north island new zealand

after meeting jamie lee and matt for a catch up in wellington we started to head up to auckland to catch our flight to LA we did a non stop tour of the north island in our $1 camper van up to rotarua a smelly town due to the amount of sulphur in the air. we stopped at an amaying campsite with thermal pools and hot springs and indulged in some relaxation in the spas for free!!! with a day at lake taupo, moutn doom, rotarua and one more day in auckland, we were out of time and ready for the heat again.

new zealand is such a beautiful country which we would like to visit again with more time but we both agreed that the next visit will have to be in the NZ summer as the winter was so bitter cold that travelling was uncomfortable at times.

we also left new zealand just in time as we found out that a week after our flight there was a huge earthquake in cristchurch which sounded like it really screwed thing up! we also heard the sad news that the sky diving company which claire had used one week previous, had a tragic plane accident where the plane crashed into a mountain and killed all those on board.

NZ - sweet as bro'!

It's been a cold and wet 4 weeks since our last blog.. but that hasn't stopped us having a great time in New Zealand! We were originally going to be flying down to Queenstown to meet up with Claire and Ed from Thailand, but they were taking their sweet time coming down from the north, so we hired out a tiny wee camper van called Lucy the Jucy and set off on our grand tour of the South Island. The was a fair amount of driving through stunning forests and past lakes, but the highlight was the drive from Te Anu to Milford Sound. It was really beautiful and if seeing it once wasn't enough then you could see it twice because all the mountains reflected in the black lakes! After that we went down south, saw penguins, seals and sealions, albatross in Otago and then up to try to see mount cook but it was soooo grey and cloudy we could bearly see 20ft in front of us!

After that was the unbelievably blue waters of lake Tekapo and thenon to Christchurch and the french town of Akaroa which was picture perfect! We also got some free drinks from the bar manager there 'cus he were a northen lad from Doncaster! Small world..! We were going to go further north but we had enough of driving so we went over the Southern Alps to the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers which were amazing to see as they came right down into the forests, and we camped out on an amazing desolate beach which was like a graveyard for washed up trees! Then after that we wanted to go skiing and happed to bump into Claire and Ed in Wanaka and after a bit of boozing and a catch up we headed for the slopes of Treble Cone the next day! It was great to be back on the slopes and considering it's been about 2 years since i last skied i didn't fall over all that much! And after a couple of hours lesson for Roz she could snowplough down the slopes with the best of them!

We then headed back to Queenstown to drop the van off and had the best nights sleep in a real bed for the first time in 2 weeks!! We spent another couple of days in Queenstown (Which is the adrenalin capitol of the world) and i did a Canyon swing which was imense fun and you can see the video on facebook, and we had a loooong game of frisbee golf, which sounded easy but was far from it as we got passed by several people who really should have been 6 feet under but were just showing us up!!

Then the grand relocation plan began where we picked up a car from Queenstown and had to deliver it to Christchurch, all for the tiny sum of $10 plus petrol. Then we did another one to Wellington where we met with Jamie-Lee and Matt who we had also met in Thailand and had a beautiful meal of tapas in one of the restaurants around Welly. For a capitol city it really is... pointless!! It's smaller than both Auckland and Christchurch and once you have done the museum, there is only drinking and eating left!!! We were very close to getting stuck in Welly after we couldnt find a relocate up to Auckland, but deciding to gample and ask at the office where we dropped the campervan off, Roz turned on the charm with the woman behind the desk and we got properly sorted with an amazing 2 person camper for the rest of our time in NZ! And all for less than the price of 3 nights accomodation!

Anyway, now we are on the road up to Auckland and we shall update the blog again soon!! Byee! x

sydney

now it is a know thing around oz that people either love sydney or hate it and people either love melbourne or hate it!!! i loved them both! melbourne, simply for st kilda but sydney is totally different. It felt almost like walking around london... same kind of buildings, cool student area, gorgeous gardens and the opera house, well that was just an added bonus.... some friends went to see an actual opers which i was so jellious about! we spent most of our time in the parks and walking round also getting a ferry over to an island where we had fish n chips and a sea gull stole dans fish right out off his fork. we also went up to the blue mountain which was so beautiful and actually blue!!!
we only had a couple of days in sydney before getting our next international flight to auckland which is where i am taking advantage of free internet!! we are now on our way to queenstown

fraser island and byron bay

We only did a day tour on fraser...... decided that enough money had been spent else where, we did however find it irresistable to miss out on a 30 quid flight in a little plane across the island, taking off from the beach we saw whales, manterays and the beautiful island from the sky! it was money well spent and we could always claw it back elsewhere :-z

It wasnt long till we were shoved back onto another over night bus down to byron bay. Its an amazing little town by the beach with loads of little boutique shops, cool bars and a great little hostel i like to call dougies 2!!! actually named (the arts factory). its starting to get real chilly but luckily this hostel has a hot tub and heated pool so nights were spent splashing around and drinking goon! we did a big long walk in the day time up to the light house which i swear nearly killed me!!! so many steps! well worth it though, the view was incredible!

next stop was sydney........

we went sailing.........we went sailing...........on whit sundays!!! la di da

After selling our beloved home in port douglas for a mere $25 we set off for cairns. Horrible place with not much going for it so we spent the day hunting down a good bargain on the grey hound bus service down to sydney with as many stops as you want along the way.

