Exploring, in a much smaller radius

Not nearly as many interesting things to report nowadays, but at least Vancouver Island is an even better fit for us than we had hoped! Mike’s electrical engineering studies are keeping him focused and he’s doing really well…much better than he would have 12 years ago! And he was hired this week by a professor to be a Research Assistant to open the Physics Department Research Facility to grow carbon nanotubes! One day I will learn what that means, but he is excited, especially to go to Victoria & Vancouver to check out their electron microscopes. I’m getting him to look into what kind of work co-op project locations there could be for his third year. Maybe here, or Vancouver or Montreal or abroad somewhere. He's still being mistaken for a 17 year-old as so many of his classmates are. That’s two years still before they can even show him around to the better pubs in town! The university is picturesquely tiny; his biggest class is Physics with 25 students, and his Electrical Engineering lab only has 5 of them in there. There’s tame rabbits leaping all over the campus and now the island’s woods are turning brilliant autumn colours (mostly oak, maple, and there’s fir, cedar, hemlock, balsam), and it is exhilarating to see Whistler’s mountain range 60km across the sea on the mainland from Mike’s Physics building.

Lots of adventuring opportunities around here, especially now that we’re getting connected through campus rec. We’re set to go sea kayaking (but we'll have to challenge the float planes in the busy harbour!), white water rafting, snowshoeing, and spelunking over the next few months. We’ve decided to save the cash and the atmosphere and not put our car back on the road for now, but I can feel the limitations as there is so much nearby but just out of reach unless we are being very creative about transportation, so that’s why I’m glad to discover how many uni trips are organized. I’m trying to convince Mike to hitchhike with me up to Coombs tomorrow to see Butterfly World. He’d rather stay home and read about carbon nanotubes…. We did go hiking of one of the many islands (Newcastle) in Nanaimo’s harbour, and take the “pickle boat” on a harbour tour past seals sunning themselves on a flotilla of logs on their way to the pulp mill. I’m wobbling around on a pair of old school roller skates, and hoping to get my wall climbing belaying certificate with a friend from work. And we attended a barn raising, and cheered on a Clippers match (local ice hockey team) to round off our Nanaimo experience. Our favourite pub is the Dinghy Dock pub, the country’s only floating pub, served from the harbour by a tiny passenger ferry boat. And there’s supposed to be some… “invigorating” scuba diving round here now that we’re certified. Ice cold waters, but tons of sea life, and a downed Boeing 737 to explore. I’m on a mission to see killer whales over the next few months, and Mike’s already pondering his submission for Nanaimo’s Annual Bathtub Race. (my sister, Lisa and brother-in-law, Tom ended up lending us their car for this rainy day excursion up-island. Butterfly World was closed for the season when we arrived, but we did visit the goats on the roof of Coombs Country Market.)

I’ve got Lisa to go to the college gym and yoga with, and I’m really happy that I’ve found an Iyengar yoga studio near our place that I adore, and we’ve started running. I try to run down to the seawall to see the ocean everyday, but sometimes I only make it to Bocca, my local soy latte supplier. And if Lisa’s not around to keep me company on my run, I’ve got the enthusiasm of Jasper, their giant polar bear of a dog who guards our patio and bikes for us when he’s not out with me. Lisa and I went down to Victoria a few weekends ago to see Naomi Klein speak, and to do (just the 8KM road race) of the Royal Victoria Marathon. It was bizarre to be swept up in the marathon culture momentarily.

I’ve been working now at the Boys & Girls Club doing their recreation program for 10 to 13 year olds, and I am opening up their Teen Centre recreation program too this week. It’s a very creative and stimulating, and noisy job: 80 kids when they all pile in after school, from kindergarten to 12 years old, racing around throwing Lego and crayons at each other till I can tease my kids out of the mob to focus on activities. I really appreciate that the programming is up to me, so it’s as fun or as boring as I make it. We went for an SPCA visit on our Cat Day, we’ve had Mexican Day, 1970’s Day, we go swimming and watch movies and bake. I just have to figure out what 11 to 18 year olds are going to want to do for the evening program, but at least we have a pool table and 4 TV’s in case of an emergency lapse in imagination. I took them to the Bug Zoo in Victoria last week, and did let the scorpion scuttle across my sweaty palm, just for them. I’m just struggling through the manual to get my Commercial Vehicle Driver’s license to chauffeur the kids around, but with that I can also drive limousines and taxis and ambulances if the bottom falls out of the recreation job market.

And we’re quite happily all set up in the suite in the walk-out basement of Lisa and Tom’s house. Mike’s helping Tom out with gardening and renovations, and we’re within walking distance of the college, my work, the old city quarter and the harbour of this old coal mining town. Like Ireland, Nanaimoites give directions by pub landmarks (well, shopping centres first, pubs second). We’re far enough away from the big box stores to feel like we’re in a small town, but Nanaimo’s population (90,000) is sufficient to support 6 Tim Horton’s donut shops. The most noticeable highway signage reports how full each ferry sailing to the mainland is, and the event of the week is seeing the cruise ships lodged between two of the harbour islands and the tourists spilling out into little boats to scamper up on the shores to shop and photograph the totem poles. The First Nations Salish name for the area was Sne-Ny-Most.

My first week before starting work was quite blissful: sitting in the sun at the picnic table with Jasper, and picking blackberries beside the brook in our backyard. After a handful of bramble slivers, I can see why no one else was joining me. The brook is a bit more wild and less idyllic than it sounds, mostly it’s a mess of brambles but it has salmonoids in it, so the sign says. There’s no grizzlies on the island, but there are black bears and cougars, bald eagles, no skunks but I’ve seen a racoon bounding down our lane.

The move 1200 kms over the mountains from the prairies to the island was a bit of a mission. We were thrilled that our car started fine after being parked for 3 years, and the only surprise was that all our stuff was in good shape in the shipping container it had been squished into and stored on a farmer’s field through 3 winters. It took sick-with-the-flu-Mike 15 hours to drive the moving truck towing our car over the Rocky Mountains, and we slept in the car at the Coquihalla Summit. Poor Mike couldn’t even clear his ears through the 2000 meter mountain passes. In Vancouver, Mike had disconnected the car from the beast of a moving truck which I manoeuvred through downtown, and as I pulled the truck onto the ferry, the car stalled and he nearly missed the boat. But judging from the speed the ferrymen jumped on the problem, this probably wasn’t the first mechanical failure that had encountered.

