Lyttelton at last

Wow, it feels great to finally be here! A bit weird not being in our new house yet, and we completely buggered up the packing logistics, and Sally's still cooped up in her cage, and it's absolutely bloody freezing... but we're all high as kites.

The remainder of our journey down was pretty easy. A very pleasant drive down to Wellington left us time enough to visit the Te Papa museum, if not enough to see everything in it. It's a superb, ultra-modern, multi-storey space stuffed with far too many amazing things for one visit, the current Monet exhibition included :( Still, we did manage to sneak the rabbit in past the motel concierge and the takeway from Masala was almost as brilliant as last time.

Although we had a pretty smooth crossing, Elly hadn't been too bright on the Wellington leg of the journey, had a bit of a temperature that night and looked decidedly peaky on the ferry. She waited until we hit the windy road up into the hills beyond Blenheim before regurgitating her breakfast of doughnut and chips. Oscar slept, watched vids, did colouring-in, got very annoyed when we didn't stop every 10 minutes for a wee, and was generally very funny and entertaining. Sally and Elly slept and looked sick as chips, but all in all we had a nice, relaxed, fun-filled journey south.

We've been here four days and it already feels like home. It's actually Nicky & Joseph's home that they run as a B&B, just down the street from our new place. Apart from their beautiful house they have two top tomcats, Angus and Gordon, two cute girly chickens who answer to Vivien and Sally and I guess one more lop-eared bunny is neither here nor there. N & J are lovely people, very tolerant of our boistrous troupe and very generously offering to put us up for the same rent that we'll be paying when we finally move up the street. E & O have really taken to them, especially Elly, who refers to them as "our family".. bless 'er :)

It was just getting to be a problem, having stuff strewn about several corners of New Zealand, when the phone rang this afternoon to say our lorry-load was to be delivered tomorrow at eight. Pete and Lois (our new landlords) own Lyttelton's longest-running bar/restaurant, the Volcano Cafe and Lava Bar on London Street, and were delighted to be informed they'd be dragged from their beds at the crack of dawn to receive us, our two jacks-in-the-box, one large removals van and several burly mister shiftas. Thank god they have a sense of humour. They're doing a kind of business swap with a French pal of theirs who has a B&B just north of Provence near the famous Alpe D'Huez, for the coming year-to-eighteen months, and are in the process of packing all their worldly goods in readiness, so it should be a right laugh...

At least I'll get my missing camera gear, the plug adaptors and whatnot that we forgot to pack, along with the wooly jumpers and long pants we were quite certain we'd easily manage without til the lorry-load arrived. One pair of long pants between us and it's been utterly brass monkeys since we landed; thick cloud and leaden skies at first, followed by a stiff sou'westerly for the last 48 hours blowing so hard out of Antarctica you could actually smell the penguin farts, as if preserved in little frozen gas bubbles. The truth is, of course, we're all soft as shite due to 12 months of non-stop summer, so anything remotely close to single figures Celsius has us back under the duvet faster than you can say "thermal underpants".

The pic at the top gives you some idea of the lie of the land. It's a bit hilly. We're going to be living halfway up the crater edge (did I mention the whole harbour is an extinct volcano? Well it is..) a leisurely 30 minute stroll from the top. You can just see our place between the legs of the second pylon. That township out on the other side of the harbour, beyond the reclaimed flatlands of white storage tanks, is Diamond Harbour; beyond that, the Banks Peninsula. We've yet to see either of them but they're supposed to be stunning. It certianly looks very pretty from up here. It's like a whole new world laid out in front of you, something we've been hoping to feel since we left Spain and something that finally, hopefully, feels like it's happening.

There's a load of new pics on the accursed Picassa. If it's as jerky for you as it is for me, try the slideshow but pause it and use the arrows to manually move from pic to pic. I promise to get a better viewer sorted for next time.

Hasta la proxima!

