Traveling here and there, without a spare….

After the great New Year we had, we decided to take it easy. We went to the beach to get some sun at St Kilda beach, just south of the city. It was very warm and the water felt great. The next day we took a free city tour that our hostel ran and met some people from Aussie, French Canada, Ireland and Sweden. Later in the day, we met up with them to check out the night market, followed by drinks at the hostel bar. Later on, lounging and chatting in the public area of the hostel, the French Canadians brought over some french peops that that they had met. We all went out for some late night dancing at a local club and had a blast. The late night meal of choice – McDonalds:)

dan

Happy New Year!! It was a brisk 42 degrees here for NYE… that is in celcius though, which we just found out converts to 107F!! Paula and I rang in the new year at Melbourne’s enormous city party. We followed the crowds and found a seat for the fireworks along the river in Melbourne. Paula noticed, although I had no clue, a barge floating near the other side of the river… dark, blending into the background, no more than 50 yards from where we were sitting. When the clock struck midnight, much to our surprise, the barge came alive and let out a massive firework display. We’ve never been directly under the fireworks before… pretty amazing. We even had bits of ember fall on us:)

Melbourne definitely knows how to do NYE. They have multiple stages in various locations around city center and many other attractions to divide up the crowd, although it still is an enormous crowd. When the fireworks go off, they are not in one spot (like in NYC behind the Statue of Liberty, or in DC behind the Washington Monument, or in Sydney behind the opera house), they launch fireworks from the roofs of skyscapers, from our barge and from other points in the city. When the finale comes, the entire city lights up. It’s magnificent!

So we checked out the beach at Lorne and found the water too cold and beach too riddled with flies to tolerate so we decided to continue down the Great Ocean Road and check out the famous views. It really is beautiful for the most part… but there is one (long) section that should be renamed the Average Inland Road. Oh well, we saw the 12 Apostles which are the great rock pillars that are along the coast. (Although there are not actually 12 of them… hmm). The next day, we decided to take a mini-drive up to the next beach, Anglesea. It was gorgeous, had very few flies, and the weather grew hot giving us an awesome beach day. After playing in the fabulous waves, we drove back to Lorne, cleaned up and made dinner. After that, we stopped and watched an evening movie… (The Golden Compass.. eh). We strolled along the strip, stopping to watch the evening surfers take their last few waves, the last few skateboarder/roller bladers do their last few tricks at the skate park… and then (not to be outdone), Paula and I bounced on the public trampolines and showed those pesky kids what the big kids could do 😉

As the evening wore on, we stopped for late night pizza and some late night live music at the local pub. Then back to the camp site for the night… what a day!!!

dan

We rented a car in Sydney. Since we bought a tent in NZ, the plan is to drive down the east/southern coast to Melbourne, with a few days spent along the Great Ocean Road. We found a tent camping area about half way to Melbourne and crashed for the night only to wake up and realize our ‘site’ was actually only the middle of two other sites. Oh well. The next day we continued on our way down to the Great Ocean Road. We checked the rates for the local holiday parks and other grounds only to find that they were either completely booked or $50 per night (the kids are off from school so it’s popular for groups of familes and friends to kick off the summer season at the beach). So, past Torquay we stopped in Lorne and found a place we could camp for free (Lucky!!). One problem… we thought that the gate to allow us in was closed … so we slept in the car!! It actually wasn’t terrible but the next day, we found that we only had to hike in with our stuff. We put up the tent and left to check out the area. So we now have 2 nights to camp for free while we check out the surrounding beaches and sites!!

dan

We flew into Sydney last night and are very much enjoying a warm Christmas here. I definitely miss spending Christmas with the rest of my family but rather than wishing we were there, I wish you were all here to celebrate Christmas aussie-style, with a barbeque on the beach. Today we walked around the beautiful city of Sydney and saw the botanic gardens, the opera house, the harbour bridge, and several cool neighborhoods. Our haven today was Chinatown where almost everything was open and food options were plenty. We ate Vietnamese for lunch today, found a nice Thai restauraunt for Christmas dinner and an ice cream place for our desert. Hey, we may even find a pub at which to have some post-dinner drinks, thanks to such a religiously diverse city:)

