Note to self, skip Auckland next time

I can't quite put my finger on it, but Auckland isn't agreeing with me. Maybe it's the traffic pollution here (surprisingly bad) or the mentality of the drivers (surprisingly aggressive) that's bugging me. Downtown is being churned up for some pavement renovations but even without those it strikes me as a characterless place. There's not even much to do around the city for that matter. Ho hum. My advice to others, fly into Christchurch or Wellington if you can and skip Auckland.

On Thursday I'm leaving the big smoke on a backpacker bus type thing. Should be interesting :-)

New country, new number

Now that I'm in Kiwi land, it's +64 211 173431

Am currently battling a cold (and losing). Ughhhhh. Snot-tastic.

End of the line (or is it?)

64 days after leaving Perth I've finally made it to the promised land. Or Sydney as some like to call it.

The weather is a bit Brit like for my liking at the moment though! Rain, rain and yet more rain...

If the weather holds out on Sunday I'll do a final fling day trip over to Canberra to say goodbye to the old girl *sniff* (the bike that is...)

And I would walk 500 ride 10,000 miles...

Hurrah, I finally passed the 10,000 mile mark (16,000km to those of you in metric land) the other day. To celebrate I visited various BIG things (well, they were on the way down the east coast, I didn't make a detour especially to see them.... well not much :)

Update: Google seem to have cottoned onto the fact you could have unlimited driving route destinations in the past and have now capped the number of destinations. Curses! I've changed the map link on the right to show the places instead. Not as funky as the route but it'll have to do for now.

A life on the open sea

As you can see I survived the sailing adventure in the Whitsundays :-) I ended up being with a group of 15 Americans who are all studying down at one of the Uni's in Sydney. Took me a while to remember everyones name but I got there with one night left to spare. Funnily enough they seemed to have no problems remembering my name...

Upon returning I wobbled (sea legs not yet become land legs...) down to Sarina for the night where the locals attempted to persuade me to see the worlds smallest sugar refinery (they failed).

Next up a quick night in Rockhampton (beef capital of Australia allegedly... every town claims to be the capital of something it seems) and after that a short stopover in Rainbow Beach with a bunch of rowdy Cockatoos.

As all this riding is clocking up the miles, it was time to get the bike serviced yet again so Brisbane became the stop for that task. I managed to use my innate sense of direction to find the bike shop without a proper map and in the rain. I impressed myself!

The current mileage is showing just under 16,000km (10,000 miles) done to date. Not too shabby if I say so myself. :)

I'm currently in beautiful Byron Bay being forced to watch humpback whales migrating north, dolphins, sharks and turtles playing around in the sea. On the move again tomorrow but as usual, no idea where the next stop will take me to...