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Counting Down – Auckland

Auckland at sunset, from Paul and Morag’s deck

We arrived in Auckland on Sunday afternoon, knowing our flight out was on Thursday. It was a strange feeling to have reached our final stop on the trip, and I had a very mixed bag of feelings: sad to have come to the end of it, nervous at the prospect of finding a job again, happy at the thought of seeing home and friends and not being transient any more. We had also both started to focus on reviving our CV’s, talking to our networks, and everything that’s involved in getting back into a career mode, which makes it harder to stay in a “holiday” mood.

On the plus side, we earned so many hotel-booking points in Southeast Asia that we were able to use them to book into a fairly decent hotel, with pool and gym, in Auckland as a final treat. We also had a commitment to have dinner with my ex-colleague Paul and his wife, and so on Sunday evening we drove out to St. Helier alongside Auckland harbour. Paul and Morag’s house has to be seen to be believed; incredible floor-to-ceiling plate glass and a deck overlooking the water and the city. We saw the sun go down while barbequeing on the deck.

On Monday, we drove out to the Coromandel Peninsula, which has a rocky, forested spine surrounded by spectacular beaches. Our particular destination was Hot Water Beach, another delightful literal description. The beach is a lovely surf beach in its own right, but at low tide an area of sands is exposed under which geothermically heated water is constantly welling up, and with a small spade you can dig yourself your own personal spa pool. Even walking through the surf around this area is quite pleasant: the combination of seawater and boiling hot spring makes the shallows a lukewarm temperature. The beaches in New Zealand are not quite as deadly as those in Australia, but mainly because there’s no poisonous sea life; the currents and rips are pretty much as bad. Still, we had a pleasant swim, paddle, and laze, but Loz was tired out by the nearly-5-hours round trip drive.

In the morning, we had to return Shadowfax, which we did sadly, having put more than 4,000 kilometres onto his already formidable total. While he lacked audio facilities more sophisticated than a tape deck and complained bitterly about having to go up hills above 70kph, he had proved a noble and reliable steed. We spent the day in central Auckland, principally at the Auckland Art Gallery, which had some of the best curation we’ve seen and a collection of New Zealand art from the 1830s on thoughtfully arranged and explained, with individual artists spotlighted. It also had an outstandingly sentimental collection of Victorian art and some modern landscape photography. Auckland was, to my mind, the only “real” city we visited in New Zealand, and the only one to have more than a few kilometres of motorway – all our driving around the country was on winding, single-lane roads. Even Wellington, although a lovely place, has the ambience of a large town much more so than a “real” capital. I’ve really enjoyed some of the cities we’ve been to, but if this trip’s done anything, it’s reinforced my love for London. Apart from my time living in the rural US, I’ve never lived outside a city – and some of them, like Oxford and Cambridge, punched above their weight from a cultural perspective – and I’m too spoiled now to go back.

On Wednesday, we didn’t do much, by choice. Each of us had begun to feel that we were mentally focused on coming home more than exploring Auckland, so we took it easy and took advantage of the hotel’s facilities while we could. At the end of the day, we had twin appointments with some of Auckland’s best needle artists, and we both came away with beautifully done mementoes. On Thursday, we rose and checked out, then spent our remaining time at the New Zealand Maritime Museum, which is filled with full-sized ships, boats, and vessels of all kinds, from Maori waka and Pacific Islander canoes to the enormous monohull sailed by New Zealand in the controversial Americas Cup in 1988. The museum tracks the full history of sailing from the arrival of the first Pacific Islander explorers a thousand years ago, through the immigrant experience to New Zealand as a competitive sailing force. I didn’t have time to see it all, but I’m pretty sure Loz loved it.

Then it was a cab to the airport, and now here we are, at the end of a long continuous journey, with a trip of many hours to go: Auckland to Brisbane to Dubai to London. I have a lot to say about what the trip has meant and how it’s gone, but I’ll save it for a retrospective. See you on the flip side.

