Taking a holiday from a holiday

So we went to Hell's Gate to see the hot bubbling muddy gaseous pools on Easter Sunday, the day Mr Bunny leaves candies and gifts for the little children in New Zealand. It did, however, smell of rotten eggs at Hell's Gate... actually the entire city of Rotorua smelled of sulfer. But the natural hot tubs made us forget the smell.

After visiting the old Bath House museum (where the English would come in the early 19th century for therapy in mud baths and hot pools, after the volcano eruption), we spent our entire evening with the Maitai Maori tribe and joined them in a hangi (feast, which was cooked underground over hot rocks) and watched a show that they gave...Push play to see a piece...the rhythms are being made mostly by the women with the white pompom balls hitting against their arms etc...



Now we are at a campground for relaxation and catching up on the internet. Talked to my parents today over yahoo instant messenger and it worked great! Just like the telephone!

We're headed to the beaches on the Coromandel Peninsula tomorrow (tuesday), in a leisurely fashion, of course!

Note: Check out Jason's website for newly updated journal entries and pics.

We saw this poster while passing through a small town in the southern countryside.




Sunday, 25 March, 2007

Okay, so the internet has been a little hard to come by, mainly because we haven't made time to use it. To update this blog takes some planning with our laptop--organizing the pics takes the most time. The laptop we brought has proven to be useful, yet a pain in the butt, because the battery is quick to die out, and it acts messed up sometimes. We have been making CD copies of all our pics, just in case. Then, when I am finally ready to go to the internet cafe, I can just insert my thumb drive and roll...Well... it's not that easy either, some cafes here are on slow dial up, and some do not have a hub slot... the bigger cities have the better facilities and the best prices.

I enjoyed our time in Christchurch. Practically every day we parked at the Botanic Garden, and enjoyed the shade of the old trees. It is a highly visited park by tourists and locals alike. There are many walkers and joggers and schoolchildren. At night we slept in Jonathan's and Andre's driveway (two univerisity students we met via frisbee, of course, and spent a few late nights discussing history, politics, and such... actually Andre and Jason did most of the talking!)
And before leaving the area, we learned how good a stir fry can be from a passing traveler friend who made dinner with us. (rosegarden pic)


So, since Christchurch we've been hitting the road pretty hard. The scenery and the people are still awesome! Mount Aoraki/Mount Cook was stunning. We hiked out to Hooker Lake to see glaciers up close! The water is so shiney from the glaciers grinding the rock into a fine dust that is reflected off the milky water. The sound of rushing water from the melting ice was everywhere. (aoraki.jpg)


Another cool fact about this part of the world is the night sky... the milk way is easily seen, and how amazing it really is! (tekapoe night sky pic)


We left for Queenstown on a drizzly dreary day. That's when I started to get cabin fever. We arrived in Queenstown with rain and cold. We tried to enjoy the city (public library, binocular shopping, lunch at a kebab place), but decided quickly to head for Milford Sound. We booked a 2.5hour cruise on the Encounter, rain or shine. Onward! (queenstown pic)



TeAnau proved to be a delightful midpoint stop. We did laundry, and showered, and enjoyed the first sunshine we had seen in almost 4 days. Next stop, Milford Sound...Wow! Weather was better than expected, and the scenery was stunning! (milford sound pic) After this adventure, it was too buggy to stay much longer than stirfry lunch. The sandflies LOVE Jason! So we push further south as fast as we could to Invercargil, but already we were dreaming of the North Island's sunny warmth, and beaches.


Invercargil was on and off drizzly and chilly winds. We met a couple of Canadian friends who hung out with us on St Patricks Day. We exchanged favorite spots to visit the night before they were leaving for Stewart Island. The next night we spent on the Bluff and almost got blown away! The locals laugh with knotted eyebrows when we tell them we slept there on a windy night. Jason and I soon agreed on our next route of travel--North (well, it's the only direction you really can go when you're in the southern most city of the island!) (end of hwy 1 pic)


Yummy lunch!
So, passing through the Catlins, the weather began clearing up, although still windy. We made a lovely lunch at a picnic area, visited a gorgeous beach, and later up the road found an nice place to park for the night (it is clear to see how easy it is for a traveler to find places to park overnight for free).

