Malaysia… and a very happy 90th to my Nanny

Just to let you all know, we have arrived safely in Malaysia.  It’s very hot, but fantastic, and tomorrow we’ll write to tell you all about Kuala Lumpur.

Happy Birthday Nanny Yeadon – we hope you have a lovely day with all the family XXXXXXXXX

Auckland

We said goodbye to the camper and hit Auckland yesterday. So far it has been a case of rushing around the city to get Malaria tablets, visas and suchlike for Asia!!! We have also needed to buy various insect sprays and sun creams. The Auckland chemists are booming thanks to our arrival! It was also very sad to hear about the earth quake in Sumatra, where we are planning to go in a couple of weeks time. We will be monitoring the situation there…

Anyway… we have, amongst all of this, managed to see some of Auckland. It seems to be a nice little city, surrounded by volcanos and lovely beaches. This morning we went across to Rangitoto Volcano on a ferry and walked up it. A very nice view of the city greeted us at the top! It’s a young volcano, which went off 600 years ago and is still active.

Just before coming to this internet cafe we went and had a look at the sky tower, which seems to be Auckland’s centre-piece.  We also had the chance to take a look at Old Government House within the university campus.

So, tomorrow the next adventure begins and we set off for:

Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Mongolia and Russia.  Nervous but can’t wait!!!!!!

The Northland (& happy birthday for the 28th Dad McG)

We have enjoyed a few days right at the top of the North Island.  The highlight would have to be the Waipoua Kauri Forest on the west coast.  It took a long time to reach it, up a long windy road, but it was well worth the trip.  We still cannot believe how big the trees were.  The biggest one had a circumference around the bark of over 16 metres.  Now that is pretty cool!  In Dad McGowan’s words, “these are trees as old as Jesus”.

The weather has been fantastic during our time in New Zealand and we thought it was too good to be true.  This has been confirmed over the last few days!  The rain came… and it came… and it came!!!  However, we love the green grass and the giant trees, so we can’t really complain about them having a drink.  It has meant that we can’t go to swim with the dolphins, but we would love to come back here in the summer one day, so we’ll save it for that trip!

From the forest we headed further north to 90 mile beach, which is an amazing beach, as well as being a highway heading north up to Cape Reinga (right at the top).  Our little camper couldn’t make it up to the Cape, so we went on an organised tour for the day.  It was a lovely sunny day again – fantastic!  We went sandboarding, which was actually quite scary, but really good fun.  I (Carly) volunteered to go down the slope first in the group, which never happens.  I don’t know what came over me!  From there, the tour took us up the beach ‘road’ to the lighthouse at Cape Reinga.  It was really interesting and we found out about quite a lot of Maori history.  The Maoris believe that when you die your spirit travels up 90 mile beach to an old tree and exits this world through the tree.  We found it all very interesting.  On the way back they took us through some little Maori villages, where we saw their meeting houses.  Finally it was lovely to see the sun set over 90 mile beach.

The rain returned on the following day and we went off to the Bay of Islands.  This always looks lovely in the photos, with clear blue water, beaches and sun.  However, we were greeted with brownish water and heavy rain!!  Can’t have it always I suppose!!!  After living in Australia for 10 months we had forgotten about how life can be affected by rain .  Anyway, we enjoyed visiting Waitangi, which is where the treaty was signed between the Maori chiefs and British representatives in New Zealand.  We were given lots of information and it was nice to hear about how they see this place as the ‘home of New Zealand’, where it became what it is today.

Last night we stayed with some people that we had met a year ago in the Galapagos Islands.  It was really nice to catch up with them (Elaine and Gordon).  They own a campsite at the Bay of Islands and they let us stay for free which was really kind.  This morning it was sunny so we got a passenger ferry over to Russell.  This is a lovely little picturesque town and you wouldn’t believe that in the 1800s it was known for it’s debauchery!!!  The sailors and Maoris used to get up to all sorts of drinking, fighting etc!!!  We saw the oldest church in New Zealand and had lunch in the oldest pub!  We also walked up to the ship’s signalling mast on the top of a hill overlooking the town.  This was the scene of many a battle between the Maoris and British as well as Maori infighting not that long ago and so was very interesting.

Tomorrow we go to Auckland and drop off the little camper that has been our home. We have loved travelling around in campervans for the last 3 months. They are so useful as a way of getting around a country and the campsites here are so clean and nice. Nevertheless, it will be nice to live under a proper roof with some more space, albeit only a tiny bit more!!!

This pic doesn’t do the massive tree justice! It’s the biggest in the world

Where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean

Rotorua (Mud, gas, mates and grade 5 rafting)

We could tell when we started to get close to the infamous Rotorua – the smell of sulphur started drifting in through the van and the usual jokes of ‘…was that you?’ started coming out!  We had planned to spend a few days here to see the sights and our friends Jon and Danielle from back home.

On the first day we had driven from Waitomo so for the remainder of the afternoon we went to one of the natural mud baths.  Carly was very excited as she usualy loves going to spas!  We were given our own private mud pool where we soaked for 20minutes scrapping mud from the bottom of the pool and rubbing it hilariously over each other.  After baking in the mud we were informed, much to Carly’s horror, that we had to have a cold shower to remove the mud before we could proceed to the mineral sulphur spa.  (Luckily I had plastered mud all over Carly’s back so she wasn’t too impressed with the cold water to get it off with! hehe!)

The next morning we visited Wai-O-Tapu thermal reserve.  This is where you get to see all the cool naturally bubbling mud and random coloured lakes, as well as a geyser.  There were a lot of lakes, one being flourescent green!  The mud was brilliant, there’s something about that continuous, vigorous bubbling!

