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