Namaste, sawasdee khap, g'day, bula,

So, this is the end. I take off for LA, then Toronto in about 4 hours. It's been a really good 3 months. I took 19 flights (well, 11 flights but with connections it was 19 take-offs and landings). I also travelled by car, bus, train, skytrain, subway, truck, motorcycle, tuk-tuk, sawngthaw, long-tail boat, ferry, speed boat, kayak, helicopter, elephant and bicycle rickshaw.

I trekked, hiked, swam, snorkeled, dived, fished, snowshoed, volunteered, learned to cook thai food, climbed, sailed, laughed, puked, propped up bars, danced on tables, fed wild monkeys, eagles and crocodiles by hand (to be honest, with the crocs I used a stick), swam with sharks and sea turtles and didn't swim with dolphins.

I saw the Himalayas, the jungles and beaches of Thailand, the outback, the Great Barrier Reef, the Southern Alps and beautiful tropical islands of Fiji. I saw dolphins, pilot whales, several types of deadly snake and sharks and sea turtles as I've already said.

One of the most remarkable things, though, is how well everything has gone. Except for getting sick in Nepal (which I got lots of money from insurance back for) nothing bad has really happened (here's hoping for no plane crashes on the way home). Aside from getting sick, the worst thing that happened to me was I lost my towel in Thailand. So, really, things went pretty well.

I'll see most of you soon. Thanks for reading. I'll probably keep updating this with info about my life back in Toronto.

My time in Fiji is almost over, though it feels like I just got here. I wasn't that impressed with Fiji initially. The cities are really uninteresting and not a pleasant place to be, and all the places to stay seemed to be resorts, where you go to a little island and are kind of a captive audience, doing standard beach type stuff, with hokey hula dancing at night and annoying british 19 year olds all over the place.

Anyway, instead of going to a resort to learn to surf and do some diving, I tried to get a little of the beaten track. I ended up spending two days on this little island called Caqelai (which, for some reason is pronounced theng-ga-lay) which was pretty fantastic. It's what I imagined when I thought of Fiji but knew nothing about it: a little island that you can walk around slowly in 10 minutes, covered in palm trees with white sand beaches all the way around. There were only about 15 tourists on the island, we all at together at a big communal table. There was no booze, no organized activities, nothing to do but swing in hammock, go snorkelling, crack open coconuts or just relax. The people on the island were pretty cool too, not the typcial bland backpacker crowd, but pretty interesting characters. It was pretty nice. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed it until I came back to civilization and saw the same people (actually different individuals but they all look the same) sitting around a pool getting pissed having the same conversations that I realized how good Caqelai was.

I fly home late tomorrow night. I'm back in Nadi (prounced for some reason like Nandi) which is near the airport. I go on a day trip tomorrow to another resort, then it's home by Sunday morning.

In Fiji now, in a little guest house in a rainforest. I'm heading to some remote islands tomorrow to try to find a beach and some relaxation before I come home. Internet is a bit pricey here so this'll be a short one.

Tomorrow is my last full day in NZ, I fly out early Saturday. I spent most of my time on this hop on/hop off bus tour thing called Stray. It's similar to the Oz Experience or Kiwi Experience for those of you familiar with these things. The idea is that you get a ticket for a certain route that's valid for a year, and you can get off the bus anywhere along the route and then just hop on the the next bus as it passes by. Part of the appeal of these bus tours is that you meet people, but I didn't meet anyone who was terribly interesting, but the other appealing aspect is that they take you directly to places and you don't have to wait around for normal buses etc. In that respect it was really good, and I actually got a bit off the beaten track with this tour company.

Two days ago I was in Stewart Island, which is the third New Zealand island (along with the North and South islands) and it was actually the least touristy place I've been on my whole trip. We hired this fisherman to take us out fishing and we caught a ton of blue cod. In about 45 minutes I caught about 20 fish. The fishing apparatus was just a 1/4 inch polypropylene rope with a weight and 2 hooks on the end. We'd let the weight sink to the bottom, wait for about 5 seconds until there was bite on one of the hooks, give the rope a yank to set the hook, and then wait another 5 seconds for another bite, set that hook, then pull it up. We were pulling them in two at a time. We had to throw back the females, but in about 45 minutes 4 of us had 4.5kg of cod fillets (the captain cleaned them for us). It was pretty cool to be somewhere with that many fish. It reminded me of the stories of the cod off the east coast back in the good old days.

Heading to Fiji on Saturday. Don't quite know what I'm going to do there or where I'm going to go, but I'll figure it out I'm sure.

