Perth to Auckland

Hi all sorry for it taking a time to update the blog but things have been really busy and had very little time to sit down to tell you all about it, but here I am and here I go.

So we left Thailand and landed in the early hours of the morning in Perth and it was very cold, we had booked a hostel on the internet the day before and from the airport we took a backpackers bus to the hostel. The hostel was in the city centre on Perth and it was s***, it looked like a prison, smelt, the staff were unfriendly, the room was very small and very expensive and there was noise from a night club all night. So far on our trip that was one of the worse places we had stayed. The next morning we packed up early and headed down to a small sea side town of Freemantle by train, once we arrived we spent some time looked at the hostels to try to find a nice one to stay at. This was a hard thing to find and we never found it. In the end we booked into a hostel that seemed friendly but we had to stay in a dorm for a night which was not fun but the following night we had a room to our self's which was lot better. The hostel had friendly staff but everyone who was staying there was really young and they all worked full time in the area, which meant it did not have a very holiday feel about the place, ow and the other thing they all drank lots and lots and at the weekend it all got a little crazy and there were fights and people with knifes at the door to the hostel.

As you might have guest we were both getting a little tired of this so we decided that the best thing to do was to get our self to NZ as soon as possible to get on the road, so on a day trip to see the city we changed our ticked so we would be off in a day or so. It's funny how the different places that we have been on out trip give us different impressions, our impression of Perth was not all that great, we found the people unfriendly, the hostels were rubbish and overall very expensive, hence after 4 or 5 days of not feeling all that great we bailed out and got onto the plane for NZ.

After 7 hours in the air we touched down in Auckland at 6 in the morning, where we were greeted by Anna's cousin Toby his wife Jo and their youngest of two girls Phoebe. For the next day we both slept to catch up on jet lag.

Toby's house was based in Devon port just outside Auckland in a really ice area, right by the beach and it had great views out to sea and views over the city, we used the house as a base for two weeks as we sorted our self's out to get ready to get on the road. Only after a few days of looking we had got our van of the New Zealand version of E-bay and we love it. The camper is a 1992 ford Econovan and is a proper little camper with a 40 L water tank, hot and cold water, a fridge and freezer and mains hook up that then gives us a heater and mains lighting as well as charging that house battery at the same time. So far we have found the camper very comfortable and easy to drive and not to bad on fuel, at the moment we pay about 72 pence per litre and sometimes it is less because we save the fuel vouchers that we get with our food shops. Once we had the camper we spent some time kitting it out with beading and kitchen things so that we were ready for the road.

The time that we sent in Auckland was great fun and Toby family were so welcoming to use, and we cannot thank then enough for having us. Anna and I went to the theatre one night which was great fun but the play was a little dark, it was about a 40 year old man who slept with a 12 year old girl, but it was very well acted and worth going. We also went to see the Black Seeds play in the city which was great, nice funky gig but there songs were a little samy and the club was a bit to clean for me. Anna enjoyed shopping in the city, looking around the charity shops with Toby's youngest Phoebe a I played tennis with Toby at the weekends which as a giggle. To say thanks for letting us stay helped do the cleaning and cooked every other night for the family, I also fixed there swimming that had a hole in. To do this I had to dive down in the pool that was really really cold and attach a patch with glue over the hole to stop the leek, this may sound simple but was very tricky. In the end I had to put a backpack on with a load of bricks in to help me stay at the bottom of the pool for longer so that I could attach the patch good and proper.

After the two weeks we were ready to head off and the open road awaits us, we are both very excited and cannot wait to get into the swing of camper vanning.