On our return to Wellington, we were lucky enough to get our hands on tickets to the Wellington Rugby Sevens (thanks, Brent!). The Wellington Sevens. It’s rugby, Jim, but not as we know it. This is how I (Chrissy) understand what we witnessed: Once upon a time, some bright spark took a look at rugby, which is, let’s face it, dull and complicated. He decided to kick a few players off the pitch but, ye gods, it was even duller. What to do? Said bright spark noticed that no-one was watching. Well, I’m not going to insinuate that all alpha males are closet cross-dressers, but when the concept of fancy dress was introduced and all the men were actively encouraged to dress as women, viewing figures escalated. Well, the rugby-widow demographic were pleased no end because they could laugh at their menfolk and ignore what was going on pitchside (just like everyone else). Add lots and lots of cold beer warmed in the January sun and it was carnival, New Zealand-style.

As for our own costumes, the chaps were far too manly to don a Wonderwoman or Bruno outfit, so we went as a lounge suite (naturally). Mei had been getting over-excited about the whole rugbiness of the event for weeks, so when he discovered that I would be dressed as a bookcase, he spent a whole day feverishly wracking his underused brain for hilarious and topical imaginary rugby-related book-titles to write on the spines of the books which adorned my smock/bookshelf. If you care more than ten-thousand rugby fans, have a gander.

From Wellington, we headed up the East Coast to art-deco Napier, intent on getting our architecture fix. Helpfully, this is also prime wine country and the lack of photos attests to our dubious priorities. We managed to drum up enough sobriety for a long, early-morning (tide-dependent) rocky beach walk to a gannet colony; even the locals choose to go by tractor rather than walk. Now we know why.

From here, we lost a few days on a stunning beach north of Napier which may be called Wapatiki, finally heading inland to Taupo and soon enough, down to a great campsite at tiny Tokaanu. We loved the geothermal and spa pools here and, like many of the places we’ve been to, find it hard to pinpoint why it was such a great place to stay. Something, definitely to do with the generosity of our hosts. In the space of two days, they gave us milk, a trout, cakes, a towel and offered us (admittedly whilst drunk) unlimited access to their beer fridge. Or maybe it was the softness of the grass that made the place so special. This is important when camping without a mallet, we’ve discovered.

From here we walked the Tongariro Crossing, New Zealand’s best one-day hike, which really lived up to the hype - emerald lakes, volcanoes and sweeping views all the way across to Mount Taranaki. If there are no photos of staple tourist favourites Taupo or Rotorua (that we also visited along the way), this is probably because nothing could quite live up to Tongariro. It may also because tourists are lured to Taupo and Rotorua so that Kiwis can keep all of the truly gorgeous places uncluttered. We did, however, stumble across a lovely open hot spring pool during a riverside walk from the tiny but stunningly white Huka Falls near Taupo.

Rotorua is a good place to get a sense of Maori cultural tradition and to eat some tasty sashimi, but our true aim in visiting the town was an anthropological quest which reached its climax while camping at a hostel here. We had heard rumours that an incredibly rare and endangered species, the Inhospitable, Hostile Kiwi could be found somewhere in the North Island (although its existence is threatened by the Chillaxed, Welcoming strain). Suffice to say that the hostel owner fell into this endangered category, and we feel obliged to say that tourists should avoid at all costs disturbing the hostel owner in its natural habitat.

We’re even worse at planning than we are at reading maps so, having crossed diagonally from Wellington up to Hawkes Bay in the north east, we decided it was time to return south west again to see the glow worm caves in Waitomo. It’s a tourist cliché in New Zealand to go there, but it was surprisingly crowd-free and beautiful, both above and below the ground. We stayed in a proper bed in Waitomo, well a bunkbed at least, and the presence of a ceiling rather than mozzie-infested canvas above our heads gave us a taste for more of the same. Chrissy has relatives in Taranaki (home of Brent and Jermaine of Conchords fame) who have a dairy farm so we paid them a visit, and when they (Bronwen and Jim) offered us the option to stay indoors, we grasped it in our grubby hands (the grubbiness due to a messy introduction to the fine art of milking). Apparently cows are incredibly placid as long as their usual routine is maintained, but if you introduce a wild card - in the form, for example, of a couple of townie Poms - bombs away! They (whoever “they” are) say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger so thank you, Jim and Bronwen, for making us stronger (if smellier) and for making us so welcome.

