Hello again!
Nick and I have finally got around to doing something more adventurous with our weekends than sampling every restaurant in Auckland, so here I am to tell you all about it.
Two weeks ago we went to Rotorua, AKA the smelliest town in NZ. Not in a Hull kind of way; Rotorua's stench can in fact be blamed on whatever it is under the ground that causes geothermal activity. It's an amazing place, as you go through the town, there's steam coming out of the ground left, right and centre, and hot water just pouring out of public taps!
Nick and I spent both nights (bravely) in the van: the first night was more than a little chilly, with a thick ice coating the entire inside of the vehicle when we woke up, which, although dramatic at the time, was actually more of a problem once it started to warm up a bit and the dripping began! Flooding averted, we made our way to Hell's Gate, where George Bernard Shaw went a few years back and threw a bit of a hissy fit as he said it reminded him too much of what he had been told might await him in the afterlife if he were a naughty boy, and wished he'd never gone (not sure why he got so upset as he was an atheist). Nick and I didn't get so upset about it, and instead were extremely impressed with the lunar-type landscape, the sulphur deposits, bubbling mud and boiling water pools. Didn't jump in, as many of the hot pools there were over 120 degrees C (they can reach that due to the high mineral content). We did however, pay for the privilege of having a hot mud bath and a soak in a mineral pool under more controlled circumstances, which was very luxurious, helped by the fact that the weather was so cold and one felt particularly smug!
We also had a little wander down by the lake, and watched a boat/plane taking off (another of Nick's lifetime desires fulfilled), and then found a lovely little campsite, where we managed to park about 2 metres from the lake shore, and practiced our wildlife photography with a somewhat stroppy family of black swans. The campsite had a hot pool, which was actually too hot to sit in for more than about 30 seconds at a time. So after about half an hour of hopping in and out of said pool, we raced back to the van to retain as much heat as possible, and had a much warmer night!
In the morning we had another lovely hot bath, then followed somewhat disappointingly by a shower as rubbish as the bath was hot. We then went and had the most amusing couple of hours we have had in ages - at 'the Luge'. This is a NZ first: basically, it consists of a concrete track down a hill, that you ride down on a small plastic three-wheeled go-cart, the speed of which is controlled by pushing the handles forward or backward. Pretty tricky to describe adequately, but suffice to say that you can go extremely fast, with your control of the vehicle being most affected by the amount you laugh on the way down! They have ski resort-style chairlift that takes you back up to the top of the run, with clever little hooks underneath that take the carts back up to the top too. Very well run, but more importantly a great giggle.
After a massive lunch to replace all the energy lost from the laughter, we trugged back up to Auckland again, feeling rather pleased to have had such a great weekend.
And then this weekend, we went skiing finally! Having been meaning to do it for weeks, and having had to put it off due to too much snow/no accommodation/being too tired after starting new job etc, we just went for it this weekend (having survived in the van in Rotorua, we decided to brave it at Ruapehu). And we had a great time! It's a pretty long way there from Auckland at van-pace, as in about six hours' drive in total, but definitely worth it. After driving most of the way on Friday night, and an early start on Saturday, we managed to get onto the slopes by 9, and skied right through until 4.30. We were shattered at the end of the day, and are now feeling rather sore, but were really pleased to have gone. The snow was not bad, quite a good amount of powder, but some icy patches. The runs were quite narrow in places, and it was pretty busy, so altogether the NZ skiing scene really doesn't have much on Europe, but to be able to pop to Mordor to ski for a day is something you can't sniff at! So we are hoping to get down there once or twice more before the end of the seasson.
I need to get up off my backside now and go and make some supper. We have another good week ahead of us (apart from weather-wise - we have just seen the forecast and it is for even more heavy rain this week), with a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert on Wednesday, and then our friend from Palmerston North (7 hours south of here) coming to stay for the weekend. Cocktails at the Hilton are on the agenda I think!
Hope all is well in the UK (and elsewhere) and undoubtedly anyone who is reading this in enjoying better weather than us currently...
Lots of love,
Vic and Nick. xxx
Monday, August 7
Monday, July 17
Job news!
Hello all!
I wonder if anyone is actually still looking at this... Probably not - I wouldn't blame you for not bothering, with the poor effort I have been putting into updating it!
Anyway, we have more news to add now, which is what has prompted me into getting down to writing. All of you in the UK will be enjoying the beautiful weather, whereas here we are rolling into winter and things are getting chillier all the time! Actually, saying that, we had a really really cold June (coldest since 1925), but it has now warmed up considerably, and was in fact just above 20 degrees yesterday! Crazy for 'the middle of winter'. Still, the evenings are chilly and, with nowhere in NZ having central heating, the flat is very damp. So much so that we did in fact manage to sprout a mushroom in the bathroom two weeks ago - bit of excitement but overall not really a good sign!
On a more positive note (and moving away from our domestic fungal issues), I have a new job. I worked for a total of eight weeks at Waitakere Hospital (in west Auckland), doing the joyous task that is elderly rehab, but have now found new and far more satisfying employment at the Starship Hospital, right in the centre of Auckland. If nothing else it's far more convenient - I start work half an hour earlier than I did at Waitakere, but get an extra half an hour in bed, and get home from work earlier than I even finished work out West! In addition to that, which in itself was a reason to change jobs ($160 a month better off with not having to buy bus passes), I am actually doing a paediatric job now! Finally!
I am working in the country's only children's hospital, and my caseload is respiratory patients on the wards, as well as running the rheumatology clinic, doing neurodevelopmental assessments on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and also covering the mental health and eating disorder unit. So a pretty varied workload, and much of it totally new to me. The team there seems great and really supportive, so I think I will really learn quickly and very much enjoy what I will be doing. And the social side of things seems good - we went out for drinks on Friday after work, had lunch out today, will have breakfast out tomorrow and a meal out on Friday night! So obviously the bus pass money will be going all on social activities, but I know where I'd rather be spending those dollars...
So that really is the big news. I am feeling very pleased with myself to have got the job there, and even more pleased that the team seems to be people I am looking forward to getting to know. Most of them are actually British, so finally I have found a group of people who understand my humour! My sarcasm (along with my stethoscope) has been set free again!
Nick however still has not found anything in the Landscape Architecture field (forgive the pun), but is temping for a goverment organisation, doing filing. Not the best use of his skills but he does say his alphabet is getting much much better! He is still very much on the lookout for a LA job, and is hoping that something will come up very soon.
I have put on a couple of pictures of the penguins at 'Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Adventure', where we went for my birthday. It is the most fantastic place - they have a moving walkway which travels along a tunnel through a tank full of fish, rays, sharks etc. They also have a huge open tank full of immense stingrays - some about 2m across. But, the crowning glory of the whole thing is the simulated Antarctic Landscape that has a colony of Gentoo and King penguins living in it! You travel around the outside of said icy landscape in what is essentially a large metal box, and get within about a metre of some of the birds. It was beyond amazing! Loved it. Will go back many times before we leave the country, without a doubt.
Think that's pretty much our news in a nutshell.
Enjoy the penguin piccies!
Lots of love to you all,
Vic and Nick.
xxx
I wonder if anyone is actually still looking at this... Probably not - I wouldn't blame you for not bothering, with the poor effort I have been putting into updating it!
Anyway, we have more news to add now, which is what has prompted me into getting down to writing. All of you in the UK will be enjoying the beautiful weather, whereas here we are rolling into winter and things are getting chillier all the time! Actually, saying that, we had a really really cold June (coldest since 1925), but it has now warmed up considerably, and was in fact just above 20 degrees yesterday! Crazy for 'the middle of winter'. Still, the evenings are chilly and, with nowhere in NZ having central heating, the flat is very damp. So much so that we did in fact manage to sprout a mushroom in the bathroom two weeks ago - bit of excitement but overall not really a good sign!
On a more positive note (and moving away from our domestic fungal issues), I have a new job. I worked for a total of eight weeks at Waitakere Hospital (in west Auckland), doing the joyous task that is elderly rehab, but have now found new and far more satisfying employment at the Starship Hospital, right in the centre of Auckland. If nothing else it's far more convenient - I start work half an hour earlier than I did at Waitakere, but get an extra half an hour in bed, and get home from work earlier than I even finished work out West! In addition to that, which in itself was a reason to change jobs ($160 a month better off with not having to buy bus passes), I am actually doing a paediatric job now! Finally!
I am working in the country's only children's hospital, and my caseload is respiratory patients on the wards, as well as running the rheumatology clinic, doing neurodevelopmental assessments on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and also covering the mental health and eating disorder unit. So a pretty varied workload, and much of it totally new to me. The team there seems great and really supportive, so I think I will really learn quickly and very much enjoy what I will be doing. And the social side of things seems good - we went out for drinks on Friday after work, had lunch out today, will have breakfast out tomorrow and a meal out on Friday night! So obviously the bus pass money will be going all on social activities, but I know where I'd rather be spending those dollars...
So that really is the big news. I am feeling very pleased with myself to have got the job there, and even more pleased that the team seems to be people I am looking forward to getting to know. Most of them are actually British, so finally I have found a group of people who understand my humour! My sarcasm (along with my stethoscope) has been set free again!
Nick however still has not found anything in the Landscape Architecture field (forgive the pun), but is temping for a goverment organisation, doing filing. Not the best use of his skills but he does say his alphabet is getting much much better! He is still very much on the lookout for a LA job, and is hoping that something will come up very soon.
I have put on a couple of pictures of the penguins at 'Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Adventure', where we went for my birthday. It is the most fantastic place - they have a moving walkway which travels along a tunnel through a tank full of fish, rays, sharks etc. They also have a huge open tank full of immense stingrays - some about 2m across. But, the crowning glory of the whole thing is the simulated Antarctic Landscape that has a colony of Gentoo and King penguins living in it! You travel around the outside of said icy landscape in what is essentially a large metal box, and get within about a metre of some of the birds. It was beyond amazing! Loved it. Will go back many times before we leave the country, without a doubt.
Think that's pretty much our news in a nutshell.
Enjoy the penguin piccies!
Lots of love to you all,
Vic and Nick.
xxx
Tuesday, May 30
Living area from two angles - on the far left of the second photo you can see the bedroom door. As there is no bedroom window, the walls do not go right up to the ceiling - odd, but it does the trick for letting light in. These Kiwis can be cleverer than they sound! There's a small balcony behind the curtains you see and another opposite where I am sitting - lucky us being on the end as it means we have two al-fresco areas!
Hello all! I apologise for my extreme sloth in respect to updating the blog, I have no excuses other than the fact that I couldn’t really be bothered. But here I am at last again, with - finally - some good news (better even than the fact that we were sorting rubbish). So here goes.
Right, we got back to Auckland after a week up north in Whangarei (where we had thought that Nick might have a chance of a job, but it turned out that the guy wanted someone with far more experience, despite advertising for a new graduate). The day after we got back to the big smoke, I went in to register with a temping agency. They found me work pretty quickly, but also introduced me to their healthcare jobs rep, for when my registration came through. And whaddaya know, the very next day I heard that my registration had indeed been granted. So on the phone to the agency guy, and before I knew what was what, I was temping at the Yellow Pages, as well as having an interview for a temporary physio post. They offered me the job, and after having spent two weeks photocopying, entering numbers into a database, and a lot of letter-folding, I started at Waitakere hospital (in the western suburbs of Auckland) doing what appears to be my inadvertent specialist area - elderly rehab. Great. But the important thing is that it is physio, it pays better than photocopying, and I am there on a month-by-month basis, so as soon as I find a paediatrics job I can leave. I am actively looking for paeds posts, and have a couple of things that I am waiting to hear back from, so hopefully I should be looking after kiddies rather than grannies very shortly. The post at Waitakere is fine, nothing very dramatic, but the nurses are really friendly (and much better than many nurses I have worked with in elderly rehab in the UK), even if the therapy team is not that thrilling to work with. I think they are all having some difficulty adapting to my sense of humour - they didn’t seem to be very amused when I started reading out all the “masseuse” vacancies from the local paper the other day (prostitution is legal here), and saying that if I got fed up of the 45-minute bus journey to Waitakere then I might just start “massaging friendly gentlemen” in town, as it would pay up to $14,000 a week and I was sure that my physio qualification would come in handy. So after that amusement debacle, I have mainly stopped talking at break times. I think it’s best.
