Mike and Michele’s Global Wanderings

Buenos Dias! Michele aqui (here)…

Today is April 5 and we have been traveling for 303 days!

We are in one of the most remote places on earth and also one of our favorite destinations on our around-the-world trip – Easter Island, Chile. We are currently only 1 hour behind East Coast time in the U.S. but it took days to get here. To back up a bit…

We left Picton, New Zealand on March 27th and drove to Christchurch. The drive was stunning since the road follows the coast, but like almost every day we experienced in New Zealand, it was cloudy and raining. We stopped in Kaikora, a coastal town, where we filled the car up with gas, got some lunch, and visited a seal colony. A sign on one of the shop doors read, “Missing: The Sun. If found, please return to Kaikora”. We arrived in Christchurch and found we had been upgraded to a flat (apartment) at our hostel. Our little apartment was very nice and for $35/night, it was a steal! We spent two days in Christchurch, which has a very England feel to it. We did walk around the downtown area and take some pictures but yep, it was cloudy and raining, so we mainly focused on running errands.

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Mike writes…

After an easy three hour drive on Wednesday, March 22, from Marahau and Abel Tasman National Park, we arrived in the small town of Picton (population 3600)…

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Hello! Michele here…

On March 17th, we made the 7-hour drive from Waitomo Caves to Wellington. I drove the first 3 hours and Mike drove the next 4 hours. The first part of the drive, like so much of the driving in New Zealand, involved going through mountain passes on twisty narrow roads. (I am still not used to driving on the left hand side of the road!) What is also true about the driving in New Zealand is that it never ceases to amaze us how stunning the scenary is. Driving in New Zealand is like constantly looking out over a scenic overlook. The country is beautiful everywhere. There are either moutains, oceans, lush forests, or green pastures filled with fluffy sheep alongside almost every road we’ve driven on.

We spent a few days in Wellington but didn’t do enough to write a blog so I will just briefly mention here what we did. First, we relaxed in our luxurious motor inn. Well, it was luxious to us. The motor inns in New Zealand are very high quality and the three we have stayed at, including this one, have had a large bathroom, spacious bedroom, cable TV, and little kitchen. Anyway, the two tourist activities we did while visiting Wellington included going to the Wellinton Zoo and visiting the National Tattoo Museum. We went to the zoo primarily to see the Tuatara lizard. This lizard has a third eye, is uinuqe to New Zealand, and has been around as long as New Zealand has been around. It is said to be closely related to the dinosaur. We viewed both a male and female Tuatara lizard in dim light since they are housed in a sort of darkened zoo area – and did you know the male Tuatara has no penis? See, you learn something new everyday.

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Mike writes…

On March 15, after having a relaxing evening at the Ceder Lodge Motel in Hamilton the night before, Michele drove us the easy 1.5 hours to Waitomo Caves.  We were a bit too early to check into the YHA so we had a look around the town, checking out the only grocery store (which amounted to little more than a convenience store) and shopping for some postcards.  After checking in to the YHA at around 11 a.m., we walked over to Waitomo Adventures to set up our caving trip for the next day. 

Waitomo Caves are known for their large glow worm populations.  Glow worms are actually the larvae stage of a fly.  The “worm” lives in damp caves and produces something like webs in which it traps insects upon which it subsequently feeds.  It attracts these insects by creating a chemical reaction in its body that results in phosphoresence (i think i have that spelled close to right).  Insects see the glowing and think it is the stars and fly towards the glow and get caught in the “web”.  Unfortunately, it isn’t normally possible to capture this on a camera because the tours don’t allow cameras.  This is because the flash from a camera allegedly disturbs the glow worms and causes them to stop glowing.

Anyway, we had been debating about what kind of tour to take since several options are offered by all of the outfitters in town.  After finding out that we wouldn’t be able to take a camera no matter which option we chose, we decided on the Ultimate Lost World caving trip which was referred to as a “wet” trip.  Since we couldn’t bring a camera anyway, it didn’t matter to us whether the trip was wet or dry.

