From one Pacific island to the next..... Raratonga, the Cook Islands! After two flights via Auckland and a 4hr wait at the airport we finally reached Raratonga at 3.30am Saturday 18th January - 7 and a half hours earlier than the time we left Fiji! Crossing the date line is very confusing and I think we are still trying to get our heads round it! What has been the strangest is getting used to England being hours in front of us after so many months of it being th...

Hi Everyone! Sorry that its been so long since we did our last blog but unfortunetly internet access in the Pacific Islands is very expensive and few and far between! Anyway here goes for the penultimate blog... We arrived in Fiji on the saturday and spent 2 days near Nadi on the main island in Fiji preparing for our 2 weeks islands hopping around the Yasawa and Manuca Islands north west of the mainland. We decided to get eth Bula Pass which entitled us to 14 ...

We left Queenstown on the 4th (finally!) and headed to Kaikoura stopping off along the way at Mount Cook to look at Australasia's highest peak and its surrounding lakes which are a crazy blue colour - quite hard to explain and the pictures probaly won't do it justice but for some scientific reason which we don't quite understand the water is this brilliant blue colour. We stopped the night just a bit further on at Lake Tekapo. The weather was gorgeous here so had...

Monday 19th - arrived in Christchurch after short flight from Sydney. We spent a couple of days here exploring the city and planning the rest of our trip and organising our hire car for the wednesday onwards. Christchurch is really small and not much going on but its really pretty and has a real English feel to it with all the architecture etc.. We stayed at Base in Cathedral Square so it was a really central location right by the Cathedral (believe it or not) an...

Since wine tasting in Newcastle we had a flying visit through Sydney where we had just enough time to do a free city walk to take in the sights and then catch up with some friends that we had met in Thailand. We are back in Sydney this weekend so hopefully there will be more to tell you in the next blog plus more photos... So after just 3 nights in Sydney we caught the overnight bus to Melbourne - probably our worst nights sleep to date! We arrived in melbourne ...