http://travels.pulltheskydown.com yet another travel blog... Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:49:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The best way to sum up Byron Bay is to say that I planned on spending 2 or 3 nights here, ended up staying for 10, and still didn't want to leave. Beautiful, small, friendly, great surfing and diving, this place had it all. Also, the hostel I ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/byron-bay So my dreams of diving Vanuatu were dashed, but I think I'm glad they were. The five weeks I now have in Oz aren't nearly enough time to see the east coast – three would have been nuts. The flight from Christchurch to Sydney was uneventful, and I ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/sydney There was little to see on the way up from the Otago region to Christchurch and the Banks Peninsula, but one interesting stop we made was at the Morekai Boulders. These are a group of a couple hundred stone spheres each measuring just over a metre in diameter, and ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/christchurch We took another driving day to get from Invercargill to Dunedin, pulling ahead of a storm that was advancing from the south, exploring until the rain caught up, and then racing north away from it again. Most of the stuff we saw were objectively magnificent, but for some reason ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/dunedin-and-otago The drive to Invercargill, the southermost city on the mainland, was boring, and so was the city. Not bad, just nondescript. Home to a bakery that fed us some amazing pies though. We ended up at Queen's Park, on the outskirts of Invercargill, and ended up finding ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/stewart-island By far the best known of the four sounds in Fiordland National Park is Milford Sound. As a result it's also the most accessible and cheapest, so we hopped on the uber tourist trail and made our way there. The drive in was a snaking hundred kilometers through ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/milford-sound Wanaka was my favourite place in New Zealand. I'm pretty sure it was anyway, though a lot of other places are damn close. (I can make this pronouncement because I've now worked my way over to Australia. Hopefully my posts catch up soon.) There was no ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/wanaka-and-queenstown Our next big stop was to be Fox Glacier, but the road there from Abel Tasman is the legendary west coast highway, so we took a travel day to make sure we could experience the drive during daylight. It was a day well spent. This fabled section of ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/fox-glacier It was really nice to be moving again, especially because after Waitomo we were pretty much done with the north island. Virtually everyone, locals and tourists alike, seems to agree that the south island is the more picturesque of the two, and the place where we should spend most ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/wellington-picton-and-marlborough-sound Waitomo is famous for its caves - they are old, deep, huge, numerous, and most importantly, full of glowworms. I was first introduced to glowworms watching the BBC's Planet Earth series, and I'm sure many of you know what I'm referring to. Waitomo is where all that glowing ... http://travels.pulltheskydown.com/waitomo