paula

Our last stop in New Zealand was Christchurch. Although we enjoyed our campervan, no tears were shed on leaving her for a real bed. Christchurch is a nice and pretty city with a river running through it although we found it to be at a loss for inhabitants. Perhaps the holidays??? After traveling so long outside the cities, we decided to catch a few movies in Christchurch. On Saturday night we took the bus to see the movie “Enchanted.” It was a great movie, and I left it singing. Apparently 50 drunken santas had ramsacked the movie theatre about two hours before we arrived. That made front-page news in Christchurch. I am quite impressed by the coordination that took though…50 santas! On Sunday we decided to check out the film, “My Best Enemy” at the Art Center Cinema which has only 11 seats. Now this is a film I highly recommend…very funny and warm.

Alas, goodbye to sunlight ’till 10pm, ultra-friendly kiwis, cafes galore, stunning landscapes, and delicious hot chocolate.

paula and dan

After waving goodbye to the penguins, we drove to Fjordland National Park on the other side of New Zealand to experience Milford Sound. Milford Sound was misclassified and is acutally a fjord. A fjord is an estuary with steep sides, created in a glacially carved valley that is filled by rising sea water levels. Basically, imagine very steep cliffs with a beautiful river flowing below and snow-capped mountains in the background…it was beautiful.

We decided to explore the fjord by taking a kayaking tour. The kayaking was great fun, we paddled out for a while and had lunch on a shore. The way back was quite tough paddling because of strong head winds. Our guide taught us how to “kayak-sail” which we had never heard of. The way it worked is we situated our four kayaks next to each other like they were one wide boat and then using our oars and hands, we held up a sail which in that wind carried us quite quickly. We made a few friends and just to give you an idea of what a small country New Zealand is, we later ran into an Irish couple we had befriended at the holiday park where we stayed in Christchurch two days later.

dan and paula

After some whale watching in Kaikoura, we traveled down to the Otago Peninsula. Otago (pronounced Otahgo like how the brits say tomato) is known for having a great variety of wildlife, including the great royal albatross, blue penguins, yellow-eyed penguins, sea lions and seals. We took a tour of a yellow-eyed penguin colony. The yellow-eyed penguin is native to New Zealand and there are only 4,000 of them in the world. In case you are a bit penguignorant, like we were, penguins do not only hang out in cold icy weather. That is the emporer penguin that gets all the fame, but that is only one of many types of penguins, ranging in size, color, etc. It was a windy, rainy day but we decided to go anyway. The tour was comprised of Paula, Dan, and the guide. Sweet, right? The guide took us through a series of shelters that hid us, slightly, from these shy little guys. As luck would have it, they like the rain and tend to be more active in it. We were able to see a baby penguin taking his first steps out of the nest to explore the rain. We also saw a number of other penguins swimming and moving around in their daily activities. The penguins were at the stage where they have new babies that they have to feed so the way they do it is Mom will stay home with baby penguin for several hours while Dad goes out to catch some food (fish, squid, etc.), then Dad will return, hang out with his “wife” for a half hour and then Mom will go out to catch food while Dad stays home with the babies. They feed the babies by regurgitating their food to the babes…yum:) The penguins were absolutely lovable and we had a great time!

dan and paula

We took a ferry from the North Island to the South Island, which was fairly uneventful, and drove down the east coast to Kaikoura. As we drove, we suddenly noticed some seals lounging about on the rocky beach just next to the road (check out the link to our pics on the right). We pulled over and to check them out. As we sat and relaxed ‘with them’, we were able to watch them jump around on the rocks; the young ones playing; an older pair having a bit of a turf battle/lover’s quarrel. Very exciting.

dan

Wellington is the capital of New Zealand. We spent the day here and as always found some quirky things that you don’t find in the US… Like an outdoor rock climbing wall (sans harnesses or ropes or any type of safety), an outdoor skateboard park that anyone can use (again, most use helmets but not required). We also saw an ad for ‘The Highland Games’… I thought this was only a Scottish thing. Paula and I discussed and figured ‘Highlands’ was maybe just a term for the mountains we had just left in the north. Later, we made our way to the museum where we were able to learn a lot about New Zealand history. New Zealand is very young and has only had people (from anywhere) living on it for less than 1000 years. Then we saw it… the Scots arrived in the late 1800’s looking for work and to make a better life. They found it here…. and they brought their games and whiskey with them.

dan