Two On Tour

Down to the bottom of the world to catch up with family

Tuesday 18 March

Today is a long relocation day: we’re both up soon after 3am. Our taxi shows up on time and as dawn breaks we’re waiting in the departure lounge of the most charming airport I’ve ever passed through. Samui airport has a roof, but no walls. Checking in, shops and cafes, security, and the departure area are all open to the warm tropical air, but protected from rain. There’s even an area providing complementary coffee and snacks – everyone’s a VIP in Samui!

We have a long ten-hour wait at Bangkok airport for our flight south. But the time passes quickly enough. At 6pm we’re on our way to Sydney.

Wednesday 19 March

We land at Sydney soon after dawn. An hour-and-a-half later we’re on our way to Auckland. We’re through Immigration and customs in a flash despite declaring a wooden hairbrush, a pair of swimming goggles, and a bar of chocolate. (You can never be too careful with NZ customs.)
We’re soon in our hire car heading through increasingly heavy rain to Martin and Donna’s place in Panmure, in the east of Auckland. It’s a grim drive in the rain in heavy traffic through what seems to be one never-ending industrial estate. By the time we arrive it’s lashing down and my umbrella is in my suitcase in the boot of the car. Martin’s at work and Donna’s in Manila for her grandmother’s funeral, so after retrieving the umbrella we walk to a local parade of shops, where we’re scheduled to meet Martin later for a beer.
It’s a bit early for an early beer, so we grab a coffee and a slice of blueberry cheesecake nearby and wait for the clock to reach the yard arm. Martin, with canine friend Marley, arrives soon after us at the BeerSpot. It’s great to see him and we’re immediately lost in conversation catching up on the last ten years. After a couple of beers, we grab some burgers to take home.

Thursday 20 March

It’s our first full day in Auckland, and indeed in New Zealand. Martin’s at work, so we schedule ourselves. It’s a glorious day. We leave the hire car on the driveway and take the train into the city centre. We grab a sandwich and a coffee for lunch and get talking to the elderly local couple next to us. After lunch we spend a pleasant couple of hours at Auckland Art Gallery before making a beeline back to Panmure to meet old girlfriend Lily Hung, who lives locally and pretty much insists on meeting up with us. I’ve only seen her once in 20+ years, and even then very briefly. But it’s really good to see her. The three of us have a couple of beers and find a thousand things to talk about.

Martin’s had a long teaching day, so we cook dinner tonight. The three of us talk late into the evening.

Friday 21 March

It’s the equinox. Auckland has late sunsets for an equinox. It follows that it must have late sunrises too, but I haven’t found out yet as I sleep late (for me at least) for a second morning.

Once we’re up and about, we head back downtown by train. Kathryn spotted a noodle shop serving dan dan noodles when we were near the art gallery yesterday, so we make a detour. It’s well worth the diversion. Back at Britomart station, we take another train to the foot of Mount Eden, which we climb in brilliant early-autumn sunshine and spend an hour gradually ambling around the crater enjoying the views of Auckland from all directions.

Back in Panmure, Donna’s back from a family funeral in Manila. We haven’t seen her in ten years since she and Martin moved to New Zealand, so it’s fabulous to finally catch up. We sit on the deck eating Filipino takeaway food until it’s too dark and too cold to stay outside any longer. We move inside and spend the rest of the evening talking about everything that needs talking about after ten years.

Saturday 22 March

Time to move on again, this time to Sue and Claire in Gulf Harbour. At Martin and Donna’s recommendation, we first take a detour to Piha, a spectacular volcanic beach between two stacks of rock. The Auckland suburbs seem to go on forever, but once we’re finally in the NZ countryside, it’s pure pleasure.

We arrive at Sue’s in the late afternoon. It’s nearly 20 years since I’ve been here, but it all feels familiar. Sue takes us for a walk around the neighbourbood down to Army Bay and back just as the sun is setting and the landscape is bathed in golden light. It’s good to be back here.

