I met up with Judy again to head off to Italy. We had three weeks together, travelling from the south to the north. Our first stop was Pompeii. We picked up a car in Naples and drove to Pompeii, eventually to find our hotel in the heart of the city. The ruins were as hot as vesuvius must have been way back then. We muddled our way around, eventually finding most of what was on our list. They'd removed most of the figures and put them in storage, leaving just the town. Most of the emotion of seeing the people in [View Full Entry]

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I've wanted to visit Slovenia for years. It lived up to my dreams and more. I only had a few days to spare between Venice and meeting up with Brent and Shona in Milan so I decided to bypass the cities and just go straight to the Julian Alps. I caught the train to Gorizia on the border and then a bus across to the station at Nova Gorica where I caught another train up to Bohinjska Bistrica in the Bohinj valley. It's a longer but far cheaper way than catching a train direct from Venice to Ljubljana then up to [View Full Entry]

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(photos below) Because he is the loveliest, and I miss him all to pieces........ x [View Full Entry]

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I had my first day at work yesterday, for Motu Weka - the local neighbourhood centre. As it's school holiday the programme is a little different to the usual after-school routine. We had a small group of eleven kids aged 6 to 12 between three adults. The low numbers were a gift of the original plan for the day being a trip up Mount Arthur for a day in the snow... I guess most parents didn't think that was such a great idea after the storms we've had recently. As it happened, the snow was too deep to try to get [View Full Entry]

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Peace Tree Walk 2008 - Riwaka Source to Mountain Valley - May 10 - 18 The Peace Tree walk was probably the best week I've ever spent. So good, in fact, that I'm not leaving town! It was eight days of blissful good will and positive vibrations. At the end of every day we all felt so good, riding a huge euphoric high together from spending whole days making music and playing with kids, painting faces and planting trees. Our group was quite a large one, on our busiest day we were 24 strong from all six inhabited continents. The international [View Full Entry]

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After a week of 'are we leaving or aren't we' in Motueka we finally made a break for it and escaped the vortex, albeit a bit reluctantly. Heather and I decided to leave the car and push on with prams because we were rapidly running out of time to get to the valley and still had two weeks of walking to get to Westport. Mick was going to stay behind and fix the car, hoping to catch up with us in three to five days. We set off in the rain with enough food for six days. A couple of days [View Full Entry]

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Walking the Walk is an environmental awareness walk with the aim of stopping a new open cast coal mine from going ahead in Happy Valley, just outside of Westport on the West Coast of the South Island. Happy Valley is home to 13 endangered species of flora and fauna, including a rare carnivorous land snail and the great spotted kiwi. Walk the walk started in Auckland on January 28th, 2008, the second anniversary of the indefinite occupation of Happy Valley by members of the Savehappyvalley Coalition. I have joined the walk in Picton and we hope to reach Happy Valley, on [View Full Entry]

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I arrived in Nelson a bit early to join the walkers, having read the wrong line on the website showing when they were arriving in Picton. They were also running a bit behind schedule. Consequently I had almost two weeks to kill in the Nelson region while I waited. And it's not a bad place to wait. I accidently arrived on St Patricks day and checked into the cheapest, closest backpackers. It turned out to be a great choice. When I arrived the whole place was crawling with drunken green people, at least half of whom seemed to be Irish. After [View Full Entry]

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Just a quick blip down to walk the Routeburn with lovely Brent and Shona. We had a full range of weather, from hot sun to drizzly fiordland mist to rain to 95km gale force winds going over the pass. Good times were had by all. I love Fiordland. :) [View Full Entry]

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Well, I'm home again. I hope everyone enjoyed the blogs. My last few days in UB passed pretty quickly. Cate and I visited a few temples around the city, ate at the nicer restaurants and generally lazed about until it was time to leave. Cate flew out on the twelfth and the next day I got up early to catch the train to Beijing. I'd met two Australian girls at the hostel who were going to be on my train and in the same carriage as me. Maree and Carol were both highly energised people, especially Carol who was entirely mad. [View Full Entry]

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