Wandering Scotsman

I’m lagging behind on blog posts again but last weekend we managed to get up for a short scenic HeliPro flight over Wellington for Ciara’s birthday.  We had to cancel on the big day due to the typical last minute windy Wellington weather but on the Saturday the weather was superb.  We departed from the waterfront in the heart of Wellington city and flew around above the city for a mere 10 minutes but it was great all the same.  I love seeing things from above so it would never be a bad trip.  We managed to get indoor climbing again the following day.

Unfortunately I don’t think the birthday meal was totally gluten free so the day before the flight wasn’t so great, but the upside was that we stayed in Wellington rather than going away, and managed to get the flight in.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves (almost).  Unfortunately some of them are blurred as I was too busy looking rather than thinking….arg – I’ll need to go up again! Hopefully it will give some of you at home a better idea of Wellington as well.

These are a downtown area called Oriental Bay – only 15 minutes walk from the main shopping street, if that.  This is where we thought we’d like to stay initially but wanted to be further out of town.

This first image is for us, probably one of the biggest frustrations of living in Wellington…. in the foreground are the hills around Wellington, and the background is the South Island.  It’s probably a 20 minute drive.  If you could drive on water….erm, due to that you have to take the expensive ferry which doesn’t really make it feasible for a normal weekend if you take a van with you. There’s a lot of stuff in the North of the South Island that we’d like to do in preference to heading north at weekends.  As the crow flies they’re about the same distance, just more costly due to the ferry….arg….  If you had 130 mile visibility you’d pretty much see Christchurch.

  This is erm…an aerial view of Wellington.  We live next to the little inlet by the green peninsula at the top right of the picture….in fact I went running along there the other morning!

As I’m talking about where we stay, we’re staying put in our friends house as they’ve been kind enough to let us stay longer term.  If you want to see the general area we’re staying in, you can check out this Google satellite view below.  The general area we stay around is close by the ‘A’ marker, the city centre is just off the top of the map, our favourite cafe is in Lyall Bay on the South (about 10 mins walk from us), and just off the bottom left of the image you can walk along the coast on a 4×4 track to see the seal colony.  Have a scroll around or click the map to see it within Google. The photo above is pretty much taken from outside the top left of the map, looking towards the right of it, if you really want to start getting complicated!

View Larger Map

Just incase you are worried we are unaffected by the earthquake that hit Christchurch last night.  It’s about 190 miles away as the crow flies but it’s in the South Island.  Our housemate felt the quake during the night but the rest of us in the house slept through it.

Unfortunately Christchurch has been a bit devastated by it as it was a big quake, and not far underground.  Here’s a few links :

Christchurch earthquake report on Stuff.co.nz

TVNZ Christchurch Earthquake reports

Wellington does have a fault line running right underneath it and every building here has evacuation boards outside them so it’s not like they don’t try and plan for these events as we are on the fault called the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’.

Fingers crossed Chirstchurch recovers soon!

It’s time for the weekly log, albeit a tad late this week!

We managed a great weekend away last weekend and drove a few hours to Cape Palliser, the most southern point of the North Island of New Zealand.  Obviously we didn’t really care about that – it was the first weekend away in the van and that was the most important! 

So that’s what this post will be about – introducing you to ‘Jumbo’ – out temporary name for the big van!

This weekend however will see us visit the Gluten Free Food Show, the St Kitts Market and I may try to head to Beervana for a wee tipple (but at $30 I’d expect more than just one sample!)…..we’ve already started it off well with a coffee and cake in our local beach cafe Maranui – with my favourite muffin yet – Brie, Sundried Tomatoes and Caperberries – delicious!!…. but meanwhile…back to last weekend….and the van! 

With Ciara finishing at 12.30pm we managed to get over there and park up well before dusk, right under the lighthouse.  The weather treated us well all weekend with no rain and hardly any wind – pretty rare at this time of the year.  We parked up only metres away from seal that lined the shore, but far enough away as not to disturb then.  After we climbed the 250 steps to the lighthouse the celebratory beers and wines were well deserved.

On the Saturday we just drove a few kilometres along the coast and parked up at a minimal Dept of Conservation camp site – i.e. hardly any facilities, but we did have a toilet available.  These were beside some Pinnacles formed by the weathering of the surround land, creating tall towers of rock and earth – a bizarre location.  This was to be our first stop visiting a Lord of The Rings filming area….as I’ve only seen one of the films and can’t remember it I won’t say anything more on that.

I’ll let the pictures speak of last weekend.  This weekend unfortunately is staying at home but that’s because it’s the Gluten Free Food Fair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   Bang the drums….Ciara’s excited.  I’ve already seen a preview of some of the stuff there so it should be good (well, what else can I do during the day but watch breakfast TV!).  We’re hoping to go indoor climbing on Sunday as well – just as well as the weather isn’t looking too great.

