b m wood
Ben Marc Wood Joined: October 22nd 2007
Logged in: May 30th 2010
Logged in: May 30th 2010
Travel Blog Posts
Makuk, Barramundi Gorge
My final boat cruise was friday evening. I packed my bags and left at sunrise with one of the same tour groups the next morning, bound for two days in Kakadu National Park. Many thanks to Debden, the driver, who agreed to take me on board at very short notice for the small price of a crate of beer. The park changes massively between wet and dry, and large areas periodically become completely inaccessible due to flooding. At this time of year most of the waterfalls are reduced to a small trickle, but it is in the shape of the rocks you can see how powerful these rivers can be during the wet season. The morning of the first day was spent swimming at the beautiful Barramundi Gorge. The waterfalls here are still running, and there ... read more
My daily commute
When I first arrived at Point Stuart Lodge in July, I was struck by how surprisingly remote the place is. No amount of warning could really prepare me for it. The lodge runs on generator power, and has no internet or mobile phone reception. The nearest settlement of any size is called Humpty Doo, about as rural as it sounds, and is about an hour and a half drive away. If I'm lucky I manage to get a lift into Darwin from another member of staff about once a month. The lodge is situated in the unique environment of the Mary River floodplain. It's all pretty dry at the moment and we run the boat cruises on a billabong (that's a disconnected section of dried up river) about 7km long. The river floods annually in massive ... read more
A red sunset at Mindil Beach
Arriving at Darwin International at 1am nearly two weeks ago, I slept for 5 hours on an airport couch and watched the red sunrise before taking a taxi into the city. Darwin is not at all what I expected. Despite being the 'capital' of the Northern Territory, the city centre is quite small and relatively low-rise. It was quiet to start with, but as the day progressed hundreds of backpackers crawled out of the shade and into the bars. I had become so used to the New Zealand winter that I didn't bother booking ahead but we're in the peak season here and I really had trouble finding a hostel. There was one point where I was considering sleeping in the park, but things worked out eventually. Upon finding long-term accommodation at a really laid back ... read more
Snow over Lewis Pass
This weekend has been one 5-day epic road trip around a large part of the South Island. A sort of farewell trip for Me, Max and Kd. With my rather spontaneous decision to leave New Zealand there was a large part of the South that I still hadn't seen, and Max and Kd needed a holiday. We decided that if we did a lot of driving then we could make it down the west coast, to Wanaka and back, and still see a lot in 5 days. We set out from Kaikoura on Thursday morning, heading west towards the Lewis Pass, stopping for lunch at Hanmer Springs as heavy snowfall had closed the mountain road for a few hours that morning. We spent most of two days driving down the west coast to Franz Josef, where ... read more
The High Street
When the bus pulled up in the familiar main street of Kaikoura a couple of weeks ago I was struck by how suddenly winter had fallen since I was away. The sky was a pale blue and the mountains were thickly powdered with snow. The air was so crisp and clear that I walked for an hour to the house with my rucksack rather than calling for a lift. The weather here in winter is better in some ways than the summer. The weather is more stable, the winds are not so ridiculous and the days are still warm, but never unbearably hot. The nights get really cold though - darkness falls at 6.00 and temperatures plummet, forcing us indoors. The vegetable yield has dropped and the starving chickens are eating what's left, so we are ... read more
Auckland
I was greeted in Auckland by an afternoon of heavy rainfall, obscuring my view of the high rise city centre and sky tower until the next day. After this though the weather quickly improved and the rest if the week was mostly hot and sunny. The largest city in New Zealand, with something like a third of the national population, Central Auckland is a big dirty mess of suburbs and shopping districts clustered around two harbours. There is a lot of volcanic history here, with extinct cones of Mt Eden and Victoria looming above the city, and the still-active peak of Rangitoto island always on the horizon. It seems to me like a very precarious location for New Zealand's economic capital. My primary objective in Auckland was to visit Tiritiri Matangi Island - a small island ... read more
Whitianga beach
I've been staying in the little town of Whitianga (pronounced with a soft 'f', it's a little bit bigger than Kaikoura) for about a week and a half now, on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. I hitchhiked over here from the even smaller town of Coromandel last thursday, and decided, being a little short of money, to stay here for a while and get a job. It turns out the second place I asked, a bar in town called The Blacksmith, was desperate for a kitchen hand so I got evening work starting immediately. Very lucky. The first thing that made me want to stay was the coastal scenery. The town is fronted by a long white sand beach, thick with broken shells, but the opposite side of the river is overshadowed by high, ... read more
Geothermal Stream at dawn, Taupo
I ended up staying for a couple more nights in Taupo after leaving Petra. Lake Taupo is one of the popular stops on the commercial tourist bus routes, and the hostel was full of backpackers (most of them British) who were only there to skydive. As much as I would have liked to, spending $220 on a skydive wasn't within my budget. I got talking to the only other guest who wasn't skydiving, an Aucklander on her way south. She had heard mention of some free hot pools just out of town and we drove out there in the early morning for a swim. There is a thermal stream in the local park which flows into the waikato river, so you can swim between the hot spring and the cold river water. It was so good ... read more
Sunset, Hawkes Bay
It's been a long time away from cheap internet... Leaving Wellington a week ago I took the bus to Napier, at the southern end of Hawkes Bay. A large portion of the town was destroyed in the 1930s, and reconstructed in Art Deco style, for which the town is now famed. Other than admiring the architecture and tasting the wine, there isn't much to do in Napier. Fortunately I met up again with German friend Petra, who was driving up to Taupo the next day with a free passenger seat. We were now entering the active volcanic part of New Zealand which I have read about. Lake Taupo is in fact the giant caldera of a supervolcano, which erupted nearly 2000 years ago and was powerful enough for both the Romans and Chinese to record its ... read more
There's a Kaka on my head!
I have been staying for a few days in Wellington with Tamzin, whom I met on the seal operation in February. She lives in a hilly suburb some distance from the town centre, so I got plenty of exercise walking about the place. I took the time to see the places I missed the first time - I walked Mt Victoria for a view of the harbour, visited the botanic gardens and spent a second day in Te Papa (still not seeing everything). I also spent a day in Karori Wildlife park, a reservoir which has been isolated from predators by an 8ft high wire fence, and hosts a wide range of native wildlife. There were tui, bellbirds and fantails in much greater numbers than I had seen before, and my first sightings of kaka, weka, ... read more