Shiny – Waitomo

From Matamata we headed north and west again towards Hamilton, a moderate-sized city without noticeable attractions (sorry, Hamiltonians), but a pretty and very habitable place. But we were really there for one main reason: the Waitomo caves.

Waitomo is a Maori word, and like many Maori (and Kiwi) names, it’s deliciously literal: “the place where water enters the earth”. The Waitomo caves are an extensive limestone cave system with subterranean rivers and beautiful glow-worms and stalactites. We were off to have a new experience: black-water rafting. Why, after all, raft along a surface river when you can do it 30 metres underground?

We were signed up for the full-on Black Abyss experience, which took us underground for almost five hours. On driving to Waitomo, we first had to get fully kitted out: wetsuits with jackets and socks, rubber boots, and helmets with lights, then climbing harnesses. Our journey started with a 35-metre abseil down a narrow shaft into the caves; I went first, and got knocked around against the walls, turning off my light, before managing to right myself and sweating and swearing the remaining distance down. Once at the foot of the shaft, Gareth, our guide, switched off my light and attached me to the zipline, then gave me a solid shove out into nothingness. I shot across a huge cave and then abruptly came up short, hanging in space, surrounded by a thousand tiny pinpricks of light.

We had the very very good fortune that several people didn’t turn up for the Black Abyss tour that morning, so it was literally us and one other person. This gave us far more time than is usual, and meant we could go beyond the usual confines of the tour to explore some of the other experiences. Once all descended the zipline, we began tubing upriver in rubber rings. Switching off our lights, we paddled to the head of a long, narrow passage with a ceiling completely covered with glow-worms, and then floated silently back down. In the faint glow, we could see huge, ornate rock chambers drifting past, with glow-worm formations almost like chandeliers.

Further downriver, we had to abandon the rings and walk or wade, occasionally swim, or jump over a small waterfall. At one point we had to wriggle full-length through a narrow opening the guides call the “rebirth tunnel”. Gareth was able to take us off our usual route and show us where some of the other tours go: the very mild walking tour of the upper caverns and their formations, the more leisurely rafting tour, and the hardcore cave climbers. The latter portion got challenging; cave climbing largely involves wedging any limb or foot into any available space, often using pressure against both walls to get the leverage to go upwards or wriggling through tight, narrow gaps, or finding ourselves crawling through a tunnel filled with thick brown mud. At times, awkwardly wedged, I thought of how far below the surface we were and could understand very easily why people panic, but knew that doing so myself wouldn’t make the gap any easier to get through. The tour finished with a freeclimb up two small waterfalls, the last bringing us to a small opening above the ground. I emerged by degrees feeling like a cross between a newborn calf and Sandra Bullock at the end of Gravity.

Our time in New Zealand was drawing to an end, but first we had one more journey to make: up to Auckland. We spent a little time on Sunday morning exploring the Hamilton museum and its art exhibits, then took Shadowfax north once more.

Smellacious – Rotorua & Matamata

Once we finished the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, we had no choice but to get in the car and keep heading northeast – up to Rotorua, capital of New Zealand’s volcanic wonders. We were staying at the Grand Hotel, which belied its name rather spectacularly; it was a cheap and dilapidated establishment, but central.

The thing you can’t help but notice about Rotorua… the smell. You may have thought the volcanic lakes at Tongariro smelled bad. They have nothing on the entire town of Rotorua. While the hot pools, geysers, and vents may make for wonderful scenery, the entire town is pervaded by a sulphurous reek so powerful that it nearly made me gag. I coined the word “smellacious” in an attempt to distract myself through wordplay.

We spent our day in Rotorua checking out one of its main attractions: the geothermal wonderland at Te Puia, which houses hot springs, bubbling mudpools, geysers, and Maori schools of carving and weaving. While the school of weaving is open to anyone, only young men of Maori descent are admitted to the carving school, and carving is the most prestiguious of Maori arts. The whole history of an iwi (tribe) is encoded in its carvings, for those who know how to read them. After having had the chance to tour the workrooms of both schools and ask questions, we were guided round the park. Hot springs and mudpools, bubbling away ominously, are dotted around liberally, as are vents where gas escapes, often with pure yellow sulphur crusted on the nearby rocks. But the star of the show is the Pohutu geyser, which erupts every few hours on average and can shoot up to thirty metres straight up. It is predicted by watching its nextdoor neighbour, the smaller Prince of Wales Feathers geyser, which reaches a highest height of around 12m and reliably erupts about 30 minutes before Pohutu.

