3rd December 2009 After a very sound night’s sleep, no doubt brought on by the vast amounts of pure New Zealand air we breathed yesterday we were all set to explore another of fiordland’s sounds. Milford Sound is the more touristy of the two fiords with numourous operators offering a variety of cruises. It is also smaller than Doubtful and younger in terms of the glacier which formed it. It is one of NZ’s biggest tourist attractions with over half a million visitors a year. ...
1st December 2009 A travelling day today, getting ourselves from Kingston to Manapouri, ready for the Doubtful Sound trip tomorrow. It wasn’t a great distance to cover, only about 2 hours or so, but it took us past Te Anau, so we stopped off there for a look around, and to book some accomodation for tomorrow night to return to after we’ve been to Doubtful Sound. Te Anau is a fairly small place, and there isn’t a great deal here - a few holiday parks, supermarket and outdoor clothing shops seems to be about it. It really is a town to base yourself in to go and explore the Fiordland area. We had a look around a few of the outdoor clothing shops, and seeing as it has been so cold of late, and that we’re out on boats a lot in the next couple of days, we kitted ourselves out with a couple of Merino wool t-shirts - hopefully they’ll be warm! ...
30th November 2009 Queenstown is surrounded by the soaring heights of the Remarkables mountain range and the meandering coves of Lake Wakatipu, but is mostly famous for being NZ’s adventure capital, dreaming up ever more weird and wonderful ways for you to throw yourself off stuff and interact with your (albeit spectacular) environment. Unfortunately, we’ve had another cloudy and fairly cold day today for our trip to Queenstown, so initially the views of the mountain ranges were shrouded from view by the low cloud. ...
29th November 2009 Having liked Arrowtown so much yesterday, we decided to put off going to Queenstown for yet another day and stay here. The morning was spent sat outside in the sun, reading and catching up with photos and blogs. After some lunch we wandered back into town for an ice cream and mooch around the different shops, before heading back to the campsite for some more down time. You do need some R&R every so often. :) ...
23rd November 2009 This morning we picked up our campervan which is to be our home for the next two and a half weeks. To be brutally honest, we weren’t exactly enamoured of our little van when we first saw her, she was much smaller than we had envisaged and while she did have the advertised shower and toilet, the toilet is little more than a portaloo. I don’t really know what we expected, but this is it for the next little while. Also Ed can’t actually stand up straight in it which means I’ll be doing the cooking for the next couple of weeks, so from his point of view there is a bright side :). ...
26th November 2009 Glorious blue skies (although still cloudy over the mountains) at 7am this morning, so we were up and off, back to Franz Joseph for our walk to hopefully get some clear views of the glacier before the cloud cover came in. Not surprisingly, the glacier was even more spectacular with the blue sky backdrop than it was yesterday covered in grey cloud, so we set off. The walk started as an easy gravel path to Peter’s Pool, this is a kettle pool formed when a block of ice is left behind by a retreating glacier and the foliage grows around it. Not quite still enough to get a perfect reflection of the glacier and the mountains. We continued on through native rainforest before arriving at our first, long swing brige crossing the river floor. ...
21st November 2009 A grey day greeted us when we opened the curtains this morning. We could hardly make out the cranes along the docks and certainly couldn’t see the other side of the harbour. Obviously a day for indoor activities, so we made our way to the Wellington City Museum. A former bond store where goods were stored before shipping, the first area we entered had been restored to look as it would have done in the 1800s. ...
27th November 2009 This morning revealed that the glorious weather we had yesterday had once again left us, and it was pretty miserable and cold. We left the holiday park we’d spent the night at and pulled over in Fox Village for a morning coffee before making the 3km journey down the road to Fox Glacier itself. Fox Glacier is smaller than Franz Josef. From a viewpoint a few yards from the carpark you can get quite a good view of the glacier and its terminal face. Having done Franz Josef yesterday, and with the weather not being up to much we settled for taking a couple of snaps from here and heading on down the road. ...
22nd November 2008 Time for us to leave the North Island and take the early morning ferry to Picton. The ferry we caught used to be called the Pride of Cherbourg (you could still read its name on the side) and is the biggest passenger ferry in New Zealand. After such an early start we spent most of the initial part of the journey catching up on some sleep, but once the ferry started to move into Marlborough Sounds with its spectacular scenary and lush green backdrop we moved up onto deck to take a look. It was a brief look though since the weather hadn’t exactly warmed up since yesterday! ...
28th November 2009 There was a big surprise for us this morning - overnight the rain had cleared and it looked like a beautiful day was in store. Jumping out of the campervan shortly after 7am, to be presented with views like this, views that were completely hidden in the rain and cloud of the previous evening. ...
