First, apologies for the long gap in the blog. My laptop decided to die, the internet in NZ is patchy and slow and when I finally got a new laptop it has windows 8 which is certainly different! Anyway,here is the next bit.
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| We loved these Christmas trees made out of plastic bottles in Auckland. This was graduation day so the square was filled with happy families! |
Our journey
south for Christmas was well planned we thought – bus to Auckland on Thursday, train to
Wellington on Friday, ferry across the Cook Straits and train to Christchurch
on Saturday. All went well until we
arrived at Auckland railway station early in the morning to be told ‘train?
What train?’ The train runs 3 days a
week and not on a Friday. The staff were
all terribly helpful but we could not contact KiwiRail as the office was closed
because no train was running! So we cut
our losses and just managed to catch a coach headed for Wellington and were
able to continue our journey.
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| Christmas Eve supper by the pool (which emptied itself during the big earthquake) |
Christmas
with our NZ family was wonderful and we enjoyed our week in Christchurch.
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| Christmas Day |
To return we relocated a camper van to
Auckland which gave us a taster of the camp sites. Far more people start their camper-van
holidays in Auckland and end them in Christchurch than the other way
around.
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| Just to prove that the rain did eventually stop! |
If you ‘relocate’ a van it
costs $1 per day, they give you $100 towards fuel and the ferry crossing is
booked and paid for – you also pay insurance and for extra passengers on the
ferry. Apart from 3 days of rain it was
a good experience and we arrived back just in time to go to a huge New Year’s
Eve party in Sharron’s (Marina Manager) garden.
We spent
January fixing things on the boat and waiting for the school summer holidays to
end before we were going to set off again.
Mending the sails in my makeshift workshop ashore and on the front of the boat.
Our original
plan was to leave NZ in April 2014 at the end of the hurricane season and sail
to Australia via Tonga, Fiji & Vanuatu.
This has changed, of course, as John has fallen in love with NZ and
wants to stay a bit longer. So we bought
a little camper van and set off in February for a grand tour – lucky us.
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| New Zealand is a different country .. |
