New Zealand. North Island.

The ferry landed in Wellington at 10 on Sunday night. The sat navs in all our devices failed us. Our hippy van's petrol gauge was on red. We had no map. How were we going to find our Travelodge? I hailed a taxi and followed it to our hotel via a service station. A bargain ten dollar ride.

In the morning we headed north. On route we stopped at a second hand bookshop. We got back in the van and the battery was flat. What to do? Luckily there was an old bicycle lying by the roadside and so using that, wire, yoghurt pots and sticky backed plastic I was able to fashion together a small generator to recharge the battery. Also we phoned an emergency number we found on the windscreen and were soon back on the road.

Lots of people had told us that the scenery in the South Island was so much better than the North. Maybe so. But the North Island was also very beautiful. Rolling hills, volcanic mud pools and geysers, lakes and snow-topped mountains.
More family. More memories. We were made very welcome in New Zealand. Lots of lovely people. Thank you all.

New Zealand, South Island.

We landed at Christchurch and took the shuttle to our hotel, a good five minute walk away. In the morning we picked up our hippy van and headed South to Dunedin. I've never been particularly interested in visiting New Zealand but so many people have told us how wonderful it was I was looking forward to discovering the attraction.

Dunedin was very nice. We stayed in a lovely B&B, ate well in a very English pub and drove down to the ocean, a stone's throw from Antarctica. (More of our adventures here on Jill's FB.) Then we headed north, winding through the mountains, stayed at Queenstown, situated in The Remarkables (great name for a mountain range) on Lake Wakatipu (great name for a lake) and continued on to Fairley, via the turquoise Lake Tekapo, and the next day arriving back in Christchurch.

In Fairley we noticed how many British birds there were chirping away in the trees. We saw thrushes and blackbirds and sparrows. How had they made the long journey from one side of the world to the other? By boat of course, brought by early British settlers.
The mountains and lakes of the South Island are simply stunning. This was the wonderfulness. Jill thought them even more spectacular than Yosemite.
In Christchurch we stayed with Jill's cousins, Colin and Erica, where we rode Molly, one of their Clydesdale horses. They took us on a sobering tour of Christchurch, still putting itself back together after the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. Fallen down buildings, rubble, the horrors of liquefaction, but a feeling of resolution and hope amongst the people. Most moving, on a strip of flattened land in the city centre, 185 empty chairs, painted white. One to represent each person who had died.

T

Roo Round-up

Or... Roger's final thoughts about Australia. If I were to live here, based on what I've seen so far, I'd go for the New South Wales coast. Lovely climate, fabulous beaches.

Almost deserted beach at Nambucca Heads.

Sydney has crept into my Top Five Cities in the world.
Despite my fear of heights we've been to some spectacularly high places.

 The Blue Mountains

Watching young people on a waterfall, standing on wet rocks above a 100 metre drop was not fun.
The Aboriginal problem. We've talked to many people about this and there is a problem but no one knows how to solve it. It's our fault, along with our Euro-neighbours, for colonising everywhere. The Aboriginal population is invisible. We saw some excellent contemporary work by indigenous artists at the superb Margaret Olley Gallery. Very political and hardly a dot in sight. Also a recreation of MO's house, which doubled as a studio.

Margaret Olley's sitting room.

At noon the sun is in the northern sky.
Only saw kangaroos twice in the wild, despite the estimated 50 million that live here. Saw no poisonous snakes nor any spiders - although they tend to come out as the summer hots up. Nor koalas. We saw lots of birds though. And heard them. They are SO LOUD. The Bush is full of scrubby bush and so is the outback.
And finally - it does get cold here, especially south of Sydney.

Grooving in the Sydney Area

No, we haven't forgotten the blog! Had a lovely time in Manly. Had a great time in Glenhaven. Lots of pics on our FB pages. Heading north in our camper tomorrow. Jill has stocked up with provisions. We have mozzy repellent. We will be vigilant for roos at dusk. Wish us luck in our Chubby two-berth. Onward!

The Royal Botanic Gardens

Things to do in Sydney. Lots to choose from. The view from the ferry is a brilliant first look at the city. Amazing. Jilly was quite literally jumping up and down with excitement. We visited the Museum of Contemporary Art right by the harbour - and that had some very interesting stuff. We had cocktails 47 floors up, overlooking Sydney from a revolving bar, courtesy of Rowan and we spent a lovely afternoon in the Royal Botanic Gardens.

