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!