Once we were island bound, I was delighted to pull out my sewing machine, cookbooks, sprouter, bike trailer, and art supplies, and especially to have my own desk and computer now that we have the laptop. It brought tears to Mike’s eyes to crack out his tools, the bread maker, and his wine and beer making gear. His first batch of Gewürztraminer and ale were fine products, and he made his first batch of stout, and a sharp and highly potent jug of ginger beer, inspired by you Aussies! He’s even started making me soy yogurt, which is much easier than I imagined. And of course we made up a tray of Nanaimo bars in our first week, we had to.

So, we’re more content than we’ve ever been, I’ve just gotta stay focused on not immersing myself too much in romantic visions of countries we can’t visit for the next 5 years till Mike’s an engineer and released from the institution. At least we can always ferry over to Vancouver to get a dose of urban relief and see gigs, and we get Seattle radio stations, so that reminds me how close we are. But I’ve got creative work to focus on, and maybe one day we’ll learn to surf. We are thrilled to be back in a country that gives free coffee refills (even if its crappy quality), created the Caesar cocktail (recipe below, I had the tastiest one in my life this afternoon in a seaside pub), and appreciates all the energy we pour into making Halloween costumes! (Mike’s going as Joey Ramone, and I’m Stormer of the Misfits, nemesis to 1985’s cartoon Jem and the Holograms rockstar)

Nanaimo Bar Recipe

Bottom Layer
½ cup unsalted butter (European style cultured)
¼ cup sugar
5 tbsp. cocoa
1 egg beaten
1 ¼ cups graham wafer crumbs
½ c. finely chopped almonds
1 cup coconut
Melt first 3 ingredients in top of double boiler. Add egg and stir to cook and thicken. Remove from heat. Stir in crumbs, coconut, and nuts. Press firmly into an ungreased 8" x 8" pan.

Second Layer
½ cup unsalted butter
2 Tbsp. and 2 Tsp. cream
2 Tbsp. vanilla custard powder
2 cups icing sugar
Cream butter, cream, custard powder, and icing sugar together well. Beat until light. Spread over bottom layer.

Third Layer
4 squares semi-sweet chocolate (1 oz. each)
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
Melt chocolate and butter overlow heat. Cool. Once cool, but still liquid, pour over second layer and chill in refrigerator.

CLASSIC CAESAR RECIPE

4 oz Clamato* Juice (A robust tomato clam cocktail, seasoned with secret spices)
1 oz. vodka
Celery stalk or pickled asparagus or today I had a pickled bean with dill
2 tsp. Lime juice
pepper to taste
salt to taste
1 Dash Hot Pepper Sauce 2 Dashes Worcestershire Sauce

Rocky Mountain High

Smooth flight from Taipei, 6 hours to kill in the Vancouver airport, an extra Tuesday to live thanks to the international date line, and we are back home in Alberta after 3 years! Mom and Eric took us immediately out to Radium Hot Springs for a family reunion. We had always suspected and can now confirm to be true that the Rocky Mountains are our most favorite place on earth. It was glorious to set our tent up beside a clear glacier stream, feel the bright, dry, sweet sunshine on our faces, smell the tree sap and feel the familiar crunch of pine cones under our feet. Swimming in the lakes reflecting the mountains, bald eagles circling above, and the smell of getting a campfire going, you can't beat it. I know, everyone thinks that their own home is the most perfect, and we can't argue with that. We were nervous about the predatory dangers in Australia, but here even the cougar prowling the town, or the 200kg black bear bounding down the road ahead of us or the skunk who sauntered past our tent at midnight, nothing can crack our blissful state. Until we have to get back to real life and start looking for jobs and all that unpleasantness. But for now, we can enjoy the bright summer days, and we'll be in Edmonton on Friday, August 3, ridiculously hoping that everything will be just as sweet and perfect as our memories paint it! Then we've got almost the whole month there before our move to Vancouver Island, so lotsa catch up time, yay!

Alberta Bound

Hey, we just had our final dash around the Taipei night market, scoffed our last mochi balls and dan bing, had our last breaths of hot, humid, fumey city air, and in the morning we will be flyin over the Pacific home after three years. Can't wait to see the constellations we grew up gazing at, and wander down a street where no one is wearing a face mask. But we'll miss the delights of Taiwan, I don't suppose anyone in Canada will stop their car and lean out of their window to eagerly ask us where we are from.
We're lookin forward to seein everyone soon, we'll be in Edmonton for August long weekend, stayin with Mike's folks till the end of August when we haul all our gear to Nanaimo, BC for the next year or two for Mike's uni courses!
See ya soon!

It Thinks About Nothing and Speed Earnestly

"It Thinks About Nothing and Speed Earnestly" is Mike's favourite new"Chinglish" adorned t-shirt he picked up in a Night Market in the bustling scooter-land of Taiwan. This quirky country always has us giggling and surprised by everything, from the Chinglish we read on the shirts of old women (won't go into detail on that one), to the odd ingredients laying in the bottom of our bowls of soup (duck blood or frog eggs), to where we end up with our hospitality club hosts when we thought we understood something totally different (grandpa was just as surprised to see us as we were to see him), to the stories behind the moral murals painted on the temple walls (yes, she's cutting out her own liver to cook for her ill mother-in-law's medicine) to what pops out of the toy vending machines. I just got a keychain of a plastic fish dissected with all its innards labelled for cooking instructions. I think that might have come from Japan, but that is representative of Taiwan as well, as there are strong Chinese and Japanese influences here, as well as Korean, Taiwanese aboriginal, and south-east Asian, not least obvious in the culinary delicacies. We are still trying new things with every meal, even McDonald's serves a burger with a bun made of rice instead of wheat. Taiwan has Mike singing karaoke, Carli-Ann eating spicy Korean kim chee for breakfast, and both us hiking in white gloves with towels draped around our necks. We will return from Asia transformed!
We are now in Ken Ting, a white sand beach town in the far south tip of Taiwan, after bouncing for the first 15 of the 25 days we have in Taiwan between generous invitations from hosts within a 150km radius of Taipei. Peggy and the bright-smiling crew of her bookshop in Jhubei invited us to stay in the grassroots bookstore for a few days. We couldn't imagine an atmosphere where our needs were more completely met: 1) air-conditioning, 2) gourmet organic meals prepared by the chef in the little restaurant in the bookshop (they were all impressed with the smoked salmon and cream cheese pizza Mike prepared for them from his NZ cafe recipe), 3) the answer to every question at our fingertips on the bookshelves! Everytime there was a word we could not explain we pulled down the Chinese/English dictionary, an ingredient we did not recognize we found a cookbook with photos, a historical query there were many books to reference. And at night we had sweet dreams of learning Mandarin by osmosis as we snuggled in our sleeping bags between the book shelves. And when they were not busy serving customers organic beer and world literature, we followed the chef blazing his way through the morning market for his ingredients, through the incense burning prayer ceremonies at temples, and grinding our own tea at a traditional Hakka restaurant. Thirty minutes crushing tea leaves, sesame seeds, peanuts, and pumpkin seeds with a mortar and pestle before our thirst could be quenched; it was a bit cruel really. But our night out with them at one of the many KTV buildings was the lychee on top of our shaved ice: karaoke and a buffet in one of the 100 rooms catering to the crooning Taiwanese, an experience we couldn't leave this country without.

