After umming and ahhing for ages over whether to book up a trip to Ayers Rock we realised that even though it's expensive, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to do it now than it would be to do it later from England. Five minutes after that we were handing over our credit cards and trying not to wince at the amount as we keyed in our pins. It didn't help that we booked up a 4WD camping safari on Fraser Island and a Whitsundays sailing trip at the same time, thus increa...

After chilling out in Darling Harbour on Monday we went out again with people from the hostel for a drink (or seven) and some dancing. We ended up in Macdonalds at 2am, which is always the sign of a good night. This time I started drinking water before I left so I was completely hangover-free in the morning - thank god seeing as it was our last day in Sydney and I didn't want to waste it by lying in bed. Instead we caught the ferry to Manly Beach where we had lun...

If we had to sum up Sydney in one word it would be, quite simply, 'WOW'; we love it here! I expected to prefer Melbourne as it's meant to be the more European of the two, but Sydney is more immediately in-your-face-amazing and, like the fickle creatures we are, we have been seduced by its instant delights ;-) On our first day here we woke up itching to get out and see the city. We're staying by Central Station so it's only a fifteen minute walk to the Opera Hous...

It took us nine hours to reach Canberra by bus from Melbourne, which was fine by us as we slept for half the journey and watched the films they put on (the Australian version of 'Free Willy' and 'Indiana Jones') for the rest of it. We only spent two nights in Canberra after the bus operator downright refused to let us book anymore and tried to dissuade us from stopping at all; 'there's nothing to do there' he kept saying. I was hoping he'd be proven wrong - afte...

The journey from Christchurch to Melbourne was a nightmare one: we had a transfer in Sydney and our first plane was delayed by so long that we had just 45 minutes to go through customs, quarantine and immigration, collect our bags, check in for the next flight and get to the boarding gate. We made it - just. We needn't have bothered rushing; we probably would have been quicker catching a later flight. Our second plane ran into some thunderstorms meaning that we h...