Cheryl and Mike’s Adventure

Well, we’ve got another update for everyone, and hopefully you all will enjoy the first batch of New Zealand pics below. Now, as a quick recap since a month(plus) has already gone by. The pics are (more or less) in some sort of chronological order, and can give you all a general sense of what we’ve been doing since we’ve been here.
We initially flew into Fiji, and we were there for about three days (around New Years). Then, during the first three weeks of January, we toured around the North Island and since about the 21st of Jan. we’ve been on the South Island. Both very beautiful, interesting, yet different and unique places. Also, we’ve being participating in a pretty neat and enjoyable program called WWOOF (http://www.wwoof.co.nz/), in which we live (and work) on organic farms (very big here in NZ by the way) in exchange for housing/food. It’s been a great way to fill in some gaps (week, several days, etc.) when we’re not traveling around, to help us save money and learn a bit about the area (as well as several new skills as well!).

We’re currently at our second WWOOF location, which is actually an Olive Oil farm (and budding winery), absolutely beautiful property, great hosts, and right in the middle of wine country (the name is the Marlborough Region) here in the south island (about 2 hours south of where we just were, Nelson). The name is Landfall Estates, and our hosts are Rosemary and Jeremy Laurenson, wonderful people who we’ve had a great time working for. We’ve more or less been working in the mornings/early afternoons since we’ve been here( about 3 days), and gone wine tasting the remainder of the day…not too bad!

But below, you’ll see several shots of cities, beaches, hikes (we did a beautiful 4 day trek/tramp in the Abel Tasman National Park, right along the beach, as well as a great day hike in the Tongariro National Park), wineries, more beaches, campgrounds, holiday parks, as well as other random pictures as well. Aside from WWOOFing, we’ve also been staying (mostly) at some really nice campground facilities throughout the country as well, known here as “Holiday Parks”,. Anyway, I know that’s not a very thorough explanation, but hopefully it will give everyone a (brief) idea of how things have been going for us since we’ve been here. Also, if you have questions about any of this stuff, please feel free to ask us and we’ll elaborate on things.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be pretty busy, as Cheryl’s parents are coming over (in a few days, they’re in the North Island right now, actually) for several weeks, as well as our friends Toni & Brese from Jackson, and Cheryls’ best friend Courtney (and her husband Ben) early March. We plan on traveling/hiking/backpacking with everyone, and there shouldn’t be a dull moment!

Gonna be busy, and the whole trip will probably fly by before we know it. Also, we’ll continue to add pics of past stuff (including India/Nepal) as we find good ones, we just wanted to get some out there for everyone to enjoy for right now. As you all might imagine, we’ve got TONS. Anyway, hope everyone enjoys!

FIJI

FIJI

FIJI SUNSET

AUCKLAND

CAMPSITE & FRANK (our car)

RAGLAN

TONGARIRO CROSSING TRAMP (lots of Lord of the Rings filmset)

TONGARIRO

TONGARIRO

WELLLINGTON

Mike & Cheryl

FARMER MIKE (our WWOOFING program, organic farming)

OSTRICH

ABEL TASMAN TREK, SPINNERS POINT

ABEL TASMAN

BACKPACKER MIKE

TREK BEACHES

CHERYL TREK

BEAUTIFUL TREK

MORE ABEL TASMAN

CHERYL & MIKE

ABEL TASMAN

CAMPSITE NEXT TO BEACH

SUNSET NELSON

NELSON

RENWICK, MARLBOROUGH REGION (driveway to our new WWOOFING house where we landscape)

VIEW FROM WWOOFING HOUSE (olive groves, vineyard, & peonies) (Landfall Estate is the company)

VINEYARDS

OUR FAVORITE NEW HOBBY, WINETASTING

WINETASTING (we visit at least 3 wineries a day after our work, about 50 wineries in the region)

MORE VINEYARDS

WINE BARRELS

HIGHFIELD ESTATE

VINEYARD

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 2:23 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.