Aus (1) - Melbourne to The Grampians

Melbourne riverside

When I finally arrived in Melbourne at 2am after the hassle with Air Pacific, I went straight to the hotel and slept. I had two full days to explore the city before picking up a hire car and hitting the road (and in Australia these are very long roads). The next morning I walked towards town and grabbed a coffee. The couples on the table next to me were all dressed up. When you see a bunch of rough looking guys in suits with wide-knot ties they're either Championship footballers, estate agents or there's a wedding. But it wasn't just the adjacent table. The whole city was full of suits and glamorous women. It was the Melbourne Cup day. Now, I find horse racing tedious (though I appreciate it provides gainful employment to men with bad teeth and growth hormone deficiencies) but here it captivates the city so much that it's declared a public holiday in the Melbourne metropolitan area. Big screens were erected for the event and the riverside was buzzing.

Just like NYC, but they drive on the left

Melbourne was born when John Batman bought several hundred thousand hectares of land from the Aborigines. Buying or selling land was a foreign concept for them so Batman managed to secure the land for just some tools, flour and clothes. I shouldn't laugh but it's funny when you see information signs that describe how "Batman took advantage of the Aborigines".


Melbourne has a great food scene: I had some great value feeds in Chinatown and apparently it's one of the best places to get Modern Australian (Mod Oz) cuisine, although I don't really know what that is... as one of my friends said, "Mod Oz is just... food". I burned a lot of these huge meals off by walking around the compact city centre and its many parks.


I picked up car and headed for the principal wine region of Victoria, the Yarra Valley. I decided to stay in Healesville, for the lack of a better option and like most of the wine towns I've been to it was the standard mix of fancy B&Bs, Cellar Doors and swanky bistros. I tried to hire a bicycle to attempt to repeat my trip around Marlborough in NZ but in the end I had to admit defeat and take the car. That meant wine tasting but no drinking and, as with most things, spitting out is the least preferred option (ahem...).


I drove south to the Great Ocean Road, 250km of beautiful road hugging the Victoria coast. I passed through small surf towns like Torquay and Anglesea before arriving at the lovely village of Lorne. It was a Saturday and happened to be the first hot weekend of spring, and everyone from Melbourne had made the trip to the coast for surfing and beach time. I walked along the beach to the pier where a group of people fishing had attracted an audience. One guy had snagged a huge 1.5m wide Bull Ray and spent at least half an hour dragging it to shore in order to take the hook out.

Bull Ray at Lorne

This piece of coastline is good for spotting koalas and while driving out of Lorne I kept my eyes peeled for them in the trees. At Kennett River I took a short walk through the forest, looking off into the distance, but this fella was right over my head when I got back to the car: 

Koala, Kennett River

Further down the Road, I passed the 12 Apostles, beautiful rock formations rising out of the ocean, now whittled down to just 6 stacks by the waves. After another close call with fuel I arrived in Port Fairy, a quaint town of sandstone cottages, a little marina and a lighthouse. Black Wallabies hopped around the scrubland near the ocean. At sunset the sky was black with Short-tailed Shearwaters coming back to shore for the evening.

The 12 Apostles

Lighthouse, Port Fairy

The next morning I went to nearby Tower Hill Reserve to walk around the volcanic caldera. There were more koalas here and they seemed completely oblivious to me creeping up close and taking photos. I also saw my first wild emu, which was a lot scrattier than I expected - nothing like those in the cartoons - and my first kangaroo, which comically chased an emu across the carpark. Ever since I arrived in Aus I'd been paranoid of leaving food in my room lest it attract spiders, insects or some other creature with anger management issues. I got chatting with a local family about my mild (I would say healthy) nervousness of Australian animals and they did nothing to put my mind at ease. In fact they pointed out that koalas, which I thought were quite cute even if they did smell of piss, have sharp claws and can attack when you're too close. Also they mentioned that, given these were the first hot days of spring, snakes would be coming out of hibernation and warming up on the paths. Awesome.

A scratty emu 

After gingerly walking around the reserve, I drove inland to Hall's Gap, a very popular one-street village in the mountains of the Grampians National Park. So popular that it has only 300 residents and around 6000 beds. The mountains aren't spectacular, they're all less than 1000m, but they rise quite dramatically out of the flat expanse of wheat fields of the Wimmera. I stayed a couple of days at an eco lodge on the edge of the village, walking in the hills and watching the kangaroos graze of the cricket pitch around the back of the lodge.

