The Day That Happened Twice

Tuesday morning, December 15, we're out in Auckland, having coffee with Sian's cousin Phil and wife Jan whose visit to New Zealand just happens to be beginning as ours draws to a close. After that, and hour or whiled away in the tranquility of the Auckland art gallery, then it's time to board our shuttle bus to the airport to begin the journey home. It's not been quite the perfect send off - just when we were congratulating each other on getting through the whole trip bug-free, Sian gets ill - food poisoning, we think, some dodgy pub-cooked prawns top of the suspect list. Then, at the airport, our flight sits on the tarmac two hours beyond its departure time when it develops a technical fault. Maybe it's Aucklands way of paying us back for being mean about it.

Anyway, we do finally get airborne, and with the return leg of the international flights booked premium economy, the eleven hours to LA are a breeze. Eat a meal, watch a film, settle down to sleep. And then, next day, it's...

Tuesday morning, December 15 - Los Angeles. Yes, due to the foibles of the international date-line and a load of science I don't understand, this is the day that happened twice, Tuesday all over again, Groundhog Day. Ironic, really - nature dealing us a day more just at the time we could have done with one less. But here we are, Tuesday, again, this time in LA. If Auckland was big by NZ standards, LA could surely swallow it whole; a vast sea of steel and concrete as the plane drops down out of blue skies. We have just the one night here, and though it be the final point of our holiday, we have no game plan bar sitting it out until our onward flight departs 1600 next day. In the event, we dump our bags at our tired little Travel Lodge hotel, and catch a bus,or two buses down to Venice Beach. It's the one bit of LA we vaguely know, having stayed there with our friends Ruth and Len at the end of our cross-US road trip in 2002. Then, we stepped off the motorcycle and asked a passing cop to take our photo. Today we take the photos ourselves as the last of the sun goes down.

Auckland: it's a city, Jim...

New Zealand has a population of some 4.5 million, just over 1 million living on the South Island, the rest on the ( physically much smaller) North. Of these, 1.37 million live in Auckland, making it the biggest city on either island with a population bigger than the whole of the South Island combined.

With its harbour bridge, waterfront aspect and bustling cruise ship trade, Auckland feels like it's pretending to be Sydney but, frankly, no ones going to be fooled. Auckland may have the trappings of many a large city - traffic, busy shopping precincts, streets of tall office blocks - but someone seems to have forgotten to add the stardust - the excitement, character or charm that turns any city stay into a memorable experience. Everything looks modern in a rather drab, grey way. Maybe we're being unfair - only here a few days, can't see it all etc etc, but on the basis of what we have seen, ie the central downtown district, this isn't going to be looming large on either of our bucket lists. But listen, Auckland, maybe it's us, not you. We've now reached that point where we are going to be hard to please - or at least, energise. After two months on then road travel fatigue has well and truly set in, and, to be honest, all we really want to do now is go home.

But not first without a visit to Hobbiton, home of the Hobbits, those loveable, furry-footed creatures conjured forth by J R R Tolkein and brought to popular imagination by Sir Peter Jackson, who, on the back of his success with LOTR worked some dark alchemy to turn one pretty short book (The Hobbit) into three tooth-grindingly long films. Getting to Hobbiton involves a journey of similar length - two hours on the bus to Hamilton (a city which makes Auckland look stellar by comparison) then a further hour on to Matamata, the little town thrown a tourism lifeline by all things Middle Earth. The deal here is basically that filmmaker Jackson was looking for the ideal location to film the 'Hobbiton' sequences of The Lord of the Rings movies, and found the perfect fit in an area of land
owned by a local farming family. The family leased the land (for both series of films) and then wisely realised, post Hobbit, there was more money to be made by preserving the set and milking the
franchise than there was milking anything on four legs. As an experience, it's still pure cheese, of course - you troop around with your guide, taking photos of hobbit-holes, before ending up in 'the Green Dragon' clutching a mug of 'hobbit ale'. But for anyone with an interest in the books - or more particularly perhaps the films -it's undeniably fun. Beers actually not bad, either.

Our last full day proper in New Zealand we took the ferry across to Waiheke Island and spent the day there, doing the tour, walking the beaches. Imagine the Isle of Wight, but considerably more exotic. You get the idea.

