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Signs, Signs

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

As the song says, there are signs everywhere in Hong Kong. I can’t actually read most of them, but the neon does make the nights seem festive. Some of the signs do have English translations, but as we’ve often found in our travels, they don’t always make things any clearer.

Here are a few of our favorites from various places on this trip and others:

From a Hong Kong menu – Is it in there or not?: “No, MSG.”

From a Hong Kong description of an organic farm – Um, whatever: “380m above sea level of clean and peace.”

On a Thai menu – I wonder what color the stop lights are: “Curry – Green, Red, or Xellow”

Sign at a beach bar in Phi Phi – I did: “Get Relaxy”

From an Indian billboard – First lesson is Spellcheck 101: “Enroll! Hotal Management School”

On an roadsign in England – Your taxes paid for this: “This sign not in use”

While searching for a place to eat last night, we saw this one (no, we didn’t eat there):

 blog-potato.JPG

Posted in Travel | No Comments »

Heaps Of Sheeps

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

We spent a few days in the Bay of Islands, a coastal area north of Auckland. We went sailing in high winds and rain (more fun than it sounds, actually) and then finally decided to return to Auckland for a few days to get ready for the next part of the trip. We have plenty of errands to do before we leave NZ – haircuts, filing taxes (reminder: April 15th is not very far away!), replacing a things that have been used up, worn out, or read.

So, I don’t have much exciting travel news to post here. However, I thought I would take a few lines to mention the most populous group of New Zealanders, the sheep. They are everywhere and there are millions of them. Over 40 million according to the last count. There are only 4 million people here, so we are seriously outnumbered. A travel writer called Tony Horowitz once described part of the landscape here as “mutton.” He couldn’t have been more accurate.

After you drive around here for a while, you stop noticing them, but these guys caught our attention again. We never found out whether this was something special for Easter or just a farm having a little fun. Sorry for the picture quality, but we were in a road construction zone and couldn’t pull over.

blog-sheep.JPG

Posted in New Zealand, Travel | 1 Comment »

Kayak and Back

Friday, March 27th, 2009

We’ve been offline for a few days – way offline. After the rafting trip, we continued to make our way back to Auckland doing what I’m now calling our Week of Adventure. The next stop was Queen Charlotte Sound at the top of the South Island, which is a pretty combination of hills and inlets. We spent a day on guided kayak trip from Picton cruising around many coves, stopping for lunch on a deserted beach, and being followed by seals playing under our kayak. At the end of the day, we left the group to paddle up to our lodge for the night in Lochmara Bay. I’ve never arrived at a hotel this way before, but it seemed appropriate in the setting.

In the morning we hiked out from the lodge on the final section of the Queen Charlotte Track. It’s a nice 20k walk, but the highlight of the day might have been on the water taxi back to town. A group of 3 dolphins surfed, jumped, and played in the wake of the boat and it was a fantastic sight that we didn’t want to end.

We took a day off from the activities and caught the ferry back to the North Island. It’s bittersweet because it’s good to have a break from the campervan, but it also means that our time in NZ is getting shorter. However, we still had more things to do and we returned to Tongariro. When we stopped there on the way south, we passed up the Tongariro Crossing. It’s a 20k trail that is considered the “best one day walk in NZ” in the guidebooks and is always rated highly in those top-hikes-of-the-world-type lists. At that time, the weather didn’t cooperate and I just didn’t feel up to it. We vowed to do it on the way back and this time everything fell into place. The views include volcanic mountains, craters, alpine lakes, and even smoking geothermal vents. It’s an incredible track with Mt. Doom (Ngauruhoe) as the backdrop, and I’m thrilled that we did it. I’m also a little tired and looking forward to a few days in an apartment in Auckland to recuperate.

View from the Crossing: 

 blog-tongariro.JPG

 On the Queen Charlotte Sound:

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Posted in New Zealand, Travel | 2 Comments »

Mother Mother Ocean

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

For the Parrotheads among you the blog title might conjure up an appropriate song. I’m referring to “A Pirate Looks at Forty” and that’s just what I’m doing. We celebrated my big four-oh with a white water rafting trip on the Buller River. There was even a section of rapids in the middle that you could swim, so of course we did. (“Swim” is a pretty ambitious term. What you actually do is jump out of the raft into freezing water, splash around until you get your breath, and then basically just try to keep your feet up in front of you and float wherever the river wants to take you until a guide fishes you out and back into the raft.)

It was just the thing to energize me and make be feel very much younger than 40… until later on when the stiff muscles set in. We ended the big day with dinner out – no cooking in the campervan! I tried to look back and reminisce a little, but it’s more fun to look forward to the next 40 and daydream about the adventure that is waiting. After all, that’s what Jimmy would do, right?

Here’s a view of something called the Pancake Rocks that we saw a few days ago. It has nothing to do with my birthday, other than that I had pancakes for breakfast.

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Posted in New Zealand, Travel | 3 Comments »

Pastabilities

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

I could have used this blog to go on about the beauty of the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, but if you want to see what they looked like, check our photo gallery on Smugmug (link at right).

Instead, we should take some time to discuss the practicalties of campervan travel. Food is a big part of camping because, really, after the sun goes down, what other G-rated activity is there to do beside cook and clean up? With no TV, dinner consumes a large part of every evening.

Although we have a stove in the camper, most of the holiday parks have nice communal kitchens where you have more room and facilites to get your gourmet on. You can also spy on what other people are eating. For the most part, it’s a pretty sad offering with lots of backpackers making pasta out of noodles and ketchup (gross) and Germans frying up all manner of meats.

For our part, we’ve tried to keep to the same type of menu we made back home. Our California-Mexican-Mediterranean-Fusion style food is often hard to duplicate, but we do the best we can. On a side note, Aussies and Kiwis do not like their food as spicy as we do – store bought condiments like mayo or salsa are way too sweet. So, we’ve resorted to making a lot of things, like fajitas, from scratch.

Generally, we like our own cooking (which is good because Gordon Ramsay is not here), but occasionally we forget to pick up a few key ingredients and have to get very creative. Tomorrow we really need to get to a grocery store because we’ve run out of just about everything. Here’s a picture of what was left in the cupboard.

If you can combine these ingredients into something that is not disgusting, please send us a recipe…

blog-dinner.JPG

PS – We drank the wine and had tuna sandwiches.  The rest is still left for tomorrow.

Posted in New Zealand, Travel | 3 Comments »

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