Byron Bay was very nice-it would have been nicer to spend a bit more time there but as we've booked everywhere in advance (because it's so busy!) we can't really change the dates as often as we'd like. From Byron we went to Surfer's Paradise, which is quite a cool city-there are loads of sky scrapers which all seem to be residential blocks and the beach looked pretty good too. Unfortunately we were staying in a dump of a hostel! It had a nice bar area that showed...

We spent a few nights at Coff's harbour after leaving Sydney-it's quite a nice little sea-side town but very quiet. We stayed at the YHA which wasn't quite what we expected-it was full of kids, including a new born baby, who stormed the pool on a daily basis (not the baby, obviously) which made it as relaxing as Butlins. We hired bikes on our first full day and cycled to the pet dolphin pool, where you can swim with dolphins and seals, but it was fully booked and...

It's safe to say that we've been rather spoilt in Newcastle! We arrived in Newcastle at quarter past 4 on the 23rd December, and tried to call my Auntie Jean to pick us up from the train station, but i couldn't call her number on my phone as I didn't know the international code for Aus. Luckily she spotted us though. On the way back to her house we stopped off at 9 mile beach, but not for long as it started to rain! We had a little wander around the shopping cent...

We looked around for campervans to hire from the 20th until the 2nd of January so that we could drive up to Newcastle for Christmas and then camp out in Manly beach for New Year's eve, but most of the companies are fully booked, and the ones that aren't want almost 3 times more than we paid for the last one we had just because it's over Christmas. We've moved to the Railway Square YHA hostel which is also very nice, it's only a few minutes away from the other one...

We went to pick up the campervan from the airport, as that's where all the car pick-ups were in New Zealand, only to find that the jucy rental station was a few blocks down from our hostel on the tram! So we took te bus back to town, which was about a two hour round trip so we could have lunch at the airport. We walked to the correct location from the bus stop only to find that we didn't actually have a jucy van!! Even though we received a quite and gae all of ou...