New Zealand North Island

In a strange parallel, we find ourselves again at Sydney airport preparing for our next flight to Tokyo. We had a change of heart about South America and felt unprepared to travel there as well as knackered from so many voyages to the unknown, so we have decided to return to Indonesia and do a few things we were unable to do last time.

We did not feel that the North Island was as attractive as the South but it had its moments. We stopped off in Wellington which has to be the most unworthy capital city in existence as it’s about the size of Barnet, but we were fortunate that our trip clashed with the NZ comedy festival. We saw an English guy called Terry Alderton who was pretty original and made us laugh. On our way further north we did a walk called the Tongariro Pass; it was about 26km long and 1800m up a dormant volcano but the views from the top of the mountain were incredible even with an 80kph wind trying to blow us to our deaths. Unfortunately our camera could not do it justice.




We then drove to a couple of places but couldn’t find accommodation at a price we could afford as the thriving Antipodean currency was burning a rather large hole in our pockets. We ended up in a really nice place in Rotorua, famous for its sulphur hot springs and coloured waters. We were not as impressed with the geysers as we had expected but the hot spring across the road was lovely. Our financial position had also lead to a new eating habit: one meal a day, buffet, eat, eat, eat, bloat, bloat, moan, hurt then nip to the supermarket for a bottle of wine for dinner. Our other highlight of Rotorua was their luge, similar in set up to Queenstown but much steeper, much faster, much more dangerous and as such, much more fun. I (Andy) came close to death as I flew full pelt round a bend with no barrier to shield me from the cliff below, my brakes were as useful as a chocolate teapot and it was only old school feet down and watch my trainers smoke that stopped me from a tragic yet rather stylish end. If you are in NZ do the Rotorua luge, it’s awesome!

We then drove straight up to the capital city that should be, Auckland. No surprise, after the luge experience, I got a speeding ticket. The first morning we had arranged to scuba dive in a local aquarium with a carpet shark, plenty of plenty of large broad nosed, seven gill sharks, King fish and a Manta ray and no protection it was awesome as were the looks we received from the visiting local Year 2 school children. We decided to have a few drinks and watch the comedy that night to celebrate our survival. Two shows for one ticket meant we could get the drinks in and settle down for the long haul. Our only oversight was that the second gig was somewhere else and when, at the end of the first show, we saw Terry Alderton (the comedian we had already seen in Wellington) appear again, we realised we were not where we should be. At this point we also realised we would have to leave our front row table and leave ourselves at his mercy. Quietly and subtly with a jug of beer in one hand and full glasses in the other trying not to draw attention to ourselves we began to leave the room. Just as we got to the bar I thought I’d afford myself a glance round to check we were clear, but when I did I saw Terry running after us. It’s hard to know how to react when a comedian with the build of Mike Tindall, a Cheshire cat smile and a sparkling pair of silver glittering plimpsoles with matching belt is right behind you, staring back at you while the entire audience is watching, faces full of anticipation. Alex let out an involuntary little scream. In the end he didn’t attack us. In fact we had a little chat and explained the situation to the amusement of the crowd. Then after a little kiss and cuddle we made our way out but not before he had kindly invited us for a drink after our respective shows. Our show passed painfully as upon our late entry we had doubled the audience and we decided we should take Terry up on his offer although unsure whether he was just being politely English. Fortunately he was there and we spent the rest of the evening having a really good chat and a good little drink to boot. Not only can he do the greatest Souf Landan impression ever but he was also a really down to earth top guy, just like Michael Macintyre. It was a really good end to our time in Auckland.

We hadn’t arranged from the outset for our trip to coincide with the local country rock festival in Paihia although the sight of literally tens of pensioners line dancing in full kit, and country singers playing their latest hits on every street corner actually created a really nice atmosphere. Though we discovered one night that drunk pensioners have a trait that makes them far more frustrating than the usual drunk teenagers. Drunk teenagers get in late, shout to their mates and laugh because they are inconsiderate, then they pass out and don’t wake up until midday. Drunk elderly folk get in late, shout to their friends because they are deaf and then as they don’t need sleep, wake up at 5 in the morning and start talking again.

That morning Andy had been skydiving, Alex decided to watch as she had already done one and this seemed the wise choice as I needed looking after upon my return to safety. I jumped from 16,000 feet and had a minutes free falling; it was cold, exhilarating and brilliant yet I never want to do it again.




