Lets Begin

Wellington to Picton was the start of our journey south, although you can fly, I thought Annette should really get to experience the trip through the Marlborough Sounds on the InterIslander. We took the same pics that we have shown you on the blog before from our last trip down south so I won't repeat them but I thought this one was funny! I'd a little difficulty keeping the gruaige under control in the windy Cook Straits. We picked up a hire car upon arrival in Picton and began the windy scenic journey to Nelson. We'd nothing else planned for the day except to arrive in Nelson that day as we planned to tramp a section of the Abel Tasman National Park the next day. Dotted along the journey were various scenic lookouts - so naturally we stopped and took the obligatory photos.

We were both looking forward to arriving at our accomodation in Nelson. I'd found out about the apartment we were staying at through a brilliant book I bought here in NZ. I'm sure Cathal rues the day that I came across this book, it's proven costly for him. The Crafty Girls Road Trip is a book choc full with recommedations of where to find crafty stuff all around NZ. It even recommends crafty places to stay. So when I read that textile artist Jenny Barraud rented out stylish waterfront apartments in her restored villa I checked it out online. Villa10 did not disappoint. The lovely Jenny even recommended some fine places to eat in Nelson (we ate at one of them and I can't remember the name of it but it was 2 doors down from a fantastic shop called Fibre Spectrum - you can see where my priorities lie and why you'll be glad to welcome Cathal back to the blog once we get to the Christchurch review).

Here's the view from the apartment.

And the apartment itself. It was a lovely place to stay and a real treat at the start of our holiday. Jenny even stocked the fridge so we had a choice of breakfasts each morning - better than any apartment I have stayed in ever. Apart from the trek in the Abel Tasman which I'll cover in my next post we just had a few hours the following day to check out Nelson. We enjoyed a great lunch at Morrison St. Cafe and I had a great time checking out all the yarn sources here but you'll have to read the Clickety Knits Blog to find out about that. We flew that afternoon to Christchurch. At which point I'll pass the baton onto Cathal but not before I tell you all about the Abel Tasman.

New Zealand for 3, please.Oops, make that 4!

Meet Welly, our travelling mascot fuelling up on the grass in our back garden before his long travels. We thought he'd add a little sparkle to our campervan so we couldn't resist liberating him from his very ungrass like shelf in a touristy shop near Turangi.

My sister Annette arrives tomorrow. I don't think I could be more excited. Here's what we plan to get up to when she arrives.

Week One
May 1st Annette arrives in NZ and spends a week in Wellington.
(I’ve all sorts of ideas of what we can do but I might let her get over her jetlag first!)

Week Two
May 7th Travel to the south island by ferry. Spend 2 days in Nelson, taking in a trek in the Abel Tasman National Park.
May 9th Fly Nelson to Christchurch.
May 11th Collect campervan for our two week road trip. Cathal will have joined us at this point – well someone will have to drive the campervan!

Weeks 3-4
The plans after this point are supposed to be fairly fluid but any of the readers who know me will know that I can’t be that relaxed, so here’s the plan. There’s a few places where we have booked things so we need to get there by those dates but everything else in between is flexible!!!

So, the Campervan

Day 1 Christchurch to Mount Cook
Day 2 Mount Cook to Oamaru
Day 3 Oamaru to Dunedin
Day 4 Dunedin
Day 5 Dunedin to The Caitlins
Day 6 The Caitlins to Invercargill
Day 7 Invercargill to Te Anu
Day 8 From Te Anu a day trip to Doubtful Sound
Day 9 Te Anu to Milford Sound – day trip?
Day 10 Te Anu to Queenstown, where we will hopefully get to meet up with my cousin who will have just arrived in NZ for the year.
Day 11 Queenstown
Day 12 Haast to see the Blue Pools
Day 13 Haast to Fox Glacier
Day 14 Fox Glacier to Greymouth stopping enroute to view Franz Josef Glacier
Day 15 Greymouth to Christchurch, dump campervan! stay in a hotel before early departure the next day

26th May Fly to Rotorua
27th May Day trip to White Island
28th May Fly back to Wellington

I deliberately haven’t linked to all of the places above, the reason being that I have no doubt you will hear in detail about all of these places upon our return (thank you Cathal).

Sharon

Cable Cars

I think the picture tells its own story. Yesterday after going around looking at second hand furniture shops, and buying more paraphernalia for our house. We decided to do something on the tourist side of things. In case you are wondering what Sharon is doing when I am taking the photos, here's a clue.

We went down to one of the main streets in the town and took the Cable Car up into the mountains. You can see from the photo, that apart from the reward of experiencing the Cable Car ride itself, you also get to visit the treasures on the top such as the Botanical Gardens. We will have more on the gardens on a later post put for now I am happy to deal with the Cable Car itself.

