It’s been quite some time since we shared our plans – in fact, in our last update we mentioned that we were thinking of visiting New Zealand and (spoiler alert) we’ve just spent a brilliant two months there! This has been our route around Southeast Asia and New Zealand since we left Japan in January…
And now onto what’s next…
June to mid-July: United States ๐บ๐ธ
We plan to spend a couple of days exploring O’ahu, one of Hawaii’s 137 islands, before moving onto the continental United States. Although the stop in Hawaii adds an additional flight to our route (not exactly nearly neutral), it’s been on our to-visit list for a very long time, so we decided it made sense to stop off while we were already crossing the Pacific – not somewhere we find ourselves very often. The compromise we have made is to stay on O’ahu rather than visiting any of the other islands, since the only way to get between them is to fly. There was briefly an inter-island ferry service, but that was halted due to environmental concerns. Go figure…
From Hawaii, we’ll fly to Portland, OR, where we’ll begin a 40(ish) day traversal of North America. We plan to travel mostly by train, visit at least a couple of National Parks, and cram in as much local food as possible in that time. Having been just the two of us since we said farewell to Mario at the start of May, we’ll be happy to have some company again as our top stalkers fans (Mum and Dad) are coming to join us again for the journey between the west coast and Chicago. At least there’ll be witnesses next time Oli throws me off a tandem! We’ll end our North American leg in New York, before hopping on one of the shortest possible trans-Atlantic flights to Lisbon.
Mid-July to late-August: Lap of Europe ๐ต๐น๐ช๐ธ๐ซ๐ท๐ฎ๐น๐ฌ๐ท๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ช๐ญ๐ท๐ง๐ฆ๐ธ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐น๐ฉ๐ช๐ง๐ช
From Lisbon, we’ll cross into Spain and then pass through the South of France into Italy (again!). Here, we’d love to visit Bologna (FOOD!), Ravenna, and spend some time in the Marche region, which we missed last time. However, this is all dependent on the situation following May’s devastating floods in Emilia-Romagna, so we’ll see how the region’s recovery is going and whether they are yet welcoming visitors.
Either way, we’ll need to cross Italy as we’re once again heading for a ferry to Greece, but this time our route is between Ancona and Corfu. Once we reach Corfu, we’ll meet up with the Appletons to gatecrash part of their summer holiday.
If our plans pre-Corfu were vague, they get even more vague after this! We’ll probably take a ferry to Albania, then work our way up through the Balkans into Central Europe. We’re aiming for a Eurostar from Brussels at the end of August, which will take us back to…LONDON! ๐ฌ๐ง
September onwards
We plan to spend at least a month in the UK to give us a chance to catch up with friends and family, meet all the babies who have been born since we left last August (well, not all of them, just those born to people we know), and hug Thomas until he wriggles free (probably immediately).
We began our time in Rotorua with a casual stroll around the town and along the lakeside. At first glance, it’s just your average NZ town, until you start to notice the little pools of bubbling mud and steam rising from all over the place. And then, of course, there’s the pungent, eggy smell of sulphur that lingers in pockets, catching you out when you least expect it. That’s because Rotorua sits within the Taupล volcanic zone, which is an incredibly active geothermal area. Even the picturesque Lake Rotorua, on which the town sits and which looks very benign, is actually a volcanic caldera!
Lake Rotorua
A walk through Government Gardens made for a pretty interesting combination of Mฤori heritage, European-style park landscaping and wild nature, but this was really just the beginning of the geothermal activity we would see.
Later in the day, we wandered through Kuirau Park, which had free foot spas that made use of the hot spring water, and more geothermal curiosities, including smoking piles of rock, bubbling pools of mud and a whole steaming lake. Again, though, this was just a warm up for what was to come tomorrow.
For the afternoon, we switched tack to see the other side of what Rotorua had to offer. Much like Queenstown on the South Island, Rotorua specialises in outdoor adrenaline activities, with a gondola to whisk visitors up Mount Ngongotaha to take part in things like mountain biking, ziplining and a 150 km/h sky swing. Seeing as we’d missed out on both the gondola and the luge track in Queenstown, we thought it was about time to put this right.
The view from the top, with one of the luge tracks on the left
I made sure to get my money’s worth by going down the luge SO slowly that at one point Oli had to stop entirely to wait for me to catch up. Safety first!