And the other major news is that we finally are living in static accommodation! Yes, Nick found us a flat while I was Yellow Paging and we have been living indoors for two-and-a-half weeks now. We are still revelling after all that time in having power, running water, walls, flat surfaces… I could go on for some time, in fact listing pretty much everything in the whole flat, as all of it was a bit of a novelty after four months in the van! But not only do we have all those mod-cons (and not-so-mod cons, given that walls have been around for a fair few years, even in New Zealand), we are 10 minutes’ walk from the very centre of Auckland, 5 minutes’ walk from a very desirable suburbs with lovely cafés, restaurants, bars and shops, and near the motorway for easy getaways at weekends. We are hopefully going away for a couple of nights this weekend as there is a long weekend here for the Queen’s birthday, and we feel ready to be with the van again after a break for recovery on all parts!
So the only thing lacking is Nick having a job. He is still finding it hard to find a place that wants someone with less than three years’ experience, but has a meeting this week at a practice that is literally a minute’s walk down the road and we are hoping that something may come of that. Once Nick has a job and I am not granny-bashing any longer, we will be 100% sorted! All of my patients appear to literally have been falling apart today - one was found to have a broken leg, and one a broken neck (no word of a lie, her head is actually not really attached to her neck at the moment), so I have spent most of my day strapping and bracing people up! Hopefully when I get to the kids they won’t havebits of bone falling off them so much…
So, hope you enjoy the photos of our new pad and look forward to hearing from you all with your accommodation bookings!
Lots of love to all for now.
V.
Right, we got back to Auckland after a week up north in Whangarei (where we had thought that Nick might have a chance of a job, but it turned out that the guy wanted someone with far more experience, despite advertising for a new graduate). The day after we got back to the big smoke, I went in to register with a temping agency. They found me work pretty quickly, but also introduced me to their healthcare jobs rep, for when my registration came through. And whaddaya know, the very next day I heard that my registration had indeed been granted. So on the phone to the agency guy, and before I knew what was what, I was temping at the Yellow Pages, as well as having an interview for a temporary physio post. They offered me the job, and after having spent two weeks photocopying, entering numbers into a database, and a lot of letter-folding, I started at Waitakere hospital (in the western suburbs of Auckland) doing what appears to be my inadvertent specialist area - elderly rehab. Great. But the important thing is that it is physio, it pays better than photocopying, and I am there on a month-by-month basis, so as soon as I find a paediatrics job I can leave. I am actively looking for paeds posts, and have a couple of things that I am waiting to hear back from, so hopefully I should be looking after kiddies rather than grannies very shortly. The post at Waitakere is fine, nothing very dramatic, but the nurses are really friendly (and much better than many nurses I have worked with in elderly rehab in the UK), even if the therapy team is not that thrilling to work with. I think they are all having some difficulty adapting to my sense of humour - they didn’t seem to be very amused when I started reading out all the “masseuse” vacancies from the local paper the other day (prostitution is legal here), and saying that if I got fed up of the 45-minute bus journey to Waitakere then I might just start “massaging friendly gentlemen” in town, as it would pay up to $14,000 a week and I was sure that my physio qualification would come in handy. So after that amusement debacle, I have mainly stopped talking at break times. I think it’s best.
And the other major news is that we finally are living in static accommodation! Yes, Nick found us a flat while I was Yellow Paging and we have been living indoors for two-and-a-half weeks now. We are still revelling after all that time in having power, running water, walls, flat surfaces… I could go on for some time, in fact listing pretty much everything in the whole flat, as all of it was a bit of a novelty after four months in the van! But not only do we have all those mod-cons (and not-so-mod cons, given that walls have been around for a fair few years, even in New Zealand), we are 10 minutes’ walk from the very centre of Auckland, 5 minutes’ walk from a very desirable suburbs with lovely cafés, restaurants, bars and shops, and near the motorway for easy getaways at weekends. We are hopefully going away for a couple of nights this weekend as there is a long weekend here for the Queen’s birthday, and we feel ready to be with the van again after a break for recovery on all parts!
So the only thing lacking is Nick having a job. He is still finding it hard to find a place that wants someone with less than three years’ experience, but has a meeting this week at a practice that is literally a minute’s walk down the road and we are hoping that something may come of that. Once Nick has a job and I am not granny-bashing any longer, we will be 100% sorted! All of my patients appear to literally have been falling apart today - one was found to have a broken leg, and one a broken neck (no word of a lie, her head is actually not really attached to her neck at the moment), so I have spent most of my day strapping and bracing people up! Hopefully when I get to the kids they won’t havebits of bone falling off them so much…
So, hope you enjoy the photos of our new pad and look forward to hearing from you all with your accommodation bookings!
Lots of love to all for now.
V.
Monday, April 3
Greetings once more! Just another little update about our thrills and spills - the excitement of this weekend was the Mighty Ox breaking down on Saturday morning! Disaster! Just as we were gearing up to have a busy weekend of museums and art galleries, we came down a flyover into town, engine stopped and wouldn’t start again. After much beeping from people behind us at the traffic lights (cheers guys, my hazards ARE on), we managed to get a push around the corner and then had to be towed all the way to New Brighton, where the garage was. Of course, in NZ there are no mechanics available at the weekend, so we have spent the entire weekend (from Saturday at about 1pm to 8am this morning) camped out on the road in front of New Brighton Panelbeaters. Cracking fun. Right on a bus route and also on what is apparently a speedway practice road for everyone in the Canterbury area with an oversized and noisy exhaust. And to make matters worse, the public loos were pretty much the worst I had ever seen - complete with vomit in the doorway of the ladies’.
On the up side though, the problem was fixed within half an hour this morning (a new set of points - oh, of course…) and we are now in town again, $200 poorer, ready for registering with temping agencies and then a rapid departure for a campsite and showers! (Having spent Friday night in a car park too, it’s been three days. Oh dear.)
So that’s the latest news. Nick is on the phone as I write, hopefully registering with a specialist Architecture-based recruitment company. We think one or both of us will be working by the end of the week (probably rubbish jobs but at least it will pay something), so things are looking positive for this week. That’s all really! Ta-ta!
On the up side though, the problem was fixed within half an hour this morning (a new set of points - oh, of course…) and we are now in town again, $200 poorer, ready for registering with temping agencies and then a rapid departure for a campsite and showers! (Having spent Friday night in a car park too, it’s been three days. Oh dear.)
So that’s the latest news. Nick is on the phone as I write, hopefully registering with a specialist Architecture-based recruitment company. We think one or both of us will be working by the end of the week (probably rubbish jobs but at least it will pay something), so things are looking positive for this week. That’s all really! Ta-ta!
Friday, March 31
Ah, hello there! I feel it is important that I share with you news of our continuing relentless rise up through the social strata of New Zealand. Nick and I last week briefly rejoined the ranks of the NZ working world, doing what can only be described as one of the most intellectually stimulating and personally satisfying employment opportunities available throughout the entire country. Yes, it was even better than hotel housekeeping. We spoke to our temping agency last Monday morning, and they informed us that, yes, they did have work for us. Hooray. They told us that it was going to be ‘sorting bits of different coloured plastic’. In hindsight, perhaps we should have stopped believing that the minute that we found that their directions to our workplace sent us out to totally the wrong side of Christchurch. Anyway, we eventually got to the correct place, where we were filled with a mild sense of foreboding when we realised that it was in fact a recycling depot. Yes, we spent a week sorting rubbish. We stood at a conveyor belt and, as the refuse passed in front of us, it was our weighty responsibility to remove the steel and aluminium cans and throw them into the appropriate receptacles. Nick at one point (by virtue of one of the more highly-trained professionals cutting himself) was promoted to milk bottles and plastic soft drinks’ bottles, which required much greater skill and accuracy as these were thrown down various different chutes. The glamour of this particular employment opportunity was indeed still not enhanced by the yellow gloves, orange earplugs, and ‘High-Vis’ fluorescent jackets that we were required to wear. However, on the positive side, the day did seem to pass very quickly, which was undoubtedly why we managed to stick it for a week.
After that trauma had ended on Thursday afternoon (thank Goodness for Good Friday public holiday), we had the joy of a ridiculously long drive up to Auckland. We were to catch the 8am ferry to Wellington from Picton (350km from Christchurch) on Friday morning. So, we set off through solid C’ch traffic and drove for 6 hours (I say drove, the first hour was more of a crawl), arriving finally at an appropriate kerbside campsite at 11.30 that night. Straight to sleep, then woke up at 6.30 to go to the ferry, I having woken up with a stinking cold. Once on the ferry, we discovered that the $1 hot chocolate was surprisingly good and that the pies had good anti-cold restorative properties, and by the time Wellington and 11.30 came, I felt much stronger. This was lucky, as of course the entire population of the capital was departing for a Good Friday drive north at exactly the time we left the ferry. Another long drive involving lots of bumper-to-bumper time, and we reached Lake Taupo at about 5pm. We stopped here for the night, and after a brief drama when a solo skydiver nearly landed on our van (and instead landed on the rather narrow shoreline), and a very quickly rustled-up supper, I was in bed by 6.35 and asleep by 7.30!
My cold felt much better after 12 hours’ sleep, and we were able to set off good and early for the final leg to Auckland, now only 300km away. We made it in time for a late lunch - thanks be for the much better road as you approach Auckland - and organised ourselves with a campsite for the following night, then set off for a brief rendezvous with our friend Jen, who was in Auckland with the basketball team she physios for. Great to see her, and then the next day we were able to spend most of the day sleeping and eating (in approximately equal proportions) in preparation for our big night out!
The Rolling Stones were amazing! The venue was a big speedway arena, with seating on the concrete area directly in front of the stage, and then the rest of us scuffers had to stand on the hill behind said seating area. The hill was rather steep - we reckoned a gradient of approaching 40 degrees - but we found a great place where we could see whether we or the people in front of us were sitting down or standing up. There was a degree of apprehension in sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with a couple of thousand - mainly drunk - people behind you, but we evidently didn’t get squashed, and we were able to enjoy the concert with only the mild disadvantage of our toes going numb as they were forced into the front of our shoes and our knees going a bit shaky as they were bent for two hours! Mick was on full bendy-dancing form, and there were spectacular fireworks, lighting displays, great songs, and even a time when the central portion of the stage slid right out into the centre of the expensive seating area. Brilliant! Nick and I are still chatting away about it.
And since then… Well, very little. Further job searching, and generally lazing around a lot. Enjoying the weather up here though - 25 degrees yesterday, it’s just beautiful. Although that does mean the mozzies are still active up here - I am being bitten to death again and Nick has one bite which is looking a touch infected, so we are back on the Vitamin B. Yum!
Right, the van’s free parking time is about to expire so I’d best dash and move it around the corner. Thrills of our days at the moment! Lots of love to you all and hope you all had a great Easter break. Vic and Nick.
After that trauma had ended on Thursday afternoon (thank Goodness for Good Friday public holiday), we had the joy of a ridiculously long drive up to Auckland. We were to catch the 8am ferry to Wellington from Picton (350km from Christchurch) on Friday morning. So, we set off through solid C’ch traffic and drove for 6 hours (I say drove, the first hour was more of a crawl), arriving finally at an appropriate kerbside campsite at 11.30 that night. Straight to sleep, then woke up at 6.30 to go to the ferry, I having woken up with a stinking cold. Once on the ferry, we discovered that the $1 hot chocolate was surprisingly good and that the pies had good anti-cold restorative properties, and by the time Wellington and 11.30 came, I felt much stronger. This was lucky, as of course the entire population of the capital was departing for a Good Friday drive north at exactly the time we left the ferry. Another long drive involving lots of bumper-to-bumper time, and we reached Lake Taupo at about 5pm. We stopped here for the night, and after a brief drama when a solo skydiver nearly landed on our van (and instead landed on the rather narrow shoreline), and a very quickly rustled-up supper, I was in bed by 6.35 and asleep by 7.30!
