auckland - christchurch

hello people,

how u going? we're now in christchurch! for those of you who don't know NZ, it's on the eastern part of the south island (for those of you who don't know NZ at all, NZ consists of two large islands, the north and the south island ;-)).

well we have our new rental campervan and we're exploring the country. we picked up the van last week. the van is similar to our last van, only better, but no airco! NOOOOO, traumas from Oz with our shitty van in the desert are appearing again... but the good news is, we don't need an airco at all!!! it's soooooo cold here. during the day the temperature is max 20 degrees (when it's not raining, and it rains quite a lot) and in the night it is -80 degrees, at least! i'm freezing my ass off when i go to the toilet in the middle of the night! no fun at all!! quite different than the conditions in Oz. no wonder we both were not feeling well for a couple of days. snotty nose, head ache, throat ache... yep, it's quite hard being on holiday for so long. the agony...the AGONY ;-). but no worries, were fine now, so we'll keep on exploring... to infinity and beyond! Show me the ring Frodo?

anyway, we're in NZ and that means LOTR. Jeroen, the biggest of the biggest of the biggest LOTR fan (not in size obviously ;-)) of course wants to visit all the locations. the locations we visited so far on the north island are matamata (a.k.a. hobbiton), tongaririo NP (mount doom, mordor, emyn muil, prologue), upper hutt (river anduin, gardens of isengard, rivendell), and many more to come i'm afraid. we took a guided tour in hobbiton. jeroen enjoyed that very very much, as for me, i didn't have a clue what the tour guide was talking about. what's the deal with the movie anyway?!

we also went to rotorua (north island). in the rotorua area are lots of thermal reserves. we visited hells gate in te ngae, te puia thermal in whakarewarewa (where we also saw maori show, very funny :-P) and waiotapu thermal wonderland. btw those maori names are unpronounceable! the things you see there are really remarkable: boiling mud pools, a bright yellow lake, geysers erupting to 20-30 meters high, and steam coming out the craters. oh and because of the sulphur the whole area there stinks like rotten eggs! the smell is really bad but after a while you get used to it...

in rotorua we accidentally saw a poster of the musical les miserables and there were still tickets available for the evening so we went to the show that night. it was very very good. of course the west end london musical is better (valjean was a bit on the young side, it seems like his beard could fall off any minute :-); and cosette was bigger and taller than marius :-)) but this one was good too. so winnie, yes it was good and you should be jealous ;-) hey go watch the DVD :-P

also, in rotorua we got our first traffic fine. we parked the van at the parking space with the P15 sign. since we didn't know what that meant, we ignored it... we parked there for almost an hour and when we came back we had a ticket between the wipers saying "parked contrary to traffic sign". it turned out that P15 means that you're only allowed to park your vehicle for 15 mins (actually that makes sense...). so we had to pay $10 to the district council (NOOOOOOOOOOO ten whole bucks!) which meant bread for dinner that day ;-).

after spending a week on the north island we decided to go to the south island. we took the ferry from wellington and 3.5 hrs later we were in picton. thankfully the cook strait was quite calm so i was not seasick (yay!) but the seasick tablets made me drowsy as hell so all i wanted to do was sleeping!

from picton we decided to drive along the east coast to the south. first stop was kaikoura, the whale watch capital of the world. so of course we went on a whale watch tour. the tour was 2.5 hrs on the ocean (again not seasick, must be the sea) and we saw nick, the giant sperm whale, dusky dolphins and NZ fur seals. the highlight of the tour were the dolphins, there were many many of them, swimming in front of the boat, jumping out of the water, making loopings. wow that was amazing!

yesterday we had a very relaxing day at the thermal pools in hanmer springs and today we arrived in christchurch. we took a scenic route with the old tram trough the city and we took the gondola up to the mountains where we had a beautiful view over the city. tomorrow we're heading to the east coast, to the banks peninsula.

sorry the pc here is dead slow so no pics this time (sorry steph). we'll make it up next time!

less than 4 weeks to go and then the long journey comes to an end. we'll keep you posted!