New Zealand

We’d heard from many a Kiwi that Queenstown was the most happening place in the country. In New Zealand ‘happening’ must mean the same as ‘full of idiots’ in Britain. Ironically - please correct me if I’m one of the several million who misuse that word on a regular basis - most of the ‘idiots’ were from the land of hope and glory. I know I’m being woefully unpatriotic when I say this, but I dread seeing other British travellers abroad, as they are generally rude and annoying, making us all look bad.

Queenstown was full of young English guys and gals who just loved to prove my pessimistic hypothesis correct. In every shop, bar and restaurant there’d be an obnoxious group of lads in their Liverpool or Man-United shirts, or a drunken cluster of laddettes wearing their hula-hoop-sized hoop earrings and oh-so-trendy sportswear. It was a real shame because the town’s setting couldn’t be more picturesque - and for New Zealand that’s saying something! The Spectaculars are a - for want of a better and less predictable word - spectacular range of snow-capped mountains surrounding Queenstown. The composite image of mountain in front of lake, in front of more mountains is something very special that words cannot do adequate justice. Please see the attached photographs!

Not wanting to waste our time snow-ploughing down the slopes - a term I learned when I had a party at the dry ski-slope in Halifax, aged 10 - we weren’t doing any skiing in the skiing capital of New Zealand. Mainly because we’d knew we’d be crap and probably pick up all sorts of injuries that our insurance wouldn’t cover. But also because we’d have to spend time with more annoying English guys who‘d want to make us renounce our citizenship. No, our plans for Queenstown were to saddle up and head through the trees of Lothlorien on horseback! In another activity we’d probably be crap at, that our insurance also didn’t cover, we booked a half-day riding tour through some of the filming locations from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The stables were about a 40 minute ride out of the town, in a place the name of which eludes at this moment, and they smelt thoroughly of horse crap and posh people. The weather was terribly cold. They had suggested on the phone earlier that we wear six or seven layers! So, attired in our 5 T-shirts topped off with our ultra-80’s style primary-coloured jumpers we picked up in Rotorua, we would have blended nicely into the video shoot for Hey Micky. Alas, that video had already been shot some 20 years ago, so we just looked plain stupid. However, our horses didn’t seem to mind being ridden by a couple of 80’s throwbacks, and besides, they gave us Countryside Alliance-style overcoats as an extra layer (yes it really was that cold!). I felt more inclined to drive a Landrover and shoot foxes than ever before, but I had to stay focused on the task at hand: attempting to mount my horse, Randal.

Describing our ride without it turning into one of those long boring narratives I mentioned earlier is tough. So, I’ll simply say it was awesome fun and we thoroughly enjoyed it! Both our horses walked pretty much where they wanted, regardless of how we pulled on their reins. Neither of us fell off, so that was a plus point. Also we saw where Sean Bean got shot in the Lothlorien forest, as well as the setting for Isengard (correct spelling anyone?!).

That was about it for Queenstown, apart from our little trip to the Casino, where, being the high rollers we are, we spent of grand total of about $10 on the slot machines. It did take us about 3 hours to finally lose our last $2, but by that time our eyes were hurting far too much to consider playing any longer. We left Queenstown the next morning to head back west to the flatlands of Canterbury and the South Island’s only half-big city, Christchurch. After another beautiful, but quite uneventful Intercity/Newmans coach journey, we arrived around 5pm and checked into the same hostel we had stayed in the previous week. Our flight to Brisbane was mid-morning, so we didn’t have to get up too early. We decided to get some beer to complete our ‘drink beer every day in New Zealand’ thing we seemed to fall into about half way through - we worked out while we were in Rotorua that a night hadn’t passed without us ingesting some kind of alcoholic beverage, so we continued… and a month later on our final night we weren‘t going to be beat! With Bad Boys 2 being the only thing on TV, you can’t really blame us for taking comfort in beer: Martin Lawrance really isn’t very funny, even after several bottles of Tui - a nice NZ ale if you can get your hands on it! So that was that. With the inspiring dialogue of a Michael Bay movie sending us to sleep, I wondered if I’d be glad to leave New Zealand in the morning. “Oh Hell No!” shouted Will Smith as five thousand cars and two million lorries exploded in unison. My thoughts exactly.

Anyways, apologies for taking so long to write this one up… at this rate we’ll be back home before I get to Cairns! Just so you know, its all good here at the moment, but the hot weather is about to start and we’ll probably be roasted alive. Check your forecasts for the insane northern Queensland temperatures! Wooo!

Andrew.

Franz Josef: Icy.
Queenstown: Cold, full of annoying Brits.
Brisbane: Hot.
Sydney: Cold, raining, a bit sunny sometimes.
Melbourne: The less said about it the better.
Cairns: Hotter than Brisbane.

There you go. A month’s worth of updates done in 30 words.

Okay, so that wasn’t the best summary. It’s just really hard to know where to start when there is SOOOOOO much to write about! Instead of turning this update into a long, boring narrative charting our exact movements over the last month, I’ll try to stick to the interesting stuff, taking each of the above places as individual chapters. I stress the word ‘try‘.

