Hooray for Virgin Atlantic! We missed our original flights from Sydney to Christchurch and as a result Air New Zealand kindly cancelled all of our subsequent flights with them. Visiting Virgin Atlantic (our Round the World ticket issuer) in Sydney to see what they could do about reinstating our cancelled tickets, they not only reinstated our cancelled tickets and changed the dates to suit but actually provided us with a replacement flight from Sydney to Christchurch for the one we had missed. All free of charge. Absolute legends! The serving of frozen fruit, broken entertainment system and rude hostesses on…
It took me 8 weeks, but I came to the conclusion that Australia is rather large (much like the road trains, a tenuous link but I wanted to include that photo). Kazakhstan is big, India is Big, Mongolia is big, I know, I’ve driven across all of them. Yet they are mere minions compared to Australia. All bar one of my posts about Australia have been about specific places or events. I’ve given very little wordage to life on the road in between. And trust me, there was a lot of road. We covered over 13,000 km in two months…
It seems so long ago and quite irrelevant now but our week in Sydney before moving onto New Zealand still deserves a mention. We arrived back in Sydney a day before Dan and Holly who’d returned to the UK for 3 weeks. Once again they graciously put us up / put up with us for over a week while we tried to sell Matilda, our trusty camper van. Although she’d treated us well for some 11,000 km, you may recall she gave us problems leading up and during our time in Melbourne. I’d managed to fix that but she was…
The attentive amongst you will know that I’m way behind with this blog. Something to do with enjoying myself too much to sit down and write. Either that or laziness. When I do something though, I do like to do it properly, and for my sake as much as yours I am trying to make this blog as complete as I can and that includes trying to keep it in chronological order. That said, something happened to me a few days ago that I just have to share with you ahead of time, so bear with me as we jump…
Any of you recognise these two? I used to work with both of these chaps in Madrid. Michael moved back to Australia about 4 years ago and Antoon, by another coincidence of timing, was visiting from Holland. They were waiting on Willem, another ex-colleague who was going to join them on a road trip up the east coast. Michael was kind enough to put us up, prepare a multitude of steak on the barbie and show us round town on the Saturday evening. On top of that, having just about made it to their (very nice) house in a rather…
Our time in the South was rushed, cramming in a lot into a short space, much like this post in fact. Heading south from the Red Centre we covered many miles of nothingness. This was in fact the most barren section of the outback that we covered, with what limited vegetation there was standing less than knee high. Gradually as we approached Coober Pedy we were greeted by loads of random high piles of dirt and ancient looking mining machinery scattered about the place. Coober Pedy claims to be Australia’s Opal capital, but I was surprised to learn that there…
I never thought I’d see my name printed in the same paragraph as Steven Fry’s. I know my writing is improving (although my spelling and grammer isn’t) but this is an honor. 🙂 What am I on about? Just another free plug in the hyperlink tennis match that Alan and I seem to have going on at the moment, alan-wright.blogspot.com and while I’m at it another free emotion 😉
Before taking a good look at a detailed map of Australia I was under the impression that Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayres Rock) were very close to each other. I was surprised to learn that this big rock was actually 500 km away, but then I suppose that in Australian Outback terms that is actually just down the road. It was well worth the journey though and the lonely barren 500k just served to add to the feeling of how remote it really is (boo to all those who fly in). Despite the fact that it is just a big…