I spent a week in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. I stayed in a nice hostel and met up with Adam and Rosie quite a few times. I visited the Te Papa museum to see a brilliant WW1 Anzacs exhibition as well as lots of interesting Maori exhibits. Particularly interesting was learning the story of how the Haka dance came to be (this is the fearsome war dance used by the All Blacks at the beginning of rugby games). I also went to Parliament for a tour of thei...

Auckland is the biggest city in New Zealand, but it's not the capital. It is called the city of sails but I didn't think much of it as I'm really not a fan of cities. I stayed in Auckland for five days and did a few walks around the city to see parks, historic buildings, the high street and the waterfront, as well as a climb up the old Maori Pa (fortress) hill of Mt Eden where I got beautiful 360 panoramic views of the city. I also visited Auckland museum which...

We headed to Cairns on Tuesday 16th August. After a delayed plane, we eventually got to the hostel at 11.30pm and discovered there would be no wifi there. The next day I went for a walk on the esplanade and then went out for a Korean meal, and I tried a meal I had never had in Korea - Kimchi Kalguksu. In the evening I attended Reef Teach, a talk about what we would find on the reef and how to identify them. It was very interesting and I learned great things lik...

When we arrived in Adelaide, we decided to stay at the YHA. It was the best hostel we had stayed in in Australia. Everything was professional, the people were helpful and apart from having to pay for the internet, everything there was perfect. I highly recommend them. The first place we visited was the South Australia Museum to see the largest collection of aboriginal artefacts in the world. I learned a lot. However, the highlight of Adelaide for me was the...

Hey everyone, here is the first blog about Australia. We arrived in Darwin at 5am after a flight with no sleep. However, our first experience of Australia was meeting a really nice local man who explained to us which buses we needed to get to town. Once we arrived in the main town centre and had dropped off our bags, we spent the morning getting ourselves set up for life in Australia - sorting out bank accounts, medicare cards, mobiles, and a tax number. We als...