After the geothermal park, we spent the afternoon touring the Rotorua Musuem, which has a strong focus on Maori culture and history, taking you through the complex way of life Maori developed to live all over New Zealand, and the issues facing Maori today. I particularly enjoyed a 20-minute documentary about the Maori regiments from New Zealand that served in the Second World War, all of whom were volunteers, and who suffered heavy losses. While New Zealand’s natural wonders are amazing, they don’t really ask much of you as a visitor, and in a way I was grateful to have to reach a bit harder to understand the cultural and political issues of the Maori now living in a mostly-Pakeha (European) environment. We finished off the day with a swim in Rotorua’s Blue Baths – an Art Deco outdoor pool and bathhouse with spa pools naturally heated to 40C.

The next day, we headed on to the small rural town of Matamata. Once known primarily for its racecourses, the town’s attractions changed significantly when, in 1998, Peter Jackson fell in love with the Alexander family’s farm and used it to create Hobbiton. The sets were temporary when first used for the Lord of the Rings filming, but when Jackson and Weta came back to film the Hobbit Trilogy, they were rebuilt with permanent materials. Even the Visitor Information Centre in Matamata, where tours start, has been retrofitted as a thatched-roof cottage. A good number of local people had managed to wangle jobs as extras, techs, or crew, and as we drove towards the site, the bus driver told us stories of the massive scale of the production and the huge tasks of coordination needed to keep it running. The location itself is stunning in its own right; small hills and valleys roll dramatically, creating a sense of intimacy and cosiness. Once the tour guide took over and began guiding us around Hobbiton, the stories began – all of Peter Jackson’s obsessiveness and fanatical attention to detail. Peter Jackson turns pear trees into plum trees by hand for the sake of a throwaway Tolkien line; Peter Jackson gets people to create fake lichen; Peter Jackson employs a troupe of university students to paint the leaves of a tree the right shade of green; Peter Jackson employs people whose sole job is to peg out and then bring in hobbit washing every day, to create paths worn through the grass. Hobbiton itself is a testament to this obsessive vision, and it’s maintained, by a huge crew of gardeners and staff, as though a full village of hobbits has just stepped out for a smoke – washing still out, tiny ladders perched against trees, fresh fruit and vegetables in the process of being gathered. The effect is charming, but also, to me, came off as though there had recently been a hobbit Rapture.

While most of the forty-odd hobbit holes are nothing but a frontage built into a hill, a few can be opened, and there are some miniscule ones used to create the tricks of forced perspective that can make Gandalf look twice the height of Frodo. The Green Dragon Inn was once nothing but a fake frontage, which Jackson burned to the ground for Frodo’s apocalyptic vision, but in 2012 the landowners recreated it as an exact match of the set used for filming, and tours end with a free pint out of earthenware mugs. So there we found ourselves, sipping ale and ginger beer, in armchairs in front of the fire in the Green Dragon.

One Does Not Simply Walk The Tongariro Alpine Crossing

One blogs about it.

From the Picton ferry, we rolled in to spend a last night in Wellington with Anna and Steve at the ex-Polish Embassy. Loz went up to the Botanic Gardens to take in the last nights of the summer celebrations there, whereas I preferred to catch up on sleep. In the morning, we took our last long drive in New Zealand: north to the small town of Turangi, at the foot of huge Lake Taupo. This brought us in reach of the volcanic zones of the North Island, part of the Ring of Fire that encircles the Pacific. Specifically, it brought us within striking distance of Tongariro National Park, home of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. For that evening, though, we relaxed by visiting the nearby Tokaanu thermal pools, where we got sucked into a tennis/volleyball game with a family of NZ dairy farmers. Someone (me) also had the brilliant idea of buying sausages for dinner, and using the leftover ones to make delicious sandwiches which we packed away for the next day.