'Roos at Hall's Gap

Fiji

Rain was falling steadily as I landed at Nadi airport on Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu. We'd had beautiful, cloudless skies until our descent over this nation of islands but after all, we were heading to the start of the wet season. I was beginning to think that I should have put more thought into the weather when planning my trip (SE Asia in wet season, NZ in spring, North Australia in the heat and humidity of summer). I waited for my bags at the carousel and watched as the other passengers removed their damp luggage and went on their way. Suddenly the carousel stopped and about 10 of us looked around nervously. A fellow passenger went to make an enquiry. Apparently the rain had become heavy so the baggage handlers, not wanting to get soaked, decided not to go back to the plane to collect the remaining pieces of luggage. About 20 minutes later the rain calmed down, the carousel restarted and I finally got my bag. That was my first introduction to "Fiji time", the art of taking it easy.


I took a chance coming to Fiji a little unprepared. I hadn't booked any diving - I was still a bit tender from an ear infection - nor had I booked any accommodation. I'd heard that Nadi, being essentially a transport hub, is a bit rough around the edges, with the true beauty of Fiji being in the outer islands, so I hoped to stay in the hotel across the road from the airport and book a flight to a nearby island as soon as possible. Luckily I managed to get the last room in the hotel (a lot of passengers from my flight thought the same thing but managed to collect their luggage and get there before me), and found one of the last seats on an early morning flight to Savusavu on Fiji's second largest island, Vanua Levu.


In NZ I found it a little weird that their dollar coin looked exactly like a pound coin, Queen's head and everything, just half the value. In Fiji there was something odd about the currency. It took me a while to realise that my uneasiness arose from the fact that the Queen is looking directly at you and smiling. Not being an avid fan of the Queen's speech, or the royals in general, I don't think I've ever seen her face-on.


I walked to the airport the following morning (all of 5mins away), and checked in:
"Oh sorry, did you not get a call? The plane is delayed by 3 hours and we can't fly to Savusavu, we have to fly to Labasa and transfer by car from there."
Little did I know this was just the start of Fijian plane woes. Labasa airport was probably the smallest I've ever been to. We practically unloaded our luggage from the plane ourselves. From there it was a hastily organised shared taxi through to Savusavu on the other side of the island, which turned out to be a fun drive through tiny villages and tropical forests with an environmental scientist / spear fisherman (personally, I'd never heard of that combination before) who had to travel with wads of paper in his ears. Probably some horrific ear-drum popping accident from the fishing... I didn't ask as I would probably have been grossed out.

High Street, Savusavu

I think Savusavu is the biggest town on Vanua Levu but it was only one street with a few cafes, hotels, a market and a marina. As I was still waiting for my ear infection to fully clear up I had to stay above the water so I did some snorkelling around the reef, spent an inordinate amount of time chilling by the pool, drank Fijian milkshakes and ate great Indian food. The food portions are generally enormous, as are most of the people (I'm no expert on correlation - remember I got made redundant from correlation trading - but I think there's one here). There's a large Indo-Fijian community in Fiji as a whole, which has brought tons of great Indian food and a few fusion experiments.


Encouraged to come over from India to work on sugar cane plantations in the time of colonial rule, Indian workers settled. As they were generally more business savvy than the native Fijians, many became wealthy and this has created tensions, leading to several coups and leadership struggles since the late 80s. Generally the ethnic Fijians I spoke to were tolerant of this sizeable community (over a third of the population are of Indian origin; Divali is a national holiday in Fiji) but occasionally some shopkeepers in the larger towns were keen to point out that a product was made by ethnic Fijians in real Fijian villages, rather than by "the Indians".

Taveuni

I hopped on the ferry to Taveuni (Fiji's 3rd largest island), which happened to be the first really scratty transport that I'd taken in a long time - plenty of roaches and diesel fumes - but an incredibly scenic trip between the islands. I spent a week on the island, with two relaxed dives every day. The reef was only a 15 minute boat ride from the resort. The place itself was quite remote - I had to pre-order my meals in advance so they could get enough ingredients from the nearest town. The diving was fantastic, the most consistently good diving I've ever done. Here I saw my first shark (a fairly common whitetip reef shark) and would later see a Great Hammerhead and Bronze Whalers, numerous turtles and amazing walls of soft corals.


Aside from the underwater sights, Taveuni is famous for being a point of land that's crossed by the 180 degree meridian - an imaginary line where the international date line should be if it didn't formally weave its way around the island. The meridian was marked by a battered sign at the edge of an equally battered rugby pitch in the middle of nowhere. A very beautiful nowhere nonetheless.

The rather shabby 180 degree meridian marker

I flew back to Nadi on a small 19-seater plane and got some beautiful shots of the reef below. Sometimes it's easy to forget on the larger planes, but when you feel every bump slight change of direction on the small ones you're reminded that you're actually flying, doing something strange and unnatural.

