Rod_M

Ooops... we didn't get round to finishing this at Christmas, so here's the last instalment from New Zealand... West Auckland From Raglan we drove north, skirting Auckland and stopping at a few wineries for tasting en route to Helensville, a convenient place to stop for the night with nearby mountain biking for Rod. Helensville was a bland little town with no campsites, so we stopped at a nearby, substandard campsite with its own substandard thermal baths. Before we moved on the next day, we drove out of town to the mountain biking area...cue Rod's update below…. Bikers’ corner: Just a quickie this time to finish. Woodhill is the major biking area in the Auckland region, so I picked up a permit and spent a few hours following the longest of the set routes (rather, trying to ... read more

Windy Welly True to stereotype, the strong winds that blew during our ferry crossing out of Marlborough Sounds en route to the North Island got even stronger as we travelled through the Cook Strait and arrived in Wellington: the World’s most southerly capital city. To be honest, the most consistent thing about the weather all over NZ has been the strong winds, so we’re not quite sure why Wellington gets singled out! Wellington is the first place we’ve visited in NZ with anything even approaching the buzz that every good city should have. Unfortunately, the same compact, hilly, waterfront setting that makes it so attractive also makes it very campervan-unfriendly. There are no campsites anywhere close to the city and the nearest campsite (7km out of town) charges a premium for rubbish facilities. Since we weren’t ... read more

Franz Josef Our next stop was Franz Josef on the South Island’s West Coast. It’s really only a short distance from Mount Cook National Park, but the Southern Alps form a central spine down the South Island that’s impassable by car for much of its length. The drive to the West Coast (AKA ‘Westland’) was suitably soggy. The coast bears the brunt of the ‘Roaring Forties’ (i.e. the winds blowing in from the Tasman Sea), which dump about 3.5 metres of annual rainfall there. If that’s not wet enough, the town of Franz Josef gets about 5 metres of rain each year and most of it seemed to be falling on our first night there. We’ve travelled to the other side of the World to find somewhere rainier than Manchester (or even Ramsbottom)! According to the ... read more

Lakes Tekapo & Pukaki We braved the strong winds and drove inland to Lake Tekapo. We’d planned to spend the night there, but after taking some photos of the bright blue waters and the mountains beyond we found that the town itself didn’t really merit a long stop, so we pushed on to Lake Pukaki. Lake Pukaki is surrounded by impressive mountain ranges all forming parts of the Southern Alps, but Mount Cook - NZ’s tallest mountain - dominates the views. The Maoris call Mount Cook “Aoraki”, which means “Cloud Piercer” and that’s exactly what it does. We found a viewpoint of the Lake and Mount Cook beyond, with public toilets and no signs about overnight camping, so we stopped for the night with the best free views we’re ever likely to get. We watched the ... read more

R’n’R in Canberra Australia’s purpose-built capital city doesn’t have the greatest reputation as a tourist destination - it seems that a lot of people think it’s a bland, characterless sort of place. We can’t really comment on that, because we saw less of Canberra than anywhere else we’ve been to all year!....but we had a great time there. Cameron (a snowboarding mate of Rod’s) kindly put us up and Stuey, his housemate, very, very kindly gave us his bed! Despite being a loud, lairy, drunken kind of Aussie bloke (words which I know will make him proud :o), Cam was the perfect host. He showed us a (very) few of Canberra’s sights and a lot of Canberra’s bars, cafes and restaurants. Given our travel fatigue, it was just what we needed…apart from the hangover after the ... read more