Bye bye New Zealand!

It has become something of a tradition on this blog for us to write a little summary when we leave a country of 'things we'll miss' and things we won't miss, so here's the dirt on New Zealand:

Things we'll miss about New Zealand:

• The friendliness of Kiwis - people regularly say hello to you in the street, and almost everyone we met was incredibly kind and welcoming. Kiwis appeared to have a particular soft-spot for Brits, too!
  
• The fantastic scenery round every bend in the road. Mountains, lakes, valleys, sea views, winding rivers and miles of unspoiled open spaces.
  
• Like in Australia, it's so easy to travel in NZ. There are lots of tourist information sites, everything is well-signposted, and there are loads of free amenities available to the free-loading public such as toilets, showers, BBQs, picnic areas, etc. And of course, English is the national language, which makes travelling there incredibly easy for us. We're looking forward to the challenge of learning/practising a new language, though!
• Wine-tasting. Again! There are lots of vineyards across New Zealand, and we made sure we got to a few of them to sample the yummy wine.
  
• The outdoorsy lifestyle. Like in Australia, there is a big emphasis on getting out of the house and back to nature. Trekking, hiking, biking, kayaking, fishing, the lot. New Zealand is also the extreme sports centre of the world, so sky dives, bungee jumps, white water rafting, and pretty much any other adrenaline rush you can think of is on offer there.
  
• It's a lot more affordable than Australia! Obviously the exchange rate will always affect this one, but things in NZ were generally the same price as at home, and we didn't spend all of our time in supermarkets horrified at the prices, which did happen in Oz. We'll also miss that the $NZ was two-to-one with the pound when we were there. It was always easy to convert into 'home prices'!
• The beer. I'm really enjoying trying the different brews from around the world on this trip, and NZ did not disappoint. My favourite was 'Sassy Red', brewed by Macs. Yum!
  
• The Lord of the Rings. Ania and I are HUGE fans of LOTR: both the movies and the books. Tolkien may have been English, but LOTR has a special place in Kiwis' hearts thanks to Peter Jackson's amazing movie version of the story. Visiting the WETA workshop in Wellington; doing the Tongariro (Mordor) trek; and best of all, visiting Hobbiton (near Matamata) made us feel like great big kids. It was truly magical!
• Dan and Sarah. We had a wonderful time living in our Jucy campervan, and then later in a cottage in Ashburton, with Dan and Sarah. It was great to make such brilliant friends on our travels!
  

Things we won't miss about New Zealand:

• The road rage. Kiwis are almost universally friendly and good-natured until they get behind the wheel of a car, at which point we found people to be surprisingly pushy and quick to anger. Perhaps it was more surprising because it seemed so out of character...
• The horrific earthquake that affected Christchurch. Very sad.

That's all we can think of for the negatives! All in all, we loved New Zealand, and would recommend it to anyone!

Last days in New Zealand...

Well, we are now in Chile, but let me get you all up to date by telling you about our last week or so in NZ. We had planned to drop off our campervan in Christchurch and then live there for a week, but of course after the earthquake we changed our plans and avoided the area. We found a place to stay on a farm in Ashburton, south of Christchurch, with Ruth, Wayne and their family. They have a lovely self-contained cottage on the farm called 'At Violinos' which we rented with Dan and Sarah for a week, and it was a really lovely and relaxing place to be. In the mornings we could go and feed the chickens and get some eggs. The family really included us, and had us over for dinner with them three times! Ruth is a very accomplished violinist, and she has given the farm a musical theme, decorated with musical notes and clefs. On our first night we had an impromptu concert from Stephan, Ruth's youngest, who played some excellent alto saxophone!

Stu had use of a guitar while we were there, which he enjoyed. Here he is serenading the sheep:


Dinner with the family! Ruth is Swiss, so here she treated us to a meal of 'raclette':

One of the days we were in Ashburton, Ruth took us out for a hike in the nearby Mt Hutt area. Ruth obviously does this all the time, and she put us to shame racing off up the steep track while we panted behind her! It was a very pretty hike through forest, past waterfalls, and with some gorgeous views of the flat plains below.