First stop was airlie beach after a grueling 12 hr coach trip through the night.
After checking in we went exploring and found a man made lagoon to chill in for the day......pleasant! after another little wonder we found some fish n chips and i reluctantly ate without mushy peas!!! again!!! the next day we hopped onto a 2 day sailing cruise around the whit sundays island. It was one of those proper sailing boats which feel like they will tip right over. Definitely got our adrenaline pumping after a day or 2 of relaxing. Any who, we went snorkeling and saw some nemos (very territorial) and lots of pretty barrier reef coral. Then we went to a beautiful beach with the whitest sand ever! it was so peaceful and there were little sharks and sting rays in the shallows swimming round your feet.

The night on the boat was horrific then combination of the goon and the swaying was unbearable but still worth being woken up at 5:30am to watch the sun rise over crystal clean water. when we got back to dry land we all went out for drinks and dinner before catching the next over night bus down to hervey bay....... next stop fraser island.

Dougies

wow, time goes so fast when your having fun!!!
So the last month has been spent in port Douglas, working, drinking, lazing by the pool, meeting the most amazing people! and well just generally enjoying every moment really!
lets see........... to start with Port Douglas is an amazing little town in tropical north Queensland, covered in palm trees and mango trees. There is one beach called 4 mile (its a long beach hence the name!) and the entire place is covered head to toe in fancy resorts. Not always a good thing but when it comes to finding a job in hospitality this meant that me and Dan were straight in there!
I worked in a little cute cafe called cafe fresque i loved it (except the days that the bosses wife would be in the kitchen and throw hissy fits and walk out with eggs still cooking on the stove with only me left in the entire place to explain to 60 customers that we cant cook there food because the chef has just had a melt down.) All that aside i generally enjoyed my 40 hour weeks alternating from cafe assistant and barrister by day and curry waitress by night! i especially enjoyed working the evenings as i would always be given free curry from the pot-head chef, never a bad thing when all you have to look forward to is porridge!
Dan, on the other hand landed a couple of very cushty jobs. He was working as a graphic designers assistant by day and by night behind the bar at a place annika likes to call hattle and rum! (rattle and hum to anybody else) all in all we had landed some beauties of jobs.
Dougie's backpackers is a dorm + campsite hostel. The way to do Dougie's however is in a tent! you wouldn't believe what some of these tents were like!!! TVs, lamps, sofas, double beds! they were basically fabric houses. me and Dan pitched our modest 3 man tent in the valley of the giants! we definitely chose a good spot though because ours was the most social area of the entire site! it didn't take long before we were integrated into a large group, some we knew from Melbourne and others joined. it became like one big happy family, eating, swimming, drinking, making fires on the beach, taking trips into town, going to the cinema, renting puppies, playing kirby, and much much more.
Alot of fun has been had in the last month and it was all thanks to;
Annika, Darragh, Matt, Steph, Natalie, Rachael, Victoria, Charlotte, Hannah,  sourcha, Andy, Casey, Matt costello, Garry, Ceian, Reds, Adam, Barry, Freshy, everyone else staying at dougies and the dougies sytaff of course. I will remember them always!

The great western aventure!

Hi again, we are back in the world of 21st communication and how much we have missed those little luxuries such as showers, mobile signal and people who aren't born from a drunken night of passion between a brother and sister...!

Picking up from our last blog then, we left south australia and headed out along the 90 mile straight road to western australia, literally not a bend on the road for an hour and a half... how exciting! After a couple of days driving across the Nullabor (Aboriginal for 'treeless') Plain we made it into Esperance which was bliss to see the sea again and even find a McDonalds! It was Roz's birthday so we had a bit of lunch and then headed out to Lucky Bay, which is Australia's most beautiful beach... Me knowing this already and it being Roz's birthday it was time for me to suck it up and ask the big question! I bought her a sketch book, put in a little poem I rustled up and hid the ring inside the book... And as I am sure you all know by now she said yes! Anyway, i won't bore you with too many details so safe to say, 2 very happy people left Esperance the next day and headed up into the forests of Denmark, where we did a tree top walk, and then bombed up to Perth to pick up our travelling buddies Darragh & Annika from the Airport.