Fringing reef between Vanua Levu and Taveuni

I checked in for my flight to Melbourne and sat on the plane. I was thinking how happy I was not to be flying with Qantas for a change, as this was in the middle of the industrial disputes, when captain comes over the radio to say there's electrical problems. We waited on the tarmac for an hour then headed back to the terminal. This was an evening flight so naturally nobody was around or motivated to fix it so I had to spend a night in a hotel opposite the airport (in fact the very same room in the same hotel I stayed in on my first night in Fiji.. very weird). When we finally boarded the rescheduled plane the following evening there was some relief... until the captain says there's a problem with one of the engines. Everyone sighs, but finally they fix it and we're on our way to Melbourne. I had no firm plans in Aus so a extra night in Fiji, fully paid, was a good thing, and there are certainly worse places to be stranded.

Diving in the Somosomo Strait, Taveuni

NZ South Island 4 - Queenstown, west coast and out

Queenstown from ~15,000ft

After the trip to Milford Sound I drove to Queenstown, which has a reputation of being the adrenaline seekers' capital of NZ. Here you can throw your body from the top of, out of, or through practically anything and what's more, it's a beautiful place to do any of the above. On entering the city the demographic suddenly changes - the average age seems to plummet to somewhere in the early 20s.


I limited myself to a skydive in the interests of preventing my bank balance running dry in the space of a weekend. For some reason I had an aversion to throwing myself off a canyon attached to a rope, but was ok with the idea of being thrown out of a plane at 16,000 ft. Maybe it's that ground appears to rush up a lot quicker on a bungy jump. We arrive at the airfield in the morning and go through the safety briefing, which was way shorter than I had expected - essentially "put your head back, curl your legs around the plane like a banana shape, hold on to your harness and enjoy". My group were all newbies to skydiving and didn't know what to expect so we all listened intently, full of nervous energy while the technicians folded used parachutes behind us (I'm going to call them technicians and not "work-experience guys" to make it feel safer). There was something strangely unnerving about them re-folding a chute - I think I'd feel better if they did that in another room so in my head each one was factory-fresh and ready to work, without manual intervention, but I was too pumped up to really care.


20 of us packed into the tiny plane, sat on the floor, legs wrapped around the person in front like an airborne bobsleigh team, and strapped to our professional who would do all the hard work. We took off and climbed for what seemed like forever, all the time I was thinking about the harness. I scuba dive and I've seen the average scuba rental equipment. There are problems with regulators, tanks and buoyancy jackets all the time, but they're usually tiny things that can be fixed with a good ol' fashioned hammer hit or just sorted out once you're underwater, and you just make do. If something goes wrong down there then chances are there's plenty of help nearby and fairly easy failsafes if there isn't. With skydiving I felt like there was not much going on behind the scenes. I relinquished all control to my tandem partner and just hoped for the best.


The plane door opened and we lurched to the side as the pilot fought the change in aerodynamics. We'd reached 10,000ft and the first tandem pair unceremoniously slid to the open hatch on their arses, in the manner of a dog with a bad case of worms and everyone else watched in anticipation. In a few seconds it was over. A quick 3-count and the instructor threw himself out of the door. The wind changed timbre slightly and they had disappeared from view. Everyone in the plane gasped. I think we all thought there'd be more involved, but I guess in essence we're just throwing ourselves out of a plane... there's not much skill involved in the falling part.


We reached 16,000ft and my turn was up. A quick 3-count and we were falling. The sound of the rushing air thankfully drowned out my screaming like a girl. The biggest thrill was definitely in the first few seconds before reaching terminal velocity, when my brain registered I was falling but somehow not landing yet. I had 60 seconds of freefall at 125mph and it was all over too quickly. The parachute came was deployed (thank goodness) and I got chance to really savour the view. After the noise of the free-fall, this was total calm and only the slightest of rustling of the chute to break the silence... and the fast beating of my heart in my ears. It was an amazing rush and something I'd do again, but I fear that once you've tried it, the experience just won't be the same the next time.


The following day, still on a bit of a high from the dive, I went on a wine tour of the region, mostly because I needed a good session on the grapes to relax. It was nice to be driven around this time, rather than using a somewhat wobbly bike like back in the Marlborough region and the group was a good laugh... what I remember anyway...

A very wet walk to Fox Glacier

Fox Glacier

Queenstown was a great city but I had to take the final leg of my NZ journey up the west coast and back to North Island. Somehow I'd managed to get an ear infection as I left Queenstown which ordinarily would have kept me in bed for a few days but I had over 700 miles to cover in less than a week and places to see along the way. Fortunately for me this happened while I was travelling through a less interesting part of the country. I decided to drive over to the Franz-Joseph and Fox glaciers. For glaciers these two move pretty quickly, especially Franz-Joesph which has managed advancement rates of 70cm per day in the past. When I arrived the walkways over to the Fox glacier were strewn with boulders from recent landslides and park wardens were busy trying to place rocks in a small river that had appeared very quickly, so people wouldn't have to wade through. The glacial landscape is extremely dynamic. I had the impression that glaciers move on a geological time-scale, whose effects wouldn't be noticeable from day to day. The glorious weather was starting to disappear and the west coast became its usual self, with gloomy overcast mornings and patchy rain. I couldn't beat the odds for that long.


