Wellington

We've now passed through Wellington twice - once on our way to catch the ferry to the South Island, when we stayed with Matt and Sara, and once on the way back. Sadly the weather both times wasn't great (which was strangely pleasing to us, as we've had fantastic weather on all the days we've really needed it), which had meant that we didn't see the best side of the city.

As the rain fell, we made our way to the Te Papa National Museum, which had some great interactive displays with lots of buttons to press. On an rainy day earlier in the trip, we had visited Melbourne Museum and seen the stuffed hide of the 'famous' racehorse Phar Lap. Here in Wellington, we got to see his skeleton. The sign said that his heart was in Canberra, but it wasn't clear whether this was literal or metaphorical.

In the evening, we went to watch the national sport of New Zealand - rugby. The Hurricanes, from Wellington, were taking on the Brumbies, from Canberra in a Super 14 match. In a fairly quiet game, the 'canes scored a try just after the final hooter had gone, to mean they won the game 11-10. The atmosphere was completely different to a football match in the UK - there was no chanting, and nobody really got excited. If it had been a better game, maybe the crowd would have been more interested, or maybe they're always that reserved.

Abel Tasman National Park

The next stop on our whistlestop tour of the South Island was the Abel Tasman National Park. It is the smallest of New Zealand's national parks, at 20 by 23 kms in area, and doesn't have any roads in it. To get anywhere in the park, you have to catch a water taxi along the coast and then hike back (or hike both ways if you've got more time than we had).

The scenery was again outstanding - New Zealand, and the South Island in particular, has far too much amazing scenery! We thoroughly enjoyed our 12km walk back to the car.

Being cheapskates on a budget, we took the cheapest possible water taxi to save ourselves approximately £1.20 each. This massive saving resulted in us having to wade part of the way along the beach to the boat which was driven by a crazy bloke with a 'tache who preferred to drive the boat by looking back at us, rather than any of the sea kayakers who lined his path. Still, we got there safely and we're not aware of any fatal accidents involving canoes as he continued his journey.

Cold as Ice

After departing Te Anau, via Matt's parents' winery, we went to Fox Glacier.

The Fox Glacier was known as the Albert Glacier until William Lane Fox, the then Prime Minister, decided he'd quite like it to be named after himself.

And I can see why he'd quite like it - it was amazing. I have decided that the day we spent hiking on the top of the Glacier was my favourite day in New Zealand, and possibly of the whole trip. It was completely different to anything I've ever done before and it was beautiful - the ice was bright white in some places, bright blue in others. In other places the ice was grey and dirty from the rocks it has picked up and crushed over the years.

The Fox Glacier, along with the Franz Josef Glacier 20km further north, is quite rare among the world's glaciers - it is actually advancing. Global warming has had an unusual effect - there is now more precipitation falling as snow in the mountains, which flows down to the Glacier and pushes it forward. It can advance as much as 1m in a day.

We spent four hours hiking on the ice, and I think I enjoyed it particularly because, with crampons on my boots, it was almost impossible to fall over (which is what normally happens with me and ice). Also, as I have missed the UK winter this year, it could be the closest I come to ice for 18 months (other than in the fruit smoothies I've been drinking).

We saw crevasses - fortunately our guide was very good, cutting steps in the ice wherever there was no route apparent - and moulons, which are drainholes for the thawed ice.

A great day and a very unusual experience which I can't see myself repeating in the foreseeable future.

Milford Sound

Milford Sound was described in the Rough Guide we've been relying on for our trip as 'obscenely beautiful'. And, once again, it wasn't wrong. We drove through woods and forest areas as we started our journey from Te Anau, but these soon fell away to reveal the high mountains with vertical drops, waterfalls, tarns, hanging valleys, cirques, arretes and other words you might recall being associated with glaciers from GCSE Geography. The last hour of the drive was breathtaking, and then we got to the Sound itself to take a cruise between the steep rocks the glaciers had formed all those years ago.

Milford Sound is incorrectly named, it turns out. It is actually a fiord (or should that be fjord (you'll have to imagine the o with a line through it, not sure where to find that particular symbol)?!). Fiords are formed by glacial erosion, sounds are formed by river erosion. It was discovered by a Welshman from Milford Haven who gave the name of his town to the area. It was fortunate then that he didn't come from Merthyr Tydfil. He got the opportunity to name it because Captain Cook didn't spot mile after mile of 90m high drops into the sea when he sailed past. The cruise took us out onto the open sea and it was amazing to see how easy the Sound was to miss from there.