Back at the house, we fall into conversation about Roger’s illness and passing. I’m glad the conversation came naturally and easily. Sue’s still understandably wobbly at times as we talk, but she clearly wants to talk and I want to listen. After dinner, we go through Sue’s box of vinyl, which is more-or-less unchanged since the late 1970s. I could name half the albums in that box without even seeing them. Unfortunately, the record player doesn’t work, so we play Regatta de Blanc and Out of the Blue on iTunes as we settle in to work on the world’s hardest ever jigsaw, which Sue’s already been working on since January.

Sunday 23 March

After a final video call with mum before she flies to NZ, a brief early-morning catch up with Claire before she disappears for a day of D&D, and dealing with everyday matters such as laundry, we spend the afternoon of our first full day strolling a loop around Shakespear Regional Park on Sue’s doorstep.

Claire and partner Taylor are out late watching the Chinese grand prix, so we spend the evening chatting with Sue about family and politics while The Suicide Squad flickers in the background. (I hadn’t realised it’s intended as a dark comedy).

Monday 24 March

Today is a bit of a limbo day. Sue and Claire are working, and mum hasn’t yet arrived. Over breakfast I briefly meet Claire’s partner, Taylor, who otherwise keeps a low profile. In the afternoon, we drive to the land end of the peninsula, to the beach at Orewa, where we wander up and then back down the beach before skulking into a cafe for afternoon tea.

Back at Clansman Terrace, I’m on cooking duty tonight, so it’s a big pot of Moroccan eggplant stew that finally lands on the patio table shortly before sunset.

Back inside, a spot of channel surfing leads the five of us to New Zealand’s play-off final against New Caledonia for a place in the World Cup finals next year. It’s a shockingly scrappy game, but New Zealand, with Forest’s Chris Wood, comfortably win 3-0.

Tuesday 25 March

We’re up at 5am to drive to Auckland airport to collect mum. Even this early, there’s a steady stream of commuter traffic on the roads. As we approach Auckland around 6.30am, we run into full-on rush-hour traffic. It’s still dark. New Zealand looks idyllic, but I wouldn’t wish this commute on anyone.

Mum’s surprisingly spritely despite 30+ hours of travel. The drive back to Clansman Terrace – the one I’d been dreading as I expected to get stuck in commuter traffic – turns out to be straightforward as the GPS steers us in a big clockwise loop avoiding central Auckland. By 9am we’re sitting outside on the deck having a morning cuppa.

After everyone’s freshened up and K’s made a smoked salmon salad for lunch, we walk down to Okoromai Bay and Army Bay with Claire. It’s a good chance to talk to Claire about where she is in life. By the time we’re approaching Clansman Terrace on the way back, mum’s unsurprisingly seriously flagging. When we finally arrive, she heads straight off to sleep.

Claire and Taylor rustle up a solid BBQ for dinner and we sit outside chatting until it’s getting a little dark and a little chilly. Mum heads straight back to sleep off her marathon journey; the rest of us chat (and in my case doze) in front of the TV.

Oh, and I have new glasses:

Wednesday 26 March

Our last day in Whangaparoa is quiet and relaxing. Everyone more or less does their own thing before convening for dinner outside on the decking for K’s Thai green curry. Sue’s at work, Claire and Taylor are downstairs playing video games, mum heads on foot to Gulf Harbour for a stroll and a coffee, while we drive to Whangaparoa town centre for groceries.

After dinner, we all sit around chatting until well after dark. Sue, mum, K and I reconvene to battle with the World’s Hardest Jigsaw and listen to 10cc until one by one we throw our hands up in despair and head to bed.

Thursday 27 March

We say goodbye to Claire and Taylor for a couple of days and fly to the South Island with mum and Sue.

The flight down to Queenstown is without incident. On arriving, however, our reasonable wiggle room for reaching Te Anau by 8pm, when the motel reception closes, is sorely pinched. We’ve already been on the ground for an hour by the time our bags arrive. The transfer to the car rental office takes longer than ideal. And the paperwork to get the keys to the car seems to take forever. By the time we drive off for the 170km drive to Te Anau, our ETA is 7.57pm.