24th November 2009 Our first night wasn’t a roaring success. We had parked the van on a slight incline without realising and spent most of the night with our feet slightly elevated making it a little uncomfortable. Also because we were undercover, we were much more sheltered than we would normally be, so found that we were quite warm in the night. However, at least today was sunny and we were planning to head south down the west coast and find somewhere a little more remote to stay the night. There are several Department of Conservation campsites which have toilet facilities but little else and are set in some wonderful locations. ...
25th November 2009 I think one of the hightlights of the campervan trip so far has to be when we both got up at 3am to go and use the facilities. Since we were in such a remote spot, with very little ambiant light, the stars studded the sky like diamonds, beautiful. I was so enthralled by it that I just stood there for 10 minutes looking up, just a perfect night sky, and I even saw a satellite passing through. ...
20th November 2009 Wellington is quite a compact city, not unlike Cardiff. After a wander around the centre this morning to find the information centre and some internet access, we took the city’s historic Cable Car up to the beautiful Botanic Gardens which overlook the harbour. The Botanic Gardens cover 25 hectares and are a unique landscape of protective native forest, exotic trees, plant collections and seasonal displays. We arrived at the top and took in the view over the central business district from the Cable Car station, before making our way to the Cable Car museum. This small museum details the history of the cable cars that have transported people between the harbour and hills in Wellington for over 100 years. It also has a fully restored original cable car known as a ‘relentless red rattler’ and a fully restored grip car. It also showed examples of private cable cars that people use to get to their homes on the hills. ...
19th November 2009 There’s something old-fashioned about travelling by train, something reminiscent of past times. Not the mad-dash commuter trains of the UK, but long, slow journeys where the train gently rocks its way through the countryside and the journey becomes the whole point rather than just a prelude to something else. New Zealand only has three cross country lines and only one on the north island, the Overlander from Auckland to Wellington. ...
18th November 2009 An admin day today, lots of things to sort before we leave for Wellington and the south island tomorrow. After leaving Tristan and Andrea’s we called into a local shopping centre for a mooch before heading into central Auckland where we’re staying tonight, close to the railway station ready for tomorrow’s journey. Nothing too exciting today - haircut for Claire, the return of the hire car, and a bit of shopping, although we did go and see A Christmas Carol at the IMAX theatre this evening which was excellent, pretty scary in places though. The 3D effects were so much better than the 3D Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs which we’d seen in the USA. Don’t know whether this because it’s IMAX rather than standard 3D or because the film was simply better created. But definately well worth a watch. ...
16th November 2009 We left Hahei for the last time this morning to once again head for Cormorandal Town. This time we took a more direct route across the mountains. Whilst this was mainly an unsealed road, the route was much quicker and offered different views to what we’d seen yesterday, climbing and snaking as it does through native bushland. We were also able to stop at Waihu Falls, a small waterfall up in the mountains, which was in full flow after heavy rain last night. ...
17th November 2009 We made our way back to Auckland today via the coastal road all the way from Thames. There are stunning views on this route over the Firth of Thames looking back towards the Cormorandal region where we have spent the last few days. We stopped at various points along the way to do a minor spot of twitching since this area is particularly famous for its seabirds. Unfortunately the extremely changeable weather put paid to us exploring the Miranda Shorebird Reserve. ...
12th November 2009 It’s very difficult to spot a Kiwi (New Zealand’s national bird) in the wild. Not only are they nocturnal and shy with a wicked sense of hearing and smell, but they are also severely endangered. The population is currently declining so rapidly it is halving in size every ten years and the Kiwi could be close to extinction by 2015. This flightless bird survived millions of years and developed defenses against other birds that preyed on them. However, these defenses were useless against man, who in the past hunted Kiwis, and the preditors he introduced such as stoats, rats, cats, dogs and possums which tarket kiwi and their eggs while wild pigs dig up their burrows. ...
15th November 2009 Another grey start, so this morning we decided to head off further north and explore the Far North Coromandel. We got back in the car and headed out on the extremely windy and undulating coast road, the car was in 2nd and 3rd the whole way round. The scenic viewpoint at the top afforded us some excellent views of the bays on both sides of the peninsula. ...
13th November 2009 This morning we headed for Waihi, about an hour north of Katikati where we stayed last night. This region has been associated with gold mining for over 150 years and there has been a gold mine at Waihi since 1879. In fact, the main street in Waihi has a large open cast gold mine called Martha Mine. We headed for the information centre, and while the rain came down outside we delved into the history of this mine through a really interesting exhibition. The open cast mine which is 250 metres deep closed in 1952 but open-cast mining restarted in 1988 and is still producing gold, although only about 3g per tonne of rock. ...