Taupo again

Hm. On my phone, this pic of our Taupo cabin was accompanied by reams of lyrical prose and it's all been conveniently lost in the upload. Exactly how that feels in the pit of my stomach I'll spare you; instead, the main points in brief.

• Lovely autumnal colours on the road south


• Lovely log cabin next to deep, swift moving, crystal-clear river


• First proper outing with Sally rabbit a partial success, no big car probs and only slightly freaking out while on the leash


• The north island is full of Christian policemen and Steptford wives. Our hopes for the south grow ever greater


• The iPhone implementation of the Blogger interface is utter Shite

Wow, that was easy. I should blog this way more often.
Next up: Wellington again.

Last night in Auckland

Elly's pre-birthday goodbye party last week

This is a long, long overdue update but I do have a whole month of good excuses to explain it. At very least, leaving the blogging til now means I've spared you a handful of very lame Easter-related puns, quite apart from the usual eggs-related ones, like rising from the dead, having our Last Supper, eggs-citing happenings (see?) and so on. Then there's the fact that we didn't really know what was happening until Easter weekend anyway. Right up until last Thursday it felt like anything could happen, even though nothing was happening at all, until eventually (as so often happens) everything happened at once. Allow me to explain.

Going back exactly one week today, I was on the phone to a borderline hysterical landlord doing her nut because we had no-one to take over our lease. Five weeks of advertising had brought exactly zero responses. In case I wasn't fully aware of the consequences, I was repeatedly reminded of the massive sacrifices she was making, having to think about maybe storing her furniture (furnished places being very hard to let here) and possibly having her cat shipped out to her holiday home in Australia (as it was quite clear that no-one was interested in a house complete with a sociopathic feline) and oh, the stress and worry etc etc. Never mind the comforting knowledge that, should we leave without finding a new tenant, under Kiwi law we were liable to pay the $16,500 rent for the remainder of the original term. Or that, should the rent be reduced to attract a new tenant, we were obliged to make up the difference.

Which is precisely what happened, although we ended up no worse off. We worked out that if we paid (as already promised) until the end of April, it would cost us around $1100, as we were moving out two weeks earlier on the 15th. If, on the other hand, we found a tenant by the time we moved out, we would save that $1100 and be off the hook. Brains now fully engaged for once, we then worked out that we advertised the place for $40 a week less we'd stand a better chance of finding someone and not be any more out of pocket, even if we did have to pay that amount to the landlord for the remaining 26 weeks of our contract. That's what I was on the phone to negotiate, as well as to suggest removing the furniture and the cat. Suffice to say she went with the rent reduction.

For some reason, before the revised ads were posted up, the phone never stopped ringing. By pure fluke, we found our new tenants within 3 days, and by sheer coincidence they are in need of a furnished place and positively love cats, especially ones with personality disorders. It really couldn't have come any later in the eleventh hour without it all turning into a pumpkin. We move out tomorrow and the new tenant's deposit, which seals the deal, is due to hit the landlord's account at more or less the exact same time our keys hit the doormat.

We Are Relieved.

We're also packed, ready for the removal guys arriving in the morning. It's been a fraught day of tearful goodbyes and frantic last-minute repairs. I'm not quite sure why, but it's at these exact times that you elect to fix the broken hi-fi, choose to reverse the car into the garage wall, change bank accounts, do a week's shopping, take the dented car to a mechanic and have all the tyres swapped around, write blogs, and so on. Moving house isn't stressful enough, clearly. Or maybe it's a bit like riding the Wall of Death: no-one really understands why you do it, but it does make for heart-stopping entertainment.

Somehow in all of this I've flown down to Christchurch to meet up with our lovely new landlords, who, it turns out, are minor celebrities in their lovely little town of Lyttelton. A working port south of the city, once (before international flights) the main landing point for European immigrants and still a popular cruise ship stop, this is the place we fell in love with on our summer holidays. The house is wonderful, full of character, on a steep hill overlooking the port, old but modernised, a garden bursting with huge trees, overgrown herbs, berries and all manner of fascinating plants. There's even a ready-made run for Sally rabbit. It's not vacant til May, but our hosts found us a great B&B just down the street for the same rent and offered to store our stuff in their garage until they leave on their European adventures. It all just fell into place over the space of a week.