Hello Dunedin! And what a nice botanical gardens you have! Yes we spent our days and nights at the Dunedin Botanical Gardens (at least our van did). We had a nice hike to town downhill, but the weather (which can dictate our days activities) was pretty nice. It is a university town, so by Thursday night, the parties are winding up for the weekend. We decided to have a pub crawl through town after our tour of the Speight's brewery, and by 2 am there were tons of students out roaming the city streets, buying a meal at the few shops that were actually open, and sobering up for the next day (I think) (dunedin garden) We enjoyed a nice shower at the city pool, which was also a water park, very cool for the kids, and said goodbye, for were headed out for the last part of our South Island excursion.

Here we come West Coast! Look-out sandflies, we are armed with Deet and ready to squish you!

Northward Bound!

Just a list to help keep track... I haven't had an opportunity to make updates, but I at least wanted to give a rundown of the places we've been driving on the South Island. Jason and I agreed in Invercargil to head north because we were sick of the rain, wind, and cold, and sandflies (ouch!). We want to try the beachbum lifestyle sooner than later; however, we are making sure to drive through a few more amazing places before we ferry back over to the North Island. So, before my minutes run out, here is a list of some places we've visited since Christchurch. (pics to come soon!)

Christchurch
Godhead
Akaroa
Robinson's Bay
Mt. Aoraki/Mt Cook
Queenstown
Milford Sound
Invercargill
Catlins
Dunedin
Moeraki Boulders
Fur seals and Crested Penguins, and Yellow-eyed
Haast Pass
now... headed up the West Coast

Canterbury Tales

The drive to Christchurch was, again, too beautiful to read a book or work on the laptop. We arrived in Christchurch, which is in the Canterbury region, on Friday. The streets were hopping with bicycles, tourists, goths, koreans, japanese, americans, brits, city buses, the electric tram... The population here is about the size of Huntsville, Alabama, but the city is so concentrated that city energy is much bigger. Friday through Sunday we stayed at a Holiday Park with showers, a kitchen, and laundry room. We had a frisbee tournament (New Zealand Nationals!) Saturday and Sunday, so a shower was necessary, as well as the washer machine.
Since Monday (now it's Wednesday afternoon) we have been parking outside of a frisbee friend's house at night and parking at the Botanic Gardens during the day (near the city's center). We eat breakfast outside on the picnic table, sometimes for lunch,(although we found that eating at a restaurant at lunch is much less expensive than dinner), and dinner, too.
Today has been a little overcast, but the temperature is nice (~22 celcius). The past couple of days the temp has been the hottest recorded this year in Christchurch.
The street names in Christchurch are English names, like, Worcester, Gloucester... and are pronounced like the New Englander's pronounce them--"Wista", but with the R sound, so, "Wister", and "Gloster". It takes us about 30 min to walk from the van to wherever we are going in the city... So we've been walking alot. Yesterday we visited the history museum and it was soo cool to see the old Maori indian artifacts, the Egyptian mummy, the Antarctic exploration artifacts, bones from the extinct Moa (bird like dinosaur once hunted by the Maori), and "30 Lounges Around the World" (exhibit of 30 different ethnic living rooms that you walk through with your shoes off). Today we plan to visit an art museum and look at some architecture built by the first settlers. So, No Worries Mate! Cheers!

HoneyWwoofers on the South Island

So we made it to the South Island. It was a beautiful ride on the Bluebridge Ferry, especially when entering the Sound, where you see the land up close. We arrived in Picton just in time for some lunch at an Indian restaurant. We took a walk around the busy little tourist city, took a nap in the bedmobile, visited and internet café in their mall, then decided to call up a family to Wwoof at. And the first place we called had an opening for us, so we headed there that night through the vineyards of Marlborough!
Val and Tony Baker (and Tez the dog)were so kind and generous! We stayed in their loft which had a bathroom, and made ourselves at home! The next 4 days we had breakfast at 8 (fresh bread, and cereals),worked gardening (apple orchard and veggies), building, moving wood, making tomato sauce, cooking (I made an apple pie upon request)... had tea time at 10am each day, a homemade gourmet lunch by Val, followed later by another gourmet dinner outside on the back patio with ample conversation. Such good food, Jason didn't want to leave!
The Baker's graciously took us out on a wine tasting trail Friday afternoon and showed us around the vineyards. Beautiful country!
Sunday we worked in the morning. Val made another delicious lunch and helped me get things together for our departure. She gave us a huge bag of apples and Tony gathered up some veggies, too. We couldn't say thankyou enough. And it was a little sad to go...

