Snow and sunshine!

Hi everyone,

Hope you've all been enjoying the summer. Snow and sunshine in this update....

We've had a good few weekends away skiing already this winter. The ski season was pretty slow to get going, but there's loads of snow now. Have been really lucky with the weather and the snow conditions and had some fantastic days on the slopes.

Have even had snow down to sea level in Wellington city! Apparently that hadn't happened for forty years or something! Didn't settle at our house, but all the hillier suburbs had loads of snow, schools cancelled e.t.c. - more than the usual 1cm that closes all the roads in the UK! Wellington weather is even more unpredictable than at home though - the week prior to the snow was gorgeous sunshine, warm enough to leave the coats at home, then snow, then yesterday we had a fantastic hail/thunderstorm - hailstones the size of marbles and over 550 lightning strikes in a couple of hours! Nice!

So decided we had to escape the winter at some point, and had 5 days in Fiji at the end of August. Bit of a change arriving to wall to wall sunshine and 30 degrees! Spent most of our time there at a small, family-run "resort" on a small island about 2 hours boat ride off the mainland. All the places to stay are called "resorts", but where we were was just a few thatched roofed chalets (called bures) around a little lawn with palm trees and right on the beach. The whole place only sleeps a maximum of less than 30 people. Was lovely and peaceful, really pretty beaches, good home-cooked fresh fish every day...and over-sized spiders and stick insects!
Apparently they're all friendly spiders out there!









There was some good snorkelling around the reef just off the beach (even Kerry managed to get the hang of it (kind of!), compared to her first, rather useless attempt when we were in Borneo!). Lots of pretty fish and bright blue starfish. Apologies for the lack of underwater photos - Ben's fault (come one, Kerry wasn't good enough to try and take photos!). Ben learnt to spear fish with one of the locals - apparently the most tiring thing ever! He managed to catch one little tiddler - though was actually aiming for the bigger fish in front of it! Needless to say the locals are great at it! They did offer to take you out to a reef much further off shore to snorkel with reef sharks - we didn't manage to do that - and decided that was probably a good thing when we saw the dorsal fin of a shark from the boat on the way back to the main island - it looked far too big to be harmless!


Also walked up the to the highest point on the island one afternoon. Yes - there actually are cliffs and hills on tropical islands! Was a hot and sweaty climb, but great views from the top, and a lovely breeze! The guide who led us up there picked some papayas on the way up for refreshment at the top - just what we needed!

All in all a really good time, very different to our usual on-the-go holidays, but actually really enjoyed doing nothing except read, snorkel and snooze in the sunshine for a few hours at a time. Think 5 days was just the right amount of time though, else we might have started getting a bit twitchy!

So now back in Wellington, though not really back to routine now that the rugby world cup has started. Went down to Dunedin last weekend to watch the England vs Argentina match, and made it back to Welly in time to get to the Wales vs South Africa game here too.
We're trying to get behind the underdogs in the non-England or All Blacks games (we have to support NZ too, we do live here after all!), but was more than a little weird suddenly supporting the Welsh! Was a great, if knackering, weekend though! Have tickets to another 4 group games in Wellington over the next few weeks, so the fun will continue! Have got flags and face paints for all the teams we're supporting, so definitely getting into the swing of things! Even had some props when we were supporting Wales - leeks! Turns out they make very good flagpoles!


























So all's going well here, busy busy and lots of fun! Hope everything's good with everyone back home...come on England! (And NZ else the whole country will be in mourning for weeks!)

Hello everyone! So we've finally got round to updating this again....!

Hope everyone is well and enjoying summer at home. It's definitely got cold and wintry here recently...not cold enough for the ski season to start yet though unfortunately!

So have had a couple of long weekends since we last updated you. Went away for Easter to the north-eastern part of the North Island. It was a typically rubbish weather forecast for the entire country for Easter, so we chose the least wet-looking place based on the forecast and drove up! We did pretty well compared to most places I think - limited sunshine, but mostly dry at least. Went to Gisborne and Mahia at the north end of Hawkes Bay, then a bit further north up the East Coast. Mahia Peninsula is known for being really pretty, lovely white beaches and bright blue sea, and it was indeed, but we were surprised how rugged and impressive the rest of the coast up there was too. Did numerous short walks, trying to avoid the showers.


Then on the way back, we went inland to Lake Whakaremoana. There's one of the ten "great walks" there so we'd seen plenty of photos of the area, and it'd always looked very pleasant - bt in fact it was really quite spectacular. We were there on a showery, really blustery day which helped with the impressiveness of it all.














A few weeks ago we went for a good long walk in the Tararua Range north of Wellington. It was meant to be a 2 day walk, walking up to and along a ridge on the first day, then staying in a hut en route and walking back down into the valley the next. The weather started off really nice so had some great views early on, though it started clouding over a bit before long (hence the misty photo below!). We got to the hut we were planning on really early, so decided we'd walk down to the next one and just make the walk out on the Sunday a bit shorter. But when we got there, the hut was already full with people who'd just done the short-ish walk up the valley from the car park and who didn't seem to convinced about having us sleep on the floor! So we had a race against the fading light to get back to the car before it was dark! Made it - just! Nearly had to get the torches out! Good job the last bit of the track was wide and well made so we didn't fall over things! So treated ourselves to a nice pub dinner on the way home! Definitely beat the pasta we were going to have in the hut! So it turned into a bit of a long walk with a lot of height gain! Wouldn't have been too bad if we weren't carrying all our overnight stuff....sleeping bags, cooking stuff, wine...!


