Wahey! Landed in Auckland after a little stopover in Sydney. Going East for the first time and we've both got a little bit jet-lagged Zzzzzzz! Staying in West Auckland with friends who are impressed at the amount of sleep we are getting. Chilled out in a funky part of town called Devonport and been up and down loads of little hills (or volcanic cones as they should be called - Auckland has got 57 or something of them). Just a couple of miles out of town we vi...

After 10 weeks basically living rough in the campervan we decided to make a break for it so rather than cruise serenely across Australia in a couple of weeks we drove from Melbourne, through Adelaide, across the Nullabor Plain into Western Australia and arrived in Perth in 4 days. Fortunately (or not) it wasn't quite as simple as that as the van overheated a couple of times in the 40'c heat of the Nullabor Plain. Driving 2500 miles at a heady 50mph top speed wa...

Drove south and called in to Australia's capital Canberra. Funky architecture of all the different embassies. Couldn't really stop and the nights were starting to get really cold in our little campervan - unlike Queensland the freebie camp sites weren't as good either some little more than fancy lay-bys. Went over the Snowy Mountains and played in the snow before arriving in Phillip Island for the Motorcycle Grand Prix just to the southeast of Melbourne. We s...

Left Brisbane after "Wicked" had fixed the van and bypassed the Gold Coast by going inland (expensive weekend party place apparently which is entireley what we didn't need as penniless backpackers). Just north of Sydney we cruised around the wine region of the Hunter Valley and found a coal seam that had been burning for 5000 years. Van decided not to allow us to select reverse gear now so we had to use a little more brainpower than usual before parki...

Headed down towards Hervey Bay and popped into a place called Eungella National Park. Saw a Duck-Billed Platypus in the wild and then stopped off at a viewpoint (Eungella means lands of the clouds so you get the idea). Only gone 5-10 mins and coming back to the car park saw a van leaving the otherwise empty car park. Wondered why they didn't do the little walk to the viewpoint and more precisely wondered where our bloody iPod was! An exciting 10 min campervan...