And enough about that – here’s more shots of two happy bunnies in the van and the road to Cape Palliser :

The road becomes gravel for the last few k’s, and runs very close to the sea at points :

And of course the ‘luxury’ food, and the Saturday night movie :

And the comfy kip :

Luckily for you that’s all the pics now but I’m sure the van will be dotted around in far more pics over the coming months as we can’t wait to go on a big road trip in it – preferably with bikes on the back as well if money allows :-)  Nice van eh!?

Its been another week of little blogging and no photos so just a mini catch up before the weekend.  Last weekend we managed to get out and about a bit with a beach walk, and a kite fly, then some indoor climbing with friends on Sunday so at least we got around after Ciara’s first week at 9-5  (well, 8.30-3, and 8.30-1!).

Ciara has ‘settled’ into her job, and I’ve been doing all the sensible things like looking for vans and stuff like that.  We got delivery of the new family addition yesterday – we are now the proud owners of our big behemoth baby Hamish the Hiace!  (name is ‘work in progress’).  You can check him out on my van gallery!  Yes he’s not small or light, weighing in at probably 2.5 tonnes and maybe about 12 feet high, probably about 15 feet long….a 1994 2.8L Diesel, and 4WD to boot!  

We absolutely friggin’ love it!!!!

(but we’re still getting over the size of it! – if I was to stand next to it I’d only be half way up the windows……it’s even got a bloody ladder on the back to get to the roof rack!).

Unfortunately my friends only told us they had kayaks after we bought it, and we don’t have a flat roof to carry them….oh well, can’t have everything I guess!

We did splash out quite a bit more than we wanted though, but buying an empty one and kitting it out would have probably cost us almost as much……believe it or not this was the first van we viewed in NZ where the sellers had bothered to clean it, knew much about it, and actually had some paperwork!  And it had by far the lowest mileage at 118,000km….yes, that’s very low for here.

Anyway, we spent a bit too long at The Warehouse tonight, NZ’s source of cheap…..well, everything. From books to towels, fishing rods to clothing, sporting and gardening goods, and everything inbetween.  Why we needed an egg slicer though, I’m not so sure, but at $2 who’s complaining.  Then of course there was the luxury 16 piece cutlery set at $4.49.

Anyway, I’ve had a long day at ‘work’ today – I had to take the van registration to the post office, check the cooker in the van worked ok, deal with loosing internet access today and lots of complicated stuff like that – jeeez I’m ready for a weekend away!  It’s hard.

This weekend we’re aiming to head to Cape Palliser – the southernmost tip of the North Island, which probably means it’s going to be windy as hell and pissing it down, but hey, we’ll be able to cook inside and brew up a cuppa without getting out of bed….assuming we managed to blag a decent stopping spot.

Although we’ll keep on the roads this weekend, we’ll be dreaming of when we head up 90 mile beach in around 6 months like the previous owners below!

We’ve arrived in Wellington and are trying hard to make it ‘home’ after Ciara brilliantly got a short term contract and is currently in the office as I write this. I’m so looking forward to being a kept man while I hunt for vans, flats and the like :-)    (Actually I need to up my game a bit but hey ho….!)

We’ve been socialising a bit with both my mates and Ciara’s.  We’ve also borrowed one of their vans to go van hunting but nothing fitted us perfectly – either a lovely van but too small, or the right size (i.e. massive) but beaten up so that was a bit of a downer.  Last week had a lot of rushing around so we managed to go and see some of the city this weekend including a great countryside type walk up Mount Victoria right in the city with great views which made us feel a bit better.  We’ve been struggling to feel as much at peace with Wellington as to some extents it seems a bit more claustrophic or built up than Auckland, even though that’s probably not the case.  It is surrounded by small hills though, and it’s the windiest city in the Southern Hemisphere which has been very apparent!  I think it takes a bit more effort to find the gems here.

I’ve turned in the paperwork for our bags that have a small bit of clothes and a lot of climbing stuff in them so we’re waiting for them to clear customs.  We’ve moving out the hostel today after a week which will be nice but unfortunately we’re moving a bit further out of the city centre.  Everything has been on our doorstep for the last week – only a couple of minutes to downtown and a few to the waterfront.  We’re going to Ciara’s mates to try it out for a few days although it’s quite an old fashioned an cold house, but that’s pretty much the norm for the buildings here, especially when rented. The hostel’s here haven’t been as great as I remembered them as I think the Asian ones are starting to kick their @ss in terms of service and facilities – it’s a shame as NZ was always renowned for having great hostels, but I’m sure we’ll find them in our travels outside the cities.