Our haphazard grasp of geography took us next to West-coast surfie mecca Raglan and then eastwards to the Coromandel Peninsula. Waihi and Oputere beaches set the tone for the rest of the peninsula – white expanses, few other people and pounding blue surf. The highlight of this region had to be our time in and around Hahei, which is a neighbouring beach to Cathedral Cove, where we walked and snorkelled. No highlight is complete without alcohol, however, and we loved spending a few drunken hours in the company of the Evans family at Purangi Winery. We were introduced to the merits of feijoa and plum liqueurs before finally settling a gert big bottle of lemon gin. The next few days were a haze of beaches, sun and merry spilling of tonic.

A few rudimentary days were spent in the lovely City Garden Lodge in Auckland, before we were due to fly to Santiago on the 28th. If you’ve read or watched the news (we hadn’t), you’ll know about the earthquake in Chile on the 27th. We felt pretty relieved that we hadn’t flown out a day earlier. LAN Chile airline put a few straggling travellers and plenty of worried Chileans up in the Holiday Inn for the night. The flight was back on the next day, but by this time we’d been advised to change our plans, so we managed to get on a flight to Buenos Aires on the 8th March.
So, the last few days have been part of a stolen week in Northland, NZ, where the sun is still shining, the campsites are ghost towns and where you can dig out pipis (little cockles) from the sand for your dinner.

South Island

Meirion wrestles control of the keyboard and writes:

Someone said that history is written by the victors, and I’m sure that’s true and terribly clever, but it seems that travel blogs are (usually) written by the person who’s not doing all the proper work, like driving campervans, brewing hot, malty drinks or making sure that the towel is weighed down neatly and securely on the beach while the glamorous half of the operation swims with seals and such.

So yeah, anyway, what I’m trying to say is someone needs to tell the other half of this blog. I had a look at what Chrissy wrote in the last two episodes, and while I admit that I had an editorial role and am happy to take credit for any amusing bits, there are some pretty glaring omissions in her account.

So, yes, it’s true that we went to the Catlins and yes, the wind truly did blow harder than a hard, blowy thing. But so much more happened than that. For example, her title’s reference to the Catlins as “Deliverance country” was taken from a sign at a place we stopped called the Lost Gypsy Gallery in a tiny one-mule town called Papatowai. Inside a tiny caravan, an inventive genius who must have inherited the DNA of Heath Robinson had created all kinds of solar-powered automata that gave us (and any others who had the good fortune to stop in search of toilets or whatever)hours of amusement. Of course, you really need to visit to see how much fun it is and we tried to insert a little video of Chrissy playing a bizarre organ but you'll have to come to our place in the summer to see our slide show because it won't upload.

Loads of people describe the Catlins as “remote” as if there’s anywhere in New Zealand that is “central”, but the truth is it’s bloomin’ gorgeous (like most of the country) and if someone would simply sort out that wind issue they have down there, it’d be teeming with tourists. Curio Bay, where we stayed for one deafeningly blowy night, has dolphins, penguins, sea lions, surfing and stuff. It even has a petrified forest (as seen in one photo) instead of conventional rocks as part of the coastline/ seafloor. This has something to do with the trees being preserved in volcanic ash but I’m sure that Wikipedia can fill in the rest of the details.

In case Chrissy forgot to mention the Moeraki Boulders in her previous blog, they are the spherical rocks stranded on the beach in another pic. Crazy geologists would love to brainwash us with fanciful stories of tidal erosion or some such nonsense, but any fool can see that they are clearly the ancient, fossilized remains of passenger pods from alien spacecraft.

And the simple explanation for why the aliens left so quickly can be seen not far away on the south coast: they visited Invercargill!

