01-08-10 Taupo

Some Pictures of Taupo

Tasha on the personal cruise we had of Lake Taupo on the Barbary, a sailboat that was constructed over a hundred years ago in Alameda. The Barbary Captain and First Mate. And a shot of Huka Falls.

Sorry short on time and a lot to write about. The trip is winding down.

Napier

01-06-10

Short entry today. Just thought I would post a few pictures. Napier has been a lot of fun but it is off to Taupo today. Enjoy! Oh, the cottage is where we stayed the last couple of days. Our hosts and the cottage were just fabulous.




Schmoose on Te Mata Peak



This is the view from Hawk Hill.



This is the front view of Hawk Hill.

Castlepoint Lighthouse and Castle Rock


01-04-10

Hello from Napier.

Yesterday we spent the afternoon at the Castlepoint Lighthouse and Castle Rock. A truly remarkable place especially if you like interesting rock formations that have been carved out by the sea. Later that evening in Masterton, we had dinner at one of the local restaurants and finally called it a night at the South Park Motel (yes you read that correctly) which actually turned out to be a pretty decent place. We left Masterton around 9:30 am with a brief stop at the Tui Brewery (New Zealand beer) and arrived in Napier earlier this afternoon.

Our accommodations for the next couple of days will be a little French Cottage on the outskirts of town called Hawk Hill. It sits on the side of a hill overlooking one of the rivers that flow around the town of Napier and into the Pacific Ocean. Sorry I don’t have any pictures but I haven’t had the time to load them onto the computer as of yet. For now you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that it’s really cool.

Tomorrow the plan is to take in as much of the area as possible including Hastings which is New Zealand’s oldest wine producing region.

Till then….




This was on the beach at Castlepoint.

A Wellington New Year

Full Moon On New Years Eve on Wellington Harbor


01-02-10

Happy New Year everyone! It is now finally 2010 all around the world. We hope everyone had a very safe and joyous celebration. We enjoyed a quiet celebration since it has been pretty quiet in Wellington. I believe I mentioned that the Kiwi’s pretty much shut it down where there is a holiday involved. Well I thought that New Year’s weekend in Wellington might be a little different but I was wrong. Very wrong!

Since arriving in Wellington last Thursday, we’ve scrambled to find restaurants that are open. More than once we ended up settling on our seventh or eighth choice just so we got some food. But I will quit complaining because after all, we are on vacation.

Since we’ve been to Wellington before, we did some things that we didn’t do last time we were here. One was to visit Te Papa. Te Papa is New Zealand’s national museum. It has been recognized worldwide as an innovator for interactive exhibits. Te Papa is a large museum standing 6 stories high on the shores of Wellington Harbor. One could easily spend three days going through all the different exhibits but we decided to do it in one. While we didn’t see everything, what we saw was impressive and informative.

Today we were originally thinking that we might take a walk on Somes-Matiu Island which sits in the middle of Wellington Harbor but the weather didn’t feel like cooperating with us. So instead we jumped into our little hotrod Ford Focus and took a drive up the west coast of the North Island just exploring the countryside. We didn’t have any particular plan and so we had fun just seeing where we might end up.
And that is pretty much all I have to report on Wellington. Tomorrow we head off to Masterton by way of Castlepoint. The original plan had us going to Castlepoint on the way to Napier but we decided to do it a day early since otherwise the drive would be a real killer.

So until we get to Napier….

Cheers!

Happy New Year from Down Under

Falls River On the Coastal Track

12-29 and 12-30-09

We last left you in Kaikoura on the track from hell. This time we come to you from Nelson and what is the jump off point for Abel Tasman National Park (not to mention two other national parks that we didn’t even get to see really) and Golden Bay. Nelson is a fairly large town with about a population of about 56,000. It is close to where the Dutch Explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to discover New Zealand around 1642 and because of that, Nelson is one of New Zealand’s oldest settlements.

So given the few facts I provided for you above, you have probably guessed by now that we managed to pack a lot into a couple of days. When we arrived on Sunday afternoon it was soon apparent that the entire region was still on Christmas holiday. Yes I know, Christmas was already a couple of days ago already and back in the states the shelves have probably already been picked clean of after Christmas sales. But things are a little bit different in this country. They don’t seem to be so hell bent on the consumerism that Americans are used to and so, when they shut down for a holiday, they shut down for a holiday!

