New Zealand part 3 - Fjordlands

From Queenstown the next natural main tourist attraction is Fjordlands.

This is a huge national park covering the south western area of the south island. Within Fjordlands Milford sounds is the most popular attraction. It is a part of the ocean winding between high steep mountains to the little village of Milford. You can reach it with one day trips from Queenstown but then you have to spend like 6 hours in each direction driving or by bus. We had our base in the beautiful town Te Anau located on the bank of the big Te Anau lake.  From there we joined a tour bus to Milford Sounds. The drive in itself is about two hours but we did many stops at beautiful attractions along the way that we would have missed if we drove ourselfves so it was definitely worth it. We also had a very experienced and funny guide. So in the end it was a full day trip with lot of amazing nature to see. To the right you see one of the big waterfalls gushing into the sound.
Only thing is that if you have been to Norway and seen the Norwegian fjords New Zealand is actually still a light version. Still well worth the trip though.
Outside Te Anau there is also a big cave with glow worms that we of course visited. A cool experience starting with a boat ride over the lake and then walking narrow paths some hundred meters into the cave where small boats took in total darkness took us to the glow worms. A must do if you're in the area.





So what more is there to say about Te Anau? Yes they have a pie shop with really good pies. I had the venison pie and that was actually the first meat pie that I have really enjoyed!

After two nights in Te Anau it was time to head north again and next stop was in beautiful Wanaka. Wanaka was like Queenstown crowded with backpackers. It seemed to be a partytown this time of year whereas it definitely is a ski resort in the winter. You could tell from the shops.

Main restaurant street, Wanaka

After Wanaka the trip continued to the Glaziers on the west coasts. More about that in next post.

Cheers

Lake Te Anau

Lake Wanaka (The water is really cold brrr)

Lumsden eventually became the most southern spot where we put down our feet

The famous seals living in Milford Sound

The Kea birds are not shy

In Te Anau even a parking lot can be beautiful

One of many streams on the way to Milford

Another nice spot in the Fjordlands

New Zealand part 2

So the next day we drove south on our way to Queenstown and the Fiordlands. On the way we paid a visit to a town called Timaru which was quite nice with a beautiful beach with thebig softly rounded black stones that are so common on the south island.

After Timaru we headed off toward the farm stay were we have envisaged to sleep with the sheep. We knocked on the door, no reply. Eventually we found the owner in the garden and made sure we were at the right place. Yes you are but I haven't accepted any bookings for tonight, I have family here over christmas. We showed our printed confirmation and she got very embarrassed. "Ohh I'm really sorry I'll have to shuffle the people around and make up a room for you.
We didn't feel really comfortable stepping into their xmas festivities so decided to try to find something else which we knew would be a challenge at this time of year. We were lucky and got the last little cabin at the camping site in Geraldine. So in the end everything turned out well and we got the opportunity to try some holiday camp life as well.

Next morning the trip went on to Queenstown, the adventure capital of NZ. On the way we passed a couple of beautiful lakes, Tekapu and Putaki, both with the turquoise water that is so specific to NZ.

They say it's because of minerals that comes down with the water from the mountains.

In Queenstown you can do a lot of various activities like skydiving, white water rafting, jetboating in the rivers and of course bungy jumping. Here you find the bridge where it all started or at least became popular, Kawarau bridge. (The native people on the pacific island Vanuatu is said to be the ones that were first).

I've never seen so many backpackers gathered in one spot as in Queenstown. They were literally everywhere and I wonder what the residents would live from if it wasn't for the tourist. Anyway a beautiful town located at the side of big lake, a must to visit if you go to the south island.

Ah you wonder if I did the bungy?? No, none of us did but I plagued the others in the car when leaving by mumbling: I should have... I will never get this chance again...

Looking down from Kawarau bridge

 Cheers

New Zealand part 1

A must when you spend some time in Australia is of course to go to New Zealand. Since you need some time, at least two weeks I would say, we decided to do it during the Christmas/ New year leave. This is also a good time since it's the middle of the summer and NZ is much cooler than Australia.
as you probably know NZ consist of two islands and we decided to fly in to Christchurch on the the South island to then 15 days later fly home from Auckland on the North island.

This time is a popular travel period so to save costs we flew out on Xmas day which is not that popular bud didn't really matter to us. It turned out to have some drawbacks. The flight went well but when we arrived the staffing at the border control was obviously minimised due to the holidays so to get through took like forever. Once there we got the rental car pretty swiftly and stred driving towards Christchurch city. We immediately discovered that everything was closed, also the bigger supermarkets. Also the restaurants that we passed were all closed. Well, we thought the motel can probaly direct us somewhere to find something to eat. Haha when we came to the motel the reception was locked and there was just a sign saying "Krusenvik room 1".
Anyway after cruising around for a while we eventually found a turkish restaurant that was open. Not cheap but really good food for a hungry family. Thanks Topkapi!

