Fiji, New Zealand and Australia

Deanna and I are taking advantage of the fact I’m not working at the moment to head to a couple of countries in Oceania. This trip has been high on the bucket list for a while and we’re heading off for much of the month of April.

Deanna did a bunch of research and had a general idea of the kinds of things we wanted to do. We opted to try something we haven’t done before and that was have a tour company plan the itinerary. After a bit of research we settled with Kensington tours. We briefly looked at a couple of organized tours from Trafalgar, but in the end thought the flexibility that we got with Kensington was worth it. Time will tell on that front, but they’ve organized the flights, hotels, transfers and excursions. It feels a bit like having a personalized tour without having to adhere to a specific schedule that someone else has designed.

Overview

Fiji

We’ll be flying to Fiji (via Los Angeles). We’ll be there for for days, mostly relaxing, recovering from the long (11.5 hour) flight from L.A. I generally suffer from jet lag, so having a bit of time to adjust won’t hurt. We’ll be on the island of Denarau. Nothing specific planned, we’ll figure out a few things to do while we take it easy.

New Zealand

The trip kicks into a higher gear with a flight to Auckland. We have six days in New Zealand with a bunch of activities planned including stops in Auckland Rotorua and Queenstown. Many of the folks that I’ve talked to about our trip have raved about New Zealand. I doubt we have enough time planned for this leg of the trip, but hopefully we’ll get a sense of it and perhaps inspire us to come back in the future.

Australia

We’ll start our Australia trip in Melbourne with stops at Ayers Rock, Cairns, Brisbane and Sydney. There will be lots of interesting stops along the way including the Great Barrier Reef, the Gold Coast and some wildlife parks.

Our journey back home will start on April 28th and get us back to a hopefully beautiful spring back home. The plan will be to blog with photos as we go.