Saturday, January 24, 2004

Heading North

We've done our time on South Island, and got up at 6am this morning to catch the ferry to the North Island. This weekend is the end of the summer holidays so the ferry was split between Kiwis ending their holidays, and international tourists in the middle of theirs. The crossing took 3 and a half hours, but after lots of practice with long car journeys, it seemed to go in a flash! No sooner had we driven on in Picton than we were driving off in Wellington – to a cold wind and light drizzle.

We'd booked our hostel ahead, the Wildlife House, which is a 5 storey tower block, painted with huge zebra stripes. Once we were inside all pretence at themes had gone out the window, and it was just another big, city hostel. But it was clean, had a huge kitchen/lounge, and free internet access. So we were able to catch up with most of our emails, while the girls played on the CBeebies website. We're not keen on staying in city hostels, because they are always much bigger, and seem more cramped than hostels in the countryside. Perhaps its just the absence of green space around them, but whatever it is, we all feel better when we're away from the cities – in north America, Australia and here in New Zealand.

In the evening we went out for an Indian meal – we just needed a break from cooking for ourselves! We decided that we'd earned a night out, and also that it was good practice for our Asian diet (I know, that's a pathetic excuse, and besides we're not going to India, but we needed to justify it to ourselves somehow!). Its only two weeks now until we fly to Singapore, so we're starting to get hunger pangs for every type of Asian food. But, ask the girls and they'll tell you the best bit was going into the kitchen to look inside the Tandoor oven. Although we're not even in Asia yet, we've started to learn new things about it (in all the times I've eaten in Indian restaurants in Britain, I've never once seen a tandoor, let alone had the kids-tour of the kitchen). And, boy was the curry good. We're going to have to put "curries" somewhere onto our list of 'What we have missed most about home".

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Te Papa Museum

There doesn't seem to be much in Wellington to amuse us, but we found the Te Papa museum (The Museum of New Zealand) great with the girls. Although they weren't keen on going (how would five-floors-of-museum-exhibits grab you for a Sunday treat?) we soon found out it offered lots of entertainment for children and grown-ups. Like the "Shear a Virtual Sheep" shed, where the girls could try their hands at sheep shearing, without all the trouble of real sheep or real shears. If I describe it, it sounds rubbish, but it was much, much better than it sounds. You run a bar code reader over a toy sheep, which has been plastered with bar codes. Just to make it easy, they're all arranged in number sequence, and you have to run the bar code reader over them in the right order, against the clock. Mmmm, okay, if you've read the last two sentences, then I should repeat "it was much, much better than it sounds" – but that’s not going to be difficult heh?

There was all the usual modern museum stuff too – like earthquake simulators (a bit more real when they show you the footage of the house down the road which suffered it), maori canoes, old newsreels, art and immigration exhibits. And the girls found the "Discovery Centres", where they could read, draw and dress up to their hearts content. So in the Pacifica Discovery Centre, Charlotte and Emily got to dress up in hula skirts, and practice their beach dancing. And in the New Zealand Discovery Centre, they dressed up in Victorian school uniforms and played at being in a classroom (that must come from 6 months without lessons – I can't imagine they'd play 'Schools' if they were at home!). When they discovered the 'Dig Up a Dinosaur' exhibit, they were completely over the moon. To be able to uncover a dinosaur skeleton in a huge sandpit – they didn’t make museums like this when I was little! We eventually left the museum about 6 hours after we arrived, to complaints from both girls. Not bad for a museum day.

In the evening we went up to Sarah's Mum's cousin, John and his wife Delia, and with Gloria and Michael again for the evening. They'd spent the last three weeks around Australia, so we all caught up with our respective travel stories.

Monday, January 26, 2004

Arriving at the atrium

Another 'driving' day – this time the destination made it all well worthwhile! We left Wellington and drove eight hours up to Mount Manganui, which is on the coast in the Bay of Plenty. It was a long drive, especially as New Zealand roads don't go in straight lines like in Australia, but bend and twist around every tree stump and bump in the field. We stopped for lunch at Lake Taupo airport, watching backpackers take their first sky dive.