Round the top then back to base

From Greymouth we head for  Nelson, penultimate stop on our South Island tour. Despite some more iffy weather we decide to take the long way round - via the coastal highway to Westport. We're assured by our hosts at the motel that this is a must-travel road, especially on a bike, and it doesn't disappoint - a long, snaking ride along the wild (sometimes wet) west coast, passing some amazing rock formations - the "pancake" rocks and blowholes at Punakai - along the way. We don't remember much being made of this stretch of road in the guidebooks, but on this evidence it could give Australia's Great Ocean road a very good run for its money (and throws in seals basking on the rocks along the shore by the waters edge for good measure)

From Westport we dive inland to rejoin the main route to Nelson and then down the East Coast to Kaikoura, last port of call before returning to Christchurch. As we make our way the scenery changes again - greener, more pastoral; the north of England or Scotland, perhaps. The East Coast ride itself is pretty good - not as dramatic as the west, maybe, but with highway (and railway) running almost parallel to the pacific it's a great ride by any objective standards.

Nelson is an OK kind of place - busier and more habited than we found Christchurch, with a pleasant riverside path that runs all the way out of the town into the countryside beyond. We hire bikes to explore; one of us (the one-time Michelin man, natch) falls off. Twice. Later that afternoon, having a cuppa on the terrace of a harbour side cafe, we see whales swimming in the waters at the harbour mouth.

More whale watching opportunities present in Kaikoura, where you can take a boat tour to the outer reaches of huge harbour. Seasickness pills at the ready,  book our seats aboard. It's a fitting way to round off our South Island trip with sightings of three large sperm whales (not to mention the group
of Orcas we saw swimming the waters just off-shore while we were waiting to check in), and on our return, a school of curious dolphins that circled the boat, many doing spectacular back-flip somersaults out the water just for fun.

A few hours later and we're back where we begun, handing Grace back to her owners and taking a ride back into Christchurch for our last night on New Zealand's South Island.

Have we been here before?

A couple of days into our NZ travels we both find ourselves with an, odd almost nostalgic déjà vu - like stumbling upon a fuzzily childhood memory of a place we've never actually visited. Yes, something about this place is weirdly familiar. Maybe it's the sounds of the bird call in the trees, the fresh summer air or the smells of broom and pine in the great outdoors, or maybe the faintly old fashioned Englishness of so many of the places we visit. Whatever the reason, it's odd - just at the point we are about as far from home as it's possible to be, it's easy to imagine quite the opposite.

Anyway, after arriving into Te Annau from Queenstown we decide to give Grace the day off and join a small tour group on a minibus for the trip down to Milford Sound, where the idea is to join one of the boats taking a cruise around the fjord. This (the going on the bus) turns out to be a very good call. As we leave Te Annau it's raining hard; by the time we emerge from the Homer tunnel into the heart of Fjordland, the heavens are battering us with a fury that has us thankful we're rolling on four wheels, not two.

The main  point of the cruise is to get up close and personal with some of the many waterfalls that tumble down for the mountains into the fjord. It's an undeniably spectacular sight; nature at its rawest, don't-mess-with-me best. Great material for photos, but we can't put any on the blog because some idiot messed up charging the IPad, which means we had to take our shots on the camera, which we can only upload to the blog via the apple Mac, which we left behind with the rest of our luggage in Christchurch. So we'll all have to wait a bit for that bit of drama.

Leaving Te Annau we were meant to return to Queenstown for the night, but, mindful of some more wet weather headed our way, decided to get further down the road to Wanaka, where we spend one pleasant evening by the lake before heading on next day on the road through the mountains to the west coast. Here, finally, there is no dodging the rain, and I get the chance to don my fluorescent Michelin man outfit as the waterproofs go on. In actual fact tho, the reality of motorcycling in the
rain is often not as bad as the prospect*, and such was the case here. A couple of hundred kilometres in the wet across the Haast Pass and we reach our destination, Fox Glacier - alpine cute in the sunshine, no doubt, but possessed of a rather dooms, back-woodsy twin peaks kind of feel in the murk. Next day the skies clear, and we visit the two glaciers - Fox and Franz Josef before moving on. Bad weather is common in these parts, and it carries a risk. A few weeks earlier, a sightseeing helicopter had crashed on Fox killing all on board, four Brit tourists included.

Sunday mornings ride takes up the west coast to Greymouth, a break point in the journey up to Nelson. We stay at the Scenicland motel, and it's excellent - a vast sprawl of rooms all to ourselves, with cooking facilities and access to a BBQ outside. Greymouth itself, however, is anything but
scenic - a drab, industrial sprawl radiating out from the harbour and a meagre town centre. It's a
working town rather than a tourist resort and makes to pretence to be otherwise, but on a Sunday
afternoon, even a sunny one, Greymouth seems as dour and drear as it's name suggests. So no photos
here, either.