Next we drove the car to the next town to stock up on groceries since we didn’t like the options in town.  This was the nice thing about having our own car — we could go pretty much anywhere we wanted anytime we wanted.  The evening of the 15th was pretty much uneventful except for the mobscene created in the kitchen by the passengers from one of the hop-on, hop-off backpacker buses that arrived late in the afternoon.  We were really glad we didn’t choose to use one of these because it seemed like mostly young (18-22 y.o.) obnoxious folks out to party and destroy whatever hostel they stopped at.  You should have seen the kitchen after they were through…

On March 16, we got up, had our breakfast and headed over to the Waitomo Adventures office and met up with the rest of the 10:30 a.m. group — a couple from Argentina and a couple of friends from Austria and Norway.  Shortly afterwards, we were in a van making the 25 minute trip over to the cave entrance with our guides, Scott and Iain. 

Once we arrived at the site, we got all of our gear on.  This included repelling gear AND full, 7-mm wetsuits since, after all, this was the “wet” trip.  Michele had Scott take this picture of us all suited up (this took place just after i finished emarrassing myself trying to speak some Norwegian with Frode)…

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Mike writes…

On March 13, we left Whagarei and made the quick, 1-hour, drive up to Kerikeri. We arrived around noon and checked into the Kerikeri YHA (Youth Hostel) just outside of town.  Since they didn’t have any double rooms availible, we paid a little extra to have a 4-person dorm room all to ourselves.  The grounds of the YHA are beautiful and back up to a forest through which a path winds down to the river.  After getting the car unpacked into our room, we made the 15 minute walk down to the river to have a look.  It was great but in order to do a real hike along the river we needed to get to the other side.  After taking a few pictures, we walked back to the YHA, had a snack and then head down the road to the bridge and the start of the trail to the Fairy Pools, and Rainbow falls.  As we were hiking along, several runners passed us and we wished we could join them — but running will have to wait until we get back to the States.  About one and a half hours after leaving the YHA we arrived at the end of the trail where we found the Rainbow Falls…

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Michele here on March 26th….we are in New Zealand…16 hours behind East Coast time and 19 hours behind West Coast time in the states. 

We left Aukland with the intention of driving north in our rental car to Tutukaka on March 11th. We rented our car from a cheap-o rental place, called ACE. One reason ACE rental is cheap is because the cars have high mileage on them. (You can probably see the writing on the wall here….oh yea, read below…)

The driving in New Zealand takes place on the left side of the road so we really have to concentrate to drive. Everything in the car in backwards (to us) and when we approach an intersection, we need to think carefully about which car is going where and who has the right away. Mike started out driving through downtown Aukland. We then got onto the motorway with no problems. However, about 15 minutes outside of Aukland, our car went from the posted speed limit of 100 km/hour to 80 km/hour to 50 km/hour to 30 km/hour with the gas peddle floored.  There were no shoulders to pull over onto so as we slowed down, we had people piling up behind us and honking their horns. Before the car completely died we drove it up over a curb and onto some grass. @*#&$@#(^!  We knew we shouldn’t have rented this cheap-o thing!  We managed to get the car started again and get it to the nearest exit, which thankfully had a gas station at the end of it.  As we pulled into the gas station, the car died for good. We called the car rental company and (eventually) they sent out a replacement car. 

We arrived in Tutukaka, on the east coast of the north island, about 2 hours later than planned due to the car trouble.  We were immediately struck at how small this “town” was. It actually didn’t seem like a town but really, more like a marina with a couple of restaurants and bars.  We stopped into the scuba dive shop there and talked with the owner about our (previously arranged) plans for doing two dives out at the Poor Knights Islands. 

We wanted our dives to be part of our advanced open water certificate requirement.  We knew we wouldn’t be getting our advanced open water certificate from this dive shop but we wanted to take a few “courses” towards the advanced certificate. The advanced certificate consist of reading the appropriate chapters in our advanced open water book, taking the tests, and completing CORE and ELECTIVE dives then being tested on our underwater skills. Getting an advanced open water certificate is sort of like getting a college degree (but it’s much easier and more fun of course!)  You have your required, or core, courses and you have your elective courses. 