Around 6pm we got to the coast, and drove straight to The Atrium, an apartment block between two beaches 100 metres apart. We are officially now the happiest family in New Zealand. For the six months we've been travelling we've been in hostels, campsites, motels, and campervans. In all that time we've shared one bedroom between all four of us except for 2 nights. And we've generally had to walk down the corridor/across the grounds to get to a shared bathroom (not so for our five weeks in the States, but then motels had lots of other drawbacks). But for the next few nights we're in heaven. We're in an apartment belonging to the parents of an ex-colleague at RM, and we've been given the use of it for a short while. After six months of travel, you cannot imagine how nice it is to have somewhere that feels a bit like home, and especially where the girls are sleeping in the lounge, while we get the bedroom. It means that tonight we can go the bed at a different time to them! And where we don't have to share the bathroom – we can put all our wash bag things out on the side, and they'll still be there in the morning. I guess these are the downsides of travelling like we are, which we've just got used to after a while, but which aren't "normal" at home.

I can't adequately describe the glory of sitting on the balcony of the 5th floor apartment overlooking the bay tonight now, so I'll wait until I can show you a few more photo's. For the minute, this photo says it all – how happy we'll be for a little while!

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

The North Island

While we've been on the South Island, we'd not seen many Maoris or signs of Maoris. But since leaving Wellington, we've seen more in a day than in the whole of the previous two weeks. Somebody explained to me that the Maoris lived mostly on the North Island because of its warmer climate, although there are Maori lands on the South Island that we passed by. Two days ago at the Te Papa museum we were able to discover much more about the Maori lifestyle, and were stuck by the similarities to things we saw and experienced in Fiji – which isn't surprising, as the Maoris originally came from the South Pacific Islands to populate New Zealand.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Rotorua stinks!

After driving through Rotorua quickly to get to Mount Manganui, went back to see some more of the thermal sites, and to find out where that awful smell comes from. We stopped in the municipal park, to see where the steam was coming out of the ground. There were steaming hot lakes, and mud pools with little mud bubbles plopping up every few seconds. But most noticeable of all was the hideous sulphuric stink which rose with the steam. It was revolting and made us feel a bit sick. Its an amazing geological phenomenon, but we wish it didn't smell so bad.

Then we drove over to Te-Whakarewarewatanga-o-te-Ope-Taua-a-Wahiao, which is the best main thermal and Maori cultural attraction in the town. In between the geysers and thermal hot pools, the Maori houses are dotted around, delicately avoiding hot vents and collapsing ground. In places the ground was covered by a thin, hot crust, and walls and paths seemed to be collapsing into new holes every few steps. Some of the water reaches 120 degrees, so it pays to watch your step! As well as heating and baths, the thermal pools are also used for cooking, with vents used for steaming meals, and the hot pools used for boiling vegetables. Despite the rotten-egg smell, the girls both enjoyed a mineral-soaked boiled sweet corn, straight out of one of the thermal pools.

We also went to the Maori concert, with eight Maori dressed in traditional costumes, performing traditional songs and dances. But, of course, we were all waiting for them to do the haka, made famous by the New Zealand rugby team. Sitting in the front row, four feet from the tongues, it seemed pretty scary, so I can imagine what its like with 15 huge rugby players doing it. Charlotte thought it was great, but Emily was a bit intimidated by it – so much so that she didn't want to stand with them for a photograph!

We queued for a photo too after the show, and decided to take it as seriously as the Maori troop did. You can see what the Maori lady on my left thought about it! All in all we had a good time, but at the end of the day we were so happy to be leaving town, and leaving the rotten smell behind. Last time we travelled we stayed in Rotorua, and we even cooked mussels for dinner – given the smell we've got no idea how we did it!

