This is a record of our trip to New Zealand in February 2018.
We start in Christchurch in the South Island on January 30th and finish in Auckland for the flight back to Australia on February 23rd.
See blog posts below for some highlights of our trip.
SOUTH ISLAND
Allan’s Beach, Otago Peninsula, Near Dunedin
En route from Dunedin to Mount Cook
Kaikoura to Picton, Marlborough Sounds
NORTH ISLAND
Picton to Wellington and on to Paraparaumu
Paraparaumu to and at Mount Taranaki
More on Taranaki and on to New Plymouth
New Plymouth to Coromandel Peninsula
Hahei to Tairua to the Airport
THE END
GENERAL
Fact-o-meter:
New Zealand is called “Aotearoa” in the Māori language. It means “Land of the Long White Cloud”. And that is so true, especially on the South Island.
You will find many British birds (blackbirds, sparrows etc) as the early settlers brought them over to help make them feel more at home.
The early settlers found the soil infertile and hard to break down so they brought earthworms from the UK to work their miracles.
New Zealand is roughly the same size as the UK but has 1/10th the population. This makes driving a breeze but also means that towns are not quite as large as you imagine and sometimes if you blink you can miss them.
What a laid-back place this is. No worries! No bother.
Comments
Will New Zealand survive the onslaught as Silicon Valley tycoons invade?
Where to go to survive the apocalypse
Whatever next. Groan!!
Money obviously talks.
One apposite quote in the above article:
The view of Auckland and its surrounding islands was indeed ravishing – though in retrospect, it was no more ravishing than any of the countless other views I would wind up getting ravished by over the next 10 days. That, famously, is the whole point of New Zealand: if you don’t like getting ravished by views, you have no business in the place; to travel there is to give implicit consent to being hustled left, right and centre into states of aesthetic rapture.