Tomorrow we drive to Taupo and stay the night at Rainbow Cottage. Then on to Wellington on Thursday, the Picton ferry on Friday morning and Lyttelton by teatime. It's hard to express, especially after all these tales of woe and havoc, exactly how exciting and positive this move feels. I'll try and keep you updated as we go, along with more details of the new place. Right now I need to get to bed before I think of anything else to do...

Packing it all in

The kids are quite keen to leave...

Wow, three weeks since my last post. Notice I say my last post; Niki hasn't blogged for so long I've pretty much taken over sole responsibility for the thing, so it's maybe not surprising that it never gets done. A bit like the housework I should be doing instead of typing this, it's a question of priorities and there's a definite pecking order, ie, if the housework needs doing, there's always something more important to be getting on with.

We haven't been ridiculously busy, really. There's been more to do than usual – I've been working (or attempting to, during the 5-hour slot I get, four days a week) and for some reason Niki's job seems to be taking up loads more of her time this term – but that's not why I've not been blogging. Ironically, there's been loads to blog about, just for one reason or another it hasn't been worth saying until now.

It all started out with a pain in the arse. To be more precise, it was several pains in the arse at once, both figurative and real, which turned out to be loosely interconnected and centering on our Niki. She came home from school one day with a shooting pain down one leg. If you've ever had a shooting pain but never actually been shot, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you've been unfortunate enough to have been shot but never so unlucky to have had sciatica at the time, maybe you won't. Anyway, that was one pain, the other was more of an intense suffering, brought on by being obliged to teach in what we now know to be (unofficially, but fairly unanimously) the worst Primary school* in the country.

The third is the figurative pain in the arse that runs the place. Actually she only figuratively runs the place nowadays, having been usurped by a Ministry lackey with functional people skills and a brief to pull the place into shape. The reality is, she's been sent to treat a decapitation with a Band-Aid. A rubbish school and disrespectful Principal not only feed off each other, they produce rubbish, disrespectful kids. Leaving aside the entire generation of failed pre-teens the place is turning out, it turns over teachers at a shocking rate. Niki was her class' fourth teacher last year and she won't be their last one this year: the fact is, she's leaving at the end of the term and we're all heading south to Christchurch.

There's only so much abuse you can take, I guess, a limit to the number of times you can come home in tears of sheer frustration and anger at the hopelessness of teaching at a broken school. The time comes when you wake up one morning and realise the pain in your arse isn't down to your crap bed, and the nauseous feeling in your guts has nowt to do with the prawns you had for supper. If your occupation is making you feel physically ill, you're probably in the wrong job. Wor lass has nothing to be ashamed of, having made great strides with the kids and managing to set up a whole-school behavioural reward system in the short time she's been there. My work has been painfully slow in taking off and it's largely down to the fact it all seems so temporary here. The long and short is, Auckland's just not working for either of us and it's time to move on.

I've left a few threads hanging there... I'll come back to them later cos this is turning into one of those epics I promised I'd stop turning out. The first, most immediate thing is Niki's back. It got much, much worse than shooting pains when she came in from yoga the other night bent double, having tackled the Warrior and come off worst. She's currently getting physiotherapy, including acupuncture, and is banned from yoga for the foreseeable. The physio is taking about a herniated disk. She should really be resting, not feeling obliged to go into work, but aside from a few days off where she's just been unable to move, she's been in every day. More about that as it develops. Hasn't stopped her going out on the razz tonight, so there's definitely hope :)

The other one is the casual announcement that we're moving on, again. In order to get to our chosen destination in time for next term, we need to be out of here within 5 weeks, hopefully straight into a new home on the South Island, and even more hopefully, having found someone suitable to take on the remainder of our 12-month lease... we'd hoped that some friends might be interested but it's a lot of upheaval if you're not blessed with itchy feet and incredibly compliant kids. E &O are just awesome, shooting away under the sun of a second consecutive summer (Oscar's grown over 7cm in under five months...) and absolutely full-on up for another move. E has a big pre-birthday party planned for the week before we leave. O has no idea what's going on, really. Daft as a brush, just like his dad.

