Departing from Munich Airport

sorry only google translate so far 🙁 Dubai is exactly how you would imagine it. You leave the plance and enter a fully climatized airport with 20?C. If you leave the airport, however, you’ll walk against a 36°C wall of hot air AT 8 AM!!! After our arrival fell on Friday morning, is very little going on ...

Dubai is a city business substantially. It shows no later than when dressed as a tourist spends some time in the metro. Only now and then we run the other tourists on the way. It is a city where you are working and can earn a lot of money, but no city to become old. ...

Nun also (endlich) in Australien gelandet… Anschließend 2 Stunden warten am Zoll, Drogenkontrolle (mit Drogenspürhund), eine 1-stündige Busfahrt Richtung Stadt und schon waren wir bei unserem 2. Couchsurfing Host angekommen: Brodie, in unserem Alter, ein unglaublich netter und witziger Australier, mit einem ähnlichen Sinn für sarkastischen Humor wie ich (und dafür muss man nun extra ...

One has to know that Perth is the most isolated city in the world. You recognize it just by driving further out of Perth. Then you easily find villages being over 600km away from each other and in-between no civilization beside so called “Roadhouses” providing a fuel station and service area. A comparison illustrates the ...

Finally we arrived at our very first national park. Kalbarri is a little fishing village, mainly consisting of hotels, hostels and camping grounds and of course a supermarket. But of course this concept exists everywhere where tourists appear so it was neither the first we saw nor the last one we’ll see. There is another ...

After staying another day in the car (we really underestimated the distances) we arrived at Coral Bay. After visiting the city (2 campgrounds and 1 hotel) we went to the beach: a beach with white sand and amazing crystal-clear turquoise water and corals. Unfortunately the corals reachable by swimming were dead and only a few ...

After an exceptional short drive (nearly 2 hours) we moved to our new hosts. This time it was a married couple around 50 years old with their 3 years old son Kevin. Of course it was a different couchsurfing experience than the once we had before but definitely not worse. They welcomed us very warm ...

We arrived at Karijini after an approximately 8 hour drive. As soon as you leave the coast and drive inland, it’s getting hotter: 40°C during the day and even in the night still around 27°C. With the first steps in the red sandstone of the national park (which would later cause quite a headache) we ...

From the Karijini National Park back to civilization it’s around 700km. We decided to go to the “city” Carnarvon, as people told us it’s so pretty and because s the whole way to Monkey Mia would have been too long. There are not that many attractions, but anyway there is a very beautiful beach, the ...

After an exceptional short drive (3 hours) we arrived in Denham at our next Couchsurfing host Paul and his young labrador bitch (we didn’t know this meaning of the word) Birra. First some words about his “apartment”: It looked like an old fabric building with a container in the back for office and sanitary. This ...

Be warned, the post has much text but only a few pictures… J Week 1: After we cleaned the car a bit and dropped it off on Monday, we went to the city in order to organize some stuff (e.g. printing of our CVs). In the afternoon we met Michelle (the second couchsurfer, who borrowed us the ...

Finally time has come: after 7 weeks on the West coast we made our way to Australia’s east coast. On our way along the south coast we didn’t want to miss the most important sights. As a rented car itself was not too expensive, but the so called one-way fees were around 2500$ in addition ...

While driving to Busselton, Tobi got a message from our event company, who needed additional staff for a concert in Busselton. So he could earn a bit additional money for the trip and Kerstin had a night of partying with Vera in Busselton (as far as this was possible in this very rainy, windy and ...

Margaret River itself is a small, not very impressive city, but additionally it’s a region famous for wineries, breweries, distilleries, chocolatiers etc. (a bit like Swan Valley in Perth). We spend the Sunday morning with tasting wines and beer in Cheeky Monkey, another beer and cider tastings in a German brewery (Duckstein). Later we continued ...

