Today is our travel day from Launceston to Sydney,with an overnight at the Mercure airport hotel, before our departure back to the UK tomorrow so I thought I would do a synopsis of the highlights and lowlights of our holiday. New Zealand:- Best wildlife experience Day tour with Nature Guides Otago - despite 3.30am start to see the yellow eyed penguins this was an excellent day - seals, sea-lions, royal albatross and lots of birds. Hildegard was an excellent guid...

Our last whole day in Tasmania was spent traveling from Latrobe to Launceston where we fly back to Sydney and start our journey home tomorrow. Before we left Latrobe I decided my hair needed a trim, and after bemoaning the lack of hairdressers previously, Latrobe was clearly the hairdressing capital as I was spoilt for choice - there were 6 and a barbers! None however opened before 9 am - we have definitely been struck both in Tasmania and New Zealand by the ri...

I didn't sleep well - the excitement or the anticipation of an early alarm played havoc with my sleep clock - so we finally stopped fighting it at 0430, had a cup of tea and I turned the alarm off. We still had loads of time to shower and have more tea and toast before leaving at 5.45am and even then we arrived before Phil. having said our good-mornings we followed him back to the river bank where we left off last night - there had been a heavy dew overnight, th...

We arrived in Latrobe at approximately 1300 hours and drove immediately to the visitor centre to book a platypus tour - this is marketed as the Platypus capital and why I put it on our itinerary. We found that they did evening and morning tours but we were advised that the morning was the best - so that's what we booked - it's a 6am start and we meet back at the visitor centre tomorrow morning. We then had an iced coffee at the cafe before making our way to Sher...

Today we headed to Arthur River 15 kms down the road on the west coast for the boat trip we had booked while in Stanley. We arrived just before 0930 so we could pay the balance and have a coffee ( all part of the deal) before boarding the boat at 10ish for a 1015 departure. Firstly we went up to the point where the river meets the sea and saw the salmon fishermen trying their luck at the river mouth. We watched the 1.5 metre breakers and tried to imagine them a...