So you can see there are plenty of things to be getting on with. Besides work, we have boxes to pack, barely six weeks since we unpacked them. Actively looking for new work in the Christchurch area. We need to find tenants. And a new house.. our broadband connection is shredded... oh, almost forgot to mention: our residency has come through too! Good news for registering with doctors etc. It's all go, and out of adversity and despair, a whole new horizon, full of hope and almost unbearable excitement and anticipation, is rising out of the gloom.

We shall keep you posted. Or at least I will...

This week I have been mostly listening to: Jim White's Transnormal Skiperoo, so now we all want to live in a turquoise house :)

*I'm mentioning no names, but if you're a teacher thinking of moving here, happen to read this and would like to know the name of the school, leave a comment with your contact details. Suffice to say, be wary of agencies recruiting in the UK for NZ schools ...

Homeward bound and gagged

The similes, if that's what they are, were flying today. The landscape between Wellington and Napier (where we are now) is astonishing in its variety, such that we started in Girona and finished in the Cumbrian hills, taking in parts of Ireland (around Levin) the Picos de Europa (outside of Palmerston) New South Wales (pretty much any small town you come across) and ending up in a Pacific version of Scarborough, complete with Art Deco buildings and wide boys in pimped cars along the promenade. All this and monster vineyards too; it's really hard to believe it's uniquely New Zealand, when everything is so incredibly familiar.

The trip's almost over and I'm starting to look forward to not driving for 5 hours a day. We still have Napier to explore and a have a night booked in advance (ooh...) on a farm overlooking Lake Rotorua, but we're definitely on our way back. By which I mean we can feel the "pull" of the places we fell in love with, like Wellington, Nelson and the little town we hope to call home one day soon. I'm superstitious about these things, so please forgive me if I don't say where it is... but we knew straight away we were home, the minute we got there.

We're staying in a great motel apartment on the ocean front, complete with barbie and pool right outside our patio doors. These places are amazingly good value: we have a self-contained studio with a double and two singles, clean, modern and central, and it's only $180 – about 65 quid – a night. We're paying nigh on the same in rent in Auckland, fer chrissakes.

Anyway, I'm pooped, it's late and I've used up all my internetty time posting up pics of the trip on a new Picassa page. Hopefully you'll get an small idea from them what a great place this is to travel; we've been knocked out by the constant stream of amazing sights and brilliant food, the lovely friendly people and their unpretentious towns and cities. Can't wait to get out of Auckland now, even before we get back...

Oh, I forgot to mention the (evening) ferry crossing was rough the other day... great fun, great views, much more like it! Pays to be choosy which boat you pick too: this one (Aratere) let you stand right at the bow, the other (Kaitaki, I think) has you penned like sheep midships. Baah.

Pics from December

What with one thing and another, I never got round to posting the December iPhone pics, so here they are.

Christchurch is good. Too much going on to blog any of it, and we're about to leave for Lyttleton and the Banks Peninsula, then hopefully get into some hot springs after lunch.

Ironic that this is the first proper internet access since we set off and all you get is a couple of cheesy links, but that's life... I'll do more pics & stuff when we get back to Wellington.

Vines, seals and automobiles

The road south from Nelson takes you through Marlborough country. Maybe that conjures up an image of a bloke in a hat smoking a fag on a horse, and maybe I did see one on the way... this is the wine-growing Marlborough, probably the biggest wine region in NZ. Vineyards line the roads all the way down through Canterbury & some of the Marlborough ones are distinctively posh, not at all like the Spanish ones I'm used to. The vines are manicured to the point of topiary, forming perfect maze-like rows with a rose bush in full bloom at the end of each one. Very impressive, very English, really. This is how they'd do it in Surbiton if it wasn't so cold and wet and like, full of houses.