Our last update was before we headed west across the South Island of New Zealand to brave the glacier at Franz Josef. We spent around 5 hours on the TranzAlpine train service from Christchurch to Greymouth. The scenery was utterly stunning for the duration of the journey, except when we went through a very long tunnel. The camera was cemented to my face the entire time! As the name of the service suggests, we wound through the southern alps, between snow-capped mountains and sleepy towns that had less people living there than the average four-piece band. As soon as I was readying myself to put the camera away and leave the freezing confines of the observation deck, we’d turn to the left or right and another breathtaking view would convince me that frostbite wasn’t all that bad. A small price to pay. To put into perspective exactly how gorgeous and photogenic New Zealand is, over the almost four weeks we have spent in Australia we have taken about 250 photos . Over the four weeks spent in New Zealand we too just over 2500. I must add that about 50 of the 250 were of Ramsey Street!

It should be noted that New Zealand is fantastic for syncing-up their transport services even between separate companies. The coach down to Franz Josef was due to set off 45 minutes after we arrived, but we were told if we were delayed for any reason, it would wait for us! I can’t imagine that ever happening in England - National Express wouldn’t care if your GNER train was running late by 15 minutes even if it meant you’d miss the only bus that day to wherever it is you’re going. But we didn’t have to test this as the train arrived exactly on time, as with every other bus and train we’d been on in the rest of the country. This gave us ample time to get a Subway sandwich!

On the coach down to the town of Franz Josef we were bombarded with all sorts of exciting facts by our driver. One of the most interesting was that in some parts of the Southern Alps, rainfall is measured in metres each year, not centimetres. One town whose name eludes me, apparently receives up to 9 metres of rain per year! I thought the weather in Bradford was cruddy, but 9 metres! That’s deeper than an Olympic diving pool. The odd thing was though, that just twenty or thirty miles down the road, they have severe droughts each year. The driver was also keen to point out anything that was even slightly related to the Lord of the Rings movie - we saw the pool where Gollum struggles to catch the fish before he is ambushed in The Two Towers. The time passed very quickly and we arrived in Franz just before dusk.

We had booked a full day hike figuring there was no point in wimping out half way through. We agreed we’d both feel like losers, quitters and every other related synonym in the book (the thesaurus that is). We were so glad we did - it was absolutely mind-blowing! It was also absolutely terrifying in places too! As we reached the foot of the glacier it was time to attach our crampons and start worrying as we caught a glimpse of the fully exposed ice-staircase that ascended for about 20 feet around the front wall. Of course there were no safety rails or ropes until we got to the top and the entrance tunnel that lead inside the ice. Kate was quite alarmed at this point, looking first at the staircase then at me, then back at the staircase with anxiety. Once we started our climb things didn’t get much better when Kate lost her footing and slid back down a few steps. After assuring us all she was fine - breathing very heavily the whole time - she continued up to the safety of the entrance cave. We were thinking that if the rest of the day was to be like that, we’d never make it out of Franz Josef alive!

The rest of the day was however quite fantastic - we walked across stupidly deep crevasses, alongside bottomless icy pools - two of which Kate managed to fall almost waist-deep into!), squeezed through very thin cracks (which we were told by our guide as we were half-way through were liable to close up suddenly as the glacier advanced!) and even slid down a wormhole that had been converted into a crude slide, which while massively fun, left us very bruised! We ate our lunch of crisp sandwiches and budget-range cookies about half way up - our aim was to get up near the bottom of the icefalls at the upper section of the glacier. An icefall, if you’re wondering, is where the fresh ice at the top of the glacier spills over the edge and joins the main body of the glacier. Our guide informed us that these particular falls move at approximately 11 metres per day, which is quite fast for ice, as the Franz Josef glacier as a whole only advances 1 metre per day.

Because the ice shifts so much on a day to day basis, the paths the guides create frequently change. This meant our route had to be improvised somewhat: our crazy Canadian guide often told us to wait while he bashed out a new and more dangerous trail for us to follow. We all loved it! Although we didn’t make it as high as we’d intended, it was the highest our guide had taken any group for the past few months, which made us feel at least a little bit special. The views were amazing - I really am running out of synonyms for that word now - I must have taken at least fifty pictures of the view back toward the base of the glacier, and the mountain range in the distance.

Our descent took around an hour and a half. It passed without incident, although I did get told off for not hanging onto the rope while I was taking a photo standing on the edge of a fifty-foot crevasse… I sheepishly apologised and held on. It was a damn good picture though!
We had a fantastic time and it made us love New Zealand EVEN MORE than we loved it before. We headed to the pub for celebratory beer…which coincidentally is cheap over there! It was $3 per pint in a nice bar - that’s £1! Cheap beer, remarkable scenery and fabulous activities. What more could you possibly want?! GO TO NEW ZEALAND NOW!

Yet another rushed update on what we've been up to for the last two weeks in Rotorua, Wellington and Kaikoura (aka since we left Auckland)....