So what was the first impression of NZ. Actually it was a bit like coming home! The air was light and easy to breath. There were birches in the parks and along the roads. The birds were singing instead of screaming like in Aussie and it was of course much cooler, around 20 degrees.
It's said that Christchurch was once a pretty and beautiful little city. The big earthquake in 2011 changed everything. Many of the buildings were destroyed and most of them are still not rebuilt. Unfortunately it seems that it was the ugly buildings that withstood the quake the best. To be honest there is not too much to see or do in Christchurch unless you are particularly interested in cities destroyed by quakes. The botanical garden though was a jewel.
We stayed one night in Christchurch. The next morning the supermarkets were open again so we could go out and buy some breakfast before heading of south to the next planned stay. A night at a small farm outside a village called Geraldine was in the itinerary.
However things didn't turn out as expected...

Cheers

Entering Christchurch. Hmmm

The big cathedral in the centre of the city. The tower was destroyed by the quake

 

There are many ruins like this

Hydrangeas in the botanical garden

Tranquil atmosphere in the botanical garden

Lifeline bookfest

There hasn't been much activity on the blog for a while, sorry about that. But from now on I'm gonna shape up a bit. At least I can't use lack of topics as an excuse after quite a lot of travelling the last months, both business and pleasure.
Anyway this post will just be a reflection over that things are going on the second lap now. Everything that was new and exciting last year are now experienced a bit differently. I'm thinking about riverfire, christmas and last week it was Australia Day. Last year a told on this blog we went to an odd thing, Cockroach races. This year however we were a bit more quiet and just spent some time at the pool at ou building and then had the typical Aussie Day food. Lamb dinner and Lamingtons as dessert.

Lamingtons are a must on this day and tastes a bit similar to what we in Sweden call "kärleksmums"
Australia Day was also the last day for the Lifeline bookfest. Lifeline is an organisation helping people in distress. An important function is they provide a 24/7 emergency number for suicide prevention. In general there is more charity in Australia than in Sweden. Raised in the swedish culture where everything should be handled by the official society I first thought this was not good at all relying on private kindness. Now I realise there are also advantages such as it actually keeps the society together and making people care about each other.

So to fund these functions Lifeline arranges an annual book sale. That means they sell books that people have donated. This is much bigger than it sounds and attracts big crowds. It lasts for two weeks and there were thousands and thousands of books. They refill every morning. I spent an hour or so there and found the classic swedish child book author Elsa Beskow in english!
Of course I supported Lifeline by buying a couple of books about Australia.

Cheers

Darwin

We extended last weekend with a couple of leave days and made another excursion to outback Australia. This time to Darwin, the capitol of the Northern Territory. Although NT constitutes about a fifth of Australia's total area only 1 percent of the population live here. There's plenty of space you could say. To get to Darwin you fly and the flight takes 4 hours. Yes, Australia is enormously big!

If I should summarise the stay in one word that word is HOT. It's incredibly hot up there. We had 33-35 degrees in Darwin city and a couple of degrees more on the trip to Litchfield National Park. Still this is the dry season and the worst is yet to come although we already felt like walking around in a steam sauna.

Darwin is known for having beautiful red sunsets and heaps of crocodiles. We're now not talking about lame american Alligators but Salt Water Crocs known to be the biggest and most aggressive in the world. In fact you can not swim anywhere up there without the area first being crocodile secured. During our stay in Aussie one person has been killed by a croc so it happens now and then.

So one of the days we went for a full day tour to Litchfield including Croc cruise on Adelaide river. It was all amazing. Stops at local outback pubs, swimming under waterfall, swimming in rock pools and studying gigantic termite mounds.
But the highlight was still the crocodile cruise. Each croc has it's own territory so every 25 meters there was a new one. They come immediately when they here splash in the water so you realise you wouldn't live many minutes if falling into the water.

The other days in Darwin we did a Harbour sunset cruise, walked the city and visited the Mindil beach sunset market. The sunsets are nice even if us as Gothenburgers are quite used to beautiful sunsets.
Darwin was completely destroyed by the Japanese during WW2 because it supplied fuel to the allied troups in Asia. Hence everything is built up after 1945 so it's a young city architecture wise. If you're interested in war history there is plenty to see but we skipped that part.

So would I recommend a trip to Darwin? Well the city in itself is not spectacular and it's extremely hot all year around but it's a different piece of the Australian puzzle that is worth to discover. Actually not to many of my Aussie friends have been there.

A local hero at an outback bar. Beer and a paper, what more do you need for breakfast?

You see a lot of road trains up here, max length is 53,5 m!

Swimming in a rock pool. Looks cold but is definitely not!

Wangi falls. You can swim into the waterfall

Yes, the sunsets are beauitiful!

 Cheers!