They cover 30 hectares of land alongside the Opera House and overlooking the harbour and contain 9000 varieties of trees and plants. Very beautiful, especially in the sunshine. And so much to see. I particularly enjoyed the cacti, the ferns (the mosquito fern, for example, soaks up chemicals and poisons in water and is used to combat pollution), the ancient calyx plants and the birds and eels.

This part of Sydney was one of the first areas cultivated by the British settlers it seems. They quickly turfed the natives out and took the area over. Recently an Aussie said to me - We should give the Aborigines their land back and stop giving them benefits and hand outs. I replied - that's a lot of prime real estate. I think he was still intending to keep the best bits.

The Flying Doctor

Today we visited the Flying Doctor museum in Alice Springs. I can vaguely remember The Flying Doctor on the radio in the 50s. And the TV series that began in 1959. Their catchphrase was "Flying Doctor to Wollumboola Base."
An excellent and informative exhibition. The service was started by the Rev. John Flynn in 1928 with one aircraft, a DH 50 named Victory. Now it has 66 aircraft and operates all over Australia.
The Flying Doctor radio and TV series, I guess, was one of the first docu-dramas or soaps. The first was, of course, Land Based Nurse. In the series, written for Strand magazine, (citation needed) they called her Florence Nightingale. I do wonder which exec. came up with that name. And whose bright idea it was to give her a pet.
"I think she should have a dog."
"No, a cat would be better. It could get all tangled up in the bandages. That would be hilarious. It would go viral."
"Don't be daft. YouTube hasn't been invented yet."
"How about we give her an owl?"
"That's even dafter."
"She could keep it in her pocket."
"Hmmm, could work..."

Don't press that button!

Never say awesome again...

We have now seen something that is truly awesome. Uluru is awe inspiring. The largest monolith on earth and worth travelling half way around the world to see. A strangely magical place, even though I had steeled myself against getting caught up in any mystical stuff and nonsense! There is just something about the rock, its beauty, its setting in the middle of the desert, its colour, its shape, its markings... Never to be forgotten. Up there in my Days to Remember with dog sledding in the Arctic. I feel very lucky to be able to travel like this.

I've still not cracked uploading photos - something to do with Apple v Microsoft I think - but Roger is going to add some to illustrate this and if you can, see my Facebook page where I will put some of the photos I took.

It rained in Japan, it rained in Perth. It rained in South West Australia. It hasn't rained in Alice Springs, but the day before I arrived it rained so hard that the usually bone dry and barren desert blossomed with a dense covering of wild flowers. Mostly white, quite a few yellow, some deep red, a few a violet-blue, purple and pink.

I was looking forward to seeing the arid red centre of Australia. Well the earth everywhere is definitely very red, or perhaps more accurately very orange. But the desert? More lush, fertile, green plain than arid waste!

I should be used to my watery journeys by now but I was surprised to be driving through floods half an hour after arriving in Alice. As he slowed down to splash through the usually non-existent river which had burst its banks and spilled over the road, our shuttle bus driver told us: "This is something very few tourists see." Oh lucky us!

We learned the names of quite a few plants on our trip yesterday thanks to trainee tour guide Roz, whose aunt and uncle were the well-known botanists Mary and Basil Smith. Roz searched out a plant which bore two different coloured flowers for us and an upside down plant which sprouted leaves at the top and flowers at ground level. We saw desert myrtle, the yellow gravilia, wattle, acacia, desert oak and, of course, lots of different types of eucalyptus, or just gum trees as they call them here. There is apparently too much of a sort of grass, the name of which I can't remember, which was planted in the 70s to provide food for cattle and which spread into the desert, and many clumps of spinifex, which can give you a nasty wound if you cut yourself on it, but which has useful resinous roots which provide a local glue.

We saw lots of desert flora, but no fauna except for a dead lizard and a few birds, one which looked like a cross between a pigeon and a plover and which might have been a type of cockatiel. I'm still looking for kangaroos in the wild. Apart from a fleeting glimpse of a few in a field near Perth, and some pretty green parrots, the only wildlife we've seen has been in the zoo.

Yesterday I learned that not all boomerangs are designed to come back.  There's one called the No 7, which is made from the root of the mallow tree, which only goes one way.

Off now to explore Alice Springs and to seek out Kevin...