A short detour, climbing up beside a waterfall:
The views from the walk:

Later, Ruth drove us to Rakaia Gorge, to see these amazing views:


It was a very relaxing week, and just the tonic after a month of living in a van!

Stu and I then said our goodbyes to Dan and Sarah, who were staying on in Ashburton, and we caught a flight back to Auckland for our last few days in New Zealand. We stayed in the same hostel as before, City Garden Lodge, in lovely Parnell. Parnell is a bit posh, full of lovely little eateries and walkable to the city centre. Here I am in one of Parnell's little cobbled alleys:


Relaxing at our hostel:While in Auckland, we visited the huge Auckland Museum, which has an extensive exhibition of Maori articfacts and a cultural performance where we saw traditional Maori dances, poi and the haka (war dance, designed to intimidate the enemy, and made famous by the All Blacks rugby team).

Maori designs:
The next day we took the ferry to the nearby island of Rangitoto. Auckland is in a volcanic region, and Rangitoto is the most recently active volcano, formed by a series of eruptions between 600 and 700 years ago. We trekked up the cone to the top, and walked around the crater at the top (now full of forest). The island is still surprisingly volcano-like, covered in black lava rock which still hasn't been completely grown over since the last eruption.

Looking back at the Auckland skyline from the ferry:

Views of the Hauraki Gulf from the top of Rangitoto:

There are also some pretty cool lava caves on Rangitoto, which were formed by lava and then left as underground tunnels when the lava receded. Here is Stu emerging from one of the caves:

On our last full day in NZ, we took another ferry to the island of Waiheke, which (unlike Rangitoto) is properly inhabited with towns and lots of vineyards. So, of course, we did some wine-tasting! Waiheke also grows lots of olives, so we learned about olive harvesting and olive oil production too. It was a beautiful day, and a lovely way to spend our last day - looking at Auckland city across the water with a glass of wine in hand.

Vines on the left, olive trees on the right:

Finishing Van Trips and Avoiding Earthquakes

Hello everyone! We are back in Auckland now and catching up on our blog entries. Thanks to everyone who got in touch after the Christchurch earthquake to see if we were ok. We were and we are!

After leaving Queenstown we stopped for a night in Te Anau, an area near New Zealand's famous Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound. This was a place to chill out and have some downtime for us. I think our best achievement here was watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD in our van. Sarah (who had notoriously fallen asleep during every film we watched) stayed awake for all three! Well done! :)

On 21st we headed to Dunedin, a cool little city about five hours drive south of Christchurch. We drank some great beer in a place called The Green Man, which brewed five of its own beers and had the longest happy hour I have ever heard of (six hours every day!).

We did the Cadbury's Chocolate Factory tour in Dunedin, a must for any chocolate fan. The tour was very reasonably priced actually, even without the Jucy vans deal which the four of us used. We had a very good guide called Dominic who walked us through the different rooms, giving us facts and then testing our chocolate knowledge as we went. Each of us was given a small plastic bag which we got to fill with goodies on the way and the tour ended with the chocolate waterfall inside the purple silo: a tonne of chocolate falling thirty metres for no reason! Everyone had to wear a hair net on the tour, plus the more beardy gents (including myself) also had to don a snood:

Posing outside the factory with an authentic old-fashioned Cadbury's van:

The earthquake hit Christchurch while we were on the tour, so as we came out people were talking about it, but it wasn't until later that we realised how serious it was. We were due to go to Christchurch the day after the quake, but changed our plans and spent a night in Rakaia, about an hour and a half south of the city. After staying in this small town, we then headed north of Christchurch to a place called Kaikoura. On the way we briefly got lost and found ourselves inside the earthquake zone. It was really shocking and quite upsetting to see so many buildings destroyed and cracks everywhere in the roads and pavements.