I may have been a bit hasty when I put down the Southern Alps and scenery in general around here. The weather has been quite lousy and I think the nice scenery was obscured and the places I was visiting when it was clear just weren't that nice. Today I hired a mountain guide and we went out and did some mountaineering and it was pretty good. We got up above the clouds, so it was a beautiful sunny day with the valleys below us full of cloud and beautiful mountains all around. Really, it was pretty nice.

In New Zealand it is much harder to sue for large amounts so there are tons of adventure activities here. Bungy jumping was invented in Queenstown (where I am now). You can bungy jump off just about anything here, sky dive, canyon, river surf (go down rapids on a boogey board), white water raft, parasail, paraglide, hang glide, and do just about any other stupid activity you can imagine. I decided if I was going to be here I may as well do the stupidest thing I could find, so I decided to do parabungy. This involves bungy jumping off a platform 180m above a lake supported by a parachute being towed by a boat. Unfortunately they don't seem to be operating in winter. They have a website that seems to indicate they're still operating, but they're not. Instead I hired the guide and had a really good day, so in the end everything worked out. It usually does.

I'm on the west coast of the south island of New Zealand now. I'm in a really beautiful spot, a village on the edge of the Tasman Sea, surrounded by mountains with a really nice glacier rolling out of them. It's beautiful, but I'm finding I'm having a hard time caring. When I was in Thailand I met a girl who said that after a few months travelling she just couldn't appreciate beautiful scenery anymore. She knew it was nice, but it stopped having an impact on her. I couldn't understand it then, but I think I'm getting there now. It's not that I don't like where I am, it's just that after a few months of seeing beautiful things everyday they just start to lose their edge. Also, there's competition. This place has nice mountain scenery, but the Himalayas blow it away.

I know, I shouldn't complain about too much nice scenery. I'm not really complaining, just making an observation about my perception of the trip I guess.

Oh, I put us some more photos.

I'm spending a few days in Christchruch, because I'm a bit burnt out from running around Australia. Today I'm taking a little day trip to the town of Akaroa, about 100km from Christchurch, where you can swim with dolphins. Apparently it's quite nice, there are hundreds of dolphins that hang around all year that are really playful to swim with. Or so I hear, because the weather isn't cooperating and I won't be going out. This means that I'm stuck in this little town all day with not much to do. That's not necessarily a bad thing, there are lots of cafes and restaurants, so I'll probably just end up spending the day reading my book eating some good food. Maybe I can find a place that serves dolphin.

New Zealand is really nice. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but some places I've been feel really uninviting and foreign (probably because they are foreign) and other places feel really homey. I feel quite at home in Christchurch. Maybe it's the weather, I can't feel at home when it's hot and there are palm trees everywhere, but 8 degrees and rain feels like home. I don't know, but I like New Zealand so far.

I'm leaving Australia tomorrow morning, heading to Christchruch, New Zealand. I think that coming to Australia was a mistake. Now, to be clear, I've had a lot of fun here. Hanging out with Oliver was really fun, Ayer's Rock was pretty good, Darwin was very good, and I spent this week in Airlie Beach, on the north east coast, and did three days of sailing in the Whitsunday Islands, which was pretty good.

There are two reasons I think that coming here was a mistake: The first is that Australia is too big to see in three weeks. I really tried to cram a lot in, and in the end I saw only a fraction of the country and I'm really tired. I woke up before 7am 12 of my 20 mornings here (I know I'm not going to get a lot of sympathy from people who get up before 7am everyday, but I'm on vacation here). I travelled almost 5000km by bus in 20 days, and generally I rushed around. Most people spend months doing Australia and that's the way to do it. I think my time would have been better spent in a smaller country. The second reason that I think I shouldn't have come is that Australia is too much like Canada. I saw lots of beautiful things, but when I was in Thailand and Nepal meeting the locals was part of what made the experience great, and here the locals are too much like Canadians.

Now, when I was planning my trip I think I kind of felt reassured by the fact that Australia was going to be like home, because before this I hadn't travelled much on my own in non-english speaking countries. So, the reason I'm criticizing Australia is also a reason that brought me here.

I guess what I'm saying is that with the benefit of hindsight I probably wouldn't have come here. However, I still had a great time, and saw some fantastic things, so really, it wasn't too bad.

Two great things about Australia that you may not know: they roll the GST into prices so if something says it's $20 you pay $20, and they don't have pennies, so all exchanges are rounded to the nearest $0.05. Both of these are very nice.