(*not necessarily the consensus view of the entire party)

Another country

Fly into New Zealand from Sydney, landing in Christchurch, major city on the South Island. It's a major contrast after Sydney, not just because of it's vastly smaller size or apparent absence of either people or bustle. It's also because in Feb 2011, following a series of earthquakes and aftershocks, Christchurch was hit by the big one. One hundred and eighty five people lost their lives - that loss marked by a simple but poignant memorial consisting of 185 empty chairs sitting in an abandoned lot - and hundreds more were injured. We arrive four and a half years on and are shocked by the scope and scale of destruction still visible - empty lots where buildings once stood; rows of homes or shops abandoned. The city is fighting back - regeneration and innovation evident across the city - but its going to be slow, costly work, hamstrung by predictable disputes over who pays for what. For the time being, Christchurch remains a ghost town.

After two nights r&r we get on the road again. Collected from our digs by the nice folks from South Pacific motorcycle rentals (an ex-pat couple, Mike and Carole) and driven out of the city to pick up our mount for the next 10 days. Our transport for the next 11 days is a BMW 800 twin (badged, for reasons too silly to go into, the F700GS) The bike looks nice, rides fine, and is apparently called Grace. After half a days riding through already jaw-sagging scenery we arrive at Lake Tekapo, a beautiful alpine village fronting a lake surrounded by towering, snow and cloud capped mountains.

Lake Tekapo sits within a dark skies conservation area, making its nightime skies some of the best in the world to view the stars. Highlight of our short stopover here is a dusk tour up to the top of Mt. John to the University of Canterbury observatory, where as night falls we are treated to star-gazing,  astrophysics, brownies and cocoa.

Move on again next morning, first to Queenstown - a pleasing lakeside town of buzzy shops, bars and restaurants, a magnet for yoof with its emphasis on extreme sports (bungee jumping, white water rafting etc etc) but enough to keep us crumbles smiling too- like the proper beer on offer. next day further south to sleepier Te Anau, which will be our start point for Milford Sound. Everywhere we look, the scenery is jaw-drop beautiful; towering snow capped mountains of the southern Alps; winding, craggy gorges; vast open plains and topaz lakes over a thousand metres deep. There's lots of beautifully coloured lupins growing wild by the roadside too  - Sian particularly fond of them.

Thus far the New Zealand weather has dealt us the kindest of hands - warm (or hot) and sunny each
day since we collected our bike. We would be foolish, I think, to expect the honeymoon to last..

Last call, Sydney

All of a sudden our month in Australia has all but passed, and we find ourselves in Sydney, final port of call before flying across the ocean to New Zealand. Like Cape Town, South Africa and maybe Toronto, Canada, Sydney isn't the capital but it sure acts like it is - big, brash, confidently on trend, the kind of place where anything goes and everything happens. At first it's all a bit overwhelming, especially in the heat, which mid-way through out stay tops out at a blistering 38c. But it's a fitting place to end our trip, for sure one of the worlds must-do destinations.

 We don't do the harbour bridge walk, but we do do the opera house, starting with a guided tour and then coming back in the evening to listen to the Sydney Symphony orchestra perform in the concert hall. The radical, breath-taking design of the opera house comes at a price - way, way over budget by the time it was finally completed in 1973, and with narrow performance areas that pose challenges for ballet dancers energetically exiting the stage. But one thing is beyond doubt; the acoustics and sound in the concert hall theatre  are simply amazing. At half time in our concert we step out for an interval drink, the glass fronted bar area looking out across the harbour to the city lights. A highlight of our trip!

We cross the city by train, bus, ferry and on foot, catching the surf (tho not getting in it) at Manley and Bondi, and spending our last morning in cooler weather walking the spectacular cliff top path from Bondi beach to Coogee. Now, time to move on.

Happy campers (whose idea was that??)

Leave the tranquility of Lady Elliot Island and fly via Bundaberg back to Brisbane, where we have a night before picking up our camper van for the journey south down the Gold Coast. We hadn't given much thought to Brisbane, other than it would be a biggish city, but not Melbourne, not Sydney. What we find surprises us- a vibrant, humming central business district with a waterfront lined with über-cool bars and restaurants, tree-lined walkways and a great free ferry service that shuttles to and fro between various points across the harbour. A place the size of Adelaide with the vibe and vigour of Melbourne, and then some. We were sorry to be saying goodbye so soon.