One thing that we are looking forward to exploring when we have more cash flowing is the bar and coffee shop scene in Wellington.  The coffees here are taken really seriously and they’re great.  Some bars are a bit like the Melbourne scene – head down some really shithole of an alleyway, turn the corner, press the buzzer and a really cool bar opens up for you.  Ciara is delighted with an even greater choice of gluten free food.  There’s such a selection of breads and stuff that it really is like heaven – I’ll do a separate slideshow of this soon as I’ve been snapping all the products.  I think her chin literally hit the ground when she said to ditch the bread at a late night burger place and they turned round and said ‘no worries we’ll put some gluten free bread in there’….and then there was the ginger cake she had…..I swear if we did ever apply for residency (now, Mother’s don’t gulp, it’s just a phrase), then the gluten free living would be in Ciara’s reasons why!   Yes Ruth, these really are gluten free, and available in a cafe….double click the image, and virtually taste the beauty!

We’ve been exploring the outdoor shops as well – sometimes they stun you with some amazing stuff in them, and others they stun you with the lack of selection of some things, or the jacket we saw that was amazing but 4 times the current sale price in the UK (although it’s winter here), or the North Face shoes that are on sale with 30% off, and are still twice the price I paid in the UK.  We did hit a great produce market yesterday which has an amazing selection of fruits and veg, sometimes at half the supermarket prices.

We have been having a laugh with some of the adverts and notices over here though – they’re not quite as ‘politically correct’ as at home which is a bit refreshing…I’ll put together a gallery of these sometimes, but check out this one for a radio station, seen on the back of a car in Auckland :

Anyway, that’s about it for just now.  Hopefully we’ll have better internet access for the rest of this week as we try to get more into a bit of a routine, get out to the climbing wall and I just notice a van we were considering has just been relisted on the auctions……

We hired a car for a 5 day one way hire to Wellington to coincide with Ciara’s interview, and we had a planned weekend of skiing and boarding based in Ohakune in the middle of the North Island.  I was meeting a friend I met in Whister, Canada over ten years ago.  I had only met him twice since when I was last in NZ but not boarded with him.  It was also to be CIara’s first skiing lesson.

We took a drive south and stopped off in Taupo for the night and we were introduced to the colder winter weather.  The thick tops were on, and the mist pretty much obscured the town in the morning.  We had both been here before but it was still amazing to see the unbelievable number of activity options available to drain your wallet – from bungy to rafting, kayaking and fishing and the volcanic mud pools, jet boating over rapids, mountain biking and everything inbetween.  I think you could spend months just in Taupo and around and still just scratch the surface.

Anyway, we headed on to our luxury accommodation for the weekend, with a great view of the mountain from the lounge as shown.  We sat there and enjoyed it as my mates weren’t arriving late.  We had a dip in the hot tub and Ciara had a real treat of a takeaway gluten free pizza!  Heaven.

Our mate’s turned up late that night from Wellington, but unfortunately Sunday was a right off as the mountain closed due to the weather, but Monday was glorious, defying the forecasts.  I put on skis as I try to get my skiing back to the standard of my snowboarding and Ciara absolutely loved her lesson (and did very well too!).  Mt Ruapehu is an impressive setting as well rising from the relatively low hills around.  The mountain is an active volcano and just over the summit, out of view, is a pool in the crater.  There was a big collapse here a few years ago where a chunk of the mountain gave way so it’s constantly monitored now.  From the top of the ski lifts we could see another volcano Mt Taranaki on the west coast. 

Unfortunately our day on the mountain just made us want to sack off the work hunt and do the season on the snow instead…..but we headed to Wellington on the Monday night and stayed with my mates – again a touch of relative luxury for us compared to hostelling, and complete with a $2000 coffee machine!  Now that’s a treat…..

Well the blogging has been going downhill a bit since we arrived in NZ as well…the wifi situation hasn’t improved since I was here 4 years ago…there’s no free wifi access I’ve found yet apart from the odd coffee shop that gives you a code when you buy stuff.

