Our second summer in Queenstown was pretty uneventful (relatively speaking). We were there during the busy season and I was able to jump straight back into work on the river, so that kept me pretty busy the whole time. Every summer is a bit different as some people had left while others had come to take their place. This time we gained another Czech, a Welshman, and a Brazilian, while lost an Israeli, Irishman, Frenchy and American. Playing in a river and getting paid for it continued to be a dream job for me and I loved every bit of it, though the weather was pretty poor most of the season which resulted in high water levels which isn’t the greatest. Meanwhile Steph was pretty much stuck inside most of the time, as it rained almost constantly the first few weeks we were there. She was not working, so had plenty of time to make dinner for me (not) and plan her big solo adventure - a week in Italy and a month with her parents in Montenegro - all without me! More on that later. Probably the highlight of that summer in New Zealand for me was a three-day hike I took with a couple of friends from work. We did a hike called the Gillespie Circuit - not one of New Zealand’s famous “Great Walks” but that just means it’s cheaper and not as crowded, not necessarily lesser views.
I would have said my last day in New Zealand was a major highlight since we took the cast from The Biggest Loser down the river as a race for one of their immunity challenges on the TV show. I was pretty much positive I was going to get on TV and kept telling people this would be my "big break," but as anyone who saw the show knows, I got cut. They somehow edited out almost every visible evidence that those jokers had any guides in the water with them at all. It was pretty impressive, but equally disappointing. Shame. Anyways, it was fun to be part of the production and I got to meet Rulon Gardner - Olympic gold medal wrestler.
Actually my whole last month in New Zealand was pretty special for me, mainly because Steph was gone on her big solo adventure (wondering if she’ll edit that out). Taking the ferry from Italy to Montenegro was still the cheapest and most logical way to go, and since she loved Italy last time, she carved out a bit of time for herself in Rome. I actually don’t know too much of what she did, so maybe she can elaborate, but I know she was sick for part of it, met some other girls traveling solo so had somebody to see the sights with, and she took a cooking class of which I have hardly seen any benefits from.
Steph making pasta
Tivoli, near Rome
Steph loved her month in Montenegro with her parents. It was good to see them again and maybe even good for her to get some time away from me, though I can’t see how that would be good. She loved meeting her parents Montenegro friends and helping out with the kids of the local Roma community.
Steph and her dad with the Roma kids
Steph's mom with some cool young italian guy she met over there. is that a leather jacket?
After our month away from each other, we planned to meet back in Georgia within a day of each other and to finally get “real jobs” again and settle back into professional life. Well, obviously that didn’t happen. I got a temporary job in Fort Collins, Colorado with an engineering firm, so we packed up the miracle that is the Jimmy and headed west, young man. We only spent about 4 months in Colorado but loved it. Initially we stayed with my sis and her husband Michael, but they were leaving for their own around-the-world trip so we found a room in the basement apartment of a couple that Michael teaches with. The couple was great but we really fell in love with their kids. While I slaved away in the office during the day, Steph would play with little Kellin, Jacqui and Ginger (our dog). Steph’s brothers came and stayed with us for a few days on their way to Oregon, which turned into a few weeks after they hit a deer with their car less than a day after leaving us. All was good though - more people for Kellin and Jacqui to play with. It was sometime in Colorado when we hatched the current life plan that we are currently carrying out - another summer in NZ and then move to Australia to work in the high-paying and booming engineering field down there.
Steph with her buddies Jacqui and Kellin
Ging loves the snow
So we went back to New Zealand, our third summer! Hard to believe. We got to spend some time with family back in Georgia before leaving, then with family in Vegas on our way. Of course we couldn’t help but throw in a short holiday in Fiji on our way across the pacific. Hey, we needed a vacation! We visited some different places than we had been at last time and particularly enjoyed our stay with Bobo on his farm on the island of Ovalau, and then having a whole island resort to ourselves for 5 days.
Steph's favorite place in the world - a tiny sand island surrounded by reefs
Ovalau Island
Ovalau from our private island Leluvia
saw lots of sea snakes
this cat "Whitey" followed us around everywhere. I liked it but Steph wasn't so happy
The last summer in New Zealand was of course another good one. This one was a bit different as we didn’t have to be far from family - in fact we lived with some! Michael and Taylor were in Queenstown for the summer in the middle of their around the world trip, so we shared a 2 bedroom apartment for the summer. Michael trained up on the river with me and Taylor got a job in town selling trips around the South Island but mainly at Milford Sound. This summer Steph worked in the “shop” - booking people on river surfing and canyoning trips. It was a good job for her though was a bit stressful when the shop manager quit on her second day and left just Steph and one other girl, Mairi, to run the shop. It turned out well as Steph and Mairi became fast friends and did a great job in the shop. This summer was the opposite of last summer on the river - instead of high water conditions we had very little spring rain which meant the river was low all season. This worked out well as we could run our low-water section of river, which includes a grade IV rapid and a really good standing wave where we could do what we do best - river surf!
