Happy holidays

   

    It was a mammoth trip and good to be back, even though now it's the shortest days with the sun setting mid afternoon and long cold nights. For me, London is still magical even after forty years, and somehow seems even more so in the dark. So it was a good time to meet up with friends and family and we certainly made the most of it: walking the south bank and the local woodland and parks; catching up with some shows; attending festive dinners and gatherings; boozing with the lads in jostling pubs. All amidst thronging crowds and pulsing Christmas lights, while avoiding the worst excesses of black Fridays and hard sell Saturdays.

     We also got to spend a few splendidly sunny days over Christmas with Deborah and Bill, their friends and extended family, witnessing the Suffolk festive rituals and managing some good long walks, between mountainous supplies of food and booze; and in Sussex for New Year with Sarah and Rob and yet more culinary excess. Some hysterically funny parlour games at both venues helped to take our minds off what 2017 might have in store: good company and jollity all round.

Quite Dickensian, all in all.

Wonders and blunders

When King Bhumipol died just before we set off to Thailand, should we have seen this as a portent of things to come?  Though it had little effect on our trip in the event, this has been one of the most accident prone holidays ever. 

Starting of course with Ian’s terrible fall on my birthday, which meant changing our itinerary as he was in too much pain for a long flight (we will draw a discreet veil over the accident that led him to be washing underpants in the shower when he slipped), we were dogged by a series of near disasters, natural and man made.

In Hokitika, the worst rain anyone could remember, lasting 24 hours.  In Rarotonga, a near cyclone out of season; followed by an extreme lightning storm next day. Then there was the M7.8 earthquake in NZ that destroyed the railway we were about to take, leading to more route changes.

There was the car crash we saw and helped the driver, miraculously uninjured, if dazed.  We saw two further accidents on our NZ leg.  People seem to run off the road there very frequently due to lack of attention - and I nearly got us undesirably familiar with a 10m wide native kauri tree after a long day at Milford Sound.

Then I left my camera, including Ian’s birthday gift lens, in a restaurant, only realising when it was closed and we had to move on.  Our hotel kindly arranged to pick it up and courier it ahead to catch up with us. In Rarotonga I thought I'd locked the villa and lost the key (with dinner merrily boiling away on the gas) only to discover I'd put it in the door of the identical unit next door. I also managed to set the pan on fire on another occasion and nearly incinerated the whole tinder box villa, but got it out fast so no damage. As far as losing things go, we have lost 3 hats between us but nothing else of significance.

For a finale, I almost couldn't get the flight from NZ via Malaysia to Bangkok as the check in people insisted I needed a full blank page in my passport for the arrival stamp.  In the event when I arrived at KL this wasn't a problem.  And then when going to board the onward flight three planes were allocated to the same gate, with only one security X-ray machine, so that there was a vast maelstrom of passengers trying to queue in a big spiral, that inevitably dissolved into a frantic scrum as a second machine opened up.

Despite all this, we have had a fantastic time with many wonderful memories that will stay with us forever.  I think particularly of Mount Cook and Milford Sound; an afternoon at a winery high above the lake at Wanaka; the beach at Bang Sak; the villa and view at Koh Yao Noi; birds and plant life rich and strange; spectacular sunsets and dark, southern night skies; and the people in three particularly friendly countries, Thailand, NZ and the Cook Islands. Not to mention my witty and occasionally curmudgeonly Ian, the perfect travelling companion as we start our fortieth year of knowing each other.

Now we have a few quiet and, with luck, trouble free days, as we break our return journey in Thailand.  We'll never forget this trip, for the best and worst reasons. 

Rarotonga

Now this is strange.  We put our clocks one hour forward and one day back, on the short flight from Auckland, as we crossed the international dateline, leaving on Wednesday and arriving on Tuesday. 