My cold felt much better after 12 hours’ sleep, and we were able to set off good and early for the final leg to Auckland, now only 300km away. We made it in time for a late lunch - thanks be for the much better road as you approach Auckland - and organised ourselves with a campsite for the following night, then set off for a brief rendezvous with our friend Jen, who was in Auckland with the basketball team she physios for. Great to see her, and then the next day we were able to spend most of the day sleeping and eating (in approximately equal proportions) in preparation for our big night out!
The Rolling Stones were amazing! The venue was a big speedway arena, with seating on the concrete area directly in front of the stage, and then the rest of us scuffers had to stand on the hill behind said seating area. The hill was rather steep - we reckoned a gradient of approaching 40 degrees - but we found a great place where we could see whether we or the people in front of us were sitting down or standing up. There was a degree of apprehension in sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with a couple of thousand - mainly drunk - people behind you, but we evidently didn’t get squashed, and we were able to enjoy the concert with only the mild disadvantage of our toes going numb as they were forced into the front of our shoes and our knees going a bit shaky as they were bent for two hours! Mick was on full bendy-dancing form, and there were spectacular fireworks, lighting displays, great songs, and even a time when the central portion of the stage slid right out into the centre of the expensive seating area. Brilliant! Nick and I are still chatting away about it.
And since then… Well, very little. Further job searching, and generally lazing around a lot. Enjoying the weather up here though - 25 degrees yesterday, it’s just beautiful. Although that does mean the mozzies are still active up here - I am being bitten to death again and Nick has one bite which is looking a touch infected, so we are back on the Vitamin B. Yum!
Right, the van’s free parking time is about to expire so I’d best dash and move it around the corner. Thrills of our days at the moment! Lots of love to you all and hope you all had a great Easter break. Vic and Nick.
Ah, hello there! I feel it is important that I share with you news of our continuing relentless rise up through the social strata of New Zealand. Nick and I last week briefly rejoined the ranks of the NZ working world, doing what can only be described as one of the most intellectually stimulating and personally satisfying employment opportunities available throughout the entire country. Yes, it was even better than hotel housekeeping. We spoke to our temping agency last Monday morning, and they informed us that, yes, they did have work for us. Hooray. They told us that it was going to be ‘sorting bits of different coloured plastic’. In hindsight, perhaps we should have stopped believing that the minute that we found that their directions to our workplace sent us out to totally the wrong side of Christchurch. Anyway, we eventually got to the correct place, where we were filled with a mild sense of foreboding when we realised that it was in fact a recycling depot. Yes, we spent a week sorting rubbish. We stood at a conveyor belt and, as the refuse passed in front of us, it was our weighty responsibility to remove the steel and aluminium cans and throw them into the appropriate receptacles. Nick at one point (by virtue of one of the more highly-trained professionals cutting himself) was promoted to milk bottles and plastic soft drinks’ bottles, which required much greater skill and accuracy as these were thrown down various different chutes. The glamour of this particular employment opportunity was indeed still not enhanced by the yellow gloves, orange earplugs, and ‘High-Vis’ fluorescent jackets that we were required to wear. However, on the positive side, the day did seem to pass very quickly, which was undoubtedly why we managed to stick it for a week.
After that trauma had ended on Thursday afternoon (thank Goodness for Good Friday public holiday), we had the joy of a ridiculously long drive up to Auckland. We were to catch the 8am ferry to Wellington from Picton (350km from Christchurch) on Friday morning. So, we set off through solid C’ch traffic and drove for 6 hours (I say drove, the first hour was more of a crawl), arriving finally at an appropriate kerbside campsite at 11.30 that night. Straight to sleep, then woke up at 6.30 to go to the ferry, I having woken up with a stinking cold. Once on the ferry, we discovered that the $1 hot chocolate was surprisingly good and that the pies had good anti-cold restorative properties, and by the time Wellington and 11.30 came, I felt much stronger. This was lucky, as of course the entire population of the capital was departing for a Good Friday drive north at exactly the time we left the ferry. Another long drive involving lots of bumper-to-bumper time, and we reached Lake Taupo at about 5pm. We stopped here for the night, and after a brief drama when a solo skydiver nearly landed on our van (and instead landed on the rather narrow shoreline), and a very quickly rustled-up supper, I was in bed by 6.35 and asleep by 7.30!
My cold felt much better after 12 hours’ sleep, and we were able to set off good and early for the final leg to Auckland, now only 300km away. We made it in time for a late lunch - thanks be for the much better road as you approach Auckland - and organised ourselves with a campsite for the following night, then set off for a brief rendezvous with our friend Jen, who was in Auckland with the basketball team she physios for. Great to see her, and then the next day we were able to spend most of the day sleeping and eating (in approximately equal proportions) in preparation for our big night out!
The Rolling Stones were amazing! The venue was a big speedway arena, with seating on the concrete area directly in front of the stage, and then the rest of us scuffers had to stand on the hill behind said seating area. The hill was rather steep - we reckoned a gradient of approaching 40 degrees - but we found a great place where we could see whether we or the people in front of us were sitting down or standing up. There was a degree of apprehension in sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with a couple of thousand - mainly drunk - people behind you, but we evidently didn’t get squashed, and we were able to enjoy the concert with only the mild disadvantage of our toes going numb as they were forced into the front of our shoes and our knees going a bit shaky as they were bent for two hours! Mick was on full bendy-dancing form, and there were spectacular fireworks, lighting displays, great songs, and even a time when the central portion of the stage slid right out into the centre of the expensive seating area. Brilliant! Nick and I are still chatting away about it.
And since then… Well, very little. Further job searching, and generally lazing around a lot. Enjoying the weather up here though - 25 degrees yesterday, it’s just beautiful. Although that does mean the mozzies are still active up here - I am being bitten to death again and Nick has one bite which is looking a touch infected, so we are back on the Vitamin B. Yum!
Right, the van’s free parking time is about to expire so I’d best dash and move it around the corner. Thrills of our days at the moment! Lots of love to you all and hope you all had a great Easter break. Vic and Nick.
After that trauma had ended on Thursday afternoon (thank Goodness for Good Friday public holiday), we had the joy of a ridiculously long drive up to Auckland. We were to catch the 8am ferry to Wellington from Picton (350km from Christchurch) on Friday morning. So, we set off through solid C’ch traffic and drove for 6 hours (I say drove, the first hour was more of a crawl), arriving finally at an appropriate kerbside campsite at 11.30 that night. Straight to sleep, then woke up at 6.30 to go to the ferry, I having woken up with a stinking cold. Once on the ferry, we discovered that the $1 hot chocolate was surprisingly good and that the pies had good anti-cold restorative properties, and by the time Wellington and 11.30 came, I felt much stronger. This was lucky, as of course the entire population of the capital was departing for a Good Friday drive north at exactly the time we left the ferry. Another long drive involving lots of bumper-to-bumper time, and we reached Lake Taupo at about 5pm. We stopped here for the night, and after a brief drama when a solo skydiver nearly landed on our van (and instead landed on the rather narrow shoreline), and a very quickly rustled-up supper, I was in bed by 6.35 and asleep by 7.30!
My cold felt much better after 12 hours’ sleep, and we were able to set off good and early for the final leg to Auckland, now only 300km away. We made it in time for a late lunch - thanks be for the much better road as you approach Auckland - and organised ourselves with a campsite for the following night, then set off for a brief rendezvous with our friend Jen, who was in Auckland with the basketball team she physios for. Great to see her, and then the next day we were able to spend most of the day sleeping and eating (in approximately equal proportions) in preparation for our big night out!
The Rolling Stones were amazing! The venue was a big speedway arena, with seating on the concrete area directly in front of the stage, and then the rest of us scuffers had to stand on the hill behind said seating area. The hill was rather steep - we reckoned a gradient of approaching 40 degrees - but we found a great place where we could see whether we or the people in front of us were sitting down or standing up. There was a degree of apprehension in sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with a couple of thousand - mainly drunk - people behind you, but we evidently didn’t get squashed, and we were able to enjoy the concert with only the mild disadvantage of our toes going numb as they were forced into the front of our shoes and our knees going a bit shaky as they were bent for two hours! Mick was on full bendy-dancing form, and there were spectacular fireworks, lighting displays, great songs, and even a time when the central portion of the stage slid right out into the centre of the expensive seating area. Brilliant! Nick and I are still chatting away about it.
And since then… Well, very little. Further job searching, and generally lazing around a lot. Enjoying the weather up here though - 25 degrees yesterday, it’s just beautiful. Although that does mean the mozzies are still active up here - I am being bitten to death again and Nick has one bite which is looking a touch infected, so we are back on the Vitamin B. Yum!
Right, the van’s free parking time is about to expire so I’d best dash and move it around the corner. Thrills of our days at the moment! Lots of love to you all and hope you all had a great Easter break. Vic and Nick.
Hello World (to quote a certain Mr Alan Wicker). I believe I can describe my readers as ‘World’, as I am certain that we have people in at least 3 countries reading this.
I have yet again been rather slack at writing this latest update, and that is not because we have been doing too much but because we have been doing nothing, and that has made me want to do even less. But now I am here to let you all know (and remind myself) of our most recent adventures - those of a couple of weeks ago now.
When I last left you, we were in Peel Forest, sitting in the sun and enjoying the birdsong and general peacefulness of the surroundings. We continued south the next day, and went to a huge lake called Lake Tekapo, with a tiny but gorgeous church - the Church of the Good Shepherd - on it’s shore. It was a beautiful setting, with views of Mount Cook and the Southern Alps in the distance. The church is lovely as well, but doesn’t take long to look around - literally a walk in, sorry for bumping into the other three tourists in there, and walk out. We made more of the lovely lake shore, taking copious photos of the amazing turquoise water (it is glacial water and thus has a large amount of rock powder dissolved therein, making it much more reflective of the sun’s light and the colour of the shy than your average lake water), as well as skimming many stones and acting like amateur ornithologists (i.e. taking photos of gulls). After an appalling coffee with appropriately awful service in the town of Lake Tekapo (not much thought went into that evidently), and the purchase of two superb and bargainous Merino beanie hats (one of which has barely left Nick’s head in the subsequent two weeks), we moved on to try and find a good camping location. We finally (after many a stop for photos of the Alps and the sunset, and both together) happened upon a good roadside location, which turned out to be the best place we have stayed in all our time in the van. We tucked ourselves away into a group of conifers, which offered excellent noise reduction and privacy from the main road only 30 feet away, as well as superb shelter from the very strong wind which was blowing that night. Not good enough shelter to cook outdoors, however, so we were forced into our first meal cooked entirely inside the Horny Ox. It turned out to be a great success (as photos will testify) - pumpkin, thyme and ginger risotto. Delicious. We had planned to accompany it with a beautiful, buttery, creamy Chardonnay that we had bought in Blenheim, only to find that we in fact had no corkscrew. Devastating. After much cursing of the false sense of security that a predominance of screw-top bottles gives the wine-drinker, we enjoyed our risotto just as much with a cask Merlot. Classy.
The next day we chugged off towards Mount Cook, very excited about the huge mountains with snow and everything that were getting ever closer. After a stop and a few hundred more photos of another, even more gorgeous, turquoise lake (Lake Pukaki), we made it to Mount Cook village. We had a rather poor and vastly overpriced lunch at the only café (any of you who have been to Mount Cook will probably have eaten in the same crummy place), and then set off for our walk towards the base of the mountain. We were initially a bit dismayed by the hordes of elderly Japanese tourists coming bombing back towards us, thinking that perhaps we weren’t going on such a taxing route after all, but they disappeared after the first hour and we could reassume the personas of extreme mountaineers. We succeeded in completing our walk to the end of the Tasman Glacier, and there was much excitement from a certain Mr Willmore at the sight of glacial ice floating in the river. We dutifully retrieved a piece of said ice and each ate a chunk, before it started to rain really quite hard and we set off back towards the village at a rather swifter pace than we had come up at!
