Wandering Scotsman

Jeez it’s been a busy couple of months for us.  I can’t believe that I’ve been so lax in blogging, yet we’ve been staying at a luxury 5 Star B&B/Lodge…with free WiFi. 

Out time there ended last week a few days prematurely due to our circumstances (more later).  It was a crazy 6 weeks there trying to give someone guidance on their business, that for many reasons wasn’t quite ready to move at the same pace as us.  At times it was frustraing, other times funny, and other times it created so much anger in us, we realised our lives were being consumed by someone else’s issues, so it was time to move on.

It was a hard call to move – we has initially wanted to stay long term, and it was a potential avenue for us to stay in Wanaka, whilst doing work we were really enjoying initially.  It looked promising for a while, but for many reasons wasn’t likely to be a viable option….a real shame as at one point we thought we could have landed onto something that would have kept us busy and satisifed for a few months.

We haven’t managed to do too much in Wanaka of the things we had hoped to, but that is slightly less of an issue now which you’ll understand soon.  Several afternoons were spent climbing, we only managed to bike in the forest on our doorstep once, I managed to do some stand up paddle boarding (and met one of the female champions…who was a right rude bugger), many swims in the lake, and was just slowly getting into the habit of a morning run.  If anywhere was going to get me up in the morning, it was Wanaka – a run along the lake and river in stunning scenery.   Ciara however didn’t find it that stunning as to get up and run

But we have great news!!  I somehow have managed to get a full time IT job as a Software Development Manager in Queenstown (which some people have got me to refer to it as “South Wanaka”)….  If you think of NZ’s as one of the world’s adventure playgrounds, then Queenstown is the commercial heart of it all. 

The company provides photo souvenirs to attractions around the world (which includes Edinburgh Castle and Fife’s Deep Sea World) and I’ll be managing the software team that writes all their stuff (that’ll be 2 of them then).  It’s a bizarre marketplace to be so successful in, but it also combines my interest in photography…  the software transfers photo and video across wireless networks, allows people to share them online in social media an much more.

We’re still pinching ourselves – there must only be one or two other jobs like this in Queenstown, if that.

In the last 10 days, I’ve had one interview, accepted the job, we’ve left the lodge, looked at 10 apartments/houses in Queenstown, applied for one of them, been down at not managing to sneak in a trip home, bought 2 winter ski/snowboard season passes at “early bird” prices and ”planned” a couple of weeks more touring in the South Island to complete the circuit!!  PHEW!  It’s been exhausting….and I haven’t even started work yet (in one week it’ll be a year after I left my last work).

We just heard today that our dream house has been secured as well, with a move in date at the start of May.  It’s bigger than we need, but it’s pretty lush……  and has a log burner, panoramic windows, and views across the lake to die for.  We can walk to the town centre as well which is a bonus, and we’ll get fit in the process as it’s up a steep hill.  The photo at the top is the view from the living room!

We’ll have 2 ski resorts within 15km, and 2 more within 45-90 minutes.  There’s everything on our doorstep from bungy jumping, jet boating (Shotover jet less than 10km away),  parachuting, paragliding, kitesurfing, fishing, world class mountain biking, some diving, 4×4 driving, some of NZ’s best vineyards,  and amazing trekking…..its tourist prices for most of those but we’ll survive with our own toys!

For visitors, Queenstown really is in the heart of where the majority of tourists want to visit.  You can fly to Milford Sound from here (or drive), the lakes and glaciers are just around the corner or on the doorstep, and the mountains are all around.  It’s only 200km from the coast, but the lake is huge anyway.

Queenstown, adventure capital of NZ, here we come!    In the meantime, here’s some pics of our new (rental) house!  Yes, that’s a log burner….and check out that view 

(in the run up to the move in date, we’re in Wanaka as a write this on a campsite by the river, we’re back to Queenstown on Sunday for Ciara’s interview for the same company, then heading towards to West Coast and glaciers for our last part of the road trip, and the last roads to cover in this South Island mission)

Hey folks, it’s been a loooong time yet again.  I know you’ll have been checking it out daily (ahem) but there’s just not been enough hours in the day. 

We arrived again in Wanaka just over 3 weeks ago and have been taking part in a ‘HelpX’ scheme working for food and accommodation.  It’s a superb place – luxury lodge, one of the top 4 or 5 in Wanaka (but that’s quite a wide price bracket), but definitely unique in town, maybe even in New Zealand.  The lodge is built in an all wood alpine chalet style, a full on eco and bio friendly house with indoor chemical free pool, outdoor spa, fruit and veg garden, and what must be some of the best views in Wanaka from the lounge and Sky level.

