Personal
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After the somewhat disappointing end to our boat tour from Airlie Beach to the Whitsundays, we licked our wounds and headed back on the road towards Cairns. Our next stop was at a very nice Bluewater Park Rest Area – a free campground on the outskirts of the boringly named Townsville. It was pretty nice staying in a place with mango trees growing everywhere: we did pick a few, to try, although the local ants did their best to aggressively protect what they apparently considered to be their property. By this point we felt we'd finally broken the back of…
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We continued our path northwards from Rockhampton, and did a big chunk of the drive to Mackay. We stopped for lunch at a rest area in Marlborough, which ended up being a great place to take a break. About 40km south of Mackay we found a place to stay via CamperMate in a place called Ilbilbie. It looked fairly non-descript from the road… … but we soon realised we'd struck campervan gold: the farmer lets people park in a big, flat field down by the river on their property and charges A$10 for the privilege. No power, no toilets, no…
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We arrived late Thursday morning in Brisbane: the flight took 1.5 hours, but – due to the fact Queensland doesn't observe daylight saving – we arrived at 11:40 after an 11:10 departure from Sydney. When we originally budgeted time for Australia we scheduled 5 or so days for Sydney (which were eaten into by us extending our stay in New Zealand) and then about 10 days to get from Brisbane to Cairns (flying into Brisbane on the 2nd, flying out of Cairns on the 13th). When we came to book a campervan we realized we didn't have as much time…
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As we'd extended our stay in New Zealand, we knew we only had one day to enjoy the fine city of Sydney. The flight from Queenstown was fairly short (3.5 hours) but really pretty: both the take-off and the landing were spectacular. On arrival we were happy – given the fact we're 5 people with quite a few bags – to be able to get an UberXL from the airport to our Airbnb in Glebe. It took some work to find the car – the Uber app does a horrible job of suggesting a workable pick-up spot at Sydney airport,…
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After spending most of the day in Christchurch, last Wednesday, we headed towards Lake Tekapo. Much of the drive was fairly flat and straight, so we made good progress despite starting out late. As we got closer to the lake the weather set in again, though – it started to rain fairly heavily – so we opted to stay in a place called Fairlie, which was half an hour closer than the lake. Musterers High Country Accommodation ended up being a great place to stay: when we woke – thankfully to much better weather – we found ourselves basically on…
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As much as I hate compressing so much into a single post, I don't see any other option if I'm to bring you all up-to-date. So please accept my apologies for not doing justice to New Zealand's absolutely incredible south island. In this post we'll talk about the first part of the journey through the south island, from Picton to Christchurch. I'll cover the journey from Christchurch to Queenstown in the next post. Here's a quick view of our journey southwards, for context. Our adventure on the south island started the Saturday before last. We took the 2.45pm Interislander ferry…
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We arrived in Wellington on Friday just in time for lunch. We parked – based on the recommendations on CamperMate, as ever – at the Barnett Street car park. Parking a motorhome for 24 hours down by the wharf in Wellington costs just $30 NZD. I left my family for an hour to meet up with Jason Howden for a quick lunch at Mojo Waterfront, and then met back up with them afterwards to go and visit the Weta Cave. This is a nice tour over at the Weta Workshop that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the company and the…
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It's been an exciting week, here in New Zealand. Not only does the country have a new coalition government (which – somewhat controversially – doesn't include the party who finished in first place in the recent election), but the polls have just closed on the Bird of the Year contest (my vote goes to the Kea, because it has an awesome name). Crazy days. After leaving Auckland and then seeing Waitomo on Monday and Hobbiton on Tuesday of last week, we arrived on Tuesday evening in Rotorua. (I can't believe I'm somehow now nearly a week behind on posts… there's…
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A big thanks to Mike Burke from Aurecon for pointing us at Hobbiton (among other places). I suspect we'd have made it there anyway – it seems somehow inevitable – but it was certainly from Mike that I first heard about this place. It would be a shame to visit New Zealand and not experience something of Middle Earth. I'm not about to spend our brief time here tracking down the various locations that were used to shoot The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but for sure we had to do something. After LoTR was filmed, the original…
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After a fantastic weekend catching up with The Joneses (Sean, Sharon & their kids) in Auckland, we headed out on our own in the motorhome. We drove south to Waitomo, with the aim of visiting its famous glowworm caves. (We'd seen them featured in the first series of the BBC's excellent Planet Earth.) It took a touch over 2.5 hours to get there, so we stopped for lunch at a petrol station on the way (ah, life on the open road). On arriving at the caves, we found a few different options for tours. As it was already 3pm, we…