Tongariro National Park contains three active volcanoes: huge Ruapehu, with multiple craters and vents, and the more conical Tongariro and Ngauruhoe. The rest of the park is a spectacular alpine landscape, and the 19km one-day walk across it is one of New Zealand’s most famous “tramps”. All three of the peaks are tapu (sacred) to the local Maori, and they gifted the peaks to the government in order to preserve them. Tongariro, with its classic cone shape and red-hued summit crater, also starred as Mount Doom in LoTR, and the desolate landscape of the plateau between the peaks put in several appearances as Mordor. We began by parking Shadowfax at the end of the route at Ketetahi, and catching the shuttle bus to the start point at Mangatepopo. Ruapehu loomed over the car park, issuing innocent-looking puffs of white smoke from its largest crater. It last erupted in 2012, and the area close by it is still considered a “volcanic hazard zone” in which stopping is ill-advised.

The walk begins with a pleasant, gently rolling tramp through low alpine vegetation and streams, but it soon starts to rise steeply and brings you alongside the Red Crater of Tongariro in a Martian landscape of bare soil and rock. Walking along the summit ridge, the wind was fierce and punishing even on our hot summer’s day, and the ground is a lethally steep mixture of ash and rock into which you have to dig your heels constantly to prevent slipping. Further along the ridge, three volcanic lakes come into view, glittering in the sunlight like precious jewels and reeking like hellpits.

As you leave the ridge, you begin working your way around by Ruapehu, with a vista out towards Lakes Rotoaira and Taupo and across to Mount Pihanga. Ruapehu was continuing to issue steam, not just from its main crater but from a half-dozen vents dotted around the summit, and we kept moving briskly despite sore feet. Slowly, the trail winds down past hot springs to a lush forest trail that leads you back to the final car park. It took us just over six hours to walk the 19.4km at a markedly brisk pace, and we fetched up, blistered and exhausted, next to Shadowfax at 2:30pm, about to drive an hour and a half to the volcanic wonderland of Rotorua.

Rejected by Whales – Dunedin, Christchurch & Kaikoura

From Queenstown we drove south again to Invercargill, almost the southern tip of the island, where we lunched. There is a more direct way inland, but the route via Invercargill is famous as the Southern Scenic Route, rolling through the Catlins and taking you near New Zealand’s southernmost point. Invercargill is a sprawling, grey conurbation without anything very much to recommend it, but it does have a few decent cafes. We also took the chance to stop above a spectacular south-facing bay and gaze out, knowing that nothing stood between us and Antarctica but open sea. After that, we spent the afternoon driving through the Catlins, an area of rolling hills by the coast, before arriving in the student city of Dunedin in the late afternoon.

We were staying in a B&B just outside Dunedin’s central octagon, and at the top of a steep hill. There are some beautiful outdoorsy things to do along the Otago Peninsula, but for once we weren’t there to do them but to return to more urban pursuits, such as art. We visited the Dunedin Art Gallery, which differed from most by not having a permanent collection. Its current exhibits included sculptures made from lacquered corrugated iron and fluorescent lights, and an exhibit of composite photos set in American suburbia. After that, it was to the Otago Museum, which harbours an enormous, Victorian-style collection of taxidermied animals, patiently laid out according to families and phyla. Elsewhere in the museum, there were exhibits on Maori culture and their legends about the formation of New Zealand. We only spent a full day in the city before moving on, though. On the drive to Christchurch, we stopped over in Oamaru to visit Steampunk World, and to those of you who don’t know what “steampunk” means, I’m afraid you’re going to have to google it yourself. The… exhibit is a small and very odd collection of kitsch, rusting machinery, and grotesque dolls, but Loz enjoyed himself.

