Leaving Oceania

Oceania has been a relatively easy place for us to travel. Sure, very expensive compared to Asia, but it is a lot simpler to make yourself understood… everyone speaks English! Except perhaps in Tahiti or the other Polynesian Islands. But then, naturally most of our time has been spent in the major countries here, Australia and New Zealand. And after struggling with tonality and the hundreds of mutually unintelligible regional dialects around China it’s been quite restful to be able to communicate with everyone easily. Although the typical twang in the Oceanic accents took a bit of getting used to at first!

It’s also been nice to be able to construct our own basic meals rather than having to eat out every night. Try buying simple bread and cheese in China. Go on, I dare you! The best bread you’ll get will be sweet, glazed, and will probably have some fishy flakes sprinkled on it. Or if you are in Japan you’ll find they cut all the crusts off their very white air-filled bread and then squish it into a small package. Very odd. In South East Asia you can occasionally find a place that does a reasonable sarney (BLT!), but we could never work out where they got the ingredients from to make our own stuff. And you risk encountering the odd caterpillar crawling out of it! Just as well you can get cheap tasty noodle or rice dishes in these places! But fortunately Australia and New Zealand have shops and supermarkets just like the UK – meaning Gary could have some nice bread, ham, cheese, and even a bottle of New World red from time to time!

I think we managed to get a better grasp of New Zealand than Australia while we were out here. Australia was just so vast (and expensive) that we struggled to see more than a few places. Even so we had a great time and saw some weird things – and managed to meet up with friends. But by hiring cars and touring around the country at our own pace in New Zealand we managed to see and do loads, which was great as it is a truly beautiful place. Both countries were fun to visit though, and we will hopefully end up in this neck of the woods again in the near future – although not immediately as it is not cheap to get to the other side of the world!

Anyway, the next continent we visit will be South America. Our first stop, Easter Island, is not exactly on the continent however. This tiny lump of Chilean rock is over 1000 miles from the nearest neighbouring island, and the native people are apparently predominantly of Polynesian descent. So I suspect our first 10 days in the most remote corner of South America won’t give us a particularly typical sample of the place but will probably add a unique flavour of its own to our trip. Then it’s on to Santiago for Christmas, before we start returning north on our route back to the UK. With a few stops en route of course! Have a look at http://www.catch-up-with-the-sun-southamerica.blogspot.com (reachable from the navigation panel on the right of this screen as always) for details – and have a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Website Guide

This is a really quick post - in response to a few emails from friends recently who seem to have got lost in this site...

Most of the posts we put up aren't here on the main page, there simply wouldn't be enough memory allowance to store the photos for the year. So we created pages for each continent, accessed on the right hand side of this page. See the bit called 'Links'. We've explained this a few times, but since a few people have clearly missed it and thought this was the only page we thought we'd better mention it again!

The Continental pages are usually updated once or twice a week, everytime we move from town to town (and manage to find an internet cafe...). This page gets updated once in a blue moon! So have a look at the 'Oceania' page for recent stuff on New Zealand (and then have a look at the post I've just put up below this one about leaving the place!).

Leaving New Zealand

I’ve found certain bits of New Zealand very familiar – lots of sheep, rugby mad, and in some places even the landscape is exactly the same despite being on the other side of the planet. 13 hours ahead of the UK in fact (I didn’t know you could get more than plus or minus 12 hours… daylight saving time makes everything confusing). But then you drive around the corner from a perfect sheep-grazing field that could be in mid-Wales, and hit a volcanic coastline with black beaches and turquoise water… and then you realise you truly are on the other side of the planet.

New Zealand is probably the most beautiful place we’ve visited. OK, we’ve seen truly lovely places all over the world, but here EVERYTHING is pretty. It’s very difficult to find dull areas, let alone ugly places. Be it rugged coastlines, glacier formed fjords, volcanic wastes, of geothermal wonderlands… But most importantly in New Zealand – to travel around it you really need to drive. There are simply too few people here for public transport systems to be particularly well developed, and of course many of the most notable places are in the middle of nowhere. So renting a car or van is really the only option to see things properly. Luckily car rentals are very reasonable – in fact most things are pretty reasonably priced compared to Australia, the USA or Europe.

So, the inevitable good versus scary list for New Zealand is as follows:

Some things we’ve found great…

1. Geothermal activity. As you might have guessed from the pictures on the Oceania page we found this very hypnotic and beautiful. There’s so many different intriguing ways in which it manifests – geysers, hot-springs, silica deposit terraces, bubbling mud, fumaroles… And of course the lovely rotten egg smell! I would very much like to visit Rotorua again at some point just to wander around some of the more active zones.

2. Volcanoes. Even if they are dormant they still look very cool! Especially the ones on the coastline or at the edge of a vast volcanic-ash wasteland. Very desolate and bleak, but utterly stunning.

3. Fjords. Also stunning, but a bit less bleak – unless the weather turns, the clouds pour in and it starts to bucket down of course! Milford Sound is the most accessible fjord in New Zealand, and therefore the one we visited. It’s the only one with a road leading to it… The others are probably lovely too, and hopefully they’ll be connected to the rest of the world some day.

4. Wildlife. The South Island was brilliant for stumbling across weird and wonderful creatures. Our favourites were the penguins – particularly the little blue eyed ones. They were incredibly sweet, only 20 cm high! But the massive albatrosses, grumpy sea-lions and sleek seals were also fascinating to watch, and neither of us are particularly into wildlife spotting.

5. Friendly. New Zealanders are remarkably friendly for the most part. OK, not everyone is perfect, you’ll always meet the odd gruff sod, but most people were lovely. Very friendly. It really makes a difference to your impression of a place.

6. Car rentals. There were a variety of low cost car rental companies to choose from (and the usual rip-off international brands too) – perfect as having your own transport is essential in New Zealand. We used ACE car rentals, and they very kindly supplied us with the same car Gary usually drives back in the UK. You need the freedom of a car in a place like this – New Zealand countryside needs to be explored. You can do it from a bus.

7. Adrenaline highs. Bungeeee!!!!!!!



And some scary things…

1. Auckland Airport. When we left for Tahiti we turned up 3 hours early for our flight (simply because we had nowhere much to go after checking out of our hotel) and we struggled to meet the boarding time. It’s just too small! There wasn’t enough room for any more check-in desks, but they were desperately needed – as was a revamp of a painfully slow computer system. The place was OK as soon as you got through to departures, but before that it was worse than Delhi Airport!

2. Sea water. A lovely shade of turquoise it may be. Very pretty and inviting. But you don’t want to swim – absolutely freezing, even in late spring! Gary found this out the hard way when we visited the Moeraki boulders in South island. He was so engrossed with taking photos of me perched on a boulder that he didn’t notice the waves coming in… This is the picture he took – note the water around the boulder and the fact that I couldn’t stop giggling!

3. Wellington weather. Rain. Lots of it. And not much else as far as we could make out. This place is wetter than Nanjing.

4. Erm, can’t think of anything else. New Zealand isn’t particularly scary!

Ah well, we’ve now moved on to Tahiti, the major island of French Polynesia. And trust me, it’s slightly surreal to here everyone jabbering away in French in an isolated island in the middle of the Pacific. The other weird thing is that during our flight here we crossed the date line… so went from 13 hours ahead of GMT to 10 hours behind. And although we left on the 5th of December we arrived on the 4th – gaining a day! Yay!