Pit stop

I'm going to let the snaps do the talking for the last few days.

Approaching the Franz Josef glacier on our way from Greymouth. The blueness of the water is the real deal. Pure glacier water.

Franz Josef. Alpine town. Does a big trade in skiing aswell as summer hiking, helicopter tours etc.

Franz Joseph Glacier

Puzzle World in Wanaka. Caleb's favourite bit so far.

Kinda sums up the cheeky humour of the place

You close an eye and the faces follow you and yadda yadda. I reckon it's an interesting pic.

The maze. First half hour was fun. And then it got stressful.

We've been in Dunedin about a day now. It's a college town on the south eastern coast that's like the Scottish outpost in New Zealand. The main square in the town, the Octagon, features a statue of the great Robbie Burns, and the city is named similarly to Edinburgh.

It's a fair bit cooler down here and an extra layer will be required for the next few days. Bit like home actually. We're staying with Thelma, Calebs great-grandmother, who is in her early eighties but has energy and an interest in the world around her that is inspiring. We finished a lovely dinner last night, sat down to watch Frozen Planet and then had a long discussion on the crisis in the Euro,dodgy NZ investment firms (where the thieving scumbags at least end up in court) and the tent at the Galway races.

Things are slowing down a bit now and it's going to be catching up with family for the next couple of days. That's okay though. The mad dash is done and we can concentrate on not concentrating until Saturday morning, when we have to fly back to Auckland for the last week.

Can't believe we've been in New Zealand a week and a half.

Goldrush

The Spoils

Something that grabbed our eye while staying in Greymouth, the town we stopped in after our night in Nelson, was "Shantytown" a few kilometres out in the middle of nowhere. We had a bit of time on our side so we headed out and ended up spending four hours wandering around this excellent theme town.

Shantytown is basically a history lesson in the goldrush on the west coast in the mid-nineteenth century. The main street features the various shops,foundries, banks and jails of the day.

We took a steam train into the forest where the family fortune grew considerably with a session of goldpanning. It wasn't so much the gimmicks that made the place so interesting as the stories of life out there. Towns of ten thousand people leapt from the mud one year and were gone the next. Local diggers became Prime Ministers of all of New Zealand and even the massive Irish contingent made their mark, rioting for home rule and being a bit pissed as usual. And it carries on today. Modern techniques mean that gold prospectors go into old mines, get what was missed the first time around and then, as part of their permission from local government, restore the landscape to it's preninteenth century condition, as many of these mines and surrounding areas were left as filthy open gashes on the local land. The nearby town of Ross is the site of a large industrial goldmining operation today. The guy behind the operation has tried to buy the whole town from the residents so he can strip it for gold. They're not moving.

Maintenance

This one's a bit dashed off but we reach Dunedin this evening and tomorrow I'm going to spend a couple of hours tidying up entries and catching up with where we are now.

One frustrating aspect of our journey down through the islands is that time is against us. We got the full day in Wellington but I could happily have spent a few days there. It's a much less tidy town than Auckland, with plenty of grungy nooks and crannys. We ended up in the hills overlooking the bay where you get a real sense of age about the place. It felt like a fishing town that had just gotten bigger and bigger.

"The Beehive" is the seat of government in Wellington. Somebody on google maps gave it a one star review, complaining that the current government sucks.


We went to the Te Papa, the national museum and spent a few very interesting hours rambling around looking at colossal squid and learning the history of New Zealand. Then it was time for the ferry and the driver to Nelson, our first stop on the south island.


The ferry was about as exciting as ferries tend to get, but the drive was a bit of an epic. When there wasn't cop cars flying up the road to some bar fight or another we were taking hairpin turns at ridiculous angles down mountainsides. Much coffee was consumed because we've gotten used to being asleep by 10.30, and by the time we got to Nelson myself and Cathy were nervous wrecks. Nelson was a lovely town. We only had time for laundry and Internet duties, but the place had a lovely Saturday morning vibe around and would have been nice to explore a bit more but alas, the road called once more.

New Eire

The blinds were drawn this morning to the familiar sight of pouring rain. We had been lucky it stopped on our trip to Hobbiton yesterday and seemed to have done it's worse by the time we got to the weather dependant town of Rotorua. It had not

Countdown. Local Tesco


We packed up the car and headed to see the Lady Knox geyser and it's friends at the Wai-o-tapo Thermal Wonderland. I kid you not.

God's Toilet

Now, let me just say that we really enjoyed our visit despite getting absolutely lashed on and constant reek of a hundred builders in the site office after breakfast. It was quite otherworldly and made you well aware of the fragility of the ground on which we stand given the whole area is just a very thin volcanic crust.

The Lady Herself

However, as the groundsphincter belched it's contents into the air and a few hundred drowned rats stood oohing and aahing with their recording devices I became convinced this was not going according to plan and that we had to cut our losses and run. So after a futile trip to the luge track (drowned rats steering go-karts down a hillside) we gave up, had lunch, and headed for Palmerston North.

Main National Motorway/Military training grounds

The four hour drive was very enjoyable. After about an hour the skies cleared, our clothes had almost dried out and we were equipped with coffees from a petrol station where they were apologising for the flooded floors.

We caught some beautiful countryside on our way down to what was a really nice college town. The main highway is generally a one lane affair where the traffic just moves along at a solid pace. People are reasonably civil on the roads and the speed limit is strictly observed. Great touring conditions.

We eventually made in to Palmerston North, which was a lovely town. They're generally very American type affairs in their layout. I'll post some pics. We visited an old friend of Cathys, where she was delighted to play with their new baby and Caleb made a couple of new friends in their very well trained dogs, and that was it. Back to motel and now we're out for the count by ten-thirty, which is now our standard bedtime. Tomorrow morning is the capital, Wellington.

