After picking up our car for the next month we drove south from Christchurch on the start of our road trip round the southern coast. We followed the coastal road to our first port of call Omaru in the hope of seeing some rare penguins. That afternoon we went up to the Blue Penguin Colony visitors center and through an organised viewing we saw blue penguins coming in from a day feeding at sea. They are tiny about 30cm tall and surf up the beach on waves at dusk th...

So after our four flights we made it back to the Western world in the form of Auckland in the north island. Walking out of the airport into a cold rainy day and fresh air was the best. Don't get me wrong Asia had been amazing but some cold fresh air was like a piece of heaven and a lot like home!. Auckland is a nice enough city although we didn't get much chance to see it all. We did wander around the harbour salivating at all the lovely restaurants and just...

When we arrived in Balikpapan,Kalimantan our luggage hadn't been put in the plane in Makassar so we had a 24 hour nervous wait to see if it would arrived, which to our relief it did the next day. From there we made our way North up the coast to Kutai National Park in the hope of seeing orang-utans. We had three days in a remote wooden lodge that only had electricity for three hours in the evening. As usual our bad luck with seeing wildlife prevailed and we only m...

We had our last five days in Bangkok where we celebrated our birthdays. A couple of friends from our old work were in town so we hooked up with them as well. for Fred's birthday we went drinking on the Khao San Road....Thai whiskey of course! After a few buckets we had a wander and ended up with Simon treating (!!??) us to deep friend crickets....yep even i had a bite and surprisingly they weren't too bad! They were washed down with a fab thai curry and a few...

We only had a day in Singapore but it seemed like a really cool city, immaculately clean and full of shops - my kind of place! From there it was onto Bali to stay in Benoa where we had two weeks with Fred's family. We all had a really lovely time exploring the island, coupled with lots of eating, drinking, laughing (thanks to Saj) and endless rounds of the shop game and i-spy in the car (thanks to me - wish i'd never suggested it!!). Bali was an incredibly bea...