The Cook Islands is an independent nation of just 60,000 or so people, but only about 15,000 live on the islands, the rest mostly in NZ, which looks after their foreign affairs and defence.  Most who remain live on the largest island, Rarotonga, where we were headed.  It is also the most mountainous, with jagged peaks of a collapsed volcano.  This erupted from the deep ocean floor and is 4000m high, but only 500m of this appears above sea level.  It is an oval with one road 32km long that you can circuit in well under an hour.  In fact there are two buses that do just that, one with the destination board showing ‘CLOCKWISE’, the other heading ‘ANTICLOCKWISE’. Offshore is an almost continuous reef that keeps the ocean swell at bay, creating a shallow vivid blue lagoon that has become a great attraction to visitors.  Almost the entire island is lined with villas and hotels, all very low key, with their toes in the white coral sand.

We rented a little wooden villa on the south side, intending just to pootle around: long walks on the beaches, paddling in the shallow waters, cooking up some local produce.  This worked out fine the first day, the weather at the end of the  dry season being perfect, with vast fluffy white clouds scudding (is it only clouds that scud?) across an azure sky, coconut trees gently swaying over silver strands and all we could expect of a Pacific isle.

However that little idyll didn't last long.  No-one had told El Niño that it was still the dry season. Next day got darker, greyer, then drizzle kicked in, then rain.  By nightfall it had turned into a raging cyclonic storm: it sounded like someone was playing a fire hose over the roof, and the whole little wooden building seemed suddenly vulnerable.  Though the wind dropped by morning, the rain continued, heavily, endlessly.  It was the kind of tropical rain at soaks you in seconds.  36 hours in and it was still raining.  We discovered later that 225mm had fallen, almost twice the monthly average and about what we get at home in 4 months. Just as it seemed to be all over there was an almighty thunder and lightning show on the second night, the worst in at least 5 years, apparently.

The last few days returned to tropical calm, and the water miraculously soaked away into the sand and coral limestone of the island, although for a while the lagoon looked like the inside of a teapot, filled with dead plant material washed down from the mountain by many streams.  Next day it had gone and all was clear and pristine blue again. We hired a car and toured the island, visiting the main town and Muri Beach, the best of them, with little palm topped islets off shore, like a cartoonist’s idea of a desert island, framing the view and the shallow sandy lagoon. Inland there is a lot of agriculture, tropical fruit and veg mostly and a few goats, and homes of the local people along sleepy lanes.

In the afternoons we lazed in the impeccable garden of the property.  The whole island is meticulously maintained, a matter of local pride, with manicured lawns and tropical plants, and the villa was no exception, thanks to Bev, the little Filipino lady who looked after it and visited occasionally.  We also had a constant round of other visitors: friendly local dogs, cats, mynah bird couples, hens and cocks grubbing around (the cocks here seem to have no sense of timing and doodle-do every 5 minutes) and on the day after the rain about a thousand dragon flies filled the garden. We also found that any food left out brought hordes of the tiniest ants I have ever seen, requiring great diligence. Frigate birds swooped overhead by day, and geckos nonchalantly wandered across the ceiling at night.

But soon it was time to turn our thoughts to the long trek home, back over the dateline, up through SE Asia, then home to winter and dark days.

New Zealand 7

Now we had a long journey ahead as we decided to spend some time in North Island to replace the train trip.  Back down the lake, as brilliantly coloured as ever, and then out across the increasingly conventional landscape of sheep and cattle farms until we reach the Christchurch plain for the short hop to Auckland.  The countryside is all divided up into huge squares, lined with neatly clipped tree-high windbreaks that made us think of the landscape of Through the Looking Glass.  One thing about NZ is that everyone seems to take immense pride in the place.  Every field boundary, every verge, every garden perfectly manicured and at this time of the year, fresh and bright with new flowers.  Given the size of the country this represents a huge effort for its small population.

A quick heads down at the airport hotel then off first thing to the Bay of Islands.  This is an area I visited 10 years ago and really loved, and Ian also found it very pleasant.  We were extremely lucky with the weather, which helped. We had found a great apartment facing the bay at Paihia, and took it very easy, visiting the Waitangi treaty grounds, crossing the bay to Russell on the little ferry, and doing a bit of home cooking for a change in the evenings.  The treaty grounds and the house of the first British Resident give a detailed idea of the early history.  The Māori actually invited Britain to provide protection.  Whether they regretted it later is not told.  They had heard what the French did to Tahiti, and saw the lawlessness of the trading and whaling port that later became Russell, the hellhole of the South Pacific as it was then known.  Now it's a sleepy tree shaded little village with a ferry pier and NZs oldest pub. The Resident seems to have been left to his own devices by the powers that be but peace generally reined.  The treaty seems to have been respected more than most and has been used as recently as the 1990s to confirm Māori rights such as the ligation to maintain and encourage the language.  

