Hello again friends and family. It is Steph writing again....two days in a row - it's a new record!

So, we left off with magical Bryon Bay. Our next big adventures were to Noosa and then Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world. Fraser Island is 120k's long at it's longest point and 53 k's wide at it's widest. That's a huge sand island! It was formed many many years ago by the tides pushing billions of tons of sand up against the Great Barrier Reef. The island is unique, not only b/c it's the biggest in the world, but also b/c there is a rain forest growing in the middle of it (in the sand!) and the purest breed of wild dingos still roam the island. Before I get too far ahead with telling you about Fraser, I need to tell you about Noosa, where we stayed for 4 nights before heading to Fraser.

Noosa was one of a few places we could get to Fraser on the ferry from. We'd heard mixed reviews about Noosa - that it's a bit pretentious and that generally people who like Byron don't like Noosa and vice versa. As we pulled in to town, we understood why...Noosa is the antithesis of Bryon. It is kind of like the Miami Beach of Australia. There are tons of expensive gorgeous homes, Mercedes and BMWs everywhere, chic and expensive restaurants, and the people to go with all of it. Rach and I love nice places and things, but even Noosa was a little too much for us.

As soon as we arrived we went straight to the information booth to see when we could get out of Noosa and over to Fraser. We thought we knew how we wanted to explore Fraser, but quickly found out we didn't want to do it the way we originally thought. Our options were 1) we hire a 4x4 and go on our own, 2) we go thru a company who pairs you together with 8 other people and then all 10 of us go out in an unsupervised group, or 3) we go with a guided tour. We thought we were set on option 2 - getting paired up with other travelers who also wanted to explore Fraser. It wasn't until we spoke with the woman at the tourist information booth, however, that that idea started to not sound so good. She advised us not to go that route, as oftentimes that type ends in disaster. Because you get paired up with inexperienced drivers, the likelihood of them getting the 4x4 stuck or even worse crashing is high. She said that people get hurt all the time - and some even die. Hmmmm. We hadn't really thought about the fact that an inexperienced driver would have our lives in their hands. So, we rethought things and decided either going on our own (just Rach and Steph in a 4x4 w/ camping equipment) or going on a guided tour. The woman talked us out of going on our own since niether of us were experienced 4x4 drivers and could run in to issues that way too. So, finally we decided the guided group tour was proably the smartest. Which guided tour however was our next hurdle.

For the next day and a half we asked just about everyone in the sun about which tour was best. We finally settled on a 3 day, 2 night tour thru a company who was supposedly fun, who took travelers about our age, and catered to smaller groups. We were skeptical of the group option b/c of the same reasons all of us are skeptical of group tours....you're on someone elses agenda and you can't be sure what your group is going to be like - if it's great, the trip is super fun, if it's now, the trip could totally stink. Tours only left every other day and the one the following day was booked, so we were hangin' in Noosa for a few. At first we were a little bummed - we would have rather stayed up in Byron Bay - but, we made the best of it and ended up having a really nice time :)

Our first night in Noosa we stayed at a little apartment right outside of town. It was nice, but secluded and we were up for meeting some people. So, we checked out the hostel right in town and ended up loving it. It was by far the coolest and nicest hostel we'd ever seen. It was perched up on a big hill right at the start of town. The building itself was and old white Victorian style house old. There was a neat little bar downstairs, a great outdoor patio with tables and chairs, and a huge veranda upstairs with comfy couches. Our room was cute, small, clean and best of all private and quiet. Our 3 days passed quickly....we went to the beach, Rach took another surf lesson, we explored Noosa National Park, and took more beach walks. We went out on the town one night and met some really nice folks from Brisbane. The morning we were supposed to leave to Fraser came quicker than we expected....

Ok, I have to sign off now - it's getting dark out and I want to walk home while it's still light out. I'll be back soon to tell you all about cool Fraser Island!

Bye for now! :)

xoxo,
Steph

Hello family and friends!

It's Steph writing this time :) As Rach mentioned in her last entry, she is home in Seattle for her sister's wedding and I am hangin' here solo in beautiful Sydney. It's been a gorgeous day here (again!) and I've been out and about most of the day. Right now I am sitting in an internet cafe not too far from the apartment I've sublet in Potts Point, a little area about 15 minutes walking distance from downtown Sydney. I am settling in just fine here on my own and keeping quite busy. I've already found a gym to join, gotten to know the local coffee barista and a few of the store owners, and have done some exploring and shopping. Over the next couple of weeks I'll continue to get aquainted with wonderful Sydney, hang out with some of the local friends we've made here, and enjoy some down time...hopefully at the beach. Fun! I can't wait for Rach to get back though so that we can continue our adventures. We have tons more in Australia to do and see! Plus, I miss her :) After she returns we will head back up the east coast to continue where we left off....good segment for me to start filling you all in on what we did after flying in to Brisbane....

