Somewhere in Auckland Airport... mission accomplished

It has been a long time since we wrote something in our beloved blog, the North Island has been keeping us busy, so much to do in so little time! But our adventure through the Commonwealth islands of Australia and New Zealand has now come to an end, a 12,000km journey through hot and cold weather, tsunamis and snow storms, rain and scorching sun, extremes of a beautiful unique landscape which we shall never forget!

Having returned Lucio, our faithful carrier through the New Zealand, it was very nostalgic, but also exciting, to look back at all the places he took us. In the North Island alone, there is much to tell. And very importantly, we have managed to return the ring to Mordor, mission is accomplished. But let us start from the beginning!

Having had some time early on when we were both with a bit of a virus, it was a godsend that we were staying in a lovely hostel in the very North of the South Island, in Picton, where we had free apple pie to help our cure. And it worked!

Taking the 3 hour ferry from the South to the North island takes us to a completely different kind of environment. Not so easy in the North Island to drive for ages without seeing another car. Big towns, many people and certainly more mining for the tourist dollar. But heh, at least we can finally catch some radio stations!

From the lovely and relaxed capital Wellington where we had a view of the democratic institutions and the quality local brew, we moved to our mission, so hard to accomplish, of visiting the Tongariro National Park, a fantastic, otherworld landscape used as the scene for Mordor in the Lord of the Rings film,.. and the film does not even do justice to just how beautiful the whole landscape is, a 17km trek through volcanos, craters, emerald lakes and pristine forest! Thank goodness for the comfortable bed in the evening to recover from the sore feet from all the steep climbing!

Nearby Rotorua, hot streams and geysers reminding us of the Azores on the other side of the world helped further our recovery, if not our body odour! Rotorua was certainly a lovely place, where we were welcomed by a most welcoming kiwi couple, only one needs to get used to the smell of the bubbly mud pools!

On the way to Auckland we still managed a stop at the famous Waitomo Caves, otherwise called the Glow-worm caves for the beautiful little worms who in the dark make us feel like we are looking at a starry sky as we float through the underground streams of these beautiful caves, and another trip to a Kiwi house where hyperactive kiwis were running around... unfortunately these cuddly little birds, the symbol of New Zealand, just love the dark and are pretty fast, so photographying them was close to impossible!

Finally the big city Auckland, where close to a third of the population lives, a huge metropolis with not much history but a nice relaxed vibe to it and a lot of really friendly people - from casino entertainers to city council members to radio new zealand journalists, many people stopped to talk to us for ages in a matter of hours!

And now we are reaching an end, and also a new beginning. The excitement and mystery of China presents ahead of us as we fly to Hong Kong and go to Macau. We look forward to this pearl of the East from the Portuguese Empire (yes, again another one!), and more importantly, to visiting Pedro's uncles who will be our hosts for the next few days! It is just halfway through our travel now, it has been four months now, a little less than that to go! More photos and entries to follow, as access to the internet becomes temporarily easier!

Bye bye Kiwis!

Somewhere in... continuing our drive through South Island

So here we are again. Driving in New Zealand and following advices from our American friend Daniel living in Thailand and our English friend Will, who is now in Tanzania - this is pretty amazing - so many nationalities!

We are in a lovely town in the north of South Island - Kaikoura. You can do whale watching here, swimming with dolpins, but we got a fantastic deal with a backpacker house in the centre of the town with our own video player in the room! So... as it is raining (not snowing! - I will got to this one:) we have seen already Whale rider, a true Kiwi film and a great experience to see something more about a Maori culture....

From Queenstown (please the anonymous comment - can you explain the nudie Pedro there:)? ) we started driving - I don't know north I guess (yes, reading maps is still not my strongest point), but as we started our travel we realised it is really cold and something is falling down the sky! Yes, so now we don't see just the beautiful scenery of the mountains, but we can feel the cold snow on our skin... It was a bit magical, but we were happy it stopped and the sun showed up after sometime and warmed us up.... Otherwise the colours of the trees are amazing and as you look up and see the snowy tops of the mountains... wow... very romantic! And easier for driving.