Thursday, January 29, 2004

Getting jabs

When we left England, we'd decided to get the girls typhoid jabs done in New Zealand, so that Emily was a little bit older. So this morning the girls got to pop down to the medical centre and get them. It was quick and easy, and most importantly for them, they were rewarded with a double scoop Hokey Pokey ice cream. So now we're all up to date with all of our jabs and other medical precautions.

Well, almost up to date. We're watching the developing situation with the Asian bird flu carefully – we're flying to Singapore in nine days time, and our plan is to travel through Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia. We're always pragmatic about risks when we travel – after all, a lot more people die crossing the road every day than in most things that hit the headlines – but we're not going to go rushing into anything dangerous. At the moment the bird flu seems pretty low risk – it doesn't pass from human to human, and you can only get it from direct contact with live, infected chickens. So the trip to the Vietnamese-chicken-petting-zoo is out then! We'll just watch and wait, and see what develops. But at the moment, its not changing our plans. But imagine if it goes the way of SARS – our Asian photo's could all look like the one above!

Saturday, January 31, 2004

Going up the wall...

The weather's taken a turn for the worse on the coast, with grey clouds covering up the blue sky, and delivering rain showers through the day. So we went swimming to the outdoor pool! Well, the pools are thermally heated, so instead of being cool, they're heated to a range of temperatures between 31 degrees (coldest!) to 39 degrees. And so swimming in the rain is unique, when you've got your body boiling, and your head and shoulders getting attacked by pin-pricks of freezing cold raindrops. The rising steam gives it a slightly mystic feel too.

As the rain carried on in the afternoon, we went to 'The Rock Face', which is an indoor climbing centre in the town. We haven't seen these kind of facilities at home – it was in a warehouse, and all the walls were covered in climbing holds. It cost £6 for each of the girls for all day climbing. There were lots of adults and children, trying out the different routes and levels of difficulty. Charlotte, who'd been rock climbing at Christmas, was straight into the harness and off up the wall.

Emily didn't need any encouragement either. As soon as she had her harness on she was away, up the wall. I had to call her back to attach the rope to her! Although it was a little more difficult for her, because the hand holds were set too far apart at times, she managed to get three-quarters of the way up the wall, and quickly got into the hang of abseiling back down again for another go. We went there because we were looking for an indoor activity for a rainy day, but the girls enjoyed it so much I suspect we'll be looking for a climbing centre when we get home.

When things go wrong...

Although we're travelling with quite a bit of equipment, like our Tablet PC, CD Writer, digital cameras etc, we've been reasonably lucky so far with keeping it safe and working. Unfortunately we've had the first serious failure this week, when the Canon Ixus 400 camera jammed with a nasty "E18" error message, which apparently means that the lens is jammed. The bad news is that Canon in New Zealand can't fix it before we leave the country, and they won't repair it anyway without the original warranty document (Right, like I carry that everywhere), even though I've got a copy of the receipt. Also, apparently digital camera warranties are only issued for the country you buy them in, rather than worldwide. So we've had to send the camera home with Michael (Sarah's Dad) to get it repaired in the UK, and then we'll hope to get it sent back at the end of March. It's lucky that we bought another camera in December – otherwise all of the website photos would have ended up looking like the one above for two months!

Monday, February 2, 2004

The Surfers Paradise

We've now moved to the west coast of the North Island, and are in a village called Raglan, which is where the surfers of New Zealand gather - and our view of the beach is great! The Solscape hostel is a surfers paradise, with half railway carriages as double rooms dotted around the grounds, full of surfers discussing their greatest wave and how cool everything is. Sarah's parents have joined us for the last two days before they head to Auckland and home, so we're all sharing a big cottage in the grounds with 'to die for' views. Or at least they would be to die for if the weather was better than it is. Unfortunately the weather all over New Zealand has taken a turn for the worse, and we're left peering through rainstorms towards where the beach was earlier! The photo shows the view from the cottage decking, during a break in the rain. But the cloud from the silver lining is that we were able to light a log fire, and have a cosy day catching up and discussing our respective plans for the months ahead.