That night we decided to spend the night in a motel, so that we could actually dry our clothes and have showers without having to dash halfway across a field in towels. We reassured the van that it was nothing personal and proceeded to feel extremely seedy staying in a roadside motel. We made ourselves feel slightly more classy by drinking the aforementioned Chardonnay (having discovered a corkscrew in the motel kitchen), and recreating the previous night’s risotto.
The next day, feeling as if we had certainly got our money’s worth of the motel shower (having spent probably a good half-hour in it each), we moved on to Oamaru. On the way we saw some Maori cave drawings (rather faint and indistinct, but nonetheless some of the oldest things one is likely to see in this part of the world), and, more excitingly, drove over the top of two massive dams. Quite a novel experience and one that we both found rather thrilling (many more photos were of course taken). Once we got to Oamaru, we wandered around the town a little, and admired some of the beautiful Victorian architecture, which seem mostly to be disregarded, with only a couple of these lovely buildings being used as hotels, shops or houses. The reason for Oamaru’s existence is the little blue penguin colony very close to the town. The little blue being very rare, they set up a few years ago a conservation programme, involving mainly controlled tourist viewing of the penguins (charging $15 a pop) and man-made burrows for them to nest in. Given that we had arrived at around 4 and the penguins only come ashore at dusk - about 7 - we decided to go for a bit of a walk along the coastal track while we waited. Two minutes after we left the visitor centre, we looked down at the beach and saw a huge New Zealand fur seal, which made us pretty happy (being about twenty times closer than at the seal colony). We walked further along the track and then went down to a small beach to look at the Pillow Lava - lava formations set into other rock which look like stones et in mortar. Very odd. Nick then went for a wee behind a rock and I walked a little further along the tiny beach to see what was what. I turned towards the cliffs at one point, just glancing around, and suddenly realised that I was about five metres away from a solitary yellow-eyed penguin! I was so excited and really it was all I could do to stay quiet and take fifty million photos while I waited for Nick to finish his wee. Once he re-emerged, there was much whispered excitement, further photo-taking (including me doing a spectacular penguin impression), and then we finally dragged ourselves away (after Nick had informed me that no, I couldn’t smuggle the penguin back to the van inside my coat). We then proceeded further down the track to another beach, where we came with five metres of two enormous fur seals (I did not even contemplate smuggling 200kg of seal back to the van, but did wonder whether they would mind me lying down and giving them a little cuddle…). More photos. We also managed to find many fragments, and a couple of whole, paua shells, which, although not to our taste, are pretty spectacular and have been added to the Jade collection for future use. After returning to the van and a cup of tea and a cookie or three to calm our excited wildlife minds, we decided to forgo the pay-per-view penguin bonanza that evening and instead revel in the memories our own private display. We therefore got back on the road and drove a short way south of Oamaru and spent the night in a bowls club car park. Glamorous.
After our night in the very accommodating bowls club car park, we made it to Dunedin. It was in Dunedin that we discovered quite how much money we had spent since leaving Furneaux, so the hunt was on for cheap tourist attractions (and a job for Nick). We spent several hours in the massive museum in Dunedin, looking mainly at a brilliant photography exhibition (wildlife and landscape photography of Australia, NZ, Papua New Guinea and Antarctica), but also at a (dead) specimen of the world’s biggest crab and some Maori exhibits. The next day we explored the (free) Botanic Gardens, and had a little picnic. We also went to, and walked up, the world’s steepest street (and that’s official, so says the Guinness Book of World Records). And yes, it was very steep (especially for us lazy and unfit traveller types). Gradient of 1:2.6 or something silly. And there’s a guy who has jogged up and skipped(!) down 30 times in a row every day for the last 10 years. Crazy. We talked to him, he did seem relatively lucid but there clearly has to be some underlying mental instability to do something like that.
And the only other thing to report from Dunedin was on our second night there, when we stayed halfway up Mount Cargill and the trowel had to come into use for a lavatorial crisis for the first time. Amy, I know you will find that amusing. Now that is not to be spoken of again.
After that, we made our way back to Christchurch and have been there since, seeking a job for Nick and generally hanging around in public places (mainly the library), trying not to spend money. This weekend, as no-one will be e-mailing Nick about work, we are going to treat ourselves to the excitement to going to the Christchurch museum. Woo hoo. And that is as thrilling as it gets right now, so please write to us to bring a little sunshine into our lives! It’s also getting bloody cold now, so camping is not as much fun sometimes (especially after we found that our mattress was going slightly mouldy with the cool damp air). And Nick says to say that will someone please post a comment on the blog (that doesn’t apply to Lucy, who has been the only one to do so thus far and are therefore in the good books)!
I shall go back to the impossible task of trying to warm my feet up now, so thanks for reading and lots of love to all!
I have yet again been rather slack at writing this latest update, and that is not because we have been doing too much but because we have been doing nothing, and that has made me want to do even less. But now I am here to let you all know (and remind myself) of our most recent adventures - those of a couple of weeks ago now.
When I last left you, we were in Peel Forest, sitting in the sun and enjoying the birdsong and general peacefulness of the surroundings. We continued south the next day, and went to a huge lake called Lake Tekapo, with a tiny but gorgeous church - the Church of the Good Shepherd - on it’s shore. It was a beautiful setting, with views of Mount Cook and the Southern Alps in the distance. The church is lovely as well, but doesn’t take long to look around - literally a walk in, sorry for bumping into the other three tourists in there, and walk out. We made more of the lovely lake shore, taking copious photos of the amazing turquoise water (it is glacial water and thus has a large amount of rock powder dissolved therein, making it much more reflective of the sun’s light and the colour of the shy than your average lake water), as well as skimming many stones and acting like amateur ornithologists (i.e. taking photos of gulls). After an appalling coffee with appropriately awful service in the town of Lake Tekapo (not much thought went into that evidently), and the purchase of two superb and bargainous Merino beanie hats (one of which has barely left Nick’s head in the subsequent two weeks), we moved on to try and find a good camping location. We finally (after many a stop for photos of the Alps and the sunset, and both together) happened upon a good roadside location, which turned out to be the best place we have stayed in all our time in the van. We tucked ourselves away into a group of conifers, which offered excellent noise reduction and privacy from the main road only 30 feet away, as well as superb shelter from the very strong wind which was blowing that night. Not good enough shelter to cook outdoors, however, so we were forced into our first meal cooked entirely inside the Horny Ox. It turned out to be a great success (as photos will testify) - pumpkin, thyme and ginger risotto. Delicious. We had planned to accompany it with a beautiful, buttery, creamy Chardonnay that we had bought in Blenheim, only to find that we in fact had no corkscrew. Devastating. After much cursing of the false sense of security that a predominance of screw-top bottles gives the wine-drinker, we enjoyed our risotto just as much with a cask Merlot. Classy.
The next day we chugged off towards Mount Cook, very excited about the huge mountains with snow and everything that were getting ever closer. After a stop and a few hundred more photos of another, even more gorgeous, turquoise lake (Lake Pukaki), we made it to Mount Cook village. We had a rather poor and vastly overpriced lunch at the only café (any of you who have been to Mount Cook will probably have eaten in the same crummy place), and then set off for our walk towards the base of the mountain. We were initially a bit dismayed by the hordes of elderly Japanese tourists coming bombing back towards us, thinking that perhaps we weren’t going on such a taxing route after all, but they disappeared after the first hour and we could reassume the personas of extreme mountaineers. We succeeded in completing our walk to the end of the Tasman Glacier, and there was much excitement from a certain Mr Willmore at the sight of glacial ice floating in the river. We dutifully retrieved a piece of said ice and each ate a chunk, before it started to rain really quite hard and we set off back towards the village at a rather swifter pace than we had come up at!
That night we decided to spend the night in a motel, so that we could actually dry our clothes and have showers without having to dash halfway across a field in towels. We reassured the van that it was nothing personal and proceeded to feel extremely seedy staying in a roadside motel. We made ourselves feel slightly more classy by drinking the aforementioned Chardonnay (having discovered a corkscrew in the motel kitchen), and recreating the previous night’s risotto.
The next day, feeling as if we had certainly got our money’s worth of the motel shower (having spent probably a good half-hour in it each), we moved on to Oamaru. On the way we saw some Maori cave drawings (rather faint and indistinct, but nonetheless some of the oldest things one is likely to see in this part of the world), and, more excitingly, drove over the top of two massive dams. Quite a novel experience and one that we both found rather thrilling (many more photos were of course taken). Once we got to Oamaru, we wandered around the town a little, and admired some of the beautiful Victorian architecture, which seem mostly to be disregarded, with only a couple of these lovely buildings being used as hotels, shops or houses. The reason for Oamaru’s existence is the little blue penguin colony very close to the town. The little blue being very rare, they set up a few years ago a conservation programme, involving mainly controlled tourist viewing of the penguins (charging $15 a pop) and man-made burrows for them to nest in. Given that we had arrived at around 4 and the penguins only come ashore at dusk - about 7 - we decided to go for a bit of a walk along the coastal track while we waited. Two minutes after we left the visitor centre, we looked down at the beach and saw a huge New Zealand fur seal, which made us pretty happy (being about twenty times closer than at the seal colony). We walked further along the track and then went down to a small beach to look at the Pillow Lava - lava formations set into other rock which look like stones et in mortar. Very odd. Nick then went for a wee behind a rock and I walked a little further along the tiny beach to see what was what. I turned towards the cliffs at one point, just glancing around, and suddenly realised that I was about five metres away from a solitary yellow-eyed penguin! I was so excited and really it was all I could do to stay quiet and take fifty million photos while I waited for Nick to finish his wee. Once he re-emerged, there was much whispered excitement, further photo-taking (including me doing a spectacular penguin impression), and then we finally dragged ourselves away (after Nick had informed me that no, I couldn’t smuggle the penguin back to the van inside my coat). We then proceeded further down the track to another beach, where we came with five metres of two enormous fur seals (I did not even contemplate smuggling 200kg of seal back to the van, but did wonder whether they would mind me lying down and giving them a little cuddle…). More photos. We also managed to find many fragments, and a couple of whole, paua shells, which, although not to our taste, are pretty spectacular and have been added to the Jade collection for future use. After returning to the van and a cup of tea and a cookie or three to calm our excited wildlife minds, we decided to forgo the pay-per-view penguin bonanza that evening and instead revel in the memories our own private display. We therefore got back on the road and drove a short way south of Oamaru and spent the night in a bowls club car park. Glamorous.
After our night in the very accommodating bowls club car park, we made it to Dunedin. It was in Dunedin that we discovered quite how much money we had spent since leaving Furneaux, so the hunt was on for cheap tourist attractions (and a job for Nick). We spent several hours in the massive museum in Dunedin, looking mainly at a brilliant photography exhibition (wildlife and landscape photography of Australia, NZ, Papua New Guinea and Antarctica), but also at a (dead) specimen of the world’s biggest crab and some Maori exhibits. The next day we explored the (free) Botanic Gardens, and had a little picnic. We also went to, and walked up, the world’s steepest street (and that’s official, so says the Guinness Book of World Records). And yes, it was very steep (especially for us lazy and unfit traveller types). Gradient of 1:2.6 or something silly. And there’s a guy who has jogged up and skipped(!) down 30 times in a row every day for the last 10 years. Crazy. We talked to him, he did seem relatively lucid but there clearly has to be some underlying mental instability to do something like that.
And the only other thing to report from Dunedin was on our second night there, when we stayed halfway up Mount Cargill and the trowel had to come into use for a lavatorial crisis for the first time. Amy, I know you will find that amusing. Now that is not to be spoken of again.