After cruising round for a couple of hours, we went back to climb up the Key Summit a few kilometres down the road. From there the tarn called Lake Marian was more obvious, sitting proudly atop a hanging valley.

Dunedin

After leaving Christchurch, a city based on Oxford and Cambridge, we made our way to Dunedin, a city directly based on Edinburgh. Halfway between the two cities at Moeraki, there are some rather bizarre large smooth boulders lying on the beach. They look like rather large snooker balls, except that they're all black, so wouldn't make for a very good game.

Dunedin is a pleasant enough city. At its centre there are two octagonal shaped roads, one inside the other. Inside the smaller octagon is a square with a statue of the greatest ever Scootsman (no, not Craig from the Proclaimers), by which I mean Rabbie Burns. This was our belated opportunity to pay homage to him, as we'd been on Fraser Island on Burns' Night this year, where there was a sad lack of haggis, neeps and tatties.

We wandered round the town, past the mini-version of the Scott Monument, along Princes Street and George Street and somehow found ourselves in a public house (that kind of thing never used to happen in Edinburgh). This was the venue of one of the funniest things to have happened so far on our trip - we were watching on the telly as New Zealand beat Australia by ten wickets in a one-day international for the first ever time. My, how we chuckled. Little did we know at that stage that we would be doing more chuckling in the following few days.

Dunedin is on the west end of the Otago Peninsula, so on the following day we drove around the peninsula. The scenery was gorgeous as we went right to the east end where we saw seals sunning themselves on the rocks. Then we went back westwards and stopped at Larnach Castle, New Zealand's only castle. Obviously we are a bit spoilt for good quality castles in the UK, so Larnach Castle was a bit of a disappointment. It was a decent enough 'country house' but couldn't compare to any of the castles back home. However, Mr Larnach had chosen a quite superb location for his castle - the views down to the coast were magnificent.

Lazy man's blog

I'm sure all of you who read my blog have missed my regular updates. I have been busy over the last ten days or so; there's too much of interest going on, and we don't have enough time in New Zealand to see everything at the same relaxed speed we did in Australia.

New Zealand is known by the Maoris as the 'land of the long white cloud'. This could be why:Although 'land of the long black cloud' is almost as appropriate at some times.

Since I last wrote to you, I have:

• Gone back to Sydney where I met up with my friend Mary for lunch.
• Sat in a plane on the tarmac at Sydney airport for two and a half hours until thunderstorms in the area subsided and we could take off.
• Arrived in Auckland at midnight for the above reason.
• Spent four nights in Taupo, next to Lake Taupo.
• Walked the 18km long Tongariro crossing. It is a spectacular walk, between volcanic rocks, mountains from the Lord of the Rings film, volcanic craters, woods and forests.
• Seen steaming sulphurous streams, bubbling pools of mud and geysers in the volcanic area of Rotorua. One of the geysers is artificially set off by putting soap flakes into the ground. These affect the surface tension of the water in the ground and cause the geyser to erupt.
• Thrown myself down a hill in an inflatable ball with a bucket of water in it. This peculiar 'sport' is called zorbing, and is great fun!
• Watched England win two cricket matches on New Zealand TV. On the second night, there were about 15 English people watching at various points, with only the hardcore eight staying until it finished at 1:30am.
• Been kayaking on Lake Taupo.
• Seen the Huka Falls at Lake Taupo.
• Visited my friends Sara and Matt in Wellington.
• Caught the ferry to the South Island.
• Seen some whales and dolphins just off Kaikoura. What an amazing trip! Saw some seals too.
• Marvelled at some 'quirky signs' in Bulls. The toilets were 'reliev-a-Bull', and the town hall was 'soci-a-Bull'! Hilarious.
• Tasted some wines in the Marlborough area. They do some very good pinots noirs.
  

And now I'm in Christchurch. It is a very pleasant town. The cathedral and the school are quite nice, but everything here is copied from the UK. All the street names have a UK reference, and the buildings are nice but not quite as nice as Oxford or Cambridge. You can't even punt your own vessel - there is a gondolier to do it for you...!

