I'd always thought you needed to be at the airport two hours for your flight so you had time to check in, go through interminable "security checks", do a spot of duty free shopping and walk along equally interminable corridors to your gate. Not any more, it seems, in this era of the internet. Having been dropped off at the airport a generous two-and-a-bit hours in advance, we were surprised to find almost no queue at the Cathay Pacific check-in desks. No queue? Very un-Heathrow. It turns out most people check in and choose their seats online nowadays, a fact that [View Full Entry]

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A Maori legend has it that long ago a god-like being, Tu-te-raki-whanoa, wielded his axe to carve out the landscape of South Island. If you look at a map of the southern end of South Island, you might well believe it. Indeed, the island's southwestern coast, facing Australia and the Tasman Sea, does look like it has had an axe taken to it - convoluted and narrow inlets seemingly hewn out of the spine of the Alps. Southland's dozens of fjords are in fact the result not of a cosmic axe but of millions of years of erosion by immense rivers [View Full Entry]

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The 170km from Omarama to Queenstown take us gently back towards the mountains. The road passes through Tarras, a tiny blip on the map which gained worldwide fame (well, almost) as the home of Shrek, a naughty merino sheep who was found in 2004 having evaded the shears for six consecutive years and, as you might expect, looking quite alarming for this fact. The hapless creature, having avoided capture for so long by hiding in caves, was caught and promptly shorn of his fleece, which weighed in at no less than 27 kilograms (enough wool, I am told, to make twenty [View Full Entry]

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We rise early and leave our maternity hospital room to have a quick nose through Geraldine's main street, a cute mix of craft shops and small grocers. Massive supermarkets are few and far between round here - there are fewer than 7 people per square kilometre in South Island, compared to 281 on the island of Great Britain - and small food shops abound. Is there anything not good about this country? We pick up a nice chunk of monkfish for about £5 a kilo. I repeat, is there anything not good about this country? We drive out of Geraldine, westwards, [View Full Entry]

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Having passed the morning watching playful dolphins frolicking in Le Bons Bay, we spend a couple of hours in Akaroa, the largest town on the Banks Peninsula and located at the end of a deep inlet that extends all the way to the centre of the peninsula. Akaroa is a gentrified kind of place, all cafés and estate agents - not too different from your average West London high street then, except for the stunning location. After the rugged and rather more isolated beauty of Le Bons Bay, we don't hang around too long as there's a long drive ahead. After [View Full Entry]

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Four weed-destroying, sheep-chasing and tangelo-squeezing weeks later, our time in Opotiki and at Te Aranga has come to an end. As well as being good exercise and a valuable opportunity to learn about many facets of New Zealand life, these four weeks have also been restful beyond our expectations. After some six and half months of constant movement - rarely sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row - it was wonderful to sit still, so to speak, for a while. To eat home-cooked food, to build friendships with new people, to be able to laze away a weekend [View Full Entry]

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Christmas was the last thing we were expecting - our boreal brains had some difficulty reconciling the month with the weather. But Christmas it was, before we knew it. We were fortunate enough to have been isolated from the consumerist hype that has come to typify Christmas at home: no jingles in shops from September onwards, no television adverts exhorting us to buybuybuy and spendspendspend. Quite a bizarre experience. Beans and weeds don't stop growing for Christmas, even in New Zealand, and work continued as normal until the day before. The day itself was spent in true Kiwi style, name [View Full Entry]

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The day starts with a wholesome bowl of Jim's homemade muesli - fuel for the morning of digging, grubbing, picking, weeding, raking and pruning we have ahead of us. We're usually ready by eight, although one advantage of WWOOFing in this particular household is that timekeeping isn't excessively draconian, which is lovely when you're as allergic to alarm-clocks as I am. Jim and Julie spend much of their morning - at least at this time of year, in early summer - picking green beans in the hothouse. It's not as easy a job as it sounds, requiring a knack for judging [View Full Entry]

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New Zealand. Our next destination lies some two thousand kilometres away across the Tasman Sea. Australia seems far enough from home already, but this three hour flight emphasises quite how isolated New Zealand is from the rest of the world. It really is a long, long way away. We arrive in Auckland - New Zealand's biggest city by far, and home to a quarter of the entire country's population - in the mid afternoon, and once again first impressions are not entirely overwhelming. Many, if not most, of New Zealand's visitors come here for the country's extraordinary landscapes. Having watched P [View Full Entry]

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Courtesy of Qantas (who serve Byron Bay Cookie Company cookies on their domestic flights, making them clearly the world's best airline) we are whisked from Melbourne to Sydney in an hour and twenty minutes. Melbourne and Sydney, which a cursory look at an atlas would suggest are neighbours, are in fact over 700km apart, the same distance from London to, say, Hamburg. The route takes us over the very mountainous terrain of the Australian Alps, at the far southern end of the Great Dividing Range. The Alps are home to mainland Australia's highest peak, 2,228 metre Mount Kosciuszko. As we desce [View Full Entry]

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