That evening I slept in Hokitika, a small town with nothing to do. Well, there was an exhibtion on Whitebait but I stick by my original statement. The hotel was heavily discounted as they were doing loud building work in some of the rooms. I happened to be the only person in the place at the time. The owner did warn me it'd be noisy, with a persistence that made me think that he didn't want any business at all. I couldn't hear anything through my left ear anyway so if I turned to the right the building work just disappeared - there are definite advantages to having middle-ear infections. It's not just Hokitika, all the west coast towns are bleak and generally uninteresting. Haast, is a dive, with just one cafe, which only offered burgers or whitebait (see a pattern here?), Greymouth is an industrial town which is inviting as its name suggests, and Karamea's prime tourist attraction seems to be an estuary.


I sauntered further up the coast and passing through Punakaiki, famous for its odd "pancake rock" formations, popping peanut M&Ms and painkillers in equal measure and decided to make a bee-line for the nearest city, which happened to be lovely Nelson. Nelson is a very chilled place at the geographical centre of the country, with an al fresco coffee scene, good food and wine, and has one of the most pleasing climates in NZ, getting lots and lots of sunshine.  All in all, a good place to recover.

Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki

I said goodbye to the Sunny in Picton and jumped back on the Interislander ferry to Wellington, where it was a quick overnight and a morning train to Auckland. NZ doesn't have much of a national train service and the Wellington to Auckland route is run exclusively as tourist attraction rather than an efficient form of transport. While it was nice to see all the sights I passed in the car in a much more relaxed way, 12 hours of rolling commentary over the tannoy was a bit much. The highlight, a few hours north of Wellington, was when the guard asked us to look out for the local nutter who, every day, waves a red plastic bag at the train as it passes his hut.


A month in NZ was a good amount of time to see the main sights and it didn't feel rushed, but I think 6 weeks would have been ideal to try some longer walks and see a bit more of this incredibly picturesque country. By now I was ready to get back to warmer climes and hit the beach. Luckily Fiji was up next...

NZ South Island 3 - The Catlins and the Sounds

Lake Manapouri

After Dunedin I drove to The Catlins, a national park on the southern tip of mainland NZ. Not exactly the most southern part of NZ as Stewart Island and some outlying NZ-owned rocks lie further towards the pole, and although remote it's not exactly what I'd call the wild frontier - Fiordland in the south west definitely takes that title. I drove through swathes of forest and farmland and around rugged coastline to get to Curio Bay, a cute, windswept hamlet with only a few backpacker places and a caravan park for accommodation. It was dusk and the local shop-cum-caravan-park-reception had a few packets of instant noodles, which were to be my only dinner option. The bay is the site of a petrified forest: some time in the Jurassic period, heavy rain fell on nearby volcanoes and the resulting ash-filled water swept through the forest, impregnating the trees with silica and turning them to stone in a matter of weeks. The wood didn't rot as it happened so quickly and therefore became preserved in situ. As if this wasn't a rare enough phenomenon, this tiny bay is also one of the few places in the world to see Yellow-Eyed Penguins, who nest in the bank and return from hunting just before sunset, like clockwork.

Yellow-eyed penguins

Petrified forest, Curio Bay

The following day I went deeper into the Catlins and walked some forest treks through to stunning waterfalls. I drove through Invercargill, the largest population centre in Southland (only 50,000 people!) to Manapouri, which I used as a base for a trip to Doubtful Sound. I stayed in a cabin with a log fire, and a gas bottle for cooking. No electricity. This was hardly the flashpacking that I'd been doing so far. I had to forage in the woods, yes.. forage for logs to burn as the temperature dropped. I resorted to speed-reading my copy of Newsweek in order to burn it for warmth. But wow, what a view! Bacon sandwiches and Otago wine on the terrace watching the sunset. That night I woke up to hear mice rustling around my bag and found that in the absence of food they'd eaten a blackcurrant flavoured rehydration powder sachet, which ironically would be quite dehydrating on its own. Serves them right.