We returned to Jhong-li a second time at the invitation of Mary, the owner of the fabulous Thai/Chinese restaurant that Han and Ching had taken us to a few days ago, to be her guests for a delicious feast specially prepared for us in her home with the company of many friends and neighbours (our first karaoke experience), and the escort of her beautiful daughters with their charming Vancouver exchange student English skills. They took us out to their friend's snazzy club after the huge dinner, but they didn't have to get up for the 6 hour hike at 6am the next morning that Mary's neighbours led us on! There was more rapelling than walking, but the mountain and steep valley views were worth the sweat that we had to wring out of our shirts.
The next two days we recovered in the tranquility of the Buddhist temples nestled into the mountains at Shitoushan (one of the dozen temples houses guests), dining on vegan fare with the serenely smiling nuns and monks, with only their peaceful chanting floating out of the delicate phoenix and dragon decorated temples over the misty valley. Until the typhoon off the east coast came rolling in, but it was far enough out to sea that it only lashed at us with a terrific electric thunderstorm. Susana in Jhunan hosted us next, bringing us to the Lotus Festival where we dined on many preparations of the seeds, flowers, roots and leaves of this beautiful flower that blooms this month, and around the culinary and historically fascinating villages of her region. She wove the stories of murals and carvings in the many temples for us, and helped us purchase ghost money to burn in the ornate kilns for the ancestors and good luck for Mike's university future, and made sure we didn't sample the luscious food on the altars as an offering to the gods. The ancient capital of Tainan was the only city so far we explored on our own, and then Scott and Grace and their two boys, Norman (11) and Jagger (7) gathered us at the train station at Kaohsiung to participate in several days in the lives of the Peng Family. I can't spell their Chinese names, but it was fascinating to hear the reasons they chose their English names! We had a great tour of Scott's office and neighbourhood, met the extended family, and the boys were wonderful tour guides around Dream Mall, Taiwan's largest. And it is much more fun messing around in the elaborate Asian game arcades with kids than just the two of us! And Scott escorted us to the dentist for a cleaning at a fraction of the cost we would have to shell out in Canada. Now we are on our own again, but still people are so friendly and Dave leant us his English/Chinese dictionary, so wish us luck on our final 6 days away from home!
Signing off,
The Avenger, Me Got the Neutron Bomb
(that's what my new baseball cap says :)

Bubble Tea Land

It is so hot and humid here (35 degrees celcius) and we are so stuffed with fried dumplings and steamed buns and rice noodles and dragonfruit, that I can hardly wiggle my fingers enough to blog, but our host family has the air conditioning cranked and are upstairs napping, so this might be my only opportunity to get online for a while.
Taiwan has been good to us, Mike's english-teaching cousin Dave rescued us at the airport and manouevered us and and our gear back to his apartment through the vibrating hive of scooters and watermelon carts and cheap clothing stands and garbage trucks playing a jingle through a loud speaker like an icecream truck (what a disappointment that was!) in this second most densely populated country in the world (after Bangladesh). It was great to stay with someone who could offer us a good chunk of insight into new dining and bathroom and footwear etiquette, as his students have been lucky enough to have held his attention focused here in Taipei for almost a year now and he's still going strong. He knew how to spiral us slowly into the excitement of this big Asian city to avoid the claustrophobic panic attacks of being mashed in together with thousands of other people pushing down narrow alleys throbbing with Chinglish t-shirts on hangers and carts steaming with bamboo leaf rice wraps and scooters whizzing (and squeezing through the crowd with a baby in the basket and a toddler standing between mom's knees) in every direction and skinned snakes dangling from the roof. Ok, we only saw a handful of those. But it has been a brilliant experience as we can always escape the heat of the day as even the buses are air conditioned, the crowds are still delighted and smiling to see the rarity of foreigners, Taiwan is one of the safest countries we have ever visited, there are frequent dragon and phoenix adorned Buddhist and Taoist temples sparkling in bright reds, greens, yellows and blues between the tall, narrow apartment buildings (and some Confucious temples), and we can sample the best food from all over Asia without fear of tummy bugs! My list of our culinary adventures this week, especially odd preparations of tofu and snacks of glistening fruits, is already three pages long.
We have being graciously hosted by two hospitality club families already, Yuying in Taipei, and Han and Ching and their daughter, Sky in Jhong-li. Yuying and her friend brought us hiking in the mists of the mountains surrouding the city where the temperature cooled to a more comfortable 26 degrees, where the cicada song was frighteningly loud, and photo opportunities abundant: so many huge butterflies and shimmering dragonflies darting through the bamboo forest, and turtles and frogs in the lotus ponds. And we would have been completely lost in the charging markets without an experienced guide; she had us sampling from almost every bin in the Chinese medicine and herb market, an outdoor Taiwanese opera wailing in the street behind us, most of the audience seated on their scooters. In Jhong-li, we piled into the van with the other 17 children that attend Han and Ching's summer school in the morning to go to the local waterpark/spa to get hammered by "massaging" waterfalls and jets targetting pressure points in the blue or orange pools of different temperatures and herbal concoctions, and then there were the saunas, as if we weren't sweating enough outside already. In the afternoon we joined them to drive into the country to an elementary school surrounded by rice fields, and were proclaimed captains of the competing soccer teams...we didn't offer very much skilled assistance though, but Mike walked away with a good few bruises from his goal-tending duties. The air quality in the cities here is quite poor, which was the motivation to get the kids into the countryside, but our game nearly got smoked out by the farmer next to the school burning off the rice stalks. Some of the kids were laying on the ground during half-time to get under the smoke, but at least it was better than the scooter fumes of the city!
Every meal is a delightful adventure here, as we never know what we are ordering (all the signs in Mandarin characters), but we haven't been disappointed yet. We avoid the animal part carts entirely, but sometimes we are surprised what forms the tofu and mushrooms and radishes can take when prepared skillfully. Today Ching introduced us to the morning market and the art of bargaining, not our strongest point. Many people excitedly take the opportuntity to practice their English, even the squid-monger, but Ching took care of most of the business, I carried the bags of lychees and noodles and papaya salad and new clothing purchases, and Mike was busy photographing the old men peering eagerly at him over carts of chicken feet, bowls of lotus seeds, and jars of crabs, and the bald, orange-robed Buddhist monks chanting along with the sacred music humming out of the ghetto blaster in their satchel. This evening they are taking us to Jhubei to stay with another HC host in her bookstore, and the further south we go, the hotter it is supposed to get!

Finding Nemo

Hey, we survived the deep sea dives and are now certified scuba divers! Yay! I don't know how often we can sample of this glorious hobby as it is so expensive, but for three days on the Great Barrier Reef we entered another world, one that humans are not meant to partake in....oh, the marvels of technology!
Turtles, jellyfish, giant sea slugs and clams, thousands of fish in colours so vibrant and shapes so ridiculous that it was hard to soak in all the new life around us on each salty half hour dream-like excursion below the surface. On our first independent dive, only the two of us to navigate our way through the deeps, Mike descended deeper than we were certified to go to tickle a thorny sea slug lazing about on the sandy sea bed, and was punished by witnessing our new underwater camera popping out of its "secure fastening" on his inflatable vest to rocket 19.4 meters to the surface above and shoot a meter above the surf! Climbing onto the boat lamenting our loss, we were thrilled to find the crew flashing self-portraits with a familiar-looking device which they had spotted and retrieved from the choppy waves. We have now spent 209 minutes below the surface, sometimes calm, occasionally a bit frightening...as Mike and I were exploring the coral reef on our last dive, the 40 knots wind and strong current above dragged the boat and its moorings out to the deeper ocean, so when all the divers surfaced, we could not swim against the current to reach it, nor the coast 50 kms away. Every person had to be rescued in an inflatable motorboat. A 1 meter wide jellyfish was floating along with the two of us waiting for the boat, we left him to his own fate.
The highlight was the guided dive at night, I was nervous enough already when during our pre-dive safety briefing, someone yelled out "Sharks!" and we peered over the rail to where we were about to leap into the water in our scuba gear...the boat's spotlight had attracted loads of little fish, which had in turn attracted 10 or more black-tipped reef sharks which were stirring up a froth of seafoam in their predatory circling. This was just the type of situation I imagine everyone's mother to warn them against participating, but our dive leader swore that they would not bother us as long as we did not hassle them. They were only 2.5 meters long after all. He said "If you shine your flashlight at the reefwall and see little red eyes glowing back at you, it is probably a lobster: catch it for our dinner. If you shine your light into the deep and see two green eyes, it is probably a shark. If those two eyes begin to diverge, it is coming at you: stop shining your light on it!" He didn't reveal how us being blind to our shark's progress in our direction would protect us 10 meters below the surface!
Now we have dried off and the land has ceased to undulate beneath our wobbly landlegs, back at the Cairns campground which is a definite step down from the private ensuite cabin and great meals on the boat. No one is beckoning us to join them on the five-a-day dives off the back of a boat to view a seascape too bizarre for us to have imagined, but Taiwan is now calling us so we will be leaving the southern hemishpere in a few short hours....

Just add water!

For a refreshing change from our 2 weeks in the desert, we have emerged from our journey across the Outback unscathed, and tomorrow morning we sail out to the Great Barrier Reef for three days (and two nights on the boat on the Reef) to get our scuba diving certification! We figured this would be a good way to commemorate our seventh anniversary, and a very refreshing way to wash off the desert dust we’ve been covered in since the first morning we leapt out of the campervan to wonder at the desert at dawn; that very first dry-air sunrise smile cracked my lip!
The last four days driving from Uluru and Alice Springs through the Outback that separated us from the Cairns coast were long days of driving from dawn till sunset, sometimes on single lane roads that demanded us to pull over onto the shoulder and stop to allow the road trains roar past us. We spent the nights curled around a fire camped at springs at the edge of the road, marked by windmills pumping water up from bores that we could wash our dishes in. The great horizon was broken by millions upon millions of waist-high termite mounds, and very few road signs (all of which had been blasted by shotguns), and our attention by the occasional country music station that might buzz into reception. Apart from that we just had our three charity shop cassette tapes to amuse us, a varied compilation: Neil Diamond, Bobby McFerrin, and the Best of Mariachi music. The moment we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, the air temperature began to warm, and life began to return to the landscape after a few thousand kilometers. Mike’s surprise of the week was the 1.5 meter long lizard crawling across the highway ahead, and mine was the green frogs that clung desperately to the inside of the outback toilet bowls as I flushed them! I can’t see that that is their ideal habitat, but I saw three!
After only four rock chips in the windshield and a broken headlight from a spit-up stone, we reached the high altitude rainforest near the Atherton Highlands for a day to refresh beside waterfalls. Mike has driven us 7403 kilometres in the last three weeks across this great country, so he deserves this break by the sea! We’ll be in Taiwan in six days!

Desert Roaming

We have finally arrived at Alice Springs, an urban oasis in the middle of the Australian desert Outback, and first thing we did is head straight for an internet cafe! Australian travelling photos are long overdue, plus Mike's got to register for his Electrical Engineering university courses online for his September start (and we had to assess the damage the many petrol fill-ups across the Outback has done to our finances).