So, from Invercargill - a town that looks even worse in the sunshine because you can see it so much more clearly – we went west through yet more stunning Alpine countryside to Fiordland. We decided to stop in Manapouri (on the shores of the lake of the same name) and not even the hordes of savagely hungry sandflies could detract from the beauty of the place. We wanted to visit one of the fiords and the lovely old American lady who ran a lovely old campsite advised us against an all-day kayak trip, persuading us to do an overnight trip to Doubtful Sound instead. Having taken one look at our scrawny yet portly bodies, she had decided that the half hour of kayaking on the fiord included in the overnight trip would be plenty.

She was so right. As a non-swimmer I frantically paddled, trying to stay afloat (forgetting that frantic actions are the enemy of flotation) occasionally glancing across at Chrissy who, tormented by flies intent on sucking her blood, had given up rowing and was adrift, mid-fiord, swatting at insects, some real but even more imaginary. As it turned out, my fear of water outweighed my fear of air-borne parasites and the huge gouges that had been gnawed from my ankles only became apparent when we returned to the safety of the” mothership”.

Fortunately, it was not only the sandflies that feasted well that day. The real attraction of the trip was not the kayaking or the beautiful scenery (see the photo); the trip was sold to us the moment Chrissy heard camp-site lady mention the words “roast beef” and “salmon”. After a few days of eating carrots and tomatoes from the back of our campervan, any trip involving a three-course meal appealed to us like rumours of gold attracted settlers to Otago in the nineteenth century. In fact, if she had offered us a bungee-jump into an open sewer, we would have snapped it up if there had been nice food at the end of it.

On from the fjords to Queenstown (briefly). Every tourist in New Zealand else goes there so we did too. For half an hour. After days of tranquillity, arriving in a place full of cars just felt wrong, so we headed up the road to Arrowtown (an old gold-mining town where buildings of the community formed by Chinese labourers still stand). More importantly (for us at least), it has a cinema where you can watch a movie from the comfort of the battered old armchairs and sofas that accommodate a maximum audience of fifty. Just what you need when it’s raining.


Wanaka was next, and it’s one of the loveliest places in the world. We parked our van outside the house where Chrissy’s lovely friend Sarah lives with her lovely friends and their regular (and usually lovely) couch-surfing visitors. The sun was out, the lake sparkled, the mountains loomed, the tramping was beautiful and the wineries let us taste their wares. What more could we ask? The pictures are of a stunning tramp (i.e.walk) that we took to see Rob Roy Glacier and of a plane-trip that Chrissy and Sarah went on to see Milford Sound from above.


From there, we drove to the west coast, stopping briefly at a lakeside layby where we bumped (by random) into someone riding a tandem that Chrissy had been to Uni with. Oh, and the tandem bit is true; I didn’t add it just to rhyme with random. The plan was to walk on a glacier, so that’s what we did, spending a few hours crunching around on crampons on Fox Glacier. That explains the photo where we are surrounded by ice.

By this point we were running out of van hire time, so even though the west coast was stunningly green and picturesque, we headed towards Arthur’s Pass (one of the routes through the hills back east). We tramped up a mountain called Avalanche that nearly killed us; in retrospect perhaps we should have paid more attention to the name. The peak was home to a trio of keas (intelligent and “playful” alpine parrots that are famous for pestering humans) who seemed to have calculated that hungry walkers reached the top with their sarnies, apples and muesli bars every lunchtime. Unfortunately their intelligence doesn’t extend to an awareness that what is food to humans is poison to them. We managed not to let them pinch any of our grub, and it was nice not to poison the cheeky little beggars, but it was even nicer to fill our rumbling bellies.

Then to Christchurch where we did city stuff (like a brilliant Joanna Newsome gig) before returning to North Island.

Catlins: Deliverance country

New Zealanders know a lot about weather. I thought we had that covered pretty well, but no. They KNOW weather. Apparently, as we're told frequenty, we're suffering the knock-on effects of El Nino here, which means cloud cover and rain for forseeable. Much like British summer.