Manapouri at dusk

Looking down to the start of Doubtful Sound

A Sound is technically where a river erodes the rock, carving a channel that is filled by the sea, whereas a fjord is similar but as a result of glacial action. The Sounds in South Island are basically all fjords with the exception of the Marlborough Sounds in the north. So Doubtful Sound is a bit of a misnomer, unless Capt Cook was making it known he was unsure of the specific erosion process when he named it. I took a daytrip, which involved sailing over Lake Manapouri, driving over the Wilmot Pass then an afternoon cruising on the Sound. Before the Wilmot Pass was built in 1959, only the most intrepid explored this region. The road was laid to facilitate construction of West Arm hydroelectric power station, one of NZ's most impressive engineering achievements.



The power station was conceived well over 100 years ago, which is staggering enough in itself, but it was deemed too costly to build at that time. When it was finally built in 1965, the Wilmot Pass cost £1 per cm at today's exchange rate - easily the most expensive road in NZ. Most of the energy from West Arm goes to an aluminium smelting plant - without this, it could power most of South Island.

Doubtful Sound

Usually Fiordland gets between 5m and 9m of rain annually and is raining on 2 out of every 3 days, but I was lucky enough to get a whole week of perfect weather. I regret not doing an overnight trip as the place was staggeringly beautiful. All you can hear is distant bird calls and the soft slap of waves against the shore. The place is true wilderness: this side of Lake Manapouri has a permanent population of 1 - a lonely warden in the most remote part of New Zealand.


I spent that night back in relative civilisation in Te Anau, in preparation for a trip to Milford Sound further up the west coast. Milford Sound is bit more touristy, mainly because it's more accessible but it was still a fantastic sight. The road to Milford was jaw-droppingly scenic and virtually deserted, with lonely creeks and a splendid mountain pass before dropping down to sea level at the start of the Sound. Both Sounds had waterfalls in abundance and I expect these would be even more impressive after a few days of heavy rainfall. The photos of the Sounds really don't do justice. It's so difficult to get a sense of scale from these pictures.

Milford Sound

155m Stirling Falls, Milford Sound

NZ South Island 2 - Methven to Dunedin

Mount Cook

 I left sleepy Methven early morning to make the long drive to Mt Cook. The first half of the journey was through the Canterbury plains - a near-flat expanse of land stretching from the east coast through to the edge of the Southern Alps around 50km inland. These mountains rise up very quickly from the plains, which apparently gives some skiers vertigo, as you can see the sea from the slopes beyond the flatness of the plains - you really get the feeling of being thousands of metres above sea-level.


I passed by the Two Thumb mountain range and had lunch at Lake Tekapo in the shadow of Mt John. The lake gets its colour from sediment, or rock-flour, in the water, rather than from ,say, cobalt compounds. When the rocky bottom of the glacier moved across the land and carved out the lake basin it ground out fine particles which were suspended in the glacial melt. Light refracts off the particles and gives it a milky turquoise appearance.

Lake Tekapo

The road to Mt Cook Village is stunning, with postcard views at each turn. The Mt Cook National Park is home to 22 of the 25 highest mountains in NZ, with Mt Cook itself being the highest at 3775m  (and also having the accolade of highest mountain in Australasia). Around a third of the park has a permanent blanket of snow and glacial ice which is a stunning sight, given its proximity to the coast. Mount Cook Village is a bit of a misnomer, being essentially a coffee shop and a boutique hotel serving the ski community, and was almost deserted save for a few ambitious skiers.


I took a side-trip down a nearby gravel track (which the Sunny didn't enjoy) to the Tasman Glacier. The road was like driving on the surface of the moon and the place looked more like a quarry than what I expected from NZ's largest glacier. However, the surface moraine is only a few metres deep and beneath it lies between 200-600m of glacial ice. Like most temperate glaciers it has been losing around 0.5% of its volume each year which has helped deposit the surface moraine and has swelled "Lake Tasman" significantly. I've put this in inverted commas because 20 years ago this "lake" didn't exist. NZ's glaciers have been retreating for the past 14,000 years or so - the top of the Tasman glacier was around 700m higher than where I took these photos back then.

Lake Tasman from the glacier

By now it was getting late so I headed back down the Mt Cook road to a small village called Twizel. The place was built to provide accommodation for the workers constructing a nearby hydroelectric power station and, location aside, is not the prettiest of places. The village was due to be abandoned in 1984 once the project was complete but the residents tenaciously held on. It's basically prefab housing around a central square, which has a strange mix of run down convenience stores and a couple of swanky cafes for the skiers who can't quite afford to stay at Mt Cook Village. I got chatting to a bunch of local lads who worked on nearby farms, who took me on a tour of "the pub" and "the bar", the latter being a pub that stayed open longer. "The pub" had a Working Men's Club feel - the lads had to convince the landlord that I wasn't any trouble before he'd serve me. The bar was a little more easy going and I was warned (advised) of the few girls that were easy (to put this in context there were only five girls in the bar). Both places were truly dead for a Friday night but I get the impression that the clientele don't change with the days of the week in Twizel.