After that, we made our way back to Christchurch and have been there since, seeking a job for Nick and generally hanging around in public places (mainly the library), trying not to spend money. This weekend, as no-one will be e-mailing Nick about work, we are going to treat ourselves to the excitement to going to the Christchurch museum. Woo hoo. And that is as thrilling as it gets right now, so please write to us to bring a little sunshine into our lives! It’s also getting bloody cold now, so camping is not as much fun sometimes (especially after we found that our mattress was going slightly mouldy with the cool damp air). And Nick says to say that will someone please post a comment on the blog (that doesn’t apply to Lucy, who has been the only one to do so thus far and are therefore in the good books)!
I shall go back to the impossible task of trying to warm my feet up now, so thanks for reading and lots of love to all!
Thursday, March 30
Ah, hello there! I feel it is important that I share with you news of our continuing relentless rise up through the social strata of New Zealand. Nick and I last week briefly rejoined the ranks of the NZ working world, doing what can only be described as one of the most intellectually stimulating and personally satisfying employment opportunities available throughout the entire country. Yes, it was even better than hotel housekeeping. We spoke to our temping agency last Monday morning, and they informed us that, yes, they did have work for us. Hooray. They told us that it was going to be ‘sorting bits of different coloured plastic’. In hindsight, perhaps we should have stopped believing that the minute that we found that their directions to our workplace sent us out to totally the wrong side of Christchurch. Anyway, we eventually got to the correct place, where we were filled with a mild sense of foreboding when we realised that it was in fact a recycling depot. Yes, we spent a week sorting rubbish. We stood at a conveyor belt and, as the refuse passed in front of us, it was our weighty responsibility to remove the steel and aluminium cans and throw them into the appropriate receptacles. Nick at one point (by virtue of one of the more highly-trained professionals cutting himself) was promoted to milk bottles and plastic soft drinks’ bottles, which required much greater skill and accuracy as these were thrown down various different chutes. The glamour of this particular employment opportunity was indeed still not enhanced by the yellow gloves, orange earplugs, and ‘High-Vis’ fluorescent jackets that we were required to wear. However, on the positive side, the day did seem to pass very quickly, which was undoubtedly why we managed to stick it for a week.
After that trauma had ended on Thursday afternoon (thank Goodness for Good Friday public holiday), we had the joy of a ridiculously long drive up to Auckland. We were to catch the 8am ferry to Wellington from Picton (350km from Christchurch) on Friday morning. So, we set off through solid C’ch traffic and drove for 6 hours (I say drove, the first hour was more of a crawl), arriving finally at an appropriate kerbside campsite at 11.30 that night. Straight to sleep, then woke up at 6.30 to go to the ferry, I having woken up with a stinking cold. Once on the ferry, we discovered that the $1 hot chocolate was surprisingly good and that the pies had good anti-cold restorative properties, and by the time Wellington and 11.30 came, I felt much stronger. This was lucky, as of course the entire population of the capital was departing for a Good Friday drive north at exactly the time we left the ferry. Another long drive involving lots of bumper-to-bumper time, and we reached Lake Taupo at about 5pm. We stopped here for the night, and after a brief drama when a solo skydiver nearly landed on our van (and instead landed on the rather narrow shoreline), and a very quickly rustled-up supper, I was in bed by 6.35 and asleep by 7.30!
My cold felt much better after 12 hours’ sleep, and we were able to set off good and early for the final leg to Auckland, now only 300km away. We made it in time for a late lunch - thanks be for the much better road as you approach Auckland - and organised ourselves with a campsite for the following night, then set off for a brief rendezvous with our friend Jen, who was in Auckland with the basketball team she physios for. Great to see her, and then the next day we were able to spend most of the day sleeping and eating (in approximately equal proportions) in preparation for our big night out!
The Rolling Stones were amazing! The venue was a big speedway arena, with seating on the concrete area directly in front of the stage, and then the rest of us scuffers had to stand on the hill behind said seating area. The hill was rather steep - we reckoned a gradient of approaching 40 degrees - but we found a great place where we could see whether we or the people in front of us were sitting down or standing up. There was a degree of apprehension in sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with a couple of thousand - mainly drunk - people behind you, but we evidently didn’t get squashed, and we were able to enjoy the concert with only the mild disadvantage of our toes going numb as they were forced into the front of our shoes and our knees going a bit shaky as they were bent for two hours! Mick was on full bendy-dancing form, and there were spectacular fireworks, lighting displays, great songs, and even a time when the central portion of the stage slid right out into the centre of the expensive seating area. Brilliant! Nick and I are still chatting away about it.
And since then… Well, very little. Further job searching, and generally lazing around a lot. Enjoying the weather up here though - 25 degrees yesterday, it’s just beautiful. Although that does mean the mozzies are still active up here - I am being bitten to death again and Nick has one bite which is looking a touch infected, so we are back on the Vitamin B. Yum!
Right, the van’s free parking time is about to expire so I’d best dash and move it around the corner. Thrills of our days at the moment! Lots of love to you all and hope you all had a great Easter break. Vic and Nick.
P.S. - Has taken me numerous attempts to publish this so it's a little out of date but we really have no news since then. Will write more when we have something to report!
After that trauma had ended on Thursday afternoon (thank Goodness for Good Friday public holiday), we had the joy of a ridiculously long drive up to Auckland. We were to catch the 8am ferry to Wellington from Picton (350km from Christchurch) on Friday morning. So, we set off through solid C’ch traffic and drove for 6 hours (I say drove, the first hour was more of a crawl), arriving finally at an appropriate kerbside campsite at 11.30 that night. Straight to sleep, then woke up at 6.30 to go to the ferry, I having woken up with a stinking cold. Once on the ferry, we discovered that the $1 hot chocolate was surprisingly good and that the pies had good anti-cold restorative properties, and by the time Wellington and 11.30 came, I felt much stronger. This was lucky, as of course the entire population of the capital was departing for a Good Friday drive north at exactly the time we left the ferry. Another long drive involving lots of bumper-to-bumper time, and we reached Lake Taupo at about 5pm. We stopped here for the night, and after a brief drama when a solo skydiver nearly landed on our van (and instead landed on the rather narrow shoreline), and a very quickly rustled-up supper, I was in bed by 6.35 and asleep by 7.30!
My cold felt much better after 12 hours’ sleep, and we were able to set off good and early for the final leg to Auckland, now only 300km away. We made it in time for a late lunch - thanks be for the much better road as you approach Auckland - and organised ourselves with a campsite for the following night, then set off for a brief rendezvous with our friend Jen, who was in Auckland with the basketball team she physios for. Great to see her, and then the next day we were able to spend most of the day sleeping and eating (in approximately equal proportions) in preparation for our big night out!
The Rolling Stones were amazing! The venue was a big speedway arena, with seating on the concrete area directly in front of the stage, and then the rest of us scuffers had to stand on the hill behind said seating area. The hill was rather steep - we reckoned a gradient of approaching 40 degrees - but we found a great place where we could see whether we or the people in front of us were sitting down or standing up. There was a degree of apprehension in sitting at the bottom of a steep hill with a couple of thousand - mainly drunk - people behind you, but we evidently didn’t get squashed, and we were able to enjoy the concert with only the mild disadvantage of our toes going numb as they were forced into the front of our shoes and our knees going a bit shaky as they were bent for two hours! Mick was on full bendy-dancing form, and there were spectacular fireworks, lighting displays, great songs, and even a time when the central portion of the stage slid right out into the centre of the expensive seating area. Brilliant! Nick and I are still chatting away about it.
And since then… Well, very little. Further job searching, and generally lazing around a lot. Enjoying the weather up here though - 25 degrees yesterday, it’s just beautiful. Although that does mean the mozzies are still active up here - I am being bitten to death again and Nick has one bite which is looking a touch infected, so we are back on the Vitamin B. Yum!
Right, the van’s free parking time is about to expire so I’d best dash and move it around the corner. Thrills of our days at the moment! Lots of love to you all and hope you all had a great Easter break. Vic and Nick.
P.S. - Has taken me numerous attempts to publish this so it's a little out of date but we really have no news since then. Will write more when we have something to report!
Friday, March 24
Sunday, March 19
We are back again - finally!
Greetings from an unusually sunny New Zealand!
Firstly I must apologise for my shocking lack of effort in terms of weblog entries over the last couple of weeks. There really isn’t much of an excuse but for the fact that we were doing other more important and/or exciting things most of the time! So this is likely to be a bit of a mammoth while I update y’all on the thrills and spills of life in and out of the Horny Ox. Go and put the kettle on and settle in for a long read!
So the last time I wrote was a couple of weeks before leaving Furneaux. We did manage to do our walk the day after I wrote, and successfully completed the “five-hour” walk to Ship’s Cove (where Captain Cook first landed in the South Island and claimed British sovereignty over the territory) in 3 hours. Very beautiful views but not surprisingly, much the same all the way when you are walking along the side of a mountain with the sea on one side! We also enjoyed along the way the practically world-famous muffins at the resort one along from Furneaux, baked in a wood-burning oven as they have no power, accompanied by a wonderful home-made lemonade and a quick lie-down in a hammock.
So at least we felt that we had ‘done’ the Queen Charlotte Track after that cracking effort at a day’s tramping - overtaking seasoned walkers with their walking poles and gaiters (still unclear as to why anyone might need those). And the mystery of why walkers stretch their shoulders prior to departing from Furneaux for their second day’s walk remains unsolved, as we did not find any areas where it appeared compulsory to walk on one’s hands.
The remaining time at Furneaux after that was pretty uneventful. We clocked up a bit of overtime (we love housekeeping that much) so didn’t do much with our days off. Obviously there was great sadness on our last day cleaning loos, but we overcame this by having a few drinks on our last night - and going to bed at 4.30. Hmm.
After leaving Furneaux, we spent a couple of days doing very dull but important things like organising the campervan and starting the process of job applications for Nick. Some disappointing news was received that my physio application has been further delayed, but we are just not talking about that at the moment. Very much on the plus side was the fact that we have managed to secure tickets for the Rolling Stones’ concert in Auckland in mid-April, so we are extremely excited about that!
Two days after leaving the hotel, our Aussie friends Beth and Mat arrived for a visit. After a good ol’ natter the night they got in, we set off for Blenheim on the Thursday (starting as we meant to go on prior to departure from Picton, with morning coffee and cake) to go on a wine tour. We were taken by coach (driven by a very loud-voiced woman with a screechy microphone) to four Marlborough vineyards, including the rather prestigious Cloudy Bay, and tasted copious amounts of very good wine at each one. After all of those we were quite ready for a nap back at the campsite. Beth and I then proceeded to go for ‘a little walk’ and got totally lost around Blenheim, causing great concern to Nick and Mat, but fortunately we re-appeared at the van (1¾ hours after leaving) clutching a Chinese takeaway and all was forgiven!
The next day we set off to re-tour the vineyards, this time to purchase a few of our favourite bottles from the tasting. After that we drove down an excessively windy river plain, to Murchison, where it was raining so we had coffee and cake, and then went for a walk, where we were followed for some time by a herd of cows and then met a very friendly deer that seemed to want to have a full-on snog with any/all of us. Saturday we had a bit of a busy day: we drove to Cape Foulwind (which did indeed smell rather unpleasant), saw the view and got attacked by wekas (we thought we had left them behind at Furneaux as they are supposedly very rare across the rest of the country - apart from Cape Foulwind, apparently), then a little further to a seal colony. Amazing - we saw probably 60-70 seals, complete with young playing in the water and big daddy seals lazing on the rocks. After many a blurry photo of furry brown things sitting on rough brown rocks, we moved on to Punakaiki via the spectacular coastal road, to see the Pancake Rocks. These are big columns of rock which have formed in a sort of layering process, and so look (quite vaguely, it would have to be said) like stacks of pancakes. They also have a spectacular surge pool and some great blowholes, so we took many a photo. We also sat on the beach for some time awaiting the potential appearance of a group of Fairy penguins (having been told by the lady in the gift shop that it was a good time to see them), only to finally check the information board and find that they are only at Punakaiki from November to February. Heigh ho. We stayed the night in the Pancake Rocks car park (to be joined also by a very nice English lady and her daughter), and made a late-night trip back down to the rocks to see them at high tide. Pretty amazing, even with just a small Maglite to illuminate proceedings.