After a night in Freemantle we all went down to Margaret River, which is one of Australia's best wine growing regions and indulged in a day of wine tasting, which involved riding around in the pouring rain from one cellar door to the next for the whole day, getting more and more drunk on free wine as the day went on! Awesome time, would highly recommend it to anyone because it's a free piss up!!

Because the weather was so shoddy, we headed back up the coast past Perth and into Kalabarri for an evening of fishing on the pier. Not much biting unfortunately, but i still out fished everyone else... even if my 6 fish would probably not be more than 12 inches if you lined them all up!!

Now one thing you should know about camping in australia, in fact probably anywhere is that the greedy bastards will charge you extra money if you have more than 2 people, which to me is a bit of a rip off, because you aren't taking up any more room if you are all in one tent. So with a bit of careful planning we put me and Darragh in the front of the car and piled all the pillows on top of the girls in the back.. then we would go in all mincing it up and just getting odd looks from the hillbillies in the receptions who just wanted us out of their way incase they caught the gayness!! but it meant we spent half the money we could have! Safe to say there will be a few phone calls going between the owners about a couple of pommie fags mincing it up around the camp sites of western australia!

Anyway moving on with the trip we stopped off in Monkey Mia where you can feed dolphins (we had a whale of a time... pun intended) then up to coral bay where the snokelling was superb, and off to exmouth where we got seriously pissed on Goon (cheap nasty wine), played beach boules with stones, and made a bow and arrow to shoot kangaroos with! Not that we caught anything, but hey it was fun! Then from there we had a couple of nothing stops in Karatha and Port Hedland, and then to the final destination on the west coast - Broome... which was worth the whole trip because it actually has stuff to do and really nice beaches! We jumped off rocks, we rode on camels along the beach at sunset, and then we cracked open the expensive bottles of wine we got from margaret river to drink with some fine cheeses and pate whilst watching the moon rise over the bay which was stunning! The way the moonlight reflects over the very, VERY low tide makes it look like 'a staircase to the moon' and while i can't really see the staircase, it was a very nice (and even slightly romantic) evening!

So with Broome well and truly done, and all the west coast boxes ticked, we set off for the east coast, calling in at lovely places such as Halls Creek, which is where Wolf Creek was set, good film, if a bit scary considering we were doing exactly what they were doing in the film in exactly the same car, Katherine which was actually quite nice, and Mount Isa which was a crappy mining city but also the biggest city in the world in square kilometers. We got into Port Douglas 5 days after leaving the east coast, and even squeezing in some hairy drives at dusk that were full of giant wild pigs, dingoes and big red kagaroos, all of which would have been the end of bessie the car, and possibly us! But we managed to get there, and only one small problem with the car as it seems to drink transmission fluid like it's going out of fashion, but whoever we sell the car too doesn't need to know that!! Now it's just a case of getting working and selling the car, but maybe a drink or twelve first...!

hittin' the dusty trail...

Sorry it’s been a while since we wrote, but there was money to be made, and a lot of drinking time to catch up on…

So we have been working hard as always (me as a milkman and roz as a waitress) and after a couple of months there we had the obligatory leaving shin dig/s which was great fun, and t’was nice to see everyone off. We had a final night round in our garden with a few friends, our housemate sarah, and plenty of cheap grog! New drinking games were discovered that night which will be brought home as long as we can remember them.. that’s a bit of a sticking point with drinking games; you’re always pissed when you play them so rules are always difficult to remember!!

So we set off for Perth in Bessie the car, on Monday the 3rd of May with the plan to get about 400ks under our belt, but after fannying around for ages getting last minute shopping and packing the car we left at 2pm and only got as far as Torquay (200ks!). It’s a nice little place with some good surf, but we were to late to make any use of that so we just pulled into a caravan park and went to watch the sun go down with a bottle of wine. We got tea on the go and were soon mobbed by a massive possum, who got a clout round the head with a wooden spoon when he put his nose in the saucepan! And then an owl landed in the tree above us and just sat watching for ages, and the stars were truly beautiful!! We then settled into the cosy bed in the back of the car for a well deserved sleep.

Next day we set off pretty early along the great ocean road for Apollo bay where we stopped in a little café which had a mural on the wall by my old uni housemate jilly! The weather was pretty dire so we just hopped back in the car and headed to the twelve apostles for the night. If you don’t know the 12 apostles is a load of big rocks sticking out of the sea along the ocean road, amazing to see, but there aren’t actually 12 of them anymore because of coastal erosion.. but the 9 or so that were there were cool enough! So we did about 250k today, nice and steady again as the weather was bad.

After the night in Port Campbell, we got up at 7 to hit the road nice and early to Kingston SE which is at the end of the ocean road, getting on toward Adelaide. We covered a good 450k so that made a bit more of a mark on the map, and we just camped for free on the side of the road with a couple of Aussie lads, 4 frenchies and a Canadian crazy lady…! It was cold again so we decided to go to the pub for tea and beer, and they had a roaring log burner on the go so we just nestled in amongst that to warm our cockles!

