Leaving Asia for Aoteoroa

SYDNEY
The flight from Bali was only 5 hours so there wasn’t much time to sleep especially considering the time taken to serve food and drinks. We arrived in Sydney completely exhausted at 7am to beautiful bright sunshine that wasn’t to leave us for the next two days. My oldest brother Jeff picked us up from the airport and we spent the rest of that day catching up with him, his wife Julie and their 14 month old bundle of joy, Chelsea. We were spoiled rotten the whole time to the point that Julie had baked a lemon meringue pie and cooked roast lamb especially for our visit. The following day Jeff drove us to see the Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Darling Harbour etc and then to their almost finished new home in Castle Hill. The drive back took us through the northern beaches, stopping in Manly to let Chelsea run in the sand in her squeaky shoes. The stay in Sydney was all too short and before we knew it, Sunday morning had come around and it was time to catch our flight to New Zealand.

 The Sydney opera house

 Sara and I at Darling Harbour

Sara and I with our niece Chelsea at Manly beach

STRAIGHT TO THE RUGBY
Coming from New Zealand means that I have rugby in my blood. Within 30 minutes of landing in Wellington Sara and I found ourselves at WestPac Trust Stadium watching the Wellington Lions beat Taranaki in, what felt like, sub-zero temperatures. It was in fact 15C (or about 60F).

Wellington v Taranaki at the Cake Tin

 There's no friends like old friends

We have now had a couple of days to get acclimatised to the cooler weather and to enjoy many of the creature comforts that we had been longing for in Asia. The remainder of this week will be spent catching up with my close friends, playing some golf and watching some of the DVDs we purchased along the way. On Sunday afternoon we drive 4 hours north to the ski town of Ohakune where we plan to spend the following two weeks.

Borobudur and Prambanan, Indonesia

JAVA TO BALI
My last update took us through to Yogyakarta. We booked ourselves on the sunrise bus to Borobudur and even though we had to get up at 4am it was well worth the effort. In fact it was probably the scenic highlight of the trip so far, partly due to the brilliant sunrise and the awesome landscape around the temple. It’s the largest Buddhist temple on Java and we spent the best part of two hours just sitting there admiring it with large smiles on our faces.

Images from Borobudur

Next, we went to Prambanan – the largest Hindu temple on Java. Prambanan is much larger than Borobudur but there is still much restoration work to be done. It’s still a remarkable sight but it has the potential to be far more remarkable.

Images from Prambanan

We had really enjoyed Yogyakarta despite some early apprehensions. It was well set up for backpackers with plenty of cheap places to stay and eat. On our way out of the city we were serenaded by the guitar playing buskers at the traffic lights as we headed east towards Bali. We were joined in our minivan by three stereotypically blonde Norwegian girls, two German sisters and an Italian Swiss guy from Lugano. We spent much of that day in the van except for a brief lunch break and a 90 minute pit stop to repair a leaky radiator. At 10pm that evening we arrived at Mt Bromo and went straight to sleep because at 3.30am we were up again to see the sunrise for the second time in three days, this time over the glorious Mt Bromo.

Mt Bromo at sunrise

After breakfast we hit the road again, this time to Bali. Another long travel day saw us reach Bali late in the evening, where we headed straight to Kuta Beach for one night before bringing a close to Asian leg of our trip.