Luckily, the next day we had booked what turned out to be one of our favourite trips in NZ. We joined ‘The Rock’ overnight cruise. The Rock is a renovated car ferry that sleeps 40. We had virtually a full group and very eclectic they were. We had a large group of young Indians who lived in KL, a group of Malaysians, some older Aussies, an American family, two other Brits and a lone mysterious Frenchman named Fred. Our first activity was a shooting completion involving a plastic duck attached to a rope from the back of the boat and a paintball gun. We each had three shots at the little fella and a prize would be given to best male and female. I was not in contention after my 1 out of 3 effort but I certainly knew who my money was on for the ladies prize, especially after her question regarding the shooting apparatus. “Where do I sight it?” asked GI Alex to the crew with the surety of seasoned assassin, then carefully and with metronomic precision she painted the little quack-quack with 2 out of her 3 shots and grazed him with the third. Alex was crowned ladies champ, given free cider and we adjourned for drinks whilst our fishing rods were being set up. We then all spent an hour or so fishing off the back of the boat though nobody caught anything, except Alex of course who landed a large red snapper.


For some reason I was asked to give a speech to everyone before dinner to try and bring people together. Luckily I like the sound of my own voice and was able to blag away, congratulating the Indians on their World Cup victory and sympathising with the Aussies over their Ashes defeat. I decided not to use my line about reuniting people from all over our empire and I think it was for the best. Though I did mention that after our displays so far I would need to practise homemaking and sitting on eggs as Alex had certainly taken the hunter-gatherer role away from me.

After a top feed and a few drinks it was time for our night sea kayaking which was great fun, looking up at the stars in the beautiful dark night sky. Alex and I then decided to go night swimming and few others joined us. All that was left to do was drink our hot chocolate, toast marshmallows over the fire and head off to bed.

The next morning we visited some of the smaller islands of the bay and were given a nature walk and talk about the islands history. We then went snorkelling for our lunch. The Malaysians and Indians were lovely people but not built for water and so they clambered about the shallows with lifejackets and a myriad of other clothing. Luckily we had befriended Kam. Kam was a local who was the size of Hagrid and who as well as working for ‘The Rock’ owned a dive school. He lived from food gathered from the sea, so much so that he’d never bought a mussel yet ate them daily. He swam out with us to gather lunch and he showed us how to dislodge sea urchins called Ateroa and oysters using stones taken from the sea bed. We collected many oysters but ate many more, it was a great experience. Then suddenly the mysterious Frenchman Fred (also a good swimmer as it turned out) started screaming for us to come over as he had ‘found a horse’. Trying to swim but laughing too much to get anywhere fast we approached Fred. He beckoned us to dive down with him and sure enough we saw a horse, a large, pregnant male Sea Horse, it was a brilliant sight. After lunch we made our way back to port knowing we had been on an absolutely superb trip!


So now off to Japan for 48 hours for Sushi and Sumo!

New Zealand South Island. Wow!

We’re writing this together as we sail on the Picton to Wellington ferry, crossing from the South Island to the North Island of New Zealand. We arrived in Christchurch at the beginning of April, and have spent the last month travelling all over the South Island in our tiny rental car ‘Snowball’, and what a stupendous 4 weeks they have been.

When we arrived in Christchurch we were immediately struck by the quietness of the city, which wasn’t surprising since a lot of the population has left since the February earthquake and the city centre was in lockdown. By complete stupidity we got the address of our hostel wrong, thinking it was 44 Manchester Street and obliviously walked straight through the army cordon, onto a rubble-strewn road where the fronts of whole shops and houses had fallen away, leaving them wide open like dolls houses. Other intact buildings had condemned signs graffitied on them, while you could hear the rumble of bulldozers pulling others down. It was spooky to see the wares still in the shop windows. Anyway, we blundered through it all, unnoticed, until we found number 44, which was a large pile of rubble with a tent on it. We had previously contacted the hostel who said they were willing to put us up, although they had experienced damage in the earthquake, but we thought this was a little extreme. It took a helpful lady with a baby to explain we’d got the address wrong – it was number 440, and she took us there in her car, perhaps thinking that despite our ragged appearance we were obviously too stupid to be any threat.
We liked Christchurch, spending three nights there, during one of which we experienced an aftershock. It lasted about 3 seconds and shook the hostel to its roots. Well, Alex experienced it, Andy was fast asleep. But with the city locked down there was little to do except enjoy the great parks and find our rental car for the next part of our trip. We discovered Snowball, covered in dirt in a rental car company carpark. She needed to be delivered to Auckland and the company allowed us a month to do it, at only $4 a day. Bargain. (Thanks Paul for the relocation information).

