The views were spectacular as you can hopefully see. We were also incredibly fortunate as the weather was unusually dry and sunny. The fjord has an annual rainfall of over 7m and there are over 200 days of rain here per year. As well as that we also saw three different schools of bottlenose Dolphins! If it hadn’t been so cold, I’d have been very tempted to jump in and swim with them- they’re amazing . We also saw some seals but having been brought up predominantly in Norfolk near Blakeny, they didn’t wow me as much- though they are pretty cool.

More photos @ Picasa

Over the next few days we took care of practicalities to do with banking, tax, jobs, phones, housing and many other boring things (and exciting things like signing up for a Subway loyalty card!). I was amused as we did some shopping in the supermarket – the brands of fabric conditioners were Fluffy, Cuddly and Snuggly (or similar)… I figured I could come to like a country where things had such cute names!  Whilst exploring areas to live (in North Shore City – a part of Auckland, cunning on the shore to the north of the city) we did manage to scout out the beaches at Takapuna, Castor Bay and Milford, which were nice (if a little windy on the days we saw them), but will have to be explored more thoroughly in the months to come. We have settled on a furnished place in between Milford & Castor Bay which has access to a pool & hot tub as well as all the usual stuff. It’s in a very quiet area (not a great thing when wanting to meet people) and a bit of a slog back from the beach (30 mins uphill), but it’s fine for the time being.

On the Sunday we popped to a local church where some people from our church back in Nottingham are involved. We not only caught up with them briefly, but met another couple of people from Nottingham – one of whom had actually lived in the same house in Mapperley – in fact the same bedroom – as Lizzy had done, just a year or so later!

With our feelings about Auckland gradually improving, we headed off to the airport to catch our flight to Christchurch where we’d start our 17-day exploration of the south island.

After  a brief farewell stop to drop Jules and Tom in Newcastle, Alex and I headed back up the ‘freeway’ to Forster  where we checked into a cheap hotel, slightly reminiscent of a retirement home, and then headed to the beach for a couple of hours.

Grey Nurse Shark

Diving the following day, was the best and worst dives of our trip so far. Whilst diving in Asia, we’d naively expected to be surrounded by dolphins, huge manta rays, sharks and even whale sharks  at every turn, (yep we know- stupid but nevertheless true!). We’d almost started to doubt that there really where loads of big things in the ocean for us to see. Fortunately, this dive resolved any disillusionment we had! On the first dive, which was also our deepest so far at 33m, we spotted about three 3m long Grey Nurse sharks as well as lots of jack fish… On the second dive, we saw 25-30 sharks, an eagle ray and a logger-head turtle and it was AMAZING!! We had to swim through the kelp, creep through a crack and hide ourselves behind a ridge half way up and looking into a bowl shaped hole. There we were metres away from around 15 1 ½ -3 ½ m long Grey Nurse sharks that were circling the bowl. It was one of the most awesome experiences of our trip. Possibly one of the most frightening experiences for Alex was when he narrowly avoided grabbing the tail of a Wobegong shark that he’d not seen resting on the bottom! The dive instructor later told us that the ‘shark attack’ in Sydney the previous week had been by a Wobegong- although apparently it’s one of the first ever reports of this type of shark being aggressive. Oh and the Grey Nurse sharks are also very docile and aren’t man-eaters for anyone questioning our sanity at this point! We’ve no photos as we don’t have an underwater camera that works below 10m BUT we’ve found some photos online to show what the sharks we saw looked like.

Wobbegong Shark

The reason the dive was also the worst so far was mainly because of the company we dived with who where quite unfriendly telling me not to tell anyone I’d ‘fed the fish’ when I was vomiting over the side due to sea sickness and they were also snobby about us having predominantly dived in Asia, which apparently isn’t ‘real’ diving. Fortunately, the highs definitely outweighed the lows- by about 25 sharks

(Photos courtesy of Richard Ling – they’re not ours! Licensed under Creative Commons)

Final stop: Hunter Valley. After an epic 12-hour drive (to allow us increased wine-tasting time the next day), we arrived in Cessnock absolutely parched. Fortunately we had a long day of drinking ahead of us, so we went to bed safe in the knowledge we’d have our thirst sated soon. As it turned out, we could have spent a week tasting wine here, but still managed to cram in 6 wineries, a smelly cheese shop (that’s their term, not ours!), a British Lolly shop and an olive-vineyard-allsorts place. Unfortunately for her, Lizzy ended up doing most of the driving and little of the tasting as she was the scheduled morning driver and with lunch not until 3.30, she was only able to make the most of 2 late afternoon tasting sessions whilst the rest of us gradually fell asleep. That night, we reminisced about our time in Asia with a meal in a Thai restaurant to celebrate Tom’s impending birthday.

