 on eating out over the 3 days instead… oups. I’d cooked pretty much every day since I got to New Zealand and there seemed to be a lot of nice places to eat out here I was quite content to not do any cooking. The first night I managed to nab a free meal at the hostel, not that there was much though, it was more of a snack with the rations they hand out, but hey it was free. Then I headed out to where there was supposedly a free BBQ on. However it had already pretty much finished so I didn’t eat so much that night! I had to use my voucher for a free big night out in Queenstown that night, which was an organized pub crawl. Turns out it was more of a night club crawl than a pub crawl. There were only a few people I knew on the crawl and I ended up drifting away from them, and the places we were going weren’t really very good for chatting to other people. I got gradually more bored and called it a night at the fourth of six bars.

Despite getting back relatively early I and the other people from Stray in our room didn’t sleep so well. There were 3 guys from a group of 16 or so who were on a stag weekend away and they were kinda boisterous at like 3am in the morning talking for ages, not helped at all when two of the girls decided to encourage them by talking too! Then they were making a lot of noise at 7am too whilst leaving. I was awake by 9am and couldn’t sleep anymore. I didn’t do much that morning though other than drink a lot of tea to try and sober up and finish off my book. I went to Fergburger for lunch though. This place is quite famous in Queenstown as it does rather impressive burgers. They definitely were impressive in terms of size but I was left a little under whelmed with the taste. They put so much flavouring on it you could hardly taste the burger itself and having cheese on it was completely pointless! I was rather stuffed and very tired after eating all that though and went for quite a long nap, I think I dozed on and off for about 4 hours… oups. After grabbing a takeaway pizza for dinner which was pricey but really nice from a random little restaurant hidden away on a backstreet, it was off out again, this time with a load of people though. The place we went had a little more variety in the music so at least there was a few songs here and there I really liked but once again I wasn’t really feeling it. I headed back early again but had managed to drink a lot really, it was a Sunday and they had some cheap drink deals. I didn’t realise just how drunk I was till I got back to the hostel when the self-pondering and doubt set in. I felt a little bit homesick and sentimental then, and proceeded to post a little bit too much on Facebook and Twitter. Oh well.

Monday was better though and more my kind of day. I went up to play crazy golf with Stefan and Anna. And despite having a nose bleed half way round managed to comfortably win, and Stefan lost hence the amusing pictures! After doing the outdoor course which wasn’t really so crazy we found the indoor one which definitely was! It had loads of random buildings to hit the ball up and obstacles to avoid. But after previous game we’d just finished we were golfed out so just took a picture or two of it then left.

That evening I went out for dinner with a bunch of the girls to a pub on the Wharf. This was a really nice chilled out pub to go and just relaxed, and they had a wheat beer on tap which delighted me! I ordered the Steak and Melissa ordered the ribs. The difference between the plates couldn’t have been more different. I had this small steak with a few gourmet potatoes in the middle of a huge plate looking kinda sorry for itself. She had her plate completely full with ribs and chips! That said mine was really really nice, just there wasn’t much of it at all. It wasn’t such a problem as none of the girls could finish their food on their own, so I was happy to help out! The pub then had some live music with a chap playing covers on acoustic guitar. This was pretty much perfect for me and I was really happy to stay, but the others all wanted to go elsewhere. We went to another bar, which had a cheap deal on two pints, which I got, then they decided they wanted to go elsewhere so I had to drink those as quick as possible, trouble was I’d just had a huge dinner and two pints of filling wheat beer so couldn’t really drink them very quickly! We headed back to the hostel for some quiet drinks before the others headed back out. I was done for the night though.

The next day we headed on down to the Milford Sound back on the bus. The bus has to quite some distance to get here, a good 5 or so hours of driving when if there was a straight road from Queenstown I reckon it’d take about an hour or so. But there’s some pretty big mountain ranges in the way when you go direct so I guess it’d have been too expensive to build a road that way! When we left Queenstown in the morning it was nice and sunny but as we got closer to the Milford Sound the weather deteriorated becoming more overcast. We stopped at a few places for photographs along the way, including a valley which has quite impressive mountains on either side and then a mirror lake and also a viewpoint overlooking and other valley. We had to go through a one way tunnel which descends quite far through a mountain from one valley to another and with huge mountains on either side. If only we’d had a blue sky to compliment the stunning mountains. We eventually made it to the Milford Sound where we took a 90 minute cruise around the area. I’m not much of a fan of cruises and even less of this one after whilst stood outside the wind decided to blow my hat off and it got swept into the sea! It was of course my own fault for trying to wear it outside, especially as I had nearly lost it earlier but just managed to keep a hold of it. As for the scenery on the actual cruise, it was quite impressive and we went right close to a waterfall on the way back and got quite wet. It’d have been so much more stunning in the right weather though, instead it was a case of yeah if only…

