Oceania - The Land Down Under

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Our journey starts as always in England, with a plan to cover four Australian cities and both islands of New Zealand over a period of three weeks. Over a year before we were due to set off on our adventure the planning begun - a long process of figuring out what places to see and making sure all the tours and activities were pre-booked to ensure we wouldn't miss anything we wanted to do.

Unfortunately because we wanted to cover New Zealand as well it meant we wouldn't be able to visit Ayer's Rock (Uluru as the natives call it) as it would have taken two days out of the trip which we could have put to better use. For our final itinerary we were able to narrow it down to sights just in Melbourne, Darwin, Cairns and Sydney for our Australian destination and a whirlwind tour of New Zealand.

This was the longest of the trips I'd taken to date - not only was it a three week trip but it took nearly 24 hours to get to the "land down under" via Hong Kong. As a fan of Lost it was quite fortunately not via Oceanic Flight 815. The run up to the "adventure" wasn't without concern though - during the weeks that led up to the flight there were talks of British Airways industrial actions taking place sometime in March. With just a couple of weeks to go it was confirmed there would be a BA strike take place over the weekend I was due to fly out to Australia, but one frantic phone call to BA later it was confirmed that although the flight had been booked through them it was being operated by Qantas and would be unaffected. The panic was over, for now...

You can view 206 photos from the trip on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jedi58/sets/72157623716119426/