We're going to be missing the best of the South Island scenery in this trip. It's just not possible to get round it all in one go without having a month to do it in, and we have to remember it's more a business trip than a holiday, a mission to find somewhere decent to live. Hints of what we're missing are around every corner; from the expected snow-capped mountains to quite unexpected golden straw covered hills, then vertical forests lining mysterious valleys, huge, sweeping coastlines of craggy volcanic rock, and we just sweep by them all, ever onward.

We did stop for three things: crayfish (for lunch, cos it was for sale at the side of the road) seals (cos they were practically in the road; dozens of them lolling round the rocks in the sun) and a supermarket just off the SH1 highway, where I took the pic above.

It's really hard to say where it all reminds me of; if I was in Spain (and I think a part of us still is) I'd say it was as if Andalucia had shifted north to the Costa Brava with the Sierra Nevada in tow. We'll definitely be back, either to live or to spend time more frivolously, when I'm sure we'll find out it's like no place on Earth.

Dire straits

Maybe Auckland has spoiled us a bit, for both facilities and space, cos we're incredulous when places are closed on a Sunday and feel crowded just thinking about airports & the like. The ferry was full to busting AND they'd all done the German thing & got there at dawn for the best seats, so we were a bit harked off before we even left the port.

It's one of New Zealand's top journeys and it really wasn't that bad, but nor did it live up to the hype. With near-perfect weather, the open ocean was like a puddle on a windy day. In fact it wasn't even windy, which made the locals visibly uneasy and probably made the front page of the Herald besides. There were some great mountain views but a fair bit short of breathtaking; I think that was the biggest let-down. They presumably need more dramatic weather, with the ship bucking like a steer, waves crashing off the bow and clouds hanging over the peaks like an ambush. Sunny and warm was just dull & lifeless.

On to Nelson and our little cabin on a gorgeous campsite just south of the town. Nelson was closed, of course, cos it's Sunday. A very pretty place, just totally deserted. All we wanted was an icecream, ffs.. whinge, moan..

And then we look again at where we are, and where we've been, and how utterly gorgeous it all is. Feeling like a bunch of bloomin' ingrates, we are, or at least I am, as I can't shake off the desire to park up the car and do off on me bike, which of course is still in box somehere in Auckland. Onward we shall press to Christchurch the morrow, full of vim for the start of a new week and a gander at the place we're hoping will stop our spoilt-brat faces twisting.

Blown away by the windy city

First impressions count for a lot and at first, I couldn't help thinking of Wellington as Melbourne. Since we spent less time there than we have here, first impressions are pretty much all I have and might well end up counting for too much. Whatever: both are infectiously cool places and miles better than their rival cities, as far as I'm concerned.

Some great cities have a real focal point, like Granada's Alhambra or Barcelona's Sagrada Familia; others have none, like Welly and Melly, and despite some earnest efforts in association with big name architects, the thing that leaps out at you is the attitude of the people who live there - way bigger than any bridge or tower.

This is a pretty cool city, a bit run-down and a bit full of itself, but ballsy enough to turn all of its faults to its advantage. Just like Melbourne; great food, amazing bars and cafes, big-hearted and mildly bohemian. You could easily forget that this is the capital, it's so laid back and does the boho chic thing so effortlessly... not giving a flying fart what anyone thinks is both how it works and why it's so appealing. It's also very windy. I asked a bloke I met if it was always so. "Ask an Aucklander," he said, "and they'll say it's always this windy. Ask somone from Wellington and they'll say, 'what wind?'"

The sun came out this afternoon and lured us up to the lookout at the top of Mount Victoria, overlooking the city, which was making a good job of looking impressive and important. Looking the other direction, an Inter-island ferry criused into its vast harbour from the infinitely more vast ocean to the South. It was still very windy, but somehow none of us seemed to notice...

