Ballarat?

[scooba doo]

Im looking into doing an international student program through my school. I have narrowed it down to two choices being, Ballarat, Australia and New Zealand. Im looking to do some diving while im there, and was wondering what Ballarat offered. All I know is it's about an hour from Melbourne.

 

[paschen]

Ballarat - affectionately known as 'Rat.
It has the highest number of pubs per capita in Australia and probably the world (feel free to check that out) due to the fact that it was a gold mining boom town.
'Rat has a nice country feel that gets a little nippy in Winter but is beautiful.
Diving wise - you are close enough to Melbourne to dive Melbourne or Geelong. Don't forget that if you are going diving in the morning you need to leave rather early.
I suggest you check out www.diveoz.com.au and ask about diving in Melbourne.
Good luck!
Pas
PS. Bond has a fantastic international student exchange program - www.bond.edu.au and you are 15mins from some nice dive sites.

 

[AndyNZ]

There's some great diving around Melbourne - some very cool wrecks, and the pier at Portsea is a great little dive.

Where abouts in New Zealand would you be?

I'm obviously biased, but if you're interested in diving and the outdoors then I'd say that New Zealand had more to offer than Ballarat. The other side of the argument, if you're also into the city living then Melbourne beats anything in NZ hands down. I head over the Melbourne fairly regularly to get some good shopping, a bit of culture and some variety.....

Ballarat/Geelong/Melbourne is a long way to get anywhere different - long drives to get to places like the Grampian mountains or along the Great Ocean Road for example. Internal flights in Aus are quite cheap, though, so you could easily get up to Sydney, the Gold Coast or Cairns for a bit of variety.

New Zealand, distances are short - but travel time can be quite long as the roads are shocking at times. Lots of diving variety, from Auckland you can head up to the Poor Knights (in Cousteau's top ten) in around 3 hours, or diving on an active volcano (White Island) in about 4 hours. There's then also wrecks like the Mikhail Lermentov and the joy of black coral as shallow as 20m at some of the Fjordland dive sites.