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Any comment about New Zealand wouldn't be complete without mentioning geographically diversity. In just a few weeks we saw beaches, plains, rolling hills, mountains, glaciers fringed by subtropical forests, ravines, meadows, geothermal wastelands and volcanic mud pools. And Auckland, probably the most underrated city we've been too so far, a place that felt a bit like home - in a good way. We stayed in Ponsonby at Scott's, a friend of Em's from Nottingham. He lived with a couple of other Brits and a kiwi - they all made us feel very welcome.
We visited the Auckland Museum which featured a volcano eruption simulation, loads of Maori and Pacific Island stuff and a natural history section which featured a full skeleton of a T-rex and what used to be the biggest bird in the world - it was massive!
Then we met up with Scott for some 'handles' in the city before a delicious curry back in Ponsonby. Scott, who had been teaching in South Korea for a few years and was applying for jobs in Qatar, put a very convincing case for spending a year or so doing the same, in SK or indeed Qatar. SK sounds very nice indeed - good people, food and culture along side being very cheap and being paid UK wages.
The next morning we flew to Queenstown and as the weather was so nice when we arrived, within a few hours we're were on our way for a sky dive!
Jumping from 15,000ft over mountain fringed lake on a beautiful day, with snow capped mountains in the distance was probably the most exhilarating thing I have ever done, hardly surprising really though. Looking out the window of the tiny plane as we climbed higher and higher. There were lots of cheesy high fives and hang looses between the 6 of us on board which added strangely to the tension. But I nearly blacked out when the pilot cut the engine and everything went silent and watched Em jump - my body went limp with fear and I almost completely lost all coordination. The best I could do was hold my breath, look straight out to the horizon and let the guy manoeuvre my limp body into position for my jump!
The first few seconds of falling we're a complete blur of the senses but when we reached terminal velocity, about 250 kmph and held it for about 90 seconds, aside from the ear popping high pressure and wind chill, it was great fun! With the parachute deployed we had a chance to enjoy the view and take a few photos of each other. But still the memory of hanging there from so high up gives me vertigo. We both had a go on the controls and I managed a few spins but then in my excitement I pulled both ropes to slow down and got a telling off as we started to drop out of the sky.
So, a good start to our few days in Queenstown - an odd little place with a distinct lack of 'normal' people. During the day it is crawling with erstwhile worthy type outdoor health enthusiasts, running about every where doing press-ups and circuits in the park. Then after 7 the streets become full of pissed up young adrenalin junkies on massive pub crawls.
We might have been a bit quick to judge New Zealand itself. Being spoiled on our travellers through Asia, in terms of fantastic vistas, lakes, mountain ranges etc. We had to stop ourselves from making annoying 'traveller snob' comparisons to other places we'd been to over past 6 months, mainly China and Laos. But those thoughts we're soon quelled - we quickly got over ourselves and started to appreciate how nice it was.
Em booked herself on the Nevis bungee jump, one of the highest in the world at 134m - from a cable car. I'd had more than my quota of pure fear the previous day so I left her to it - the video looked great - but to me, not much fun.
We met up with Lee and Bee (Notts) who were 6 weeks into their camper van tour. It's always great to see familiar faces, and get the low down on news from Notts so we immediately went to the bottle shop for some 'long necks' and headed to the park to catch up. All around us people were playing frisbee, jogging along the path, jumping into the freezing cold lake, practising their tight rope walking, arriving back from their jet-boat trip or just simply paragliding around above our heads.
Bee cooked an amazing curry in their van and we had a chance to talk football and make a plan for the next few days - unfortunately due to time restrictions we wouldn't be able to go on a mission with them in the van, it was around this time we started to wish we had taken two years off and done this thing properly!
Not being fussed about the bungee jump Lee and I had a look through the catalogue of adventure sports on offer in and around Queenstown and tried to book ourselves for a hang glide. It would have been amazing but we were scuppered by high winds on two attempts.
To make amends we ended up playing a round of American style indoor crazy golf - Lee must have set a record in missed tee off's! We also managed a couple of runs down the cart luge, during which Em tried to cut me off as I was passing at full speed on a straight by ramming me into the dirt. Our handle bars got momentarily tangled and we almost had a nasty little collision. We stopped laughing about it and realised how lucky we were on the way back down when we saw a man with an oddly bent looking arm, on the track being attended to by a first aider and a sorry looking friend standing over.
We had to say good bye to Lee and Bee after that, they were heading off to Milton Sound. We got straight back online to try to book somewhere to stay in Brazil for Carnaval.
You can't walk for more than a few minutes around the town without seeing a flat screen advertising extreme adventure sports and one of those is the 'Canyon Swing'. After a few days of exposure Em was sold to the idea so we booked her up. It's much like a Bungee Jump in that you jump off a platform, fall for a few seconds and narrowly miss some jagged rocks on the way down. The guys that run it do their best to freak you out in the process. They've dreamed up several ways you can go - jumping forward, back ward, sideways with your hands behind your back, hanging onto a small piece of rope which they cut little by little, or my favourite, 'the indian rope trick', in which you simply hang onto a piece of rope for as long as you can. Em finally opted to do 'the chair' AND 'the sideways jump'. In 'the chair' you lean back over the edge and let yourself fall backwards down the canyon, needless to say Em's dvd looked amazing and her scream echoed all the way down the valley. I just went along to take a few snaps and laugh but somehow got myself into a harness and ended up doing the chair as well- I'm glad I did it for the excellent photo but don't really get the buzz, it's perfectly safe, so why does everyone get themselves so worked up about it? You Tube it (or watch the DVD on Em's facebook) to see what I mean...or if you're MAN enough as the instructors clearly thought I was for 'overcoming my fear' ...waste a hundred quid and try it yourself....give me hang gliding any day of the week!
