From Melbourne, we flew to Darwin, and from Darwin we flew to Denpasar in Bali. Our flight was slightly delayed in arriving as the weather over Denpasar was very stormy. From the airport we took a taxi in the pouring rain to our hotel, Sayang Maha Mertha. The ride through the streets of Kuta to our hotel was our first big culture shock - hundreds of scooters whizzing past, food stalls everywhere and bright neon signs. We checked into our room but realised the rai...

As Matt stated in the last blog entry we spent the majority of the Indian Pacific journey to Adelaide in the lounge car which was nice. It made the journey more pleasant. We had one stop off in the Silver City - Broken Hill, which as stated in the title is well known for its production of silver, although is now more of a mining town. We only had an hour and a half to spend there so we went off to explore. At 6.30 in the morning it was very much a ghost town and ...

Once we arrived in Sydney we made our way to Panania where we were going to be staying for a few nights with an Australian family. After being advised by my friend Lee back in June to start looking for hostels for Sydney in December ASAP, we did exactly that. But even back then, most hostels were fully booked due to Sydney being such a hot-spot for Christmas and New Year, and the hostels that were not quite fully booked were charging between $60-$100 per night fo...

After leaving the Australia Zoo, we almost missed the Greyhound to Brisbane as we were standing at the wrong stop. Luckily the bus was late so we were fine and got to Brisbane safe and sound. On arrival we had a bit of a walk to get to our hostel through the city centre. First impressions of Brisbane were good as it had a nice city feel to it. We checked into Base Embassy and once we had put our things in the room we went to explore the city. We walked to Vi...

From Airlie Beach we travelled to Mackay which was only a 2 hour journey on the greyhound. We spent the afternoon and the following morning looking around the town. There's very little to see in Mackay and because of this it's not swarming with backpackers which suited us fine as our intentions are to visit as many places as possible, not just the usual hotspots i.e. Sydney, Melbourne etc. Mackay was fine for just the one night stop-over that we did. From Ma...