Next stop was a small town Wanaka (by a huge lake - but it looks like that all Kiwis towns are by a lake surrounded by mountains). We have done an obligatory walk (as New Zealand is all about walking and trips) and settled down to a fantastic small cinema in the centre. It is very special place, as the seats are mostly done from old couches and comfy chairs, you can sit in the car, take a blanket or an extra pillow... you can drink and eat whatever you wish before, during and after the movie (as the menu said). We had a traditional pop corn and fantastic white chocolate - baileys home made ice cream and watched our first kiwi movie - Black sheep! We do recommend to everybody who gets hand on this movie to watch it.. It was a bit crazy, but scary as well if you imagine that there are just 4 million people in New Zealand but 40 million sheep! So we don't see these beautiful cuddly things the same way anymore:)

Travelling through the Alps gives you fantastic views, waterfalls, high mountains (Mt Cook and Mt Tasman are definitely worth mentioning - but they are very difficult to get on the photo as they are most of the time hidden in the clouds, but we did manage at least a little bit) , deep lakes, creeks and of course glaciers ( Franz Joseph and Fox are the most famous one). They are huge, white and it is very cold there:) As we visited some glacier visitors centre, we have seen some fantastic photos of them done by.... of course by a Czech photographer P. Hubacek. Amazing Czechs everywhere - and that is true - we have met soo many Czech people travelling in New Zealand or in Australia - it was a big surprise for me.

After a cosy night in Franz Joseph and exploring the glacier and being cold, we have decided to see some pancakes... Yes, further north there is the famouse rock formation called pancakes rocks (gosh, I would eat an pancake! It i crazy, the taste is just in my mouth... with fruit, chocolate and whipped cream.....) They were really funny, they did look like pancakes and were very photogenic:) This was as well a place, where we have lost our camera.... Walking down the track already at night, coming from the beach and seeing a weird bird - as we thought we might be lucky and we might be seeing kiwi, we took our camera out the back and started photographing ..... Hmmm there was nothing much on the photos, so we put it back and start quickly walking back to the carpark and to our hostel. After great dinner, beer and two hours of relaxing, we wanted to charge the camera and look at the photos and saw that the bag is empty.... Upps! So we took our torches and went back, hoping for luck..... And yes, I think we are the luckiest people ever, as the camera was sitting in the middle of the track, in the middle of the bush, just waiting for us to pick it up..... !!! (Did you see how I described the story in plural? We lost our camera, we did this and that:)))

Anyway we were lucky and could go to sleep peacefully! We are tired of tracks and walking... so we decided to go for a nice spa. Hanmer Springs (the main Kiwi spa town) welcomed us with lovely warm swimming pools (41 degrees). So we soaked our old bones, until our hands wrinkled... Ohhh that was good....

We have 3 more days in the south island and we will take a ferry and transport us to the North of New Zealand.

Keep in touch, we will do as well:)

Somewhere in ... South Island looking for hobbits

That is much easier than looking for kangaroos in Australia! They are everywhere... With the gorgeous sceneries and deep lakes of New Zealand it is soo easy to look for them... :-)

We left Dunedin, where we had a great couch surfing host Anne & Andy and start driving through the national park Caitlins towards our destination Milford Sound. It is soo easy to drive and to navigate in New Zealand, which is very fortunate for Lenka as her map reading skills need some development. But you really can't get lost if there is just one road to the town and you have to take this road back as well... So far - no problems! The only problem we had was with our lovely car. It decided to give us a bit of sorrows on Easter Monday, when everything was closed... To describe it easily (as well for the non car experts) - the keys in the ignition got stuck and we couldn't take them out. Pedro tried, I tried, the lady from the motel tried, her husband.... and I could continue like this until Christmas:) We called the rental company to see how is their customer service business going and were pleasantly surprised as they found someone for us who fixed the issue and gave us cheaper rate for one day of rental:) Cool ... so off we went to enjoy more mountains, deep lakes, sunny weather....