So back to Auckland and the next and most remote stage of our adventure.

New Zealand 6

The drive in to Aoraki gets more and more interesting: first through coastal farmland, with distant views of mountains way across the island in the clear NZ light; then up the Waitaki valley past several lakes.  After a break at Omarama, where bizarrely, there were 15 classic Triumph Stags lined up, some of which we had seen buzzing around earlier, we head up the 90km road to the mountain.  This passes amazingly vivid aquamarine Lake Pukaki, and with each twist the mountains ahead become more visible until a final bend opens up a huge panoramic view of the head of the valley, surrounded by snowy peaks, and the great white cone of Aoraki itself, towering over the rest.  As you approach you can make out the glaciers on its flanks, and across a desolate glacial plane, the Hermitage, our destination for the night.  The sunset and sunrise effects are stunning, and worth this whole trip just to see them.  Clouds swirl about in the valley and come pouring over the ridge from Westland.  We are only a few dozen km from Franz Josef here, but cut off by the Great Divide. The colours change minute by minute. 

New Zealand 5

Next, deep into Fiordland, to Te Anau, another little lakeside town, from where we struck out to Milford Sound.  Rain lashing down, valleys filled with cloud and mist, dramatic but foreboding. Also many Chinese tourists bussed in from Queenstown. But the Sound rises above it all, jaw dropping in scale, near vertical cliffs rising 700m, with full size rain forest trees clinging to them, rise straight out of the water.  The rain meant that hundreds of temporary waterfalls were active, adding to the spectacle. We joined a nature cruise and saw bottlenose dolphins, surfing the bow wave of a cruise ship, as well as seals and blue penguins.  This is one we will always remember. 

Another is Aoroki/Mount Cook, but more on that later.  FIrst we dropped in on Dunedin, where the city fathers in gold rush days had great plans to create the Edinburgh of the south.  While maybe not quite that, it has some very fine Victorian buildings and the same vibe as many boom towns of that era, like Calgary and Glasgow. There is an amazing confection of a station, from where the Taieri Gorge Railway sets out. This has to be one of the craziest places to build a track, along steep fragile cliffs of fragile schist, with dozens of tunnels, and bridges across raging torrents.  We decided to escape the rain and driving (and a small recompense for missing the long scenic coastal trip) by taking this 4 hour excursion and it was well worth it.  The river was fuller than any of the crew could remember and it was a good way to access remote countryside effortlessly.

New Zealand 4

A beautiful relaxing Sunday in Wanaka. This town sits around a bay at the end of its mountain ringed lake, which reflects the snow capped peaks and scudding clouds. The lake is fringed by huge poplars, planted by some far sighted city fathers maybe a hundred years ago, and a footpath that goes for miles, which we followed from our hotel into town, busy with local kids having their annual sports day, racing their bikes at enormous speed.  We didn't do much except take this all in, and then in the afternoon visit the local Rippon winery to sample their very fine pinot noirs (sample = knock back an entire bottle while admiring the view over the lake).  And so early to bed, until a strange sensation starts us as the beds started rocking from side to side.  A very uneasy, queasy sensation, and we realise it's an earthquake.  No panics outside so, thinking it was something minor, we went back to sleep, only to discover next day how serious this had been: a M7.8 quake.  We were over 400km south but still felt it strongly enough to get woken up. We have of course since seen pictures of the devastation caused.  We had been planning to travel by rail from Christchurch right through the affected area to Wellington and Auckland, but have had to rearrange this to fly direct. Nothing compared to the terrible effects on people locally of course, and we felt every sympathy to those who have lost their homes and loved ones.  The rail line and coast road are completely wiped out in many locations by land slides and many communities completely cut off, but NZ authorities are prepared for disaster.