Onto Fox Glacier for some Ice Climbing! There are two main glaciers open to tourists in NZ - Fox is the smaller of the two and gets half as many visitors with 40,000 as opposed to 80,000 per year. With this information it wasn't hard to decided which one we would go to.
Again there was a whole array of different ways to enjoy the glacier - Em liked the sound of the heli-hike as there was no strenuous walking involved, her knee still a problem - it involved a ride to the top section and a general peruse around some ice formations - more of a heli-browse really. It cost about 130 quid each so I was up for the full day hike from the bottom. After much debate, open to rest of the people of the hostel, we settled on Ice Climbing! On the basis that it didn't cost much more than the hike and "you use your arms more than knees". Along the way we met various people that were impressed with our bravery, they'd heard it was really tough, esp on the legs, so the fear started to creep in for Em. We woke up to lashing rain and icy southerlys and put our money on it being called off but it was going ahead, and there were just two of us and two guides. So we really felt cheeky while all those 'muppets' on the full day hike trudged on by in lines of 10-15 and we spent a great day, learning the techniques, tackling climbs, and seeing lots of the glacier.
The next day we took the Transcenic Express from Greymouth to Christchurch. It was like a strange time warp, Greymouth is a very New Zealandish little place and Ch Ch could have been any town in England rebuilt exactly, stone by stone, every lawn, canal, pub, square even the damn weather was cold and grey, with relentless drizzle and that icy southerly still blowing. We spent an afternoon looking for a pair of shoes and trousers for me. I'll spare the details but Em was a legend!
We took a day trip to Akoroa, about an hour by bus from Ch Ch, driven by another mentalist bus driver. He was angry at being held up by one passenger and by the roads - busy with people avoiding the rain. He wouldn't let us eat, drink or even wipe the condensation off the windows - 'that's what the aircon's for'. But the air con didn't work so we saw absolutely nothing out the windows all the way! The idea was to go swimming with these cute little dolphins and in doing so tick off yet one more ambition of Em's. Let's just say that that icy Antartican southerly was really not giving up and while we struggled to breath in the near freezing water, waves lashed up at our faces and burnt our eyes. I personally felt like a prize idiot in that I actually pictured us swimming with dolphins in warm turquiouse waters, stroking them, catching a ride on their dorsal fins etc We declared the day a success because one of them swam within 2 metres of Em and I saw one do a flip (about 100 meters away), and we got some money back, and neither of us got pnuemonia. When we got back on the bus the same driver gave us a cuddle and took us back home.
Back in Christchurch we went out for a nice valentines meal on the friday, in a pub/restaurant called Dux de Lux. The place looked like your standard British big pub with a big beer garden and bar out back with a stage, but the food was 100 times better than anything I've had in a pub in the UK. And the beer was brewed on site and delicious..ah...cold beer. After dinner we checked out the warm up act - one man with a guitar and a sampler and various striking implements, I think there was a saw in there.
Early flight back to Auckland the next day. Spent a nice evening in with Scott and his house mates, more beers and Charlotte made cheese on toast. The next day, Sunday, Scott and Charlotte took us to a party in the city park - not all different from one in London except 'the booze ban had been temporarily lifted' (and it was sunny and hot)! Had a great day, drinking beer and pre canned jack daniels and coke.
Next day, a hung over bus journey to Rotorua! We took a nice walk round the local park, with its sulphur pools and many pits of boiling mud. Had a look round the local Salvo store. Saw some Black Swans. Had a look in a Maori church. Had an ice cream and got my hiarcut - at last.
The next day Em spent at the spa while I went mountain biking in a redwood forest. Then we watched a film, Hot Fuzz, in bed and woke up at 3am to ring the travel agents in Brazil - still no ticket from Rio to Salvador.
Back in Auckland, seeing as we had a flight the next morning and not wanting to break with tradition, we went out for a few drinks. We joined a big group of students and teachers from Scott's school who had just come from a fancy dress boat party so provided some drunken entertainment. It was a nice little insight into the life of a TEFL teacher and the adoration that comes with it. In lots of ways it was a typical work party with the release of lots of built up tension and people over drinking. We naturally got caught up in the whole thing and at two o clock we were driving round in a taxi looking for a kebab shop blissfully unaware of what we would forget when we left the house in the morning.
Ah, it wasn't so bad, just another tupperware box. The flight went pretty smoothly all things said. Not Qantas this time at least - but the button on my game controller was stuck down rendering it useless and the films were crap so we just tried to sleep as much as possible as we flew into the unknown - still nothing booked to get us to Salvador. We had to resign ourselves to organising it at 2am from Rio airport after 20 hours of flights which went about as well as we expected - so after about an hour of hopelessly messing around we cut our losses and caught the first plane to Salvador, expensive, but at least we're still together!
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