We did take time to do part of the famed Abel Tasman Coast Track while we were in the area. We started out by taking a water Taxi from Kaiteriteri to Totaranui and then back to Bark Bay. We got dropped off by the taxi at Bark Bay and then hiked the track to Torrent Bay where the taxi picked us up again for the ride back to Kaiteriteri. The track itself was not too difficult (except for a couple of steep climbs), well marked and certainly well populated given the time of year. I kept to my promise about the kayaks and I doubt anyone missed me out there because there was certainly no shortage of other folks in kayaks.

The day before we went to the northern most part of the south island to a place called Cape Farewell. Nearby is the famous Farewell Spit which is a land mass that extends 25 kilometers into the sea and is home to numerous sea birds including a very large gannet colony. Farewell Spit is a nature reserve of international importance. Since it was low tide while we were there, we were able to walk quite a way on the sand flats. Quite frankly, it looked more like a desert than anything else.

Probably the roughest aspect of this part of our trip was the fact that Nelson is really pretty far away from most of what we wanted to do. Needless to say we spent a lot of time in the car driving to the activities we wanted to undertake from our accommodations at the Sussex Inn B & B where we were staying. Our hosts, David and Vicki at the Sussex were very nice folks and even got us our breakfast early (6:30 am) on the morning we went to hike Abel Tasman.

So that’s about all we have to report on Nelson. We made our way to Picton via Queen Charlotte Drive yesterday and got some beautiful pictures along the way. At Picton we turned in our little Toyota Corolla that we had picked up in Invercargill. It was pretty dirty. Once we arrived in Wellington, we picked up a little Ford Focus but won’t be driving that anywhere near that much in the city.

Have a Happy New Year everyone.

Cheers!





Just a nice place to anchor your boat.

Oh No! Not Another Dolphin Picture

Yes, that's exactly what it is, another Dolphin Picture.

Swimming with the Fishes

12-26-09 Boxing Day

I am sorry to report that our vacation took a turn for the worse today. Tasha tried to kill me. I’m not sure why she wanted to kill me but she did. Let me tell you about it.

The day started out innocently enough; we awoke early so that we could walk a couple of hundred feet to the Encounter Kaikoura building to begin our morning with the Dusky Dolphins. Encounter Kaikoura is an award winning organization that offers boating tours to view Sperm Whales, Dusky Dolphins, Albatross and other sea birds in their natural habitats. In our case, Tasha was going to snorkel with the dolphins and I planned on taking lots of pictures. Well all that went according to plan. Tasha swam with the dolphins and I took lots of pictures of them. Far more pictures than I took the first time we did the tour and I got some really excellent shots.

After that, we came back to the apartment to make a couple of phone calls to the family to wish them a Merry Christmas. Once that was done we went off on another hike.

This is how Tasha tried to kill me. When we got to Kaikoura she had mentioned that one of the things she wanted to do was hike Mt. Fyffe. Her complaint was that she had been here twice already and had not had the opportunity to at lease do some sort of hike on Mt. Fyffe. Grant you, there is an eight hour hike that you can do to the top of Mt. Fyffe but this fat, old, middle aged ex-smoker was not going to agree to an eight hour hike. I knew I wouldn’t come back alive from that one.

No, I agreed to a nice little walk up a hill to a picnic area that supposedly had great views of Kaikoura and its coast. Boy was I duped! First of all we parked the rental car on an incline. Once we got out of the car we started climbing, and climbing, and climbing, and climbing. I mean all we were doing was climbing. And this wasn’t your grandma’s nice gentle grade; at times it was as much as a 45% slope that we were climbing.

I must admit, I thought it a little suspicious that we didn’t have an “official” map of the track (the last time we didn’t have an official map, we almost got lost in the Big Basin Redwood Forest) so we had no idea how long the track actually was or what sort of climbs were involved to get to the picnic area. Not only that, it turned out to be a pretty warm day and if it weren’t for the fact we were covered by the forest canopy most of the time, I probably would have died from heat stroke if the heart attack didn’t kill me first.

Still, somehow I managed to survive and I’m here to tell the tale, sordid as it may be. I will tell you this much, you won’t catch me going on any more hikes without an “official” map, that’s for sure.

Off to Nelson tomorrow. I’ll be staying out of kayaks.

Cheers!

P.S. Alright, alright! In fairness, the part about Tasha trying to kill me is not true. I just made that up to make the story more interesting. In fact Tasha was just as uncomfortable as I was and any visions you had of her sashaying her way up the hill, well you can just wipe those thoughts right out of your head.