Photos from Uluru and Kata Tjuta

A quick update before Laura and I hop on a boat and finish up our scuba diving certification course for a couple of days. We’ve uploaded photo albums from our first two days in the Red Center of Australia — Uluru and Kata Tjuta. We really do have some fun highlights to share from our week-long adventure in the outback (some of which don’t even mention flies), but they’re not quite ready for public consumption. Our brains are a little waterlogged from two days in the pool doing exciting things like pretending our air tanks have run out of air, doing underwater acrobatics to remove and replace our BCDs and weight belts, and trying to decipher the hand signals from our PADI instructor Chris (almost as difficult as understanding his Irish accent).

We’ll get the rest of the Outback photos posted when we’re back on dry land, as well as some of the happier highlights from our 4WD adventure. Stay tuned!

Bushwhacked

Our five days camping in the “bush” of Australia’s aptly named Red Center were hard. Very hard. At one particular low point, Dustin turned to me and said, “I’d like to take the Outback out back and shoot it.” We had thoughts like this fairly often. Among the various enemies we were battling were sleep deprivation (a 5:30am wake-up call was considered a “sleep in”); mozzies, which were especially annoying at night while we slept under the stars, unprotected in a “swag” (basically a padded sleeping bag); heat (it was summer in the desert after all); and water (thanks to the floods the week before, the ground was super-saturated, resulting in heavy dews at night. We literally woke up one night soaking wet in our swags).

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G'day, Mate!

After an amazing five weeks in New Zealand, Laura and I hopped a flight from Christchurch (on the south island) to Auckland (on the north), then another to Sydney in the Land Down Under. We arrived late on a Friday night with only a few vague ideas about what we wanted to see and do during our month-long stay in Australia, a mode of travel we’re both starting to get pretty comfortable with. Our four days in Sydney included some great walks, a few scenic ferry rides, a ridiculous afternoon at the Four Seasons spa, one very quirky B&B and another “boutique” hotel (we are *so* over that word), a bit of post-Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade chaos, one very grumpy walk through Chinatown in search of breakfast, birthday tequila shots, and even a bit of culture at the Sydney Opera House.

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Sweet As

Greetings from a freakishly soggy Alice Springs! We arrived to gray skies this morning and learned that it’s been pouring here for the last 5 days. Everything is flooded and the normally 100+ degree temps have been in the 60’s. We’re about to head off on a 5-day 4WD tour of the “Red Center,” but before we go totally offline we wanted to close out with a few final thoughts on our month in New Zealand.

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"Um, Dustin, Where's Laura?"

Our last big adventure in New Zealand was a really fun day of rafting the Rangitata river gorge deep in the Canterbury plain of the south island. The section of river we paddled included two sets of “class 5” rapids (which in laymen’s terms translates as “you’ll probably wet yourself when you paddle this rapid but technically it’s still safe.”) The only rapid more dangerous than class 5 is (you guessed it!) class 6, which you paddle only when you have a death wish and/or gills.

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New Zealand's Down Under

The deep south tour took us from Queenstown to Milford Sound (and Gunn’s Camp, a lovely little spot which you’ve no doubt already read about), down to Invercargill and on a ferry for an overnight on Stewart Island, then back up the Catlins Coast to Dunedin, finally looping back into Queenstown. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, but one that we’re glad we took!

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Milf(j)ord Sound

For a portion of our New Zealand tour that we almost skipped (the “deep south”), the southern loop turned out to be one of our favorite parts of the trip! There weren’t a heck of a lot of funny backpacker stories to share, just some incredible scenery, a few more million sandflies, and some looooong days of riding on the Stray bus.

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Love in the Time of a Head Cold, the Frayzhe Edition

We’re wrapping up our month-plus in New Zealand by spending our last full day here online (two computers at once!) at a computer lab in Christchurch. This is all well and good, except for the fact that outside these dreary lab walls, Christchurch is experiencing its sunniest, warmest day of the summer. If we weren’t subject to the NO COMPLAINING EVER rule, I might whine a little about this, but instead I will go about blogging and emailing with a smile on my face. :) (—-> See, that’s me smiling!)

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By George, It's a Glass-y-er!

As if New Zealand didn’t already have enough going for it — incredible jagged mountains, crystal blue seas surrounded by lush green islands, steaming volcanic rivers from the center of the earth, giant fern forests, deep caverns lined with glowing worms, Flight of the Conchords — it has to go ahead and throw a glacier surrounded by a temperate rain forest into the mix. We spent a full day climbing up the Franz Josef glacier, and though both of us had seen it before, there was something about being on the ice for a full 6 hours surrounded by blue ice lit up by the miraculous appearance of the sun (they don’t call it a rain forest for nothin’!) that made this a pretty special day.

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Travel Tech Talk

A recent comment by Nathan Fisher reminded me that we’re overdue for another exciting installment of Travel Tech Talk with Dustin. [Cue theme music intro] So in honor of Valentine’s Day (in the US, at least), please enjoy this very romantic and riveting geek update!

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