You have to, don't you?

This morning we hit the road. The tin can has thus far held up
surprisingly well, despite worrying sounds and a mysterious fluid
leak.

Our car. Bleh.

The plan was to head straight for Rotarua, which is a town that smells
perpetually of fart. There's luging down mountains, half buried
villages in lava and geyzers (hence the smell of sulphur all over the
place). As we discussed our route last night however, someone
mentioned that if we take the slightly more complicated but actually
faster route we would be passing within a few miles of the set of
Hobbiton. Now how can you say no to visiting the Shire?

Of course you can't.

This actually turned out to be a very enjoyable hour and a half
wondering around hills on a sheep farm out in the middle of nowhere.
The location was ultimately chosen by Peter Jackson because it had a
beatiful tree sitting beside a pool, as described in the Hobbit and
LotRs.

When the original trilogy finished shooting, they pulled half the 30
odd facades they had built down. Nobody thought there'd be more than
six months worth of visitors to a half broken set. Needless to say,
they've been increasing numbers of tours every year for nine years
now, and Mr. Jackson and co. recently returned to same location to
shoot the Hobbits scenes of the Shire. They rebuilt the original set
and added 7 or 8 more bringing the total of fake houses up to 42. The
detail in the facades and the wee stools and cups and jugs is
marvellous and we were able to ramble right up to the doors.

German chap for scale

The guide regalled us with stories of the errr, passionate fans who
have visited over the years, including the seven foot german dressed
as a hobbit who refused to leave the set when the visit was finished
and the countless pedants who quoted back verbatim verse from the
books, the kind of thing that had Jackson and co. spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars on never seen details in the set in the interest
of veracity, like extra doorways down on the pond which are mentioned
in the book but never appear onscreen.

So that was good fun. Unfortuanately, as you can probably tell from
the pics, it's also started pissing down rain over here, and driving
down from Auckland today, I have to say, the place eerily feels more
like home every day. I'll address this matter more in a later entry.
For now though, sleep. Luging and smelly geysers in the morning.

The Tallest In The Southern Hemisphere

Apparently

There's much lounging around the worlds funkiest house in general at the moment because from Wednesday morning we're on an unmerciful drive south. Plus the jetlag needs to be overcome, cars need to be rented, phone's need to be localized and most importantly, family ties need to be re-inforced. That said, we are getting out and about some bit and yesterday we made off the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere.

The view over Auckland gives you a great sense of the place. It's a relaxed, properly modern city. Everything runs well and stress seems in short supply. It's the equivalent of September over here as the schools just started back after the summer break, ending in January. It is a very busy time for the tourist trade, but that said, we've had no problem getting around the place and all the people are lovely to deal with.

Prices are about equivalent to Ireland, with obvious outliers (video games are ridiculously expensive, petrol not as much as home). The news features regular reports from Europe and especially England, which is interesting given New Zealand's proximity to the major Asian countries. The similarities to home are sometimes even weird, as the Sky box remote is the exact same as the thing sitting on our coffee table 12000 miles away. I'm gathering more of an impression of the place all the time, but intitially it's obviously a big thumbs up.

We're off to do a bit of shopping and prepare for the first leg in the mad dash south tomorrow. Our rental car is an absolute tin can.

I didn't bother jumping up and down.

SimCity baby

Tan While You Sleep

I woke up this morning with two nice pink arms despite hardly spending a moment in the sun after our arrival yesterday. It would appear that the bleeding huge hole in the ozone layer above Australia extends to New Zealand. That's fine because even sitting in the sun after that trip would take more effort than I was capable of.

Departure from home was marred by two dirty letters from the Gardai informing me that I had caught speeding on my way to and from the shop last week. That's right, two point on the way to the shop for a sandwich, and two points on the way back to the office afterwards. And a hundred and sixty euro fine. I recommend people avoid Blarney for their own sakes in cars or otherwise. So that pissed me off rightly and as we left Cork I didn't bother looking back. To hell with the land of speed cameras.

The plane rides were tolerable enough. After London it was a case of head down and wait for the light at the end of the tunnel. The only issue was the ten hour flight from Kuala Lumpur, where we had the pleasure of a bunch of wealthy schoolkids sharing our flight; one of whom decided to play smash the back of her seat into the guy behind her. I hate people that smash their seats into me. There was tit for tat exchanges, though ultimately I was chuffed to see her buddy pulled over by passport control at Auckland and much distress for my nemesis. Petty? Yes. Childish? Yes. Satisfying? Definitely.

I'd recommend 50/50 if you're looking for a flick in the next while actually. I was blubbing away on the plane, though I'm not sure if that was the bittersweet cancer movie or the fact that I had slept for all of an hour over two days. Anyway...

We were picked up at the airport by the most excellent Russell crew and are staying at one of the funkiest houses I've ever had the pleasure of being a guest in. We were welcomed with a spread of salad and beer and a fine family gathering. Reckon I held my own until around 6pm local time (about 5 am back home), at which point I just started dozing off mid-conversation. Nothing new there then.

Irene is the mammy of the Russell clan and this is Terry, her partners, place. Indoor stone gardens, band room, barbecue station, an amazing view. It's awesome.

Before I continue onto the next post, I just want to say I'm keeping this blog because I found the India one really did help keep the memory of that trip fresh for me. I was mulling over this morning should I bother, but I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. A few people enjoyed the last one so hope I can live up to the standards previously set. Thanks.