Anway, what have we been up to?  Well the hours have been way longer than we expected as we’ve been doing housekeeping, but also helping out with marketing and IT work. I’ve been trying to get online booking up and running for them, an in-house property management system, and getting the data out to various websites for booking.  Ciara’s been trying her hardest to formulate some kind of marketing plan for them.  I’ve spent the bulk of the last week comparing a couple of systems and we’ve just confirmed which one we’re doing, so it’s full steam ahead…or maybe a little simmer, as that’s about the pace it seems to happen here   It has sometimes felt like we’ve not sat down until after 10/11pm as we usually end up doing the dinner as well, which is never just a straightforward stir fry.

It’s been a bit of a battle with our time – we’ve been a bit too soft and it’s felt like our life revolves around the place sometimes and we hardly escape, but it is a very interesting project for us both…..if a little frustrating at the lack of progress sometimes, but hey this isn’t the place to write about that.  It often appears hard to escape the building….there’s always stuff to do, we’re probably too soft at sticking with times to go as we have got too stuck in the ‘project’ for our own good.  We’re sure we can make a big difference, but there are too many distractions taking our focus away from what needs to be done, and we’re not really getting a decent reward for the amount of care and the endless talks we have about the place.

The host is amazingly generous with us though and we’ve probably been eating the best we’ve ever eaten in our lives!  Fresh fruit and veg, salads, venison steaks and mince, organic produce, and the best muesli and home made yoghurt ever.  The hardest thing is trying to balance the housekeeping side of things, and trying to make a difference with the business building stuff which we feel we can make a huge impact with.  We’ve had some very interesting chats with him, visited some of his friends, and taken him out climbing.  It could prove expensive for us in the long run though as we’re starting to appreciate expensive cuts of meat and fine wines (he’s a winemaker by profession).

The downside about this is that although we’ve been out climbing a few times, we’ve not done as much as we’d like locally, and not had many opportunities to try and network.  The realities of getting suitable jobs for our visa is unlikely in Wanaka, and it would truly gut us to have to leave this place.  Wanaka’s slogan is “Life the way it should be”…..and it’s hard to argue with that.  You’re away from the madness of Queenstown (although only an hour away) but you have many similar activities to do, and with less commercial pressure.  There are more local, quality climbing crags here than anywhere in New Zealand, we can swim at a pebbly beach 200m from the door, run/walk/bike on lake and riverside trails from the door, mountain bike from the door to the trails in the forest up the road, fish just down the road, and loads more.  We can see the local ski hill (Treble Cone) from the window, and there are 2 other ski fields just along the road, and we’re on the edge of the Mt Aspiring National Park.  We’ve even managed to get out on some borrowed inflatable stand up paddle boards on the lake which has been great. I actually won a board like this just after we left Wellington, but we can’t get it in the van.  As we’re basing ourselves here for a while I may get it sent to me if possible though.

We’ve only had one night out on the town since arriving this time which was with a couple of American’s we met in Queenstown who came back to Wanaka.  We’ve went to the cinema once since we started to get some space, and that’s about it!

You can probably tell though.  We. Love. Wanaka.  And we don’t want to leave.
(especially just before the winter season which is 3 months away….arg, I had to miss out on early bird season passes last week).

We are going to be here for at least another three weeks, hopefully longer.  There’s been mention of a couple of things in the offing, but I doubt they are going to materialise.  I’m waiting to hear about another local job application, but there seems to be a flood of Christchurch people applying for jobs around the South Island so it’s been a very popular job and it’s an extremely rare opportunity.

The weather has been superb this week, but it’s been frustrating sitting in the lodge, watching the morning clouds burn off leaving stunning days, whilst we stay in busting a gut doing professional stuff for little reward, but hey ho, it’s a great place to be around.  We are staying in what we now call ‘the dungeon’ – its a small self contained apartment style but it’s so dark it’s been a chore getting up for the early morning exercise we keep promising.  The most active it’s been before I’m online and working has been a stroll to the beach with a coffee in hand about 8.30am.  I have been swimming daily this week just before the sun goes down, after the water has had a chance to warm up in the lake.

That was a usual waffle after a few weeks so I’ll leave it there for now.  We have our case office for our residency application, but we have to get relevant jobs for it to progress….. we’ll have to see what happens over the next few weeks.

Hope everyone is well.

