After the New Plymouth half-marathon in October, our friend/boss/second mother in Taranaki, Jo, somehow managed to convince us that we needed a new challenge to focus our minds and encourage us to keep fit. We allowed ourselves to be signed up for the Motatapu Off-road Marathon, a remarkably scenic, and correspondingly hilly, event run between…
Tag: New Zealand
Routeburn Track
The New Zealand Great Walks can be expensive undertakings. Quite apart from geographical challenges – getting to start points and from end points – the increasing popularity of the walks is pushing up the prices of the Department of Conservation (DOC) huts and campsites. The two ends of the Routeburn Track are 325km apart by…
Mount Aspiring National Park
Rees Track, Cascade Saddle and Matukituki Valley If I had to have a regret about our time in New Zealand, it could be that we did not spend more time in Mt Aspiring National Park. Part of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Site which makes up most of the bottom left corner of New Zealand,…
Kepler Track
We were in the Fjordland National Park Visitor Centre in Te Anau looking for a good walk to do when we thought we would check the online booking system for the Great Walk huts and campsites. Normally the Milford, Routeburn and Kepler tracks, all three of them in Fjordland National Park, get booked up well…
Abel Tasman Coastal Track
We were told in our first week in New Zealand that if a Kiwi tells you something will be ‘busy as’, you should not believe them and go anyway. They live in a country 50 per cent bigger than the UK, with one fifteenth of the population (roughly four million), and most have never been on…
A Home From Home
About six months ago Gillian and I bought our first home together. Since then we have had a lot of questions but very few visitors. This post aims to correct this state of affairs. The Story of Sam We picked up Sam, our 1997 Toyota Estima, from a nice chap called Anthony in Christchurch. He…
Lake Waikaremoana
Lake Waikaremoana (why-carra-mo-arna, or something like that) sits within Te Urewera, a large, remote, densely forested area near the East Coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The Waikaremoana Great Walk follows the western shore of the lake for 46km, sometimes hugging the lake, sometimes climbing high above it through the bush. Having watched the weather…
Whanganui River Journey
We are two people who like ticking things off. The sort of people who will put ‘write to-do list’ at the top of a to-do list, so we can tick it off when we have finished. So, obviously, when we read about New Zealand’s nine ‘Great Walks’, we thought we had better start ticking them…
Tongariro Alpine Crossing
The Tongariro Alpine Crossing forms part of the Tongariro Northern Circuit, one of New Zealand’s famed Great Walks. It passes through Tongariro National Park in the centre of the North Island, starting at Whakapapa at the base of Mt Ruapehu (2,797m), past the base of Mt Ngauruhoe (2,291m) and over the top of Mt Tongariro…
Quick Update
Following a period of blog silence, we have been inundated by a request for an update. More to follow shortly now that we are settled in one place for a couple of months, but here, in brief, is what we have been up to for the last seven weeks. After a week in Christchurch we…
Quake City
As we got the bus into Christchurch from the airport last Monday, and then walked the couple of blocks from the bus stop to our hostel past large expanses of gravel and rubble, we wondered how long we could keep ourselves entertained in such a city. In every direction lay a damaged building, or a…
Passepartout 