In Christchurch, I spotted and zeroed in on one thing in the guidebook: the International Antarctic Exhibition. I had never realised that the American, British and New Zealand expeditions to Antarctica all base themselves out of Christchurch, and there is a huge exhibition building dedicated to this purpose out by Christchurch Airport. I love everything about Antarctica, and I have no idea why. I think it’s the harshness, the enormous distance away it is from everything I’m familiar with, and of course the scientific fascination. The first exhibit we hurried to was the one that gives you the chance to experience, in part, an Antarctic storm; you step into snow in a room kept at around -8C, and then the lights dim and the wind rises and rises until you’re experiencing a windchill of below -20C. A 4D show gives you the experience of travelling on a ship through icebergs, including rocking and the occasional spurt of icy water in your face. The centre has extensive exhibits about Antarctica’s geology, flora and fauna, and the environmental research that takes place there, as well as, of course, what life is like year-round. As a finishing touch, the centre has a troupe of blue penguins. I loved it.

The next day we were on the road once more, heading back gradually towards our ferry to the North Island. Three hours’ drive brought us to the coastal town of Kaikoura, which is famous for its marine wildlife. We had an afternoon whale-watching expedition booked, but stormy weather at sea had led to cancellation, so we crossed our fingers, rescheduled for early the next morning, and retired to our motel room. Sadly, the next morning the whales had once again declined to play ball, and we had to be in Picton for a 2pm ferry, so we hit the road, arriving in Picton three hours ahead of schedule. We filled the time by a visit to the local aquarium and a hike out to Bob’s Beach along the edges of the harbour. And there we were; done with the South Island, after looping right from north to south along both coasts. Now for the North Island: volcanoes and hobbits await.

 

Wordless – Queenstown

There’s one way in which New Zealand is not really working out for me: it’s making me feel like a failure as a writer. I search for adjectives and come up bankrupt. “Stunning”? Used it two sentences ago. “Beautiful”? How bland. “Breathtaking”? Well, yes, but now I sound like a Visit Scotland PR puff piece.

So, the hell with it. I present to you Queenstown, New Zealand, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu:

The drive there had its non-ugly moments as well. Here’s a sample of the kind of road we found ourselves rolling down:

We’d planned to pull over at Wanaka on the drive to Queenstown to have coffee and trade places, and as we reached the outskirts we saw a sign for “Puzzling World”. We exchanged glances and threw the car into the car park. We started with the outdoor maze, where you have to find your way to each of four corner towers, then went inside for the rooms of optical illusions. Unfortunately, the “tilted room” where water seems to flow uphill made me so dizzy Loz had to keep on driving for the rest of the afternoon.

The glorious weather didn’t hold completely; our first day in Queenstown was grey and rain-spattered. We had booked a Lord of the Rings location tour, and were picked up in a battered jeep by Cameron. A lot of the locations used are actually composite, where several, sometimes miles apart, were combined by computer into one place, but nevertheless, he was able to drive us to the tiny town of Glenorchy at the top of the lake, and also to the plain that became Isengard and the woods where Boromir was shot. Cameron pulled out a couple of blunt swords and grey elven-cloaks for photographic posing at the latter. In between stops, he told us funny stories of the filming; of his boss getting hired to play one of the Rangers of Ithilien as an extra, but then knocking himself out on a take and ending up as an orc, the generous fees paid by Weta to farmers for use of their paddocks and their donation of barely-used machinery afterwards. Evidently, the Weta crew are highly popular around the area. I also had to laugh when I got out of the jeep and spotted its licence plate: BOMBUR. Cameron’s boss had taken the initiative to buy up licence plates of all Tolkien’s character names before the films came out, and now uses them for his tour vehicles.

