This blog has been inactive for months..
To be just a tad more precise it is today the 28th of January, 2017 - and the last post on this blog is from the 25th of March, 2016.. Soeh.. It's been quite close to a year. I do have a good explanation for 7 of the months, though!
I have been traveling Australia and New Zealand for just about 7 months, and I came home the 26th of January.
So there's that! I have many times doing my travels thought about posting some updates on my blog, but the thought has always slipped out of my mind, or I have just decided to live the experience, and then maybe write about it when I came home. This is what I am planing on doing now, and maybe I'll stretch it over a few posts, but we'll see.
It has been such a great feeling to finally come home! My parents visited me in Sydney for two weeks starting at the end of November - and when they left to go home I had a few options; I could go back to Melbourne (where I had come from to meet them in Sydney), I could go home with them, or I could go to New Zealand.
The choice became New Zealand, as I didn't feel ready to go home at that point, and I didn't fancy flailing around in Melbourne and risk not having accommodation over Christmas and New Years. And well, I was already on the other side of the planet, so I figured I might as well go to New Zealand while I was there in the first place.
I was lucky to be able to travel with the weather, meaning I was able to move around and stay in temperatures I, as a normally pasty white Scandinavian, could survive in. The highest temperatures I experienced was about 35 degrees Celsius, and admittedly I was on the brink of melting 24/7... This was in Cairns, one of the bigger cities on the north of the East Coast, in "Tropical North Queensland".. "Tropical" isn't really what I'm used to so that was definitely a huge change for me.
The big change was especially because at that point I came straight from the "winter" down in Adelaide - South Australia. To be fair, the winters they claim to have are not just mild, but for me, most of the days I experienced the 1½ week I spent in Adelaide could easily have been the spring back home. We are talking about 15 degrees here, and most of the locals were running around in giant jackets, hats and gloves. That was extremely strange for me to see, as we break out the light jackets, and some of the true viking even wear shorts at this point of the spring back home. Now, you might think I'm highly exaggerating, but I seriously know 3-4 guys who stubbornly wear shorts as soon as the thermometer says 15 degrees Celsius outside.
I had read online that the warmest months in New Zealand would be from December to February, which suited me really well as basically all the clothing I had was summer-y, and I did really have space for buying more clothes - my bags were packed almost to the brim. And yes, bags, plural! You accumulate a lot of shit over 6 months, so by the time I was flying to New Zealand I had 4 (!!!) bags..
Two "big bags", a big duffle bag and a small 25 liters hiking bagpack. Then I had two backpacks, where one of them was packed into one of the bigger bags. So I had two pieces of checked-in baggage, one carry-on and then my small handbag. I didn't exactly travel as primitively as I could've.
This post is turning out to be quite long, so I'll write more about my Australia and New Zealand adventures in other posts. And I promise there wont be several months between posts, as it has more or less been custom for the last 1½-2 years - I am really not good at writing on a blog, but as it is something I really want to do, I'll get better.. Maybe ;-)
Till next time!
- Kristine