The topography of Wellington City is very similar to that of Hong Kong, in that the buildings are sandwiched between the mountains and the sea. Over the years both cities have succumbed to the demand for further development and sprawled, in a compact way, up the mountains and through the valleys. It is no surprise then to learn that Hong Kong has a cable car also called the Peak Tram, which it has to be said is far more hair raising that the Wellingtonians version. Sorry Wellington. The Peak Trams incline is over 25 degrees in some places and you really just hope the cable doesn’t snap when it rocks to a stationary position at one of its many stops on the slope. The Peak Tram is so steep that the seats only face one direction otherwise you would end up apologies profusely to the couple opposite that your intentions were purely honourable while peeling yourself off them on the way back down. Here is a photo from the top of the Peak Tram and the roller coaster type view of the drop from the top.



In any event we enjoyed the Wellington Cable Car and in particular the brilliant weather. Which ever way the Botanical Gardens were situated there wasn’t a breath of wind. We had some tea in the tea house, where else, and I decided to have a mince pie with ice cream. Well it is Christmas after all. I have to say it was not as nice as my mammy’s but the sunshine helped ease the disappointment. Here are some photo's.

Cathal

From 20 to -5 degrees in 60 seconds

Although we have gone from Hong Kong to Wellington via Auckland and Hamilton we are still playing catch up with our posts, and so we turn our attention to NZ’s biggest city, Auckland, before posting our way down south.

Human nature is funny, once you arrive somewhere for a year, the sense of urgency goes and in its place comes the catch phrase “a sure we’ll do it when we come back.” Add a little jet lag and you become quite lackadaisical about the whole tourist thing.

Therefore we have few photographs of Auckland except for one we took on our way to Devonport, a small resort town about a ten minute ferry ride from Auckland.

We did however manage to do a few other things while we were in Auckland despite our tiredness. One of those was a visit to the “Minus 5” bar where you can have a drink from an ice glass in a bar made out of ice which is full of ice sculptures. Basically lots of ice! Before you go in you are kitted out in gloves, jackets, boots etc. It’s a bit gimmicky but an experience none the less. You are not allowed to take your own photographs, but you can conveniently buy theirs before you leave. This also entitles you to download the digital photos off their web site and send e-cards of your photo which is a good idea. At least they don’t have to worry about people out staying their welcome as believe me it is cold irrespective of jackets, gloves etc. and one is not inclined to loiter.

We also tried to get into the revolving restaurant in the tower building you can see in the city skyline photo above. It rotates every hour so you can go around twice if you are a slow eater! Unfortunately it was full, but we didn’t mine “as sure we’ll do it again when we come back!”

Incidentally there is a very funny part of a novel about revolving restaurants I read sometime ago. Two old acquaintances are eating in a restaurant and every time the older gentleman leaves the room, when he returns his friend was no longer where he had left him but seemingly moved to another table. Each time the older gent would ask his friend was the new table more to his liking. The younger friend would look at him somewhat puzzled and say that the table was fine. It turns out that the older gent was unaware that they were in a revolving restaurant. It’s funnier in the book....................honest.

Cathal

Manaia

We've been taking life pretty easy since we arrived in Auckland. Perhaps it's the atmosphere or perhaps it's the fact that we know that we are going to be in the country for some time but we haven't felt the need to do a mad dash of the tourist spots here. We did make it to the Auckland Museum though and were treated to an excellent exhibition called Vaka Moana, obviously we weren't allowed to take any pictures but to explain briefly it was an exhibition describing the exploration of the Pacific some 4000 years ago when the anestors of the Pacific launched their first ocean going craft. After that we had decided to attend a Manaia Cultural Performance, experiencing Maori song, dance and of course the famous haka. Most of my photos didn't come out well due to dimmed lighting and intense action on stage, so I've just posted the best of a poor lot. Our families will be treated(?) to the whole performance as Cathal captured it on the camcorder. We still haven't downloaded anything to DVD yet so it'll easily be the New Year before ye will receive a DVD - apologies!

Today we headed out to Devonport on the ferry and took this picture of Auckland on the way out. It was an absolutely beautiful day and the factor had to come out - yipee.
Here's a quick glimpse of our arrival on Devonport. I'm not going to elaborate about Devonport I'll leave that to Cathal. I will talk about it a little on my other blog though, I found a yarn shop there, and continued my stash enhancement ( did I mention I also managed to find a yarn store in Hong Kong).
We're off to Hamilton in the morning to visit Sean and Anna Mc Cormack for a few days - Leixlip readers will know who I am talking about.