At the Tutukaka dive shop we had arranged to do two elective courses with a dive instructor. The two elective dive course were called Peak Performance Buoyancy (basically floating underwater at the right depth) and Underwater Photography. I’ll explain more about these later.

After getting everything set up with the Tutukaka dive shop, we asked them to help us find a place to stay. They had a list of places in this small town but after calling about 20 hostels, B&Bs and hotels  – everything within our budget, and even places out of our budget – were booked due to a fishing tournament. Oh, how we hate being in this situation!  It was getting late, pouring rain, and we had no place to stay. So, we turned around and headed south down the motorway (about 30 minutes) to the next big town, called Whangarei (pronounced “Fun-gar-ray”). We went to the International Youth Hostel in the town and it was full. I asked if I could use the phone and our calling card (that we bought at a convenience store) to call other places to stay.  The woman said this would be fine. Mike sat in the car as I went though the guide book calling and calling and calling. Finally, I found a motor lodge that had one vacancy. Sweet! I told the lady we would be there in 10 minutes.

We arrived and took one look at the place and told ourselves, “Well, it’s only for a few nights.” From the outside, the place looked rundown but when we walked into the last room available, we were overjoyed.  This is still one our favorite places we have stayed in New Zealand. It was similar to a small apartment with a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen – all spotless – and the kitchen window looked out to nice green plants. This was one of the most stressful days we have had on our trip, especially for Mike because he was driving for many hours on the left side of the road on a two-lane highway in the pouring rain. So finding this great, affordable place to stay was like a little reward for all the stress we had endured.

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Hello!  I know, I know, we haven’t blogged in over 2 weeks. Maybe we hit the blog “wall”?! Michele here….Mike is on a computer next to me in an internet cafe on the south island of New Zealand.  We both have blog assignments that we hope to finish tonight. If so, there will be six new blogs!

We flew from Singapore through Bali and Australia before arriving in Aukland, New Zealand on March 8th.  Before we left Singapore, we were hassled a bit about that fact that we were flying to Australia and we didn’t have an electronic visa.  We explained to the guy at the check in counter that we weren’t even getting off the plane in Australia since it was a continuation flight.  This didn’t matter to him and our bags were put aside and we were referred to another desk.  The people at the other desk said we needed an electronic visa in order to visit Australia and since we had not obtained one, they were unsure of how we were going to be allowed into Australia. We explained to them that we weren’t going to Australia for a visit and that this was merely a stopover.  The guy explained the situation to several people at this special desk and none of them knew what we should be doing. When the counter suddenly became very busy he said, “Uh…don’t worry about this,” gave us our tickets, and checked our bags through.  Hmmm…o.k., whatever!

Anyway…It was another one of those situations where we moved ahead multiple time zones (5 times zones to be exact) so when we went to bed at midnight on the plane we were practically landing and it was morning. Ugh!  To make matters worse, while in Australia, our early morning stop, I bought a huge cup of coffee from a foofy espresso shop and drooled over it with anticipation.  I obviously have enough experience to know that airplane coffee sucks so I was looking foward to my $3 USD coffee that I would be bringing on the plane from Australia to New Zealand.  When I started to get on the plane I heard,

Airline staff: Excuse me, ma’m, you can’t bring coffee on the plane.

Me: Why not?

Airline staff: Because it is a hot beverage that could be spilled.  

Me: Seriously?

Airline staff: Yes ma’m – but you can stand here next to us and drink it until we shut the doors.

The problem here was that I had the foofy espresso counter make it extra hot (boiling water) so that by the time I got the breakfast on the plane I would have an awesome, hot cup of high quality coffee to go with my meal.  So, I tried to drink it but it was so hot it was burning my mouth off.  After all the passengers got on the plane, I was left standing there with almost a full cup of coffee and had to leave it there with the staff.  Can you believe it?  You can’t bring coffee on an airplane these days! Sheeze! Coffee drinkers beware!

