Queenstown

Now seasoned pros, we stole another shower on the way back through Te Anau (thank you Te Anau Holiday Park), then headed to Queenstown where we spent a marvellous few days enjoying the buzz, the sunshine and the views from the top of the gondola. We also stayed in a campsite in town rather than a DOC site for the first time since coming to NZ, with the sole purpose of allowing us to go out into town in the evening for some drinks. This we did, and we had an awesome night bar-hopping and spending a lot of our night feeling smug (/devastated) that we are no-longer 21 like the most of the population (and awesome hangovers to match in the morning). 

We also spent a lot of our time luging. For those of you who haven’t been to Queenstown, this is the only organised thing available to people visiting that does not require you to take out a loan (total over-exaggeration, but we’re trying to last a year, so £100 to go canyoning is not really an option). So we did it 7 times. You basically sit in a plastic sledge on wheels and go down a hill. The fun part is that you can go as slow or as fast as you like, so on one track you have 10 year olds tootling at 2mph, and groups of men hooning it down at break-neck speed. Stick Brodie at the top end of the spectrum and me not far behind, and you have apparently hours of (relatively) cheap fun!

Three waterfalls, a Sound (that’s actually a Fjord)…and a flat battery

So after Dunedin we meandered down to the Catlins where we spent a glorious night parked up on a heavenly beach, followed by a day of exploring the area’s treasures. This is a simply stunning area on the South coast with incredible empty beaches, lined with thick forest. We spent the whole time down there following our noses and exploring tourist routes and footpaths, and we found some gems. Amongst others…Parakaunui Falls, Parakaunui beach and Makai Falls. 

From here we made the long drive towards Milford Sound. Milford Sound was phenomenal. When you get there you can choose from a selection of different trip providers. We of course picked ours because they gave you free fish and chips on board, and we’d convinced the sales person to throw in a free coffee. Result. The weather was pretty overcast, and even rainy on the way back but it was still an incredible spectacle, and the clouds made it quite eerie!

Mirror lakes

Seal rock

Brodie not quite getting the selfie!

Unfortunately our day took a turn for the worse when we returned to the van to find the battery was dead. Whilst rather annoying this was easily remedied by paying a guy from the café to jump start it, however the downside of this was that we then couldn’t stop for our much-needed petrol as we couldn’t turn the engine off, so had to cruise on fumes on a 7km detour down a little gravel track where we had to pay double the amount to an old local to fill up our van enough to get us back to civilisation. The up-side was that the 14km return detour led us to an incredible waterfall that just blew the other two out of the water! If it were in England people would flock for miles around to see it, but in New Zealand you have to make an unplanned detour down a forgotten track to reveal such a wonder. I bloody love NZ!

Albatrosses

After our late-night shenanigans at the rugby we ended up parking the van in a random carpark on the Otago Peninsula overnight. So imagine our delight to wake up to a beautiful view of the estuary. I don’t need to say much about today apart from it’s been AWESOME. We saw Albatrosses, fur seals and a baby penguin!

Because they are so awesome, here are some photos and some facts about Royal Albatrosses-

Bull Kelp from the cliffs-it was forming such incredible patterns!

A baby Albatross-the first day alone from its Mum!

View looking back over the peninsula

Fur seals

A baby penguin! (Look closely!)

Albatrosses! 

·         The live a looooong time and the oldest on record is still alive and still breeding at 64

·        They have a 3m wingspan

·         Once they’ve hatched, they rapidly grow so big that they outweigh their parents. Some can reach 13kg, and in contrast the adult parents may drop to 5kg by the time the fledglings leave their nest! That’s a big baby!

·         Once the fledgling takes off for the first time, their feet don’t touch the ground for the next 5 years. In this time they remain at sea feeding and sleeping and have been recorded to have flown from NZ to Argentina, a whopping 9,000 miles in 9 months!!

·         They return to the same nesting place where they themselves hatched. The male chooses the spot, but if the female disapproves she will move it! Once mature, each breeding pair will lay an egg every other year.

·         Adult breeding pairs recognise their own nesting site and their own mate, but do not recognise their offspring. This is particularly useful to breeders who occasionally swap offspring if one breeding pair is struggling to look after theirs. It also means that parents often mate with their siblings or offspring, but this doesn’t seem to have a detrimental effect on their gene-pool or on any offspring produced as a result.