this is me playing on the wave
This is what I am supposed to be doing - catching clients on the wave:
Somehow we didn’t get up to too much this season, or at least it didn't seem like it. Mostly just work a lot and enjoy our time in and around Queenstown. There were a couple free(!) campervan trips we took to Christchurch at the beginning of the season and a few camping trips nearby and Steph even joined in for two "full moon" midnight runs down the river. Some of the guys from work got together to run a pretty mean-looking grade 5 rapid on a couple occasions (search "citroen rapid" on youtube to see it). Our biggest trip was down south to the Catlins to swim with some dolphins and to Dunedin where Steph could finally do some of the shopping she had been craving. Steph’s job allowed her to do pretty much all the activities in town (more than me), so she did a lot of jet boating, rode some four-wheelers, jumped off the canyon swing, went paragliding, and lots of other cool stuff. I did a few of them with her, though she didn’t come when I went with a buddy for a 143 meter (470 feet!) high bungy.
coolest bench ever - that's Mt Cook in the background
kayaking on Lake Wakatipu
So that brings us to today. We left Queenstown yesterday, spent the night in Auckland airport, and are currently on a flight to what’s known as the Little Red Dot - Singapore! We are excited about being back in Asia - we have been dreaming of Thai food ever since we left! I’ll let our travel plans reveal themselves as we go along, but just know we have a month in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand so stay tuned!
the famous Twelve Apostles - only there aren't twelve anymore
Every marketing textbook should start with the story of the Great Ocean Road. The only conclusion I can come to is that this was one of the greatest marketing achievements of all time. I’m not trying to be negative here - there are some great sites along the GOR, and it’s definitely worth visiting if you are in the area, but being practically a household name across the world would cause someone to expect a bit more. The coastline is beautiful, but not really better than anything I’ve seen on the west coast of New Zealand or the States. Most of the drive that we did was not even on the coast - it was inland and you had to park and walk out to the lookouts. I was expecting Big Sur type conditions - with the road tracing the coastline as it hugs every cliff and sharp bend. Nope. I mean, we drove 10 hours for this. I was a tad disappointed. So now that my rant is out of the way, we did get to see some cool stuff.
this island used to be connected by a bridge, and some people got stranded when it collapsed
So the coastline wasn't all that we expected, but that wasn't the only reason we were here. We wanted to see a koala. Just one koala. I know koalas eat eucalyptus, but it seemed like every tree was a eucalyptus. Where do they hang out? Way at the top, near the bottom? We had no clue. Our first day and a half we were constantly straining to spot one of these guys. Eventually we gave up trying, and were driving out to see a lighthouse when I spotted what looked like two koalas mating in the tree above the road. Don’t get too excited, it turned out to be a mother and baby, but we pulled over and started snapping photos. It was about this time when we started looking around us and started noticing koalas EVERYWHERE. There were heaps of them all around us - how did we miss them before? It reminds me of Harry and the Hendersons when they took Harry to the woods and all these other sasquatches appeared out of the woodwork. Nobody else remembers that? Most of them were just chilling out in the fork of the trees, but a few were moving around a bit eating leaves. You could get real close to some of them, especially one who was just sitting in a tree at eye level right next to the road inviting tourists to stop for photo ops.
Our favorite koala that we met was Bert - yes we gave him a name. This is how we met Bert: being the cheapskates that we are, we stopped by a grocery store for a rotisserie chicken and a frozen cheesecake and headed into the hills for a free campground where we could sleep in the car for the night (yes we did eat the whole cheesecake thank you, and yes we felt pretty awful afterwards). Anyways, as we’re sitting there enjoying our gourmet dinner we spot a koala climb down a tree next to our car and quickly scamper over to a neighboring tree. As we sat and watched him eat his leaves, we gave him the name Bert because I suggested bear and Steph suggested something lame that I can’t remember but ended in -rt so we compromised on Bert. It was pretty stormy that night with some pretty strong winds and we naturally got pretty worried about our buddy Bert, who was at the top of a pretty small tree. We needn’t worry, though, as when we looked up Bert was as calm as a cucumber, using the violent swaying of his tree to try to reach some juicy green leaves on a nearby tree. Crazy Bert.
didn't get a picture of Bert, so instead I'm showing you a double rainbow
Mission accomplished. We spotted some koalas. Now we had to make it back to Sydney for the final flight of our journey. Unfortunately we had to skip seeing Melbourne as we hear it’s a real cool city, but we used the time we saved to take the scenic route back through the Snowy Mountains. It was summer so there was no snow, even on Australia’s highest peak - you can take a chair lift to the top of that one so it ain't exactly snow-capped. It was a beautiful area though and not really what you expect when you think of Australia.