Had a long weekend for Queens Birthday at the beginning of June. We flew up to Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty on the Friday afternoon and rented a bach near Whakatane at the other end of the Bay for three nights. We were hoping to go to White Island (the most active volcano in NZ about 50km off the coast there, with geysers, fumeroles, lots of sulphur e.t.c.), but unfortunately the weather was too bad all three days we were there so we didn't get to go. There's just a small boat that goes out, and the swell was so big all over the weekend that no boats could get out of Whakatane Harbour at all. Bit of a shame for us geology geeks!

We had a hire car, so we made the most of it anyway and explored some places we hadn't been before. The weather wasn't actually that bad most of the time (just really windy), so we got out a fair bit and did a few nice shortish walks around the East Cape and Mt Maunganui. Also went down to the Rotorua area to satisfy our geology-ness with the geothermal areas down there.



























So that's us really.....had a good few day trips out of Welly, and have been to see rugby matches, comedy festival shows and the like in the city.

All's good with us, hope it is with you all too. Bye for now...til the next well overdue update!

Happy New Year

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year and 2011 is treating you well so far!

Kerry started a new job with an environmental consultancy firm in September, seems to be going well so far! In fact, we've ended up working together for a couple of weeks carrying out land assessments following the earthquake in Christchurch in September.

We spent a very enjoyable 2 and a half weeks on the South Island over Christmas and New Year. We sailed over on Christmas Eve and drove all the way down to Aoraki Mount Cook, stopping in Kaikoura to pick up a crayfish (rock lobster) for our Christmas dinner! Kaikoura is the place in NZ for crayfish, and since we were driving through it seemed like a good excuse!

Christmas day was a beautiful sunny day, so we did a fantastic walk from our campsite to Mueller Hut. There had been some fresh snow overnight so it was great to be walking in fresh snow and warm sunshine. The hut is in a spectacular setting, with great views to Mt Sefton and Mt Cook itself. We were watching loads of small avalanches down the faces of the mountains across the valley.










Fortunately the campsite we were staying in had a cooking shelter, else our Christmas dinner would have blown across the campsite in the gales! So we had a delicious summer platter with nice cheeses, parma ham, olives, sun-dried tomatoees, crusty bread and of course the crayfish and a nice bottle of wine (Kerry's work Christmas present was 6 nice bottles of wine - dare say they didn't last too long!). Was great - all the other campers were looking at us with such envy as they tucked into their boring pasta and sauce! We camped here for 2 nights...until the gales got too strong and we hastily pulled down the tent and drove down to Alexandra, Central Otago where it's always sunny! Indeed it was!

We then went down to the Catlins in the far south, where there's lots of empty, wild beaches, sea caves and impressive waterfalls. Saw several sealions and some yellow-eyed penguins on some of the beaches as well as a cool petrified forest...geology geeks again!


We spent the four days around New Year on Stewart Island, an hour's ferry ride off the South Coast. It's a beautiful island, with loads of pristine rainforest and beaches. We did a 3 day walk on the Island - one of NZ's "Great Walks", which was really good. The first and last days in particular were really nice, through rainforest between small coves. We stayed in Department of Conservation huts, normally very basic, but the one on the first night had just been renovated and was really quite nice - apart from the mosquitoes buzzing around your head all night!
Supposedly Stewart Island is the place to see kiwi in the wild, but unfortunately we didn't spot any. We ventured out at night a couple of times, but with no luck. We did spot plenty of mud though! Stewart Island is famous for it's mud, evidently we barely scratched the surface, but was pretty gloopy for a good few kilometers!


The second night was New Year's Eve. It was good to have spent the previous night with the same people in the first hut, so we already knew each other a bit. Almost everyone had brought some wine to celebrate New Year with, and even without electricity, it's so far south that it still wasn't properly dark at midnight.

The evening we finished the walk we met up with some of the people we'd stayed in the huts with for drinks in the one and only pub on the Island. Also tried local natural oysters which were surprisingly nice! Sailed back to the mainland the following morning on a rather rough crossing! Spent the whole hour concentrating on the horizon! The boats are only small catamarans that seat about 50 people, and the swell was about the same height as the boat...! We were watching the albatross soaring around the boat as an attempt to take our minds off the rough ride!

From there we drove to Fiordland and did a two-day sea kayaking/camping trip on Doubtful Sound. It as a beautiful location, and very remote so much quieter than the more famous Milford Sound. We had two days of perfect weather, light winds and blue skies - incredible for Fiordland (the area receives about 10m of rain a year, so 2 consecutive days with no rain at all is pretty lucky!). Ben was complaining that the good weather meant there was no atmospheric mist to make moody photos! The only bad thing about it - the sandflies! Little buggers! They're tiny little flies that give you the worst bites! And there's so many of them! Put your hand down towards the ground or reach round some vegetation and it turns black! Not nice!


We hadn't planned our route after the kayaking so we could wait and see what the weather was like across the country. Managed to avoid most of the rain by heading up to Queenstown and then Arthur's Pass. Did a bit of "caving" - it's a marked footpath that a tiny bit of crawling, scrambling, ladders and traversing round pools, but was quite fun! Rented a bach (holiday chalet) in Arthur's pass for a couple of days - it was nice to be able to spread out a bit more than in our little tent! And a very good excuse to cook lots of nice food in a kitchen rather than do our best on a camping stove!



Had a bit of time to squeeze in some wine-tasting in Marlborough on the way back and arrived back in Wellington on 9th Jan...after another pretty rough ferry ride! And then had a huge shock to the system going back to work the following morning!

Shouldn't complain too much though, we get a bank holiday weekend next week! So we're off on holiday again! Will be going up to Hawke's Bay on the east coast of the North Island with a few friends to a music and beer festival and to do some more wine-tasting. Fingers crossed for a sunny rest of the summer so we can make the most of all the events that go on in Welly.