The road, of course, is almost as empty as the landscape as we hurtle towards our destination. In the following two hours, I rarely dip within the speed limit and we eventually arrive with five minutes to spare before we would have been searching for alternative accommodation for the night or sleeping in the car.

We dump our luggage and immediately head on foot to the town centre, where we find a very agreeable Indian restaurant. I dart out to buy groceries for breakfast from what I’ll call The Supermarket at the End of the World (photo below taken the following day):

Friday 28 March

We’re up well before dawn to join a small tour group heading to Milford Sound. We’re the last ones to be picked up, the upshot of which is that I end up sitting up front with our Canadian driver, Dayton. By the time the sun is about to rise, we’re well on our way to Milford Sound, stopping for multiple photo opportunities along the way. It’s a stunning morning in the stunning glacial landscape of the Southern Alps. Banks of mist hang over the lower ground, while the peaks of the towering mountains are lit up by the early morning sun.

We arrive at Milford Sound mid-morning. We initially sit inside the boat cabin sipping coffee and munching a lemon muffin, but amble outside as the captain announces bottlenose dolphins frolicking around the boat. The dolphins are an initial distraction, but as the mist clears out on the Sound, the full grandeur of the fjord becomes visible. It’s spectacularly beautiful.

I’ve had a good gander at the scenery from the front passenger seat on the drive to Milford Sound, so I offer my seat to anyone who wants it for the drive back to Te Anau. I doze most of the way back in the warm sunshine streaming through the window of the minivan.

Back in Te Anau, the four of us walk around the south-east shore of Lake Te Anau and back. A few people are swimming in the lake. We watch a floatplane take off from the lake and, thirty minutes later, land again.

Before settling on somewhere to eat, we walk out of an Italian restaurant. The staff look miserable and bored. It isn’t especially busy, but in the 15 minutes we spend there, a member of staff only gets as far as slapping some menus on our table and bringing some water. All pasta dishes are unavailable according to a sign on the door. When we ask our server to confirm this, she just shrugs and said, “Yeah, that’s right”. No apology. No explanation. After waiting more than 10 minutes for someone to come and take our order, we give up and leave. We find a very agreeable Thai restaurant just a couple of doors down the road. All is well again.

Saturday 29 March

We say goodbye to Te Anau. Before driving back to Queenstown, we take the 20-minute drive south to the village of Manipouri, New Zealand’s most westerly settlement before humans give way to the wild and rugged expanse of Fjordland National Park. After a coffee and a flapjack at a small cafe by the water, we head for Queenstown, a couple of hours to the north. It’s a beautiful day, and this time we have time to enjoy the drive. We stop for lunch in a converted railway station at Kingston, half an hour short of Queenstown.

Our Airbnb in Queenstown is as spacious and comfortable as it looked on the listing. After an afternoon cuppa, K and I drive to the local supermarket to stock up. Claire and Taylor arrive shortly after we get back and we all walk down to the centre of Queenstown for dinner.

Mum understandably struggles with the steep walk back up to the house. We may need a taxi next time.

Sunday 30 March

We’ve been tearing around since Thursday, so today is a day for staying more-or-less put. The five of us, minus mum, trudge our way to the top of Queenstown Hill. It’s a surprisingly tough climb in places and in jeans and one too many layers, I’m not really suitably attired. At the summit, we stop a while to admire the views and watch a plane take off far below. The path down takes us through deep, dark coniferous forest and is precipitously steep in a couple of places.

I’m on cooking duty this evening. I rustle up a slightly gooey shepherdess pie. Everyone is polite, but it could have been better. Never mind. After dinner, we all sit down together for a game of Damn It!, followed by a round of Pencil and Paper.

