Advertisement
Published: April 5th 2007
Yes, we're in New Zealand... and it's amazing!
We landed in Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island and stayed in the first hotel of our travels (thank you Joanna's parents!), complete with swimming pool and spa! We spent our first afternoon exploring the city and its beautiful gardens - they say Christchurch is New Zealand's most English city and coming straight from Australia it felt like a complete contrast! Although the city was great and our hotel was fantastic, the real excitment came when the campervan was delivered to Joanna's parents - this is our home for the next few weeks and it wasn't long before we had stocked it up and hit the road!
Our first stop was the tiny French town of Akaroa, which was really cute and we got our first taste of the unpredictable New Zealand weather - as we were looking for a spot to pull up and camp, the cloud descended and the visability became next to zero. This forced us off the road and into a small village called Le Bons Bay - a tiny cove on the Banks Peninsula with about ten houses looking out to the ocean.
Victoria Gardens
See! Looks like England!It was a pretty scarey place to spend our first night 'freedom camping' with the wind howling against the van and the sound of the waves crashing in, but it was probably our most memorable night camping so far!
Our next stop was Lake Tekapo on the way to New Zealand's tallest mountain, Mount Cook, so we hit the road again. After making some stops in a couple of small towns on the way down we arrived at the beautiful lake you see in the pictures, we pulled up and set up base lakeside. Unfortunately things started to go wrong when Joanna and James leapt on the mountain bikes and decided to get some sunset pictures of the Church of the Good Shepherd before the end of the day... travelling at full speed down the narrow country road James rode ahead, only to hear a scream of 'Oh Shit!' and a loud crash behind him. Turning around there was a broken Joanna under a brand new mountain bike and a small group of guilty looking children riding away from the scene.
The next day we left for our meeting with Mount Cook. The drive was amazing, even
Church of the Good Shepherd
Joanna nearly broke her arm on the way to get this photo, but it was probably worth it! more impressive than the Great Ocean Road, we watched as flat plains transformed into foothills and eventually huge mountains - 'proper mountains'! We set off from Mount Cook Village, on a four hour trek to get to the Mount Cook Viewpoint and reach the Hooker Glacier. This was probably the best trek of our whole seven months travelling, crossing swing bridges and raging torrents of water and the reward was so impressive! The whole day Mount cook had been covered by cloud, but as the whole peak came into view the cloud cleared and we were treated to a few minutes of the brilliant white peak! We were probably some of the only walkers who managed to see it that day as it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
Our photos don't really do it justice, but we went back to the van happy - although Joanna was sad to leave the glacier, she spent ages fishing out a big piece of glacial ice, but was too weak to carry it back to the campervan freezer! Anyway, we slept pretty well that night and left the lovely Mount Cook to head south to Dunedin. We'll let you know
Dog Statue
This proud statue was built to thank the sheep dogs used by New Zealand farmers, cute! how that went soon, we promise!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.088s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0538s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Alice
non-member comment
Looks like you are still having fun! I'm in France at the moment enjoying the first good weather of the summer. Awesome. Keep up the great photos. xxx