Kaikoura is a great little town that's been built around its tourism trade, which thrives on whale, dolphin, seal and albatross-spotting tours. We booked ourselves in on a seal tour with Top Spot Seal Swim and had quite a strange time. I say strange, because the tour really has to be broken down into two parts: 1) Swimming with seals in the bay was magical. They were so close to us and we had a good long swim with them, with even more seals and their pups sitting on the rocks nearby. The tour company provided us with gear like wetsuits, fins, masks and snorkels. I was swimming along in the very cold water, the visability was very poor, when suddenly a seal came right towards me out of the gloom. They're very playful creatures and it was breath-taking to see it swim so close to me! 2) Our guide was not very good, unprofessional, rude, aggressive and racist. Those aren't the words you want to describe someone who's leading your group for the morning are they?! While I'd recommend going to swim with seals in Kaikoura, don't do it with this company. The man who took us was horrible, particularly to two Dutch girls in our group, whose list of crimes included 'speaking Dutch'. He also left us on some rocks in the bay at one point to get some more shoes from the van (one of mine had broken). But that's not the way to end this account. I'll repeat myself and end it in the way it should be remembered: swimming with seals in the bay was magical!

Unfortunately neither of us has an underwater camera so we didn't get any photos of these wonderful seals. I've picked this picture from Google images instead:

After spending two nights at the beautiful Peketa Beach camp site in Kaikoura we headed back to the outskirts of Christchurch where we dropped off our Jucy van, that's been home to myself, Ania, Dan and Sarah for the past four weeks! We've had a wonderful road trip, but as was the case in Australia, four weeks is enough in a van! Goodbye Jucy, you served us well!

Sarah demonstrates the comfort of the 'up bed' in our van. I can assure you that those things in the foreground are my thumbs.

Glacier trekking and other frolics

After our amazing skydiving trip in Abel Tasman, we drove for a whole day south to get to Fox Glacier, and the next day we went glacier trekking! The glacier is a 13km-long, slow-moving river of ice running down the valley. Snow falls in the mountains and then presses down and compacts into ice, which then flows slowly downhill under its own weight before melting at the bottom (it takes years for ice at the top to reach the bottom). We had a gorgeous day for it - crisp and sunny - and the views in the mountains were fantastic:

We went with a guided group so that we could actually get up on the glacier itself. After a walk up to the first section of ice, we stuck crampons on our walking boots and started climbing up a stairway that had been cut into the ice. The glacier is always moving and parts gradually fall away into chasms, so the guides are always having to find new routes through it. Our guide went ahead of us, scouting a route through and hacking at the ice with a pick axe to create footholds.



It was a really amazing day, and a very memorable experience. Plus we had some silly moments too:



After the glacier trip we headed to Wanaka, which is set in the middle of some of the most beautiful lakes and mountains I've ever seen:

We all really enjoyed Wanaka: it had really nice cafes, a great ice cream parlour, lovely walks, and a brilliant little independent cinema full of sofas where you can get a pizza in the interval! (We went there to see 127 Hours - not for the faint-hearted!) We started our first day in Wanaka with a walk around Mt Iron, and we also spent a couple of evenings swimming in Wanaka lake:
The next day we went to 'Puzzle World' - brilliant fun! It's just outside Wanaka, and they have a two-storey maze with towers and a bridge which was genuinely difficult to figure out:

They also have a sitting area where you can while away hours doing puzzles, and they have whole set of illusion rooms, including this one (demonstrated by Stu and Dan):

We really could have stayed longer in Wanaka, but we are on a schedule so we pushed on to Queenstown. (On the way we stopped for tea at quaint Arrowtown, a lovely old gold mining town which reminded me of Lewes back home.) Queenstown is most famous for being the adrenaline-junky capital of New Zealand - you can do pretty much any variation of throwing yourself off bridges and out of planes. We had already done a bit of that sort of thing and, since it's quite pricey, we gave it a miss. Luckily, Queenstown has lots more to offer. It's a really nice little town to walk around, with lovely lake and mountain views and plenty to see. Stu and I had had a hankering for mini-golf for a while now, and we spent a happy hour or two on a very elaborate mini-golf course, complete with electronic 'effects' that lit up/played music/took your golf ball up a ski lift. Here is Stu making like King Kong at the golf course:


We also made sure we had a burger at 'Fergburger', which is something of an institution in Queenstown, and it totally lived up to the hype. I think I'll stop there and leave you with the above image, because I like the idea of it lingering in the minds of our friends and family across the globe...

