After what can only be described as a terrible descent and landing by our Tiger airways pilot (they really aren't endearing themselves to us!) into Sydney, we were back at the domestic terminal in thankfully warm weather. We checked in to our nice private room in the hostel and then went for the dinner put on by them over the road, where we sat next to yet another accountant! After that we met up with Lou from the Stray bus and her fellow Irish contingent for a ...

We were convinced something was going to go wrong with our Tiger flight to Melbourne as everyone in front of us seemed to be getting stung for excess baggage etc, but to our amazement, check in (when it finally arrived) was a breeze! The only slight downside was we realised we were flying into Avalon not Tullermarine, which shouldn't really be classed as Melbourne at all because it's in the middle of nowhere at what looks like an army base! So after leaving Fiji ...

On Monday morning we got up early and got dropped off at Mango Junction in plenty of time to wait for our bus transfer to the airport. But, alas, in a typical example of 'Fiji time' a bus that was supposed to pick us up at 815am and take 2 hours ended up arriving at gone 9am and taking nearer 3 hours! Not ideal given that we had a boat to catch! When we finally got dropped off in Nadi we were unsurprisingly hustled straight away by a guy who duly passed us on ...

It was a bit stressful when we rocked up at Nadi airport and our transfer to the hostel had just decided not to turn up- there had been a hurricane warning and it was pouring down with rain so apparently there was havoc on the roads - so we weren't sure whether it was that or the fact the driver was operating on "Fiji time" which meant he didn't show. Anyway luckily one of the local drivers helped us out and we got in a taxi to the resort. Two hours la...

Our final trip on the Stray bus on Thursday got us in to Christchurch, the 'most English' of all city's in NZ, late in the afternoon and after our driver dropped us off at the wrong hostel we were actually pretty glad to be off the bus by this point, even if it has been really good overall.The average age of our hostel room was about 50 and there was a pretty special crowd there all told, especially the guy with a hole in his shirt who claimed he worked for the g...