We'll be back online mid next week when we get down to Wellington, till then see ya.

Sharon

Bia Hong Kong - Part II

We intermingled International cuisine with Chinese food during our stay and although it’s touted as fusion food, I’d count our meal in Felix as an international meal. To explain further, Felix is a Phillipe Starck designed restaurant on the top floor of the Peninsula Hotel, with absolutely fantabulous views. Before we left Ireland we were told that if we felt like treating ourselves in Hong Kong, Felix was the place to go. We decided to book a table there for our last night in Hong Kong.

Felix was a real treat. From the dedicated luxurious lifts that swoop you up to a dizzy height (they also spectacularly dim the lights upon arrival at the restaurant), to the dual frontaged bar, the incredible view, the well designed serving pods, Felix has a serious wow factor, oh, and two g&t’s cost you €18!!!!! So, hands down I think it counts as our most expensive meal we have ever had ever, anywhere. The views are spectacular, the experience was unforgettable and the food is excellent. We had a really great night. We didn’t take any photos of our meals but we couldn’t ignore deserts….
oh, and here’s one which will give you some sense of the décor, just ignore the pensive look (oh, ok, then I was a little inebriated by that stage).

Just in case you might think Hong Kong is a precursor to how we’ll be living in New Zealand, be under no illusion, real life commences when we reach Wellington. We’ll be treating Auckland and Hamilton as part of the holiday (before the long real life holiday in Wellington begins).

Sharon

The story so far

Hi all,

Well we made it to Hong Kong safely, the flight was uneventful but long!!! We had organised a pick up from the airport to our hotel and when we arrived we were very glad we didn’t have to think about how to get ourselves there. So, below I’ve listed a short summation of our time here in Hong Kong so far. We’ll be back with pictures, we've quite a few to trawl through, we'll probably do that on our next 11 hour flight which will be on Tuesday to Auckland!

HK Highs & Lows

Highs

Star Ferry at night – from Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. At this time of the year all of the skyscrapers are lit up with various seasonal greetings. Very pretty.

Shopping – oh, where to start. The shops are huge, well stocked, seemingly open all hours, and oh, so seductive. Everything is on sale or is tied into some promotion. You can expect at least a 10% discount off the listed price. It is impossible not to end up shopping even if your intentions for the day are sightseeing. To allow you cross busy streets you are navigated underground through a warren of department stores before you finally emerge on the other side. It takes a strong will not to get sidetracked. We had a long shopping list for Hong Kong and we knew we were going to spend a lot of time in the shops but on our first very positively we are not going shopping day we got sucked in almost immediately. It has to be said though it’s such a part of the city and is a tourist attraction in itself. There are so many higher end shopping centres with nothing but designer labels it’s hard to see how they all can survive but with a population of almost 7 million I guess the $ must be there. One of the best shopping centres we found was Times Square in Causeway Bay, 10 floors of retail therapy with a good mix of designer and more affordable brands! We bought runners, backpacks, a camcorder and an iPod here. The value in electronics is not as good as we would have thought prior to arrival but saying that you will still make savings over the same goods back home, but it’s not so good that you would veer from the shopping list and be tempted by other electrical goods. Cosmetics and perfumes are good value though!

The Street Architecture – I’ll leave that one to Cathal to describe but even I was impressed.

The Peak Tram and the journey back down from the peak – feels like a vertical drop – a definite must do for any trip to the city.

Cleanliness of the city

Politeness of people everywhere

Cathal’s first massage! Maybe I should let him elaborate but lets just say he was walked on – literally.

Very efficient and user friendly transport network

Pacific Coffee Company and their free internet.


Lows

Still having a bad cold in Hong Kong and getting a lot of scared looks every time I sneezed/coughed or blew my nose. Think I should have been wearing a medical mask. A lot of people wore them on the streets.

Fake Handbag and fake Watch hawkers – like anywhere these people are just annoying.

Eating my first full meal with chopsticks – a painful experience. I mean if I can manipulate a pair of knitting needles why oh why can’t I eat with chopsticks!!!

Chicken – fatty and grisly – everywhere, from cheap and cheerful establishments to restaurants where we paid over 20Euro for a chicken main course. (Liam & Sheelagh – the chicken in The Grand Paella is 1st class by comparison).

Christmas muzak in hotel

Clothes shopping when you are a UK Size 12 – the equivalent of XXXXXXXXXL in Hong Kong – depressing.

Hong Kong Museum of Art – disappointing to say the least, the contemporary art section wasn’t even open.

Walking the legs off ourselves every day.

Don’t know if I can call it a low but we’ve been on the go so much here I haven’t had time to either knit or read – a relaxing chilled holiday this ain’t.

Sharon