Next up was Oamaru, a short drive back to the coast. It was pretty much the only place with any sort of life between Twizel and Dunedin, and consequently my best chance of finding a bar showing the England vs Scotland game so I popped in for a night. Oamaru has a collection of Victorian warehouses and pubs by the waterfront, but instead of going down the chintzy pensioner tourism route, it's somehow become the self-acclaimed steampunk capital of New Zealand.

Steampunk HQ, Oamaru

When I arrived in Dunedin the whole town was awash with the green of Ireland rugby fans. I had a ticket to the Ireland vs Italy game and had somehow managed to get some accommodation within walking distance of the stadium at short notice. Dunedin is a student city and has a reputation of being a raucous party place. Mix this with thousands of Irish fans and the place was heaving. The city has a tradition of holding an informal nude rugby game (I suppose it can't be anything other than informal) on matchdays for the games held here. 14 naked guys and 1 naked girl take on a fully-clothed team of, in this case, Irish and Italian fans (which to me sounds more like a gangbang than a sport). Fortunately I arrived too late to see it.

Dunedin train station

NZ South Island - Picton to Methven

I took the Interislander ferry across to the South Island. It was a blissful 3 hours of sailing on the Marlborough Sounds and through the Cook Strait over to Picton. That's the famous Capt James Cook, if you were wondering. He passed through the Strait as he circumnavigated North Island. On his third voyage around these parts, he sent 10 of his crew to collect scurvy grass from Arapawa Island in the strait but they were ambushed, killed and eaten by local Maori. Thankfully the locals have since lost their appetite for cannibalism after introduction to Christianity (though some missionaries took one for the team).

Marlborough Sounds

If you're expecting a city like Wellington on the other side of the Strait then be disappointed. The ferry terminal at Picton is the only real attraction if you exclude the bizarre Dutch bakery. There are more rental car agencies than any other business, ideal for people who needed to pick up a car directly from the ferry. Once I got my Nissan Sunny (again... but this time brown/gold and manual transmission) I headed straight for Renwick in the centre of the Marlborough wine region. Wasting no time I hired a bicycle and made a bee-line to the nearby vineyards for free tastings. There are tens of wineries within cycling distance producing everything from the standard Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir (by the end I was tired of hearing "this is not your typical Malborugh Sav") to the more unusual Montepulciano, Syrah and fake Champagne. Being an almost exclusive red wine drinker I took this as an education and the tasting staff were happy to oblige. Later in the afternoon my bike started wobbling and wouldn't go in a straight line. Obviously a mechanical fault.


The next day, nursing a delicate head, I drove the short distance down the east coast to Kaikoura. I thought the North Island scenery was spectacular but it was nothing in comparison to the South. You don't have to expend any effort to get to the most beautiful places. Merely travelling down the main highway you see snow-capped mountains rising almost directly from the sea, and deserted black-sand beaches.

East coast beach, near Kaikoura

Kaikoura was a whaling station from the mid-1800s but before that the Maori had built stepped defences (pa) on the peninsula. Along the peninsula you see geology at its rawest. Over time and lots of seismic activity, the seabed was bent, buckled and lifted to form the peninsula, and in the last 125,000 years or so has been cut by wave action to its present state, with layers of sea-floor shunted into unnatural angles.

Seafloor uplifts, Kaikoura peninsula

Kaikoura peninsula - can easily see the two major seafloor levels here

I drove south to Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula and on to Christchurch. I'd originally planned on staying in the city for a night, people were telling me that the city was slowly rebuilding after the recent earthquakes but once I got there and saw the damage I decided against it. The city was  heavily damaged in the Sept '10 earthquake and is still reeling from aftershocks, the most deadly was back in February this year where 181 people lost their lives. National radio stations are all still broadcasting messages of support and there are plenty of fundraisers for the reconstruction. Many roads in the city centre are closed while dangerous buildings are being torn down, and city streets have become a maze, making navigation very tricky. I stopped in a mall for a coffee and only half the shops were open, the rest pending refurbishment. While I had a morbid fascination with the place I decided to head inland to the little town of Methven, which would be dead were it not for its proximity to the slopes of Mt Cook. As the ski season was coming to an end, the town was a little quiet. I asked around if there was any free wifi in town and was told that the only cafe that did it fell down in the earthquake. I tried in the pub:


"Do you have wifi?"


"Not heard of that, ay. We've only got what you see on tap".

NZ North Island 2 - Rotorua to Wellington

Te Whakarewarewa Thermal Area, Rotorua

 I mentioned in the last post that I stayed in Ruakaka because it was "convenient". I should have phrased it "I stayed [35km] south of Whangarei as it was the nearest available bed to the stadium". As luck would have it, it was one of the friendliest B&Bs I've stayed in so far. After a mighty breakfast and some casual internet surfing (who would have guessed that this would be my only free wifi in NZ accommodation... Asia puts NZ to shame in that respect), I made the long drive south to Rotorua in the heart of North Island.


