Wandering Scotsman

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.

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to whoever reads this..…if you read it leave a comment below to let us know!  I’ll warn you this is going to be a VERY long post, as it’s a brief update, and a summary of our year and trip so far – so grab some xmas cheer, kick back, and start reading.  There’s a load of pictures from each country linked to at the end of the post as well.

This is our first Xmas overseas without any family or friends around so to all of you, we’ll raise a wee toast, hopefully in the sun, and hopefully with a BBQ on (I’m writing this a few days beforehand).  Even for those we used to live very close by but for whatever reason we never saw each other much, and for all our friends around the world…a big xmas-y toast to you all!

We are based in Golden Bay in the North of the South Island in NZ for Xmas in a wee camp site.  It’s not quite the busy Xmas we had hoped for but many places appeared to be booked out, but we have a great view of the sea from the beach 2 metres behind the van.  Unfortunately it not really one to swim in as the tide goes out so far and it’s so shallow you’d have to walk 3km to get out of your depth.

For the last few days we’ve be in Kaiteriteri just before Abel Tasman National Park getting a slow intro to the Kiwi holidays as each spot around us got more arrivals of families carrying half their homes with them for the three week break… 4x4s with families, boats and BBQs pull in and set up camp.  Just as you think they have a lot of gear, the boat cover comes off, and the rest of the kit comes out.  Fridge Freezers are linked up the power outlets around the campsite, and BBQs are set up.

We are starting to feel like the poor camping cousins….as we don’t have any canopies to share, or bottles of Bacardi to sit around.  Our neighbours have been more than welcoming, offering their BBQ to us for a shot if we want, and keeping us in touch with the campsite going ons.  The arrivals of their three week long neighbours are talked about, and greetings made as they return to the same annual spot, despite all seeming to come from different areas of Christchurch, this is the only time they see each other.  Unfortunately le left that camp to head further north.

So it’s been a big year for us!  This time last year we were still contemplating our travels and handing in our notice, unless some magical idea came about that we could move up to the West Coast of Scotland and make some money.  Now we’re sitting on the other side of the world with a residency application in for the 2nd stage fo the process!

Last year we drove up to take in New Year in Gairloch, stopping on route to flash out headlights at our friend’s cottage across Loch Maree as they set off a Chinese Lantern to say hi to us from the distant shore in their lovely pad.   The next few months flew by with some winter activity and me spending the coldest minus 20c weekend winter climbing with my mate, and staying in the van, with the gas and all water bottles freezing solid. 

By last New Year we had made up our mind to hit the road and use the NZ working visa’s that had been burning our passports for the previous 6 months (applied for at the last minute ‘just in case”), and spent many hours trying to decide a route to get there, and work out what was feasible.

A route across Central Asia was worked out as it suited a visit to my sister’s in Oman to start out, then over to the ‘Stans (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan), Mongolia, China and Hong Kong before heading to NZ for a year.  Just as we thought we had worked out the timing of the railways from Uzbekistan round the long way to Mongolia, we stumbled across a weekly flight from Kazakhstan to Western Mongolia which was our savour and saved us buying Russian visas and ‘wasting’ a week just to transit to where we wanted to go…. 

Before we knew it, the stress levels were raising along with the excitement as we realised how much stuff we (or more likely I !?!) had, where we were going to stash it at my mums (thanks mum!).  A succession of visa applications had been made, and our Uzbekistan one arrived just in the nick of time, after hounding the useless bastards in the London Embassy for weeks (sorry, but it’s more than justified!  Jeez you’d think they’d want visitors, not make it a nightmare for them).

The trip was on, we landed in Oman fully exhausted and did very little for a week in the searing heat apart from re-acquaint with my niece.  Confident of the price of the taxi between Dubai terminals en-route to Uzbekistan, we still got ripped off by a cocky taxi driver within minutes of being left on our own.  We landed in Uzbekistan and was met by my sister’s friend (who had been my Estonian tour guide many years ago) who quickly showed us how to get a lift off a local rather then taxis.  There was always a car appeared next to you whenever you the thought of heading home entered your mind – far more efficient than any UK cabbie. 

