Welcome to the Flash Blog…

20/03/08
Greetings from Blenheim, the sunniest place in New Zealand according to the hours of sunlight it gets. I’m staying with a family overnight here, and it’s just awesome to not have any snorers in my room :-). Today was a pretty relaxed day, most of which was spent hungover, yet I still managed to do a mini cycling tour of the wine areas here. I only did 32km, and only drank at one place, picking up a bottle for my host family as well. I also visited what is by far the greatest aviation heritage center (not really a museum) you’ll ever get the chance to check out. To give you an idea, the owner of most of the pieces is Peter Jackson, and the designers of a lot of the scenes was Weta studios, who did all the LOTR effects. Pretty cool eh? Read on for the full tale, but sadly, no map. All attempts to revive my GPS have met with failure. Boo!

Well, when I last wrote, I was telling you all about my first day in Fiji and the experiences that it held for me. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly for me, in spite of the fact that I had minimal sleep in the first 24 hours. Day two broke early for me, and I took a stroll around the hostel in the early morning light, after heavy evening showers. I felt pretty good, having finally gotten a night’s sleep, and was looking forward to hitting the Islands that were the main part of my Fiji adventure. On my stroll, I happened across the marine forecast to Fiji. Uh-oh. Cyclone warning. Cyclone Daman in particular, the first such storm hitting Fiji for the 07-08 storm season, which had just begun. The forecast called for rain for the next few days. However, as I would soon find out, that was just the beginning of my troubles for day 2. Read on for exciting news from days 2 and 3.

Hey gang! I just thought I’d bring you all up to speed on how my trip preparations have been going. As I sit here writing this post, I realize that in 14 short days, I’ll be heading to the airport for my four month trip-of-a-lifetime to Fiji and New Zealand. Although I’ve been saying all along that I’m not planning my trip in any detail, there is still a fair amount of preparation to undergo in order to make sure that all the loose ends are tied up. In this post I’ll try to give you folks a sense of what’s been happening on my end. I’ve also put up a folder of pictures on flickr to show you some of the stuff in detail. Head on over to the flickr folder to see them. On with the tale.