·         They have 4 joints in their wings

·         Newly hatched nestlings aren’t waterproof

·         They have the second-largest eggs of any bird after the ostrich (followed closely by the kiwi)

·         And if you’ve made it this far without falling asleep, my favourite fact is that they drink only salt water, and we all know that too much salt isn’t good for you. So…to deal with this they have salt glands at the top of their beak to filter out the salt which then drips of the end of their beak continuously in a highly-concentrated salt solution. Because of this, it has long been said by locals that Albatrosses are seen to be crying as they do not like being on land (in actual fact they ‘cry’ at sea too, but we won’t tell the locals that).

And that’s all we can remember for now.

Off we go!

So we picked up our lovely Camper (Edmund) and off we set on our New Zealand adventure. It is at this point that we lost all internet and all of our devices died simultaneously, so apologies for the lack of posting, and I’m not going to bore you with the details, but you can have a summary of what we’ve been up to and some pictures instead.

Firstly we went off exploring the Bank Peninsula-the remnants of a volcano and a simply beautiful drive-I’d definitely recommend it.

You've got to love a country that has a free box of toys on the beach and trusts that no-one will steal it! 

Day two we headed to Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki (magical) where we had a little swim in the crystal-clear water underneath a backdrop of snow-tipped mountains. We then drove to Oamaru, a town famed for its smart Victorian buildings and little penguin night-visitors. We staked out the beach until dark, but only one tiny penguin in the murky dusk did we spy. He was worth it though! 

Day three we drove to Dunedin and enjoyed wondering around the centre. Imagine our shock when we travel to the other side of the world and stumble across an international Bagpipe competition!! There must easily have been 6 different groups (what do you call a group of bagpipers?!...a Whine of Bagpipers? An Annoyance of Bagpipers?) all competing very seriously. It was actually maddeningly enjoyable.

In the evening, we went to the Highlanders vs Christchurch Crusaders Rugby match. For those of you like myself who don’t know much about New Zealand Rugby, this is BIG. It’s a bit like Liverpool playing Man U, but rather than being supported by drunken northern Chavs (am I allowed to say that?) you have drunken Maoris who are a arguably more scary, but less annoying. So anyway, we happened to be in town, so we got ourselves some tickets (I say ‘happened’, this was actually part of a big Master Plan cooked up in Christchurch). Brodie was almost peeing himself with excitement and I have to say I was rather excited too! We backed the home team (Highlanders) for fear of getting beaten to a pulp by local beer-wielding Kiwis, but alas we lost. Still it was good fun! 

Christchurch

We’re in New Zealand! (And have been for 5 days but this has been coupled with no internet and no charger so apologies for the absence!)

So we said our sad goodbyes to Bro’s family in Melbourne after a frankly awesome few weeks.

After a flawless journey (omitting the part where we spent the three-hour plane ride having our chairs kicked continuously by a couple of overactive and falsetto two-year old twins (Mum, I have renewed respect!) in which my coping strategy was to imagine I was sat in one of those vibrating chairs they have in Sarah Hodge which was surprisingly successful) we arrived in the very sunny Christchurch, congratulating ourselves on deciding to travel rather than procreate.

Having readily befriended 3 Kiwis (a little old lady and two very helpful schoolboys) on the bus, we arrived at our Air BnB by late afternoon, having already made up our minds that Kiwis are simply lovely. It’s very surreal arriving somewhere that you’ve always regarded as being in the far corner of the world in less time than it would take you to get from London to Newcastle. 

We arrived early evening so headed off into town to find some food, and have a look around. I don’t think either of us were quite prepared for post-earthquake Christchurch. We’d been told the centre of town had been pretty much flattened, but seriously it has been totally flattened. 

A friend of our hosts kindly offered us a lift into the centre as he was heading that way, and I’d fleetingly had the thought in the car that we must be passing through some out-of-town regeneration project, when he announced that we were there. He dropped us off right next to the Cathedral which Claire had told me was (and Bro remembered it to be) a beautiful old building in the middle of a handsome square. It is now a shell of rubble, half propped up by metal scaffolds, and resembling something you see on the news from a warzone (apologies, photos are only on my phone which has been dead for a few days). We found it quite surprising that this icon of the city was still left in such a state of disrepair, when clearly it represents the heart of the city. But talking to locals, it turns out there is a huge conflict between the people of Christchurch who largely want to try to restore what is still there to its original glory, and the Government, who want to demolish it and rebuild it. So despite it being 4 years after the earthquake, it still stands at stalemate and consequently in ruin.