From North Island to South: Wellington to Abel Tasman

Just when I think I can't love this country any more than I already do, it gets even better!


We are now on New Zealand's South Island. The four of us have elected to spend slightly more time here than on the North Island, following advice from friends and other travellers. So far I've enjoyed the whole thing, it's hard to choose a favourite place!


Our last stop on the North Island was Wellington, the capital city. We didn't spend a huge amount of time in the city for one reason or another, but I liked it! We stayed one night in a very odd campsite just minutes from the inter-island ferry. I say odd, because it wasn't bad, it was just basically a car park with some clean toilets and showers. It was weird though, sleeping in a van, right in the city centre.


So our stand-out experiences of Wellington were: 1) a weird place to sleep; 2) a nice South Indian meal (we treated ourselves to a rare trip to a restaurant); and 3) best of all: the Weta Cave! Weta (named after a native NZ bug) is the home of the company who do all the amazing models, weaponry, special effects and other digital awesomeness for such films as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, District 9, Avatar, King Kong and ooh, loads of others! The Cave is basically a tiny museum and shop with lots of collectables for sale. I was in heaven seeing all of the LOTR paraphinalia, especially this guy: Ania also met this fighting Uruk-hai: a massive orc from LOTR! This is the actual outfit and actual size. The guy playing Lurtz (for that is his name) would apparently sleep while this make-up was put on him, before filming for up to twelve hours a day!
The staff were all really enthusiastic and let Ania and I pose for some photos with the alien weaponry from District 9! Wow! Whilst in Wellington we also checked out a more traditional kind of museum called Te Papa, which had some fun exhibits.

On 8th February we caught the inter-island ferry. It's a three-hour ride from Wellington to Picton on the South Island. We spent a night at a campsite near Picton and did their 'farm walk' the next morning, finishing up at a spectacular waterfall.

Our next stop was the nearby Marlborough Wine Region. 75% of NZ's wine is made here, according to our guidebook. I can now testify that it's gooood! The area's huge number of wineries are mainly found in two towns: Renwick and Blenheim. We arrived in Renwick in the afternoon and drove to four wineries, taking advantage of the free tastings (Dan drove, he's not so keen on wine: lucky for me, Ania and Sarah!). The next day the four of us hired bikes and spent the day cycling around different wineries, tasting as we went! We made it to five cellar doors and a brewery. For some reason it got harder to pedal as the day went on! At home Ania and I are usually red wine drinkers, but it's been the whites that have impressed us here. We've had some really nice Riesling, Gewurtztraminer and Pinot Gris. Yum!

Cheers! Outside Mahi winery, with their vines in the background:
After saying goodbye to Marlborough, we drove to the Abel Tasman area, in the north west of the South Island. We stayed for two nights on the driveway of Sarah's friend Fiona (in our campervan!). There's a National Park in the Abel Tasman and the whole area is really beautiful. We stayed in a town called Motueka with Fiona and packed a few activities into our short stay.

On 12th we got up early and went sea kayaking! We set off in a group of six: us four plus our guide Caitlyn and another traveller called Mitch. They were both from Canada. Within the first few minutes of setting off we saw an island with lots of seals basking on the rocks and playing in the water. There were adults and also pups, they were very cute!

After a morning of kayaking, we had a beach picnic and then the four of us parted ways from Caitlyn and Mitch and did a two-hour coastal walk. It was incredibly beautiful. We could have been in Thailand on one of the islands!