After seeing and tasting Margaret River, we wanted to start our journey towards Albany. We were really looking forward to seeing the ways, because they should lead us through a huge forest area, the Shannon Forest. The ways were indeed really nice, until at some point, we saw thick smoke clouds above the forest. Probably ...

When we arrived in Albany we got a bit disappointed. Even though we arrived at the mechanics almost one hour before closing they told us to come back the next day. A bit annoyed, we made our way to a couchsurfing host, who let us stay for one night. Rachel was super kind and helpful ...

It’s an around 5 hours’ drive between Albany and Esperance which was so far the longest at the south coast, but we’ll beat that, promised. So we arrived in Esperance at around 4PM but since our couchsurfing host had to work we spent the time with a drive on the Ocean Drive. This one makes ...

It’s quite a long drive from Esperance to Aidelaide, so to say 2268km. Just to set this in a better context, the distance between Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the most southern city of Germany) and Flensburg (the most northern city of Germany) is 1000km. So we crossed Germany twice in 2 days. The difference between Esperance and Adelaide ...

We finally arrived in Adelaide after our two days driving adventure. We spent the evening at the Brighton Beach south of the city centre to relax and watched the sunset on the beach of the camping site. After having a refreshing shower the next day, we headed to the centre of Adelaide via Metro in ...

You have two options if you want to drive from Adelaide to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road. One of them is to drive around 600km along the coastline, the other one goes inland before leading to the coast through the Grampians National Park. We chose the second option since Kyle (couchsurfer from Esperance) ...

After visiting the Grampians we drove until late night towards the Great Ocean Road (which was apparently quite exciting because of all the night active animals in the park). When we finally found a good spot to park, it was close to midnight why we all fell asleep immediately. The next morning was waiting with ...

After the last night in our camper (again on a parking spot along the highway), we had to clean the camper, do the luggage and drive to Melbourne in order to return our camper. It figured out to be a not too easy process. The poor guy from the renting company didn’t know anything about ...

After we tried for a long time to get a couchsurfer in Sydney and didn’t succeed (understandable cause it was Christmas), we booked a room in an apartment through AirBnb (was indeed cheaper than the worst hostel in Sydney). The apartment was quite central (10min to the CBD) and our hosts also very friendly. They ...

The event company for which we already worked a couple of times in Perth, was looking for staff for the 3-day music festival Lost Paradise in Glenworth Valley (30/12-01/01), around 100km north of Sydney. We wanted to use this chance and applied for all possible positions. We got both rosters for 40h as bartender. Additionally, ...

The overnight train was very comfy as we both could sleep almost without any interruptions. That’s definitely a recommendation whoever want to do this trip in the future. While we were sitting in the bus to our accommodation, we experienced what it means to be in the middle of the summer in Queensland. We were ...

The first day, we had to pick up our car. A wonderful Nissan Dualis (one could nearly say an SUV). We had even a car passenger for the first day, a finish guy called Mikey. Yes, you heard it correctly, neither German (50 % of all backpackers in Australia) nor French (48 %), but Finish, ...

We originally chose Gladstone because we thought we might get the chance to visit the Great-Barrier-Reef from there. On the other hand, we knew before that the tours were too expensive. These cost 190$ for a 5 hours boat tour in order to spend two hours on a bird-poo-island calles Lady Musgrove (Indeed, the island ...

After a quite cosily driving to the entrance of the national park and a subsequent drive over hedge and ditch (which was fun due to our SUV), we arrived late afternoon in the campground at the gorge. After a nice chat with the lady at the reception the plan for the evening was set. We ...

Unfortunately we couldn’t find a couchsurfer for Airlie Beach, also nobody answered on our request, but ok. That’s why we started to search for a camp ground. As we had to drive through the city centre, we were really shocked and were close to turn around, because Airlie Beach is absolutely THE tourist city. There ...

We found two couchsurfers for Mackay, each of them for one night. The first one was Dish. We are actually still not sure if it is his real name or a nickname. He is, anyway, a very relaxed guy around 30 years old, originally from Los Angeles and in Australia since 8 years. Until now ...

