From Waitomo, we drove to Rotorua, famous for its geothermal landscape - geysers, mineral pools, stinky hot mud pools. It has it all. In Maori legend, Rotorua owes its thermal attractions to the Te Arawa tribe leader who stood on Mt Tongaririo in order to claim the surrounding land. He almost died at the top from the icy wind and cold so to save himself, he sent a prayer to his sisters who responded by sending fire demons to his aid. These demons cut across the o...

We arrived in New Zealand and Auckland airport after a good 3 hour flight from Sydney and had the smoothest immigration, customs and luggage experience ever! We then headed to Jucy to pick up our hire car and after sorting all the paperwork, getting the ski rack on the roof and collecting the hundreds of free maps, we headed across Auckland to North Shore and Takapuna, where we stayed with Paul for a couple of days. We spent the first day on errands - money exch...

From Wilson's Prom, we made our way across the rest of Victoria, staying at Lakes Entrance and a lovely new campground and catching up with Lorraine and Ken. We had some dodgy as well as lovely weather so we chilled out sunbathing, walking, eating delicious vanilla slices and apple tarts and generally having a lovely time before we headed further up the coast to Merimbula, Bermagui and Narooma and our final state - New South Wales! All these places are nice seasi...

Our first stop in Victoria was Portland...and we were met with winds and rain! Welcome to the rainy state. It's about 20 degrees cooler and a lot rainier in this neck of the woods. It was the first time we have seen rain for 2 mths! Portland is a large-ish seaside town with nothing much to see or do when the weather is a bit rubbish and as there was no surf either (surprise surprise) we only stayed one night . However the great thing was we saw a koala very close...

The journey in to Coober Pedy is a strange one as 30 km before you reach town, you start to see mounds of earth and holes all over the landscape, all sizes and the closer you get to town the more there are...some people say it looks like you are visiting the moon. In actual fact, it is an opal mining town and anyone can look for opals if you buy a plot of land. We were very tired from the long drive so had a pizza and then went to bed. It was very cold during the...