Picnicing on the beach, with a nosy, unusual-looking duck:One of the many amazing views from our coastal walk:
A gorgeous beach where we chilled out and had a swim, whilst waiting for our water taxi:
In the evening we did a skydive! Fiona works for Skydive Abel Tasman and organised some jumps for us. We went in twos: Ania and I first, Dan and Sarah second. I paid to have a DVD made of my jump, so we had five people in our little plane: me and Evan (my tandem guy); Ania and John (her tandem guy); and Kev (my cameraman!). We climbed and climbed to 16,500 feet, taking in the amazing views on the way up. The five of us were squashed in sitting on the floor of our tiny plane, right next to the door that we would soon leap out of! And leap we did! I will never forget the sight of Ania saying, 'I love you!' and then just... falling! Amazing! Kev was out next and stood on the side of the plane as me and Evan got ready. A few photos for the camera mounted on the wing and we leapt! I'm grinning as I remember it now. What a feeling! We were free-falling for a whole minute, which was great. Kev was with us, taking photos and video as we rushed towards the ground. Then suddenly, Evan pulled the cord and we were floating gracefully towards the ground. We could see fields, the sea, mountains and the sun: all below us (or so it seemed when it comes to the sun!). I'm really pleased with my DVD too, they did a great job! I'd recommend it to most people, it really was one of the best days of my life!

Ania and John, jumping from 16,500 feet:
Kev's view as he clings onto the side of the plane. Ev and I are about to jump out!
Ev and I, falling!

Stinks, treks, and underground adventures...

Our next stop was Rotorua, which is famous for being in a volcanic region full of geothermal activity and sulphurous smells. Dan and I visited Wai-O-Tapu, a 'geothermal wonderland', and I can honestly say that I have never smelled a nastier stink than the devilish stinks I smelled there. It was also thoroughly fascinating, and absolutely beautiful. The geothermal activity and hot volcanic springs create the most incredible natural colours in the rocks and water, as well as many areas where hot, stinky steam belches out of the ground (some of these phenomena have been given names such as 'The Devil's Home'). Here are a few of my favourites:

The 'Champagne Pool', with steam boiling over it:

A lake that has a natural lime green colour because of sulphur in the water:

Bright yellow sulphur:

Dan and I then met back up with Sarah and Stu, and the four of us went round the corner to visit some boiling mud pools (otherwise known as 'The Bog of Eternal Stench'):

That evening we fled the smells and drove to Waitomo, ready for a caving adventure the next day! The Waitomo region has 310 known caves - the majoriy of the caves in New Zealand - and we went caving in the Mangawhitikau cave system. Our group consisted of the four of us, plus two really nice Danish girls and our lovely guide, Scott. Dressed in a fabulous ensemble of wetsuits, wellies and helmets, we started with a 29-metre vertical abseil down into the mouth of the cave to the river at the bottom.

Here is Stu, decescending into the drop:

The huge entrance chamber to the cave:

Once down there, we switched on the lights on our helmets and waded upstream into the dark! There was plenty of clambering and caving, and even some proper spelunking (which is the name given to the 'sport' of squeezing yourself through claustrophobia-inducing rock tunnels)! Some of the tunnels we went through were literally so narrow that you have to shuffle through on your tummy with your arms above your head, because if you had your arms by your sides you would get stuck. It's mostly an exercise in self-control - it takes some serious 'mind-over matter' not to panic in such tiny rocky spaces (but we all succeeded admirably, I hasten to add)! Stu and Dan even managed the very narrowest tunnel (Sarah and I took one look and opted out)!