Rotorua is a geothermal hotspot, home to bubbling mudpools, hot springs and some terrific geysers. The town itself is so thermally active that it actually smells eggy from the sulphur. Kuirau park in the town centre happily steams and bubbles and many parts are roped off so you don't accidently step in boiling water. These range from large steaming pools to small discolourations in the soil or bleaching of nearby bushes. It most recently "erupted" in 2003, covering the park in mud, and it was an odd feeling wandering through, knowing that there's so much energy lurking just under the surface.


I visited Rotorua's star attraction, Te Whakarewarewa, a thermal reserve just outside town. The most famous geyser here is Pohutu which erupts around 20 times a day and can reach 30m tall.

Bubbling mudpool, Te Whakarewarewa

Te Puia, Te Whakarewarewa

The entrance fee included a free Maori culture show (another one...). This time there was audience participation and I was forced up on stage to do a haka. Why is it always me? I basically had no choice because you just don't say no to Maori. The guys that are too big to be All Blacks go into nightclub security and I have never seen people as huge. Seriously, you just wouldn't mess.


The following day I took a drive around Tongariro National Park and through to Lake Taupo, NZ's largest lake. It was a stunning drive, made way longer than it should have been as I stopped every 10 minutes to take pictures. There was a slight hairy moment when I almost ran out of fuel... I'd told myself to refill before the tank reaches 1/4 but (a) the car wasn't very fuel efficient, (b) had a small tank, (c) was automatic, so aside from putting it in neutral down the hills I couldn't really do much else to conserve it, and (d) petrol stations were often more than 50km apart, if you knew where to look. Luckily I stumbled on a tiny petrol station in the National Park, but if that had been closed (as a lot of them are) I would have been screwed.

Mt Ruapehu from the Desert Road

Driving through North Island made me think that New Zealand would make a great golf course. The whole place seems sculpted for that very purpose, with smooth contours and hills that roll even more than England's. There's a terrific amount of open space - a country roughly the size of the UK but with a population of only 4.4 million (the old adage of "more sheep than people" is still true but I'm told that it's getting much more comparable). I also heard that there's around 5.5 million NZ passports, which is certainly believable given the number of them living in South West London. It's almost a rite of passage for a New Zealander to study abroad or just travel the world, which is fair enough given how geographically isolated the country is. Some emigrate across "the ditch" to Australia but Kiwis generally believe that this increases the average IQ of both countries.

From Taupo I drove south (one speeding ticket later, oops...) to Wellington, one of the coolest cities in NZ. Wellington has some great bars and cafes considering its size (only roughly 165,000 people) and a gorgeous location on the southern tip of the North Island, looking out over the Marlborough Sounds. Here I said goodbye to the Sunny, watched the Scotland vs Argentina game and hopped on an early morning ferry across Cook Straight to South Island.

Wellington Civic Square

NZ North Island - Auckland to Whangarei

Auckland at night

I had been looking forward to getting out of the heat and humidity of the last 3 months in Asia and into the NZ springtime, but on landing at Auckland International I realised I was under-prepared for the temperatures. With gritted teeth I walked out of the plane in a T-shirt. Where had my Northern roots gone? It was only 15 degrees, I used to be able to do winter nights out in Sheffield in just a T-shirt.


I was just one of thousands travelling to New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup and the excitement in the country was evident. The guy at passport control chatted with me (talked at me) for 10 minutes about England's fly half problems while people waited in line behind.


NZ is a special place and I hadn't really appreciated it until passing through customs. There are signs all over warning of the risks to NZ's delicate habitat. Bringing in fruit and vegetables is prohibited and even hiking boots need to be declared, as they may be coated in soil that can contaminate the native environment. This delicate environment is mostly due to NZ's relative isolation from continental landmasses. When the supercontinent Gondwana started to split around 180 million years ago dinosaurs ruled Earth. NZ and Australia gradually moved away from the supercontinent and their isolation allowed evolution to run its course almost independently. As a result there are no mammals native to NZ, except for bats and marine mammals. Some native birds lost their ability to fly as they simply didn't need it. Until mammals were brought over by the Polynesians and Europeans, these birds had no natural predators. Authorities in NZ take the preservation of NZ's natural environment very seriously.


I spent two days in Auckland, watching rugby all afternoon and adjusting to the new timezone and climate by buying ales and warm jumpers. Auckland museum had some good exhibits but its in-house Maori cultural show was pretty cheesy. I treated myself to some western food in restaurants with menus with words like "jus" and "reduction". Bliss.