Photos from the whole road trip @ Picasa

First stop: Noosa. Arriving in the town centre late afternoon, we managed to bag ourselves a bargainous 2-bed apartment for 2 nights – air con, pool, bbq, washing machine, full kitchen (we used them all)… what more could you want for AU$99? Noosa seemed like a really nice, relaxed seaside town , but we’d come here for one thing – the waves . Only having one day we decided against surf boards and instead opted for their smaller and easier cousin – the body board. We spent pretty much a whole day in the waves before retreating back to the flat, satisfied and only a little sore from our exertion. We also saw a man standing on a surf board… with a dog as passenger – very weird & impressive! Here’s a video of my expert body boarding

Next stop: Byron Bay. We visited the Arts Factory, stopping for a coffee and, later in the day, for some beer tasting (they have their own brewery). Byron Bay has a lovely sandy beach with an inviting wavy blue sea. The sea, however, was misleading – in fact there was an immensely strong current running along the beach – so strong that it was like wading through a strong river. Any time you lost your footing or tried swimming, you were very quickly 10m down the shore from where you’d just been. We had some fun jumping in the waves though and then trekked back up the beach to top up our tans. As the sun began to sink behind the hills, we headed up to the nearby lighthouse for sunset. This is very nearly the most easterly point of Australia; it’s a little walk to the actual spot, but we figured we’d got close enough. As you can see, we enjoyed a sunset over hills and sea with lighthouse in the background.

To be continued…

More photos (& videos of body boarding!) from the whole trip @ Picasa

So off we set, Tom, Jules, Lizzy and Alex on a mini 4WD adventure around this beautiful but apparently deadly island. I was quite happy to leave the driving to Alex and Tom who both loved navigating the sandy, rutted tracks- I was content to drive only on the easier beach section where we invented the game ‘Jellysquish’ . Fortunately, despite this leading to a very messy under carriage, we weren’t fined anything on returning the car. We managed to blag** a campsite spot which normally should have set us back $40 for the two nights so we enjoyed the luxuries of flushing toilet and running water and didn’t have to use our shovel once

The sights on the island where very pretty and we enjoyed swimming in lakes and in the ‘Champagne rock pools’ (the only bit of sea safe to swim in as sharks can’t get in), climbing the dunes, walking through the rainforests, wandering round the Maheno shipwreck and of course all the 4WD. We also enjoyed swatting and then feeding giant March flies to the catfish in Lake Wabby which gave us a great deal of satisfaction as they had bitten us to shreds by then- Ouch!

Bugs aside, a fantastic trip

More photos @ Picasa

*nope- despite looking, I didn’t see any

** read trespass- although admittedly we didn’t actually know it cost anything to start with- we only found this out as we were leaving

Five hours later, we arrived in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta. National Park. As the temperature was predicted to be 48 degrees C, we spent a few extra hours in the cultural centre, waiting for the temperature to fall to a mere 40 degrees before setting off on a very short walk to the Olga’s.

Sunset at Uluru, where we drove afterwards, was spectacular for very different reasons- Our guide told us that a cyclone with 140mph winds was predicted to be coming our way (hence our free upgrade from sleeping in swags to tents….although what good a tent would do in 140mph winds I don’t know)! As we approached Uluru, we could see the dark clouds massing to our west and saw the beginnings of some very cool twisters behind lots of lightning. All the tourists who’d braved the winds and the extremely annoying millions of flies that constantly try to fly up your nose, eyes, mouth and ears (Thank God for fly nets and the top tip we’d had to get one- thanks Tom and Jules!!) stood with their backs to Uluru, snapping shots of the storm instead.  Fortunately for us, the storm by-passed our campsite and all the tents where still standing in the morning. We heard a campsite several miles away had been utterly destroyed by the storm so we were pretty fortunate !

At 3:45am the next day we got up to see Uluru at sunrise and then do the 3 hour walk around its base before the heat was too unbearable. How the Aborigines survived for so many thousands of years in a land this harsh is beyond comprehension! It was very interesting learning more about how they survived and why Uluru is such a sacred space for them.

The rest of the day we spent driving through several different eco-systems en-route to our campsite near Kings Canyon. After dinner, stories and games around the campfire, we got into our swags for the night, trying not to think too much about dingos (wild dogs which sometimes get aggressive) and creepy crawlies that might try and eat us as we slept under the full moon. I think Alex was a bit freaked out when he awoke at 00:00 and turned to see a Dingo a few metres away from us. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately!) it didn’t stay around long enough for me to grab the camera!

The next morning we were all psyched up for a 3-hour walk around Kings Canyon. Fortunately, the ‘difficult’ section we had been warned about, would have been what guides in Asia called ‘very easy’ so the time we spent psyching ourselves up for a horrendous climb where completely wasted! This was our favourite walk of the trip though- much more interesting and varied landscape than we’d already seen.
All in all, a fabulous trip!

More photos @ Picasa