Australia

Mar 3 – To Oz

We were up at an ungodly hour this morning to catch the bus to the airport. Our flight was at 7:30am and we had to be there about 2hrs before so we caught the bus at 5am. Our bags were the right weight (yay) and we got on the flight no problem. The flight was uneventful but we were a little delayed arriving. We got through customs no problem but then the bags were delayed coming off the carousel. A whole bunch of other aircrafts had arrived around the same time and there were several huge lines to get out of the baggage zone, we still had to go through bio-screening. Since we had been hiking in NZ we had dirt on our shows and the Australians are as strict as the New Zealanders in controlling foreign organic substances entering the country. We then had to line up to get our shoes cleaned. We didn't get out into the public area until close to 2 hours after our flight had landed. The poor Dutch couple, Monqiue and Ingo, who had been so kind to pick us up from the airport and offer us a place to stay had been waiting for us for over an hour. We felt so bad even though there wasn't much we could have done about it. They drove us to their place where we got to meet Snowy and Juneau who are two Samoyd-Retrievers. They are beautiful! Snowy is 3 and is bigger than Juneau who is 2. Snowy's father was a retriever and looks much more like a Golden Retriever than Juneau whose father was Samoyed. They are both lovely. We had breakfast and spent most of the day chatting with Monique and Ingo. They had plans to go for dinner with some friends of theirs and invited us to join them. We went along with them to an Italian restaurant that had good prices and huge portions. Beau and I shared a pizza and had to take some home for leftovers. Our day started early and was annoying for a little while but ended with new friends.

Mar 4

We slept well last night finally a night in a real bed. We had some breakfast then Beau and Ingo took the dogs for a walk. Monique and Ingo went out for the afternoon to a friends birthday party. Beau and I spent the afternoon doing some research on campervans and set up a few meets. We were pretty lazy most of the afternoon. Once Monique and Ingo returned we went with them to badminton. Every Sunday night there is drop in badminton at the local rec center. We played a game against Monqiue and Ingo as well as played with one other random people. It was a lot of fun. I don't think I've played badminton since the cottage with Elaine, Mike and Kate.

Mar 5 – The HelpX

After breakfast we finished repacking our bags, we were leaving some stuff at Monique and Ingo's, and headed out to catch the train to go to our HelpX for the week. We had been doing some journey planing to figure out our route but as it turns out the schedule we were looking at was for the next train station, not the Diamond Creek one so we missed the train. The next train wasn't for another 40mins so we were a little behind schedule by the time we got on the train. It took about an hour to get into Melbourne CBD. It's quite the metropolis and I am looking forward to exploring it later this week. We got off the train at one of the downtown stations and then hopped on a tram headed for Kew like the HelpX lady told us. We got off at the specified stop then headed down the road. We found the house no problem and could see she needed a lot of help in her yard. We knocked on the door and to our dismay there was no answer. We knocked several times and waited around for about 45min before getting fed up. We couldn't understand it, while we were about 30min late since we missed our train she had specified the times to come and there was a car parked in the driveway. Frustrated we headed back towards the main road. An older gentleman started talking to us asking us where we were from, he knew where we were supposed to be staying. He said there had been two girls staying there recently but he thought the host was a bit of an odd duck. No kidding. Monique and Ingo had given us a mobile phone that one of their previous backpackers had left behind so we bought a SIM card for it and attempted to activate it. I spent an hour on the phone to some moron at Telstra while he tried to verify my identity. Apparently one international passport wasn't good enough for him he needed another form photo identification and it couldn't be my drivers license! Fortunately I have two passports so he finally was able to activate my SIM card although he did say it could take 2-24hrs to become active. We had been hoping to call Monique or Ingo and double check it was okay if we returned to their place. They had already invited us back for after the HelpX. Feeling a little defeated and hungry we stopped into Subway and split a footlong. Then we bought a week long train pass since we want to explore the city this week and we figured we'd be at Monique and Ingo's. We took the tram back into town and through the use of wifi and skype we confirmed the cell was working and bought some credit for it. We got in touch with Ingo who said it was no problem for us to come back to their place tonight. What a relief! We then decided to get in touch with some of the campervan people who were in town and headed off the St Kilda to see a camper van. The van turned out to be a dud. It had a bad set up, hadn't been looked after properly, some strange gimicks with the driving and was smelly. It was good to check it out though since it gives us something to compare it too. We also set up with another couple to see their van tomorrow. We headed back into the CBD and were tired, sore and hungry. I was pretty fed up with hauling my pack around all day and can see how an extra 10kg can really affect your body. We had dinner at an Indian restaurant that was really good, cheap and right across the street from the train station. We then caught a train back to Diamond Creek and turned up back at Monique and Ingo's around 10pm. We hung out with them for a little while, while watching Seinfeld then headed to bed.

Wellington

I know I'm behind on my blog but for some reason its harder to keep up here.  I'll up date you on more recent events and try to post the rest of our South Island travels soon!