Ohh uppps, the sunny weather is something we should enjoy really hard here as the weather is changing quite a lot to rain, mist, wind and really low temperature. OK, you don't complain about weather in New Zealand, we are not far from the south pole and it is kind of autumn. So we take it with a smile on our face and think about it as more mystical and more beautiful for our photos.

We got until Te Anau, small town by a beautiful lake and booked a sea kayaking for the next day. As I said, the weather was beautiful and we couldn't wait to see the beautiful sceneries and imagine Frodo carrying his ring and being on the same fjord as us... We woke up in the morning, it was dark, rainy, windy.... but we were still optimistic (as it is an island and the weather changes quickly). We were still optimistic even when the guy from the kayjak company came and said that we need to wait a bit more to see if the weather gets better and we were still hoping when we were in the kayjak fighting the waves, wind and the rain. Now we really felt like a little hobbit (with our hoods on), fighting against the dark power, carrying the ring... It was amazing! It stopped raining even for a little bit and we could enjoy the mountains and waterfalls around us... Truly hobbit experience!

Now we are in Queenstown, which is quite high above the sea level, so you can see snow on the top of the mountains and we are happy we have our jackets and jumpers. It is beautiful here... (almost good for skiing:) - so next time if there is no snow in Europe, here is a tip for all the people who love to ski!:)

Enjoy the spring in Europe, we are sending you autumn greetings from New Zealand!

Somewhere in Dunedin, New Zealand

And now we have passed the Tasman Sea, over to the other Commonwealth, a much colder one, New Zealand! We landed in Christchurch late at night and immediately the fresh brisk kiwi air told us we had left the tropics and were now in a very temperate, european weather, where the early autumn resembles the early autumn back home. But other differences followed, and will surely be made evident to us over the next days, the people still speak English but with a somewhat different accent and attitude, the architecture is different too, with the stone-built houses reminding us of the small English villages in the countryside, probably not just an accident as the early settlers named so many of the places and streets of New Zealand after those they had left behind in the British Isles.

After taking the keys of Lucio, our car for the next few weeks, we set off immediately to explore this country which opens before us so many exciting new adventures! And the same way as in Australia the first town we went to had been an odd German town, this time we started off with a peculiar French town called Akaroa, filled with french street names and cafes, absolutely charming, ever more so as its setting was an absolutely gorgeous bay, reminding us straight away how unpopulated this country is.

Moving on to the countryside (gravel roads are less of a problem for the much more manouvereable Lucio), the scenery before us makes clear what drove the sparsely populated New Zealand to be the setting for the Lord of the Rings films - sometimes you can just expect to see a Hobbit running over the beautiful pristine hills and mountains!

We are now in Dunedin, gaelic for Edinburgh - as Pedro is wearing his University of Edinburgh jumper, many times over we had heard how we have to go and visit the Edinburgh of the South - and how confusing it is to see the familiar street names of Princes Street and George Street over the main streets of this Scottish-settled town!

We will continue moving further south in the South Island tomorrow - the abundant (and fascinating to watch) penguins, sea lions, seals and albatrosses have already made it very clear that we are close to, and nearing, the Antartic! And we will certainly buy ourselves a woolen jumper in preparation!

Somewhere in.... Sydney Airport, sipping coffee

So that's it! Schluss, finito! Six weeks passed and we don't know even how! We caught an early flight from Cairns today morning (waking up time 4.50am!), and departed to Sydney at 6.25am. I know, crazy times, but it was the cheapest (no wonder, with the timing!). Now we are waiting for the flight to our next destination, land of Kiwis and Hobbits - Christchurch, New Zealand.