Stu and I underground:

One of the main reasons we visited the cave was to see the New Zealand glow worms, which hang from the rock celining in their thousands, glittering and glowing like a really bright, close night-sky. The glow worms are actually the larvae of a gnat fly, and they live on the ceiling and hang lots of sticky 10-15cm long 'fishing lines' down to catch any insects in the cave. They glow to attract their food; insects are attracted to the light and become ensnared in the sticky lines. (We also saw some cave eels in the water.) Here is our group sitting in the underground river. If you look carefully, you can see the glittering glow worms in the dark above us:

After having a good close-up look at the glow worms, we each grabbed a big inflatable donut ring to sit in and went 'tubing' (also known as black water rafting) - floating down the river looking up at the glowing ceiling with our lights off. Here is Stu tubing over a mini-waterfall:

After a quick stop for a snack of chocolate and hot squash, we made our way back upstream (taking the time to leap off some rocks with our inflatable rings) to the entrance chamber. We then did a fairly easy rock climb back up out of the mouth of the cave. Here I am emerging, with Stu, Dan and Sarah down below:

Back at base camp, we had much-needed hot showers and a hot mug of soup - aaah! It was an absolutely brilliant day!

After the caving we drove to Taupo, which has the biggest lake in NZ ('Lake Taupo', of course). The views were lovely, and the next day was a bit more relaxing. In the (late) morning we went to The Honey Hive, just outside of town, where we learned about honey bees and tasted lots of different kinds of New Zealand honey, as well as mead and clover honey cream liqueur! We also had honey coffee and honey ice-cream at their little cafe.

In the afternoon, Dan and Sarah went for a walk to a waterfall, while Stu and I went to a hot springs park which was attached to our campsite. The water there is naturally hot from the volcanic springs, and is full of lots of minerals. It was very relaxing, and also fun - they had a brilliant water slide that we went on about twenty times, as well as giant chess!

We then drove to Tongariro, because the next day we had an early start: we did the Tongariro Alpine Crossing! New Zealand is big on treks, or as they call it, 'tramping', and the Tongariro Alpine Crossing is reputedly one of the best one-day tramps in the country. It is 19km through mountainous terrain. For any LOTR fans, the Tongariro National Park is also where Mordor was filmed! We got up in the dark and rain and got dropped at the start with our backpacks and waterproofs. The weather was not good at all, but at least it wasn't too hot! There was a heavy mist, so it looked really eerie. The ascent started fairly easily, trekking through rocky scrubland past trickling streams and waterfalls, but soon it gfot tougher as we approached 'The Devil's Staircase'. Here the track got much steeper and the landscape started looking much more like Mordor - black volcanic rock and less and less vegetation as we got higher up the mountain. Just as we were getting really worn out, we got to the South Crater, which is a huge flat area, and a short break from climbing uphill. The mist was so heavy that we couldn't really see the sides of the crater - it felt like we were in some sort of alien landscape. Then we were out the other side and going up again, with the track getting gravelly and looser so our feet slid out from beneath us as we tried to walk uphill - it was really tough going! The rock and sand was black with chunks of red thrown in as we approached the highest point of our walk: the Red Crater. We stopped for lunch at the top, surrounded by mist. Just over the crest of the hill the fog cleared enough for us to get a view of the reddiush crater behind us and the Emerald Lakes below.

Stu in the black rocky landscape:

In the South Crater mists:

Here I am washing my legs in one of the lakes after tripping over and getting covered in black gravel!:

The downhill part of the walk was longer but not such hard work, and as the fog cleared and the sun came out we really started to enjoy the views:

We tramped down from the Mordor-esque landscape, through scrubland and past some stinky sulphur vents, and finally the last part of the trek was through a forest. By the time we reached the end we'd been walking for six and a half hours, and we were all aching! Nevertheless, we pushed on with a bit more driving to get to Wanganui, where some friends of Sarah's live. John and Judy brought us some delicious cakes and home-grown strwberries at our campsite, which was just the ticket at the end of an achy day!

Here's a slice of van life:

Judy and John kindly showed us around Wanganui the next day, and we were all exhausted and incredibly grateful to them for giving us such a relaxing day. They have a traditional Kiwi 'bach' (beach house) which they let us stay in. It was wonderful to relax and just read a book with a gorgeous view of the sea. And that brings us up to date! Phew!