New Zealand so far - Oct '06-Oct '07

We arrived in Auckland on 31st Oct 2006 and 9 days later Daf was working for Vodafone. I've been temping in credit control and collections for various large companies. Just now I'm at Vodafone as well, calling people who haven't paid their bills, taking abuse and then cutting them off.

We stayed with Jennifer and Jethro in their wee house on top of the hill in Orakei from November until March when both Jen and Jeth's parents came over visiting. We've been living here with Emma and Dan (newly Mr & Mrs Channing) and Siegfried since March in Epsom. We've pretty much done nothing since arriving here, apart from the 4WD day and a day trip or two to Piha!! It's been all about saving!! We spent most of our savings from the UK in Australia so if we want to leave NZ without missing out on all the LOTR sights we need to save our pennies!!

Our working holiday visas expire in 2 weeks and, rather then extend them at a cost of nearly $1000, having to submit blood tests, medical certificates and chest x-rays, we're going to Tonga for 3 nights then back into the country again as UK visitors!! Immigration are a bunch of monkeys, honestly.

The itinerary so far is:
Tonga on the 29th,
3 nights on the beach for some snorkeling and lounging,
back to Auckland to send stuff home,
down to Masterton to see Daf's relatives,
fly to Christchurch,
drive around South Island for 2 weeks,
onto Thailand for 3 weeks,
home on Xmas day.

We've both made loads of really great friends here in Auckland, it's a complete pain in the arse than the govt won't let us stay. Especially since VF have just announced that they can't get the staff here in NZ so they've out-sourced an entire call centre to Egypt!! All good things must come to an end however and it's not like we're coming back to get a mortgage and 'settle down' OK?!

I think it's safe to say we are both dreading coming back home to no jobs, no house and no cash on Xmas day having spent 3 weeks in the glorious tropical heat of northern Thailand. Obviously it'll be great to see our mums and families and having the seasons round the right way again will be good. NZ is so spacious though! The Kiwis don't know how lucky they are to have their 'section' or not to have to live in a glorified tenement costing roughly 8 times the average salary!! It'll be strange going back to the squashed up, everyone-on-top-of-each-other housing in Edinburgh.

Looking forward to public transport and a good local pub again though!!

I can't wait for a haggis super with a can of Irn Bru.....

-AM

4 months in Australia

We really should have started this well over a year ago but we've only just got the laptop and now we can actually add things to it!!

We've been away from Edinburgh since June 2006, we've covered A LOT of Kms, drunk a lot of beer, swatted a lot of flies, seen a lot of people, places and things. Here is a very brief summary of the Australia leg.

We flew into a windy and rainy Melbourne after leaving a scorching hot Edinburgh and a 25 hr flight with 2 hrs in Hong Kong airport. Daf spent the first week on Europe time watching the world cup in our hostel off Chapel St. Once we'd found our feet we were keen to get moving so we hunted around for car deals on backpacker noticeboards. We bought 'Mac' in at the dodgiest of dodgy second hand car dealerships on Elizabeth St, I wouldn't recommend them. From there we drove along the Great Ocean road, stopping in Lorne to do a bit of wwoofing at a local pottery for a week. We continued along the awe inspiring GOR and up to Adelaide, where Daf stopped for a PC for a few days, then on up through The Barossa Valley where we met up with Bryoney and Martin in their Caravan! We stayed there for a week or so, toured around the vineyards, drank a lot of the Barossa's finest and figured out how to live in a tent. From the Barossa it was straight up through the middle of the red centre stopping at road stops on the way and camping on hard red dirt.

Coober Pedy was quite a culture shock, the first place we saw the scale of and living standards of the Aboriginal community and the first place that felt the intense, dry, desert heat. We camped underground in an opal mine which was nice and cool. After a long night on pebbles we then bought an inflatable mattress and electric pump! We stopped off in Alice Springs for 3 nights and met a young farming family who had taken their kids out of school to explore the outback. We drank too much VB with them and then on into the Northern NT. The radiator sprung a leak just outside of Renner Springs, on a baking hot day, with no other cars in sight. We managed to get it bodged back together again with the aid of a knife and some wire, very MacGyver, but also very scary! From there on it was a race to get to Darwin before Mac konked out altogether. We made it as far as Daly Waters and camped in Bill Bryson's favourite outback 'resort' (a pub with a huge field and beer garden) and had a much deserved swim in the freezing salt water pool.

We continued chugging up the never-ending Stuart Highway to Mataranka hot springs where we went for a dip in the piping hot river, surrounded by little fish, big frogs, spiders and dragon flies the size a blackbird!! Daf went UNDERWATER (clever) and got 'tropical ear' then we continued up to Katherine where we kayaked up and then down the beautiful gorge while the bush fires raged above!! Finally, after nearly 2 weeks of solid driving, we made it to Darwin and the azure ocean was a welcome sight, as were the first clouds on the horizon in 2 weeks. Darwin was beautiful, friendly, humid and hot. It never dropped below 28oC, even in the middle of the night. Camping on the air mattress made it hotter and the inevitable sunburn just added to the heat!!