We managed our third viewing of the Rocks the next morning at high tide again, and then finally decided (when all camera memory cards were full) that we really should move on. Onward further south along the still beautiful coast road, to Greymouth, which we found has really nothing at all to offer on a Sunday. However, we were not there for the sights, we were there to go Cave Tubing! We were kitted up with wellies, wetsuits, thermal socks and helmets with head torches, packed into a big truck, and driven to the middle of nowhere by an Aussie called Mitch. We then walked half an hour through the forest, having various inane photos taken along the way, and then clambered down into a big hole in the ground. We spent a total of 2½½ hours underground, wading and swimming through cold water, climbing through very small holes, clambering along narrow ledges, and floating along in tractor inner tubes. All in all very very good fun, although Beth and I were unimpressed that we both ended up freezing cold for some time despite their “you will not be cold” guarantee, and the mid-way warm-up snack of hot chocolate and a Mars bar. Also at the end was a big waterslide (natural, just a not-very-steep rock face with a stream running down it) that you could slide down on a rubber mat. I was the only one of the four of us to have a go at this (admittedly there was a disclaimer stating more than once and in capital letters that you could get killed doing this), and evidently I survived, and indeed enjoyed, it. To reward us for all our efforts in the caving field, we were also given a complimentary hot Jacuzzi plus glass of wine and hot muffin afterwards.
When we had recovered from the exhaustion that was our caving expedition (i.e. the next day), we trekked off to try and make our own knife with the Barrytown knife man, about which we were all very excited, only to find that he is closed on a Monday - dammit! So instead we went to the Blackball Salami shop and bought some great sausages for supper, then went to try and make our fortune panning for gold. Unfortunately the man at the local store (for local people - it was a bit like that) did not want us discovering the secrets of Blackball’s riches and sent us to a very dodgy spot. It was hard enough to get down to the riverbank in the first place (maybe he was trying to kill us off - it certainly was a very remote spot with a smashed-up car in the car park), and then we only managed to find one very small bit of anything that looked like gold - Beth has retained the small nugget but is not holding out hope that it will pay off their mortgage. After that disappointment, we drove down to Hokitika and went to Jacquie Grant’s Eco-World, to see some Kiwis. And Kiwis we did indeed see, so that was a plus in the day. We also rescued a seahorse that had managed to get itself sucked into the filter system - perhaps a Finding Nemo-style escape effort but as he had stopped moving we thought he would appreciate a bit of help. To make up for the gold failure, we tried to find some jade on the beach, and despite picking up a lot of stones, we found out the next day that they were all quartz.
Tuesday we journeyed over Arthur’s Pass, at the top of the Southern Alps, and there was much rejoicing that the van had managed the steep hills without needing to enter first gear! After lunch, we went for a lovely walk up to a waterfall (got very wet walking right beside it while the wind was blowing), enjoyed the fact that we were in New Zealand’s highest town, and then continued on to Christchurch (Arthur’s Pass was far too windy for our liking).
The next day we wandered around Christchurch and also visited the Antarctic (Centre), where we had a ride on a very cool Hagglund - US$500,000-worth of all-terrain and amphibious Antarctic vehicle that can climb crazily steep slopes and cross crevasses and all sorts of great stuff. (The ride took us through water, up/down slopes, over crevasses etc, it wasn’t just on the road.) They also had a simulated Antarctic storm with a -18C windchill - Beth and I cold again - and fantastic little ice slide (evidently geared for five-year-olds but had me giggling for quite some time). There was also a lot of informative stuff but obviously we were more bothered about the rides and big furry stuffed penguins!
After a fantastic meal at a jazz café that evening in Christchurch, we stayed at a friend of a friend of Beth’s house, which meant a proper bed for a night - hooray! (Although it did turn out to be the world’s softest bed and thus I felt like I was mountaineering every time I tried to turn over…) Then the next day, after a bit more coffee and cake, it was time to say goodbye to Beth and Mat, thinking for the second time in four months during a farewell to them that we didn’t know how long it would be until we saw them again. On the plus side, because of all the things we didn’t get to do this time (seeing real penguins, making a knife etc.), they are very keen to come back again soon, so we are looking forward to another little adventure next year maybe!
And since then we have just been pottering around Christchurch, sending off e-mails to all the people who e-mailed us while we were busy with B+M (thanks everyone), and Nick sending off his portfolio to a load of companies. We are currently in Peel Forest in a lovely little campsite, where the birds are singing and we can hear the river nearby. So that’s us all up to date finally! Hope you enjoyed it and you can now be pleased that you can get up, have a walk around, and get the feeling back into your bum!
So cheerio for now everyone, lots of love, Vic and Nick.
Firstly I must apologise for my shocking lack of effort in terms of weblog entries over the last couple of weeks. There really isn’t much of an excuse but for the fact that we were doing other more important and/or exciting things most of the time! So this is likely to be a bit of a mammoth while I update y’all on the thrills and spills of life in and out of the Horny Ox. Go and put the kettle on and settle in for a long read!
So the last time I wrote was a couple of weeks before leaving Furneaux. We did manage to do our walk the day after I wrote, and successfully completed the “five-hour” walk to Ship’s Cove (where Captain Cook first landed in the South Island and claimed British sovereignty over the territory) in 3 hours. Very beautiful views but not surprisingly, much the same all the way when you are walking along the side of a mountain with the sea on one side! We also enjoyed along the way the practically world-famous muffins at the resort one along from Furneaux, baked in a wood-burning oven as they have no power, accompanied by a wonderful home-made lemonade and a quick lie-down in a hammock.
So at least we felt that we had ‘done’ the Queen Charlotte Track after that cracking effort at a day’s tramping - overtaking seasoned walkers with their walking poles and gaiters (still unclear as to why anyone might need those). And the mystery of why walkers stretch their shoulders prior to departing from Furneaux for their second day’s walk remains unsolved, as we did not find any areas where it appeared compulsory to walk on one’s hands.
The remaining time at Furneaux after that was pretty uneventful. We clocked up a bit of overtime (we love housekeeping that much) so didn’t do much with our days off. Obviously there was great sadness on our last day cleaning loos, but we overcame this by having a few drinks on our last night - and going to bed at 4.30. Hmm.
After leaving Furneaux, we spent a couple of days doing very dull but important things like organising the campervan and starting the process of job applications for Nick. Some disappointing news was received that my physio application has been further delayed, but we are just not talking about that at the moment. Very much on the plus side was the fact that we have managed to secure tickets for the Rolling Stones’ concert in Auckland in mid-April, so we are extremely excited about that!
Two days after leaving the hotel, our Aussie friends Beth and Mat arrived for a visit. After a good ol’ natter the night they got in, we set off for Blenheim on the Thursday (starting as we meant to go on prior to departure from Picton, with morning coffee and cake) to go on a wine tour. We were taken by coach (driven by a very loud-voiced woman with a screechy microphone) to four Marlborough vineyards, including the rather prestigious Cloudy Bay, and tasted copious amounts of very good wine at each one. After all of those we were quite ready for a nap back at the campsite. Beth and I then proceeded to go for ‘a little walk’ and got totally lost around Blenheim, causing great concern to Nick and Mat, but fortunately we re-appeared at the van (1¾ hours after leaving) clutching a Chinese takeaway and all was forgiven!
The next day we set off to re-tour the vineyards, this time to purchase a few of our favourite bottles from the tasting. After that we drove down an excessively windy river plain, to Murchison, where it was raining so we had coffee and cake, and then went for a walk, where we were followed for some time by a herd of cows and then met a very friendly deer that seemed to want to have a full-on snog with any/all of us. Saturday we had a bit of a busy day: we drove to Cape Foulwind (which did indeed smell rather unpleasant), saw the view and got attacked by wekas (we thought we had left them behind at Furneaux as they are supposedly very rare across the rest of the country - apart from Cape Foulwind, apparently), then a little further to a seal colony. Amazing - we saw probably 60-70 seals, complete with young playing in the water and big daddy seals lazing on the rocks. After many a blurry photo of furry brown things sitting on rough brown rocks, we moved on to Punakaiki via the spectacular coastal road, to see the Pancake Rocks. These are big columns of rock which have formed in a sort of layering process, and so look (quite vaguely, it would have to be said) like stacks of pancakes. They also have a spectacular surge pool and some great blowholes, so we took many a photo. We also sat on the beach for some time awaiting the potential appearance of a group of Fairy penguins (having been told by the lady in the gift shop that it was a good time to see them), only to finally check the information board and find that they are only at Punakaiki from November to February. Heigh ho. We stayed the night in the Pancake Rocks car park (to be joined also by a very nice English lady and her daughter), and made a late-night trip back down to the rocks to see them at high tide. Pretty amazing, even with just a small Maglite to illuminate proceedings.
We managed our third viewing of the Rocks the next morning at high tide again, and then finally decided (when all camera memory cards were full) that we really should move on. Onward further south along the still beautiful coast road, to Greymouth, which we found has really nothing at all to offer on a Sunday. However, we were not there for the sights, we were there to go Cave Tubing! We were kitted up with wellies, wetsuits, thermal socks and helmets with head torches, packed into a big truck, and driven to the middle of nowhere by an Aussie called Mitch. We then walked half an hour through the forest, having various inane photos taken along the way, and then clambered down into a big hole in the ground. We spent a total of 2½½ hours underground, wading and swimming through cold water, climbing through very small holes, clambering along narrow ledges, and floating along in tractor inner tubes. All in all very very good fun, although Beth and I were unimpressed that we both ended up freezing cold for some time despite their “you will not be cold” guarantee, and the mid-way warm-up snack of hot chocolate and a Mars bar. Also at the end was a big waterslide (natural, just a not-very-steep rock face with a stream running down it) that you could slide down on a rubber mat. I was the only one of the four of us to have a go at this (admittedly there was a disclaimer stating more than once and in capital letters that you could get killed doing this), and evidently I survived, and indeed enjoyed, it. To reward us for all our efforts in the caving field, we were also given a complimentary hot Jacuzzi plus glass of wine and hot muffin afterwards.
When we had recovered from the exhaustion that was our caving expedition (i.e. the next day), we trekked off to try and make our own knife with the Barrytown knife man, about which we were all very excited, only to find that he is closed on a Monday - dammit! So instead we went to the Blackball Salami shop and bought some great sausages for supper, then went to try and make our fortune panning for gold. Unfortunately the man at the local store (for local people - it was a bit like that) did not want us discovering the secrets of Blackball’s riches and sent us to a very dodgy spot. It was hard enough to get down to the riverbank in the first place (maybe he was trying to kill us off - it certainly was a very remote spot with a smashed-up car in the car park), and then we only managed to find one very small bit of anything that looked like gold - Beth has retained the small nugget but is not holding out hope that it will pay off their mortgage. After that disappointment, we drove down to Hokitika and went to Jacquie Grant’s Eco-World, to see some Kiwis. And Kiwis we did indeed see, so that was a plus in the day. We also rescued a seahorse that had managed to get itself sucked into the filter system - perhaps a Finding Nemo-style escape effort but as he had stopped moving we thought he would appreciate a bit of help. To make up for the gold failure, we tried to find some jade on the beach, and despite picking up a lot of stones, we found out the next day that they were all quartz.
Tuesday we journeyed over Arthur’s Pass, at the top of the Southern Alps, and there was much rejoicing that the van had managed the steep hills without needing to enter first gear! After lunch, we went for a lovely walk up to a waterfall (got very wet walking right beside it while the wind was blowing), enjoyed the fact that we were in New Zealand’s highest town, and then continued on to Christchurch (Arthur’s Pass was far too windy for our liking).