That’s us based in Wanaka again for a couple of weeks.  We are taking part in a ‘HelpX’ scheme and working in exchange for accommodation and food at Wanaka Lakehouse.  This is the first time we’ve done anything like this although we’ve talked about it for ages.  If you know about ‘WOOFing’ on organic farms, it’s similar, but not restricted to organic farms and stuff.  We have started this scheme at the top though – take a moment to check out the link and you’ll know what I mean!

We arrived yesterday and there are 4 others here helping out which has been a nice intro for us, and we sat and had a bbq with them last night.  It’s going to be an interesting two weeks – most of the time will be spent gardening and housekeeping, but will likely get involved in other aspects of running an upmarket B&B like marketing, social media etc.  The owner appears to be pretty flexible although there is loads to do.  We hope to be able to go climbing, biking etc in our downtime.  The river is out the back of the property as well so no doubt I’ll make another failed fishing attempt as well!

The place is almost like my dream house.  It’s on the edge of Wanaka, with killer views over the lake and mountains, and built in an alpine chalet style with an extremely strong emphasis on being an eco lodge.  There are luxurious features around like an indoor small swimming pool which links to the lounge area, a games room, and guests use the place like their own house.

The other HelpX’ers leave on Saturday and the place is quiet on the booking front, although a big promo is being launched today.  I’ll let you know how we get on…

We’ve had a great couple of days in queenstown, and a few drinks with an American couple (including some boozy bar bucking bronco machine!).
We did some climbing today (followed by a swim in the lake!) and biking yesterday and really like the vibe of Queenstown although it is a tad touristy…but that leaves and endless supply of things to do.
Were heading towards Glenorchy slowly and a lakeside BBQ with the same couple tonight at a DOC camground just outside Queenstown.
We’ll be out if reception for a few days before heading back to Wanaka mid week.

I’ve just been watching a bit of one of NZ’s documentaries showing latest pics of the quake aftermath. The damage to the city is far worse than I could have imagined. Cars, buildings and lives crushed…many of the streets we’ve walked along almost unrecognisable.
If you’re buying yourself a wee treat or a couple of pints this weekend, please consider dropping some money to help the people of Christchurch instead by visiting http://www.redcross.org.nz/
If you read this regularly consider the donation a ‘payment’ for reading the blog 🙂

We are ok after the big tragic earthquake in Christchurch today.  We were on Stewart Island at the time and out fishing, about 6 hours drive away so felt nothing.
Thoughts going out to everyone across Canterbury.

It’s been a bit of a whistle stop tour of the South Island so far since my folks have arrived.  In saying that, we’ve picked wisely so they’ve visited the top spots, yet still managed to relax, and have rarely driven more than a few hours every few days.  This is a much better way to ‘do’ the South Island than do what most people do – visit for three weeks, try to cram in the North and South Island, underestimate distances, and spend have their time on the road whilst flying through places.

Our budgets have been blown out the water a bit too, but it’s been good, and we’ve now done most of the expensive ‘big ticket’ things we wanted to do on the trip, so we’d have done them at some point anyway….but we’ve left many places without scratching the surface, in the hope we return.

In the last three weeks’ we’ve been from Christchurch to Lake Tekapo, Mount Cook, Wanaka, Queenstown, Doubtful Sound and wrapped up their time here with Kaikoura and Akaroa so they could see some of the coastal areas too.

So what have we been doing?   Within the first two days on the road we went up Mt John Observatory in Tekapo and saw the starry skies at midnight, with some good photos taken on my own camera (with the staff’s help!).  We also went on a 50 minute scenic flight from Lake Tekapo on a cracking day, which took  us over the lake, surrounding hill stations (huge farms), then around Mt Cook (NZ’s largest mountain), the Franz and Fox Glaciers and surrounding mountains.  This was one thing that blew me away – I love seeing things from the sky, and mountains like this were an exception, so it was worth every dollar spent…and it could have brought me to tears if I wasn’t so manly

Needless to say when I tried fishing in the ‘top spot’ where some motorhomers told us to go…I never caught jack shit. 

From here we went to Mt Cook where we left ‘the olds’ to do a day walk and relax, whilst Ciara and I overnighted in the Mueller Hut in an alpine setting.  We lucked out on this with a perfect day and evening for it.  A beast of a short (in distance) but very sharp trek directly up the mountainside to a hit in an amazing setting, just beside a ridge which overlooked the campsite, but it was also directly across the valley from a glacier.  Clearish skies were above for some stargazing at night, and we got up at 5.30am to catch the sunrise opposite the glacier.  Mueller Hut is reached via a bloody steep walk, but it’s right in the mountains on a ridge overlooking some glaciers.