Upon our arrival in New Zealand we were given custom entry forms.  We have filled out many of these but this one had some specific questions that pertained to us.  One question asked if we had been hiking in another country in the past month. Answer = yes. Another question asked if we had hiking boots with us that had been used during our hikes in other countries in the past month. Answer = yes.  Once we were going through customs and they saw these answers we were referred to the biohazard team.  In the biohazard section of customs, we were told to unpack our backpacks and hand over our hiking shoes. We did this and it appeared as though they sprayed our shoes with some sort of anti-contamination stuff. They handed them back to us, only now there were wet and wrapped in individual plastic bags. 

We caught a super shuttle mini bus from the airport to the hostel we were staying in downtown Aukland. The first thing we noticed is that we could read every sign and understand the converstations of everyone around us. 

Aukland sort of reminds me of Seattle or Porland. The streets are wide and there are many funky coffee shops and clothing stores.  We also commented how it was strange to see people walking dogs.  We didn’t see any dogs in Malaysia or in Singapore and in many countries we had previously been in dogs were used as working dogs or guard dogs, not as pets.

While in Aukland, we spent time planning the rest of our New Zealand trip, making car rental arrangements, and setting up diving trips (you’ll soon discover scuba diving is our new passion). Since our hostel was in the heart of downtown we also walked around the downtown area quite a bit and visited the 328 meter Sky Tower at night in order to get some photos.  This is anaward winning photo of the Sky Tower:

 Photo — Mike

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Hello! Michele here….

We arrived in Singapore on March 4th. To get here we took what was supposed to be an 8 hour sleeper train. The funny thing is that the 8 hour train was exactly 4.5 hours late – meaning that we left Jerantut, Malaysia at 2:30am and arrived in Singapore at 3:00pm.  Although the train ride was very jerky, the bed was comfortable and the set up for the sleeper beds was close to ideal. So, you want to know what a sleeper train looks like?  Well, I wouldn’t say this is the best photo ever but I think you can get the idea: 

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Hello! Its Tuesday, March 7th and we’re in Singapore (13 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time and 16 hours ahead of West Coast Time). Michele and Mike here….

On February 28th we headed to central Malaysia where we planned to go treking in Taman Negara National Park, a 130 million year old jungle. It is somewhat complicated to get there independently and greatly simplified by buying a transportation and accomodation package.  The trip would require a bus from Kuala Lumpur to Jerantut (the closest large town to the park headquarters), a transfer to a second bus to get to a river jetty and then a three hour boat up the river to Kuala Tahan — a small village across the river from park headquarters.  We did a lot of research while in KL and finally decided on a transportation and accomodation package through NKS which we felt was a great deal.  The package included:

• a bus ride from KL to Jerantut, Malaysia
• bus ride from Jerantut to river pier/jetty at Kuala Tembling
• 3 hour boat ride in low wooden boat from Kuala Tembling to Kuala Tahan, the village where we stayed
• double room with Air Con in Teresek View Motel in Kuala Tahan village
• breakfast for both of us on two mornings
• double ensuite room in a hostel in Jerantut while we were waiting for the train to Singapore
• transport to the Jerantut train station
• two economy class train tickets from Jerantut to Singapore

Because we’ve done the overnight travel thing many times, we knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep sitting up in seats on the train so we paid a small supplement to get beds in the sleeping carriage.

All the transportation described above went smoothly. The 3 hour boat ride to the village of Kuala Tahan was very scenic and was pretty relaxing (although sitting in a small space on a wooden boat made our legs, butt, and feet fall asleep from time to time).  Here is a picture looking at the river from the village we stayed in, Kuala Tahan:

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Michele here… writing from Singapore on March 6th about our time spent in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Today, we have been away from the U.S. for exactly 9 months. Wow!

