Fortunately, although I live and work in London, I was nowhere the explosions this morning. It looks like most friends and relatives who might have been expected to be in the area have reported in ok, so *touch wood* it looks like the chief impact on my life will be a couple of long and incredibly tedious journeys and a rather twitchy unproductive ( Read more... )

Sunday was not such a nice day in terms of the weather. I finished off the coach journey that I had started on Friday, which took me to Queenstown via a lunch stop at Mount Cook Village. This was fairly interesting, although the most common comment from the driver was "we'd have a good view of Mount Cook from here if it wasn't for all that cloud". ( Read more... )

I only stayed in Christchurch for the night before having to get up really early in order to catch a coach to Lake Tekapo, which is in the area known as the high country or MacKenzie Country. Christchurch will be my last port of call before I fly home, so I'll say more about that then.

( Friday: Up into the high country )

( Tuesday: Scenery and Salt geeking )

Late on Monday afternoon, Alais and I took the Interislander ferry across from Wellington to Picton in the Marlborough Sounds region at the very Northern tip of the South Island. This was a good opportunity to sit back and watch the world go by over a quiet drink. Unfortunately, we managed to bring the cloud across with us from Wellington, so I ( Read more... )

We spent Sunday night in Wellington with Anne, who is a former work colleague of Alais. She was really hospitable, and offered to take our luggage and give us a lift to the ferry terminal the next evening. What a total star!

( Monday: Hobbits and other cultural stuff )

Friday morning: took the scenic train from Auckland station down to Palmerston North, and on from there to Ashhurst which is a few miles away. The journey down was very pleasant and we passed through lots of pretty scenery, although it all looked rather parched as it hadn't rained for quite some time. At least not until I turned up - it was ( Read more... )

Stayed in Auckland on Wednesday and Thursday nights in the Auckland City YHA, which was nice cheap and very handy for the town centre. Oh and it has a terrace that you can have barbecues on which has a really good view of the Sky Tower.

( Thursday: Auckland Zoo and up the Sky Tower )

Arrived in Rotorua at about 8:45 local time on Monday morning. After spending a bit of time sorting out my travel arrangements for the next few days at Tourism Rotorua, I headed off on one of the local buses to the Skyline Skyrides. The main feature is the cable car that takes you up to the top of a fairly steep hill, or you can take a chairlift if ( Read more... )

I'm writing this sitting on the plane - we're over Reykjavik apparently. The plane has one of those GPS systems and every now and then it flashes up on the big TV where we are, how fast we're going etc. Even when we were taxiing at Heathrow it kept updating to show which direction we were facing, which I thought was overkill slightly ( Read more... )