We meet up with our good friends Toby & Heather Gee and their 3 children at Mount Maunganui on New Years Eve. It’s really great to catch up with friends from home again and our children once again have other children to play with. Heather’s cousin Biddy is also there with her partner Ant and her children Fox & Otis. Fox is roughly the same age as Jemima and they immediately hit it off – trampolines seem to be a great place to make new friends!
Already, Toby and Heather have been brilliant – buying and insuring our car, planning for the road trip we will embark on in a few days, including getting ferry tickets to the South Island. It’s peak holiday time here, so important to book well ahead. They’ve also said that after 6 months travelling together, we will need a break (how right they are!) and have offered to look after our kids while we do the Abel Tasman walk – but more of that later…
Yet another use for a Frisbee – a steering wheel for a sand car!
They’ve all just returned from Heather’s sister Lizzie’s wedding, so New Year is a quiet affair – in fact we only stay up until midnight out of some strange sense of duty – we are all getting old!!! Our few days here are spent on the spectacular beach at ‘The Mount’ – miles and miles of sandy beach, with BIG waves crashing in from the Pacific. There’s lots of sand castle building, plus sand cars and crocodiles, and I just can’t get enough of body boarding in the surf – it’s a child’s board but I’m afraid the children don’t get a look-in! There are also walks around and up The Mount itself – really beautiful with huge container ships coming in and from the port in Tauranga.
From here we head south toward Wellington. Heather has insisted that Toby, Fi & I do the Tongariro crossing (another thank you to add to the list) – she takes all 6 children to her parents and we catch up later. There is a bus collecting us from the car park at the end of the walk at 7.30am to take us to the start. Unfortunately it’s a 3-hour drive to get there, so we have to leave at 4am – and guess who’s driving? The Red Bull does its job, and we get there in one piece. They say “no pain, no gain” and in this case it’s true – it’s a really dramatic walk past Mt Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings), through volcanic craters, past some extraordinary volcanic rock formations and bright green and turquoise lakes. This is certainly not something you could get in Scotland!
One of the many dramatic views on the Tongariro crossing – note the person on the ridge for scale. Once Toby had suggested this looked like a certain part of the mountain’s anatomy, I couldn’t look at it any other way! (Copyright Toby Gee)
We spend the night at a hotel / backpackers – New Zealand is great in that it’s go much better accommodation across a range of budgets than at home. It’s very simple, with bunk beds but clean and comfortable. Heather has arrived with a large whole fish, which we cook on the communal barbecue – very civilised! The next day we go for a lovely walk, via a waterfall. Jemima and I follow Toby’s lead and go for a quick dip in the river beneath the fall – we don’t have any ‘togs’ (we’re learning the local lingo) and it’s so cold it hurts, but as Fi wisely says, “you never regret going for a swim but often regret not going”. We gasp as we dive in but our skin tingles and we feel alive and energised for the walk back through the woods.
On our walk back from the waterfall, with Mount Doom in the background. It doesn’t look so sinister on such a lovely day!
We head down to Wellington and after one night at Toby & Heather’s take the ferry across to the South Island. During our road trip, we have the big kids in our car (which has been christened Dynamite!) and MIllie is in with Loma and Thalia in Toby & Heather’s car – MIllie and Loma are inseparable and sing songs from Frozen constantly, correcting each other on the lyrics – it’s hilarious! Unfortunately, it appears that there’s a problem with our car’s battery – very quickly we need to jump start it every time we resume our journey, which Toby & I quickly get to a fine art.
After stopping off at Kaikoura with its beach strewn with the most amazing driftwood (which Fi has a compulsive need to collect, however full our car is), we have a long day’s drive to Lake Ohau. We go via Christchurch and see the stunning new Cathedral that’s been built since the earthquake. On the outskirts of the city there’s no evidence at all of anything untoward, but as we approach the centre we see more and more derelict plots and new buildings being built. The cathedral is a stunning piece of architecture, made largely out of huge cardboard tubes and plywood – it’s simple and clean, with the design based on triangles and smooth curves. Behind the cathedral there’s a very simple but moving memorial to the 185 people who lost their lives in the quake – one chair for each person, all painted white, including wheelchairs for the elderly and pushchairs with teddies and highchairs for the children.
Driftwood near Kaikura – someone had got there before us to make this great den!
We stop at Lake Tekapo with its wonderful views of Mount Cook. We take a short detour to check out the ‘ancient church’ there – when we get there I notice a small plaque stating that it was built in 1935, the year after my father was born! It’s a good example of how we in the UK really take our history for granted. At home, every village in the country has a church that’s several hundred years old, in fact I used to live in a house that was over 400 years old. I’m not a great historian myself, but am surprised at how much I miss it here.
The last leg of the drive is incredibly beautiful with the sun setting behind the mountains, casting a wonderful pink hue on the clouds. We’ve decided to splash out and stay a couple of nights at Ohau Lodge, which is all the more special given that we camped last night! It feels way off the beaten track here and the scenery is spectacular.
Stone skimming on Lake Ohau
The two Elsas on Joss’ trampoline
From Lake Ohau, we drive down to Wanaka where Heather’s aunt, Joss, has foolishly agreed to put us up for a few days. Honestly, I’m not sure she and her husband Kevin have thought through what having 10 of us to stay is going to be like! The three big kids camp in the garden, which helps but still, it’s considerably busier and noisier than they are used to! But here we are reunited with our camera at last (a replacement to be precise, after many heated discussions with John Lewis) – hurrah!
We hook up with Biddy, Fox and Otis again and spend a great day rock-climbing. Biddy is clearly a very experienced climber and looks completely in her element hanging off the rock face, putting up the rope for the rest of us to follow.
Jemima and Fox doing a spot of rock climbing in Wanaka
A surprising highlight is our day out at Puzzling World – it’s a fabulous place for adults and children alike, with a host of optical illusions. There’s a room in which you look tiny in one corner and like a giant in the other, concave faces that look like they’re standing out, pictures that say different things when you look at them differently and a cafe full of table top puzzles for you to battle with. Toby & I took the kids in the morning – I think we enjoyed it more than them (I had to physically drag Toby away from a puzzle to get us back vaguely in time for lunch!). And then Fi took them back in the afternoon to do the maze that we hadn’t had time for.
It’s a Puzzling World… these 3-D images of Van Gogh are actually hollowed into the wall, not protruding out as it appears
We’ve planned to do a walk up to one of the many DOC (Dept of Conservation) huts – in the morning of the day in question I take the car in to get the battery checked; not only does it need a new battery but also a full set of new tyres. Unfortunately, worse is to come… as I walk through the door, Fi stops me and says I need to turn right around and take Gabriel to the hospital. He’d been reaching up to look in a mirror balanced on a chest of drawers; it fell off and landed on his foot, taking out a wedge of flesh. They are really excellent at the emergency health clinic; they opt to glue it together rather than stitch it but say he shouldn’t go on any big walks (or swim / go on trampolines, etc) for a few days. So Gabriel has to skip the walk to Meg hut and I volunteer to stay behind with him. We (wisely) decide that Fi can’t manage getting Millie up on her own, so she also stays back with Gabriel and me. We have a quiet day, pottering around town, looking for a replacement mirror and eating delicious ice creams.
After the Meg hut expedition (see Fi’s blog for details) we decide we’ve stretched Joss & Kevin’s generous hospitality as far as is reasonable (probably more so, actually) and to move on. Toby and Heather need to get back to Wellington sooner than us, so we decide to go our separate ways at this point, after two great weeks together. Millie (aka Elsa) rejoins us in our car and we head south once more…
Five Go Round The World 