On our second day, we had booked a tour out into the glorious Fiordland of the west coast. Rather than the more famous Milford Sound, we opted for Doubtful Sound, which is quiet and untrafficked. (It was named by our old friend James Cook on one of his voyages around the region; he was doubtful whether, if he sailed in, he’d ever be able to get out.) Getting there took some doing – a two-hour bus journey was followed by a catamaran across Lake Manapouri, then another ninety-minute coach trip over the Wilmot Pass to get to the cruising boat. Along the way, the tour takes in the hydroelectric power station burrowed deep into the mountain above Deep Cove. The fiords are serene and uninhabited, other than by a rich variety of wildlife, and are spectacularly carved by glaciers, with waterfalls, steep green peaks, and hanging valleys. The environment is unique; the fresh water that pours into the Sound is stained brown with tannins, and sits on top of the seawater because it’s less dense. This means that the waters of the Sound are unusually dark, and many creatures who normally live in very deep waters survive here close to the surface. For an area where it usually rains two days out of three, the weather held sunny, with hardly any cloud.

On our last day in Queenstown, the weather was utterly flawless, and we felt like some activity after twelve hours of near-motionlessness the previous day. We hired mountain bikes and set off around the Queenstown trail, an exhilaratingly hilly walking and cycling trail along the lake. We saw the day in drinking some New Zealand craft beer at a rooftop bar, well satisfied.

Fire & Ice – Nelson & Franz Josef

We boarded the 8am ferry for Picton – a trip of around three and a half hours across the Cook Strait – to spend a few weeks seeing the best the South Island had to offer. We had a smooth crossing of the open water, and after a few hours, we entered the area of fiords that is the Marlborough Sounds. I went up on deck (or, as the Kiwi accent renders it, “on dick”) and leaned on the rail, enjoying the breeze and the view. It was a stunning day, with the islands and peaks that surrounded us a vivid green against deep turquose water. We landed around lunchtime, and picked up our rental car to see us through the next three weeks. By dint of being willing to drive a 2003 Nissan Sunny, we got a good deal. Since the car was grey, we named it Shadowfax in the hopes that it would show us the meaning of haste.

Our first drive was along the narrow and winding Queen Charlotte Highway, which runs along the rugged north coastline, to the tiny town of Havelock, where we stopped for lunch. Havelock appears to have two main industries: mussels, and tourist tea-shops. We continued to Nelson, which sits on the edge of Abel Tasman National Park on the north coat. Nelson is famous for its lovely Mediterranean climate, and is a centre for outdoorsy activities. We started with a day kayaking and walking in the National Park, which has miles of native bush, walking tracks, and stunning beaches on which storms occasionally dump black sand – pure iron ore from deep-sea trenches. We paddled out to Adele Island, which is maintained as a nature preserve, and saw a tiny fairy penguin shooting through the water. Next was a whole family of seals lounging on the rocks and taking occasional dips. We were learning a good bit about New Zealand’s ecology – principally, the problems caused by its two big pests, the stoat and the Australian possum. Both came from overseas – the possum accidentally, but the stoat was imported from England to try and solve the problem caused by rabbits (also introduced from England). This genius plan went mildly awry, since stoats discovered they could kill native birds and eat their eggs much more easily. “If you see a stoat or a possum in the road,” said our kayaking guide, “it’s your patriotic duty to run it over.”

We picnicked on a beach some way into the park, then trekked back along the Abel Tasman track. The next day, we had planned to drive out to Golden Bay, some way further into the park, but after a sleepless night in our thin-walled hostel we couldn’t face the four-hour round trip, so we spent the day relaxing and walking around central Nelson. We also dropped in on the World of Wearable Art museum, full of weird and wonderful creations made for the annual WoW show, which began in Nelson but has now relocated to Wellington, a victim of its own success.

After a long drive down south the next day, we fetched up in the tiny town of Franz Josef Glacier. What we were there to see needs little explanation. As we got closer, the Southern Alps rose up to become a looming presence to the left; then the streams and rivers started to display the eerie blue of glacier meltwater. The glacier is the only one in the world that occurs within 10km of the sea, and which sprawls down directly into temperate rainforest – an odd, but visually arresting combination. Naturally, we awoke the next day to constant pouring rain, and had to cool our heels and catch up on our sleep for the duration. The next day, after some early cloud, came out fine – and we climbed into helicopters to explore the glacier (it’s too dangerous to walk directly onto it). As the helicopter banked and swooped like a dragonfly, we had amazing views of mountains, sea, and the glacier tumbling down in between the two. We strapped crampons onto our boots and followed our sunburnt Kiwi guide, Ross, up rough steps cut into the ice and into caves marbled with bands of white and frigid blue. As we climbed, the crevasses we traversed got narrower until we had to slide crabwise, unable to put one foot in front of the other, wedged solidly between two sheets of ice.