The next phase of the trip - the drive south down the Gold Coast ending in Sydney - is perhaps the closest we've come so far to disappointment. The weather doesn't help - grey and damp a fair bit of the time - nor do some of the worst motorway roads we've come across in a long time, the tall, skinny little Toyota wallowing and bucking alarmingly through the ruts and cracks in the carriageway. But to be honest, the real problem wasn't so much the travel as the destination(s). Stay the first night just outside Byron Bay, the second at Port Macquarie, and don't exactly fall in love with either. BB is oh-so self-consciously hippy dippy twee, not to mention being in the throes of an invasion of schoolies (Australia's equivalent of the end of term exodus of sixth form students on a bender to Newquay). PP has an altogether more sober view of itself, and boasts a lovely beach, but on a grey, overcast Sunday it looks pretty much like any other seaside resort enduring a wet weekend, and to our eyes seemed, frankly, rather dull.

For our final stop en route we head inland from the coast to the peaceful little town of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains north of Sydney, and suddenly the journey seems all too worthwhile - stunning vistas, waterfalls,  sunshine and walks in fresh mountain air. Our last taste of wilderness Australia before Sydney.

And what of the camper van experience itself?  Turns out to be rather like living inside a Rubik's cube - forever moving A to get at B, but in the process getting in the way of C with the result that before long the whole van needs to be off-loaded and re-packed just to make a cup of tea. Nerves and tempers fray, beautiful friendships get put under stress. Admittedly we were starting to get a handle on it by the end of our very short trip, and with a bigger van and a bit more nouse no doubt things would be different. For the time being, though, once is probably enough.

On the East side

Say goodbye to Darwin and fly over to the East Coast and Cairns, jumping off point for tropical Northern Queensland. A bit less hot and humid maybe than the northern territories, but no need to break out the woollies just yet. Stay a night heading in and out of Cairns, in between renting another car for the short hop up the coast to Port Douglas.

Rise Saturday morning to the news emerging from Paris - grim echo of ten years earlier travelling in Peru when we woke to first coverage of the London bombings.

From PD we join a tour to Daintree national park - the main attraction on this leg of our travels. Daintree lays claim to being the oldest continuously surviving rainforest in the world - 120 million years old by conservative estimates and home to all kinds of  wonders including, on our trip, a sighting of the rare Casawary bird (imagine a metre high psychedelic turkey) along with its young. The following day we get another view of the rainforest from the air, taking a ride on the skyrail cable car that runs for 7.5 km above the canopy of trees, forest stretching out seemingly forever in every direction. Except that, once again, it may not be forever. The forest takes an amazing 40% of its water not from the ground but through "cloud scraping" - literally, skimming moisture for low-
hanging cloud. With global temperatures forecast to rise, cloud levels are expected to significantly diminish, with the result that...

After two nights in Port Douglas and a second in Cairns we hit the road - or the air - again and fly via Brisbane to Bundaberg, from where we will head out to Lady Elliot Island. Famous mostly for the rum that bears it's name, Bundaberg is a one-horse town consisting on one long, wide street of shops,
bars, food outlets and so forth. Not much to get excited about, but possessing a kind of vaguely old-
fashioned charm slightly reminiscent of small towns across the American mid-west. As a place to
visit, Bundaberg has a few claims to fame including the eponymous rum distillery outside the town, but what drew us was the protected turtle beach at Mon Repos, where we were lucky enough to witness a large and rare Loggerhead turtle laying her eggs. This was one of those very special
moments, particularly as once the old girl had shuffled back info the surf we were able, under the supervision of rangers, to join in moving the eggs - all 143 of them - to a new location further up the beach. Sounds like vandalism but in fact it's conservation - like many of her kin, our turtle had laid her eggs below the high-tide line, meaning that when the tide came in, they would have been waterlogged and destroyed. In moving them the rangers, and us tourists, are hopefully boosting this endangered species chances of survival.

Next day we board a light aircraft for the short flight across the ocean to Lady Elliot Island. By now
we are inescapably in the domain of cliche and hyperbole - remote pacific island on the Great Barrier Reef, clear blue waters,  waking in the morning to gaze out over golden beaches and coral
lagoons...Yes, it was not at all bad....

snorkelling (or doing our best to) in the waters of the reef gave us a chance to see see some amazing sub-marine life at close quarters; sharks (harmless); turtles (a local lad by the name of Buddy); barracuda and a host of flamboyantly coloured reef fish and coral formations. On shore, birds, birds and more birds - thousands of them everywhere, co-existing happily with their human visitors. Our island is so small you can walk right round it in under an hour. With a fully stocked bar and restaurant it wasn't exactly castaway, but it was a temporary flight from the modern world - no internet, no mobile phone coverage. Fittingly, when we found ourselves alone in the resort lounge on our second and final night, picking out something to watch on the VCR, it was an ancient VHS tape of "Groundhog Day" - a movie featuring an improbably young Bill Murray, plucked from a time before the digital world ever existed.

Northern territories - hot enough for ya now, Poms?

