Me, Joanne, Jaime, and Pablo

The two guys, Pablo and Jaime, were very nice and, although they were very chatty, they understood that we were not exactly lives and souls of the party after our flight. Pablo was from Uruguay, which was very interesting and useful, since we hadn't yet decided whether we were going there; Jaime was a native of Chile. They told us that the rest of South America doesn't think that Chileans speak Spanish, but some other related language and Argentinians, and especially the Uruguayans sound more like they are speaking Italian because of the slow, sing-song way that they speak Spanish, which is much easier to understand.

That night we both slept for fourteen hours. Excellent! From 10pm until midday. However this meant that my avoiding jet-lag plan hadn't exactly worked, but at least we'd caught up on some much-needed sleep. We had thought we would wake up at 8am, after all who can sleep longer than ten hours?

Joanne neither up nor down

We went out for a wee look around. Pablo, Jaime, and the guidebook has told us there wasn't really much for tourist to do in Santiago except climb both of the cerros, which you can do in one day. Since half the day was gone we decided to go for the smaller one, Cerro Santa Lucia, as it also had the advantage of being closer to Pablo and Jaime's flat. The weather wasn't great, but we hoped we would get a view of the Andes, which we had been told you can see from the city. When we arrived the previous day, the weather was so bad that there was no chance, but it had improved a bit since then. Even on the walk to the park we could see hints of the Andes between the buildings. It's really nice to see such massive mountains from the middle of the city.

City and mountains

Santa Cristobel (the other hill)

A snogging couple in the park

Pollution and mountains

Big mountains, ugly city

Nice fountain in Cerro Santa Lucia park

More of Cerro Santa Lucia pretty bits

On top of the city, looking down on pollution

Later we headed to Bella Vista, which the guide book says is a trendy part of town and great for night life. On the way we were intercepted by a student who was handing out poetry to make money, because the government is increasing the fees and it's impossible to live, he said. We had heard a fair bit the previous night about the relative political inclinations of Chile and Uruguay: in Uruguay health and education is free; in Chile you pay for everything. As we were travelling for a year, we had become quite hardened to begging; for one thing, our trip would be severely curtailed if we gave to everyone who seemed in need; for another thing it becomes very annoying when you are constantly targeted as an obvious walking piggy bank. Consequently we hadn't given much in India, probably about the same frequency as a middle-class Indian, and in India there was a lot of need. It may seem callous, but after refusing so many needy people in India, there was no way I was giving money to some poet-student who looked pretty well dressed. When I told him we couldn't afford it, he said please just a token, so I handed him a 100 Peso coin and he responded “It's too much of a token”, and refused to take it, so I just said OK and walked off. We still hadn't got used to the money at that point and, in fact, it was more stingy than I had intended to be! How are new-comers to the country supposed to understand a currency that only manages about 1000 to a pound? Mind you, writing this I've changed my mind: what beggar in Glasgow would have refused 10p? In fact in Chile the cost of living is much lower, so this is probably equivalent to 50p, although I have no idea how much glue costs in Chile.

Soon after we were lingering outside a bar with a sign for pisco sours, which we were obviously going to have to try as they are a national speciality, although if you ask Peruvians, apparently, the Chileans stole this speciality along with Ceviche from them, who invented them first and have the best ones. Later a Chilean guy would tell us that this is because the best lemons come from Peru and, since both specialities rely heavily on lemons, Chile could never has as good versions as Peru. As we were dawdling there a few locals came out, in high spirits, and invited us to join them. It was the girl's birthday, they told us. I didn't see the harm, although I felt a little nervous about a random encounter with strangers in South America, which I had been looking forward to with apprehension, slightly, all the way through safer-than-Europe Asia. Nevertheless, I felt our trip to Cuba had missed a little from not mixing enough with the locals whenever they seemed a bit shady (which was all the time), so I thought stopping off for one pisco sour would do no harm. The pisco sours were great, and the people we very nice and friendly, so we stayed for a beer too. Then one of the three left and soon after the bill arrived. The “brother” of the “birthday girl” threw in only a few coins even though most of the bill was theirs. I complained that their bill was much more than that and he put in a bit more, but I didn't feel confident enough in my smattering of Spanish to involve the staff and just decided to pay the extra 1500 Pesos. They had still been expecting us to meet them later in Bella Vista, but I told them that there was no way we were meeting them later if I had to pay so much extra towards the bill. If they had asked before, I might well have said yes, because the chat was good and it's only actually about £1.50, but they had broken at least one principle, so that was it. £1.50 to be encouraged to look up “La cuenta distinta” for next time didn't seem too costly.