From Mackay we went back to Gladstone. Actually, we thought about directly going to Hervey Bay, but on the one hand, we had some buffer and on the other hand it would have ended in a complete day in the car. That’s why we decided to make another stop in Gladstone at our couchsurfer Stephen, ...

Before we arrived in Hervey Bay (at our next couchsurfer, this time a German expat called Axel), we wanted to see the beach of Agnes Water, because Steve described it as the best one in this area. It’s definitely a nice one without many people and so we spent there some hours. After a small ...

Before we arrived in Noosa, we made a stopover in the Great Sandy National Park, with the Rainbow Beach as its main attraction. Helen and Myra from Fraser Island said, that we MUST go there, because there is sand in all colours you might imagine. A word a blow. The main beach, where we made ...

Back to Brizzy – Australian word for Brisbane – we directly took a train to the world famous Gold Coast. There we found a couchsurfer for 5 days: Joshua. He is as old as we and trains for his first marathon in L.A. which will be in May. Unfortunately exact one day before we arrive ...

Today should be our longest hitchhike, 400km from Byron Bay to Coffs Harbour. After it literally rained the whole night, also into the tent, we had a little lake in our tent (well, it was only a 32$ tent), and tried to convert it into a transportable condition in order to leave after breakfast. This ...

Before we made our way from Coffs Harbour to Port Macquarie, we had to prepare a sign. Slowly, Kerstin started to like preparing it 🙂 Done with that, we had to reach the highway. The right spot for hitchhiking is important, that’s what we already learned. We walked a bit confused and without sign, cause ...

After Tobi made friends with two Dutch girls on the campground, the drive the next day to the highway was no problem at all. The two girls planned to go north, but until the highway we had the same way. Somehow we made it to put our luggage and the four of us into their ...

Steve’s sister Leanne picked us up at the train station and welcomed us so lovely including offering us nice dinner. Anyway, her two dogs welcomed us before: Alex and Diesel. One of them is 4 years, the other one is around a year old and therefore very active. The two are Pitbull Terrier and very ...

So here we are, the world famous Blue Mountains… They are mostly famous for the fact that they are one of the “nature” spots in Australia which are easy to access by car or train (which is a bit of a contradiction but anyway). As we already figured out before, “experiencing” the nature bush in ...

To see a bit of the coastline between Sydney and Melbourne, we rented a last time a small red car. Unfortunately the first day started directly with a lot of rain. But anyway, we didn’t want to miss a few highlights around Kiama: the Cathedral Rocks, a rocky formation that indeed resembles a church, and ...

We arrived at Jervis Bay during the afternoon and had beautiful weather. Tobi found a little bay with turquois water (Currarong) at the northern end of the bay. There is another Rock Pool there as well. Just a gorgeous area! We stayed the night in a camp ground in Huskisson in order to explore Jervis ...

The most interesting part of Batemans Bay is the further north Murramarang National Park, as it includes three dreamful beaches (Pebbly, Pretty and Depot Beach) and a beautiful river into the ocean in North Durras. But before we came there we visited two other beach cities, namely Bendalong and Narawallee (incl. Mollymook). The beaches weren’t ...

We got up very early the next day for two reasons: first we had another 2.5 hour drive to Canberra and the car had to be returned at 10 am. Additionally, we wanted to see the sunrise, but unfortunately it was quite cloudy why we couldn’t see anything and we directly started to drive. We ...

So we arrived in Melbourne, our last stop in Australia. Having slept accordingly, we were relaxed and talked to everyone. We weren’t in a rush, as 1 week to explore a city should be enough time. The two British couchsurfers (one of them Scottish with a really difficult accent) couldn’t find another accommodation in Melbourne ...

Well, after three hours in an uncomfortable plane we left Australia after 125 days. Somehow a very weird feeling as this short “jump” to New Zealand doesn’t feel very different to the other journeys we made through Australia. Anyway, it might be a good point to write a short summery for Australia, who knows who ...

