Crapping on a yak.....overland to the other side of the world and the rest

This is the story of my 32 week London to Sydney overland trip on a big orange truck with 30 odd other people.....and what happens after.. I try to find the best pizza in the world. I test the limits of endurance of my T-shirts in the hunt for the most bizarre location in which to bump into a fellow fan of the band 'The Fall'. Slightly more successfully, I try to take a guitar to as many of the world's monuments as I can. Finally, I confront the greatest cultural divide of them all...toilets.

Day 235 – 24 March 2010: Ha Ha You’re Irish

Today we book a camper van with Escape, haggling the price down from NZ $50 a day down to NZ $43.75 (NZ $2 = c. £1). For some reason, the fact that Mary has an Irish accent sends the woman at the Escape office into giggles. Now, Caz and I are quite fond of mimicking Mary’s accent, but given the prominence of Irish bars in the city complete with actual Irish people in them, even we find this reaction quite strange.

This feeling is further reinforced in the evening when I go to a bar near the hostel to find a Maori looking man performing Irish tunes as well as some old classic covers. I join him for a couple of songs, singing Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’ and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. The cider is almost as expensive as Sydney though, with a bottle of Magners costing NZ $12.50 (c. £6).