After that we were in need of more food and the only thing we thought we could afford was another empanada. Pie for lunch and pie for dinner: a good Glasgow diet. We did get to Bella Vista alone and it was a great wee area. Actually it seems to be just one street. Litres of beer for only 990 Pesos and the whole street is jumping with activity. It wasn't great, though, that everyone smoked. We had got used to it in China, but New Zealand had made us sensitive again. The city and now, especially, the night life really reminded me of Barcelona. The lively atmosphere mostly. The architecture in Santiago doesn't have a whisper of a dream of Barcelona's, but the atmosphere is just a nice. And who cares how ugly the city is when you can see the Andes between every pair of buildings? One unexpected difference is that the people are much whiter in Chile. I had expected the people to look pretty much Spanish, but a bit darker due to mixing with the indigenous people. Now, there are plenty of people like that, but there are also a lot of locals who look northern European, which I was not expecting. I didn't realise, but there were a lot of later immigrants to South America after the original colonial days, and they have certainly left their genetic mark.

written by  The Happy Couple on September 4, 2009 from Santiago, Chile
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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For the first time, really, we were able to see New Zealand's fantastic scenery. For three weeks nearly all we had seen was cloud, but now, on a bus journey on our last day, we passed beautiful mountains that we could actually see. As soon as we moved a bit further East than Queenstown it cleared up. When we were planning New Zealand we had asked lots of people their opinion regarding the North versus the South Islands. In retrospect we should have asked about the West versus the East: presumably then everyone would have said “Oh yeah, the West is the most dramatic, but if you're going in winter you won't see any of, so you might as well skip it”.

The bus travelled through a region which had, in the past, been designated the hunting region, and huge areas of forest had been cleared. Now the scenery went from looking quite like Scotland to looking exactly like Scotland: I was almost expecting to come round the next bend and see a sign for Braemar. So just as in most of Scotland, there were some parts of New Zealand where the English had cut down the trees. The difference is that in New Zealand they have since exterminated the forest-destroying wild deer and have now replanted large parts of the country. In New Zealand you still see quite a lot of deer but the fences keep the deer in, not like in Scotland where the fences are to keep the deer out. So in Scotland there is almost no native forest and there can be no serious programme of reforestation until something is done to curb deer numbers. Somehow legislating on the price of venison seems like the way forward to me; how the meat of vermin can be sold at such high prices seems outrageous to me. In Scotland we should refuse to eat an beef at all and switch to venison so hopefully we can eat enough of the beasts to allow trees to grow again. Or we could just reintroduce wolves. And bears.

Lake Tekapo

Further on, we passed right next to two large lakes with Mount Cook in the background, New Zealand's highest mountain. The bus driver / tour guide told us that the reason the lakes are so turquoise-blue, particularly the first one, Lake Pukaki, is that they are full of glacial flour; the particles of rock ground off the mountains by the glaciers are so fine that when they eventually wash into the lakes they are suspended in the water, affecting the way they reflect and diffract light. We stopped at Lake Tekapo for lunch and had a proper chance to admire the scenery. What a waste that we had spent three weeks missing all of this!

Lake Tekapo

Lake Tekapo

Eventually we arrived in Christchurch and found our hostel. They seemed very friendly, but we declined the included pasta dinner and instead went out for a steak special we had seen advertised on the way to the hostel. The next day we were going to South America, where we would be able to get even better steak, but I just couldn't resist a NZ$10 steak.

Christchurch

We had to get up early the next day, but it turned out that the Wednesday included dinner deal they run at the hostel turns into a drunken party after the food is eaten. Our room was right next to the kitchen and it was about 4am when the manager, who seemed to be the ring-leader, and the partying guests finally went to bed. We had to get up at 6am for our flight to Auckland.

We dragged ourselves to the airport minibus in time and on the way the driver entertained us with stories of gap-year kids in New Zealand going wild on daddy's credit card or getting themselves pregnant and, either way, being too scared to go home. Certainly there had been a lot of young travellers in New Zealand and, as we had endured that night, plenty of partying. In Auckland it was lovely and sunny and we finally got to see what Auckland looks like. Quite nice. I wished again we had asked about West-East instead of North-South.

Goodbye New Zealand

The flight from Auckland to Santiago was another nightmare flight. When we checked in the woman asked if we wanted emergency exit seats, which we thought was very kind, what with all the extra leg-room. What we did not reckon with was the fact that they were right next to the toilets. Perhaps because of the accelerated night when flying East, nobody seemed to feel like sleeping on the flight and, instead, they spent the whole night going to the toilet and slamming the door behind them. I hate night flights. We took off at 4pm and landed at 11:30am in Chile, although the flight was only twelve hours long, so people were only really ready to go to sleep about the time they were preparing to serve us breakfast. Another oddity is, because we crossed the dateline just after taking off from New Zealand, we arrived the same day we took off, only earlier in the day, even though we had gone though another night. We get to live the same day all over again! Maybe this time we'll ask to sit somewhere away from the toilets... we might have been one day younger but we didn't feel it after that flight.

