Advertisement
Published: March 5th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Our last few days in Australia were spent in Gosford. Stuart’s relations whom we had met up with one night were very kind and gave us the opportunity to stay in their beautiful beach house at McMasters Beach. Stu had never even spoken to Paul and Fiona before so the gesture was extremely generous and greatly appreciated.
We eventually found Paul and Fiona’s house and rolled in with the traditional bottle of vino. They were both very nice and their daughter Gina was very cute. Kerry got special dispensation to look at her princess room. We had decided anyway to leave Sydney and head back up the coast as Sydney was just so expensive and our camper park was a dive! So as you can imagine it was amazing when Fiona and Paul hatched a plan to allow us to have use of Fiona’s mum’s house.
The following day we made our way to the beach house. We didn’t know what to expect on arrival but WOW, their home was beautiful! It was more of a bungalow but had a lower floor which extended out into the garden. It was huge and even had a piano (if only Kerry
could still play). It was fair to say we didn’t move for 3 whole days, only to go to the shop! It was great being able to walk around with not much on and not have to walk outside in the night to go to the toilet. Our final day was a bit of a mission day. We left at 10am, drove back to Sydney to find Fiona’s and Paul’s house again to drop off a few bits. We then went to our hotel near the airport to drop off our bags. Stu realised that he had left the beach house key on his key ring so we had to go back to Fiona’s and Paul’s to drop off the key before going into Sydney City Centre to drop off the van. We then had to go to the Quantas office to get our flights changed (as we are coming back 2 weeks earlier due to lack of funds) before catching a train back to the hotel. Our flight the following day was at 8.50am so we had to leave our hotel at 6.30am. The flight to Christchurch, New Zealand was only 2hr 40min but with the 2hr plus time
difference we landed at 1.50pm. We caught the shuttle to SPACESHIPS whom we had booked our home with for the next month. We are now the proud borrowers of a Toyota Previa aka SPACESHIP K-PAX (see pics). It is a far cry from what we had been used to for the last 2 months as we have no space to live in like before. What we do have though is all our beding provided, cups, pots, cutlery etc, a tiny fridge/cooler, a swing out gas stove which allows you to cook outside the car and a small plasma screen so you can play DVD’s. They give you 3 DVD’s to take with you and you are allowed to swap these with any other Spaceship you pass and also go into any one of their spaceship offices just as long as you take 3 back. Our backpacks fit in the boot which means we still have to live out of our bags and this also means we have to be far more organized than before. We also have 2 chairs and a table! We just have to make sure that we don’t sit up fully in the middle of the night
as we will be sure to knock ourselves out. We are sure we will get used to it - it’s a case of having to.
The first thing we noticed about NZ is how much cooler it is here compared to OZ. We pretty much left Christchurch straight away and headed to a small town called Akaroa on the Banks Peninsula. It was great that we didn’t have to drive for hours to get there an dit only took us about an hour. We stayed in a nice little campsite on the hillside. The view was stunning. We could see the small town with a beautiful mountain back drop from our hillside spot. Unfortunately the evenings here are also so much cooler and we woke engulfed in cloud which didn’t help our cold feet much. The following day we left Akaroa to go back inland to a place called Lake Tekapo in the Mackenzie Country. The scenery along the way was breathtaking. We could see snow capped mountains and went pas some quaint little towns. Lake Tekapo is a small Town and the lake itself has stunning views surrounding it (see pics). We also made a visit to the
beautiful ‘Church of the Good Shepherd’ which is situated beside the lake and was built of stone and oak in 1935. There was a wedding there at the time so we did not get the chance to go inside. We had a look around a couple of gift shops and spent the late afternoon by the lake. Stu went for a swim - lets just say if you need waking up from a hangover then this would be ideal. Stu somewhat………shriveled and it took him a good 10 minutes to actually get all the way in to the lake. There are various watersports on the lake but generally it was really quiet and very peaceful. The moonrise was really cool, shining over the mountains and in the lake. We tried to take a couple of pics but we will see if they came out ok.
The next day we decided to go for a long walk or a “tramp” as they call it here near Australasia’s largest mountain, Mt Cook! The drive there was fantastic, we were told that we would be wanting to take pics every 10 minutes - how true was that! Around every corner there was
amazing scenery, just see the pics! We went to the Mt Cook/Aoraki village and enquired about the best walk to do - that would take us about 4 hours. We got told to do the Hooker Valley track which took us aver a couple of wooden swing bridges, past Mueller Lake at the base of the Mueller Glacier off Mt Sefton and The Footstool then on to the impressive Hooker Glacier and the lake which amazed us both as there were icebergs floating down the lake, but the sun was out and we were boiling hot. That was until we sat down by the side of the lake and felt the wind whistle down the glacier along the lake to us - it was like we had just switched the air con on! We had to put our coats on as we felt instantly cold! The view here was wicked - with Mt Cook peering over us it really was like something out of “Lord of the Rings”. Stu was expecting a troop of Orcs to come rampaging over the next ridge (weirdo). We saw quite a few people on our little walking track - the majority of whom were
Japanese! All of them had really cheesy grins on their faces too! We returned to the car park and jumped back into K-Pax and headed off to our over night stop in Oamaru, a quaint little seaside town where a couple of penguin colonies are visible from the cliffs. The local ticket office wanted $17.50 each to view the colonies so we just walked to the Cliffside to check out the view first. We saw one penguin and lots of seaweed. Needless to say we legged it and decided to spend our money in the local cinema. We watched “Stranger than Fiction” which was quite apt as we were the only people in there - no exaggeration - just us two! We went to our campsite and settled on down for another night of luxury in our new spaceship. Even less room for any cat swinging though! Next stop DUNEDIN!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.104s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 11; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0652s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb