Here I Go Again

Woah, has it really been that long since the last post? My apologies to anyone that has been faithfully checking back every five minutes… no one? Good good.

Since I’ve done a fair bit in the last few weeks I’ll chuck it all into one post rather than making a post for each, coz I’d have to think of titles for each one, publish each on and put the picture links in each one so for my laziness’ sake here it goes…

We went on a day trip to Akaroa, a little harbour town about 80kms from Christchurch. You get some awesome views of it when driving there from the top of the hills and there’s a scenic drive which takes you over the hills around it giving impressive sights and the sun being out topped it off. The French landed there in 1840 and planned to colonise but unfortunately for them, we (the brits) had already proclaimed sovereignty over New Zealand :-). There’s still some frenchness there though, with street names and French flags dotted around.

Akaroa

Not long after we quite our jobs at The Warehouse and got travelling again, heading south we stopped at Dunedin which is the second largest city in the south island after Christchurch. It’s a nice city and has a Speight’s brewery and a Cadbury factory, we did both the tours which were cool, they both gave out freebies :-D. At the end of the Cadbury one, you go into one of the silo’s and they show you a chocolate waterfall, well 1 tonne of chocolate run down in front of you. In the Speight’s one you get to pull you’re own beer (a few times) for each of the different beers. I must say that after going through each tour and seeing how they’re made, I have a new respect for them and no what to look for when sampling different brands. My favourite Speight’s beer is the Summer Harvest which has a refreshing apricot flavour and I’m gutted you can’t get it back home so I’ll be getting some at the duty free at the airport .

The next day we jumped on a train, the Taieri Gorge Railway which is a tourist train that runs from Dunedin Train Station. The line was closed in 1990 so the Otago Excursions Trust and Dunedin City Council bought part of the Railway from the Dunedin Train station to Middlmarch. There’s some remarkable views along the way and going through the tunnels is always cool.

The other cool thing in Dunedin is, the worlds steepest street! I’ll have to get a spirit level on Hill Street in Deri and check but this street was steep! And much longer than Hill Street.

Dunedin	Speights Brewery Tour	Taieri Gorge Railway

Milford Sound was the next stop for a bit of kayaking. We had to get up at 6am for this because Milford Sound is so out of the way, there’s only one road there and it takes about 2 hours. Oh yeh guess what, Milford Sound was originally called Milford Haven by the Welsh guy that found it John Grono. It’s also incorrectly named a sound because its actually a fiord, but there wasn’t an English word to describe a fiord at the time apparently. Its an amazing place whatever it is, with in-your-face cliffs either side of the river. There were some small(ish) waves which made it interesting and our tour guide Blake gave us loads of info. We saw some penguins and a seal but no dolphins. On the way back we made a raft by joining the kayaks together then he Blake gave the people at the front of the two person kayaks a sail and the people at the back attached the rope of the sail to one end of their paddles then when we held our paddles up the sail caught the wind and we were off. It was quite difficult to keep it going but we got some speed fair play before the Germans started seperating from the raft and capsized ha ha! So Blake rushed of to save them while we waited, and waited until Blake comes back toeing the Germans coz their rudder broke during the capsize. Great laugh

Milford Sound

Wanaka was next. This is kind of like a smaller Queenstown but I liked it just as much as Queenstown, its got the same sort of chilled-out vibe and there’s loads to do in and around. It sits right next to the Lake Wanaka where you can swim, sunbath or go out on your yacht, if you have one. Time was against us but if you’re ever in the south Island of New Zealand, go to Wanaka!

Wanka

Queenstown, this is a cool town. Named so for being “fit for a Queen” its known as the adrenaline capitol because this is where all the fun things are from skiiing, mountain biking, jet boating, bungee jumping and skydiving. We didn’t manage to do these here but there’s always next time. We did go up the gondola which from the top gives awesome panoramic views of Queenstown and there’s a luge ride which was good fun and we found our Italian friend that was in our kayaking group so we had a chat with him.

Queenstown

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under New Zealand, Pictures, The Big Trip, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.