So, where to catch up from...we last updated from New Zealand's South Island, from Dunedin where we were still bloated from the morning's chocolate factory tour and five story one ton chocolate waterfall...from there our final Kiwiland wish was granted and we witnessed fairy penguins surfing in from their day out at sea and scurrying into their little holes after pausing to preen themselves for our dusky viewing pleasure. Then we shot up to Christchurch to drop off our beloved campervan, and catch up with Hayley and crew again, and then back up to Wellington for a day and a half to say our final goodbyes :(
The flight to Sydney was only a few hours, and it almost felt like home to see the sunset over a huge horizon again. Our hospitality club host, Ollie, got us going in the right direction for how to do Sydney in three days, and then Tomasi (who Mike had worked with in Wellington) showed us the beach scene. We were a little disappointed (and more than a little relieved) to realize that despite having all the world's most poisonous creatures in one country, and all the frightening tales to go with it, nothing scary has jumped out and bit us, or even rattled in the bushes, or spun any webs to ensnare us. It was even a bit anti-climatic not to be chased by hairy spiders or glistening snakes, but now that we are camping, it makes our runs out to the bush to pee in the middle of the night alot less spooky. But those fruit bats dangling and climbing the trees in the afternoon in Sydney's Botanic Gardens, that was eery. Everything in this country is huge: those bats had a meter wing span. Families were picnicing in the shade, and above them were creatures that looked like they could swoop down and carry off their children! We were only visiting the gardens to see cockatoos!
So, big full moon rise over the Sydney Opera House, kangaroo pie and crocodile pizza, lazy afternoons watching the surfers on the famous beaches, catching up with friends we had met in Europe, not a bad first impression of a new land! And then we were off in our own Priscilla, Queen of the Desert campervan! (though ours isn't nearly as shiny)
First stop was to go hiking in the Blue Mountains and to see limestone caves, and then we beelined it south to meet Anne, my mom's 1977 European Contiki tour backpacker friend who I was named after. We hadn't seen each other in 28 years, but I wondered if with my head shaved perhaps I don't look that different to our last visit when I was a week old. Her husband George was an Outback tour guide so he loaded us up with maps and camping guides and planned out our itinerary for us, and told us where to get cheap fuel, and made sure we were carrying enough water for our ambitious journey through the Outback. Good thing, because we didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into! Anne toured us through their goldmining town of Bendigo, filled us up with good homecooking, took us to their local pub to have a game of pool with their son, Matthew (and for us to sneak photos of the cowboys leaning on the bar), and drove us around the countryside to spy our first live kangaroos. Up until then we had only seen kangaroos dead on the side of the road, which was quite startling, but since we have seen hundreds: lazing in the shade on golf courses, hopping across our path when we are hiking, little joeys with their heads reaching out of their mom's pouch to nibble at the grass, bounding across the road in front of us as we're hurtling down the highway! In the Outback you just don't drive after dark, or not at over 30 kms per hour at least.
They sent us on our way to Melbourne well fed and equipped, where we were taken on great urban tours with more friends we had met in Europe, and then the Real Adventure began. Mike's now expert left-side driving wound us past dozens of beaches and glorious coastal cliffs on the Great Ocean Road, and what was that dense little wad in that eucalyptus tree? Yes, a grumpy little ball of fur that barely had the energy to glare at us for the photo before dozing off back to sleep, our first koala, the cutest animal on the planet! You can just imagine our delight, and two more blinking at us through the bushes down the road. We didn't dare cuddle them with their gorgeous little padded noses and tree-climbing claws, but I'm still holding out for a koala sanctuary that has tamed at least one to receive our affection. Up from the coast we hiked through the Grampian Mountains, spying emus frantically hurtling through the bush, and kookaburras singing in the burnt gum trees. The bush fires are evident in so many places, as is the acute water shortage, and we hadn't even made it into the desert yet! An excellent Aboriginal Centre had a theatre which illustrated the Dreamtime Creation stories of the original inhabitants of the area, and we drove far too far on awful, dust-corrugated gravel roads past giant termite mounds to see ancient ochre cave paintings of handprints and emu tracks.
We burned straight through Adelaide, as we had a huge journey ahead of us still, and the next day there we were in the desert, the great Outback, a flat red expanse with grey scrub, no water, a hot glaring sun but a cold wind that nearly dropped down to 0 at night (it is winter), and a big road across a continent in front of us, traversed by trucks called "road trains" which pull three semi-trailers. For hours and hours, the last four days and the next seven. Sand, lots of space for Mike to perfect his boomerang throwing skills, flocks of meter tall eagles feasting on kangaroo roadkill, once the sun beats through the cold wind the flies begin bouncing off our eyeballs, bleached bones, we've seen one dingo. We spent the first night in Coober Pedy, the opal mining town where 50% of the inhabitants live in homes dug underground, and the next day we arrived to see the sunset on Uluru, Ayer's Rock. We were glad that we organized to go on an aboriginal tour of The Rock: two guides walked us through their sacred area, and in their language (with an interpreter) told us the creation stories of Uluru, illustrating them with pictures drawn in the dust. Mike got to learn to throw a spear, and how to make bush glue and start a fire. Hopefully we won't have to resort to digging for witchetty grubs or honey ants on this journey though. Mmmm, bushtucker.
This afternoon we hauled our rattly campervan through the desert to find three meteorite craters, and had a dusty camel ride on Pebbles and Benji. We have yet to see any of the 100 000 wild camels wandering through the desert, set loose once motor vehicles replaced their necessity in the 1930's. Another week of desert dwelling for us, and we will have reached the ocean again at Cairns, for something completely different! Yay for scuba diving! Might be Teipei on July 1st when we get the precious combination of a fast internet connection and time and energy to update again!

Big Red Centre

Hey from OZ's big red centre! We're about a third of the way along our ambitious driving extravaganza around and through this continent country! We're just using exceptionally expensive internet in Coober Pedy, the opal mining town near Ayre's Rock where most of the homes (and this internet cafe) are caves dug into the desert, so no time to talk of koalas and kangaroos and Sydney and Melbourne and Anne and George's for the moment, but its all good! We've got a big journey ahead of us still, but hope to update soon, maybe a week or two, from a more...cosmopolitan location!

Greetings from 45° South!