It's so beautiful. What a nice place to land after a long long day at airports. I am still wondering if the jetlag is causing hallucinations or if what I am seeing is real.
While waiting for our ride at the airport, we met a cyclist who was reassembling his bicycle from a box (ther was a teapot on his back rack)... he said he was at his final destination and that he had just finished 50,000 km (which is longer than our plane trip) around the world!

After picking up our bedmobile in Auckland, we headed directly to the Pac and Save for some start-up groceries (1000's of kilojoules in apples, muesli and rolled oats, soy milk, hummus, pita, wheat bread, spirulina juice, 10 liter jug of water, and a couple of Gatorades). The shopping was easy compared to the driving. You drive on the left side of the road and the steering wheel is on the left. It feels very strange at first. My job is to constantly remind Jason "Drive on the left, Left is correct, Drive in the middle of the road, Left!" He is feeling much more at ease, I think, on this third day Monday, the 19th, and so am I.

Well, we drove here to Whangarei (fahn- ga-ray) on Saturday for the 5th Ultimate frisbee beach tournament at Ocean Beach. It was a 6 hour drive. We arrived at 2 pm, thinking we were late, but actually not. Brendon, the organizer, greeted my "SpaceMan", with a handshake and a bright orange Tshirt. Jason jumped in for a point, then it ended... but there was one more that day. So the games were played one at a time with a 30 minute timecap even if the teams were tied. There were 6 teams, about 30% were Americans who had just come from Worlds in Perth, Austrailia. There were a couple ex-patriots too, along with the Kiwi players, plus individuals from Canada, Switzerland, Austrailia, France... Oddly enough, it felt just like home, except for all the languages and accents. Saturday night, there was a bar-b-que of sesame covered lentil burgers, steaks, and sausages, and BIG salads of shredded carrot, red onion, tomato, cucumbers, and zucchini. There were actually 2 parties happening (one was a going away party for a lifeguard, and the other was the frisbee party) . After dinner I went straight away to bed in our van (next to a field of camping tents), and Jason partied for a couple hours more then joined me instead of playing beer games, skinny dipping, and a bonfire. He was really tired! Ha!


Well, Sunday was another full day. An amazing event happened that stopped the games for about 10 minutes... A pack of dolphins came swimming by, leaping into the air! I wish I could've gotten more pics, but I was in shock while fumbling for the camera. From 10 am to 5pm, they played 2 rounds of games, then awards were given out along with another bar-b-que of sausages. Then it was time for everyone to say goodbye and head on their way. We actually plan to join the Auckland teams(I'll be on the women's team, and Jason will play with the Ginja Ninjas) in Christchurch on March 3rd.

So, after a morning of hiking around Ocean Beach, we are headed out of Whangarei this evening and headed to Wellington for our ferry on Wednesday. I will miss it here (cliffs next to the beach, surfing, hiking, frisbee, sunshine, and cool breezes.) But there is much more to discover, and we have arrived at the nicest weather of the season; the people are as lovely as the landscape, and I expect to see more of the same.

Mojito Valentine's/Birthday/Going Away Party at the Quinns

Well, Taryn is planning a party at our house tonight. She is inviting a bunch of people, so we will see what kind of turnout arrives. Michelle is prepared, for, not only is it the final night with her new roommates (for 3 months!) it is her birthday! She brought home all the ingredients for the Mojitos. So tonight is a bash in the making, whether we like it or not. And since I am finally over the flu (well, since the Donna and The Buffalo show), I will definitely have a Mojito, and perhaps another for Mandy Camp, who would've come if she didn't have a baby to feed. So here's the recipe, Mandy! Just in case... you get another Karaoke Night Out with the Ladies.




Mojito
Batch for 6

9 parts rum (13oz)
15 part club soda (23oz)
8 sprigs of mint leaves
3 limes
12 parts simple syrup (18oz)

1. Measure out rum and Add juice from limes.
2. Add mint leaves; and Muddle.
3. Add simple syrup; Mix.
4. Add club soda and serve over ice.

Simple Syrup Recipe
1 cup sugar (natural cane or brown tastes best)
1 cup of hot water
Mix ingredients until dissolved.

Love, Shelley and Jason!

Please drive responsibly