So that was New Zealand. We had some fun, it cost a lot of money, but really we missed most of it, especially the bits I wanted to see, just because the weather was too bad. I had originally only planned to stay a few days in Auckland as we had to stop there on the way to South America, because I wasn't that interested in New Zealand culturally as I expected it to be quite like home; it was, only very empty. However when Joanne expressed more interest in seeing the place, we extended the time there. We couldn't really choose the time of year to arrive and, given when we were arriving, we probably should just have stuck to the three days. Or stayed away from the West. I can't complain, though; if someone went to the West of Scotland in winter then moaned about it raining, I'd have to quote Billy Connolly: Well of course it bloody rained! It's f-ing Scotland isn't it?. It seems New Zealand is much the same.

written by  The Happy Couple on September 3, 2009 from Christchurch, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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The following day the weather was better again so we headed into town to organise the bungy jump I had decided on. There was an expensive “highest” option but, when I realised it was only the highest in New Zealand, not the world, I decided instead to opt for the “first bungy in the world”, which I had found out while researching the activity's safety record, is actually just the first commercial bungy site. When we turned I up at the bungy shop, they said we could go immediately or wait for another two hours. I was tempted by suddenly rising nervousness opt for the later one, but realised that was silly and in less than five minutes we had paid and were on a minibus. Joanne did not intend to jump, but they had a spectators go free promotion on so she was along for the ride. The only other people on the minibus was a group of Muslim girls from Kuala Lumpur, all wearing hijabs, not exactly the surfer-dude stereotype I had expected to be on the bus with us but clearly the appeal is very broad. The girls told us that only one of them was actually jumping, the other three just coming along to watch.

The Remarkables

How much!?

I have to do what?

Perched

Ready

So I jumped. I think I went just in time: it's really hard to overcome the instinct not to jump from a high bridge, no matter how many positive safety reports you have read or how secure the equipment all feels. It's a very odd sensation, dropping like that when the water is so close, but it was all over very quickly. I did think that I was going to hit the water just before the elastic snapped me back in the other direction and bounced me quite high up again. I bounced and dangled upside down for much longer than I expected, before I realised that I hadn't been told anything about how to get off it. Then I noticed that the dinghy I had assumed was just there in case of an emergency rescue was paddling towards me with a big pole in the air for me to hold onto. After a couple of misses I grabbed onto it and they pulled me down into the inflatable boat. I told them that I had jumped just in time because I was getting nervous as it was my first time. One of them replied “Was that really your first time? You jumped like a pro.”

Boing!

On the way back up the steps to the viewing platform, I stopped to watch the girl who had been on the bus with me, as I thought I would miss it if I continued to the top. I actually would have had plenty of time because she was having trouble going. The bungy engineer kept peeling her fingers off the pole she was holding onto and saying some, presumably encouraging, words to her before she grabbed back onto the pole and looked sceptically over the edge. This happened many time but then, eventually, it seemed like he pushed her, and she went feet first, which is inadvisable since it increases the chances of whiplash or getting caught up in the bungy. When she reached the maximum she was whipped around which looked very uncomfortable but at least she remained intact. Later I told her it had looked like the guy had pushed her off and she said that he had, because she had asked him to; I just couldn't go on my own, but I really wanted to. The price had included a t-shirt but the DVD and photos package was nothing like as much of a rip-off as the Skydiving would have been at full price, so I shelled out and got my souvenirs. It really is an efficient factory: by the time the jumpers have climbed the steps back to the office, they have your video and photos ready to view, and by the time you have paid for them, the disk has been finalised and you can take it. They must make loads of money.

The next day the weather had deteriorated again and the snow-line was only just above where the hostel was. It was freezing! I spent most of the day trying to back-up photos to DVD so we could post a copy home, but finally realised that it wasn't possible anywhere in town: the girl are reception in the hostel had assured me that it was possible but, after waiting ages while it appeared to be copying, there was nothing on the disk. At one place in town I was told it wasn't possible to write DVDs and at another the USB port was so slow the computer was reporting 100 minutes to copy everything first to the hard drive, and at New Zealand internet prices I wasn't going to wait that long. I couldn't understand it: in no matter where we were in Asia we had no problem writing DVDs. So much for New Zealand being civilised!

The other task for the day was to contact BA again about getting a quote for out requested change of route. This was now the eighth time we'd had to contact them because they kept leaving messages or sending emails to say that they needed more information then, when we phoned them back, they always asked the same questions all over again. And BA in Thaland had been so efficient! This time we managed to get a quotation from them but it was far more than we had been expecting so we even after all that we still had to ask them to leave it while we considered it.

written by  The Happy Couple on September 1, 2009 from Queenstown, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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And I also forgot to include this quite nice photo of Queenstown taken when we got back from the bungy jump.