We are just pulling out of the friendly “Scottish” city of Dunedin, on our final mission in New Zealand: to track down those elusive penguins that are supposed to be hiding out all along the coast of everywhere we have travelled and lived, but have so far eluded us completely! Less than a week now till we fly from Wellington to Sydney for our month in OZ, and we decided we had better get ourselves sorted before we hit the big red desert! Following Nicole’s advice closely, we have booked a 5 day Learn to Scuba Dive course on the Great Barrier Reef (no better place for it!) that includes three days living on a boat out on the Reef, so we’re pretty stoked about that. And we decided to curb the ultra-adventure urge that would have had us hitchhiking blindly into the hot Outback, and instead booked another campervan for the journey. Not quite as flash or cheap as this one we’ve got now, but it will reliably take us into and out of the desert, so we can manage our general route that will take us from Sydney through to Melbourne through to Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) and up to Cairns for diving. Then we’ll fly back to Sydney to fly to Taiwan, where a whole new adventure awaits us! It has been great to have planned such a diverse three month journey: New Zealand’s quiet, chilled, blue mountainous coastal nature excursion, then to Australia’s big red hot Outback leaping with kangaroos (hopefully), then to Taiwan’s crowded cosmopolitan cities and brand-new-to-us Asian culture and merchandise and culinary delights!

Since our salty bath with the dolphins on the Banks Peninsula, we drove through some of NZ’s most spectacular mountain passes (everywhere seems to be a filming location for the Lord of the Rings films, or that’s what the tourist brochures tell us), and to the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. A few days hiking through the native bush and parking our van beside the wild west coast beaches, and searching for our own rough chunks of jade on the beach (every rock looks like it when it is wet, much duller the next day) and then we weaved our way through the steep mountains to Fjordland!

From New Zealand

It was like entering a different world taking this 1.2 km tunnel through the cloud-rimmed mountain to emerge at Milford Sound (which receives 6 meters of rain annually!) where thousands of waterfalls are cascading off the glistening steep rock walls into the sea every direction you look. A cruise took us out to the open Tasman Sea as Captain Cook would have first viewed it as his British ships were exploring NZ’s coast in the 1700’s, and right under waterfalls that the wind whipped so strongly that the water never reached the sea below, so we could look straight up into them! Coming around and up the east coast is lots more isolated beaches and a vast coastline with only birds to keep us company (and two giant sea lions who surprised us by rearing up out of the grass beside a lighthouse where we were going to park the van for the night; we let them keep their camping spot) has brought us to this university town of Dunedin, and a chocolate factory that we got to tour! We’ve been basked in hospitality since we arrived here by friends of my Grandma Betty’s, Gai and Geoff and kids, and Katie, a friend of Scotty’s from Glasgow has shown us all the hip cafes, and the pubs with warm fireplaces to curl up around. Mike’s put a couple more photos online of our last moments in Kiwiland… our next entry will probably be from Down Under!

EZY Cruizn

For the photos to go along with this entry open this link in a new window...

For the record, we did eventually feel a single earthquake of the weekly minor quakes that Wellington (built on a continental plate fault line) is supposed to suffer from. I was on the 16^th floor of Jon’s office building when it began to wobble, just enough excitement to have me and the other Canadian girl chattering about noting it on our blogs, too small to do any damage. At home, Mike momentarily thought the lady downstairs had slammed a door, until he checked his online seismograph. (it was a 4.4)

As I am typing this, we are cozy and warm in our campervan overlooking the village streetlamp reflections shimmering in the volcanic crater harbour of the Banks Peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island. We feel like we are living a very luxurious lifestyle this month travelling around the south island: no shivering in a cold, wet tent or waiting on the side of the road on the kindness of strangers to transport us to our next destination! Nope, we’re in our EZY Cruiza campervan, complete with microwave, laptop, fridge, stove, sink, DVD player, queen size bed, and a safe! All for less per day than we would pay to stay at a hostel! When did we morph into “flashpackers”? Perhaps it was the inspiration from the tales of Gren and Beryl in England towing their caravan all across the continent, or perhaps it was the rude awakening Mike had at that music festival when he discovered that our tent is no longer waterproof…

Work in Wellington has been all wrapped up now for almost two weeks, Mike gorged on his final café indulgences hoping to build up his fat stores for the next four months of unemployment (ie glorious freedom travelling). I had a last few giggles with Tess, and a good send off with Jon and Sarah and baby Amber: accompanying them on their holidays around the North Island. And I thought I was going to get away without having to drive at all on the narrow, cliff-hugging, winding tracks that New Zealand calls their main roads. Instead in the last month I manoeuvred the van full of us over 2200 kms, cresting over some lush mountain views, every horizon jagged with palm trees and giant ferns. Apart from Jon diving over a small cliff in his power wheelchair, and getting that damn heavy thing stuck in the rising tide on a golden sand beach, it was quite an idyllic excursion, even with a 4 month baby in the backseat! And travelling with Kiwis gave me a whole new perspective on the country: those 2 meter tall tufted grasses are called toi tois and have you ever felt one before…and those long pods falling off that tree are perfect for whipping your mates…and these marshmallow cookies have to be smacked onto your forehead at birthday parties… Everytime Sarah mentioned that anything was a “little slice of Kiwiana”, I was totally sold on it. And I finally got to go for a dip at the famous “Hot Water Beach”, where hot springs pass below the sand on their way to the sea, so if you bring a spade and find the right spot, you can dig yourself your own little hot tub, but you have to defend it shrewdly from all the other holidaymakers who want a piece of your own little bit of paradise!

But now we are onto our own journey, all of May chugging our Ezy Cruiza up the mountains and down the scenic coasts of the South Island. We were warned that the landscape doesn’t get much more wild or beautiful than down here, and we have not been disappointed. Some days have been gloriously sunny, and some nights have been frosty…it is the end of autumn, the leaves are all changing colours, and we are passing from coast to mountain summit everyday. We began our travels in Christchurch where we met up with Steve’s Kiwi girlfriend, Hayley, who made sure we got to sample the full scope of the nightlife on offer down here! Then we sped across the island to the northwest tip to Farewell Spit to meet up with Ben and Caroline, our French friends whom we tracked down kitesurfing on a deserted beach…we were only able to spot them from the highest peak of an ever-shifting sand dune. We joined them hiking some of the Able Tasman National Park coastal track, a route which constantly rises over mountain ridges for panoramic views of the sea, then drops down to tramp across impossibly beautiful empty beaches. So we decided to get the full perspective of the majesty of the park by renting a kayak to explore the coves from sea level the following day. We saw one stingray, and three pups from a seal colony tagged along with our kayak to the beach we picnicked on to play, and then entertained us by darting under and around our kayak all afternoon, nearly leaping right up over our paddles, but the sharp-fanged mom (or dad?) did charge at us once to maintain her territory when we first floated up. Two days ago we hiked some of the Queen Charlotte track in the stunning fjords of the Marlborough Sound, and were absolutely mesmerized by what we found on the dark beach where we pulled off the road to spend the night. At first we thought the moonlight was just illuminating the waves lapping gently against the pebbles, but then we realized that the water was glowing where it touched the stones! We tossed some rocks in, and the ripples lit up like a fountain… then our hands were speckled with bright glowing spots…so were the bottom of our shoes… and we looked back across the wet, low-tide beach: our footprints were glowing behind us where we had disturbed the brilliant photo plankton! Every step we took was illuminated, and then the breeze picked up and the glowing spread and faded up the beach where the wind touched the wet rocks, just like the aurora borealis dances in the sky. All this under how many shooting stars, and no one else around except the curious possums, their eyes glowing in our flashlight beams down from the trees.

