After a comfortable night at the Shining Star holiday park in Hokitika we used up the last of the offered facilities by uploading more pictures to Google Drive over the wifi and by emptying out our grey water tank. Then it was time to head to the road and fill up another tank with some unleaded petrol. It costs about 202 cents per liter here, which is about 70 cents more than it did in Australia. Luckily some supermarkets give out vouchers for a 4 cents per liter...

I covered our arrival in New Zealand in the last entry, but I'll put it here short again; don't bring food here. We didn't get into any real problems, but got a little more attention from the customs people than we would have liked… Our plane arrived to Christchurch from Sydney at about 0.15 in the night, which meant that there wasn't any real reason to head out to an expensive hotel/hostel. We spent the night at the airport instead, first in the drafty arri...

OK, we've been travelling for about four months now, going through Nepal, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Australia. That's a lot of border crossings and going through customs. We've never had any problems before arriving in New Zealand and while those were not in any way major ones, they are still worth writing about. So first of all, Sini is a self-proclaimed fruit junkie, she's physically depended on her daily dose of fructose. There is no known cu...

Our last night in the rental car turned out to be the coldest one by a long shot. We were freezing in our lightweight down sleeping bags, so much so that we had to huddle up closer to each other for warmth. We woke up to the sound of kookaburras laughing at us and checked the tiny key ring thermometer we have with us; it showed six degrees Celsius inside the car and just one outside of it. Our sleeping bags would have been able to handle that but the problem was ...

We took off from our campground in Norah Head ad about 9.30 and continued south along the Central Coast Highway, which later merged with the M1 motorway towards Sydney. That was problematic. We wanted to stay away from the city for two major reasons: first of all we had a bit of a drive ahead of us and didn't want to get stuck in traffic; second of all, we knew there would be toll roads there. We don't have those at home and we don't like them here. It made no ma...