Jan 24 – Christchurch to Wellington

We took the morning to explore the little town of Akaroa. It's a cute town on the water. We didn't have too long since we had to drive the Christchurch to catch our flights. Once back in the Christchurch area we realized we were in the same area as where Beau and I house sat. We had come full circle and had lunch at the pub that we went to the day everyone arrived. After returning the camper we were shuttled to the airport and got checked in. Elaine and Shane's flight wasn't for several hours after ours. We said our goodbyes to Mom and Dad, who we won't be seeing for awhile and our see you soons to Elaine and Shane who we will. The flight was probably one of the shortest I've ever been on. We arrived in Wellington and had about an hour to kill before we got picked up by Dan and Gabrielle. We had arranged to stay with them through a program called Help Exchange. They hosted us in exchange for us  helping out with some work. In this case Gabrielle runs a charity program called CanBead which teaches cancer patients to make jewelry. We were to help her put together some of the beading kits. She also is an avid jewelry maker and makes her own glass beads. As you can imagine I was pretty excited to learn about bead making. After they picked us up we grabbed some groceries, we were alternating cooking nights. We had dinner and then Gabrielle showed me her bead room while Dan and Beau commiserated over being partnered to bead addicts.

Jan 25 – Wellington and Te Papa

It was nice to sleep in a full sized bed again! We slept well but not too late. Yesterday when we picked up groceries we forgot to get breakfast food so we ate a banana and hopped a bus down town. We walked along the Wellington water front which is an odd mix of shipping, sports and restaurants. We discovered a little take away restaurant that Gabrielle had told us about and had coffee and wild venison burgers for brunch! After eating we continued our walk along the water front and went in NZ national museum Te Papa. We wandered the second floor which was about the earth and animals as well as went outside to the museum gardens.  Then we went upstairs to the third floor which was about the animals of NZ including extinct ones too.   After museuming out for the day we walked over the Cuba Street which is a pedestrian only road. There were some interesting people about including two guys juggling. We got another coffee and muffin to snack on. We then went into a sports store and bought our selves some really cheap snorkels. We head back on the bus so we were back in time to start dinner. It's our turn to cook, we made curry. We then got to work on some HelpExing duties, I put together some bead kits and Beau tried to make up a new instruction sheet which didn't go very well since Windows kept thwarting him!

The national museum Te Papa

Jan 26 – Back to Te Papa

We had a pretty late start to the day even though I had set an alarm, we slept through it. After breakfast we took the bus down town. We started off doing some recon work at the Warehouse for camping things. We then went back to Te Papa and explored the 4^th floor which had New Zealand history. There was information on the Maori, the native people of NZ, and the European settlers as well as present day immigrants. We got foot sore a lot faster today than yesterday and we ready to call it quits fairly early. On our walk to our bus we stopped into a few outdoor stores to check out more camping gear. We were pretty hungry at this point and split a small sub. We caught our bus back towards Dan and Gabrielle's but got off the bus at the mall to check out their nearby warehouse and pick up a couple of bits and pieces from the grocery store. When we arrived back at the house sushi dinner preparations were in full swing and we had yummy sushi for dinner, although it was missing the fish and seafood since Dan is allergic. We also got lucky with some chocolate lava cake for dessert. After all the delicious food Gabrielle said she'd show me how to make glass beads!! It was super cool. You use a blow torch and melt glass rods then carefully wrap the molten glass around a metal rod. It was awesome and there are all sorts of neat techniques to make unique patterns. I want a blow torch now!

Jan 27 – Parliament and Botanical Gardens

We awoke to some hideous weather this morning it was rainy and windy. We decided to wait out the weather in hopes it would change. Beau worked on his website while I made a necklace. Low and behold it got nice and sunny. We took advantage of the change in weather and headed into town to the Parliament buildings and the Botanical Gardens. We arrived at Parliament shortly after one of it's many free tours had departed so we decided to head to the botanical gardens first and hoped to catch one of the tours later on. We wandered through the gardens and while they were nice, we thought Christchurch's were much better although Wellington did have a lovely tropical green house. In the green house there was a tropical pond with guppies, platties and swordtails. We had enough time to get back to Parliament before the 4pm tour departed. We got a tour of the three main buildings, two of which had undergone severe reconstruction over the years due to some major fires. They also had to redo the foundations to be able to with stand earthquakes as Wellington straddles a fault line. Our tour was informative and relatively interesting, I now know more about the NZ parliament buildings than I do about the Canadian ones! We headed back to the house and during one of our bus changes we ran into Gabrielle on her way home from work and so got picked up by Dan. For dinner we made a really good baked bean burrito dish. The rest of the evening I made some pendants out of the beads I had made and talked beads with Gabrielle. Then we had the unhappy job of getting packed up again.

Looking down on the Wellington harbour from the gardens