Rotorua was INCREDIBLE! Our hostel was dirt cheap and still had 2 thermal spas and an outdoor heated pool (it is winter for some of us, remember)! Had a nice little kitchen and actually cooked a meal for the first time since we left England which was lovely! Only problem was that the kitchen light didn't work so we had to make sure we cooked while it was still light outside!

First day we went to Kuari Park which is filled with bubbling mud pools and steaming lakes! It was really cool but it did smell like rotten eggs! Then that evening we did a Maori cultural evening which involved going to a village, watching them do traditional singing and dancing and then a traditional hangi meal (that's food cooked on hot stones underground for 4 hours)! Very nice!

For the next two days we just hung out and went for long walks round the lakes and enjoyed the sulphurous air! We spent Saturaday shopping for costumes for the hostels 80s night! Was great fun and we made our costumes for about $10 and we got 4 free pints which was nice!

Sunday went out for Sunday dinner at an English pub which was a bit disappointing cos it turns out kiwis can't make Yorkshire puds! I miss my mum's roast dinners! They actually put sugar on the carrots and didn't serve brocolli! I wanted to go and teach the chef how to do it properly but Andrew wouldn't let me!

Monday was EXTREME day and we went whitewater rafting on the Kaituna river which had the highest waterfall that it is legal to go over on a raft! It was only an 18ft drop but it's enough to submerge the entire 5ft raft vertically! Slight problem was tho, that our raft capsized under the water and some of us (me) got trapped under the boat while some other (Andrew) got thrown clear! It was a very very scary few seconds...I couldn't breathe and my feet were still in the raft and I had to unhook myself and swim up to the raft (still under it) and hold my head in the small bit of air under the seats while the lovely men righted the boat to get me out! It was such a rush!!! We got some pics from them as well! which if you're lucky I might send with this if my time doesn't run out!

I can't wait to do it again! But we won't be again here...just whale watching, glacier hiking and horse riding to go now I love this country! I can't wait to come back again!

We got to Wellington yesterday after an 8hour coach ride and we hung out and played free pool in the hostel bar went to the Te Papa museum where there's a Lord of the Rings exhibit! Woo! We saw the original costumes from the films, the actual scale model of Minas Tirth they used to film the scenes from afar and loads of props and stuff...we spent 5 hours in the museum! We totally lost track of time there, it was so facinating!

We were only in Wellington for 2 days after a day spent travelling but to be honest, there's not that much to do so we were pretty glad we'd decided to cut it short. On our second day we visited the houses of parliament and did the tour which was fun but even better was the fantastic Indian restaurant we found for lunch! $10 for curry, rice and naan plus Andrew's introduced me to this drink called Mango Lassi which is mago juice, yoghurt and buttermilk....now I'm a total addict! Yum!

Travelling from Wellingotn to Kaikoura was fun! All transport in New Zealand is brilliantly intergrated so it completely takes the hassle out of making connections. We got on the ferry at 8am and they asked us if we would be transfering to the train (which we were) so they said they'd put our luggage on to it for us. We didn't have to think about it at all which was fantastic! The ferry took 3 hours but we occupied ourselves with sleeping and listening to our ipods, taking time out occasionally to poke fun at the huge group of American "ambassador" kids on there with us! Geeks and freaks, the whole lot of them - one from each state apparently!

The train was very nice, much better than Connex! It took us along the coastline, past the mountains which was gorgeous! Andrew spent much of the journey outside on the observation car taking photos (some of which are on our weblog now) but I opted for warmth and just watched from my window!

Kaikoura (which means Kai - food & Koura - Crayfish in Maori) is a cute little town...only one proper pub and that didn't seem to open until 4pm Not that we're alcoholics but we have had beer either in a pub or in our rooms every day since we've got to New Zealand (and thinking about it, everyday in Fiji too!) We're going for a record but I think I'm getting podgy from it so I've started on the low fat Subway sandwiches!

We only stopped in Kaikoura for 2 nights so we could go Whale watching! It was SO COOL! They told us we'd be lucky to see 2 whales but we saw 5 sperm whales and a whole pod of about 50-60 dolphins too! It was totally brilliant! And neither of us puked from sea sickness either which I class as a result!!

Our room was pretty cold there so we were glad to be moving on to Christchurch (which is where we are now) and there first thing was to have crazy hot showers to get rid of the lingering cold! We moved on at the right time too because according to the telly yesterday, Kaikoura have a warning of 30cm of snow! Wouldn't wanna be in that!

Yesterday was gorgeous and warm so we went to the botanic gardens and just walked around the city. It is really English and it's nice to feel at home! Had a nice curry out again (but only because I wanted that mango drink!) and walked around the Catherdral too like the good Catholic girl I am!

We're glad we did that yesterday because today is grey and overcast and peeing it down with rain! That's why we're sheltering in an internat cafe and running out of time too! So, I must dash once again! I gather by Wimbledon on the tv that the weather is gorgeous so for once we are slightly jealous of you guys while we're in our jumpers, hats and gloves but I hope you're all enjoying it!