It's a real shame that the weather wasn't better, and our clever plan to get 3 summers in a row by coming down to the Southern hemisphere seems a bit of a distant memory, but in 7 days time we'll be in Singapore, where it is currently 32 degrees and very high humidity – then we'll be dreaming about the cool New Zealand summer!

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

The Farm, Whangaruru – WHOOPS!

After another emotional farewell to Sarah's parents (with all the bird flu news, they're even more nervous about us heading to Asia next weekend), we drove north towards the Bay of Islands, the area where the first European settlers arrived in New Zealand. But we're not really here for the history, but because we'd been recommended 'The Farm' five months ago, when we were in Fiji. It sounded like an ideal place to spend a few days before Asia, and for the girls to get a chance to milk a cow etc.

As we arrived the sun was shining, and the girls were over the moon that there was a full-sized trampoline in the garden, and the owners have 4 children for them to get to know and play with. So we sat on the decking with the other backpackers, enjoying a cup of tea in the early evening sunshine, and relaxing from the drive.

The peace was broken by the sound of Emily howling. Somehow she'd landed awkwardly on the trampoline, and had sprained her ankle. It soon started to swell up, with a horrible lop-sided look to it. So much for worrying about the dangers of Asia – we hadn't even got there yet!

It was straight on with the bag of frozen peas, and a quick dose of Calpol (its amazing the things we've been carrying in our rucksacks!). Fortunately the hostel owner is a vet as well as a farmer, so he soon bandaged Emily up to limit the swelling, and begin the healing process (the only slightly curious moment was when Michael, the vet, said "She'll be okay – she can just walk on her other 3 legs for a while. Oh"). And for the rest of the evening Emily had to be carried around everywhere. She loved it! But later in the evening it was so uncomfortable for her (mainly because she couldn't scratch an itchy bite that was underneath the bandage..) that she couldn't sleep. At half past twelve we ended up doing the old parents-favourite, of taking her for a drive to get her to sleep. It took 20 minutes to get her to sleep, because around every corner was a possum in the middle of the road! In the end she went to sleep counting the possums, and we all got a restful night!

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Should her foot really look like that?

Hmm...This morning Emily seemed okay with her ankle, but we weren't entirely sure whether it was okay or not. Our worry was that when we leave for Asia next weekend, we'd want to be confident that her ankle was okay and getting better. Although it was bandaged up well (any sheep or cow would have been pleased with the result!), we decided that we should get it checked a bit further, and make sure there were no broken bones.

That turned out to be a bit more difficult than we thought! We had to drive to Whangerai Hospital, about 40 miles away on a windy, twisty, hilly road. The rain, which had started at midnight, had caused the local streams and rivers to surge, so we quickly came across a flooded road. On the photo you can see where the road is – it’s the bit under the water, between the white posts. We made it across, just, but we saw two cars on the other side that hadn't! If it had been too deep, we'd have had another 40 mile detour.

At the hospital A&E the treatment was quick and efficient – after a check from the nurse, and then an inspection by the doctor, Emily was taken to have her ankle x-rayed, and the verdict was delivered. But unfortunately it was inconclusive – she could have broken her ankle, but the x-ray showed a shadow rather than a definite break. So they recommended that we put her into a plaster cast for the next week, and then get it checked before the plaster comes off. Two and a half hours later we left hospital with Emily plastered up to the knee, and wondering what we should do next.

Everything should be okay for the plaster to come off next week, but we'll have left New Zealand by then, and have flown to Singapore. Rather than head straight off to Malaysia, we'll stay a few extra days in Singapore, so that we can get Emily checked in one of their good hospitals, and then move after everything's been confirmed to be okay. It's better than it could have been – if she had definitely broken a bone, the doctor would have put her into a bigger plaster and recommended for it to stay on for six weeks, and we'd probably end up spending extra time in New Zealand. At least we'll be able to get to a beach in Asia for a quick bit of recuperation for her!