Fairly shocked, and appropriately humbled, we spent the next couple of hours wandering the streets of the centre just observing, open-mouthed. I was observing with fresh eyes, but Bro had been there 10 years before so was perhaps even more shocked at the change. It’s now like a series of building sites and carparks, jumbled together with piles of rubble and eerily boarded up buildings.

The good news is that the suburbs are far less affected so the city is still thriving despite the crater in its centre, and you can already see something new and exciting emerging from the ruins of this old town. I always mock Brodie for using this word, but walking around there’s a weird kind of juxtaposition between the devastating ruins of buildings, nestled between super smart new buildings with pristine driveways and elegant shop-fronts. There are also an eclectic handful of bars and eateries that have started cropping up-some in newbuilds, but most of them making use of buildings that are still usable which gives them a quirky appeal and a lot of character.

Some beautiful graffiti has cropped up here and there, a lot of which reminded me of parts of Bristol, and people have made use of some spaces for pop-up shops and communal grounds which reminded me of some of the quirky parts of London that I love. Apparently they’ve also got big plans for the centre, and building work has already started, so I’m excited about what it will become, and perhaps in 10 years we’ll go back and I’m sure we’ll see a very different Christchurch. 

Boarding passes printed...

OK, so I've never written a blog before and it feels a little weird writing a message to the internet when you have no idea who's going to end up reading it, but here goes! The idea is I will be plonking my ramblings on here, instead of splurging my travelling excitement all over facebook, and annoying all you lovely folk back home. I guess it means that if you want to know what we're up to you can, and if not, at least I'm not rubbing it in your face!

So, if it's only mum that reads this...Hi Mum! (love you zillions and miss you already even though you're sat in front of me)...and if anyone else is there too...

                                                                       ....HELLO AND WELCOME TO MY BLOG!

PS I am aware my blog name reminds some people of laxatives (thanks for the heads up Dad!), but I am hoping this is only relevant to people over the age of 40 and to be honest, it took me and a team of about 20 people to come up with the name, so it's sticking.

Wedding of dreams!

Wedding certificates -1
Thunderstorms -1
Hand-made name cards -60
Smiley happy faces -60
Glasses of champers -1 too many

Picture the most perfect couple you can think of, the most perfect venue, and the most perfect weather, and stick them in a big mixing pot brimming with family, friends and smiles, and you have Adam and Bella's wedding. It was simply glorious!

We'd spent the week nervously updating the weather forecast as from about Tuesday onward it had been threatening thunderstorms all day on Saturday...not ideal for a wedding planned entirely for the outdoors. But they say the sun shines on the righteous, and of course the storms came early and we all rejoiced in the rain on Friday, ready for a simply fabulous day of sunshine on Saturday!

The morning was spent in a whirlwind of preparation- feeding people, making place tags (a team-effort of gargantuan proportions), curling hair, avoiding Angus's ambushes, enjoying the sunshine, and in Bro's case, finding hiding places where he could put the finishing touches on his Best Man speech without getting tickled by his excited niece and nephew.

The Artistic Department of Hepburn Springs...

Last minute speech-writing...

And finally the ceremony started at 5pm. It was elegant, relaxed and beautifully personal. Bella was simply stunning, and she and Adam radiated happiness throughout.

This was followed by a frenzy of champers, chattering, incredible food (eaten under a canopy of trees, like some sort of magical fairyland), speeches (Bro's went down a storm!) and of course hours of crazy dancing! An awesome day on all accounts, and now I can't believe it's all over!!

Unfortunately I have a woeful lack of photos, due to filming the ceremony and then discovering the champagne and forgetting about all else, so you'll have to make do with these from before the wedding, and perhaps some might appear here from the lovely (and very talented) Frances some time soon!

Our stunning bride-to-be on the morning of the wedding...

Celebrant, Ad (looking very dapper) and Bro before the ceremony

Bella and Daddy Ross (courtesy of Jane)

Angus sporting Cheri's hat, and pulling it off wonderfully

And of course the token drunk eyes photo, courtesy of Too Much Champagne...

Congratulations MR AND MRS LEA, and thanks for letting me be part of your magical day! xxx