From here we drove down to Wanaka which is one of my favourite places in New Zealand – like a local’s Queenstown, albeit on a much smaller scale.  We managed a walk up one of the small local hills, and a days climbing, and some fishing.  I had crammed in a job interview on the first morning of their visit in Chirstchurch, and I had a second Skype interview from the van whilst we were in Wanaka.  (Un?)fortunately I never got the job as it wasn’t a perfect skills match.

Moving on a bit too quickly, we drive straight through Queenstown and went to Te Anau to spend an overnight trip to Doubtful Sound, one of the biggest fjiords in New Zealand.  Most folk would head to Milford as you can drive directly to it, but for Doubtful it’s a boat, bus, ferry combo to get there.  It was chucking it down which meant there were hundreds of amazing waterfalls around that were just as a result of the rain.

From here we headed back and spent a couple of nights in Queenstown where we did the Skippers Canyon jetboat (which I think offers a far better package than the better known Shotover Jet), where my mum was panicked on the road to get there, never mind the jetboat ride!  Somehow when we got back and went up the gondola overlooking Queenstown, Allan commented that he may like to do the bunjee swing….before he had the chance to rethink we had him paid and checked in.

We did a big drive up the east coast, and went to Kaikoura where we swam with dolphins, and mum and Allan went to see the whales.  I’ve been going on about hundreds of dolphins there to Ciara for year, so luckily it was a similar experience to what I had a few years ago with hundreds of dolphins around us.  We also saw several Orca’s as well which was amazing.

Also, I finally CAUGHT MY FIRST DECENT FISH!!!  I was surfcasting from the beach in Kaikoura when I hauled in what I thought was my third bunch of seaweed until I realised it kept moving and had some silver fleshy thing on the end of it… unfortunately for Allan he had to do the nasty bit at the end as I still need to be able to deal with all the jumping around.  Although we put it on the bbq that night I think the ‘aftermath’ of the actual fishing may have put Ciara off a bit.

That last few days were spent in Akaroa where Ciara and I had been just before they arrived.  There was mixed weather but some absolutely roasting hot days by the beach…well timed as I read yesterday that swimming there was banned for a bit this week due to bad water quality!

This post has been half written for quite some time but I’ve hardly been online while they have been here as we’ve been too busy doing things, and catching up – the first time since the end of April last year (which was manic as we were packing to head off).  Although I haven’t went into too much detail about everything it was a really quality few weeks, and we loved showing off New Zealand and the completely different things you can do here in such a short space of time, and relatively short distance (they covered 2300km in 3 weeks).  We had some van rental issues at the start which we rapidly got over, but apart from that everything went super smoothly, making up our plans as we went along, and readjusting them to ensure we weren’t rushing around everywhere, and not spending too much time driving.

It made us feel good that we had visitors that had never been over here, and really appreciated why we wanted to stay for longer, and what we loved about the place.  We managed to experience some really diverse activities throughout the time, and many great free ones as well – never mind just the quality time we managed to spend.  It was fortunate we had them visit whilst we were on the road as well as it will prove really hard or impossible to spend such an amount of time when we are working, with limited holidays.

Sadly they’re back already, but we’ve managed to spend this weekend looking after a 12 acres ‘lifestyle block’ owned by one of Ciara’s relatives, and we are heading away again on Monday.  We’ve made enquiries to a volunteeering place in Wanaka which we need to contact again, in the hope we can do some work in exchange for accommodation for a couple of weeks or so.  We’ll head back there at some time anyway, and hope to squeeze in a visit to Stewart Island.  We’re going to really struggle to decide when to start putting an end to this road trip, despite it costing a bit more than we hoped, and even harder to decide where to end up.  Both of us would love to stay in somewhere like Wanaka for a while, but ‘real’ jobs may take us elsewhere.  We are considering Christchurch but we just don’t think it’s nearly as nice a city as Wellington, but it does offer a whole host of other places to visit around it.

Anyway, better dash…….  more sometime!  (and I’ll do pictures).

Alive and well and in Mt Cook. Had amazing couple of days with a night visit to an observatory, then a grand scenic flight for 50 mins today around the tallest mountains, glaciers and Lake Tekapo.
Today’s flight was the best I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some mean heli drops snowboarding before. Amazing and for once, worth every expensive dollar.

We got our first hardcore walk in today.  It was a bit more than a walk but took us to the 1800m or so summit of Avalanche Peak in Arthur’s Pass..it was a cracking day. We were surrounded by Keas at the top, an alpine parrot which apparently is super intelligent.  I remember them from the last time…you cant leave anything out or they’ll fly off with it. Wont write much more as I’m writing this on my phone.