Hello everyone, Well I made it to Wellington although it feels like I've just made it to Antarctica - it's freezing here! I took a 12-hour train from Auckland yesterday, it left at 7:30am and got here about 7:45pm. The train ride sure was long but it was great - I really enjoyed it! It was an epic 423-mile trip across the whole interior of the North Island, and I saw pretty much every kind of scenery possible - the cities, volcanoes, mountains, really lush grass...

Hello from New Zealand! Well I made it here, it feels a bit surreal to be on the other side of the world to home, I couldn't really get much further. The weather is a bit grim - rain non-stop on Monday and Tuesday - a bit of a shock coming from Fiji! But apparently summer arrives very quickly at the start of November so I'm looking forward to that. I have a week booked at a backpackers in a nice suburb of Auckland called Ponsonby, it has plenty of trendy shops, ...

Bula for the last time from Fiji! I am back in Nadi, near to the airport, and have a free day before I fly out to New Zealand tomorrow afternoon. I have done some serious washing this morning, my rucksack smelt rather nasty but all my clothes are now sunning themselves in the Fiji sun! And I took some drastic action with my sandals - they were still stinking from a trip through a pig farm en route to a local village in Waya Island, they would never have got into...

Bula, or hello from Fiji! I arrived here at 5 am on Tuesday morning and have had a whirlwind of a time over the past two days! I joined up with a bus tour of the main island of Viti Levu on Wednesday morning and we are currently along the South coast nearish to the capital, Suva. It sure is a bit of a culture shock coming here from the States - it is far more primitive than I imagined, but I am really loving it - everyone is so laid back, it is a far cry from Lo...

Hello from Los Angeles, I arrived on Friday afternoon from San Francisco and have been staying in a nice hostel in Santa Monica. Santa Monica itself is great, the beach is beautiful and there are plenty of up-market shops and cafes along '3rd Street Promenade' - the place to be in Santa Monica. I ventured out into the rest of LA yesterday, on a tour of the city - it is amazingly vast, in fact LA is composed of 88 smaller cities so getting from one to another in ...