Having a good time touring the length and breadth of this beautiful contry by campervan.  Never travelled this way before and so far it is cool - cheap, easy and no hassles about finding somewhere to stay.  There are plenty of good campsites around or else I just find a good spot by the beach and fall asleep with the sound of the surf a few metres away.

 

I took the cheap option and hired from a company called Wicked Campervans.  Only slight downside is the yoof culture spray jobs they give their vans.  Mine is like an urban graffiti style.  I get some funny looks when I roll into the camp sites and park alongside all the huge gleaming white motorhomes.  Actully I like it - it's the bad boy mother fucker of campervans.  I even got some respect from some local Maori lads who wound down the window of their growling V8 to enquire whether I had painted it myself.  The only bad thing about it is that like all the other Wicked campervans it carries a really bad joke spray painted on the back.  Mine says "Constipated people don't give a shit" .  I wince a little every time I see it.

 

So far done about 1k kms I guess and everything they say about NZ is true. Fabulous countryside - it's like the best bits of England and Scotland without the people or the planning blight.  And the people are incredibly friendly

 

As far as adventures go, so far I've done a day's diving up in Poor Knights Islands, which was sublime and the best days diving I've done so far.  And I've done one bunjee jump- off the Auckland bridge, a 40m jump.  Planning to do the triple when I get to Queenstown in the South including the spinchter tightening Nevis, which is NZ's biggest bunjee jump at 140m.  Also did a powerboat trip around the Bay of Islands, which was remarkable in that the couple opposite me both vomited simultaneaously.  As the powerboat was going at full tilt, they were both instantly covered from head to toe in their own puke.  Luckily I was not sitting behind.

 

More soon

About to leave Oz which is always hard because it is so great here.  Thanks to all my Aussie friends that have have made it such a great trip, especially Kathy, Donella and Phil. Now I'm bound for NZ - two days in Auckland and then travelling around in a combi camper van.  More soon

Listening to the today programme on the internet I heard that the UK Independant paper had run a front page in the UK on the plight of Australia's Darling-Murray basin. 

 

There is a drought here that is the worst for one hundred years.  Everywhere in Oz looks brown and parched and the land is the driest of all of my trips out here. In Canberra a complete ban on garden watering means that eveyone's gardens have shrivelled up and died.   In Western Australia some of the major rivers have not been full for more than five years.  But the biggest single issue facing the country right now is the Murray-Darling river where 90% of Australia's dairy and crop agriculture is based.  The river is virtually dry with fish stocks beginning to die out.  A widespread water ban is in place and it is about to get worse if the government goes ahead and imposes a ban on agricultural irrigation from July 1 - a move that would devastate the regions farming community.

 

It's not hard to imagine the whole of Australia becoming a vast red desert. Whether the warming of the earth's atmosphere is soley down to man's actions is of course still controversial, but even for the Howard government, who refused to sign the Kyoto agreement and have consistently been highly sceptical of the greenhouse gas effect, the Darling-Murray crisis is an irrefutable example of the devasting impact climate change is going to have on even developed countries.

Just got back from an amazing 3k round trip to north West Australia and the Ningaloo reef - one of the best dive sties in the world.   The diving was spectacular, swimming in warm tropical water (28c), and with superb viz amongst rays, sharks, coral  and fish of all kinds.  I've now got my advanced PADI so can dive to 30m now (rather than 18) which is handy and I'll probably go diving in Kinghts Island NZ next week - one of the late great Jaques Costeau's favourite dive sites apparently.

 

The drive up to Ningaloo was equally as spectacular as the diving.  3000k of red, fairly barren Australian bush may not sound that great, but it was the first time I've got a real feel for the majestic majesty of the continent. 

 

The amount of road kill was grisly, there was one stretch of road, about a kilometre long, where we counted 20 dead kangaroos, a couple of dead emus, 3 dead cattle and numerous bones from earlier unforunate marsupials. Most of them had met their ends under the wheels of one of the giant road trains that make the run from Perth up to Broome and bejond on the Great northern highway.  Luckily this time I managed not to kill one of Australia's national animals, unlike the first time I was here when I inadvertantly mowed down a roo.  An act which I have never been allowed to forget.