Blog 1 Australia and New Zealand -- The Land Down Under

Blog 1 -Australia and New Zealand – the Land Down Under

G’Day Mates,

In a few days, Bill and I will begin what will probably be the last of our long, major trips – a 2-month tour of Tasmania, Australia and New Zealand.  It will also knock off one of Bill’s more important bucket list items – visiting all 7 continents.  (I completed that item with our trip to Antarctica.)

In preparation for our trip, I have been trying to learn a few Australian words and phrases.  Here are some of the more important ones:

            Dunny             toilet

            G’day              hello

            Hooroo            Goodbye, see you later

            Stuppy             can of beer

Bottle-O          liquor store

Mozzie                        mosquito

Brolly              umbrella

Baggered         exhausted

Hungers           hung over

Knackered       tired

Maccas            McDonalds

The lot             An Aussie burger containing meat, lettuce, egg, bacon, pineapple, cheese, beetroot and sauce

Few roos loose in the top paddock                 Someone not very bright or slightly crazy

Dry as a dead dingo’s donga                          To be thirsty, usually for alcohol

And one of my favorites:

Drop your guts                                                To pass wind

We will begin our trip in Melbourne, Australia, with about 2 weeks of traveling on our own.  We will visit Phillips Islands (with its parade of penguins), wineries (if in Australia you have to sample their wines!), and the Great Ocean Highway during our stay in Melbourne.  That will be followed by a visit to Adelaide where again we will visit wineries (no trip is complete without many visits to wineries) and Kangaroo Island. 

We will then board The Ghan, one of the world’s most famous trains, for a 2 ½ day trip through the center of the Outback from Adelaide to Darwin.  Bill is really excited about this part of the trip.  I am hoping to see a lot of kangaroos and no snakes!

From Darwin we will fly back to Melbourne for a day’s rest before flying to Tasmania to begin our pre-tour with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT).  We will be in Tasmania for 8 days where, hopefully, we will see a Tasmania Devil.  But like the Bengal Tigers in India, it is very rare to spot one.  We will keep our fingers crossed.

From Tasmania, we fly back to Melbourne where we will begin our 2-week OAT tour of Australia.  In addition to Melbourne, we will travel to Alice Springs and Uhuru (Ayers Rock), followed by a flight to Cairns and a snorkeling/scuba diving opportunity on the Great Barrier Reef, and ending with 3 days in Sydney.

From Sydney, we fly to Wellington, New Zealand where we will be met by another OAT guide for our 2-week tour of New Zealand.  We will start our tour in Wellington on the North Island, but after 3 days we will fly to the South Island where we will spend 6 days exploring Queensland, Hokitika, the Fox glacier, and Fiordland National Park and Milford Sound.  Our tour then takes us back to the North Island where we will visit Rotorua, the geothermal capital of New Zealand (very much like our Yellowstone National Park) and ending in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand.

At the conclusion of our OAT trip, Bill and I will be staying on in New Zealand.  We will spend 2 days in the Bay of Islands, a group of islands on the northern tip of the North Island, where in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the Maori and the British Crown (more on that when we get to New Zealand).  From the Bay of Islands, we will return to Auckland where we will board the Northern Explorer, a train that travels through the center of the North Island and ends in Wellington.

From Wellington we will fly to Dunedin on the eastern coast of the South Island.  Here we hope to get a glimpse of the rare yellow-eyed penguins and the royal albatross nesting area.

Our final trip will take us back to Auckland where we will take our last tour to visit Hobbiton, made famous in the Lord of Rings and Hobbit films, and the Waitomo Caves, inhabited by thousands of glowworms.  Then it is back to Auckland for our flight home to Denver.

We hope that you will join us as we explore new worlds and cultures.  I will try very hard to keep up to date on this blog, but there will be times when internet services will not be available – especially in Tasmania and the Outback.

Hooroo – until my next blog from Australia!