So, we flew in to Brisbane from Sydney and picked up our rental car, which Rach deserves some kudos for.... We rented a Toyota Corolla and expected an upgrade b/c she is a Hertz Gold member....we just didn't expect the upgrade we ended up getting! As we wheeled our cart of luggage over to spot 27 on the Hertz lot, we noticed that our car was the most ugly "I'm a tourist" blue we'd ever seen. Clearly this was not going to be acceptable b/c we were going to have the car for so long. So, Rach went in and jokingly said to the girl (who she'd befriended while signing paperwork, etc.) that we just can't drive around in the tourist-mobile for 2 weeks and asked if they had anything else. They didn't. However, since the girl liked Rach so much, she upgraded us to a totally phat Nissan Maxima with leather seats and all the bells and whistles (many steps up from the Corolla!!). Huge score! Guess how hot we looked rolling around? Pretty good if I do say so myself :) Anyway, so after we picked up the car we had to decide where we wanted to go.....yes, we were winging it again! We decided to head south b/c we knew Byron Bay was one stop we definitely wanted to make, as it had been highly recommended many times. We thought we'd check out one or two places on the way just to see if anything else tickled our fancy. We passed by Surfers Paradise, as we'd heard from quite a few people that it probably wouldn't really be our scene (a bit young and roudy) and ended up stopping by Palm Beach, another beach town along the way. It was quite a let down - strip malls, no personality, and a little dub-T. So we continued on to Byron Bay. Boy oh boy are we glad we did and didn't waste any time anywhere else.

Byron Bay is an amazing place!!!! As soon as we pulled in to town we knew were going to like it and that we wanted to stay a while. There was this awesome energy pouring out from everywhere. There were tons of young people (but not too young!) and the town itself was adorable too. Both of us looked at each other and said, yep, this is it! So, we went to the tourist agency to find accomodation and settled on a little apartment just outside of town. The rest is history after that.

We ended up spending the next 6 nights in Byron Bay at "Laila's Apartment". Laila, the woman who owns the house where the apartment is, was wonderful to us. The apartment itself was simple yet adorable, decorated with lots of bright colors and cool paintings. Laila is a painter and all of the work in the apartment is hers. Very cool! We even had our own outdoor shower (and an indoor one too) and a nice little back yard all to ourselves. The location couldn't have been better either - we were right on the beach (literally 50 yards away) and only a 20 minute walk in to town. Does it get any better??...yes...Bryon has the most stunning beaches we've ever seen! Aside from Croatia, we agreed that we haven't seen prettier water. It's crystal clear, really clean and, depending on the tide and time of day, has varying colors of blue and turquoise. The beaches are amazing too - they're longer, cleaner, and whiter than any we've seen. And at low tide the beach totally changes - it gets much longer and the b/c the water goes waaay out, little pools, which get really warm in the sun, get created. One afternoon we took a long walk and ended up sitting down for a few minutes in the shallow water. We just sat there and took it all in. It was awesome. Both of us said again to each other how lucky we were to be in Byron and on this trip. We both used the term "magical" to describe Byron quite a few times. It truly is.

Over the next seven days and six nights we explored, shopped, layed on the beach, met some new friends, and just had a blast. I ran on the beach in the mornings, Rach ran some evenings. We took long beach walks every day and Rach took a surf lesson (the pics are up). We cooked in for a lot of our meals (a nice change from eating out so much!), managed to have sushi about 5 times, and went out to a few fun dinners in town too.

All in all it was an awesome 6 days and both of us would highly recommend Byron to anyone! It's truly a magical place!!

Ok, time for me to sign off. I'll be back soon to write about our next adventures in Noosa and Fraser Island!

Until next time :)

xoxo,
Steph

So I was talking to a friend the other day and a few stories came up that we haven't put on the blog yet. It really made me realize that when we let so much time pass in between entries we end up just giving you the highlights on what we've been up to and leave out some of the good stuff.