Anyway, we spent a while over a week in Auckland looking for jobs etc although I was a bit slower that Ciara.  We spent a bit of time inbetween heading to the office of the visa organisation I went through and cruising around trying to see some of the city.  We then found a nice hostel with a private room in the Parnell area.  The room even had a small balcony (albeit with no view) and a nice mix of long term residents with enough people passing through to make it lively.  It was close to the sea as well so I even made it out for a run at one point.
Although we always thought we’d rather get out of Auckland asap, we quickly grew to like it as it’s a very open city with minimal high rises outside the immediate centre, plenty boat trips across the bay and to the islands, and lots to do around the city once you get transport. In some ways in NZ it’s always easy to have home in your mind as there’s always constant reminders in place names, people’s name and more :

We did a small boat trip to Devonport which is a plush suburb and got some great views of the city, explored the suburbs, and a couple of the Asian supermarkets (which are great as there’s a relatively large Asian population here), and getting some Irn Bru.  We also hired a car for a one way hire over 5 days to Wellington so we used that to go to the beach one day and have a small hunt for vans.  After a bit of being mucked about Ciara eventually got an interview in Wellington so we decided to head south – at least that was one decision out of our hands as we had been in a bit of a state of flux deciding where to look to ‘settle’.

We had both felt it a tad weird to be landed in Auckland, our bank accounts opened, our tax numbers applied for, and hitting reality after some superb travelling – it all seemed to come about too quickly.  We we were left with some of the same things to think about as back home, and our cash was being eaten up by hostels and the relatively expensive cost of living.  NZ is a weird mix of things – some things about it are great (e.g. the food is superb) but some things aren’t so good (e.g. availability of some books, selection of stuff), and some things can be over twice the price of the UK (like some outdoors kit, although some is the same). 

We did however love most of the mid-winter weather in Auckland as it seemed we landed at a good time.  Despite the regular heavy downpour there were a few days where we were walking around in t-shirts as it was so warm.

We’re alive in Wellington – blogging has been slow due to internet access…but Ciara has a job for at least a month, I’m still looking but things not looking too great for my normal role, and I’ll upload pics and more soonish…..

We’ve been in Auckland for a few days now and nothing much to report.  We’ve been looking at job sites (well, ahem, some more than others, and I’m not to be praised on that front), but we have set up bank accounts, applied for tax numbers, looked at housesits, help exchanges, transferred a bunch of cash to NZ, and just had a wee look at cars and vans for sale.  We’ve seen a really nice Mazda Bongo like the van we’ve left at home but it’s a bit outside what we wanted to pay for a van but it is oh so tempting……we wish we could instantly ship ours over here now.

But there is one thing that cheers one of us up no end – the constant selection of gluten free goodies in Auckland, so here’s a selection :

Yes, from sausages to crisps, loafs to bagels and sauces it’s all here in the delis and supermarkets….even some menus such as the curry takeaway above and a mexican place have ‘all our courses are gluten free’ – it’s like a dream come true for some after navigating through the ‘Stans then ‘soya and oyster sauce in everything’ China….and of course it makes my life easier too ;-)  Ruth – there may be some inspiring ideas for us to drop you for Mophia’s Gluten Free Bakery – Ireland’s best Gluten Free Bakery. 😉

But apart from dropping a couple of hundred dollars every few days for accommodation which is starting to kill us, the rain has been quite regular as well : Like proper Asian torrential style rain – just that it’s cold too!

Anyway, we’ve seen some cool help exchange places (work for free accommodation) that we’re going to maybe follow up for the future.  We’d like to do one just now but it doesn’t bring the money in – just stops us spending it.  My head doesn’t seem to be getting in the right place for IT jobs although I saw a cracking travel related one (but it was permie)…but cash is calling.

Meanwhile we’ve moved to a more chilled hostel in one of the central Auckland suburbs to get away from the massive central one.  It’s the same price, but there’s free wifi which in theory frees us up a bit more during the day, rather than heading to the office of the visa company to use theirs…..we had great plans to go indoor climbing and go for a wander today but the rain put stop to some of that (the wander).  I’ve signed up for an Auckland photwalk that I hope to go to tomorrow (even though we had kindof erm planned to take the boat across the bay! – oops).

And that’s about it!  More soon….

We landed in Auckland yesterday and immediately got hit with the realities of trying to leave behind free minded travel, free wifi, cheap food and drinks…..and hitting a western country that has similar prices!
Not much has seemed to change much since I was here 4 years ago – internet still isn’t free in many places, it’s 1/3rd more expensive than it was back then  (£1.75 for a small bottle of coke in the 7-11!), and there’s not a huge selection of some stuff when you go looking.

But we did hit happy hour for a couple, had a great mexican where most things were gluten free, we got Ciara a gluten free cookie in a normal corner shop, and I’ve checked in at the organisation I got my visa through. 
Today’s mission is to apply for bank accounts, tax numbers and try to stay upbeat!  My sleep wasn’t the best last night as the reality hit us (oh it’s such a hard life eh!).

Anyway, off to go for a wander and try to decide on the real jobs versus fruit picking etc options! I’m desperate to get a car to get us mobile so we can drive just outside the city and experience some of the other stuff but that’ll come with time.

Wish us luck……..