The next day we wandered around Christchurch and also visited the Antarctic (Centre), where we had a ride on a very cool Hagglund - US$500,000-worth of all-terrain and amphibious Antarctic vehicle that can climb crazily steep slopes and cross crevasses and all sorts of great stuff. (The ride took us through water, up/down slopes, over crevasses etc, it wasn’t just on the road.) They also had a simulated Antarctic storm with a -18C windchill - Beth and I cold again - and fantastic little ice slide (evidently geared for five-year-olds but had me giggling for quite some time). There was also a lot of informative stuff but obviously we were more bothered about the rides and big furry stuffed penguins!
After a fantastic meal at a jazz café that evening in Christchurch, we stayed at a friend of a friend of Beth’s house, which meant a proper bed for a night - hooray! (Although it did turn out to be the world’s softest bed and thus I felt like I was mountaineering every time I tried to turn over…) Then the next day, after a bit more coffee and cake, it was time to say goodbye to Beth and Mat, thinking for the second time in four months during a farewell to them that we didn’t know how long it would be until we saw them again. On the plus side, because of all the things we didn’t get to do this time (seeing real penguins, making a knife etc.), they are very keen to come back again soon, so we are looking forward to another little adventure next year maybe!
And since then we have just been pottering around Christchurch, sending off e-mails to all the people who e-mailed us while we were busy with B+M (thanks everyone), and Nick sending off his portfolio to a load of companies. We are currently in Peel Forest in a lovely little campsite, where the birds are singing and we can hear the river nearby. So that’s us all up to date finally! Hope you enjoyed it and you can now be pleased that you can get up, have a walk around, and get the feeling back into your bum!
So cheerio for now everyone, lots of love, Vic and Nick.
Thursday, February 23
Hello all and greetings once more from sunny Furneaux Lodge! I have been a bit slack in writing over the last couple of weeks and so here I am again to update you on the thrills and spills of New Zealand. As I write it is the most beautiful evening here with a slight breeze and only a few clouds in the sky, which are slowly turning a lovely pinky-purply colour. It has been a bit of a stormy day, and we spent most of it huddled indoors in front of the fire in the bar reading and playing Pictionary with other bored employees! Our plans of walking to another resort along the Queen Charlotte Track were foiled by the fact that they wouldn’t give us a discount for being staff here and that we would still only get to sleep in bunk beds there, so didn’t really see the point paying $90 for something we are already paying for here. So instead we plan to walk along the track tomorrow and either walk or catch the boat back, depending on how far we get.
As for what we have been up to in the last couple of weeks, it doesn’t really consist of much other than housekeeping outside of our days off. Due to various staff leaving and arriving, I have been moved from the bar and onto housekeeping full-time last week and this (mainly because I complain the least). This is fine as it means I work with Nick and have the evenings free, but does mean that I have to contend with dirty toilets, soaking and washing the kitchen’s repulsive tea towels, and removing people’s used dental floss from their used tea cups. What larks, Pip!
Enough of whingeing, I must instead concentrate on eulogising the fantastic meal we had on our days off last week. We went for a couple of nights in Nelson, which is really a lovely town, and our boss recommended that we go to this “world class” seafood restaurant called the Boat Shed for a meal, which we duly did. Hopefully there will be a photo thereof on the weblog by the time you are all reading this, but it is built out over the sea (an old boat shed, funnily enough) and the legs are covered in oysters and mussels and other various unidentified shell-dwelling creatures. We were seated out on the balcony for our meal and so during the course of the evening were able to watch a beautiful sunset over the water, as the sun descended behind the row of kauri pines growing on a small spit of land opposite the restaurant, turning the sea and the sky a fantastic shade of pink. As for the food, we ate a huge mixed platters to start, with green-lipped mussels, proscuitto ham, venison salami, cured tuna, smoked chilli salmon, gravadlax, cured swordfish tails, and bruschetta. Nick then had moules-frites as his main and I had a fantastic dish of gnocchi with a whole crab, green-lipped mussels, oysters, and king prawns. That, all together with a bottle of 2002 Marlborough Chardonnay, then coffee and port to finish, we were happy chappies by the time we went back to our campervan that night!
The rest of our time in Nelson was spent wandering around the shops, seeing the sights (including full-on culture walking around a cathedral) going for lots of morning/afternoon/anytime tea and cake, and generally enjoying all that civilised conurbations have to offer! A wonderfully relaxed two days, just great to get away from the same old sights, sounds, smells (toilets and burning rubbish) and people here at Furneaux. Not that we don’t enjoy it here but it takes a certain type of person to stay in the same 3 hectares of land and not start to go mad after a couple of weeks!
What other news? I can’t honestly think of very much at all. We have told the boss that our last working day here will be the 5th of March, so we will depart on the 6th and spend a couple of days in Picton (or it’s surroundings as Picton itself is pretty quiet), until friends of ours from Australia (but known to us from the UK), Beth and Mat arrive for a week with us in the South Island. We will then hopefully spend another two weeks travelling around and by that time we hope to have jobs to go to, most likely in Auckland. So that should be our life for the next month or so. Sounds pretty good eh? The novelty of Furneaux is beginning to wear a little thin, although the one-legged weka bird (nicknamed Gimpy) still does provide us with quite a few laughs!
It is getting rather chilly here now so I may retire back to the bar to post this on the weblog and warm my feet by the fire!
Hope you enjoy the couple of new photos. Love and missing-you type thoughts to all.
As for what we have been up to in the last couple of weeks, it doesn’t really consist of much other than housekeeping outside of our days off. Due to various staff leaving and arriving, I have been moved from the bar and onto housekeeping full-time last week and this (mainly because I complain the least). This is fine as it means I work with Nick and have the evenings free, but does mean that I have to contend with dirty toilets, soaking and washing the kitchen’s repulsive tea towels, and removing people’s used dental floss from their used tea cups. What larks, Pip!
Enough of whingeing, I must instead concentrate on eulogising the fantastic meal we had on our days off last week. We went for a couple of nights in Nelson, which is really a lovely town, and our boss recommended that we go to this “world class” seafood restaurant called the Boat Shed for a meal, which we duly did. Hopefully there will be a photo thereof on the weblog by the time you are all reading this, but it is built out over the sea (an old boat shed, funnily enough) and the legs are covered in oysters and mussels and other various unidentified shell-dwelling creatures. We were seated out on the balcony for our meal and so during the course of the evening were able to watch a beautiful sunset over the water, as the sun descended behind the row of kauri pines growing on a small spit of land opposite the restaurant, turning the sea and the sky a fantastic shade of pink. As for the food, we ate a huge mixed platters to start, with green-lipped mussels, proscuitto ham, venison salami, cured tuna, smoked chilli salmon, gravadlax, cured swordfish tails, and bruschetta. Nick then had moules-frites as his main and I had a fantastic dish of gnocchi with a whole crab, green-lipped mussels, oysters, and king prawns. That, all together with a bottle of 2002 Marlborough Chardonnay, then coffee and port to finish, we were happy chappies by the time we went back to our campervan that night!
The rest of our time in Nelson was spent wandering around the shops, seeing the sights (including full-on culture walking around a cathedral) going for lots of morning/afternoon/anytime tea and cake, and generally enjoying all that civilised conurbations have to offer! A wonderfully relaxed two days, just great to get away from the same old sights, sounds, smells (toilets and burning rubbish) and people here at Furneaux. Not that we don’t enjoy it here but it takes a certain type of person to stay in the same 3 hectares of land and not start to go mad after a couple of weeks!
What other news? I can’t honestly think of very much at all. We have told the boss that our last working day here will be the 5th of March, so we will depart on the 6th and spend a couple of days in Picton (or it’s surroundings as Picton itself is pretty quiet), until friends of ours from Australia (but known to us from the UK), Beth and Mat arrive for a week with us in the South Island. We will then hopefully spend another two weeks travelling around and by that time we hope to have jobs to go to, most likely in Auckland. So that should be our life for the next month or so. Sounds pretty good eh? The novelty of Furneaux is beginning to wear a little thin, although the one-legged weka bird (nicknamed Gimpy) still does provide us with quite a few laughs!
It is getting rather chilly here now so I may retire back to the bar to post this on the weblog and warm my feet by the fire!
Hope you enjoy the couple of new photos. Love and missing-you type thoughts to all.
Sunday, February 12
Hi y'all!
Just a quickie to say what we have been up to in the last few days. The weather has not been too great recently (just to make those of you in Britain feel slightly better), but we did have one good day in our two days off. So on that day, we managed to do the 'Waterfall Walk' from the Lodge. It's an hour in total, uphill to the waterfall and then back down the same path. Quite a narrow path though, through otherwise untouched rainforest, and as we went the day after some rainfall, it felt pretty tropical. Although the waterfall is pretty much an overzealous trickle, it's very attractive, with the 'cliff' that the water falls down covered in moss and ferns, and it's all very secluded and peaceful. Lovely.
I swam back from work to place where we stay the night before last as well, about which I felt very smug. Most of the other staff here thought that it was a silly idea and that we wouldn't enjoy it at all, but Ruth (another English staff member) and I went for it and felt great afterwards. Although the water didn't feel cold at the time, my fingernails were an interesting neon blue colour when I emerged from the water... After Ruth and I had swum, we inspired a whole group of the other staff, including Nick, to run off the end of the jetty and also go for a bit of a swim. So we then all rewarded ourselves for our exertions by drinking copious amounts of wine and cocktails and whisky that night with the whole lodge staff crew, as a farewell to Ruth.
Ruth and I also kayaked back to our accommodation the night before our swim, which was good fun. Nick and I had to paddle the kayaks back the next day, and I got very excited when I saw a stingray! Pretty cool. There are loads of green-lipped mussels in the water too, and sea urchins, and I managed (almost capsizing myself in the process) to get myself a beautiful sea urchin shell.
So that was the major excitement of the last week. We are back to work now, and I am anticipating perhaps another couple of 12- or 14-hour shifts this week... I ended up on two days this week doing a full day's housekeeping with Nick and Ruth and then a five-hour shift on the bar straight afterward. Fun. Thinking of the money though! And the possible skiing...
Hope you like the new photos.
Lots of love to all.
Vic and Nick.
Just a quickie to say what we have been up to in the last few days. The weather has not been too great recently (just to make those of you in Britain feel slightly better), but we did have one good day in our two days off. So on that day, we managed to do the 'Waterfall Walk' from the Lodge. It's an hour in total, uphill to the waterfall and then back down the same path. Quite a narrow path though, through otherwise untouched rainforest, and as we went the day after some rainfall, it felt pretty tropical. Although the waterfall is pretty much an overzealous trickle, it's very attractive, with the 'cliff' that the water falls down covered in moss and ferns, and it's all very secluded and peaceful. Lovely.
I swam back from work to place where we stay the night before last as well, about which I felt very smug. Most of the other staff here thought that it was a silly idea and that we wouldn't enjoy it at all, but Ruth (another English staff member) and I went for it and felt great afterwards. Although the water didn't feel cold at the time, my fingernails were an interesting neon blue colour when I emerged from the water... After Ruth and I had swum, we inspired a whole group of the other staff, including Nick, to run off the end of the jetty and also go for a bit of a swim. So we then all rewarded ourselves for our exertions by drinking copious amounts of wine and cocktails and whisky that night with the whole lodge staff crew, as a farewell to Ruth.
Ruth and I also kayaked back to our accommodation the night before our swim, which was good fun. Nick and I had to paddle the kayaks back the next day, and I got very excited when I saw a stingray! Pretty cool. There are loads of green-lipped mussels in the water too, and sea urchins, and I managed (almost capsizing myself in the process) to get myself a beautiful sea urchin shell.
So that was the major excitement of the last week. We are back to work now, and I am anticipating perhaps another couple of 12- or 14-hour shifts this week... I ended up on two days this week doing a full day's housekeeping with Nick and Ruth and then a five-hour shift on the bar straight afterward. Fun. Thinking of the money though! And the possible skiing...