After the arrival in Christchurch the security checks passed by quite fast this time, but most likely because it was 5am. So well, after we were security checked, telling them what kind of food we imported and showed our lately cleaned tracking boots (New Zealand is quite free of pests and tries to stay like ...

Quite spontaneously we found a HelpX host in Twizel, this time on a camp ground. We didn’t get a lot of information in advance, just that we were accommodated in a campervan and that we had to start working on Monday (because our boss was away for the weekend) and all this even though we ...

So we were standing at the street again waiting for someone to pick us up. Our first lift brought us to Omarama. The second one was a Kiwi, who made several stops during his drive, because apparently he had fun in being our tourist guide. So we could see the biggest earth dam of the ...

It figured out to be quite easy to find a lift from the Moeraki Boulders to Dunedin, this time a German couple from Stuttgart who were visiting New Zealand for three weeks. They drove us directly to the town centre and as hitchhiking worked so well this time, we were 3 hours too early for ...

Although it was quite late (3pm) or maybe that’s why, we went on really well. A first driver brought us a bit further out of the city to get a better spot for hitchhiking. We also got quite fast our second driver. This time a woman, who would have picked us up also at our ...

After only two hours of driving we arrived in Queenstown and all prejudice we had were immediately approved. It’s an incredible beautiful spot directly at Lake Wakatipu, but unfortunately full of tourists. Full is even slightly understated as 2 million tourists push through the city with only 19,000 citizens every year (5,500 per day). 65% ...

There is a little town between Queenstown and Milford Sound called Te Anau which is also the start of another Great Walk, the Kepler Track which leads along the Lake Manapouri. Again, we walked a little part of the walk, just enough to see the lake. The good thing about the Great Walks is, that ...

We arrived at the mentioned motel in Fox Glacier Township around late afternoon. Township is a not very appropriate definition, as it mainly consists of Motels, Hotels, Backpackers and providers for tours on the glaciers. But to be honest, there is not much more to do there anyway. We were welcomed by our British flatmates ...

The Copland Track was a warm suggestion of Irene and Pier (let’s remember, that were the two Italians we celebrated Christmas with in Sydney). After a seven hour long walk one reaches a hut which is directly next to natural hot pools. That sounded promising for us why we started our first multi-day hike. At ...

When we arrived in Hokitika, dusk already started and as our GPS had some problems finding the address, our search for our next host was a bit longer. After finding the number of the house and knocking at the door of the beautiful house, nothing happened, so we made our way back to the car ...

We planned two stops between Hokitika and Nelson. One of them was the Kahurangi National Park, which is famous for its untouched rain forest and the Oparara Bassin. The second one was Kaikoura at the east coast. So the way went north along the west coast with three short stopovers, namely the Pancake Rocks (which looks ...

After we arrived in Nelson we relaxed a bit just because we had a bit time and not too much on the schedule. We wanted to do the Abel Tasman Coastal Track, Golden Bay (both around 2 hours north-west) and some of the beaches and sounds around Picton before we would take the ferry to ...

One box of cracker and another crazy pass through the mountains later, we were almost back at the west coast. In fact only around 100km beeline apart of the Oparara Bassin, at the west of the north coast of the south island (sorry, I couldn’t resist putting 3 cardinal direction in one sentence 🙂 ), ...

After we came back from our Abel Tasman trip we planned five more days at the north coast in order to visit some beaches (Kaiteriteri,…), take a boat trip along the Pelorus Sound and do parts of the Queen Charlotte Track before we take the ferry to Wellington. Additionally we wanted to try to sell ...

We already informed us about the highlights of Wellington on the ferry, why we directly drove to Claire once we (finally) got off the ferry. As already mentioned in the last post, we were quite excited about this unknown situation but the tension eased immediately within minutes. Not only that Claire baked some cookies for ...

