Category: A Tale of Two Countries
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Kaikoura Whale Search
The morning we were to watch the giant sperm whale dawned with a beautiful blue but windy sky. Our first hint shoud have been when Clive, the hotel owner/chief, mentioned that it might be too rough for the catamarans. As we were loading up the car, he came out to…
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Christchurch to Kaikoura
Australia is the world’s oldest continent, while New Zealand is one of the newest islands on the planet. Both have very thin soil lines for opposite reasons – Australia’s has been weathered away while NZ’s plant life hasn’t been around long enough to deposit any great depth of soil. The…
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Christchurch Again
For our return to Christchurch, we asked the travel agent to find us a better accommodation than the mid-night arrival place that greeted us to New Zealand. The new nice place is only a block from the Vodafone sales office (that would have saved us a long walk our first…
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Orokonui (Leaving Dunedin)
The host at our Dunedin hotel did not have a high opinion of the sites of Christchurch. And after the devasting losses of the earthquake, we did not disagree with him. Our next target is the Banks Peninsula, the Christchurch equivilent to Dunedin’s Otago Peninsula. His suggestion was that we…
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Dunedin
Before we left Lake Te Anau, we stopped by the free bird sanctuary that is one of the breeding areas for the takahe, a flightless bird though to be extinct for 60 years but rediscovered in 1948 in the Murchison Mountains overlooking the Lake. We were not permitted to view…
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Millford Sound – Part Two
As the tour bus pulled up to the wharf at Milford Sound, the driver (and our guide for the road trip) said, “It is always a good day in the Sound when you can see Mitre Peak.” We could – it is in the lower right in this picture and…
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Milford Sound – Part One
After our experience with the weather in Franz Joseph, we were closely watching the weather reports for Milford Sound for days. The rain falling heavily on our way to Te Anau weighed on our spirits. But the morning of our tour, the sky was clear and only a few clouds…
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Off To Te Anau
The first draft of our NZ route from the travel agent suggested that we spend four days in Queenstown and travel from there to tour the Milford Sound. That would require a four hour trip to and from Milford Sound, which would have been a tedious ride and not a…
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To Middle Earth – Glenorchy
Dawn and I made a startlingly discovery in Queenstown. I was, as usual, reading some history on the origins of the town. It was 1863, and a group of Irishmen read that some of thier countrymen had recently renamed thier port town after Queen Elizabeth – they named it Queenstown.…
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On To Queenstown
The road trip to Queenstown is the second longest driving trip of our journey and it requires going driving through the Southern Alps in NZ (that is pronounced “in-zed” here because the Brits say zed not ze for the letter Z). They also call Australia “Oz” here. But the weather…
Ginger Without Borders 