Queenstown

On the bus journey from Fox Glacier to Queenstown we saw little glimpses of scenery, which all looked like they would be fantastic if the cloud base was higher than 200 metres. We passed through huge flat-bottomed glacial valleys, much bigger than the glacial valleys in Scotland. And there were trees everywhere, unlike Scotland, but so much rain. At the time I thought that there must be more rain than Scotland and, later I did a wee bit of research online that confirmed this is the case. The average rainfall on the West coast of New Zealand is more than double the average at the heaviest points in Scotland.

Queenstown looked a bit like Aviemore at first sight. It was much smaller than I had expected, but it was clearly another artificial town mostly constructed just for tourism. People had told us, though, that Queenstown was a touristy place and some people, mostly kiwis, had implied that we shouldn't really bother with it at all. I thought it looked OK, but it was the best scenery we had seen yet, mostly I suspect, because the cloud was a little thinner here and we could actually see a bit of scenery for the first time. After checking in we found a curry place that wasn't too dear by Queenstown standards which, we had been warned and we were finding, are expensive. It was nothing special but at least it was much hotter and less greasy than you can usually find in India. Oh for a curry from Glasgow – curry capitol of the world!

New Zealand Curry

Real India curry. Greasy as anything.

We had intended to take a day trip from Queenstown to Milford Sound, which was reputedly one of the wonders of the world, according to Rudyard Kipling, however considering the lack of success at the glaciers we were reluctant to fork out the large amount of money required for the tour. Instead we discovered that the weather was forecast to be good in Queenstown the next day and booked skiing instead. Joanne had never skied before and was keen to do so; I realised that it was twenty-one years since I had last skied and I was keen to see if I still could. The forecast for Milford Sound was poor the whole time we were scheduled to be in Queenstown so we were thinking of cutting our stay there short and heading somewhere else.

What we had booked as a twin room wasn't in the main part of the hostel like we had expected, but one of two rooms in a little self-contained cottage, which we were sharing with a couple of young kiwis. It would make an excellent destination with friends, but the couple seemed nice and we got on well with them. They were planning to go snowboarding for the first time the next day, so we all went to bed reasonably early.

We were picked up early by the bus going to the Cardrona ski resort, which was further from Queenstown than I expected since the town was surrounded by snow-covered mountains. It turns out that the package we had booked, almost at random, was not really in Queenstown but 90 minutes away, near Wanaka. There was hardly a cloud in the sky and on the way we were told that there had been twenty centimetres of snow during the night. It would going to be amazing conditions they said, the best weather they'd had all week.

Joanne was signed up for the beginners group and two lessons, whereas I had signed up for the Achievement package, which meant one lesson in the morning then free time in the afternoon. There were loads of different levels for me to choose from and I wasn't sure where to go, but they told me to speak to an instructor if I wasn't sure what level to go in at. There were various signs for me to choose which to stand next to, and I reckoned level one, “stoppers”, and level two, “beginner turners”, were beneath me, so I thought level three, “wedge turners” would be fine. I explained to the instructor at level three that I was probably a level five last time I skied over two decades ago, but I wasn't sure where I should go. She suggested I try to see what I could remember then choose: if you can stop and turn come here, if you can't turn go to level two, and if you can't stop go to level one.

Level three it was! The group was a mix of people who had recently come from level two and people like me, who hadn't skied for a while. At twenty-one years my length was the greatest. One of the women in my group said “So you were three last time you skied”, which I liked. Later Joanne told me that this only meant I am now old enough for middle-aged women to make passes at me, but I'm sure she really thought I was twenty-four. It was great fun, and I was in the correct group, but I was definitely near, though not quite at, the bottom of the group.

The slopes

One of the guys in my group was an American and on the way up the chair lift together we got chatting. When I said I was from Scotland his first response was “Scotland's in a lot of trouble now isn't it?” referring to the release of al-Megrahi. My news consumption has been quite limited while travelling and the only US sentiment on the issue I had picked up was on internet forums. I responded that I didn't really think anyone apart from Americans cared, and he stopped talking to me! I re-engaged him by asking him whether it was really that big a story in the US and he told me that it was the story; it was the full hour on CNN. He told me that they were genuinely discussing freedom whisky and freedom tape just like the freedom fries debacle in the build up to the Iraq War. How childish! Anyway, he told me, most people had decided to boycott instead of just changing the name, so I just told him that this would be great since it might cause the prices at home to fall.

