Back in April we had our first real holiday in about four years. It was a grand old time we had in the North and South Islands of New Zealand and, though we went for 19 days, we really wished we could’ve had longer. We listened to a lot of advice from family, friends and colleagues before we went and did our research so we always had a rough plan though we generally played it by ear each day.
I’m not sure why we decided to go to New Zealand just as winter approached especially as we haven’t really seen much of Australia. I estimate that, from Sydney, we’ve been about 160 miles south (Canberra), 70 miles west (Jenolan Caves) and about 270 miles north (Coffs Harbour). That’s about 30,000 square miles out of the 30,000,000 available to us; only 1% of the country.
But New Zealand we chose and I’m glad we did. I have about 19 days of entries coming through soon all taken from my diary after some minimal editing to remove references to any criminal activity we were involved in1 or the copious notes I made on the distribution ratios and correlation between dead possums and One Lane Bridge signs2.
We created 1000s of pictures and a small percentage of them have been uploaded to flickr and can be found here. If you’re not too interested in flicking through them all then our tl;dv gallery is below – this is a picture or two from each day which is either a bit nice or just representative of our day:
I’ll be publishing the articles with the day of their telling so they’ll appear beneath this article. I’ll edit this post with links when this happens.
Day 1 – Sydney to Christchurch
Day 2 – Ashburton, Lake Tekapo, Omarama
Day 3 – Queenstown
Day 4 – Te Anau
Day 5 – Milford Sound
Day 6 – Queenstown
Day 7 – Lake Wanaka, Haast
Day 8 – Glacier Highway, Franz Josef, Hokitika
Day 9 – Arthur’s Pass, Castle Hill, Akaroa
Day 10 – Christchurch
Day 11 – TranzCoastal Railway, Marlborough Sounds, Wellington
Day 12 – Wellington, Te Papa
Day 13 – Napier
Day 14 – Taupo
Day 15 – Wai-O-Tapu, Rotorua
Day 16 – Hobbiton, Whitianga, Hot Water Beach
Day 17 – Auckland
Day 18 – Auckland
Day 19 – Auckland to Sydney
- we weren’t, well, except maybe on day 13 [↩]
- I didn’t though I have mentally stored every single occurrence [↩]