Tomorrow: Nelson and the South Island. It's the high point of the trip but the surprise so far is looking forward to getting back & having another look at this wild and wacky city. More pics soon.

The long road to Welly

A motorway-style roadsign on the main route south from lake Taupo warned of "high winds on Desert Road", which was odd on two fronts: first, it's nowt like a motorway, second, this is the last place on earth you'd describe as "desert". It's so unbelievably verdant and well, wet, basically. Apparently the layers of volcanic soil are so permeable, rainwater just drains away as soon as it lands; the greenery is all heathers and tufts of wiry grasses clinging on for dear life in the gale-force winds. Fantastic scenery, must try & get some shots on the way back, when there might be a reasonable chance of staying upright.

A fairly epic leg completed, we had the good sense to stop off at the ferry terminal on the way in. That 5.25am sailing we booked sailed on the 1st.Yesterday. Don't ask how, I have no idea. Fortunately, the nice boy at the ticket office took a shine to us and all we had to pay was $35 to book the Sunday morning crossing instead. Force 6 gales forecast for the Cook Straits tonight and tomorrow, I think fate has smiled on us today :)

The sprogs have been superb today too, here's hoping it lasts another week...

Away in a minger

It might not be Carnegie's yacht but it's cheap, available and er, full of character. And mosquitoes. To be fair, that was our own fault, leaving the door open after sundown and being made of mozzie food, in fact it was all our fault for leaving it so late to book a place on this, the busiest day of the year. I mean that Jesus was born in a trough thanks to his mam & dad's ineptitude. Travelling with child, at Christmas, without booking in advance? What were they thinking of? At least our little lad has a mattress on the floor.

We've done better than a trough, cos even though you can eat out of it, thanks to a clever design it transforms into a bedroom with just a minor 20 minute workout. According to Olwyn McStingie, the owner of Turangi Cabins and Holiday Stables, our caravan has "just been done up", as is evident by the DIY debris scattered around the pitch. The inventory of knives, forks, spoons and pans pinned to the wall bears little resmblance to the prehistoric contents of the skip-salvage kitchen unit. As Nik pointed out, it's as if she saw the caravan abandoned at the side of the road and thought, " I'll 'ave that, make a bloomin' fortune." - at $22pp you've got to admire the ambition.

Next stop, Wellington, home of the gum boot. Hopefully, it won't come to that.

As promised, a miracle

I think I've got it now. It's not enough to know the levers to pull, you need to know the order to pull them in.

Assuming this works, I'll post up a pic of the luxury accommodation we located, before we hit the hay. Hay's about right... Anne hasn't stopped laughing since we checked in.

Out with the old

Just realized it's finally 2009 on the dark side of the world, so a Happy New Year to one & all, let's hope it's a good one.

We're starting it as we expect to end it - on the move... the long-threatened exploration of the kiwi world beyond the end of our street commenced at first light on the first of Jan; which is to say, we left the house at ten to twelve and made it to Hamilton (120km south) in time for lunch. If I succeed in posting a photo via this phone, it'll be a marvel of modern technology and a picture of us having a picnic at the Lake Domain.

Plan is to navigate our way to Lake Taupo by nightfall, then onward to Wellington in the am, overnight there and catch the early inter-island ferry on Saturday.

If the day so far is anything to go by, I'll be grateful just to make it out of the park without ending up in the lake. We really must invest in a map. Satnav is all well & good if you know your left from yer right, and to give Nik full credit, it would also help immensely if you actually had satnav in the first place. Gmaps on the iphone is ok, but just as soon as we make our way to the shops by way of Eastern Tibet I'll give up & buy her a proper one, "with a curly binder and road numbers and everything." Anything, as long as it gets us to the boat in time...

Twenty-six degrees here today. Hope you had a warm start to the year, wherever you ended up.