The beginner slopes - Joanne may be in this shot

I had a lot of fun, but it wasn't quite working for me, and I was always one of the group that the instructor gave advice to when we stopped. None of the advice seemed to be helping though, until finally she asked me “Do you know the difference between defecation and fornication?”. Apparently I had been crouching instead of sticking my pelvis forwards, but this was only because I was trying to follow other advice she had given me. After this last bit, it all came together and, for the last two runs I think I went from being one of the worst in the group to being one of the best.

View at the bottom of the chairlift

At lunch time I met up with Joanne, after fighting through the reporters who were there for the final of the Winter Games. Apparently loads of top snowboarders and skiers had been at this resort for the last month or so, and many of the competitions were finishing that day. I met Joanne just after they announced the female freestyle halfpipe champion (or something). Joanne was still unsure whether she was enjoying it. I fell over once she told me, ashamed, it seemed. I told that falling over once on your first ski lesson is nothing. After lunch we both went to the nursery slope where I went on one little run with Joanne, but I didn't think I would help very much so I decided to go off one my own then remembered that I had forgotten to take a picture of her, so went back but couldn't see her.

View from the top of the chairlift

I spent all afternoon practising what I had learned in the morning and introducing some stuff I used to know that I probably wasn't “supposed” to be doing yet. The weather was amazing all day and every trip up on the ski lift I met new single-serving friends. Loads of the people there were with children, some as young as three. Apparently that is the correct age to start skiing, although one guy told me he'd left it too late to start his daughter at three: you should start them skiing before they can walk he said, at least half-serious, I think. I kept popping in at the beginners' slope to take photos but I could never see Joanne.

The Remarkables

At the end of the day, Joanne said that she'd really enjoyed it too, as had our skiboarding neighbours. Immediately I started thinking about how we could go skiing cheaply in the future. It had been quite dear but, in fact, compared to skydiving or bungy-jumping it was very good value: they are both over in no time and cost about the same or more than a whole day skiing.

Queenstown

written by  The Happy Couple on August 29, 2009 from Queenstown, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Next morning it was still raining heavily. Then it hailed. We made a dash to the supermarket for a couple of beers since we couldn't afford the bar and there was nothing to do but drink, blog, and read. At the supermarket boredom made me buy a tomarillo, which I had never before heard of, probably out of some hope it was related to the tomacco from The Simpsons. It looked a bit like a tomato, but inside it looked a bit like a granadilla. Guess what! It tasted like a cross between a tomato and a granadilla, which isn't all that pleasant a combination. After the pear crossed with aubergine in China, I should have learned that things that look like A crossed with B, usually taste like A crossed with B. Probably because they are A crossed with B.

Tomarillo

Another glacier, another waste of time. The next morning we were woken early by really heavy rain and soon after there was a huge rumbling noise which didn't quite sound like thunder to me. Was it giant chunks of ice crumbling off the invisible glacier? Later, the manager said no, it was thunder. Before the bus arrived, we called BA to re-route our ticket: Joanne would fly home from Quito on the 19th November and I would fly from from Bogotá on the 9th December, the very last day of the ticket. They were not able to confirm anything and would have to phone us back. We weren't sure if we could get all the way to Glasgow or if we only had enough stages to get us to London; we weren't sure if there was a flight on the days we had requested; we weren't sure if I was allowed to land on the 10th or if I had to land before the ticket expired; but they couldn't tell us any of this, and more importantly they couldn't tell us how much it would cost. Changes of schedule are (usually) free, but re-routing costs something. In fact they were so useless that they didn't seem to have heard of Quito or Bogotá.

When the bus picked us up at 11am I was regretting not having gone for the camper van option after all; just up the road, there were better views, although the weather was still awful there. The point is, we would have been able to move around at will, looking for the nicer weather and spots. Instead we were doomed to waiting around in one place, hoping that the weather would clear enough to justify spending money on a trek or tour.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 27, 2009 from Fox Glacier, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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In the morning there was no electricity, although it had come on during the night long enough to bake me on the top bunk bed I had in the dorm. At least in Asia and South Africa they have a back-up generator or solar power for when the electricity goes down. To shower, I had to tiptoe my way through bits of shrapnel on the floor where workmen seemed to be hacking the entire surface up. After showering we couldn't even make food easily or get comfortable in the lounge because, apart from the fact it was freezing in there, workmen were sanding down a newly set concrete floor. This was another YHA place, which we had booked before swearing against them in Nelson. Now we were certain!

When the power finally came on, I hung about blogging and Joanne just watched films. The weather was awful outside and, although we were only in Franz Josef for the Glacier, there was no point in going on a trek in its direction because, even if we braved the conditions, the cloud was so low we didn't think we would see any scenery even when we were in it. It was a waste of time really. Briefly it improved and we went outside to take a photo and go to the shops to buy blank DVDs for backing up photos to. The weather quickly deteriorated and when we returned I discovered that the PC in the hostel did not have a DVD writer.