Once Snowball was added to our team there was no stopping us (or Snowball as we discovered when we tried to use the handbrake during a blizzard). So off the three of us went to Hanmer Springs, a thermal baths complex about 120km from Christchurch. It was a lovely way to relax before the driving ahead; though the pools were not a patch on Hungary it was still a good day out.
From there we drove to a tiny place in the middle of nowhere even by New Zealand standards called Peel Forest, to do some white water rafting the next day. The drive was stunning with vistas worthy of book covers and postcards everywhere you looked. It was during this drive that we first decided that aesthetically New Zealand is by far and away the most beautiful country we have ever been to.
The rafting itself was great. We rafted down some grade 2 rapids to practice and acclimatise ourselves to the river; we looked good and none of our crew fell into the water, except Alex who catapulted off the boat in true army roll fashion. With Alex safely back on board we spent the next hour negotiating the grade 3-5 rapids which was great fun though we both would have liked a little more grade 5 as that was the most thrilling. Our trip was made even more enjoyable by one of our guides ‘Steve’ who had a beautifully dark sense of humour that not everyone understood. He explained how he received a letter of complaint after a rafting tour with a group of midgets during which he suggested that to improve their stroke rhythm they chanted. His suggestion of ‘Umpa, Lumpa’ didn’t go down too well, though he insisted the complaint was worth it.

After Peel Forest we headed along the East coast to Dunedin, which is strongly reminiscent of Glasgow, only – like most European comparisons in New Zealand – much nicer. In this case, it was the lack of Tennents swilling, abusive, needle clad junkies that gave the game away (sorry Karen). We went on a fabulous tour of the Cadbury’s Factory, which unlike the UK was still a fully functioning factory, unrestricted by crippling Health & Safety rules, although thankfully they had enough legislation in place to require Andy to wear a beard net. Sadly, they didn’t allow photos. Our tour guide around the factory was brilliantly generous and worked on the premise ‘you eat it, I’ll replace it’. Needless to say, that suited us. That evening we waddled out of our hostel to see a great little one-man play about a famous New Zealand cricketer called Bob Blair. Having spoken to lots of New Zealanders though we’ve discovered that they regard their national cricket team with a sort of bemused tolerance. Rugby’s their game through and through and strangely, even the basketball took a higher profile amongst the Kiwi’s.
The next morning we thought we’d beat the bulge with a spot of surfing, hiring a university student originating from Cornwall to teach us. After an hour on a beautiful beach with waves battering us from every direction, and not a hope of getting upright, Alex gave up to search the beach for shells, and instead found a dead penguin, which shows how cold the water was. Andy meanwhile, feeling all mannish, decided to throw off his wetsuit, and clad only in his board shorts, decided to have another few (successful) tries at standing up. How he later managed to keep a straight face while thanking our teacher for a great trip is a wonder, as he scraped most of the skin off his chest against the surf board.

In a lot of pain (especially in the nipple region) Andy drove us straight out of Dunedin wailing like a little girl. Queenstown was our next stop, the adrenaline junkie capital of New Zealand. We were not sold on it as a place as there were virtually no New Zealanders living there but it was like being in an adult playground so we got stuck in. Our first activity was river boarding - a little like white water rafting but on a bodyboard not a raft. The event itself was fun but a little tame, however the after event rides more than made up for it as we spent the next two hours jumping off cliffs and rope swings, lying on a float and being pulled along on the back of a jetski through deep gorges and canyons, and sliding down a converted gold shaft into the river in an array of dodgy positions, all in all a great day out.





The next morning we decided to go on the luge (go karting down a hill) and after Alex accused me of cheating (gamesmanship), we decided to have a best of 5 race. To put it mildly, we were both a little competitive and frequently, narrowly avoided collisions with other members of the public. It was a hard fought race but justice prevailed as Andy won the 5 match series 4-1 although it was a lot closer than that sounds.


We liked the luge so much we did it the next day before heading off to the Fiordland National Park in the far south west via the puzzle museum in Wanaka (which is awesome, see video above). Normally entering a national park you get a sense of change as suddenly nature is unspoilt by development, but there really wasn’t much change at all, as the whole of the South Island is much the same, and most of the time only the single lane highways that wind along mountains, around lakes, through forests and over pastures give any clue that the country is inhabited at all.