Monday 31 March

We make a day trip to the old gold mining town of Arrowtown, a few minutes’ drive from Queenstown – to a playlist of ELO, Blondie and Police songs. It’s pleasant enough in its predictably folksy way. A stroll along the river, lunch, a visit to a farm shop, and a visit to the former Chinese settlement, which is perhaps the most interesting part as some of the Chinese miners’ basic huts have been restored to what they would have been like in the late nineteenth century.

It’s Claire and Taylor’s turn to cook tonight. They effortlessly rise to the challenge, turning out roasted sweet potatoes and carrots, kofte, and a side salad of baby spinach and tomatoes. After dinner, we spend the rest of the evening doing a sort of JigMap of New Zealand.

Tuesday 1 April

We stick to Queenstown today: we wander through the very pleasant Queenstown Gardens, grab some street food for lunch, then us younger generation amble off for a round of mini golf at the foot of the gondola. Low cloud gives way to bright sunshine as we play and the whole town and its surroundings look magnificent.

We all rest up for a couple of hours before heading back down to the town for the weekly pub quiz, where we finish a respectable second out of thirteen teams.

Wednesday 2 April

It’s a good day for a drive. We head up to the far north end of Lake Wakatipu at Glenorchy, where the Dart River flows into the lake, stopping on the way for photos.

After lunch in Glenorchy, we continue driving north heading for a hamlet called Paradise because, well… Long before we reach Paradise, the sealed road turns to gravel. The rough surface is hard going in what’s effectively a bit of an old banger and eventually, after gingerly maneuvering our way through a herd of cattle being driven up the road, we stop, turn around, and head back the way we came. Paradise is elusive today.

We’ve been driving today close to several filming locations of the Lord of the Rings. Back in Queenstown, Claire and Taylor find The Fellowship of the Ring on TV and we settle down to watch, or in my case, half-doze, half-watch. It’s K’s turn to cook: she rustles up a fine seafood chowder, after which it’s a game of Damn It!, a game of Pencil and Paper, and the final hour of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Thursday 3 April

It’s a wet day, but it clears up enough in the afternoon for a drive to Cromwell. Five of us, minus Taylor, squeeze into our rental car for the hour-long drive, which takes us through the Kawarau Gorge, home to the suspension bridge that in the late 1980s birthed bungee jumping as an extravagant pastime for the non-faint of heart. We pause a while to watch reckless youngsters launching themselves from the bridge before grabbing a family photo and pootling on through the gorge to nearby Cromwell.

Cromwell appears mostly closed for the day, even though it’s barely 4pm. We eventually find a bar with a sideline hustle in coffee and cakes, then drive back through the gorge to Queenstown.

In the wider world, the Trump administration has just announced America’s so-called ‘Liberation Day’. It looks set to become America’s own Brexitshambles. I’ll aim to check back here in six months and comment on how it’s going.

Friday 4 April

A drive to Wanaka, overlooking a breezy but stunning Laka Wanaka, then on to more remote Lake Hawea, which is starkly beautiful. We drive back via a lavender farm and the 45th Parallel South Marker overlooking the Clutha River just outside Cromwell.

It’s our last night in Queenstown, so we return to Yonder, the restaurant we ate at last Saturday when we arrived, and then return to the Pig and Whistle to spend our quiz winnings on some adult refreshments. It’s as charmless on a regular night as it is on a quiz night: to spend our winnings, Claire has to download and app, verify her email address, enter credit card details etc. Meanwhile, the world’s most unmemorable bar duo play in a corner, ignored by all. Still, a fabulous and memorable day.

Saturday 5 April

It’s farewell to Queenstown as we drive through increasingly empty country to Lake Tekapo, a couple of hundred kilometres to the north. By the time we enter the Mackenzie Basin, we’ve arrived in a sparsely populated part of what’s already a sparsely populated island. Twizel, population 2000, is the largest town for a hundred miles in any direction as far as I can make out.