Where the Glacier is apparently

Then at 4:30pm we had to catch our bus to Fox Glacier where we would hopefully see more than we had of this one.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 26, 2009 from Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Joanne cooked us both nice big steaks for dinner but the kitchen got a bit smoky in the process, and there was no extractor fan, causing the manageress to run through and make a huge fuss, coughing, fanning the air, and apologising to everyone, much to Joanne's embarrassment. The steak was delicious though. New Zealand supermarket pricing policy was turning me into a dedicated carnivore. Other than the steaks we had also stocked up on loads of other food and whisky because we had heard that the glaciers, where we were heading, were so far from any large towns that the prices were ridiculous.

It was a terrible night's sleep. A full dorm makes loads of noise, everybody coming back at different times, but the worst was two girls next door, talking really loudly until very late. Of course usual “no noise in the rooms after 11pm” rules applied, but they didn't seem to care and I was already too determined to get to sleep to get up and tell them to shut up. On top of that, the bed was too short for me to be comfortable and double glazing doesn't seem to have hit New Zealand yet, so the fact this hostel was on the main road meant I was listening to lorries all night. Definitely the last YHA we stay in!

Useless!

written by  The Happy Couple on August 24, 2009 from Nelson, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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First tantalising glimpse of the South Island

The ferry trip to the South Island was very pretty, although the wine from last night's dinner party meant that we didn't have our best sea legs on. It wasn't just a matter of sailing away from one coast and landing at the other: it was about one hour at each end of channels and islets, a complicated jigsaw of land rather like Scotland's West Coast. Much of it reminded me of the ferry journey to the remote Knoydart peninsula in Scotland. The only real difference in the ladscape was that it is covered in trees in New Zealand because, I supposed, the English didn't cut all of them down in New Zealand. It was beautiful. Finally it seemed like we were getting to where this famous New Zealand scenery was.

Queen Charlotte Sound

Nice wee house in Queen Charlotte Sound

Queen Charlotte Sound

Queen Charlotte Sound

Me!

A couple of minutes after the bus was due, I dialed the number you are supposed to dial “if you have any problems” on our New Zealand SIM card. A recorded message told me I couldn't dial premium rate numbers, so Joanne went back across the road to the information place to buy a phone card to dial the “help” number on their public phone. After about ten minutes, she came back raging; phone cards for public phones cannot dial premium rate numbers either. My phone with the UK SIM card couldn't dial premium rate New Zealand numbers either, so I phoned customer services on the New Zealand SIM, incurring the NZ$1 charge, only to be told that there is no “unlock” for premium numbers. Our bus wasn't there and there was no way for us to phone the number for help! We didn't know what to do, so I went into the train station to ask just in case there was a train to Blenheim from the port. There was one a day, but it had left just ten minutes ago. The lady behind the desk at the train station was extremely nice and helpful, and explained that they get a lot of Naked Bus customers very confused, never knowing whether they are supposed to get a bus or a train and wrote a complaint email on our behalf. “You won't get any money back from them, though”, she assured us.

A short time online across the road, at the information place who had told us to look out for the Atomic Shuttle, revealed that we should have been on the train. The text messages we had paid extra for, so that we wouldn't have to print out the instructions, were truncated to one sms length, which meant that some vital facts were missed, like it was not a Naked Bus we would be getting and it wasn't a bus at all. There was no way to contact them on the website and we couldn't phone them, so we just had to give in and accept that we had lost out. We saw now on the website that Naked Bus only actually run on the North Island; on the South Island they contract the routes out to other companies. Luckily there was an Atomic Shuttle four hours later and, since this was our shortest journey in New Zealand, it didn't cost us too much to replace our train journey with this minibus. There wasn't that much to do in Picton where we were stranded so we just waited in a bar.

We only had to phone when we arrived in Blenheim and we were picked up in the hostel minibus. On the way to the hostel, the guy who had picked us up told us that they were having an international night where the guests at the hostel were all cooking a dish from their native country for everyone else to share. It sounded nice, but it would have meant us improvising something Scottish in 30 minutes from the meagre bag of food we had brought with us. In retrospect we could have made porridge, but I don't think it would have gone down very well for dinner. The hostel was really nice and the staff were very friendly.

After everyone had finished their dinner we went to join them for a drink in the “shed” which was a small building detached from the hostel with a darts board and table tennis and, of course, a beer fridge. It reminded me of a school six year common room and I got the impression the staff more or less left the place alone. Everyone else at the hostel was working in the area, mostly as pruners on the local vineyards; in contrast they asked us if we were “just passing through”. They were a nice crowd and the atmosphere among them was excellent after several weeks working together. After most of them had gone to bed the Irish guys we were talking to produced a bottle of Jamieson's from the freezer. I would have thought this to be sacrilege, but they insisted we try it. Apparently a German guy had done the same a few weeks previously and they were totally sold on the idea. It goes down so smoothly they enthused, whereas I like the way that whisk(e)y burns when it's neat. We weren't complaining though.

Not having been prepared for such a party atmosphere, we had under-catered on the alcohol front and the only nearby licensed premises was a rugby club across the road, we were told. None of the pruners had ever been in it but we decided to give it a try. Before we were even close to the door, a girl standing there called to us and waved us over, inviting us in. It was her 30th birthday and it seemed rather empty considering the time. Only a few people remained, so she invited us to sit down with them and got us drinks. She was far too sober for the end of her 30th birthday but, she explained, she had children to go home to. After a couple of drinks, more people left, bringing the number of guests down to four: us, her brother, and her ex-boyfriend, so we thought it might be time to take our leave. On the way out I asked if I could buy some of the stack of beer and she told us not to be silly, insisting that we leave with an armful for free. Kiwis really are nice! We returned to the Irishmen and shared our bounty, as well as the explanation about where we had been. More frozen Jamieson's followed.

The following day we weren't feeling much like it, particularly Joanne, after all the booze the night before, but we were in Blenheim to go wine tasting, so there was no way we weren't going to do it. The excellent hostel had bicycles to borrow for no charge, so we followed the girl's advice on which were the “best two” bikes. My back tyre needed pumped up quite a bit, Joanne's range of gears was extremely limited, and I was missing a few. What on Earth were the other bikes like if these were the best? My navigation took us a slightly longer route than intended to Hunters, the first vineyard, but the scenery was quite pleasant: rows of severely pruned vines and hills in the background.

There were some other people already tasting when we arrived: an Australian couple with a kiwi friend, who seemed to be quite a successful Maori business woman. They certainly seemed much posher than we did, arriving on bicycles, but I was still quite miffed when I realised that the tastes of each wine we were poured was less than half what the others were poured. The whites in particular were very nice, in fact we had tasted the chardonnay in the Wellington sun, which is why we had chosen to do a tasting there. Since they had started before us, we had missed a couple of wines that the others had tasted and they were ready to leave before us. The Maori woman asked us casually which wine was our favourite, then immediately bought a bottle of the chardonnay for us, despite our slight protestations. It's a wedding present she explained. This was the first thing we had received on the trip for our wedding; we had hoped that being on honeymoon would guarantee us upgrades on every flights, but so far we had received nothing. But this was yet more evidence of the generosity and niceness of New Zealanders.

We only made it a hundred yards or so in the direction of the next vineyard when I had to stop thanks to my tyre being completely flat. We hadn't brought the pump with us but, even if we had, this looked like a major puncture which would not have been helped by just a pump. Luckily the girl working at the hostel had given us her mobile number and offered to pick us up if we were too tired to cycle home, but we thought we would be able to get at least one more vineyard in if we changed our plan and headed for the nearest one. On the way a local shouted over the road to us to ask if we'd had too much wine to cycle. Very funny. The wines at the next place were nicer but much more expensive. The brut, which could easily have been mistaken for champagne, was delicious, so we reasoned that since the gift at Hunters had saved us money, it made sense to spend more than we had intended on the wine we did buy. We bought a bottle of the vintage brut and one of the Gewurtztraminer which, we were assured, would be the perfect accompaniment for the curry we intended to cook that night.

The Gewurtztraminer did go very well with the curry, although it's not the style of wine either of us would normally drink, and the sparkly worked reliably as an aperitif. Making the curry had involved working around huge piles of large green-lipped mussels, which were in both ovens and seemed to be in every pot. Soon some Taiwanese pruners appeared and admitted being responsible for the haul. It had only taken them ten minutes to collect all of them, one guy told us. There were quite a lot of people, but there were plenty of mussels each. They gave us a couple each and told us to help ourselves if we wanted more. I was a bit suspicious of the mussels, remembering being told that easy-to-pick mussels are usually there because the locals know a very good reason not to pick those ones. Nonetheless it was only two each and we ate them.