Not to glorify this little island nation hanging off the edge of the globe, but what can top that? So we drove back into the interior the next day for lunch at a sunny winery, and today, well we just went swimming with the world’s rarest dolphins. Sigh, it’s a wonderful world. Although I did swallow far too much sea water for comfort, and since I cut my hair really short, I don’t think I have fully warmed up once, but the wetsuits at least kept us buoyant in the crashing waves. Mike was just floating there innocently, knocking two stones together underwater (a sound these Hector’s dolphins adore, apparently) and they just came right up, surfaced, and sprayed him in the face from their blowholes. Rude.

If I ever finish this blog entry and get to bed, then the plan is that tomorrow we are driving over a mountain pass again to the west coast of the island to see the glaciers, then down to Fjordland, a destination I am very titillated by, as my favourite author, Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) described as “the one place on earth that looked like it was dropped from outer space”. It is supposed to be stunning, even in torrential weather conditions. Thank God for the Ezy Cruiza!

We’re not getting very much internet access, but we’ve got two more weeks down here, then off to Australia May 30, so if you don’t here from us in the next while, you can imagine us sunning ourselves beside a kangaroo-adorned billabong! I can’t wait to get one of those cork dangling sun hats those crazy Aussies wear to chase away the flies!

Top to Bottom, almost done...

So, we're getting near the end of our time in New Zealand. It has treated us very well! Just over three weeks of work left before we leave our jobs and flat and head for the South Island, hopefully before it snows down there! Today was Carli-Ann's last day working with Tess, the little girl she nannied for this year. Tomorrow, Carli-Ann goes away for two weeks with her boss Jon and his family on their holiday. She will be doing all the driving and most of the personal assisting all the way up to the Coromandel peninsula. Now, we'll tell you what we've been up to the last couple months on the North Island.

My university plans have come together nicely, being accepted into the engineering transfer program at Malaspina university in Nanaimo. We'll move out to the "Bathtub Racing Capital of the World" at the end of August to live in the basement suite of Carli-Ann's sister Lisa and husband Tom. Just last week we found out that my Plastics Engineering degree from 7 years ago will transfer 30 credits to my university degree. That's almost a whole year's worth!
Last month we were lucky enough to get tickets to WOMAD (World Of Music And Dance), a fabulous music festival up in New Plymouth near Mount Taranaki. It is held in a beautiful, sprawling city park, filled with giant NZ ferns, lakes and hills. At night, hidden coloured lights illuminate the giant old trees like a fairy tale. Bands from 26 countries played on 5 stages, and some of them even gave cooking lessons on a special chef stage! On the second night it began to rain, gently at first, but increasing through the night. As we slept in our tent, the winds grew strong enough to nearly flatten our tent. As the tent bowed in the wind, it pressed it's unwelcomed, cold, wet nylon in my face. In the morning we woke up in an inch of water. Well, Carli-Ann's side was dry. I woke up in an inch of water. All my stuff was soaked, including our camera (the good old thing works again now after drying out!). In the end, the sun came out that day and we were rescued by our flatmate with her car and moved in to her hostel for the last night.

After the festival, we took an early bus further up the country to the Waitomo Caves. These famous caves house heaps of glow-worms and almost as many tourists! After donning wetsuits along with 5 other adventurers (all Taiwanese girls), we tramped through a sheep field until we came to a large hole. Under these fields are dozens of rivers carving out magnificent caves filled with the usual formations, and the ceilings starred with glow-worms. We sat on inner tubes and floated about a kilometre through the cave, going down a couple waterfalls as well.

Immediately after the blackwater rafting experience, we had to get moving to make it to Rotorua that night. Thanks to New Zealands reliable hospitality, hitchhiking there was no problem, and we were even given a view of the city by being driven up the mountain before being dropped off at our hostel doorstep! The next morning we were shuttled out to the coast, where we took a boat 50km to White Island/Whakaari, New Zealand's most active volcano.
About 25km out from land, we came upon about 20 playful dolphins. We found it interesting how similar they are to dogs. As the boat slowed, they seemed to chase it, swimming beside it, jumping around. Much like a dog chases a car (minus the barking). Anyway...this strange, sulphur encrusted island is the peak of an active volcano, poking out of the sea. We were given gas masks and hard hats and told to beware of possible "car-sized rocks hurtling at the speed of a bullet" that it has been known to hurl out when erupting (the hard hats were apparently meant to ward these off). We were given a fascinating guided tour up to the rim of the smoky belching crater complete with eerie stories of disappearing geologists. After a long day, a night bus carted us back to Wellington for work the next morning.

Earlier this week, we took another boat, this time to the nearby Kapiti Island.

We spent 6 hours hiking around this nature reserve, home to some of New Zealand's rarest birds. Along with forest dwelling parrots, parakeets, and other unusual birds we were lucky enough to see one takahe, a big dinosaurish bird (photo above) of which there are only 280 left in the world. Nineteen of them are on Kapiti Island.

I've been eating a bit less brownies at work this week after getting one of my molars pulled out. This is the same tooth that had broken in Ireland, and I got fixed in Kosovo. Unfortunately, a filling wasn't enough to save it and a root canal was out of our budget. The bright side: now I have it as a kosovar souvenir! Stay tuned for a time-lapse video of the healing process...not for the faint of heart!

So, we've been busy but we're almost done with our North Island experience. On May 2 we'll get the ferry from down the street to the South Island where we're going to rent a camper van for 25 days. We'd usually just camp, but it's starting get bloody cold here! And the South Island should be even colder. So we're really excited to travel in style for a change, and to be the ones stopping for the hitchhikers!

