Welcome Paul,

Once your wife gets over the "morning sickness" stage, she will still enjoy
camping for a few months anyhow. I am not too sure for the 8th and 9th
months. Other ladies can comment on that.

GPS- I have recently imported a Garmon Geko 301 from the US and landed it
cost A$293-33. The US price was $176 + internal postage to an American
address 0f $9.99 + postage to Australia of US$22.35. The exchange rate was
at the time .7509c to the A$. There is the bank fee of A$15 for the draft.

The cheapest I have seen here on EBay is A$407 and in the camping shops
A$470. No cables are supplied. They have to be purchased separately.

There was no problem with Customs. Duty is payable on items worth over A$200
but they use commonsense and do not worry about the 5% duty on amounts
exceeding that up to A$50 as it is uneconomical to chase it as told to me by
Customs when I enquired before purchase. In my case it would have been duty
of $1.70 based on the exchange rate on the purchase price of US$176 = A$234.
ie. $34 at 5% = $1-70

I use mine for geocaching as I am new to this.

Hope this helps.

Ralph



_____

From: aushiker@... [mailto:aushiker@...] On
Behalf Of Paul Walker
Sent: Thursday, 3 November 2005 2:37 PM
To: aushiker@...
Subject: [Aushiker] "New" Member


On another matter, I've been toying with purchasing a GPS for
Christmas and indulging in a bit of geocaching. Does anyone here
recommend any particular makes and models? From what research I've
done, it seems Garmin are the most popular.

Also, I've noticed a huge difference in price between the Australian
models and importing them (particularly on the higher priced units).
Has anyone here imported one? Are there any gotchas that I need to
look out for (aside from warranty). If anyone has any experience with
the GST / duties side I'd also be interested in hearing about this.


Paul





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