Hope you like the new photos.
Lots of love to all.
Vic and Nick.
Friday, February 3
Hi there y'all!
Just to let you all know that we commandeered the guy who was being employed to fix the lodge's computers to put our one on the wireless network, and after he'd spent about an hour playing with it and fixing all the bugs, we can now use our own computer to e-mail. (We are keeping this quiet from the boss, who had evidently just paid for our computer to be fixed...) Thus, you all might be much more likely to get decent replies to any letters you might want to write to us...
Nick and I have just had our first couple of days off, and went back to the real world for a night in the Horny Ox. Quite a shock to see cars again actually! We are popular now as we have returned with two casks of wine, loads of fresh fruit, and new books to read! And Nick and I also spent a vast sum of money on a decent pair of walking shoes each, so on our next days off we can go and sample the joys of the Queen Charlotte track (on which the hotel is situated) - and the muffins from the wood-burning stove of the next hotel round!
We have a wedding here tomorrow night, so it's all systems go with a marquee being erected, the grass being mown, and all rooms being cleaned and prepared for a big influx of guests. Nick is really getting into his housekeeping, and even had a conversation with a fellow housekeeper last night about the relative joys of cleaning the shower screens versus using meths on the chrome fittings versus bed-making and the production of cracking hospital corners. I am sticking to the bar and conversations with one of the waitresses about how good the crema on my espressos is (excellent).
Right, it's 11.15 which means that it's lunch in 15 minutes (yes, really) and so I will be off to get changed for work.
Hope you enjoy the photos - I think we can forget about the old blog now and I will soon put the Oz photos on here so you can finally see them!
Lots of love, V.
Just to let you all know that we commandeered the guy who was being employed to fix the lodge's computers to put our one on the wireless network, and after he'd spent about an hour playing with it and fixing all the bugs, we can now use our own computer to e-mail. (We are keeping this quiet from the boss, who had evidently just paid for our computer to be fixed...) Thus, you all might be much more likely to get decent replies to any letters you might want to write to us...
Nick and I have just had our first couple of days off, and went back to the real world for a night in the Horny Ox. Quite a shock to see cars again actually! We are popular now as we have returned with two casks of wine, loads of fresh fruit, and new books to read! And Nick and I also spent a vast sum of money on a decent pair of walking shoes each, so on our next days off we can go and sample the joys of the Queen Charlotte track (on which the hotel is situated) - and the muffins from the wood-burning stove of the next hotel round!
We have a wedding here tomorrow night, so it's all systems go with a marquee being erected, the grass being mown, and all rooms being cleaned and prepared for a big influx of guests. Nick is really getting into his housekeeping, and even had a conversation with a fellow housekeeper last night about the relative joys of cleaning the shower screens versus using meths on the chrome fittings versus bed-making and the production of cracking hospital corners. I am sticking to the bar and conversations with one of the waitresses about how good the crema on my espressos is (excellent).
Right, it's 11.15 which means that it's lunch in 15 minutes (yes, really) and so I will be off to get changed for work.
Hope you enjoy the photos - I think we can forget about the old blog now and I will soon put the Oz photos on here so you can finally see them!
Lots of love, V.
Thursday, February 2
Hi guys!
We have finally got a new weblog and hopefully this one will function slightly better than the last… Hope you are all well at home? Now I look forward to loads of letters from you all telling us how fantastic we both look in our photos and how wonderful our campervan is (which we obviously know already).
So, since the last update… We spent quite a few days in the Hawke’s Bay area, looking for work and making the most of a lovely car park with river access for washing! We finally got a job offer and I think I might have mentioned it in my last letter. So on Saturday last week we made our way across the hills (and they were big hills) to a place called Waiouru. The road there was really quite spectacular, in more ways than one. Amazing views all the way, huge hills and beautiful valleys, but a total of 36km of gravel road was pretty exhausting. Poor little van! We stayed the night just off the road in the middle of nowhere, about 30km in either direction to the nearest house. Wow. So after the poor little van had struggled up the hills, down the valleys and over the gravel, we arrived in Waiouru. Wow, it’s pretty remote. 816m above sea level and with literally 3 restaurants, 2 shops, a petrol station, an army museum, and an army training camp. And fortunately, one internet café. We stupidly arrived several hours before our friend Jen was due to arrive on her coach, and so after exploring the aforementioned delights of Waiouru (which took about fifteen minutes, including the time taken to brush our teeth in the museum toilets), we sat in the van and waited.
Jen finally arrived and we went off for a few days exploring around the southern part of the north island. We got some amazing views of a huge mountain, the name of which has escaped both Nick and I at the moment. We spent a couple of nights at campsites and also had a night right next to a dairy farm - fascinating smell… Cow dung and off milk together… Jen seemed to have had a great time, it being her first ever camping experience. Despite having a tent, it was only used for one night, with tent-putting-up being restricted on other nights by lack of space, low temperatures, and rain. So we tested the campervan’s capacity - it can sleep three, but as the mattress is slightly too small for the bad area, one person ends up sleeping wedged down the side… A few sleepless nights did result. However, we had a good time, saw some great scenery, and had a day in Palmerston North, where Jen will be starting work in a week or so. It has been referred to as the armpit of NZ, but we thought it was quite alright, much to Jen’s relief.
We arrived into Wellington and spent pretty much all of the few hours we had there stuck in the tourist information office, as we were served by probably the least experienced girl in there, who overcharged us for the ferry and then had to spend ages refunding us. But we made it onto the ferry, and the ferry made it to Picton, through the wind and the rain (photo taking on entry to the Marlborough Sounds was pretty tricky, as my hand kept being buffeted and I kept getting photos of the sky). We arrived in the South Island to horizontal rain and low temperatures, but made it to a campsite and the rain even had the decency to stop for the evening. And we managed to stay at a campsite with a Jacuzzi, so indulged ourselves, all three of us currently craving a bath!
And then on Thursday morning we made our way through the Marlborough Sounds again to Furneaux Lodge. Not a very inspiring day for the scenery, as it was a bit grey and cloudy, but that was all made up for when we saw a school of dolphins. Wow. I had seen on the website of the resort that they sometimes have dolphins in the bay, and was so excited by the idea of seeing some, and then was really pretty happy when we saw some on the way! Amazing!
So we are now working at Furneaux Lodge (see the amazing views on the webpage: www.furneaux.co.nz). The place is pretty relaxed and it has so far been up to us to ask what to do rather than being ordered around, but I think once we’ve settled in and got used to the boss’ approach we’ll be pretty happy here. We have said we’ll probably stay here for around a month, and then we’ll probably spend another couple of weeks seeing the South Island and then head on up to Auckland for work (assuming we’ve got some by then of course). At the moment, I am doing a combination of bar work and housekeeping (all physios amongst you will appreciate the trauma for me of having to do multiple hospital corners), and Nick is doing a bit of housekeeping as well as having been given the task of redesigning the gardens. Just as well we brought the computer! Everyone seems friendly, and loads of staff are leaving tomorrow so we are on full shift patterns as of tomorrow (although it’s 9.30pm on Sunday and we still have no rosta - this is what I mean about the boss’ laid-back approach). I have today mastered the art of milk-frothing, and have made some spectacular lattes and cappuccinos.
I am now going to go back to watching the tennis on the projector screen they have set up in the bar here, after going to see if the elusive rosta has appeared… Nick and I will be annoyed if we have tomorrow off, as we could have left on the boat tonight. Hope all is well at home. Yet again I will mention the weather - sunny and beautiful again today…
Lots of love to everyone, Vic and Nick.
We have finally got a new weblog and hopefully this one will function slightly better than the last… Hope you are all well at home? Now I look forward to loads of letters from you all telling us how fantastic we both look in our photos and how wonderful our campervan is (which we obviously know already).
So, since the last update… We spent quite a few days in the Hawke’s Bay area, looking for work and making the most of a lovely car park with river access for washing! We finally got a job offer and I think I might have mentioned it in my last letter. So on Saturday last week we made our way across the hills (and they were big hills) to a place called Waiouru. The road there was really quite spectacular, in more ways than one. Amazing views all the way, huge hills and beautiful valleys, but a total of 36km of gravel road was pretty exhausting. Poor little van! We stayed the night just off the road in the middle of nowhere, about 30km in either direction to the nearest house. Wow. So after the poor little van had struggled up the hills, down the valleys and over the gravel, we arrived in Waiouru. Wow, it’s pretty remote. 816m above sea level and with literally 3 restaurants, 2 shops, a petrol station, an army museum, and an army training camp. And fortunately, one internet café. We stupidly arrived several hours before our friend Jen was due to arrive on her coach, and so after exploring the aforementioned delights of Waiouru (which took about fifteen minutes, including the time taken to brush our teeth in the museum toilets), we sat in the van and waited.
Jen finally arrived and we went off for a few days exploring around the southern part of the north island. We got some amazing views of a huge mountain, the name of which has escaped both Nick and I at the moment. We spent a couple of nights at campsites and also had a night right next to a dairy farm - fascinating smell… Cow dung and off milk together… Jen seemed to have had a great time, it being her first ever camping experience. Despite having a tent, it was only used for one night, with tent-putting-up being restricted on other nights by lack of space, low temperatures, and rain. So we tested the campervan’s capacity - it can sleep three, but as the mattress is slightly too small for the bad area, one person ends up sleeping wedged down the side… A few sleepless nights did result. However, we had a good time, saw some great scenery, and had a day in Palmerston North, where Jen will be starting work in a week or so. It has been referred to as the armpit of NZ, but we thought it was quite alright, much to Jen’s relief.
We arrived into Wellington and spent pretty much all of the few hours we had there stuck in the tourist information office, as we were served by probably the least experienced girl in there, who overcharged us for the ferry and then had to spend ages refunding us. But we made it onto the ferry, and the ferry made it to Picton, through the wind and the rain (photo taking on entry to the Marlborough Sounds was pretty tricky, as my hand kept being buffeted and I kept getting photos of the sky). We arrived in the South Island to horizontal rain and low temperatures, but made it to a campsite and the rain even had the decency to stop for the evening. And we managed to stay at a campsite with a Jacuzzi, so indulged ourselves, all three of us currently craving a bath!
And then on Thursday morning we made our way through the Marlborough Sounds again to Furneaux Lodge. Not a very inspiring day for the scenery, as it was a bit grey and cloudy, but that was all made up for when we saw a school of dolphins. Wow. I had seen on the website of the resort that they sometimes have dolphins in the bay, and was so excited by the idea of seeing some, and then was really pretty happy when we saw some on the way! Amazing!
So we are now working at Furneaux Lodge (see the amazing views on the webpage: www.furneaux.co.nz). The place is pretty relaxed and it has so far been up to us to ask what to do rather than being ordered around, but I think once we’ve settled in and got used to the boss’ approach we’ll be pretty happy here. We have said we’ll probably stay here for around a month, and then we’ll probably spend another couple of weeks seeing the South Island and then head on up to Auckland for work (assuming we’ve got some by then of course). At the moment, I am doing a combination of bar work and housekeeping (all physios amongst you will appreciate the trauma for me of having to do multiple hospital corners), and Nick is doing a bit of housekeeping as well as having been given the task of redesigning the gardens. Just as well we brought the computer! Everyone seems friendly, and loads of staff are leaving tomorrow so we are on full shift patterns as of tomorrow (although it’s 9.30pm on Sunday and we still have no rosta - this is what I mean about the boss’ laid-back approach). I have today mastered the art of milk-frothing, and have made some spectacular lattes and cappuccinos.
I am now going to go back to watching the tennis on the projector screen they have set up in the bar here, after going to see if the elusive rosta has appeared… Nick and I will be annoyed if we have tomorrow off, as we could have left on the boat tonight. Hope all is well at home. Yet again I will mention the weather - sunny and beautiful again today…
Lots of love to everyone, Vic and Nick.
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