It’s about a week till our departure date. I am VERY excited. I have wanted to go to Australia for years and here I go!  Jakub and I are getting our gear ready, slowly packing, reading and checking various websites about what to do DownUnder. Over the weekend, we watched a Globe Trekker DVD: Australia (also can be found at the library). It was neat to see the scenery and the crazy adventures the guides have, I had a real good laugh watching Ian Wright.  See you DownUnder.

Last week or two ago I looked through a listing of various car rental companies in New Zealand and was very close to booking some wheels. Fortunately, I happened to run into a ferry company web site (NZ is primarily two large islands), which mentions that only certain car rental companies allow their cars to cross with the ferry. Nice. So today we ended up booking a car with EZY Rentals. Ewa and me discussed the vices and virtues of manual vs. automatic transmission cars and as much as we’d love to jump into a gear shift car (and save a couple hundred bucks on the way), we decided to go with an automatic as it would be safer. Even though we both picked up some manual driving skills on our recent trip in Spain, I think it will be enough of an effort to have to focus driving on the wrong side of the road. :)

I booked camp sites for the two nights of the Routeburn Track for February 27th and 28th over at the very informative Department of Conservation web site. I’m really pumped to do this one after looking at some of the gorgeous pictures over at flickr. Due to its high popularity, the track had to be booked in advance. The other informative site for hikers which I stumbled upon is the New Zealand Tramper.

So I called Cathay Pacific today and confirmed the weight restrictions which befall on us. It turns out that each of us can take two luggages weighing 32kg along with some hand baggages of up to 10kg. In total that’s 74kg of back breaking atoms per head. I hope we don’t have to fill up our bags to the last kilo. Whatever the scales say on January 31st, all the stuff we’re taking will serve two core purposes. Probably half the gear we’ll be touring with and camping through New Zealand. That’s backpacks, camping gear, tents, water filters, etc. While the other half should help us settle in and survive the first fews days in Sydney. Here are some items from the first half I’ll be taking: