Nomadic Adventures

By the time this is posted I know I will be home already, so I apologize for the delay.  It's not my fault though! Oh so much has happened since the last time I wrote and we have hardly stopped moving- or had wi-fi for that matter! Through our end adventures it is not a case of what did we see, but what didn't we.

Since I last posted we:

• Toured the North Island with Elliot
• Traded our car in for a rented campervan and did some exploring (and ife lessons, and crisis) just the two of us
• Picked up two new friends, Ryan and Tarik, and retraced our steps back to Wellington

For the sake of everyone's 21st century attention spans, I will be brief in my writing and let the pictures do the talking!

Part 1: Elliot's Trip
Elliot joined us in the beginning of May in Wellington and left us in Auckland. Our first stop after the capitol was Tongariro National Park in the center of the North Island. The next day (after waking up in our tent which had frosted over in the night!) we began the 7-hour Tongariro Crossing which took us over and around 3 volcanic mountains:

It was quite a feat and luckily we hadn't sent Elliot running for the hills already!

The next day we did a massive swing through a canyon by Taupo. I'm glad Wells and I did it together, I dont know if I could have done it alone! We ended our day in sulfer-smelling, geothermic Rotorua after rolling down the hill in a giant H2Ogo ball filled with water.

Taking the Plunge!

Waitomo Caves: a truly amazing experience with abseiling (repelling), cave exploring and glowworms.  It was great to test the boundaries of my comfort zone, especially when it turned out to be such a great day! I had nothing to be nervous about, only amazed:

Magazine worthy!

That night we headed to Raglan, a small surf town with surf breaks professionals come seek out. We stayed at the Eco lodge in a converted caboose (though apart from some gardening we learned 'Eco' meant 'excuse to have to power outlets'. Noted.)




Our next stop took us to the beautiful bay of Islands north of Auckland where we took a fun sailboat ride in Pahia and Wells caught dinner!

So happy!

We hit the Auckland art gallery and found a cool exhibit that gave us this fun shot

Part 2: Campervan Living

When we were still so excited..

As we had nowhere to live and the prospects weren't looking promising, we sold the car and rented out a campervan... for a month an a half.  As we had to pay upfront, the rental quite nearly broke the bank and we had no money for insurance. This later came back to bite us. However, it was a great way to set out exploring, stay in some interesting places and Wells got a lot of surfing in.  We spent most of our first month in the Northland, north of Auckland.

Undeniably Beautiful

 A couple of the more unusual places we spent the night in our quest to Freedom Camp:

A parking lot by an oil refinery and a wood chipping plant... Hey, they had a bathroom.

A cemetery. As the local who told us about it said: "No one will bother you there. At least no one alive."

Part 3: The Boys' Trip
We picked up Wells's high school friend Ryan and his friend Tarik from the Auckland airport midway through June and made our way back down to Auckland.  Although we hit some of the same places we had with Elliot, our experiences were different ans equally amazing.

They love to be proud.

First, we hit Hot Water Beach in the Coromandel Peninsula.  Digging in the sand uncovers boiling, volcano heated water!
Next, we hit Hobbiton, after making a quick stop to see the shrine to NZ's own soft drink "Lemon & Pearoa', or L&P.  "World famous in New Zealand."

We passed though Rotorua again to take a dip in the free natural hot springs on our way to the Waitomo Caves. Even though we had done this with Elliot, we had a totally different experience with different caves. Green Glow Eco-Adventures was seriously one of the most amazing things we did in New Zealand and worth every penny.  Paul is a wonderful guide and, again, an excellent photographer!

Yes this is a real photo! Glowworms galore.

Tiny crawl spaces!

After this we continued retracing our steps so that we were back in the Tongariro National Park area, where we had done the alpine crossing with Elliot. Except this time there was snow!

Enough snow for some ski, but really nothing beyond the bunny slope.

Lack of snow was bad on the mountains but, it meant that the Alpine Crossing could still be done (with ice axes and crampons).  Wells led the boys through the mountains and I went with them as far as I could before turning around and picking them up at the end.

Luckily, when Wells and I passed through a week later (on our way up to Auckland after the Fulbright ceremony in Wellington) there was definitely enough snow!

Final 'In Review' post to follow!

In Review: North Island Edition

As we get ready to take of on our 2nd grand New Zealand road trip with Elliot, I thought it would be a good time to reflect again on our time here.

Weather

I don't even know anymore. I have given up on the weatherman and especially on that warm northerly wind people used to tell me about. Ironically, when we returned from Australia it seemed warmer in New Zealand, if that makes and sense, which was nice for our 3 day, 47 km hike in the Abel Tasman for sure.  Settling in Wellington we have started to experience the famed wind, though unfortunately it recently brought with it a cold front and it definitely feels like winter now.  Plus, in contrast to all those lovely long summer hours that I was raving about before, it has started to get dark earlier and earlier with the sun setting at about 5:30. The season change is especially confusing when I get emails that say 'feeling the heat?' and other various summer references that are obviously coming from the states.

Driving

Since I last wrote, the confusing and unnecessary 'give-way' rules have changed! Yay! However despite the few weeks of radio and TV ads informing people of the change, there are still a few people who you'll find haven't quite caught on and so still awkward moments will arise. In time they will learn, in time.

Also, since the last review we took Betsy in for a new WOF certificate and we are glad to say she passed! In New Zealand you are required to be driving with a valid Warrant Of Fitness (WOF) which expires every 6 months. Basically, they give your car a check-up to make sure it is safe to drive on the road, there are no broken tail lights, etc. This doesn't mean you don't need an oil change, but it mean that everything is working. They won't give you the certificate until everything is clear, which means you technically can't drive it. Very relieving to get a clean bill of health! There is debate as to how useful this rule is. On one hand it does make you take a look at your car every few months, but on the other, if you car is fine is it worth the.. fine, as it were. You do see a high proportion of older cars on the roads here, but whether that is due to them staying in shape longer (what I used to think) or if it's just that cars are outrageously expensive here (another valid option).

Accents

After returning from Australia, I found myself really noticing accent differences and variants that make the Australian and New Zealand accents unique. Maybe it's those Spanish linguistic courses I took, but I find myself analyzing commercials and people I meet. I know I have mentioned before how it can be hard to understand (especially giving street names over the phone) but now it is a much more linguistic interpretation. It is to the point now that when we were re-watching Star Wars the other night (oh, yes) I picked out a little boy who only had 2 lines and said to Wells 'ah, he must be from New Zealan'. Dropping the 'd' of course as they do here. Sure enough, he was.

Try as I might, however, I cannot imitate the accent. Especially the Maori English accent. I try, but I just can't get it. Here is an example from a popular public service commercial against drunk driving:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIYvD9DI1ZA 

Living as a Nomad

That's right.

This past month in Wellington has been the longest we have stayed in one place since the beginning of March when Brady came for his trip. After that we were in a mix of hostels, tents, a converted jailhouse and an old ship. Finding a place to stay in Wellington for just a month (that's how long before Elliot arrived). Most people were wanting longer-term renters, understandably so. On top of that we are a couple and on a low budget. We are a hard sell.  We ended up finding a place that has been amusing everyone that has Skyped with us. The place is very nice, but then to get to our bed we, ahem, climb out of the window in the living room, down a narrow set of stairs and into a small bungalow. Yes, essentially we are sleeping in a plywood box in the backyard. But, hey, for a month the novelty lasts. Now, after this trip with Elliot we will be scrambling to find a place in Wellington again. A joy I am glad to put off for a few days. I am fantasizing about staying in one place for at least a year when we move back.

All our worldly possessions in the car

Luckily, I was able to transfer branches with the Promotional company in Christchurch and have had a few jobs plus some lined up when we return. Even with the high cost of living here, I've been impressed with our ability to save up money for these exciting trips we have lined up!

Elliot has arrived! Here we go!

In A Sunburned Country: Australia from the view of an American living in New Zealand

"Unless we're there on one of those freak days when it rains, it will be sunny and warm- and surfing!" I remembered Wells saying as we walked into the Christchurch airport in the dark early morning. Famous last words. Just yesterday we had dropped Brady off for his flight back to the states and now there we were ready to start a whole other adventure in Australia.

"They have 287 days of sun a year." 

I thought about this statistic as rain spattered against the plane window. Welcome to Surfer's Paradise. It looks like we brought the Christchurch weather with us. We made it to the hostel while it was still really early due to the time change. We filled our empty stomachs and killed some time with an all you can eat pancake breakfast. The weather report was looking like rain so we booked a ticket to nearby Byron Bay for the day after next. Plus, it could have been the weather but this city was seeming a bit... Grunge... Seedy. It looked like it had been set up to be a small but bustling city and maybe the wrong people came. Or the surfers just weren't concerned with how it turned out.  The next day we decided not to sit around and made it out to the sea even though the sky was grey. Wells rented a surfboard and I borrowed a boogie board from the hostel. I had forgotten how fun that is! Even though it wasn't a picture perfect day it was so much fun to be in the water and enjoying the waves!

Beautiful rainbow over Byron. Photo: Wells

The next day we took a couple hour shuttle to Byron Bay, a small hippie town down the coast and it WAS a picture perfect day. The water was warm and crystal clear, Wells had the best surf day of his life and the sun was so warm, perfect for soaking up. Bliss. Florida, I will never take you for granted again. 

I'm glad we made it here in time as the next day was cloudy and the next, rainy. 

I later learned that the country had recently overcome about a decade of serious drought and that the past couple of years had brought, in natural contrast, floods. Now if I was basing my sunshine statistics mostly on a drought season, I'd expect 287 days of sun as well.  

Colors everywhere!

Our second day in Byron we took a bus tour out to Nimbin, a small hippie village lost in time. It started with the Aquarius Festival held there in 1973. Since the dairy business there collapsed, many people stayed behind and built communes for an alternate lifestyle. Think of it as Woodstock if the people had never left. Today, the area is a big supporter of legalizing cannabis, especially hemp which is free of THC. The cops have turned a semi blind eye, ignoring sales of marijuana as long as it is not on the street or in front of children. It was definitely a way to spend a few hours and see the remote rainforest area that it is surrounded by.

Nimbin area rainforest/waterfall

Ahoy!

 After a rainy day surfing in Byron, we boarded the overnight Greyhound to Sydney and arrived there the next morning (gotta save on those hostel costs). Since our room wasn't ready we explored the city a bit, toured some awesome old boats and a submarine (!), then went on a free walking tour of the city. We learned how the nation really pretty much was founded by convicts and some history into the iconic opera house and bridge. It was kinda funny being tourists again. In New Zealand, we lived in Christchurch. It was like traveling around a place we lived in and would for a while. Here, we were back in the tourists category, just touring the country for two weeks. I wondered if this was what it was going to feel like when we got back to NZ and moved out of Christchurch. For some reason it feels so different, people seems to have a different reaction depending on what you tell them. Truth be told, sometimes it is nice to play the tourist card.

Emerging from the sub!

Speaking of being a backpacking tourist, I have never been so bombarded with travel packages and travel booking stores. New Zealand and Australia are the most tourist-centric places I have ever been. New Zealand has a government I-site building in cities and at most attractions with information pamphlets and people to help you book. In Australia however there are competing companies with flashy stores offering free Internet and/or surfboards if you book through them.  The are hundreds of package deals that teach you how to surf over three days, spend a couple nights on this island or a trip to Ayers Rock. I though about how this contrasted with our backpacking trip around Europe where we pretty much figured everything out ourselves.

Our second day in Sydney was a lucky sunny day so we climbed up the bridge lookout and took the ferry across the harbour to Manly Beach where Wells did some surfing. The city is really very beautiful when the weather is nice, with so much of the city by the water.



Our last day in Sydney was spent on a Blue Mountains tour. Made of sandstone plateaus and deep valleys the are is covered with eucalyptus trees. The oil they disperse into the air gives it a blue tinge. We got to take in the sights, have a nice long bushwalk and also stopped at a conservation zoo where we pet koalas and were surrounded by wallabies and kangaroos. Or course there were also penguins, crocodiles, crazy colored birds and wombats. Australia really has the coolest animals. The wombats are a bit weird though.  We wrapped up our Sydney trip with another overnight trip, this time by train, to Melbourne.

Awesome animal photos:

Gotta love those grass filled cones!

So cute!

At the Blue Mountains

 

You really realize how big Australia is when you see the travel times. It was about 13 hours from Byron to Sydney by bus and 12 or so by train to Melbourne. Although it is pretty expensive to travel like this, it is definitely not as easy to caravan in as New Zealand. This picture might help.

By the time we ran away from the bad weather and made it to Melbourne, we had a week left in our trip which was great since we really enjoyed Melbourne from the quirky shops and street art to the diversity festival with lots of food, the super cool Australian Center for the Moving Image, and of course having friends! Wells had a high school friend studying in Melbourne and our Texan friend we had met in Christchurch lived there too. Plus we made some friends with a couple Australian Fulbrighters! Two things you won't leave the city without doing are visiting Chinatown and drinking coffee.

Chinatown is always a good bet for bustling place with cheap and different foods and other quirky things. One night out we had an all you can eat BYO(wine) dumplings meal followed by a photoshoot in a store that somehow survives on only Asian photo booths. And these are not your average mall photo booths. You get hats, choose your backgrounds, and after get to add silly clip art. So Asian.

Number two, coffee is really big in Melbourne. And by that I mean, independent coffee is really popular. Its the little tucked away shops that everyone likes and they are everywhere-if you know where to look. We went to one hidden place called 7 Seeds that a friend took us down an alley to. They roast their coffe in house and have free cuppings every week where you smell the grounds dry, in hot water, and sample them. You have a sheet to mark down tastes and smells from woody to milk chocolate to stone fruits. Learning about where all the different coffees come from and how their tastes are different felt a lot like a wine tasting- and from what we hear, that is the future of the coffee world. Here's to sophisticated palettes making us strain for those faint qualities of dark cherry.

Wells and the 12 Apostles in the early morning haze.

Part of our Melbourne experience also included a tour of the Great Ocean Road. There were plenty of day trips available but we decided on a two day trip since we heard it would not be as rushed, plus it included a nights stay. It was definitely a full couple of days but we got to see everything and we stopped and a pretty cool volcanic park where we could walk around and see koalas, wallabies and kangaroos all in the wild. We did have a pretty crazy encounter with kangaroos jumping right toward and past us. In the end, we decided that the rock formations of the Great Ocean Road reminded us a lot of Lagos, Portugal and made us extra glad that we had that awesome experience with Brady those few years ago when we explored the coastline ourselves. There is something great about being able to find and experience something on your own, though sometimes it makes more sense to do a tour like the one we did. Someone else to drive and give you information you might not have otherwise figured out (like the naming of the 12 Apostles was really just a big marketing ploy). The Blue Mountains tour was also this way. Yes, we could have spend much more time walking around the trails ourselves but our guides very informative (taught us how to throw a boomerang) and we wouldn't have seen all those awesome animals! I still think that self exploration is the way to go when you can though, and it was nice to know that Wells and I would be doing that again in New Zealand with the freedom of our own car :)

London Bridge over 'London Bridge' (which ironically half of did fall down)

All in all we had a great time in Australia and packed a whole lot in. Similarities and differences abound between the Aussies and the Kiwis. They are both fairly new countries with vast differences in terrain. Australia, however, is huge. Everyone knows where it is and where it is located. I don't know if this is the reason for it but New Zealand can feel more isolated and the people in turn have a more isolated viewpoint. I guess these things all depend on how much one has traveled as well. It should also be noted that Australia hands down has cooler animals. Koala, kangaroo, etc versus the Kiwi, a flightless bird. It's nice what the bird has been able to do for New Zealand identity, but then what? Prices, like in NZ, are pretty high- this was an expensive trip. Though I did see something I was not expecting: lower priced boxed wine($14 for five liters) and higher priced liquor ($58 for a bottle of Smirnoff).

One of the biggest differences I saw was the difference in the attitudes and reaction to the native cultures. Even though both had their basic rights severely violated, the Kiwis  still hold the Maori in a higher respect than the Aussies do the aboriginals. The Maori have their own TV channel and their language is considered an official one and one that appears under official signs. Even if there is some social discrimination, I have never felt it like it was in Melbourne concerning the aborigines. You learn about how they were killed and pushed off their land and how they may detest the area and not wish to ever return, but the tension truly becomes palpable when a cultural diversity week celebration is held in the city with food dance and performance- none of which displays a trace of the traditional culture. In this regard, New Zealand, you have shown us all up.

To end, some fun Aussie signs:

A 12-year-old with clip art must have done this.

Ah, so that's what you'd look like

Kangaroo attempt!