After the hard good bye with Claire we made our way to the next stop of our journey, Wanganui. On the way we made some stops at some beaches along the coast and at the Queen-Charlotte Park. The highlight was supposed to be a black sand beach, but it figured out to be rather grey… ...

Arrived in Startford, the hometown of our host Chris, we first informed us about potential walking tracks. The highlight of this area is Mt Taranaki (or Mt. Egmont for the locals) in the Taranaki National Park. It is with almost 2600m the highest of a range of volcanos, most of them still active. Statistically, Mt ...

Lake Taupo is the biggest lake of New Zealand. Taupo has the first commercial Skydiving provider New Zealand’s. There is the highest Bungy Jump of New Zealand. Taupo has volcanic hot springs, is location of one of the best scenes in “The Hobbit” trilogy and is only some km apart from the Tongariro National Park. ...

Happy that we finally could leave our hosts in Taupo but also a bit sad to say good bye to Lisa we made our way to Rotorua, the city which is in the centre of a highly active geothermal area (which is sometimes called “The Ring of Fire”. It is located on the edge between ...

Coromandel is an around 70km long peninsula not far away from Auckland. It’s famous for its beautiful beaches including two specialities, the Hot Water Beach (description follows) and the Cathedral Cove. However, it will probably stay in our minds mostly because of our host Anthony, but one step after the other. We already found a HelpX ...

On our way from Coromandel to Kerikeri we made a stop in Auckland in order to put some advertisments for our car in some backpacker hostel, because we wanted to get rid of it by the time we fly out. After that we drove to Kerikeri in order to receive a very warm welcome of ...

Arrived at Jamies, we first met all his flatmates, which are apparently 4. All of them were super friendly and welcoming and Jamie invited us to go with some other friends to a bar in the town, what we accepted for sure! 🙂 There is nothing really special about the night life in Whangarei, but ...

We were not very lucky when we were looking for hosts in Auckland, mostly because we were looking for couchsurfers and HelpX host with only 2 hours work. That was not very successful until Damika wrote us and invited us to stay with her. We directly mentioned that we only want to work for two ...

Lying on the beach at one of the countless islands of Fiji, is a nice opportunity to look back on the New Zealand adventure and sum up everything important: New Zealand, the ever green island: This is not completely true. Especially the South Island was quite disappointing in that point (but it has some other awesome things ...

After three hours in the plane, we landed in Nadi, Fiji and were finally back in summer! We found a local couchsurfer, Lawrence, who wanted to pick us up from the airport, why we didn’t have an address of him. Unfortunately, the police at the customs wanted to know the address of our first night. ...

The skipper of the jetboat is a friend of Dee, that’s why he picked us up from her house which is on his way. Once arrived, our last doubts were gone. We paid exactly what Dee told us and went on the boat. After one stop on another island we arrived at our destination Mana ...

The day of our departure from Mana Island, we received an E-Mail letting us know that our flight to L.A. has a delay of 10 hours and so instead of flying the next evening (Monday) we were supposed to fly Tuesday morning. As information in the internet were quite contradictory, Lawrence recommended us to go ...

36 (!!!) hours delayed, we finally arrived in the city of angels in the land of unlimited opportunities. Caused by the delay, we didn’t arrive in the afternoon as we actually thought, but at midnight. That’s why we got a grandiose landing with thousands of lights, but on the other hand we were kind of ...

Why Spanish town, we are in America, aren’t we? That’s what we thought as well, but it makes sense (be aware, we want to sound smart now). On the one hand, California is a famous place for Mexican immigrants (who earlier days made friends with Spanish people, as we all know). Secondly, in the beginning ...

When you inform yourself about San Francisco, you will be overwhelmed with positive references. But we wouldn’t have thought that the city is so extremely charming. But one thing after the other… We arrived clearly after sunset at Judy’s place, who wanted to host us for our time in San Francisco. Judy is a friend of ...