The weather really came in by the time we got back to the bus, it was raining and it didn’t stop till the following morning. We were staying at Gunns Camp which is stopped at as a cultural stop. But this place which has no fridges and not really enough rooms for everyone, I had to sleep in the same room as a couple who were meant to have their own room, which they weren’t really happy about. The place was made up of a lot of old huts that were used during mining and road building in the area and were fitted as such aside from a few bunk beds! Time was killed by playing card games and then we had a really good big group meal of bangers and mash. Then everyone took an early night, the next morning we were leaving at like 6.30am which meant getting up before 6am!

We needed such an early start to cover some 200km before 11am so that those of us going to Stewart Island could catch the ferry. There was maybe 10 or 15 of the bus taking the ferry over a crossing which is known for being really rough. And rough it certainly was! I had to keep my eyes firmly fixed on the horizon to keep myself from feeling sick. The old chap behind me wasn’t fairing so well and he went completely white. It was quite fun once the boat strayed from swaying from side to side and started to ride up to the top of quite high waves before falling back down the other side. An hour later we’d made it to Stewart Island (in one piece) where we headed straight to the hostel and chilled out and got some lunch. A few of us had the foresight to check out the hostel options on the island and found a better option that the accommodation Stray recommended at Bunkers Backpackers. The hostel was really nice and had a very homely feeling as well as free wifi which is a rarity in most places in Oceania! This meant I ended up trying to sort out plans for Fiji and Australia whilst here and also finishing up my previous blog entry whilst kicking back in the evenings here. I was pretty knackered after the ferry journey and went straight to bed for an afternoon kip. The island is south of the South Island and there is only one small town on the island. The majority of the island is inaccessible and there’s only 20km of roads on the entire island. (Which spans 60km long, 40km wide). Naturally the 3 nights I spent here were to go on a few walks and to kick back and chill out for a few days. As well as the people from the Bus I arrived on there was a couple of other welcome familiar faces in the hostel from earlier buses I’d been on including Christina who’d stopped with me in Wanaka briefly and Robin who’s birthday had been celebrated in the slightly surreal settings of the Makarora karaoke night!

On the first full day I headed out to Ulva Island with Kim and Melissa. This island is a short 5 minute ferry ride from the main island and it’s known for the amount of birds you can see which are completely oblivious to humans being around. We spent a good 4 hours here just walking around and chilling out on the random beaches, and being pestered by birds for our food! There was a big cruise ship just off the island today which meant we had to dodge the slow moving members of the cruise whilst walking around too! There was one bird in particular which was after our food, or well Melissa’s and Kim’s I brought the extra healthy option of two chocolate bars for lunch after having a big breakfast. The bird in question was the imitation Kiwi Bird or Woodhen and despite much shoeing away would always come back. We did see a bunch of other more interesting birds including an inquisitive little robin that was hoping around the bench we were sat at for a while.

On the second day I went on quite a long 6 hour walk alone. It was really nice to explore some deserted beaches along the trail and had lunch after climbing down quite a steep hill to a deserted beach and sat on a rock outcrop outlooking onto the sea. After walking around horseshoe point track which took a couple of hours with all the little extra detours I was taking, I walked along Horseshoe Bay before cutting across to Lee Bay. It felt like I’d been walking for ages by this point but it was only 2pm, after setting out at 10.30am. Whilst in the shade it was really temperate but in the sun it was quite hot and tiring, and the walk was either all in the sun for half an hour or mostly in the shade! I took the Garden Mound track to make a sort of loop back towards the town. Garden Mound is a 160m high summit which takes you right into the forest and quite a muddy trail. After making it to the top it became a bit unclear which way the path went at times and I managed to get lost briefly for a minute before finding the path behind a fallen tree! Oh and I slipped on an exposed wet tree root, I think I jarred my knee, it was quite sore for the next few days. I headed back quite quickly after this feeling quite jaded and my knee was really sore when walking downhill.

