I've made it to New Zealand (or "Nu Zuhland") and am terrified that after just one day i am already finding myself saying "yis" and "thinkyou". Shudder. Brisbane was great fun and i wish i had the foresight to stay there longer. The theme park was pretty cool and i enjoyed braving the Superman ride where you are shot into the air reaching 100 kmph in 2 seconds and pull 1 negative G force and 4.2 positive Gs as you are hurled around the track. Amazing. It has made me foolishly brave though, as i now face a paragliding session tomorrow. Gulp. Hayley's parents also took me down the Gold Coast for the day. Surfer's Paradise was pretty trashy but everywhere else was ridiculously gorgeous. I couldn't believe my flight out yesterday - we flew over the Gold Coast before heading out to sea. I was staring down on beaches that were MILES long, and then when we arrived over the west coast of New Zealand it was a long stretch of small bays perched at the bottom of instantly massive moutains that gave way to long stretches of flat farmland in patchwork fields. I'm looking forward to more aerial views tomorrow.

Christchurch is a bizarre place. It is full of Victorian brick buildings, white weatherboard houses, and grey concrete offices, the streets are lined with oak trees, the skies are light blue and neary filled with white clouds, the roads and cars are relatively small, and there are small village-green-like parks dotted about. I have to pinch myself to check I am not in England. The overt friendliness of the people reminds me i am not. I am also delighted to find porridge on breakfast menus (a blessing when you arrive to temperatures of 10 degrees after a stint in warm and sunny Queensland) and highly pleasing exchange rates in shop windows.

I am currently on a quest to find a public phone so i can book more activities. It seems that in its quest to shake off the "looks-like-England-from-50-years-ago" image that Christchurch has perhaps gone a little too far in providing virtually no public coin phones. But i have well and truly adopted the laid back "she'll be right" attitude of Oz and am sure that all will fall into place, perhaps even without any input of effort (or i am adopting the slow-paced Kiwi approach too readily?). Meh, whatever. "It's all good."