As the flight is at 6.25pm, we have the whole day to kill.... Wow ! What a change, there is nowhere we have to drive or millions of things we want to see, it is just another airport after all, so I can see relaxed Pedro reading his incredibly thick book, which will remain always a mystery for me :) . Anyway he seems to enjoy it and I am sipping my cafe latte but let's see what the last days in Australia brought to us - I must say that the days have been really busy.

We left our Skippy friends and drove our way North to the Mission Beach, with a view of Dunk Island. Empty caravan parks, empty beaches - just paradise! So we got a nice bottle of wine, prepared the BBQ (barbie in the aussie language), and we spent the next morning in our camping chairs :) in the completely deserted Mission Beach with a fantastic invention - stingers enclosure net - so we could swim away (or at least until the end of the net :) ).

Cairns is getting closer and closer, from the initial road sign indicating 1900kms it is now only 150kms away, which is nothing for us, so we bravely fill up the tank of our hungry campervan again and push the gas pedal (oh boy, it eats like a small baby, every four hours!)

We stayed at the caravan park near the centre of Cairns and the feeling that we leave Australia soon completely overwhelmed us. We started talking to a couple of people (Hannah from Germany and Lee from California). They had some kind of cheap red wine, and unfortunately they shared a lot... so after receiving a fantastic call that morning from Arnaud's leaving do back in Strasbourg, we drank to Arnaud in our own way! It was a good long night! :)

Next day we had an important mission to accomplish, to book our dives to the Great Barreer Reef! We got a deal on a huge boat where normally many snorkels go and only a few divers, so the diving groups are small. As we haven't dived for nearly a year, we had booked an introductory dive and two normal dives and made our way up to Port Douglas where the trip departed from.

I don't want to repeat myself, but the drive was fantastic. It is the coast where the old and always lushly green rainforest meets the white sandy beaches - naturally we have hundreds of photos that it is truly real and not a dream. We were very tempted by the offers of land for sale around this region, but well, it is a long way away from Europe :) As we arrived to posh Port Douglas, we checked out the Marina and stayed in the Caravan park where the only campervan around was our Jabba (we have renamed Abba to Jabba, we liked it better and it reflects its speed and size). It was an early night as we had to get ready for the Nemos!

Gorgeous, sunny day with dazzling turqouise sea it seems as the weather knows we're going diving (looking back, it was the last sunny day we got in Oz). We had a huge boat with only 30 people on it, six divers including ourselves. After we realised we were actually the only experienced divers in our group (and we have dived only seven times!) we cancelled our intro dive and went straight into the normal dives, Wow ! There are no photos to show you the beauty of the GBR, the colours of the reef and the amount of fish we saw - I am not counting the hundreds of Nemos and Dories, manta rays, stonefish, lionfish, cuddle fish (you do not want to cuddle this one), and to my surprise, Sharks!! It was pretty scary but the divemaster was very happy and couldnt stop saying how lucky we were to have seen them. Well, it was fun, if I think back on it now above the sea level :) The dives were just great and we had a fantastic day on the boat!

On our last day we woke up to very nasty weather with lots of rain and wind. We had to start packing so we moved to the camp kitchen where it wasn't raining and switched on the news on the telly. An earthquake in the Solomon Islands and a Tsunami Alert over the Northeast coast of Australia were all over the news. Hundreds of people were leaving the city, schools were closed, there were queues by the petrol stations - everyone still had in mind the last tsunami in Indonesia and the terrible Cyclone Larry which devasted Australia the same time last year so... we stayed put away from the beach in the hills, until the threat was gone. Funny feeling!

But well, Australia is releasing us. We survived all the nasty poisonous animals, swimming with sharks and the tsunami threats and we loved it! Another country we need to return to, there is so much to see! But we are now off to the next destination - less sunny but we are sure with lots to offer aswell!

And to finish for today, Lenka's lovely sis Lucka is celebrating today her 25th birthday so join us in wishing her all the best! Vsechno nejlepsi Lucinko!