Continuing on from the Otago Peninsula we traversed the Catlins Coast. Anywhere else in the world and this would be stunning with an abundance of beaches, waterfalls, wildlife and walks (several of the best were closed for “Lambing”) but after already seeing so much natural beauty on this island it kind of paled in significance. Due to time constraints we also rushed through here ticking off the attractions yank style and not giving much time to appreciate them. The miserable weather didn’t help much either. Worth a mention though are the Cathedral Caves, tall narrow caves in the cliff face…
Returning back to the sea to tour around the east and south coasts of the south island we took in Oamaru and Mauraki with their penguin and fur seal colonies briefly stopping to see the bizarre Mauraki Boulders. A collection of almost perfectly spherical boulders lying on the beach. We covered quite a lot of ground in this region, often camping beside the sea, however the true highlight was the Otago Peninsular. A particularly stunning outcrop of land. One side has still calm waters throughout the harbour, the other has long sandy beaches, while the interior is blessed with deep…
Moving onwards towards Mount Cook, we spent the night at the side of the spectacular Lake Pukaki. Not only was the camping was free, but we had one of the best views in New Zealand outside our “room”. I was hoping to wake up to sunrise over the opaque blue lake with snow capped mountains in the distance. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be as the wind became so strong over night rocking the van so much that we had to retreat behind the trees at about 2 am. Taking the winding road up to Mount Cook the weather deteriorated. With…
Hooray for Virgin Atlantic! We missed our original flights from Sydney to Christchurch and as a result Air New Zealand kindly cancelled all of our subsequent flights with them. Visiting Virgin Atlantic (our Round the World ticket issuer) in Sydney to see what they could do about reinstating our cancelled tickets, they not only reinstated our cancelled tickets and changed the dates to suit but actually provided us with a replacement flight from Sydney to Christchurch for the one we had missed. All free of charge. Absolute legends! The serving of frozen fruit, broken entertainment system and rude hostesses on…
It took me 8 weeks, but I came to the conclusion that Australia is rather large (much like the road trains, a tenuous link but I wanted to include that photo). Kazakhstan is big, India is Big, Mongolia is big, I know, I’ve driven across all of them. Yet they are mere minions compared to Australia. All bar one of my posts about Australia have been about specific places or events. I’ve given very little wordage to life on the road in between. And trust me, there was a lot of road. We covered over 13,000 km in two months…
It seems so long ago and quite irrelevant now but our week in Sydney before moving onto New Zealand still deserves a mention. We arrived back in Sydney a day before Dan and Holly who’d returned to the UK for 3 weeks. Once again they graciously put us up / put up with us for over a week while we tried to sell Matilda, our trusty camper van. Although she’d treated us well for some 11,000 km, you may recall she gave us problems leading up and during our time in Melbourne. I’d managed to fix that but she was…
The attentive amongst you will know that I’m way behind with this blog. Something to do with enjoying myself too much to sit down and write. Either that or laziness. When I do something though, I do like to do it properly, and for my sake as much as yours I am trying to make this blog as complete as I can and that includes trying to keep it in chronological order. That said, something happened to me a few days ago that I just have to share with you ahead of time, so bear with me as we jump…
Any of you recognise these two? I used to work with both of these chaps in Madrid. Michael moved back to Australia about 4 years ago and Antoon, by another coincidence of timing, was visiting from Holland. They were waiting on Willem, another ex-colleague who was going to join them on a road trip up the east coast. Michael was kind enough to put us up, prepare a multitude of steak on the barbie and show us round town on the Saturday evening. On top of that, having just about made it to their (very nice) house in a rather…