Kiwi Roaming

It’s June and we are back in London. I stopped writing these in January but do need to bridge the 3 months we were home in Aotearoa NZ – we travelled down the West Coast of the South Island to central Otago, flew to Auckland and took a road trip stopping at top spots like Tauranga and Raglan before driving down the Forgotten World Highway and did so much more. All of those deserve a blog to remind us what we got up to from February – April 2026.

In May we headed back to Melbourne then continued to London flying via the Middle East. We are here for 3 months with trips to Sardinia and Puglia in Italy planned this month. By the time we return we’ll have been on sabbatical and travelling for 12 months!

Our trip started with a lovely couple of nights staying at the Sofitel Wellington enjoying a series of birthday events, movies, dinners and drinks with friends and whānau.

Melbourne in May

Our stopover to see our Mokopuna (grandchild) meant we could continue exploring this amazing city. May is much cooler than January was, with single digit temperatures rather than the 40C+ we experienced then. We took a suitcase with us to cater for winter stopovers and summer scortchers this time.

Staying at the Holiday Inn on City Road we were perfectly located to wander, train, tram and bus. We were also really lucky to have struck a month when the state of Victoria has free public transport, designed to keep people moving about during the fuel crisis. So we took full advantage of this.

Our first couple of days involved travelling around during the day then heading to Pascoe Vale for dinner and cuddles. Babies grow so quickly, they were home with us at Eastertime for a couple of weeks yet she had changed so much since, now 5 months old, rolling and poking her tongue out.

Top spots we enjoyed were Prahran, the pedestrian streets, low rise buildings, building facades retained with apartment blocks behind. And of course the Prahran market where we grabbed a freshly cooked donut and wandered around scouting out our lunch options – there were so many well priced yummy food choices.

Williamstown Beach was another suburb we really enjoyed, no apartments just houses, a lovely beach and promenade that goes for kilometres. We enjoyed a great stroll, shared a reuben and smoothie in a local cafe and then walked to Williamstown proper to train back to Pascoe Vale. There we got caught in torrential rain so sheltered from this in the pub for a very very expensive pint.

We also trained down to Sandringham, walked around the suburb before heading out to the beach and walking along the clifftop path to Hampton – which was another lovely seaside suburb. Prahran was definitely our favourite for this explore.

My mother and her travelling companion (my daughter) arrived a couple of days after us, it was Mum’s first time in Australia so food, cityscape, kangaroos and nature were all in order.

Their first day was action packed, Preston Market for lunch was a real highlight – OMG the Gözleme (Turkish flat breads stuffed with lamb) and fried dumplings were our favourites. We went back to Preston Market another day as they were closing so got ourselves lots of deals – $5 Báhn Mi and loads of dumplings for $10.

After lunch we headed into the city for an initial tram ride and wander, ate some amazing Raman for dinner (so yum and so quick) then off to Book of Mormon at the Princess Theatre. Mum and Imogen hadn’t seen it before but tbh both Don and I found it just as good second time – laughing so much. We were seated in the front row which was good and bad. Sitting right beside the keyboard playing conductor and above the orchestra/band was amazing, so was seeing every expression and every subtle movement on the stage. The bad bit was the limited legroom which wasn’t ideal for arthritic older people. Great experience!

The next day Steve drove us to La Trobe universities Nangak Tamboree Wildlife Sanctuary. It’s a low key wildlife park, with an honesty box entry system and great foot wash station to remove all of the kangaroo poo from your shoes as you leave. We walked about 3km around a loop beside a lake and billabong, Australian scrub / bush is so open with large trees and limited undergrowth – so different to the dense foliage we are used to at home.

The site was once a mental institution and a convalescence hospital for returned servicemen after WW1 before they scraped the site and planted it in the 1930’s later fencing it off with double fences and gates on the perimeter. It was kinda weird hearing noise from the university, train track and roads while we walked and at times with houses lining the edges of the park. There are great signs as you walk around and remnants of the former tennis court and other installations left behind.

Importantly we saw masses of birds, a few emu’s and lots of kangaroos. A great free resource very close to the city centre.

Steve and I flew out that night. We opted for the cheaper (yet still cost us a bomb) route of via Dubai flying Emirates. The risk and lack of insurance cover for opting to fly via the Middle East is very real but we didn’t want to fly via the USA and Singapore would have cost us $3000 more! we also figured Emirates would ensure we got to our destination and if bombing started again (which it did a few days later) would put us up in Dubai. Needless to say we got to London safely, coped with only a 2 hour stopover in Dubai and are now in London!