The Torquay Foreshore Caravan Park recently claimed the dubious honours to Escape the City’s “Worst Caravan/Campsite Award“. As Ying is to Yang, it gives me great pleasure to award The Jailhouse hostel in Christchurch, New Zealand, winner of Escape the City’s “Best Hostel Award”. (Yes, I just created this award too.) In the budget price […]

We would like to offer our sympathies to the people of Victoria, who have lost their homes and families in the horrendous fires. Just watching it on the TV, it’s quite hard to believe. As you know, it’s only 6 days ago that we left Victoria as we couldn’t cope with the temperatures there. We […]

You read the title right, we’re in New Zealand already. How can this be, you ask, only yesterday I published an article on Ballarat in Victoria, Australia? Firstly, you should know that this blog trails reality by a couple of weeks (or more recently only a few of days). Secondly and somewhat surprisingly, New Zealand […]

At our campsite in Adelaide, we had the good fortune to make friends with two couples from the Victorian city of Ballarat, Judy and Ian, and Julia and Dave. Judy had insisted that we look them up when we got to Melbourne, so we thought “why not?” Ballarat’s past revolved around gold and–‘scuse my pun–revolution, […]

Claire has been to Australia before, I hadn’t. It’s true to say that we were both really excited at the prospect of coming [back] here, after all it’s probably the most common backpacking destination for us Brits and probably rightly so. It’s culturally familiar and very easy to get around. I say “probably rightly so” […]

Our kind Melbourne host, Mark, had a brilliant idea for escaping the city heat: let’s spend the day underwater. What a stroke of genius! He drove us to Mornington, a seaside town with a pier that is a well regarded starting point for shore-based dives. Unfortunately, the busy dive shop could only rent us full […]

Joining the roads in Melbourne shocked us a little bit. It’s the biggest city in Australia that we’ve been to yet (4 million people) and we were unprepared for the weight of traffic and the number of lanes it filled. Add trams trundling along and across with navigating the roads for the first time and […]

I’m awarding Torquay Foreshore Caravan Park as the winner of Escape the City’s hastily created “Worst Caravan Park/Campsite Award”. Every country has it’s bad caravan park and campsites; France and Italy have more than their fair share. On the whole, the campsites in Australia have been above par: cleaner than average bathrooms, reasonable camp kitchens, […]

From the Fleurieu we took the coast road south-east, towards Melbourne. On arriving in the small town of Millicent, we found a lovely owner run camp site where, for the usual cost of pitching our tent, we were able to hire a caravan. Whilst not very glamourous (it was a brown and orange left over […]

We’re on our way to Melbourne, it’s over seven-hundred kilometres away on the main road and we’ve chosen to travel on the longer, but hopefully more picturesque, coastal roads. First stop, Tourist Information to find out on which day the Nude Beach Olympics at Adelaide’s Maslin beach are being held. My guidebook only says “around […]