Finally made it to Sydney (hence the Australian flag). It’s a big shock to the system after the slow-paced, tranquil, sedate cities of New Zealand! We’re staying in the Glebe YHA until the weekend, a little out of the centre of the city, and will spend a few days in Coogee, just along the coast. We were couped up inside yesterday as the heavens poured all day long but we made it out this morning, walking across the city to view the obvious sites: the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. ...
After the progress we made on our first ever day of skiing, our second day was a lot less encouraging. After learning the basics of stopping and turning on a gentle slope, we realised that we weren’t as good as we thought we were when skiing down a steeper slope. We were itching to try the much steeper chairlift slopes but were still not good enough. Impatient and disenchanted, we could no longer be arsed and went home. In a huff.
Quick disclaimer: we’ve been in New Zealand where everything...
Had a quiet couple of days in Dunedin, picked up a sore throat, endured the Bus Driver From Hell who seemed to think his job was to point out every single farm or sheep throughout the Central Otago Region throughout a five-hour journey in one monotonous tone, did the Speights brewery tour and then came back to Queenstown. We’re now in a huge YHA full of stupidly-rich Japanese kids that are indefinitely living here and have been reportedly skiing/snowboarding for the last three months!
We did...
We’re now in Queenstown, the bungy/jetboat/extreme capital of the Southern Hemisphere after a mad week of Kiwi Experience. Against better judgement we did a 12000ft tandem skydive on Sunday morning, freefalling for 45 seconds. Very strange feeling that you just can’t describe but, despite being scared stupid, I want to do another just so that I can know what to expect and appreciate things like seeing the plane disappear above you so quickly. Amazing feeling.
Far too much to summarise here...
We’ve finally left Wellington so I’ll have no excuse for being so slack in posting to this thing. It was a strange feeling waving goodbye to the place - we’d made friends, had cool jobs and it was very tempting to stay but it was time to move on. It was beautiful day for the ferry trip across Cook Strait: the sea was flat and the sun was shining. The highlight of the trip was a young German boy breaking his glasses and then running to his mother crying (what we could hear) “my glasses are...