The next morning we were both slightly unwell and I wondered how the Taiwanese people must be feeling after each eating a large pile of suspect mussels. Just before we left to catch our bus about lunch time (getting another lift from the lovely people running the excellent hostel!), one of the Taiwanese guys came into the kitchen for some water, still wearing his pyjamas. They were supposed to have left for work at 6am! I wondered if they were all in bed instead of work.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 23, 2009 from Blenheim, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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When we went to get the bus I obediently left my bag down because of the scolding I had received in Auckland for trying to pass my bag to the driver. This time it was a female driver and she said “Can you bring the bags over? I'm sick of carrying other people's bags. I'm not paid to carry other people's bags”, so it seemed like all New Zealand bus drivers are grumpy, but each in their own individual little way. This is odd because generally kiwis are extremely nice. Actually another exception seems to be the people who own cafes that the buses stop at: most of these cafes have nasty signs up warning you that you are not allowed to eat any of your own food even if you buy something to drink, “This is not Macdonalds! Food takes longer than 10 minutes!” and lots of other angry-looking signs; lists of rules in a little road-side cafe. Several times we had to shiver outside in the rain, to eat our pre-made sandwiches, and only then go inside to order our hot coffee. I wondered, coming out of one of those places, why the owner's friends had not suggested that the hospitality industry wasn't really his field; maybe because he didn't have any friends. But all this only made it seem more like home: where would the world be without Highland hospitality? I bet he had a Scottish surname. What they need are Aussies, South Africans, and East Europeans, who have revolutionised the hospitality industry in Scotland.

When we arrived in Wellington, Stephan, our German host, kindly picked us up at the bus stop. We had a couple of bottles of wine and chatted with him. He is a computer programmer, with permanent residence in New Zealand, working for clients mostly in Germany. He does his web-based work via the internet. It's my dream, I told him, how does he do it? Apparently there is a German website where you can register. I've still not checked, but I am dreaming that there is an English language equivalent, so we can live in Nepal earning European wages. Or somewhere else. Stephan was very accommodating, but his living room, where we were located, was a bit on the chilly side; and it had a cat in it. I love cats, but I'm also slightly allergic to them. I just had to remember not to touch my eyes after touching the cat. We had known about the cat in advance as it was on his Couchsurfing profile, so I could hardly complain. Self control, that was all I needed.

Joanne didn't sleep because of the cold, but I had been alright. And I woke up without itchy or swollen eyes! I had managed not to transfer cat hairs to my eyelids, which I regarded as a personal triumph. We had been told that the Wellington Museum is the best one in New Zealand so, despite the disappointment of the Auckland one, we thought we should go. After Auckland we had decided to restrict our museum visits to those considered the best.

View from Stephan's lovely home

With the daylight, we could see that Stephan's flat was in a fantastic location and the view was stunning. Wellington is a port surrounded by hills, one of which Stephan's flat was on, hence the great view. It reminded by quite a lot of Cape Town which has the same sea-plus-hills formula, which is almost always a winner. Stephan told us we were very lucky because “windy Welly” hardly ever sees the sun and it was a gorgeous day. We were already forgetting what the sun was like, so were keen to get out in it.

View from Stephan's lovely home

View from the waterfront

The waterfront

Kayakers coming into the harbour

Next door to the museum was a microbrewery. How could we not? There weren't any seats there either, but there were benches at the very boundary of the drinking area where we found a couple of spaces. And we sat in the sun and had a couple of beers / wines for Joanne. Then a couple more drinks, watching the Welly skateboarders out in force. Some of the beer was quite nice; of course I had to try all of them to decide which I liked best.

Sk8!

More skateboarding

Finally we felt obliged to go into the museum, but we were just slightly to sozzled to get much out of it. It did seem like a really good museum, with lots of interactive exhibits and much better organised than the Auckland one had been. Actually thinking about it, much of what I said I learned from the Auckland museum was probably from Wellington instead, just too fuzzily remembered to place correctly. We enjoyed it but it was wasted on us. Or were we wasted in it? After about just a week of cold, rainy weather, we could not see a sunny day go by without sitting around enjoying it. How are we ever going to adjust back to Scotland?

Dusk over the harbour

Joanne had offered to cook for Stephan to thank him for hosting us, so she cooked pasta and pesto with roasted vegetables. It cost us a fortune. I've said it before, but vegetables are really expensive in New Zealand. It would almost certainly have been cheaper to cook three steaks instead. Stephan's flatmates happened also to be entertaining that night, so we joined them drinking and talking after our meal. His flatmates and most of their friends were seismologists, Wellington being a world centre for it, receiving San Francisco levels of earthquakes. One of the guests was a cosmologist, which is my own field, and she had of course heard of my evil ex-supervisor George Ellis, “he's famous”, she said, although nobody outside of cosmology circles thinks so. We stayed up late and drank many bottles of wine. Everyone insisted the weather in Wellington is never like this. I suspected this was a lie perpetuated by Wellingtonites (Wellies?) to prevent other people from moving there. From what we saw it was a really lovely city, although in the wind and rain the allure of the hills and waterfront may have diminished somewhat.

The next morning Stephan drove us to the ferry terminal, which we had not thought very necessary until we saw that the terminal for our ferry company was much further out of the city than the terminal we had seen. What a gracious host! And what a lucky sod as far as his work goes. We were very lucky that he could host us because later that day he was leaving for China to spend some time with his Chinese girlfriend in Beijing, where he could continue doing the same German-rates work.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 21, 2009 from Wellington, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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