We travel on board the Ghan, the iconic Australian train that travels the best part of 3000km from the southern city of Adelaide all the way through to Darwin, in the process passing through some of the most remote, empty country on the planet. The Ghan is a sumptuous experience, a kind of mini-cruise on wheels where all your food and drink on board is free (as in, part of our very-sharp-intake ticket price) and the scenery tho desolate is often breathtaking. You encounter some very interesting people, like Bob, a retired particle physicist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of just about everything who confided he used to keep a box of depleted uranium under his desk at work...

The Ghan also turns out to be a time-machine, offering an un-asked for glimpse into the not so distant future. The average age of passengers on board has to be 70, with quite a few much older than than that. No problem in itself, but what is slightly depressing is that when we disembark to do the various off-train excursions in Alice Springs we found ourselves apparently morphing into generic Old People -  young woman at a coffee stop offering to carry our drinks for us, and, worse still, the guy at the reptile house going out of his way to see us across a busy (as in, one car per hour) road.

Meanwhile the weather is getting its act together. Leaving Adelaide it was 28c, in Alice the gauge was nudging 36, and by the time we made our penultimate journey stop in  Katherine the day temp was scheduled to hit 40c. It's getting very, very hot, and that's the way it is when we finally reach Darwin after two days and nights on board. We weren't expecting a lot of Darwin - just a launch pad for our Kakadu trip - but find we like it a lot. On Christmas Day 1974 Darwin was al but totally destroyed by cyclone Tracey, meaning that what is here now is almost all new - a young, funky city of about 110,000 people that feels like it has as much in common with tropical South East Asia as the rest of Oz. It's also unique in that, in Feb 1942, the same Japanese attack force that had bombed Pearl Harbour launched a raid  on the city and oil installations at the port of  Darwin - the start of an assault on the Northern Territory that lasted some 21 months and to date the only ever recorded external attack on mainland Australia. Walking out of our hotel one morning, we happened by total coincidence to find ourselves, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, witnessing the service  of remembrance on on the lawns in front of the war memorial - a small poignant moment.

The planned highlight of our stay up here was the trip to Kakadu - the vast area of national park deep in the outback beyond Darwin. The trip centred on a visit to some aboriginal rock-art sites and, before that, a wee cruise on the Mary river; allegedly the most croc-infested waters in all Australia with some 50 crocs per kilometre of wet stuff. Unlike those in Katherine gorge (the mini-cruise we'd done as one of our excursions from the Ghan) these were not freshwater but the much more dangerous saltwater animals, top of the food chain and they know it. We certainly saw plenty, and at close quarters, during the hour or so we were out. It's all perfectly safe, of course, so long as you follow some basic rules, such as remembering that the kangaroos in Cleland wildlife park in Adelaide are cute; they will feed out of your hand. The crocs in Kakadu are not cute. They will feed off your hand (and probably your arm, too.)

As well as some hefty reptiles we also caught views of a huge variety of exotic bird life, making Kakadu a truly special place to visit. Inevitably we spent a huge proportion of the long day sitting on a coach, but that's the deal - the scale of everything here is vast. It's also very much a case of catch it while you can. Kakadu has been there forever and it's easy to imagine it will be there forever, too, but it won't. Current forecasts on rising sea levels suggest that in 40 years the waters in the park will run salt, and then Kakadu will start to die.

Home comforts. Adelaide

Our journey west along the great ocean road into South Australia takes us from touristy Apollo Bay to dour Portland with a final stopover in the pretty little waterside resort of Robe. From Robe it's pretty much one long straight and seemingly unending road for 350km until Adelaide, and it pours with rain most of the way.

Arriving into Adelaide is briefly a shock. All of a sudden there are people, and cars, and houses, none of which had been much in evidence the last few hours of driving. But it's a smaller, calmer city than Melbourne, with an unhurried, easy-going vibe that sets it apart. We stay as guests of Bev and Mike, Sian's friends from way back - both originally from South Africa but long settled in Aus. As well as offering us their generous hospitality, they also show us the sights in and around the city - out to dinner with their son David and daughter Karmen and her partner Richard, the next day a tour of the wine-growing (and wine, and beer,

tasting) region around McLaren Vale and the day after that into the hills to Mount Lofty and the remarkable Cleland Wildlife park, where we make up big-time for our lack of kangaroo sightings,  Sian gets cuddly with a Koala called Stephen, and a gaggle of exotic geese mistake her for a mate and try to eat her shorts. A rare chance to get up close with a huge variety of beautiful bird and animal life without hordes of other tourists milling around.

Tomorrow, the Ghan - the train that runs the spine of Australia from Adelaide all the way to Darwin. Two days and two nights on board; we are looking forward to it.