To be honest, the biggest adrenaline rush probably came from our bus journey back into town, when we were picked up by an incredibly enthusiastic driver who wouldn’t accept our bus fare (we’re still not sure it was actually a public bus) and spent the entire journey frantically giving us emphatic recommendations for the local area while maintaining eye contact in the rear-view mirror and not looking at the road at all. The whole thing was both alarming and heartwarming, such was his level of enthusiasm. He even left his engine running in the middle of a busy road and hopped off the bus to point us in the direction of the Thursday night market, which was our next stop.
Here, we joined the longest queue we could find (always a good sign) and shared some of the locally-famous Johney’s dumplings as well as a satisfyingly spicy portion of channa masala and rice, all while enjoying some live music from the two-piece band.
The following day, we started bright and early with an attempt to visit the Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland 30 km south of town using only public transport and our own steam. We’d read online that this was just about possible, as long as we were prepared to do quite a bit of road walking and spend all day there to fit with bus times. A long day and the possibility of getting stranded in the middle of nowhere? Sign us up!
Our first hurdle was to get into the geothermal area containing the Lady Knox geyser, since we’d read online that pedestrians weren’t allowed to enter and we saw a huge sign saying the same. We thought that was a bit ridiculous and thankfully the person we spoke to at the visitor centre said it was fine, as long as we were VERY CAREFUL of the traffic while walking along the road. Well yes, we do know to avoid cars (of which there were very few) – we’d assumed it had more to do with the risk of falling into hidden ditches filled with boiling water!
Anyway, Lady Knox erupts every morning at 10.15am, which sounds impressive until you find out that one of the guides pours in organic soap powder and this sets it off. Exactly how this works is still a mystery, since their explanation was rather vague. But I have to say that seeing the occasional soapy bubble floating out of the erupting geyser did add a bit of comedy to the proceedings.
After this somewhat odd spectacle, we spent most of the rest of the day on the walking trails exploring the various geothermal features around Waiotapu. We saw a series of craters, some 15 m across and up to 20 m deep, formed after acidic steam rose from underground and eroded the ground until it caved in. At the bottom of one of the craters is a pool of boiling mud making a pretty ominous sound, which was recorded for use as Mordor sound effects in the Lord of the Rings films. In another crater, birds nest in holes in the walls, with the rising heat helping to incubate the eggs.
The whole area was hissing, bubbling and steaming, with hot waterfalls, unnatural-looking colours and strange deposits forming a landscape that looked unlike anywhere else we’ve ever been, and on a huge scale. It was quite an assault on the senses, but the indiginous population knew how to make the most of this environment, and used the heat for cooking and collected unrefined crude oil from the mud pools to burn in lanterns. We just did our best to stay on the paths and not get ourselves in hot water, which was tricky as I was trying to navigate using yesterday’s map of the luge tracks and couldn’t work out why nothing seemed to fit!
Bright yellow sulphur deposits
A mud pool with crude oil sitting on top
A stream flowing along terraces of mineral deposits
Tiny terraces of mineral deposits
Hot waterfall
The star attraction is the Champagne Pool, the largest hot spring in NZ with a maximum depth of 62 m, which takes its name from the fizzing of carbon dioxide in the alkaline water. While it looked very appealing on a chilly day, the spring that feeds the pool is 230ยฐC and the water contains such minerals as arsenic, thallium and mercury, so probably not brilliant for a dip…
Even more alarming was the lime-green colour of the Roto Karikitea, or Devil’s Bath, which had a pH of 2 – roughly the same as lemon juice. I know it looks like I’ve filtered this picture, but it really was this bright! Fun fact: the canteen in our University Hall used to serve a cake that was just this shade of green. Funnily enough, we all called it radioactive cake.
Our final stop before catching our return bus were the Waiotapu mud pools, which sat outside the Thermal Wonderland park and were free to visit. These were so mesmerising that we could barely tear ourselves away – it’s difficult to explain why, but they made such satisfying blip blopping sounds and we got really into predicting which mini mud-volcano would erupt next. I know it’s probably hard to believe from the gif below, but it was the best thing we saw all day!
Finally, after a busy and baffling day of geothermal wonderment, we hopped onto the bus to take us back into Rotorua. Then, early the next morning, we set off back to Auckland to complete our figure-eight of NZ and return to where it all began, nearly two months ago.