Nemo successfully located

You can't really come to Cairns and not go to the Great Barrier Reef, so we did. And it was amazing. Maybe some of the impact was lost by the fact that we'd seen some coral reefs last week in the Whitsundays, but the view at the Hastings Reef was far more impressive. The water was clearer, the colours of the corals were brighter, and we saw Nemo, star of the Disney film 'Finding Nemo'. This fish is a clown fish. We saw two of them down there, hiding amongst the anemones.

Sadly, as you might expect from recent posts, it was raining, and also quite windy. This meant that the waters were a bit choppy where we were, and I felt seasick for most of the day. It also meant that we couldn't go to the Breaking Patches, another area of the Reef we were scheduled to visit as it was too dangerous. There were supposed to be lots of turtles in that area, so we missed out on those, but it was still a good trip and the Great Barrier Reef lived up to all the hype!

We are now at the end of the Australian leg of the tour, and we finished off in style, by seeing the Big Captain Cook and then having a barbeque (I mean an outdoor gas hotplate). New Zealand next.

Atherton Tablelands

We went on a trip to the Atherton Tablelands, named after Mike Atherton. This is a really attractive area in the hills around Cairns. As you might expect from recent posts, it rained all day, very heavily for most of it. But we saw some amazing sights. The Barron Gorge was impressive, especially after the recent rain! Then there were two fig trees.

You might not expect fig trees to be interesting, but these ones definitely were. They are parasitic trees and had 'taken over' other trees, killing that tree off over time. The roots grow down from on high, so they form a kind of curtain. So much so, that one of the trees was called the Curtain Fig Tree. The other one was more impressive. This was called the Cathedral Fig Tree, because somebody had decided that its roots looked like a cathedral. There were some interesting lakes in the Tablelands too, among the tropical rainforests.

The Great Escape

We looked into the viability of getting from Townsville to Cairns by plane, and it was good. Just as we were preparing to take the car to the local Hertz office and travel the rest of the way in the air, the radio came on and announced that the police had opened the road. We could not believe this - it was only Saturday and the initial reports had said it would be closed until Sunday at the earliest. So we tentatively made our way to Ingham where the flooding was the worst. It was only an hour's drive away, so if it was really bad we could still get back to the airport in time.

There were two bad patches - the first one just south of Ingham was deep, but the car had no problems with that one. So on we went. The patch just north of Ingham was far worse, and we stopped before it to assess the situation. Unfortunately this meant we got stuck behind an American tourist who was unaware of the old adage 'don't be gentle with the rental' and proceeded through the raging torrents at about 10kmph. We were far less inclined to gentleness and wanted to put our foot down a bit to get some momentum going. As the water lapped at the car above the wheels we weren't sure if we would make it. There were a few sticky moments but we made it, and from there it was plain sailing (not literally) to Cairns.

The road has now been closed again, so we were very lucky to get the window of opportunity that we did get!

Stuck in Townsville

After leaving Airlie beach, we made our way up to Townsville in the pouring rain. We were just using the town as a stopping-off point for one night. We then had a decision to make - should we go to Mission Beach? Should we go to Magnetic Island? Should we go straight to Cairns and spend an extra night there?

As we woke, though, it became clear that the answer would be - none of the above. Due to the heavy rain, during which 300mm of rain had fallen in Townsville in the previous two days, the roads out of the town were flooded and we were going nowhere. This was Thursday morning, and we have told that this would be the case until Sunday at the earliest. This has been the worst weather in the area for ten or twelve years, and caught everyone unprepared.

Townsville is the biggest settlement in the Northern Queensland area, but it is still not very big, and there is certainly not enough there to keep us occupied for four days. We do now know everything there is to know about the shipwreck of the HMS Pandora, from the extensive displays at the Museum of Tropical Queensland. Pie knows how to fire a cannon. We will look into the options to escape; possibly we will take a flight to Cairns if they are running. For now we have some relaxing time.

Every cloud does have a silver lining though… We had spotted that a lot of Australian pubs have a ‘trivia night’, their name for a ‘pub quiz’. So far we had not managed to be in any town on the night that the quiz was advertised. But as we were stuck in Townsville on the Thursday night, it meant that we could attend the Thursday night trivia night at Molly Malone’s. Sadly, it wasn’t a great quiz, and we didn’t win anything, but at least it satisfied my desire for a pub quiz for a few weeks!