We've spent a few lovely days in the Catlins, which seems to assume almost legendary proportions amongst any New Zealanders we spoke to along the way, probably because it's pretty remote and some section of the roads are unsealed. The highlight has to be Curio Bay, where we saw a petrified forest, some wee penguins and two rotund sea lions and some amazing bay views. Photos to come when technology blesses me again.

Stuck for an hour in Invercargill for resupplying. It's Milton Keynes, but bigger.

Four seasons in one day

Wandering in transit around Sydney Airport after a long haul from Heathrow (to be closed a few days later... thank you for my passage, weathergods!), I was buoyant to see Mei appear, looking as tanned as a Welsh boy can be. Brief reunion enjoyed by both, but the joy was acorn-sized in comparison to the oak tree of excitement when Mei said “There’s someone famous behind you.” Looked around to see Martin Johnson – hero to all English rugby fans but arch-enemy of the likes of Mei - also in transit with us. Tried to get surreptitious photo to send to Hello! but Johnson’s brow furrowed in a menacing way. Photo untaken.

A couple of flights later and after numerous comparisons of arm colour that confirmed I was a few tones bluer than milk, we arrived in Wellington. Fantastic Christmas hosted by the Spicer clan in the warmth of summer. If I felt any initial bemusement by the lack of snow, trees and general rigmarole of British Christmas, this was soon dispelled by a gert big three-meat Christmas spread and the regular appearance of the sun.

From here, we went en masse with handfuls of Spicers, Attenboroughs, and a Waesenbach, down to Kaiteriteri, in the Abel Tasman National Park. Even the photos taken on my pink Argos camera manage to capture how beautiful this area is. Most of the park is only accessible by foot or boat, hence on our walks we had our pick of pristine white beaches with turquoise waters and next to no-one there. Another afternoon we went horseriding along the beach, mentored by the wise words of the guide,Harmony (that’s him - far left- on the phone, dispensing some advice to another punter). New Year was seen in with my bro and my sis (a first since the days when we were too young to know better, I think?!) watching Fat Freddy do his Drop in nearby Riwaka. Good drunken revelry.

There’s a lot of water in New Zealand, so we had lots of fun on boats here, and back in Picton, where we began our venture as a duo. We went on a dolphin watching expedition with a 98% success rate. Suffice it to say we were in the 2% of failures. The sales pitch that day was that orcas (“killer whales”) had been spotted that morning. What they didn’t tell us until we were already on board was that if we didn’t see the orcas, then we’d see no dolphins cos the killers scare them all off. A consolation prize was that we did see king shags (stop sniggering at the back!) which, according to the skipper, are some of the rarest birds in the world (or New Zealand, or somewhere). To us they just looked like big seagulls, but maybe some ornithologist somewhere will be impressed when we tell them. Despite a lack of sea mammals, the boat trip gave us beautiful views of the Marlborough Sounds, a visit to an island bird sanctuary where we saw little blue penguins nesting and plenty of sunburn.

A bus took us down the East coast to Kaikoura, where I got back in the water, encased in wetsuit, to swim with seals. They are brilliant! Really inquisitive. The guide told the swimmers to mimic what the seal pups were doing, as they like to interact with you, so I did try to duck and dive, but....if they look rotund and beached on land, they move like the dickens in water! I really loved this morning trip though and got really burnt on my face. Again.

From here we spent a couple of aimless but pleasant days in the garden city of Christchurch before picking up our hideous transport, which garners us plenty of tutting and narrowing of eyes from more well-heeled campers. If you can’t quite read the sign, know that it’s part of the Wicked ‘philosophy’, which seems to be plastered all over (and inside) the van. Still, it’s cheap and relatively cheerful, and has powered us slowly to the Banks Peninsula, where we’ve spent a brilliant and varied few days, stopping at an old friend of Mei’s for the night in Little River.

Nuff blathering. We’re southward bound now and it’s raining, much like a British summer. Four seasons in one day and all that.

xx

About to set off

I'm all set to join Mei in Sydney in less than a week. All set, in the sense that it's going to happen. All set, in the sense I have a bag and a passport.