“Yeah, I love it here,” said Ross. “At weekends we go tramping and camp way up in the hills. Or I go hunting. I kill all my own meat. I never buy meat from the supermarket.”

Once helicoptered safely back down, we spent a little time relaxing in the town’s 40C hot pools, surrounded by rainforest. Then we packed up to take Shadowfax further south to Queenstown.

Giving It Some Welly

We arrived in Wellington at midnight local time, and headed straight for our latest Airbnb accommodation. We were staying in a kind of international student house headed by Steve and Anna, both mature students; a huge, rambling, comfortably shabby old house full of books that made me feel immediately at home. It had been used as an embassy by the Polish delegation in Wellington for many years, and the cupboard in our room was in fact their old steel-lined document safe, installed at the height of Cold War paranoia. The house had a semipermanent population of five, but up to eight travellers like ourselves were also in residence at any given time, and Steve cooked big communal dinners every night, whilst Anna plied me with coconut-milk ice cream and homemade vegan cake. I spent some happy hours on a dilapidated couch reading a James Herriott book that I think also lingers somewhere in the mustier corners of the house I grew up in.

Wellington feels more like a sizeable town than a capital city, and it is set on and around a harbour as stunning and complex as Sydney’s. The whole of Wellington, in fact, felt like a parochial British society had collided with a Pacific Islander one, somehow producing a two-headed chimera that walked and talked. Aspects of the culture feel inescapably British, but they’re combined with a widespread integration and pride in Maori heritage. Wellington’s beautiful harbour is subject to frequent earthquakes, whilst the hills surrounding it are rapidly becoming higher from the friction between the two colliding continental plates that sit below it. For me, it was a mildly weird combination of British cosiness with the exoticism of lively tectonic activity. If actually asked “what do you think of New Zealand?”, my honest answer would be something like, “It’s a bit like Surrey, but with volcanoes”.

We took it relatively easy while we were in the city, spending some time just wandering the centre and its famous Cuba Street. We also visited Te Papa, the national museum, where displays include the mighty stripped bones of a blue whale and a whole, preserved enormous squid, caught in Antarctic waters a few years ago. Displays explained New Zealand’s volcanoes and recreated, with video, a milder version of the devastating Christchurch earthquakes of 2010. The museum is huge, and there were many displays we didn’t get to, such as those on Maori culture and the Aztecs. We did, however, pick up some new Icebreaker layers cheaply to deal with New Zealand weather – Wellington is the southern hemisphere’s windiest city, with wind being funnelled through the Cook Strait between the North and South Islands, and even in summer with a fierce sun, the windchill factor could be significant.

Loz has long planned on some major Lord of the Rings geeking out, so the next day, we took the bus out to the Weta Cave, where Peter Jackson’s special effects production company is based. We arrived too late to book a tour for that day, so we were left to admire the lifesize figures of trolls and orcs. The next day, we did manage to get on the tour, where a cheerful South African walked us through the production studios, talking us through the intricacies of, say, prop weapon design, and sword and chainmail production. He demonstrated for us that Sauron’s armour would be totally impractical in battle, and would have a reasonable risk of taking its wearer’s eye out. Happily, Weta got round this problem by making the spiky ridges on the shoulders out of rubber. The tour is fun, hilarious, and very popular; book ahead while you’re in town. We also visited Victoria Peak, where you can get a 360º view of the harbour. On its wooded lower slopes, some of the Shortcut to Mushrooms scenes were filmed (“Get off the road!”). At Te Papa, Loz had also managed to acquire the LoTR location guidebook, so many further visits of this nature were being plotted. We fitted in a trip to the National Maritime Museum, which tracks the notable events that have affected Wellington every year from the city’s founding until the present.