Country trip continued

Ok, so after the first day's adventure we headed of for Bunya Mountains, but first some words about Dalby. We have now experienced about about ten different small towns ( ca 10 000 inhabitants) in Australia and what strikes you is how similar they are. Dalby is a very good example. Streets are very broad in general and the main city center street is broad with 45 degree angle parking along the sides. In some corner you always find a "hotel" which is not a place where you sleep but a place where you have steak and beer. You also always find a little shopping center where the big food chains, Woolworths and Coles are dominating. Dalby is situated in a agricultural area surrounded by giant fields. A small river is floating through Dalby and in general the town feels quite wealthy. A quite nice place but unfortunately far from everywhere...

Dalby CBD

Dalby












So between Dalby and Kingaroy is Bunya Mountains, a national park with highest peak about 1100m above sea level. The area is most known for the big Bunya pines and a rich bird life. A popular place for campers and bush walkers. A nice place, well worth a visit, but frankly there are other national parks closer to Brissie offering same or better experiences.


Next place for staying was Kingaroy, the peanut capital of Australia. The main attraction here are the big peanut silos in the middle of the town and a local vendor called peanut van selling the nuts from a little stall in a corner. Don't know if peanuts are being outcompeted by cashew and other nuts but the general impression was that the town is closing down. Lots of empty premises, no place to eat except for Macca's and KFC and we were almost alone at the motel.
However they had a small museum with the story about the peanuts and quite a lot of old peanut farming machines which was quite interesting for a farmer boy like me.

The last morning I woke up early and decided to go for a morning walk on my own. The rain was hanging in the air but still it was a nice morning and I saw some nice birds like cockatoos and lorikeets. Then, while walking through a park I saw him, high up in a stand alone tree. Mr Magpie! I actually hesitated for a moment, thinking is it safe to pass but then thought I was quite far away from the tree so walked on. 10m past the tree he hit my back head from the left, bang! Ouch! I screamed "bloody bird" and started walking faster. Bang! strike number two from exactly same angle and now I started running. Although now maybe 50m away bang, there was strike number three. Kept running and when I finally stopped I realised I was bleeding from my left ear. I won't laugh at the swooping bird alert signs again!

Back to the motel for breakfast and then it started raining and it continued for the whole day. We visited a local winery and then made the 4 hour drive home in one go. An interesting thing at the winery. While we were tasting the wines a small group came in. They were not interested in any tasting but just bought two 25 litres plastic containers of the local port wine. I'm still wondering, what would anyone use 50l of port for? But since they actually sell it in those containers I guess it's not unusual.

Cheers

 Kingaroy with peanut silos in background

Kingaroy street view

A Bunya Wallaby

Country trip with wilderness

Last weekend was a long weekend in Queensland due to that the queens birthday was celebrated on Monday. No her actual birthday is not that day but since there are no public holiday during the second half of the year the Queenslanders have decided to celebrate in October! Hmm
Anyway, we decided to use the extra day to do a roadtrip to the metropolitan cities, sorry, towns of Dalby and Kingaroy, about 4 hours from Brisbane.
The intention was to see some typical small cities and also encounter some wildlife. It actually became a little bit too much of the latter which I will come back to. We also had the aim of seeing the southern hemisphere stars from a dark spot.
The journey started around 10am on Saturday and our first stop was in Toowoomba for lunch. Toowomba i a quite big and very green city about two hours from Brisbane. It's called the garden city and well worth a visit. However we were aiming for the small ones so continued straight after lunch. Two hours later we entered Dalby. This town has actually got its name from immigrants from Isle of Man between UK and Ireland who in their turn got that name from Swedish Vikings! Felt like coming home...  :)

Since it wasn't really time to check in at the Tourist park cabin we drove on to Lake Broadwater national park, aiming for a nice bird watching trail. We easily found the car park, turned off the engine and opened the doors. And everything turned dark...  What happens? What is this? The car was totally filled with mosquitoes in two seconds. Bloody Hell, what do we do? We had seen a Kangaroo mob 100 m before we stopped so we decided we at least need to take some pictures before leaving.
Probably the most stupid decision taken this year. We were literally covered by mosquitoes during the five minutes photo session. I counted 30 bites on my body that night. Luckily the kangaroos were at least willing photo models.

On the way back we saw three black snakes, almost driving over one of them. Research showed that red bellied black snakes are common in the area so that's our guess although they didn't introduce themselves properly. Yes, of course they're deadly!

Back in Dalby we found our cabin and then had a Chinese Smorgasbord. Yes you read it correctly. Chinese Smorgasbord, funny crossover kitchen. For the non swedish speakers, smorgasbord is originally a swedish word literally meaning "sandwich table" and normally a buffet of light cold dishes and bread. It's said to be one of only two swedish words in official english. The other is ombudsman.
After the meal it was dark so we just drove 10 minutes out in the middle of nowhere to watch the stars. Really beautiful and so worth it. A good nights sleep and then off to Bunya Mountains and Kingaroy
To be continued