To get to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, we took a 2 hour bus from Trang, Thailand to Hat Yai, Thailand on Thursday, Feb. 23rd. From Hat Yai, we caught a huge double decker ultra comfortable luxurious bus to Kuala Lumpur.  We didn’t have any idea that the bus was going to be so great.  Mike had more leg room than he knew what to do with and could lean back without being in someone else’s lap.  Plus, it was cool being on the top of a double decker bus because we were higher up than the other drivers on the road. The A/C worked great and we were also provided with blankets in case the A/C got too cold (which it did). The real bonus was that there was a woman employee on the bus that spoke pretty good English so I asked her a lot of questions about the border crossing, where we were going to get dropped off in Kuala Lumpur (KL), etc.

The 9 hour bus ride was actually uneventful – which is the way we like it!  We got to the Thailand (Sadao) border, got off the bus and quickly got our passport stamped with an exit stamp.  Then we drove through no man’s land before arriving at the Malaysia border (Bukit Kayu).  We got out of the bus, got our luggage from underneath the bus, and walked to the border partrol building.  We got our entrance stamp and proceeded to customs where we were simply waved through. Sweet! The entire process (exit from Thailand and entry into Malaysia) took about 20 minutes. 

Once we got into Malaysia, we immediately noticed the giant jungle-like foliage on both sides of the highway. If you were walking through the palm trees and other leafy vegetation, you would certainly feel like a tiny ant because all of the trees and leaves are huge!

At 8:00pm we were dropped off in the big city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. What a difference from the small town we left behind in Thailand. There were sky scrapers everywhere and it was incredibly hot and humid.  We had a few places in mind that we were planning to check out and after looking at them, we decided to stay in a budget hotel.  We didn’t stay there because the hotel was some great place. I think what made the hotel attractive was that I was sick with a fever, we were both soaking wet and dripping with sweat, and it was 9:00pm. In the morning (after listening to the air conditioner drip water all night) we decided the hotel wasn’t worth the money so we checked out. We found a much cheaper backpacker place (Pondok Lodge) that had funky decorations and shared bathroom.  We liked it there and that’s where we stayed for the next 4 nights.

Kuala Lumpur is an interesting place. It’s a mix of three cultures although the majority of people in Malaysia are Muslim. The three cultures include Malaysian, Indian, and Chinese.  With these three cultures comes three different religions (Muslim, Hindi, and Budhist), three different types of food, and three different sets of habits and customs. Some contrasts we saw included young, hip, Chinese women wearing make up and skimpy clothes next to Malaysian (Muslim) woman wearing long skirts, long sleeve shirts, head covering, and no make up. We also saw a crematoria where Hindu (Indian) people cremate the dead next to a Chinese cemetary where people are buried. 

Our backpaker place was next to a well known Chinese hawker stall row where an entire street was dedicated to serving cheap, fast food.  We ate there several times and one night Mike ate a sting ray and another night he ate frogs. Both were actually very good.

While in Kuala Lumpur (KL), we visited two famous sky scrapers: The Petronas Towers and the KL Communication Tower.  The Petronas towers are really two towers built in an 8-sided arab Islamic art pattern. There are 5 tiers that represent the 5 pillars of islam.   This building was designed by an American architect, was completed in 1988, has 88 stories, and a skybridge across the 41st floor (146 meters/320 feet above ground).  We got up early one morning and stood in line with a lot of other people in order to get tickets to visit the sky bridge. Below is a photo of the Petronas Towers.  I took a lot of photos from the sky bridge but they weren’t nearly as impressive as the photos I took from the KL Communication Tower observation deck. 

The K.L. Communication Tower is nothing special to look at but it has an observation deck at 276 meters, which is much higher of course than the sky bridge of the Petronas towers.  The views from the K.L. Communication Tower observation deck were impressive. I’m sure on a clear day its possible to see forever but we rarely encountered clear days in Malaysia.  Everyday was cloudy and sometimes it poured rain (which makes sense because the rainy season is just coming to an end now). Even though it was cloudy, a photo from the K.L. Communication Tower is still worth seeing and is shown below (along with the Patronas Towers photo):

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