Again we got up early on the next day (Thursday) with the intention to get to Adelaide, but Bessie isn’t great in the mornings but refused to budge on this particular day so we had to crack out the jump starter kit our mate had advised we buy (thanks Barry!) to get her going. With that worry on our mind we called ahead to a contact in a town just south of Adelaide for some mechanical help. Luckily Mark and Wendy knew a decent honest mechanic so we changed course slightly and headed to McLaren Vale, which is a really, REALLY beautiful little town surrounded by wineries, rolling hills and the sea. After dropping Bessie off at the garage, Mark and Wendy took us round their winery (Hassle & Lightfoot) and then back to theirs for a slap up mediteranean style feast! Of course we sampled some of their local brew which was a very cheeky little Chardonnay! Then we went kangaroo spotting and there was a mob of about 12 grazing in amongst the vines in their back garden! Roz was most delighted to see her first wild roos and got some great photos, and some great shots of an amazing rainbow across the vale. We had a call a little later on saying he could find nothing wrong with the car, and so we decided to power on past Adelaide to a place called Port Wakefield about 200k north.

We did another early rise because we wanted to try and hit about 700k and get to Ceduna which is one of the last stops before the open desert road. We made it in record time, even having time to stop for supplies shopping in Port Augusta. Ceduna seemed nice enough but is full of bogans (Australian hill-billies) and it just so happens that most of them seem to live in the camp sight we stayed in… The guy next to us spent most of his night throwing tins of beer down his neck, listening to hiphop and yelling obscenities at the sport on tv! Delightful!! We thought one of the bogans was moving his caravan until we realised it was actually a woman waddling to the toilet who was the size of a small caravan… I think she has made her dress from a bed sheet.. a double king size one!!

Anyway, that’s enough slagging off of the locals for now… on the road again tomorrow and hopefully get to Western Australia for more fun bogan adventures…!

the power of persuasion is an impressive thing!

A couple more weeks have passed since the f1 and the boring, long hours at work are grinding on the both of us but not all is dull. We have been talked into going on a mammoth of a trip with some friends we met here........... I happen to be working with dans work mates girlfriend and we all get on really well almost a little too well considering I have only known annika for a matter of weeks I spend the majority of my melbourne life with her while dan is at work then I go to work with her too.

Anyway, she has convinced me that it would be a good idea for me and dan to join their travel around the west coast and the other day we went out and bought a car!!!! yep she is a beauty! red 1988 ford falcon wagon, came free with a tent, matress, all you need to go camping, a surf board, volley ball and lots lots more all for $3000 or £1700 ish between 4 of us! its a bargin and she runs like a dream! our plpan is to drive from melbourne-adelaide-perth-coral bay-exmoth-broome-port douglas, stay there for a wee wile to work and save a bit more then down the east coast down to sydney. If this car makes it she will go down in history as the biggest legend ever!! if anyone has any advice, knows anything about traveling in oz please let me know because i am just kinda hoping that it will all fall in to place.

So with just 3 weeks till we set off for our near impossible feat we are both extremely excited and raring to get going. melbourne has been good but i am so over cities (for now). just got back from the casino celebrating matt and stephs (dans brother and girl friend) last nights in melbourne before moving to port. me and steph rocked on the black jack and the boys sucked at pretty much everything apart from getting drinks at the bar!!!! hehe na to be fair, dan won bowling afterwards :-) xx

ozzy ozzy ozzy oi oi oi

8 weeks into our ozzy experience and we are still in melbourne juggling between the crazy weather of sun and blinding heat and flash floods and cold cold nights! about a week ago, me and dan got stranded in the library while hale stones the size of golf balls came pelting down! when we decided to leg it to the underground, we had to wade knee deep through flood across the road! then when on the train we saw that one of the stations roof had been pelted through and the whole place was flooded! it was a very very long journey home that day!

www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/05/26/flood,1.jpg

other then that it has been 3 days hot, 3 days cold then 3 days hot etc its so confuddling! :-\

we have just moved into our lovely share house in st kilda, (the center of everything). we share with a girl called Sarah and her cat Fanta who have both been very nice and friendly. we are enjoying having a social life again, maybe a little too much as on monday night after champagne tasting at my new job i went out and found myself dancing on the table in the middle of a drag show. Its not all boozing though unfortunately, I am juggling 3 jobs in one go and dan is a milk man!!!! yep you cant make this stuff up! 

We are both working at the formula 1 at the end of march and hope to have enough money to move up to port Douglas after that, where the beach is golden and the sea is.......well not as bloody freezing as it is in melbourne! 

just seen on the news that there is a 2.5m long shark swimming in the bay near our house arrrrgggggg!!!! oh and for all the animal lovers there is a family of possums living in our tree in the back garden who arnt very photogenic but still its worth a go!