Blogs from Te Anau, South Island, New Zealand, Oceania - page 17

Well another few weeks have passed between the end of my last blog and now. I do feel though that I'm just not doing enough to justify so many entries, take today for example, another quiet day on my travels. All I did was go to Milford Sound, take a cruise to the Tasman Sea, fly in a helicopter across the Southern Alps, land on a glacier, walk up 300m to Summit Key and come home, have tea and call Mum. See - doing nothing! So I arrived in New Zealand full of beans after my adventures in Ramsey Street and keen to see and experience some of the country which everyone I've ever spoken to has fallen in love with. My arrival wasn't auspicious, particularly after I was sought out by the bloody sniffer dogs ... read more

Before I get stuck into our adventures for the day an apology for the delay getting the entries up. We’ve had trouble getting internet access since getting to Wanaka. Our NZ dial-up service provider has one place in NZ where they’re server isn’t working properly. Yep, you guessed it…in Wanaka. While talking to them on our mobile they said “oh, it was working last year!!” LAST YEAR!!! Geez guys you reckon you could check it a bit more frequently???? :-) Right, now to our day. We were up in time to shower, pack and have a cooked breakfast (quite a treat from cereal and toast) before checking out at 10am. Left Wanaka after another visit to the supermarket (our 3rd since we arrived), fill up with fuel ($1.71ltr) and a quick photo. Our route is via ... read more

Friday, 7th September We hired a car - a lovely white Mazda Familia which is gonna be our transport for the next 24days - taking us all the way to Auckland. We drove to Te Anau last night and are staying in a really nice (quiet) hostel in what seems to be a town stuck in the middle of nowhere. Though it does have all the essentials! Just spent the day kayaking on Milford Sound. Technically it is a fiord because it was carved out by glaciers - as was most of the south - Queenstown etc..hence the reason eveything is so flat between the mountains. We were looking out for wildlife, but there wasn't as much as we had hoped - it is penguin season and we only saw one but didn't manage to photograph ... read more

Hello all, sorry for the delay in blogging but the site has not been working. This computer has no USB slots so there are no pictures - apologies. We have safely arrived in New Zealand, we flew into Christchurch 4 days ago. Whilst there we stocked up at the supermarket after collecting our camper van. We visited the Antarctic centre which had a room full of snow and simulated an antarctic storm (-20 c), they also had a rescue centre for Blue Penguins (which were so cool!). We then chugged down to Dunedin for 2 nights, whilst there we went out to a reserve to watch seals and Yellow eyed penguins in the wild. Today we drove over here to Te Anau a beautiful location on a lake with a mountain back-drop, in preparation for a ... read more

So it was an uneventful drive to Te Anau, picked up jac from the airport, continued meandering south to te anau, gorgeous sunny weather, started at lunchtime so the ice on the roads was luckily all melted, awesome. We turned up at the walker bach (jac's husband's family's) with plenty of light to spare, walked the '500 Jenny-steps' down to the DOC office to check the weather, which was a little scary, and settled in for the night. The forecast for the next day was for a cloudy/showery cold day, with snow in the afternoon, and then lots of snow and rain and gale force winds and COLD for the day after. Considering we only had a short-ish day up to Luxmore hut (less than 5 hours from the start of the track), and considering ... read more