The Whitsundays

We went our a two day, two night cruise around the Whitsundays. There were 15 of us aboard, plus two members of crew. Most of the travellers were in a similar position to us, travelling along the East Coast, although most were going south from Cairns to Sydney, so we had a lot in common to talk about.
We went snorkelling in three different areas during our trip, which was amazing. It was my first sight of any reef, so I particularly loved it. There were all sorts of different corals, different shapes and colours. I saw corals like big brains, corals like large strawberries, corals like large corn on the cobs, corals like large sponge fingers, corals like big mushrooms, corals that flickered in the water, bright blue corals, browns, yellows, reds and greens. And then there were the fish. There were small silver fish which shimmered in the sunshine filtering through the water which always swam in huge shoals, large multi-coloured fish, black fish which hid in between the corals. All the fish were inquisitive and seemed to stare in bewilderment at the large unusual shaped ‘fish’ with its odd swimming style, rubbery skin (a stinger suit to protect against the jellyfish), beady eyes (goggles) and tube-shaped mouth. The people who had been to Cairns or Port Douglas already said that the snorkelling in the Whitsundays was relatively disappointing, and that the views were far better farther north, which is great as I’m now really looking forward to seeing some of the real Great Barrier Reef in a few days!

We did some proper sailing too - I volunteered to pull a few ropes and winch a few other ropes. We mainly put up the mainsail and headsail and had one attempt at tacking on each voyage.

We went to Whitehaven beach on Whitsunday Island, which is apparently number six on the list of best beaches in Australia. The sands were white and the beach was uninhabited when we arrived there. However, we couldn’t swim without putting on our stinger suits again, and there were a few scary-looking hornets flying around the beach. Also, it didn’t take too long for other people to arrive, flying in by sea plane. So I sat down for a while reading a book, went for a walk, threw a Frisbee a few times, and then that exhausted my excitement of that particular beach.

On our next stop, we went for a long walk on the island, 650m each way. It was a nice walk through a rainforest-like area to a lookout point. From there we had a picturesque view across towards Whitehaven beach.

The cabins on the boat were pretty small. Our room was right at the front of the boat, next to the toilets. We had occasional people coming through during the night, and the flush was the noisiest you would have heard. It had to be flushed for at least 15 seconds to allow all the water to drain away. There were five of us in that room in a small area. On the first night, there was torrential rain for most of the night, so we had to shut the hatches to the top deck, which meant we were all boiling hot. The second night was slightly better, we were all exhausted from the first night, and many people decided to take the option of having a few glasses of wine to ensure a good night’s sleep.

We had a lot of time to chat to the other people on the boat, and they were all very nice. There were two English couples, two other English girls, one of whom had gone to St Helen’s school in Abingdon, a lovely French couple who lived in Adelaide, three Germans and two Canadians.

As mentioned above, it rained on the first night we were there, but also it rained on the second night, and didn’t stop the following morning. We had no option but to go straight back to the marina at Airlie beach. All of us were dressed in the fetching yellow raincoats they had on board, but all of us we still absolutely soaking wet.

All in all, it was a great fun trip!

Continuing our Journey

‘Every step I take I make a new friend,
Can’t stay too long, just turn around I’m gone again.
Maybe tomorrow I’m gonna settle down,
Until tomorrow I’ll just keep moving on.’

‘The Littlest Hobo’ theme tune has been our theme over the last few weeks. We left Mackay to go to Eungulla National Park where the Rough Guide said we were almost guaranteed to see platypuses. Sadly this was one of the times that the guarantee didn’t cover. We stayed at the lookout point for about half an hour, then went for a walk through a tropical rainforest and came back later. But no sign of any platypuses, or platypi, or whatever the plural is (it should actually be platypodes, as I informed Pie - I can explain why some other time). There were plenty of turtles in the water, so maybe they’d eaten all the platypuses in an unexpected twist on the food chain. The closest we came to seeing one was a duck-billed…duck.

And then on to Airlie Beach. We spent a pleasant evening there, doing very little.

After a pleasant cruise round the Whitsundays, we stopped at the Big Multi-Coloured Easter Egg. Oh, apparently it's a Big Mango.