I picked up my hire car - a white, automatic, Nissan Sunny (remember, I'm trying to do this on the cheap) which tracked to the left at low speeds and to the right at high speeds (I'm not even sure that's mechanically possible) - and drove 170 miles north to the Bay of Islands. The main motorway in North Island stretches from Wellington in the south to Cape Reinga in the very north. To call it a motorway is doing it a favour - once you're out of Auckland it's essentially a single lane road.

Bay of Islands

On a good day at Cape Reinga you can actually see the deep blue Pacific and the blue-green Tasman sea mixing together, but as weather wasn't ideal and it was getting late I headed to to Paihia on the northern coast. A picturesque bay but nothing much to see here, just more rugby and great wine and satisfied my cravings for western foods, which by then had moved on to nachos. The hostel had a weird nautical-theme and had a piano right outside my door which we weren't allowed to touch. It's been three months since I dropped mine off in storage and haven't played since. The gods are teasing me.



I planned to skirt through North Island pretty quickly as I've been told by lots of people that the South is amazing. It had taken a while to plan, but I had a rough route in mind which would take in a few World Cup games. The first of which was Japan vs Tonga in Whangarei. The town itself was very small and accommodation for the game day was totally booked up. The nearest bed I could find was a small village called Ruakaka, about 25 miles from the stadium.
game.


The game was terrific. Not many Japanese are aware that their country was competing but the supporters who made it over were fanatical. North Island as has a huge Pacific Islander community so this made for a terrific atmosphere, and all the more exciting when the stadium caught fire - mild panic only started when the tanoy announced that "the fire was under control" and fans turned round to see the 5 metre flames for the first time.

Sipi Tau, the "Tongan Haka"

Not a great pic, but there's the little fire if you don't believe me

Singapore

Singapore officially marked the end of my trip through SE Asia and while I've not exactly been slumming it in the rest of Asia, I was looking forward to some home comforts in this westernised oasis. Steph kindly offered to put me up at her place and knowing that I was starting to crave dairy products, had stocked the kitchen with cheeses, milk and yogurts, and other western delights. My first evening in Singapore was spent with a plate of fish and chips and a bottle of tempranillo, which wasn't exactly top quality wine but in comparison to the Hardy's and Jacob's Creek offered as fine wine in other restaurants in Asia it was like a bunch of naked girls fighting on my tongue.

Turns 22,23 of the Singapore Grand Prix

However, delicacies like these come at a price. Drinking and eating out here is on a par with Scandinavian prices, although I'm told that prices drop significantly outside the expat bubble. Many people come to work in Singapore on good company packages, expensing their rent, utility bills, transport costs etc., to the point where their actual salary goes straight into the bank... or into the nightlife, so the bars and restaurants can afford to jack up the prices in the Central Business District. I had expected Singapore to be like Hong Kong, but it felt much more developed. HK had a grittier edge to it, whereas Singapore's streets were sparklingly clean, bars were swankier and people seemed to be more connected with the nightlife scene.


Singapore is definitely a social city. Expats know that their neighbours will only live there for a couple of years seeing out their contracts and then move on, so that generates a friendly atmosphere. Business moves quickly here and bars and restaurants, like their patrons, are transient. If your place doesn't get the cache quickly then it's pretty much over. What's the point in building a legacy if your customers move away after a couple of years?

Central Business District waterfront

But it's not just the expats that are tuned into business. The locals are industrious and entrepreneurial. My taxi driver gave me a motivational speech on the way to the airport: "Singapore is the land of opportunity; every business is a people business...". There's definitely a buzz about this place and when you see the construction projects and optimism here, you really get the feeling that the recession has largely missed this tiny country.

Marina Bay Sands Hotel

As for sightseeing, my few days in Singapore were largely based in the centre around Steph's beautiful apartment, so unfortunately I didn't really get to experience Singaporean local life, but I wasn't complaining. With Top Gear on the telly, an on-site swimming pool and calcium back in my bones I really couldn't have been happier. My one regret was not scheduling my trip around the Singapore Grand Prix, which was held only a few days after I left the city. However I had my heart set on being in NZ for the Rugby World Cup and I wasn't thinking straight. 
From the viewing deck atop the Marina Bay Sands hotel you could see pretty much all of the Grand Prix circuit and out to Indonesia (and to Malaysia on a good day!). Wonderful views of this stunning city.

My evenings were spent drinking over at Arab St., a funky neighbourhood with Middle-Eastern and North African restaurants and cool cocktail bars. When we went clubbing at Zouk, Gilles Peterson jumped on the decks and the locals started dancing in orderly lines, all facing the front. The streets were littered with wasted locals who had underestimated their alcohol tolerance. Both reminders that I was still, very firmly, in Asia.