Tomorrow I’m off to NZ with John. We’re spending a week in and around Wellington , and then on the 30th we’re off to the South Island to stay in one of John’s friend’s holiday home in Wanaka, and then on the 4th we head to Auckland to spend some time with John’s Dad and John’s Auckland based friends. I’m back in Sydney on 11 January.

I’ll be reverting to my UK mobile phone number while I’m in NZ.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Australia appear to approve of me … they’ve given me a new 4 year business visa which enables me to stay beyond the initial year I planned. I got a call on Monday to say I had been approved and then I had to hand in my passport for it to be evidence – I’m running out of spare passport pages with all these visas!

 I didn’t apply for it necessarily to stay out here any longer, rather my current visa only allows me to work for one organisation for up to 6 months, and ARTD wanted me to stay longer. So I no longer need to worry about being unemployed, I’m back to work on 14th January.

After a brief visit to Brisbane, Mum, Dad and I caught the tilt train north through Queensland to Hervey Bay. We mistakenly thought that te tilt train would be a fast train but we were totally wrong. It was designed to go fast but it wasn’t allowed to. We did the trip in the same length of time it would have taken us to drive there, if not longer. Hervey Bay wasn’t up to much, but we had good accommodation with a pool and we were really there to chill out and relax after the relentless touring we had done over the previous week.

From Hervey Bay we went to Fraser Island, the worlds largest sand island. The island is home to the purest breed of dingos, and we came across a dingo puppy on the beach. It’s also home to deadly snakes, and plenty of insects to scare the life out of Mum. On one of the days we did a tour of the island in a 4×4 coach to see all the main beauty spots on the island, including Lake McKenzie, a freshwater lake with pure white sand – see picture.

Mum and Dad have been out to Sydney to see John and I. After a couple of relaxing days in Sydney we headed off to Tasmania. Mum, Dad and I started our trip in the capital of Hobart. We booked into our B&B and went for a walk into the city centre and towards the harbour. We stopped for lunch at a cafe on route, and whilst there I pulled out my Lonely Planet to check out what it advised us to do in Hobart. In advised to walk around the streets we’d just come through and have lunch in the very cafe we were sitting in!

The next day John flew in from Sydney and we travelled to Port Arthur, where second time convicts were jailed. Although clearly a very grim place to have been in the 19thC it is a really nice place to be today. In the evening we went back for a ghost tour – we didn’t see any. We stayed in convict built B&B cottages over night and then travelled up the east coast to the Freycinet Peninsula. We had a wooden lodge in the national park and the main building of the complex was in a fantastic location over looking a beautiful bay. After we arrived in the national park we walked up to a lookout over Wineglass Bay – see picture.

Tasmania was really beautiful and John and I plan to go back to explore a little more of it in the future.

A group of us went to see David Beckham’s LA Galaxy play Sydney FC. It was actually an exciting game and included a David Beckham top left hand corner penalty. Beckham injured his weak ankle as a result from being the victim of a bad tackle, but stayed on the pitch to the end of the game despite clearly being injured. Unfortuately we left the stadium before he removed his shirt.