Ciara said “How do you stop for long enough to realise where you are?”. 

We had been in our first country for 10 minutes, with 6 more to go.  It was just the start!

Uzbekistan whizzed by with our first realisation we were away wen sitting in the heat, surrounded by market sellers in Bukhara.  Our next stop in a very troubled Kyrgyzstan was all up in the air even when we left Oman due to recent border closures and violence against the government.  We had heard the border was opened so we headed for it in a 2 day trip in a hired taxi to save catching a succession of local buses.  This was to be the start of almost 6 weeks in lands of difficult communication! 

The Kyrgyzstan border crossing went smoothly and we had to call the guard over and interrupt his chess game due to the crossing only being open to foreigners.  The next few weeks were spent with highs and lows experiencing Kyrgyzstan, knowing all too well that we’d probably look back on the experience as one of the most interesting in our trip, and it was.  We asked 5 different locals about a route and got 3 different answers, we got dropped off in villages which left us very little bargaining power to get to the next village 30km off the main road.  We paid tens of times more than the locals price on the way to places, and got locals prices on the way back.  We ended up in villages with taxi drivers (that should be car owners) that spoke little English, and ended up in houses where we weren’t sure if we were getting dinner or not, with no shops in sight.  We finally got to main touritst attractions, then couldn’t work out what to do there as there were no signs, and no people.  Then we tried again, and again, to explain that there couldn’t be any wheat in one of our meals, despite every Kyryz family cooking up the finest bread and practically living off the stuff. 

This story was to be repeated several times over the next few weeks.

Despite this, In every place we were met with amazing hospitality and interest…including from my dad’s friend in the capital Bishkek who showed us some places to get a decent fill of food and beer for a couple of days.

From here we headed up to Khazakstan for a couple of days to get our tiny plane to the far west of Mongolia – we landed in a true hick town with a dirt air strip called Olgii….to start what was probably the height of our trip…..a week hiking with a cook, guide, horseman, 2 horses and a big stinking camel close to the Chinese Border.    We never got confirmation of our ticket until the day before the flight despite trying to book it for weeks….but luckily we managed to avoid last minute visas and train journeys. Until that point, it was a slight worry that it wouldn’t all come together in the few days we needed it to, and we tried to avoid the thought of paying top dollar to try and get rapid Russian visas and train tickets.   

The week was definitely one of our favourite parts – trekking every day, pitching up in tents with world class mountain views, washing in icy cold streams, and ending up trying to haul a camel through a snow drift over the last pass – stories that will live on forever.  The horseman never spoke any English but by the time we left him he had given me one of his traditional hats.

Once again, the hospitality of the few Mongolian families we stayed with was amazing, and yet again it proves that the people with the least are usually the most generous. We grew to miss the milk and yoghurt we got accustomed to, even the fizzy putrid mares milk that would explode if you shook it – a bit like a milky Coke! (in terms of fizz).  Despite planning on braving the 3-5 day bus journey across the explanse of Mongolia, we discovered there was no definite day of departure (‘when the minibus fills up’), and 2 seats were left on the 3-4hr flight, but at crazily inflated foreigner prices – plus the crazy excess baggage.  After our week’s tour  in the Altai mountains we landed in a totally chilled state to have a frantic hour of changing money, going to the ticket office, going back to the bank, back to the ticket office, arranging accommodation in Ulanbataar, and instantly the peace of the mountains had vanished!…even though it was good to shower out the smell of camel dung fires from our senses.

When we landed in Ulanbataar, we were overwhelmed by all the travellers and conversations in English around us – it was the first hostel we stayed in, and we had been on the road for 7 weeks.  It was surreal.  After a 3am yelling match between residents during a football world cup game, we decided that backpackers were a bunch of fekin’ idiots and we were sick of them already. 

From here we booked a 10 day trip that came highlighy recommended from a freak of a Manhattan brain surgeon (apparently!) who said “sitting on a bus for that long, it’s shit, f*(Cking sh!t, if you want to learn how to want to commit suicide you should go but be warned – its f&(*&ckin shit”.  When we met her she emptied her sack of collected animal bones onto the hostel floor and told us she planned to make a dress from to fly back home to the States with.  We decided our personalities were suitably far removed from hers, so we booked the trip.  