We have bought our plane tickets to be on our way and make a long, roundabout trip home. At the end of May (30th), we get a flight to Sydney. It will be our first time in Australia and hopefully we'll get to see a lot of it in the month we have there. On June 30th, we fly to Taipei, Taiwan for a visit to Asia! We'll see my cousin Dave who has been living in Taipei for a while now teaching English. Hopefully he'll have some tips for us to keep out of trouble there! And then finally, we fly in to Calgary, to be in Canada just in time for the August long weekend.

So, we hope to see everyone soon!! (if applicable)
Happy Spring/Autumn in *insert hemisphere here*White Island from our New Zealand album

You can't beat Wellington on a good day!

we have a new photo site here: http://picasaweb.google.com/mikeeg555/NewZealand

You can't beat Wellington on a good day! And finally we have had a few of them, even in a row! We are now in the height of summer (unless the southerly winds are blowing up from Antarctica, which forces me to shiver in bed wearing my hoodie and slippers like last night), but then this afternoon the sun dried my washing in only half an hour. We have been taking full advantage of the good weather to cycle around the peninsula to reach the best beach-side cafés, thrash about in the harbour a bit in kayaks, do some hiking to seek out glowworms, and I finally went swimming in the sea for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere! I even found a dead baby shark on the beach, its teeth stuck into my finger like Velcro, so I saved them as proof of my battle.
My jobs are still fine, and at Fidel's Café Mike has been promoted to Kitchen Hand, so he is reinventing himself as Master Pizza Chef. And, much to my delight, he is applying his new skills at home, though not very often as he still consumes a good 80% of his meals at the café, and he gets paid for his time too! What a charmed existence.
Wellington has been an exciting place to be in the summer, despite only having a population of 200 000. But it is the national capital. They seem to have at least two festivals going on at any one time, at the moment is the Asia Pacific Festival and the Fringe Festival, and this weekend is their carnival. A few weekends ago was the Rugby Sevens matches, the most bizarre Welly event to date, at least 30% of the people in the streets were walking in groups of 5 or 6, dressed up in matching costumes. Like way way way more costumes than at Halloween. Nothing thematically related to rugby as far as we could decipher, they were just off to watch the match dressed as Marilyn Munroes, or Smurfs, or aliens, or Fembots, or as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
Since Christmas we have actually managed to get out of town quite a few times, every time we can both manage to wrangle two or more consecutive days off we use our thumbs to jet up the North Island (too expensive to ferry down to the south island for just a weekend trip, we're saving that mammoth journey for May). Big thanks to all the sheep truck drivers, old Maori ladies with grandkids in the back, horse-trainers, pumpkin delivery men, farmers, marines, German tourists, tattooed bros, and students who cart us all over this little volcanic country!
In January we attended a music festival at the historically potent village of Parihaka, where the non-violent reactions of the Maori people when their land was being confiscated by the British in the 1800's were said to have inspired the movements of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. We got a new perspective of the event from our first helicopter ride: the barefoot pilot flew us over the village nestled at the foot of the snow-capped conical Mount Taranaki, where it is rumoured that you can snowboard in the morning, and surf in the afternoon. While the clouds clung to the mountain top most of the weekend, once they parted, they provided a stunning background for our photos of the festival volunteers on horseback, crowned with the white feather symbolic of their passive resistance. And the music was inspiring too, but on the Saturday afternoon, after the 5th tedious hour of bands playing Bob Marley covers, we were forced to seek out other sources of entertainment.
After our dusty festival weekend, we hitched into the nearby city of New Plymouth to meet up with Vivien, who I was a Personal Assistant for in Scotland. She and her new Aussie Personal Assistant, Sarah (who's couch we plan to surf in Melbourne in June) were on a 6 week tour of Australia and New Zealand; its always exhilarating to catch up with someone on the other side of the planet!
Our last days of 2006 were spent in the smelliest city in New Zealand, Rotorua, where the city park is dotted with natural hot springs boiling and steaming away, geysers erupting every half hour, and large puddles of mud bubbling and leaping playfully. Rotorua is famous for the traditional Maori concerts and feasts they put on for the tourists: the hotspring steam pit-cooked food is divine, but the show is terrifying, and Mike was glad that he wasn't chosen to represent our table by accepting the "peace token" from the threatening, hollering, puffing warrior chief. Our favourite memory was the beach near to our campground (our tent site was, incidentally, thermally heated!) where the hot water flowed out through the sand and into the moonlit lake shared only with the silhouettes of floating black swans. If you pick the right place to dig, right at the water's edge where the hot spring water mixes with the cool lake water, you can be sitting on warm sand with your feet in warm water, but if you move an inch back, you might scald your feet!
A few weeks ago we took a few days off to hitch up the East Cape, a remote part of the country with dazzling beaches and lots of little Maori communities. We stayed with cousins of Karlee's, a friend we met in the UK, and they showed us a proper East Coast good time. They took us mussel collecting off the longest wharf in the southern hemisphere, showed us their marae (Maori meeting house adorned with carvings of their ancestors and family history), and invited us to a hangi. All the hangi food (cooked in a pit dug in their garden and buried with hot rocks) was collected by them from the sea or from their garden: crayfish, sea urchin, mussels, abalone, potatoes, wild boar, lamb, pumpkin, sweet potatoes. The night before we had shyed out of going on a wild boar hunt, an event that was so extraordinarily far out of our realm of experience: imagine us going into the forest with a knife and a hunting dog! And one of our host's cousins was from the tiny village of Whangara, where the Whalerider movie was filmed, so he graciously brought us to his beach and marae, and let Mike have a go at surfing on the movie prop whales that are left crumbling on the beach. He said when other tourists turn up uninvited, they send them packing back up the road, so we were glad we didn't show up on our own.
We are working on securing our plane tickets home, and have decided to do a little detour to Australia in June, and Mongolia (via Beijing) in July, so as soon as Air China releases the tickets, we will know when we are coming home. We're still aiming for August for Mike to begin university in Nanaimo in September. He just got notice of his university acceptance letter today! We'll save the celebrations for later this week when his cousin, Nicole, who is on a world tour for 6 or 9 months, is blowing through Wellington. That will be the first family that we have seen since my Grandma Betty last April in Italy! That seems like a lifetime ago now...but I guess it was on the other side of the world, still can't quite wrap my head around New Zealand's isolation. But we know that we are not forgotten, a few weeks ago we received our Christmas presents from the Germains finally!