That evening our friends from home, Jon and Danielle, arrived at our camp site in their ‘green machine’.  We were very excited to see them as they’ve been travelling since August through South America – lots of stories to tell!  We planned to go to a cultural Maori evening called ‘Mitai’.  We were shown the traditional way of cooking (Hangi – steaming food underground), saw a Maori war boat coming down a stream with the war party screaming war cries, had a song and dance performance (including the haka) and were generally entertained throughout the evening.  This entertainment was followed by a trip around a wildlife centre where we were to see kiwi birds at night (they’re nocturnal, so this does make sense!).  They were bigger and fluffier than we thought!  All together a great evening catching up and being entertained.

Now, where to we start with the next day?  The four of us had planned to go rafting, unfortunately all the grade 3-4 trips weren’t running so  we went for the only option… a grade 5 rapid on the Kaituna River (the highest level you’re allowed to raft commercially!)  This, instead of being met by much jubilation (as I would have thought), was almost greeted with tears of fright!  It was awesome though!  The highlight of the trip was going down the 7 metre waterfall!  None of us fell out, but we did all get very wet.  All smiles at the end though

To celebrate our courage we all went to the pub for the afternoon and chatted about various things we’d done, what we were going to do and helped each other plan some of the rest of our trips.  All much fun with a curry and pub grub thrown in for good measure.

Waitomo Caves

Is that a hobbit in the van?

The day after completing the Tongariro Crossing we headed west to Waitomo.  It’s a tiny little town, which is there purely because of the caves.  It was a pretty drive, with nice views of Lake Taupo and some really nice hobbit looking places!

We had gone with the intention of going to do the ‘Legendary Black Water Rafting’ and weren’t disappointed.  Sarah had done this 8 years ago and still talks about it, so we thought it was a must-do!

So, what was involved with this activity?

• Get into a thermal fleece, wet suit, booties, wellies and put a helmet on
• Get a rubber ring
• Go into a tiny dark cave and float/climb through it

I can see that this might sound quite awful but it was really good fun.  We jumped over some waterfalls on our rings within the cave and at one point we all turned our torches off and saw an amazing array of glowworms on the ceiling.  All in all it took 3 hours.  Our hands were very numb by the end, but we weren’t as cold as we thought we would be and the company gave us soup and bagels to warm us up.

Tongariro National Park

In preparation for the famous Tongariro Alpine Crossing we undertook a little walk to Silica Rapids near Whakapapa.  It was a nice little walk in amongst the weird volcanic landscape.  There were little bright orange streams and weird creamy coloured rocks. 

Last Sunday we felt ready for the Crossing.  It’s a long hike of 19.4km and we were lucky to have booked a beautiful sunny day for it!  An important point to note is that it was -5 (yes, I said minus 5) degrees overnight and our little campervan heater stopped working!!!! Aaaagh awful, but now fixed!  Anyway… we set off at 7.30am and were greeted with an easy track (to start with), with a lovely view of Mount Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom) and Mount Tongariro which we were going to cross between.  We could also see Mount Ruapehu, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest ski field and you could even see Mount Egmont, 180km away in the distance. 

After a long winding track, we hit Devil’s Staircase.  This is very much like it sounds – a long steep set of stairs up the mountain!  At the top there was tons of snow around and we had to begin walking on it, as well as some ice, which was cracking beneath our feet.  This made the hiking a little more difficult! 

We crossed various melting ice covered streams and little lakes.  Next to the track we could see the red crater (highest point at 1886m), as well as other highlights, such as the emerald and blue lakes.  The emerald ones were really bright green (as you would imagine, but it’s cool to see!).  Most of the lakes were quite frozen, but this just seemed to make the views more spectacular.  We would like to see the summer colours there to compare - so Marianne and Helen please show us your pics!

Following a lot of snowy climbing, we descended 1200 metres passed some natural thermal springs, with lots of steam coming out of the ground and through some alpine forest to the end of the tramp.  We would highly recommend this hike.  It’s one of the best ones we have done.

Checking out the glow-worms and Wellington

We forgot to mention our little trip to see some glow-worms on the last blog. What happened was we arrived at a little campsite in Picton. This particular one was nice and clean etc, but with some very rough looking types who lived there! Anyway… there was a big map of the campsite and at the top there was a little path saying ‘to the glow-worms’. I saw Dave’s eyes light up and I knew we would be off to seek them out later on! When dark came we wandered off up the path over broken trees and through thick mud. I was about to say ‘there’s none here and it’s spooky, let’s go back’ (in fact I may have already moaned about this for 10 mins ) when we saw an array of little stars in the mud at the side of the track. We haven’t seen glow-worms before and thought they looked pretty cool. They were tiny white glowing dots – as you would imagine really – but loads of them.

Back to where we left you last time… We arrived at Wellington last Wednesday night and spent Thursday looking around the city. It was a gorgeous sunny day and, having been out in the sticks for so long, we really enjoyed being in a city. As well as being the capital, Wellington is New Zealand’s centre for art and architecture so we went on a little walking tour to see various good looking buildings, including the funny looking Beehive next to Parliament House. The tour ended at the Te Papa museum, so we went in there to take a look around. It’s one of the best museums we have been to. There is a big collection of Maori artwork and sculptures and a lot of information on the history of New Zealand. We had lunch at Macs Brewery overlooking the sea which was nice. Later on in the day we felt the need to go to the cinema, as we haven’t seen a TV or film for ages (it feels like that anyway!). So we went to see Pelham 123, which was quite good.

We have now made it to Tongariro National Park, which is beautiful. Today we had a look at Mt Ngauruhoe (better known as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings). Soon we are doing the Tongariro Crossing, which is 19.4km long and reputedly known as the best day walk in New Zealand. So you will hear about that shortly!