avelog

Four days into New Zealand and we have yet to see the sun! Fortunately, it hasn’t been raining either. After splurging on hostels our first two nights here, we’ve opted for tent sites the past two, with mixed results. Both the Rolleston YHA hostel and YMCA hostel in Christchurch seemed to be filled with fairly unfriendly if not hostile people, although we managed to strike up some conversation during breakfast of the second day. We decided to rent a car from Christchurch to Queenstown since it will allow us to see and do much more, after which we have a short break with two multi-day hikes and another, much cheaper car rental from Queenstown to Auckland. We immediately took the car over to the Christchurch gondola for a ride up, a walkabout at the lookout complex above, and a tour through the Heritage Time Tunnel, within which they seem to have spent all their funds on a slick, if not historically accurate, film presentation rather than on maintaining the lights, sounds, and other gadgets.

Camping in a holiday park our third night provided slightly better company and much cheaper accomodation. Holiday parks in this corner of the world involve an often crowded and stark campground with a small kitchen and bathrooms for sharing. Our fourth night, spent tenting at a farm hostel in Akaroa, turned out to be much more enjoyable, and we spent part of the evening chatting with those guests who were staying in the warmer main building. Our tent site is the highest of a series of sites on the side of a steep hill. We both managed to get through the first night without stepping out of the tent in the dark and rolling all the way down to the bottom.

It’s been fairly cold in New Zealand, with temperatures unlikely to have exceeded twenty degrees at any point, and dropping to less than ten or five at night. I understand from fellow travellers that we can expect the southern South Island to be a fair amount colder at that. They seem to have had a very cold summer this year in New Zealand, whereas the Gold Coast of Australia, where Liz spent the summer, saw some of the hottest and sunniest months on record.

We had our first real (read anxiety-filled) adventure yesterday. Having not yet adjusted ourselves to the realities of driving in New Zealand, we hadn’t adjusted our sense of what constitutes a road. What appeared on the map in the guidebook to be a paved and fairly well-used road turned out to be a harrowing and wild hour of narrower-than-one-lane dirt track winding entirely along cliff-sides with hundreds-of-meters drop on one side and rock wall on the other. By the time we realized where we were, we had committed ourselves, there being nowhere to turn around and a large tractor blocking our retreat. Definitely the most exciting driving I’ve ever done, and I’m very thankful that our brand spanking new set of tires on the rental car didn’t blow out at an inconvenient time. Thankfully we simply emerged a little dusty at the other end. I’m also quite thankful there were no other stupid tourists lost and driving the other direction along the same stretch of dirt track. The tractor turned out to be the only vehicle we encountered, and its operator kindly drove a few feet up a hill to let us past.

We’re planning on spending another night tenting at the farm hostel here in Akaroa before heading off, possibly back to Christchurch to meet up with Liz’s friend, or south down the coast towards Dunedin.

Liz and I have arrived safely in Christchurch, having flown in on Jetstar from the Gold Coast. We got in at midnight to the quiet YHA hostel on the edge of the big park here, and found that nobody there would talk to us. The next morning, we immediately hiked over to the YMCA hostel, which had much nicer facilities and a friendlier crowd. We then spent the day trying to get food sorted out, having a walk through the gorgeous neighbouring park, discovering new and funny little birds, and having a jaunt through the Christchurch Art Gallery.

I pretty sure that we’ve decided to rent a car down to Queenstown so that we can see everything that we’d like. The rental should only be slightly more than $30 per day (cars are apparently dirt cheap here), but gas is upwards of $1.50 per litre (should be able to drink it at that price, feel bad burning it).

Hopefully we’ll have more reliable access to the internet and I’ll be able to get some more photos up. You may have noticed that I’ve uploaded 8 photos from our Gold Coast adventures to the Flickr site.

We had a nice day-trip down to Byron Bay the third day I was there, and spent the day sunning ourselves on the beach, frolicking in the ocean, and doing a bit of shopping in town. Byron Bay’s pretty touristy, but much less tacky than Surfer’s Paradise and the rest of the Gold Coast area. The first four pics above are from our walk up to the lighthouse in Byron Bay, from which we saw some dolphins dancing about and a couple of turtles floating by the cliffs. We woke early for the sunrise the next morning down at the beach near the grandparents’ place on the Gold Coast, followed by a drive up inland to Springbrook falls for a couple of short hikes out to lookouts. The drive up was quite exciting, both because of the incredible winding of the narrow road, and the proliferation of wallabies crossing in front of us. Fortunately, we managed to avoid hitting any.

Well, we’re off again to do some more adventuring around Christchurch before we head south to Dunedin!

Having secretly rented a car, Liz picked me up from the airport soaked in glorious sunshine yesterday afternoon. A walk down to the beach was in order upon arrival at her grandparents’ home, followed by a few beers by the backyard pool as dusk approached. I managed to last until almost ten o’clock local before finally succumbing to the effects of 25 hours of travel and almost 45 hours without real sleep. I’m sure that I wasn’t making much sense in the final hours before I hit the sack.

We have a few days of rest, relaxation, and a bit of shopping here in on the Gold Coast before we fly over to Christchurch, New Zealand on Tuesday.

I’m at Sydney Kingsford waiting for my flight up to Gold Coast, so I payed the $2 for 10 minutes at this pretty dumb internet kiosk. Anyways, safe so far with all my parts and luggage intact!! Some crazy russian cab driver walked up to me and offered to transfer me from the International Terminal to the Domestic Terminal for fifty cents cheaper than the shuttle bus would have been… and I was his only passenger. Well I think I still have all my parts and luggage….

I’m on my way.

The first night in Edmonton, I am rudely awakened at four in the morning by a furious banging on the door. Falling off Jason and Anthony’s couch, I stumble into a pair of pants and contemplate the possibility that drunken hoodlums are marshalling their forces in the hall, prepared to ambush me and hang me naked by my ankles from the frozen balcony.

What a pleasant surprise! The police. My still-slumbering mind slips into an odd calmness. It seems somewhat less likely now that the night will end in an ankle-hanging.

What do I know of the garbage being launched from one of the balconies down into the deserted, snowy street sixteen floors down? Nothing. I dozed off watching some silly television show in the dark. But apparently there’s a suspicious black item flapping from the balcony railing, so I let the officers in to have a look.

My attention having been drawn to the deadly nylon folding-chair cover being fished off the balcony, I am somewhat confused, yet somehow unsurprised to find myself making shirtless smalltalk about Australia with eight overly-tall officers of the Edmonton Police Service, all of whom appear to be decked out with flack jackets and guns. At four in the morning I can’t decide whether this is unusual. Anthony continues to sleep soundly in his room.

After a few minutes spent discussing the finer points of recreation on Australia’s east coast, the whole lot of them wander off to combat evil elsewhere, leaving me to return to the somewhat uncomfortable embrace of the couch.