We promised you a while back that we'd tell you the story of Rach's pillow and pj's traveling over 200k to find her after she'd left it in a hotel so here it is! :)

We were in a small town called BlackBall on the S. Island of New Zealand. The charm of this town is all built around the 1 B&B called the BlackBall Hilton and the fact that less than 20 people live there year round. Because of this, we decided to park the campervan for a night and stay at The Hilton. Well, for those of you that don't know, Rach hurt her back years ago and still suffers from it. She started sleeping with a special neck pillow a while back and it's really helped so she brought a mini one with her on this trip! This is one special pillow :) The pillow has a cover on it with a pocket that she tucks her pj's into. Well, we left the BlackBall Hilton, went for a hike, and then drove over 200km south to a town called Franz Joseph. It was only when we were going to sleep that night that she realized her pillow was gone.. she'd left it on the bed at The Hilton.

The next morning she immediately called the hotel to see if they had it. They did, but the woman was working alone for the next 3 days and wouldn't even be able to take it to the post office to send it. We are on the go so much that in 3 days we would have no idea where to tell her to send it. Rach tried asking if there was anyone in the town that she could pay to bring it to her and there was litterally no one around in this small town. We thought about going back, but really didn't want to have to drive back up there because 200k of coastal roads in a campervan takes a looong time. Rach really wanted her pillow though so she went to work.

First, she talked to the Top 10 Holiday Park where we were staying and found out that there was a bus that came from a nearby town that might stop and drop it off if she could find a way to get it from the hotel to this bus station in Greymouth (about 30km's from the hotel). She then called the hotel to see if there was a way that they could get her pillow there, but there was no way she could leave and no one else to take it. Rach then called the Top 10 Holiday Park in Greymouth to see if they had anyone she could pay to drive up to BlackBall to get it.. they didn't. After a long conversation with them and Rach trying to pull strings by being a "Top 10 Member" (you should be laughing now because that's totally ridiculous) the woman finally gave her a number of a local taxi company that she could try. She called the taxi company and explained the situation to the dispatcher (and we think owner) named Scott. Scott sympathized with Rach, but told her he just couldn't do it because there was no way for her to pay him (they only take cash) and he had been burned by this situation before. Don't ask me how she did it, but this hard no soon turned into him going to get the pillow personally and trusting her to mail a check to him for his services. Of course, Rach mailed it immediately, but we still can't believe he did this.

So long story short, that night around 6pm the pillow was delivered to our campervan safe and sound. It had traveled over 200km's from The Hilton to the Greymouth information center and then placed onto a public bus and delivered to the holiday park who then hand delivered it to us. Crazy huh? Rach, her pillow and her pj's lived happily ever after :)

So we'll try and be better about sharing good stories like this one.. we have a ton! We still owe you an entry on our time up the coast and will have that up soon.

Miss and love you,
Rach and Steph

Hello Hello!
Wow.. has it ever been a long time since we've last updated our blog! Sorry! We've had so many people emailing us to see if we are home yet, but if you haven't guessed by now, plans have changed slightly! Normally Steph and I write this together, but I am in Seattle now and Steph is waiting for me in Sydney. After I help my little sister get married, I'll fly back to meet her so we can continue to see Australia :) Our original plan was to come home on January 16th from New Zealand, but because we stayed so long in Thailand we haven't seen anything of Australia yet. Also, we want to go back to Thailand to see Bai's house and do a little more volunteering. So when does this put us home??? Good question and one that we'll answer as soon as we know ;)


We've done so much since we last wrote so I'm not even sure where to start... guess I'll just give you some of the highlights!

Our last few days in New Zealand:
The weather on the S. Island of New Zealand got better and we finally did get to go skydiving. It was amazing, but quite the eventful day. We thought we'd get cancelled again because of high winds so we had a few extra glasses of wine at our friend Tom's bday celebration..oops! Needless to say, we started the day with a bit of hangover and getting Stephanie to actually dive was a challenge :)

Skydiving itself was amazing. I don't think we could have chosen a better place than Lake Wanaka to jump out of a plane. We got incredibly perfect weather and a really fun crew to jump with! We all did a 45 second free fall from 12,000 feet! Craig had jumped before, but it was our first time. We thought we'd be more scared, but it actually wasn't bad. I think the scariest part is right when you jump out because you fall backwards first and then flip around before you're face down. The actual free fall goes by really quickly and you don't realize just how fast you're falling until you pull the chute and see the others shoot past you.. it's nutz! Once we got down, Craig and Steph were all excited and I was so sick I could barely stand up. I don't know why it never occured to me that jumping out of a plane might make me sick... I get sick on basically anything that moves :(