When I got back Melissa was at the hostel and she’d manage to catch a minor feast when she went fishing that morning and we all had a load of Blue Cod to eat for dinner. So I ended up having two dinners that evening, having the remainder of my Bolognese leftovers from the past few days along with some really nice Fish and Chips later. There was six of us that evening including Melissa, Robin, Kim, Lucy a dutch girl who was on our bus too and Bubbles, the driver from the bus we’d be on tomorrow who’d headed over for the night. So we ate quite a feast of fish and chips and then played Apples to Apples to pass the time, which for those who don’t know, as I didn’t before playing, is a game of two stacks of cards, one for descriptions and another for things. You take it in turns to turn over a description card and everyone else has to put one of their thing cards face down. Then you get to choose which you think is the best and they win that hand. Repeat till you get bored. It can get quite amusing at times.

The next morning we headed back to the mainland to get back on the bus. I felt slightly disappointed to be leaving the chilled out atmosphere of the hostel and Stewart Island and getting back to the hectic 15 minute stops here and there on the bus. This marked the start of 3 consecutive days on the bus to get me upto Christchurch. The first of those days is the last day I’m covering in this entry and took us along the spectacular Catlin Coast upto Dunedin. After a much more settled ferry crossing back to the mainland and briefly stopping in Invercargill to pick up the rest of the group we headed onto the coast.

Our first stop was Purpoise Bay and Curio Bay. Here on the headland you could see waves come crashing in really high on the rocky landings that surrounded the cliffs of the headland. It was cool to walk around and climb around the rocks and try to get close up to the waves. Apparently in this area they get schools of dolphins playing and being inquisitive with people who go kayaking in the nearby bay area. We then went like 1 minute in the bus to Curio bay to see an extinct rainforest. All that was left was the stumps from the trees fossilised in the rocks. Just as we were heading out from here someone spotted a penguin across the way and before you knew it there was about 30 people, myself included trying to get as close as possible to this pair of Penguins sat on a ledge way. One of them was taking a nap whilst the other kept guard!

We took a few more stops along the way to Dunedin, including at a nice look out onto another bay, and another at a nice waterfall before taking a late lunch at a small town whose name escapes me. As we ate our lunch at some picnic tables there was a little farm area just behind with a goat, 3 calves, a lamb and two llamas. Then a girl from the owners I think was shreeking and whaling trying to get everyone to feed the animals. We all collectively wanted someone to shut her up! After the break we headed straight onto Dunedin. We had a quick city tour in the bus before we stopped at the steepest street in the world. Which we duly walked up, before hurrying back down as it started to rain. The pictures don’t really do it justice to be honest, at its steepest it has an incline of 1 in 2.86.

That evening was a good one. The Speights Brewery tour was mildly interesting; I learnt that Egyptians were the first people to brew beer and the term skull it came from when the Vikings would drink beer out of an actual skull along the way! However it was the 30 minute drink as much as you can session at the end everyone was waiting for though. You got a 150ml glass and you could drink as much as you liked. They had 6 different choices, including a dark beer and a cider amongst others closer to their most popular golden medal ale. I managed 10 glasses tasting all except the stout which is just over 2.5 pints in half an hour and I was drinking the heavier brews too. Set me well on my way for the night anyway. We headed straight to a bar where there was a special stray discount. This included food which meant a large pizza came in at only $12! Several more beers were had here, they had a wheat beer on tap too which is always good! After a while we were whisked off to some other night club, but this wasn’t really so interesting and rather quiet. But Melissa had spotted on the way in that there was a cover band on next door and it looked somewhat more lively, so we headed there instead. The band was probably really mediocre but in our intoxicated state no one really cared. The majority of the others decided to go back next door, just leaving myself and Robin. I didn’t really care for the other place to be honest. Anyway all of a sudden there were loads of people up dancing here so we joined in, and then one by one the people who left before came back. It was a cool little place there.

One by one we all called it a night not too long after though, those of us staying on the bus the next morning had a harsh 7.30am start and it was maybe 1.30am by the time I got back. On the way I managed to lose the bud for my earphones which rather annoyed me, and I couldn’t find the spare set of earphones I had when I got back too. I was in a two person dorm in the place we were staying, this translated to just one bunkbed. The other girl must have not wanted to share a room with a random guy, she’d moved out by the time I got back, so I got a room to myself for the first time in a while! Perhaps not the best thing when you have to be up really early and are quite drunk, but I managed to make the bus fine in the morning although feeling rather rough. I’d later realise I left my towel behind, and I’m still waiting for it to catch up with me in Christchurch. (It’s an expensive micro fibre travel towel!)

Well anyway that’s all for now, till next time. Ciao.