Half an hour short of Tekapo, we stop at a viewpoint on the south shore of Lake Pukaki, where we’re treated to spectacular views of Mount Cook across the lake. Tekapo itself appears to be essentially a scattering of holiday homes and restaurants, plus a well-stocked supermarket. Our bungalow is far less plush than our rambling home in Queenstown, but it’s fine for a couple of nights.

No town is complete without an Indian restaurant: we eat at Fishtail, which does both Indian and Nepalese cuisine. It’s excellent. After dinner, despite the after-dark chill, Sue, Claire and Taylor head off to see a storyteller ply his trade around a fire. It sounds tempting, but it’s chilly. Mum, K and I head back to the bungalow and leave the others to it.

Sunday 6 April

Today is our capstone day in New Zealand as we walk the Hooker Valley Trail to the foot of Mount Cook. We decide to break into two groups: the two of us with mum, and Sue with Claire and Taylor. Given that hiking in a group of six can be like herding cats, this works out just right. It’s a mostly gentle 5km stroll to a glacial lake that marks the end of the trail, and where Sue, Claire and Taylor are waiting for us before they head back to the trailhead. On the way, we cross three narrow suspension bridges over roaring rapids. Mum manages the outward walk seemingly effortlessly, but understandably begins to flag on the return leg. By the time we arrive back at the trailhead, she’s exhausted. Still, all six of us are thrilled to have got so close to the stately Mount Cook. It occurs to me that I haven’t been in scenery like this since my post-school trip to the Alps in the summer of 1984.

Eating out was pricey last night, so we make a pit stop at Lake Tekapo’s single supermarket on the way home and buy a couple of frozen pizzas to cook back at the bungalow. Everyone’s tired to some degree and we all happily while away the rest of the evening sorting photos on our phones.

Monday 7 April

We say goodbye to Lake Tekapo and drive back to Queenstown. Before we leave, we spend some time investigating a scale model of the solar system on the waterfront – part of the Dark Sky Project that Tekapo is promoting. Some of the information boards are too weather-beaten to read, but those that are legible are full of little facts: who knew that distant Nepture only receives 1/400th of the sunlight that we receive on Earth? Best of all is a sundial based on an analemma: stand on the part of the analemma marked with the name of the current month and your shadow falls across a number indicating what hour it is. Amazing, eh? And I’d never heard of an analemma until today…

We have a drivers’ break at Cromwell, an hour or so short of Queenstown. Here, we say goodbye to Claire and Taylor: they’re flying back to Auckland tonight. We push on to the Queenstown Holiday Inn through increasingly ghastly weather. But we can’t grumble. We’ve had good-to-magnificent weather for most of our three weeks in New Zealand. I return the hire car unscathed and get a ride back to the Holiday Inn in it courtesy of the Hao Rentals chap who I was a bit grumpy with ten days ago when we arrived. We get chatting, and he’s a lovely chap.

There’s a Thai restaurant next to the Holiday Inn that does the four of us nicely for dinner. We spend the rest of our last family evening together working our way through a couple more rounds of drinks in the hotel lobby.

Tuesday 8 April

As we walk to our plane on a cold, drizzly morning in Queenstown, we see that the first snow of the season has fallen overnight on the mountains above the town:

Back in an equally damp Auckland, we say goodbye to mum and Sue, who drives us to our motel close to the airport. The room is spacious and perfectly fine to lounge in for the rest of the afternoon:

We spend our final evening in New Zealand with Martina and Donna at a restaurant somewhere near the airport:

They drive us back to the motel, we say goodbye, and settle down to catch up on some of our YouTube channels. Sadly, after four years, 2GoRoam is ending, although 2GoRoam Travels will continue. It seems Neil was getting disheartened by negative comments on his retirement strategy videos. I’m sad that he’s called time on his channel, but to be fair, he did ramble at times. Although we’d largely outgrown his videos on financing retirement and the psychology of retiring early, it’s a shame to lose a channel that was proudly free of any sponsorship and endorsements. Neil was 100% genuine. Good luck to him.