The rest of the day was pretty tough for me and of course, it's the one day that we had something planned. Well, not just something, but ANOTHER scenic flight into the Milford Sounds. After getting sick and not being able to get verticle for several hours I had to get back on a 6 person prop plane and fly for 2 hours over the mountains, take a boat for 2 hours around the Sounds, and then get back on the plane to fly back to Wanaka! Lets just say that everyone on the plane was thankful they had those little white bags in the seatback pockets. After I became friends with the white bag... I felt so much better and was fine the rest of the trip. Steph, all the sudden after having to watch me, started not feeling so good and had to run to the bathroom as soon as the plane landed. I think it was a sympathy puke :) The most embarassing part of it all was that we had 3 of our new friends on the plane with us: Craig, Tom & Max. Tom and Max were the Germans we mentioned earlier that we met on the Glacier. They joined us for the Milford Sounds trip and then we ended up traveling with them through Queenstown!

We left Wanaka the next day and went to Queenstown. On the way we all stopped to get some sun and have a picnic in the mountains overlooking Queenstown.. it was stunning! Steph and I realized that day that we don't stop and just chill out very often. That day we all brought a bunch of food and the boys have speakers for their ipods so we just sat and relaxed in the grass for hours.

We stayed in Queenstown for a few nights and really enjoyed it. It's known for having every adrenaline rush known to man, but we actually found some beautiful hikes to do too! The boys were adrenaline junkies and went and did some things like bungie jumping, canyon swinging, white water rafting, etc., but Steph and I just weren't that into it. We had both really wanted to skydive and since we had done that we didn't feel like we needed to do anything else. One afternoon Max, Tom, Jenz, and us went up the Gondala to the top of Queenstown. The boys decided to race eachother on the Luge and asked us to take pictures of them. This sounds simple, but they took so long and we were SO cold that we quickly ran inside to get some tea. As we were coming out they came RACING around the corner so fast that we could barely get a picture of their back..oops! We felt really bad, but the tea tasted really good :)

We left all the boys in Queenstown because we had to drive 8 hours to Christchurch and return the campervan. Boy was this ever a long, long day. So long that we ended up pulling over on the side of the road and taking an hour nap.. the benefits of a campervan! That night ended up being a late one because we had to empty out the van, fill (and empty.. yuck) all the tanks, pack for our early flight the next morning, and return our campervan named Stella. We had a very sad goodbye. We didn't think we'd love the campervan as much as we did, but it's definitely something we'd do again.

Sydney:
We only intended to connect through Sydney, but ended up spending a few days there. We both love that city, have made some good friends and feel pretty much at home there. This particular trip we got really lucky. We happened to hit Australia Day and get invited by our friends Chris and Declin to go see Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the Sydney Opera House. I discovered my favorite running path that goes through the Botanical Gardens and has views of the bridge and Opera House and Steph found a great gym. We also found a cheap internet cafe and a great sushi-train restaurant. The fact that I used my Marriott points to put us up in a 5 star hotel just next to Hyde Park might of had something to do with it too, but I'm not totally sure ;) Needless to say, we were a bit spoiled for these few days and always look forward to going back to Sydney!

Our night out at the Opera House was really wonderful. Chris and Declin picked us up in the city and brought us back to their place for a BBQ! They had a really nice apartment with gorgeous views of the Harbour. The others cooked dinner while I added music to my new ipod. I don't know if I told you, but the last few weeks have been torture. I accidentally left my ipod on the overnight plane from Thailand and have been running without music ever since. I bought a new one and Declin was nice enough to let me use his music. We had dinner on the deck and while we were eating a cockatiel flew up and just sat there while we ate (see pic). I don't know about you, but I've never seen one in the wild. They are usually in a cage and repeating every word you say. After dinner we took a ferry into Sydney. The ferry ride had perfect views of the city, the Opera House, the Sydney Harbor Bridge and just happened to be at sunset. The ferry dropped us off right at the base of the Opera House just in time to see Vivaldi. We both understand now why it's such a big deal to go to the Sydney Opera House... it's stunning inside.

After Sydney we flew to Brisbane and spent time in Byron Bay, Noosa and on Frasier Island. All were so incredible that they deserve their own entry. Ok, the truth is that it's bed time and I'm falling asleep at the computer. Pictures are up though and I'll try and get them labeled and write again in the next few days! Things are really busy with my sis's wedding though so don't get upset if it doesn't happen.. I promise to get it done soon!

Miss and love you heaps,
Rach and Steph