From Orinda we took off to Yosemite national park which is probably one of the most famous (and the 3rd oldest) national parks worldwide. And for sure there is a reason why, you will recognize it clearly in the pictures. However, approximately 4 million visitors per year ask for entertainment why the main part, the ...

Marc (44) and Rachel (29) were our hosts for our time in Arizona and once again, it couldn’t have been any better. They were not at home when we arrived, but they left the door unlocked and we made ourselves comfortable in one of the two guest rooms we were allowed to choose from. After ...

After we said good bye to Marc and Rachel, we continued our way along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and crossed the Glen Canyon Dam (the highest dam of America), in order to drive to our next destination, Bryce Canyon National Park where we planned to stay half a day. First we drove ...

A quick 2.5 hour drive later, we arrived at the very popular Las Vegas Boulevard aka “The Strip”. The obvious goal of the Party-/gambling-/entertainment-/luxury-mile is to fulfil even the weirdest wishes of its customers. Whatever that might be… Everything is possible here. You name it, you’ll find it. Luxury Hotels (which are apparently not as ...

Yes we went back to Utah, the state with all these nice national parks. We only saw two of them so far, why we wanted to extend the list with another two. The main reason for the 7h drive (which is extremely scenic, so not boring at all) was Arches National Park, but as Moab ...

As we already know, Utah is the biggest habitat for followers of the Mormon Church and Salt Lake City as the capital of Utah does the same job for the church. The centre of the city is characterized by the Temple Square with an enormous concert hall and a temple for weddings, which is not ...

During our time in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national park, we found a couchsurfer named Bruce. When we arrived (it was finally a bit cooler, only roundabout 30°C), it seemed there was no one at home, until he opened the door being on the way back to work. Bruce is 66 years old and to ...

From Marylin, we drove towards Glacier National Park, more specifically to Kalispell, where Lance and Shelley Jo wanted to host us for the next two days. A short 6 hour drive and two stopovers in a small town next to a river and at the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas later, we arrived at their ...

Actually, except of a short stop in Vancouver, we hadn’t planned a bigger trip in the west of Canada. But after the recommendation of Mike from Salt Lake City, we decided to make a short trip to the wilderness of this huge country. As it was only a marginal detour of 1000km, we decided to ...

We were quite lucky that we didn’t have to organize accommodation for Vancouver, as Johanna – a former study colleague of Tobi – left Munich a few weeks before us in order to live in Vancouver for a year. So we wrote her a few weeks in advance and of course she said it’s ok ...

After we left the (sorry again, but the guy thought to be really important) asshole at the border behind us, we were back in the States. The city Seattle is mainly known for music, legalisation of marihuana and the main location of Microsoft. We were lucky enough to find again super nice couchsurfers named Emily ...

The drive to Crater Lake figured out to be longer as we initially thought (around 6 hours) and that’s why we arrived at the north entrance of Crater Lake NP in the late afternoon. We tried our luck at a camp ground in the National Forest which surrounds the national park and were able to ...

Back at Judy’s house in Orinda, we relaxed a bit and ordered the probably best Pizza in San Francisco, Zachary’s Chicago Style. As we already saw most of the highlights of the city and because the tickets for Alcatraz were unfortunately sold out (due to the peak season they were booked out a few weeks ...

After the quite gross bus dropped us off around noon in the middle of San Diego, we started to get an overview about the city. That’s why we wanted to store our big backpacks somewhere and for all the travellers of you, we’re telling you now the ultimate tip: we just went to one of ...

Arrived by tram (or Trolley how its name is in San Diego) at the border, we were quite surprised. It is probably the first border we crossed that really does look like a border. This means, huge walls, barb wires, shooting towers and so on. And we planned to go directly on the other side ...

What wouldn’t you do as a backpacker in order to save a bit of money… Ok, maybe that is a bit too philosophic now, but it basically hits the nail on the head. We spent a lot of time thinking about our planned drive from West to East and decided to keep that for our ...

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sorry, coming soon 🙁

sorry, coming soon 🙁