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..