Luckily we got in with a great crowd of 3 others that were chilled….just as well as we did spend bloody hours and hours in a hot russian van for hours criss crossing the bumpy desert of Mongolia!

From here we had booked our train to Beijing.  Crossing the border was like crossing into the 21st century after being stuck away from it for 7 weeks.  There was music playing in the station, there were neon lights flashing in casinos (well it was a Chinese border town!), a very well stocked shop and it took longer for us to adjust than it took for them to adjust the width of the train wheels as we were raised on a platform to watch the spectacle.

China was great – a country that intrigues me and one that I had wanted to visit for many years.  This time there was just long enough to scratch the surface – Beijing to Xi’an, to Yanghsou, then Hong Kong and into Macau.  It was great, it was SUPER easy to travel through and a piece of piss to organise our travel.  Maybe it was just that we were used to the opposite but this felt like a holiday from our holiday.  The hostels were superb, the backstreets were fascinating, the people amazed me, and the shopping was superb.  We stayed a week in Yanghsou doing climbing, cycling, walking, river rafting (or more like a luge!), and relaxing.  Some of you may remember we considered trying to get some work here through my friend from Borneo around 6 months earlier, however she had left around 6 weeks before we got there… but in true Darren style we met one of her friends there.

From there it was a sleeper bus to Hong Kong which we LOVED!  Again its a place I’ve wanted to go to for years.  We both enjoyed it – we had a day on the beach, saw the light show, did some shopping, and could have done WAY more shopping.  Unfortunately here we also missed someone I used to work with but hey there was plenty to keep us busy.  We couldn’t get over the commercialism but we loved it all the same.

Our last stop was a treat in a hotel in Macau for two nights.  We had planned to hit the casinos and enjoy the luxury, but having seen the minimal gambling stakes, and being right at the end of our hard travels, and before the start of a bit more of reality in NZ, we totally chilled out here catching up on sleep and swimming in the pool, enjoying the luxury.

At the end of July we arrived in New Zealand just before being able to spend my birthday weekend skiing with a good friend I met in Canada over 10 years ago.  I had only met him since on my last trip to NZ.  We hit this country with a big bad thud and a bit of a downer as we realised we had to get back to a bit of normality, and had to deal with the relative monotony of living in a westernised country : no haggling, not great markets, no language barriers, no dodgy buses, trains or flights.

We were to get over this downer within a few weeks, and you can read recent blog posts about our time in NZ.  I’ll try to post up something over the next week or so about why we like it here and what made us want to stay.

Although our visas tell us we should leave here in July, in our hearts that would be way too soon for us.  We seem to have this sense of ‘purpose’ here (although god knows what it is!? ;-> ) and there are lots of things to explore, and it’s just a bit different.  Sure there are many downsides, with distances and costs being the main and the biggest ones.

Our second and hopefully final stages of our residency application went in just before Xmas, with realms of paperwork, certificates and references, and a big cheque (but not that big considering).  It’s now up to the Immigration department how long we’ll be able to stay.  We are hoping it should be relatively easy, we’ll get a ‘returning residents’ visa, and we’ll have a couple of years to live through spending at least 6 months a year in NZ (but likely most of that time) before we get our full residents permit, assuming it goes that far.

It’s been a blast of a year, and we’re starting off 2011 on the road.  We’ve got our 4×4 Hitop Toyota Hiace campervan, boogie boards, mountain bikes, BBQ, climbing gear, road atlas and it feels like it’s right where we want to be.

If only the lot of you could get over here easily to catch up regularly, life would be near perfect!*   Roll on travel at the speed of light.

(* – although it’s all too easy for me to write that – I’ve not worked since May!)

Merry Xmas everyone, and have a bloody great New Year!!

Photos – click on the country to launch the slideshow :

Uzbekistan Gallery
Kyrgyzstan Gallery
Mongolia Gallery
China
Hong Kong Gallery

PS : If you read this far, leave a comment below!