Emily's happy anyway, because she got to eat tea at McDonalds as a treat, and she got a get-well balloon signed by Ronald McDonald, and a little bag of goodies.

Friday, February 06, 2004

The Farm at Whangaruru

Emily has quickly adjusted to life wearing a plaster cast. After the first night, it doesn’t seem to have caused her any pain, and she was quite happy to sit and watch satellite TV all day long, without having to move a muscle. And when the sun came out, she moved out onto the veranda, looking over the horse paddocks, volleyball pitch, and the backpackers playing petanque.

And after two days she was up and about. In the hospital they'd wondered about crutches, but Emily's happy without them Although we're not letting her walk often, she doesn't want to sit down all day, and there are times when she sees all the children playing and she just wants to be up and about with them. Hopefully that means that she's not got a broken bone, but we'll have to wait until next week to see.

Charlotte, of course, hasn't slowed down a bit, and managed to get her very first horse ride. Although it was just around one of the squares, she learnt to be able to get the horse moving and steering it around. And her first question after getting off? "Can I get a horse when we get home?" We've been asked a lot of questions that start and end "Can I.....when we get home?" and most of them have been answered with a 'maybe', but this one just had to be a 'No'. Who knows what life will be like when we get home, but I suspect it's unlikely to involve Charlotte having a horse!

Saturday, February 07, 2004

Having a treat

When we're travelling, 'having a treat' has a special meaning. It can be something small, like a decent cup of coffee or an ice cream for the girls, or it can be something else. The girls' treat today was an ice-cream, which had been emailed to us by our friends Tom and Elizabeth. (Well, emailed so to speak, because they'd sent Emily a get well soon email, and asked us on their behalf to buy her an ice cream as a get well treat. I suppose the cheques in the post!).

We also dropped in to see Steve and Eileen Tully, who'd loaned us their deluxe apartment in Mt Manganui last week. And that was a treat for us too, because we were able to sit down in somebody's garden, have a dip in the pool (imagine how Emily wailed about not being able to swim because of her plaster) and sit around a dining table and eat a normal meal (no backpackers pasta in sight). The girls got to ride around on the trike, and play with other dolls for a change ("Daddy, can we buy one of these to take with us to Asia?"), and could sit on the sofa without fear of sitting next to a grumpy backpacker.


When it came time to leave, we had to tear ourselves away. In just 4 hours we'd had a great time, and made really good friends (we'd never met, and only spoken on the phone three times before!), and in the car on the way out Charlotte said "I felt so welcome there – more than anywhere I've ever been in the world". When you're backpacking and hostelling, you tend to meet people, get to know them, and treat them like old friends very quickly, because most times, you'll only see them for 2 or 3 days before you each go your own way. Its one of the strange facets of travel that doesn't seem to exist in 'real life'. And that seems to apply even now, travelling with the girls, and they seem to have the same effect – somebody they've know for 2 days becomes somebody they will talk about for a long time afterwards.

Sunday, February 08, 2004

Flying to Asia

Handy travel hint: Getting through airports is made a lot easier when you've got a child in a wheelchair. Those people that push you around the airport know every single way to jump a queue and get you settled in a lounge quickly. Much better than one of the swanky Gold cards!


After 7 months on the road, since July 16th last year, we're finally leaving the luxury of the 'developed world'. We deliberately chose to visit "easy" countries first – Canada, the USA, Fiji, Australia and New Zealand were all fairly easy to travel around, and we were on familiar ground. By now, the pattern of backpacking has settled down, and we're all used to the style of travel that results from there being four of us rather than just two, like last time we did this. But when we wake up tomorrow the girls will wake up in Singapore, and pretty soon afterwards we'll hopefully be heading up the isthmus to Malaysia and Thailand. Although they're not as difficult to travel around as India or China, we will be off the beaten track for a while, getting away from the resorts on the west coast. And the heat and humidity will be worse than we've experienced for a prolonged period elsewhere, so we're all waiting slightly nervously to see how it goes. And then we can tell you!