Last Sunday John and I were tasked with entertaining a couple of people visting John’s company – Raymond from Hong Kong and Richard from the USA. In order that the task did not eat in to our valuable golf time we offered to take them to play golf. Given we represented four different continents we dubbed it the inter-continental golf tournament.

Raymond had never been on a golf course. In Hong Kong the fees just to be on the waiting list of a golf club are huge, and being a member costs c4 million HK$ a year. So the average Joe, or Raymond, only gets to play at driving ranges. He was totally thrilled to be on an actual golf course and not even slightly daunted. Admittedly he wasn’t great to start with, but towards then end he was hitting some pretty good shots - even if he had an inventive swing.

After golf John took Richard to have his photograph taken with a Koala in Darling Harbour and then they and Raymond went for a few drinks at a bar in the harbour. They were pretty taken with the Australian women walking past apparently.

On Thursday I experienced my first summer birthday … it was as wet and cold, not unlike a UK February day. However the day was still nice - it commenced with a phone call with Carolyn, then Mum and Dad and then Michelle. When I got to work I discovered some lovely presents in my inbox, and then just before lunch some flowers and chocolates arrived from John. One of my colleagues took me out for a birthday lunch and then another colleague went out to buy a cake and we had afternoon tea in the office. Just before I left work for the day another bunch of flowers arrived from John’s Dad and his family.

Fortunately the sun came out on Saturday for my picnic at Bronte beach. My friends Marian, Simon, Nicola and Steve joined John and I and we all left feeling over full from grazing on the food all afternoon. 

Following the success of our Blue Mountains trip it took little effort to persuade John to head out of town for another weekend in the country. This time it was a place called Windsor, which is an old ex convict town north west of Sydney. I’d like to tell you that Windsor was delightful, but we couldn’t tell you either way as we didn’t leave the resort we were staying in. They served great food, had great amenities, including a golf course, a swimming pool, a spa, a sauna and a tennis court – plus they had free newspapers. So we were royally entertained the whole weekend.

We played golf on both days and I lost more balls than I have in total since I started playing because the edges of the golf course were surrounded by dense wilderness with signs saying “Danger, snakes, enter at own risk” – it didn’t seem like a risk worth taking! On the Saturday the golf course was full of stag parties, so there was lots of fairly drunk, bare chested men roaming around, many with brightly coloured wigs.

However, the highlight of the trip was stopping at a train station on the way there and back in a town called ‘Schofields’ – although I’m guessing the area is a little chavvy, which is clearly not in keeping with the name.

Everyone back in Blighty seems to be remarking on what good weather I must be enjoying in Sydney …  well I’m not! The weather has been terrible. Since we got back from NZ it has rained most days and has rarely gone above 23 degrees. This apparently is their one year in seven bad summer, and everyone seems happy about it, other than me, because it is helping to resolve the drought problem. What’s worse is that all those people in charge of air conditioning in shops, restaurants and buses haven’t seemed to have noticed that the summer isn’t hot this year. I’m having to take a jumper to work just so I can travel on the overly air-conditioned buses without turning into an ice block.

Anyway, things recently started to get better – it has been 28 ish degrees in the last few days and there hasn’t been any rain. This is all good news for the picnic by the beach I’m planning for celebrating my birthday – I’m celebrating my first summer birthday in true summer style (hopefully – weather permitting).

John and I, well just me really as John barely evenly grunted agreement to the idea, decided to head out to the Blue Mountains for a weekend. I found a great B&B in Wentworth Falls with fabulous views of the mountains and a couples only policy. The room was lovely and we had a fantastic spa bath. We did some walking in the forest and spend an enjoyable hour in Katoomba getting a ‘couples massage’.

It was a really relaxing trip and it made us feel like we’d taken a long weekend, but best of all we avoided hideous wet weather in Sydney.

This was my first Christmas away from my family, which I wasn’t looking forward to, but also my first New Year somewhere hot, which I was looking forward to. In the UK New Year is always a cold, rain drenched affair and I generally can’t be bothered celebrating.

The location for the Christmas festivities was just up the coast from Wellington in John’s Mum and Al’s new weekend gaff. There was a total of 15 of us on Christmas day and I’m please to report that my Christmas dinner was BBQed. The weather was a little dismal, not to dissimilar to the usual grey day we get in the UK.

We headed down to Wanaka for New Year to hang out with some of John’s friends in their family’s holiday gaff. Their place had great views of Lake Wanaka, which looked totally inviting on the 30 degree days, but was absolutely freezing being fed by glacial water. New Year was brought in with a BBQ and then a trip to the top of the hill over looking the fireworks being set off in the town. Wanaka gets a special mention for being the location of my first golfing ‘birdie’ – one under par.

After New Year we went to Auckland to hang out with John’s dad and family, and John’s friends living up there. We hung out at John’s Dad’s weekend gaff at Piha during the day and stayed in Auckland at their house at night.

In all, the whole time away was spent very lazily and accompanied by excellent food (which is the only kind of food you can get in NZ!) and plenty of golf.

Sorry – an unplanned blogging break has been imposed purely as a result of my laziness. However, I have heard the complaints and I resolve to do better. I’ll post a series of simultaneous posts to ensure that you haven’t missed out on what I’ve been up to down under and across the Tasman since I last posted, and then I’ll endeavour to get back to regular posting.

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.