The Trip

I have updated my photo pages on the Flickr service . There are about 40-odd additions there and they're all from my trip so far in NZ. Let me know what you think. Also, I need to do something about the length of my posts on this journal as the last-bar-one was too long. Sorry. I'll try harder.

This afternoon I did my first skydive and it was very nice. Good fun to see the whole of the Remarkables range spread out underneath me, although I did have a rather strapping lad attached to my back. The dive was good fun, though seemed to pass very quickly. The bestest best bit was when I had to open the door of the aircraft and sit on the ledge with my feet dangling below awaiting my instructor to just push us away. Now there's a job for you. After the free-fall the 'chute opened and we drifted towards earth. Very pretty and probably the best view I shall ever have of any mountain range. As I had my mouth open during the dive and with the coldness of the air I had spit all over my face when we got to the ground, rather like I have in the mornings. Even after I had taken off the goggles I was speaking to several people at the aerodrome and it was not until about 15 minutes had passed that Chris pointed out a nice large bogey stuck to my glasses. How humiliating. It was a good...

The South Island of NZ is very different from the North. It's quieter, the roads are empty and the towns are much smaller. I suppose the contrasts with Auckland are going to be extreme. My friend, Chris, and I hired a car for the 2 weeks we had together in the South. After looking around we got the sensible car of choice, the Toyota Corolla, and set off from Christchurch. Christchurch is the largest city on the South Island but it certainly does not feel it. The centre of town is small and quiet with a teeny tramway that does a circle of the town centre. The town is like the other towns in the South in that it's a compact mixture of classic 19th and early 20th century architecture and the less enlightened 1960s/70s efforts which plague all cities around the world. It gave the town a very English feel as it reminded me of Chichester's town centre but without the chavs. Most of the cities here have little to do for the intrepid explorer so they are best for accommodation and ...

Auckland is not the place to spend much time. This is what my Kiwi friends advised me long before I arrived. I thought that as I'd experienced many unpleasant places in my life (e.g. Woking) then this would not be as bad as they made it out to be. They were right, of course. As soon as I landed here 5 days ago my friends whisked me off to the North of the North Island to see a place called the Bay Of Islands. This is almost like an archipelago of inhabited islands and the day after the rain finally stopped we took a boat cruise out into the bay and saw some dolphins. This was lovely and being winter time and very far South the light gave everything a strange luminous quality. Unfortunately we had little time to spend there as one of my friends had to return to Auckland for his flight out. We came back and I have been here now for about 3 days. This is more than enough. It's problem is that it has no charisma or charm. Yes, there are decent places to stay, eat, sleep b...

Darwin is the capital of the Northern Territory. It is the smallest of the state capitals with only 90,000 or so people living here. It's history has been quite a turbulent one. It is an RAN base and during WWII it was bombed by the Japanese. This naturally flattened it and after the war it was rebuilt and started to grow. Before the war it's population was limited by its remoteness and the only real links to it being the railway (from about 1870) and the Stuart Highway. In 1975 it was flattened by a typhoon that roared through doing an estimated $50 worth of damage. Thankfully most of the population had been evacuated but it was flattened again. In the late 1970s it was rebuilt this time in fashionable concrete. As you can imagine postcards of the town are rather interesting: "Tyre Concession and Municipal Car Park at Dawn", "Naval Dockyard and Meat Processing Plant at sunset", etc. Darwin has one newsagent. They hold a monopoly over the whole of the centra...