After taking the cable car back to our loftily-positioned lodgings, we were ready to move on. Steve drove us to the ferry terminal for our trip to assault the South Island.

Stinger in the Tail – Cairns

It hits you like a slap as soon as you get off the plane – the wet, thick heat that tells you you’re back in the tropics. Brisbane hadn’t exactly been cool – temperatures were forecast to hit 41C the day we left – but there’s nothing quite like humidity to take the weather into oppressive and unbearable.

Cairns was a bit different from the other Australian cities we visited. It’s a lot smaller – only 60,000 people or so – and it shows; the centre’s small and compact and quickly sprawls into multi-level wooden houses and bungalows that looked (to me) like the farmhouses of rural Iowa or (to Loz) the American suburbs. We had the advantage of having a whole house to ourselves – we were using Airbnb again, but the owner was away – but a ceiling fan is not much defence against the steamy, sweaty nights full of a loud and unearthly chorus of frogs.

One other notable thing about Cairns: it was the first place in Australia where we saw Aboriginal people more than very occasionally. One of my reference points for this section of the trip is Bill Bryson’s Down Under, which was written in 2000; Bryson describes Aborigines as existing in a kind of parallel world to other Australians, but what we saw was Aboriginal people just… going about their lives, shopping, working, having a coffee. You don’t have to look far to see that how Australia resolves injustice and racism towards Aboriginal people is still a big problem, but I was actually encouraged to see things not nearly as binary as he’d described. (In other news, I still harbour the hope that I’ll one day get to use my favourite Aussie put-down as collected by Bryson: “Oh, he’s all right in his place – they just haven’t dug it yet”.)

There’s one thing you would have to be crazy to come to Cairns and not do: the Great Barrier Reef. Cairns is crawling with tours, so we booked a mid-priced one to the outer reef and were on our way. The outer reef is more pristine than the closer areas, so we boarded a large catamaran and chugged our way out for ninety minutes. The boat eventually moored at a small floating pontoon in the middle of nowehere with a roped-in snorkelling area, and we were ready to be let loose on the reef.

Launching yourself off the pontoon to snorkel is quite an unsettling experience. You are some way above the bottom, and on top of the uncomfortable feeling of the vacuum between your mask and your face, all you can hear is your own stertorous, Darth-Vader-on-a-treadmill breathing: fshHAHfshHAHfshHAHfshHAH. But once you get that under control, a world of incredible detail and beauty starts to be revealed; coral like petrified forests and giant boulders, huge shoals of tiny fish flickering past your eyes, sunlight filtering down to give an iridescent blue sheen to everything. A shoal of large yellowtails swam directly towards me, barely bothering to flick their tails to swim around me; then, as I paused to watch them, a zebrafish swam past around two inches from my mask. When we got tired of snorkelling, we took the semisubmersible boat and watched green turtles swim through and around the coral canyons.

While Loz was skydiving the next day, I took a day trip to see the rainforests and wetlands of Cape Tribulation and the Daintree River. Our guide, George, was an Aboriginal man whose grandmother was part of the Stolen Generations; as he drove us towards the Cape, he explained the Aboriginal tribal groups which have historically lived in the area, as well as gleefully sharing with us the latest stats on croc and stinger attacks. (January is “stinger season” on the Queensland coast; all beaches are covered with warning signs featuring people ensnared in the long tentacles of the incredibly poisonous box jellyfish. Swimming is not possible except inside small screened pools which should keep the stingers out, because a jellyfish an inch or so long – barely large enough to see – is enough to give you an excruciating painful sting.) We cruised up the Daintree River and spotted two crocs, a pretty good haul; one eighteen-monther of a foot or so long, and a considerably bigger adult female, both resting by the side of the river in preparation for being more active at night. After a walk through the rainforest, we bought some local ice cream and finished the day with a swim in the mossy, bouldery Mossman Gorge. Sadly, we didn’t manage to spot the very rare and rather testy cassowary. I was stupefied with tiredness after two nights of restless sleep, and finished the day by virtually passing out in my plate of fajitas.