Blogs from New Zealand, Oceania - page 2330

I always receive the complaints that I am not sharing any photographs of my new home (for another 3 years). So here I am with a few pictures which might give you some idea about how beautiful this place is. Let me start by a brief introduction of the people I went with. All these are my friends from a student group called REALISE. Taking time to go to the church blessed me with the wonderful company of these people; especially Christina, David, Kathryn and Luke. This time after the church was the plan for a BBQ followed by a trip to Sandfly beach. Now don’t go by its name, it is called so because of the sand that flies when it's windy and not because of the pesky sandfly found all over the Milford area. ... read more

Frankly this is beginning to get a bit repetitive!! New Plymouth 08-15/02/06 We decide to take the Intercity bus to New Plymouth and then travel down to Wellington for a few days before heading back to Hamilton so that the next medic can give us his opinion about my knee. We are booked into the Sunflower Backpackers which is in the centre of New Plymouth, the place is okay, but by midnight we've had enough of the boy racers revving their engines outside the window and the high pitched shrieks of assorted, inebriated females; it has been a long bus ride today and we both want to sleep. In the morning we head to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery which has a collection of Len Lye sculptures, they are great fun. We particularly like the circle of ... read more

Checked out and drove the short 2 hour journey to Queenstown. Picked up a hitchhiker, Christian from Germany, on the way. Hitching is fairly common amongst travellers in New Zealand, there's always other people with cars touring the islands. Stayed at the Southern Laughter Backpackers, each room had 8 people with it's own lounge, TV and kitchen, nice! Chatted to our roomies from England and Canada, and basically stayed in the room for the rest of the day chilling out.... read more

so, i'm truncating the entries for my last few days in new zealand.... dunedin: south of christchurch by about 3 hours. my recovery day from stewart island included a speights ale house tour and a cadbury chocolate factory tour. i don't like beer, but i decided i had to try the variety as a tasting was included in the tour. this i will label as 'michelle's part of the day' because she LOVES beer. she was all smiles the entire hour....she even smiled as we entered the stinky hopps (we don't know if there's 1 or 2 p's in hops) room. the biggest grins though were while trying her hand at pouring beer from an actual bar tap. by the time the tasting was over we'd had about 3 glasses of beer between us....feeling rather 'happy' ... read more

Well by now we were all prepared to be writing in the style of Big Brother ... "Dey nine in the Big Bovver Campervan and the vanmates are getting ratty...", but am relieved to report that no one's been nominated or evicted. Infact vanmate numbers have doubled with the addition of Someone and Somebody (ie, Someone forgot to lock the door and Somebody didn't empty the kettle...). Fortunately, it's very hard to do anything but smile here as everything is as good as we'd imagined it to be. Worked through the lingering pains of DS and headed for Lake Wanaka on Thursday. A cool, relaxing place to break up the journey to the glaciers and rest overnight. The town had lots of good cafes and bars but lost points because we couldn't find a pavlova anywhere. ... read more