We stayed in Darwin for a week, I got horrifically sunburned by the pool one lunchtime and we managed to land fairly cushy jobs working as bookies at the Darwin Cup race weekend. That was a real eye opener, Aussies love to gamble and they love to drink. We made a small fortune in tips and earned $35p/hr!! We finally had to leave Darwin once we'd had Mac looked at and no-one in town could replace the burst hose so we were directed to Brisbane for the elusive spare part. Back down the Stuart Highway then east at 3 Ways Junction and onto the longest stretch of un-manned highway in the country. We arrived in Mount Isa on the annual Rodeo weekend and stayed in a campsite full of mullets, spurs

and studs. We ate a lot of steak. Onto Townsville on the east coast of QLD and stayed there for 4 days. It was heaven. Not as hot as Darwin with a sea breeze to keep the sand flies at bay. From Townsville we drove down through Bundaberg, stopping off at the distillery and onto Brizzy. We stayed in beautiful Brisbane for a month altogether, endured the worst tropical storms in living memory (when we arrived it hadn't rained for nearly 300 days) in our little tent and worked in various jobs including childcare, car insurance and admin! A brief trip up to Mooloolaba to stay with Mr and Mrs Seeheusen again at the big pineapple on the sunshine coast, Daf learned to surf while Bry and I ate and drank!!

By this point it was September and we figured we needed about a month in Melbourne to get the car sorted before we sold it on, so we headed down the coast to Sydney. We camped in a couple of national parks surrounded by bush turkeys and wallabies. The coastal road was a bit disappointing though, Surfer's Paradise and Byron Bay were pretty nasty, so we veered off down the New England Highway inland through the mountains and the country music capital Tamworth. Back towards the coast again through The Hunter valley where we topped up on the vino levels, which by this stage were seriously depleted. We camped in a national park in Sydney for 2 nights, we didn't like Sydney much after living in the outback for so long, then we drove back inland towards Canberra. We actually stopped at the truck stop outside Canberra and thought about going through it...naaah, we kept on going towards VIC, through the forests and arrived back in Melbourne at the start of October.

It was inevitable, but none the less disappointing, to be back in cold and blustery Melbourne. We couldn't get any work because no-one had any 3 week jobs going and we needed to spend some time and money getting Mac up to re-sale condition again. It took nearly $1500 spent on minor things before we got a buyer. Mac was sold, Xmas presents posted and bags packed, we headed off for New Zealand.

The outback is jaw dropping. Big, hot, dry, red, sweaty, honest and in-your-face. 4 months altogether in Australia was nowhere near enough time to see what we wanted to see. We drove right past Uluru, The Whitsunday's, Australia Zoo, The Great Barrier Reef, The Olgas and Canberra (although no loss there I hear). They'll all still be there in a few years time! But we did see a lot of things that we would have missed out on had we been part of a tour or flown, instead of driven 11,000kms in our 1989 black Hyundai Excel without air con. Amazing sunrises and

sunsets over the desert, flora and fauna of every colour, texture and shape like I've never seen and didn't

believe existed outside a David Attenborough doc!

In retrospect, perhaps driving a second hand wagon around the most in-hospitable desert roads in the world wasn't the best move for two brand new drivers with the ink still wet on their licences, and camping for 3 months in a $100 tent was never supposed to last for 3 months!! We didn't drive after about 4pm because we didn't have roo-bars on the car, we'd heard how dangerous it was to hit one at 150kmph without them so we avoided dusk when they came out to feed.

The ants were the by far worst, not the legendary Redback spiders or the Huntsmen or the White-tails. Not the snakes or the roaches or the lizards. Not even the giant fruit bats which shat like a cow in the middle of the night on top of the tent and screeched like banshees. The Bull ants/inch ants (they're an inch long) were the worst. They can get into your tent even when you're sure it's ant proof. The best thing we learned, quite quickly, was to encircle the dirt around the tent with citronella oil, and as long as you don't strike a match and cause the destruction of most of the state, it'll keep the little bastards out. The sand flies in Darwin were pretty bad, invisible too.

We saw a lot of native wildlife including echidnas, emus, kangaroos (both dead and alive), wallabies,

bats, foot long stick insects, snakes, lizards of all shapes and sizes, parrots of every colour and spiders to make your eyes water. Camping in the outback wasn't as scary as it sounds and we would definitely do it again!

Australia was fantastic. Although we never planned any of it, it was superb and we learned so much. The photographs which we have posted on various websites don't nearly cover the amount of pics we took.

-AM