Advertisement
(Matt)
We were somewhat surprised when the drunken rugby player and his girlfriend let themselves into our room at around 2:30am. I'd imagine going from deep sleep to wide awake in less than a second produces different reactions in different people, in our case I said "Get out, you're in the wrong room" in a way that sounded far too relaxed for the situation, Catherine sat bolt upright and said "Waghhhh!" really loudly.
It turns out that every evening when the receptionist finishes for the day he or she gives a list of available rooms to the bar staff in the event a customer has too much to drink and decides to stay over. The bar staff have a second set of keys for all rooms, our room was mistakenly put on the available list, oh how we laughed...well not really, especially as we were then woken up at 4am when the rest of the rugby team came banging on the door looking for their friends!
The next day the manager was very apologetic and we had free drinks and a free night's accommodation, they even assured us that no-one else would be letting themselves into our room
so that was nice.
Room allocation aside, we love New Zealand. With only 4 million people in a country that is a bit bigger that the UK (which has 60 million ish) there is a real sense of space. The cost of living seems cheaper and the scenery is absolutely (Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings) breathtaking.
We started travelling New Zealand in Christchurch which is like a little England, it has a Cathedral, the Avon River, street names like Hereford and Worcester, a similar climate and even an English style pub with a log fire. We had a really good few days going for a long walk at the top of a mountain after riding a cable car, braving sub zero temperatures at the International Antarctic Centre and finishing off with a very refined dinner on an old tram (which went around a 20 minute circuit).
Leaving Christchurch in the early morning we only just caught the Tranz Scenic Railway which crosses from the east coast of New Zealand to the west. We completely misjudged how far away the station was and a thick fog reduced visibility to about a metre, these things resulted in a
mad dash for the train about 30 seconds before it left. We were so glad we made it though, after 10 minutes the fog magically lifted and the skies were clear.This train journey is truly astounding, well it was certainly nicer than my old Bromley South to Victoria journey! Soaring snow capped mountains, huge sparkling lakes, narrow bridges and a tunnel that takes 20 minutes to get through! They even had a viewing platform which was fantastic but absolutely freezing, we braved frostbite in order to capture the scenery on film!
We stopped in Franz Josef (population 320) for a few days in order to do a glacier trek, the main questions we had were: how hard will it be? And will we see 'blue ice' ?(blue ice is the holy grail of the glacier trek world, this is what features in all of the promotional pictures they use to sell the treks), the answers were 'not too hard' and 'yes, the ice is more likely to look blue when it rains'. We didn't really appreciate the rain comment but have since discovered Kiwi's have a tendency to make the rain seem like a good thing. It's because the
Chess in Christchurch Square
Just after this was taken a small child ran in and started moving the pieces...funny to watch!area we were visiting doesn't measure rain in cm but in metres (this is true)! The trek lasted about 4 hours (it rained the whole time) and was not as hard as it looks in the pictures...the ice picks were not strictly necessary!
Everytime we think we've seen the most scenic part of New Zealand we take another bus journey or visit a new place and wham (expression of surprise not the 80's pop group) there is a vista even more stunning. This was certainly true for our next stops at Fox Glacier and Wanaka. I'm going to stop going on about it now and upload a few more pictures than usual so that you can see what I mean.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.364s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 11; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0563s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
