Part 3

It is 1200 miles from Fiji to New Zealand, although that is not nearly as far as some of my other recent oversea journeys, it would still be another mostly boring ride over nothing but ocean.

I ended up aborting my first approach into Auckland due to another aircraft that landed in front of me taking his sweet ass time clearing the runway, the second approach went fine.

I then flew to Wellington and on to Invercargill, the landscape is very different between the north and south islands, the south island being much more mountainous and rugged.

A few years back I used to watch Xena fairly regularly, and I believe this is where they filmed that show, here in the land of the hobbits.

There is plenty of cool terrain to explore on New Zealands south island, there are a lot of cliffs along the western shore, and some ice capped peaks in the southern alps.

I have it in my notes that New Zealand was a place I would like to return to and maybe explore a little more, if you happen to be in this area, I reccomend a visit to the south island at least.

As for mt trip, there was still a lot of world to see so I worked my way back to Aukland where I landed a job with Qantas airlines for my flight to Australia.

If there was one thing I learned since leaving the shores of North America it was that there is a lot of water out there, they say the earth is 3/4 covered in water and all this flying over the ocean was certainly driving that fact home.

Now if you have been following my story, you know that my computer had a stroke and was out of commision at this point, my New Zealand trip was performed entirely on my wifes 900mhz athlon powered machine, and I have to say it kept me going quite nicely.

I was still waiting on the recovery disc from Compaq, which would allow me to get my machine back up and running, when I seen an ad for a powerhouse of a machine at a very reasonable price, it had been about 2 years since I replaced my setup and couldn't think of a better time than now. After getting the okay from wifey, I ran straight out and came home with the new machine which has been a dream and is the machine I am using to date, the only upgrade I have made was to double the RAM.

I now have the power to fly FS2002 with all the graphics on high, and have had no problems with slowdown, this is a very nice machine for under $700 USD.

Eventually I got my other system up and running and swapped it out with my wifes, so in a sense with both ended up winning in the end, I should be set for a while and so should she.

Once I was headed toward Australia I had another 1000 miles of water to cross, before I would land in Sydney, this should be the longest stretch of ocean I had left to endure for sometime to come, my next major water crossing shouldn't occur until the transatlantic flight which was a long way in the future.

My first outing in Australia came in the form of a night flight around Sydney, which was quite pleasant as the city is lit up nicely and the Sydney opera house is a interesting piece of architecture. I repeated this flight the next day and then ventured to Melbourne.

I flew down to Hobart just so I could say I had been to Tasmania. I scoped pretty hard in search of Tasmanian devils but came up disappointed, I expected to see them twirling around and shit like little tornadoes, busting through rocks and chasing bunnies. Oh well.

My next stop was to be Addelaide, which appeared to be right on the edge of the desert. The landing went okay but I have it noted that I may have flared too much judging by the sparks shooting out of my ass end when watching the replay of my touchdown.

It starts to occur to me that Australia is a bit boring, at least as far as the default scenery included in this program is concerned, and also I haven't crashed for quite a while, I begin to fear my story will also get boring if I don't have a mishap soon. Obviously my piloting skills have come a long way since my tour of the U.S.

I figure I'll take a trip to the north. I aquired a Qantas dash-8 and used it for the flight to Newman, which is a little out of the way, middle of nowhere place northeast of Perth, I don't know why there needs to be a town this far away from anywhere else but hey, thats not for me to judge.

I don't recall how far Newman was from Perth, but I ran out of gas about 60 miles south of the Newman airport, I was flying fairly low so I wouldn't miss out on any of the dirt and rock action, and this must have had a negative effect on my fuel efficiency.

I managed to glide about another 10 miles and set her down in a clearing, a perfect landing I might add, other than the fact that I 50 miles from civilization.

I got on the horn and they sent a crew out with some gas, I got her back in the air and finished my trip to Newman, Whoo Hoo, I'm in Newman Australia, break out the pretzels.

I flew on to Hall's creek, when I got there I looked around, there is no hills, no bushes, no trees, I'm not even sure there is a town, but there is a gas pump, so I charge the tanks and head on to Alice Springs.

It was pretty clear to me by now that there was nothing to see in Australia, but I wanted to visit the great barrier reef before leaving here. so I flew to Rockhampton on the east coast.

Once I was in Rockhampton I got me a kingair and headed out over the reef, which is kind of weird, it's flashy and wavy looking, but more exciting than anything I've seen since leaving Sydney.

My visit to Australia was quite disappointing, unless I missed something, there really seems to be little to see here outside of Sydney, I found the south island of New Zealand to be more interesting than this whole continent,and so, it was time for me to leave the land down under.