We arrived in a small town called Te Anau, which is the last town before Milford Sound, a beautiful stretch of water, littered with lush green mounds all the way to the ocean. We actually stayed in a different town (hamlet) just south of Te Anau, in a rustic lodge with our own cabin complete with a log stove. The next day we drove up to Milford, where we became stranded in a sudden snow blizzard just outside the mouth of the Homer tunnel. The tunnel was a huge cavernous snake of a thing which took about 10 years to build during the depression. Here our luck held out amazingly as we happened to squeal to a halt just behind the van of the company who we had booked to go kayaking on Milford Sound with. They kindly agreed to take us through the tunnel to Milford, and we emerged at the other end into stunning sunshine. The kayaking was really, really lovely. Milford Sound itself didn’t wow us as much as we expected but perhaps that’s because after a week here you really get spoilt for views. But we had a great few hours paddling along the water, and then suddenly Alex screamed ‘DOLPHINS!’ only to be mortified to find it was actually a log. But – the very next minute real dolphins appeared, a small pod of big black ones called bottlenoses. Alex now firmly believes she is a dolphin whisperer.



Our next port of call was a place called Franz Josef, a town that consisted of a couple of streets and a huge glacier.
The next day we joined a group and strapping crampons to our feet, spent 5 hours climbing up the Franz Josef glacier. It was definitely one of the highlights of our trip. The ice was a brilliant range of whites and blues, with natural ice caves and vertical crevices which made you shudder as your crossed them, or walked through them. We drank the fresh glacier water from the ice streams though nobody else in our group would, more fools they as it was absolutely delicious! We met some really nice people on the tour and all in all had a great day, topped off with a trip to the local hot springs.




From Franz Josef we drove to Greymouth which was a pretty unremarkable place but two things made it a really great experience. Firstly, our hostel was by far the best we had stayed in so far in NZ, the kitchen was awesome and it offered free bikes so we could get out and enjoy the sea air. Secondly, on our first bike trip we bumped into a local legend unbeknown to us named Mick Collins, who lived and worked out of a little old work shed with a ‘Pounamu’ sign outside it. Pounamu is a Maori jade that is available on the beaches of Greymouth though local law states that it is only to be collected by the Maori population. It was for sale in the local jewellery shops but was rather expensive and there were a lot of fakes about. When we heard the drills from Micks open shed we decided to take a look. The first sight that we saw were two shaped, shiny, boulder sized pieces of jade that Mick was carving as a memorial to 22 local miners who had lost their lives near Greymouth a few months ago. When asked where the council had asked for it to be placed, Mick replied, ‘I’ll tell the Mayor where it’s going’. We later learned this was not just talk. Mick looked like Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses and had lead the most incredible life. He had trained Malay military jungle troops in his youth, been decorated for rescuing a US colonel after he’d had his legs blown off in a minefield in Vietnam, and was generally very highly respected in the local community. We spent a few hours with him during which he received calls from Japan informing him that all his pieces had sold at a large exhibition and he spoke about how he was the lead speaker at the Anzac day celebrations which is similar to our Remembrance Day. All this from a guy in an open shed.

Our final destination took us to the Marlborough region, to a place called Renwick. We stayed in a lovely if pricey B&B and spent the next four days going round on bikes (including one interesting day on a tandem) to the plethora of incredible wineries where we learnt a little and drank a lot of exceptional wine. The majority of the tastings were free and the quality was superb, each night we would choose our favourite wine we had tasted the previous day and drink it after dinner in the B&B’s Jacuzzi. To name but a few we went to Cloudy Bay, Spy Valley (amazing), Brancott (Montana), Lawsons Dry Hills (also amazing), Forrest and Peter Yealands. We tasted a great deal of Sauvignon Blanc (I know someone in particular who I think would love it here, can you guess who it is?) which is the speciality of the region and also some amazing Pinos Gris and Pinot Noir. The scenery during the day was like something from a Renoir painting although by late afternoon it was more like a Van Gogh. (my first ever art joke, i’m not sure how I feel about that). All in all it was the perfect end to a perfect island.



We were sad to leave the South Island and would recommend it to anyone who wanted an adrenaline packed holiday or just to see constantly breathtaking scenery. It really is a very well kept secret.