After bidding a fond farewell to our little camper van in Christchurch, it was time to get back on the public transport bandwagon and start our return journey to the North Island. We spent an evening doing an inordinate amount of laundry and then woke up the next morning bright, early and extremely disoriented – it might not have been very comfortable, but our 12 nights in the camper had been by far the longest we’ve slept in the same bed since leaving London in August. Neither of us could work out where we were for quite some time! It was still dark outside and pouring with rain, but we had our priorities firmly in place so ventured out for one last visit to C1 Espresso to pick up lunch supplies for our bus journey. You can tell how much we liked it as we were banging on the door when they opened at 7am!
We then hopped on the bus and spent 6 hours travelling north to Picton. This was a little odd as a lot of the journey was retracing our steps from the previous day, including a long break in Kaikลura, from where we’d just come. As much as this felt like a waste of time (and carbon!), it was necessary because Christchurch was the furthest north we could drop off the camper unless we wanted to take it all the way to Auckland, another 1000 km north.
Until this point, the journey was going almost boringly smoothly, but the slightly rough ferry crossing to Wellington soon livened things up. I had the great pleasure of re-experiencing my lunch very publicly, and according to Oli, inadvertently set off a chain reaction where several other passengers joined in. Whoops! Despite my best efforts (and those of the very large waves), the chunder rate didn’t get anywhere near our journey between mainland Vietnam and Cรดn ฤแบฃo, so that was something.
Is this the worst photo Oli’s ever taken?! I wasn’t feeling at all well so put him on ship photography duty and this is the monstrosity he came back with ๐
We’d already spent a sunny few days in Wellington so didn’t plan to stay for long this time, but we did have to attend to a couple of pieces of unfinished business. The first was (predictably) food-related: our Italian correspondent Mario had given the Pizza Pomodoro menu his seal of approval when we were there together a few weeks ago but sadly they’d totally sold out that evening, so we needed to put this right. We happily gobbled a couple of Neapolitan pizzas and they were every bit as good as we’d hoped. No photos were taken as I was still recovering from my exploits earlier so ate dinner in my PJs in bed!
The second item of unfinished business was to go on a tour of the New Zealand Parliament. I’d read about this last time but the tours were all booked up during the school holidays, so I was happy to get a second try. True to form, as we walked there early the next morning, Oli announced that my beloved Swiss Army knife was still in his backpack. Thankfully the security staff were thoroughly nice (just like everyone we’ve met so far in NZ) and stored it for us while we were on the tour, but it’ll still be a miracle if the penknife makes it through the year – it’s now been temporarily confiscated at least five times!
The three buildings we visited: the Beehive (left), Parliament House (centre) and the Library (right)
I’m a big fan of NZ politics – both because they were the first country in the world to allow women to vote in 1893 and also because former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is a bit of a feminist icon, so I really enjoyed the tour, even if it felt a bit like our guide was making it up as she went along! Unfortunately we couldn’t take photos, but we saw backstage in three of the buildings that make up Parliament, including the aptly-named Beehive (below left; and see below right for a pretty impressive 7000-matchstick model of it from 1981). The coolest part was seeing the debating chamber first hand, but it was also great to nose at old photographs on the walls, see the themed select committee rooms, and learn more about the political system. Did you know that NZ has a unicameral legislature, meaning there is no upper house?
That afternoon, we headed to the highly-rated Wellington Museum. This was a very well-executed version of our new favourite genre: the baffling local museum. A whole floor was dedicated to travelling by sea, and in particular the perils of crossing the Cook Strait. One particularly memorable exhibit was entitled 160 years of Cook Strait Shipwrecks, and I was very glad we’d got the crossing out of the way the day before.
A model of the Wahine disaster in 1968, during which 51 people died after the ship was driven onto a reef at the entrance to Wellington Harbour and then capsized in a storm
Most of it was much more lighthearted, though. In a very small space, they managed to cover UFO sightings, local television studios, a stuffed lion named Rusty, memoirs of US soldiers stationed in NZ, and much, much more. But probably the best bit was the section covering Saatchi & Saatchi’s Absolutely Positively Wellington campaign from 1991, which became a bit of a modern classic. I’ll just leave this here…
That concluded our time in the Wellington, and after a great second visit, we continued our journey north to the Art Deco capital of the world, Napier.