Snowy Mountains
Snowy Mountain Scheme - if you don't know, Wikipedia
We spent one final night in the car (apparently we love to sleep in uncomfortable places), got in a little beach time somewhere south of Sydney and we were on a plane back to Queenstown. Round the world trip complete! Done and dusted.
We’re baaaack!!! It’s been a while. Not sure anyone is still reading this, but we do it for our own memory-keeping as well, so we’re going to pick up where we left off. Since our last blog from Australia (it’s been almost a year and a half since this happened), we’ve had another brief summer in New Zealand, Steph spent a month with her parents in Montenegro and traveled to Italy solo (didn’t know that was possible), we’ve spent a summer in Colorado, some family time back in Georgia, a quick stay in Vegas, and most recently yet another summer in Queenstown. So we won’t be having blogs on most of that stuff, but I’m going to try to quickly get us up-to-date as we are about to board a plane to Singapore for a month-long adventure in SE Asia! We are sad to leave our friends and the beautiful life that we have in Queenstown, but excited to be moving on to new and different things. But first, let’s go way back to Australia. We last left you in tropical Queensland, and over the next month we’ll be going full circle…
Our commercial flight from Cairns down to Sydney was a travel highlight in itself. First you get a birds-eye view of the Great Barrier Reef - which is almost as spectacular as seeing it from the water. Then as we came into Sydney we had a great view of Sydney Harbour and it’s two famous icons - Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House. It’s probably not as stunning as Rio, but Sydney is certainly one of the prettiest big cities in the world. And to my chagrin, that beauty came at a price. I figured going into this that Tokyo would be the most expensive place we’d visit, but thanks to the strong Aussie dollar, Sydney easy takes that mark. We paid $60 bucks to stay in dorm beds. Most other places you’d get your own room for $20 or $30. Anyways, it was the end of our trip so we weren’t too concerned about the money and just decided to enjoy the 10 days we had.
The first couple days in Sydney we basically just wandered around. We were there during what I call Oprah-mania - there were signs up everywhere, it was all anyone talked about, and they even had a big O on the Harbour Bridge. One day as we were walking past a nice hotel downtown, there was a red carpet out with aboriginal dancers along it. Everyone seemed quite excited, which I don’t see why since it was only the stinking audience arriving. The audience! Not even Oprah herself was making an appearance and they brought out the red carpet? They do realize these are just ordinary Americans that just happened to be in the Oprah audience at the right time?
come on, people
Sydney has lots of cool stuff to see for walkers like us - the botanical gardens with it’s many cockatoos and fruit bats, Sydney Harbour at sunset, art museums, and the Christmas decorations were up with as much effort as anyone in the southern hemisphere is going to put in. You can pay an outrageous fee to climb the Harbour Bridge but Steph found us some free passes to climb one of the support buildings for similarly good views.
the church had a strange but cool light show displayed on it at night
suckers
If you are a dedicated blog reader you may remember Simon - our Irish friend who worked with me on the river and we lived with us our first summer in Queenstown. Simon was living in Sydney at the time so we took the Manly ferry out to visit him and get some beach action in. There are of course very good beaches in Sydney - we didn’t make it to the famous Bondi Beach, but Manly is supposed to be better anyways. The problem I have with these beaches is that they set out these flags that swimmers must stay between. If you ever watch Bondi Rescue on TV you’ll understand why - dumb tourists who can’t swim just go right out in rip tides and have to be rescued - but still it’s pretty lame. I spent the whole afternoon being whistled at by the lifeguards for having one foot outside the flags while Steph (surprise!) laid on the beach.
Sydney is cool but we had another week left and Steph wanted to see some koalas. From our research, the best place to see koalas in the wild is on the Great Ocean Road - west of Melbourne. Even if you’ve seen a map of Australia you may not realize - that is a long stinking way from Sydney. Us not being too averse to road trips, we hired a car and headed west. First stop was the Blue Mountains, for which Simon tagged along (he had to call in sick to work and made up this really strange story about an infection from a bug bite, but it worked!). The Blue Mountains are maybe an hour or so outside Sydney and is a really great area for hiking and sightseeing. They look kind of like a smaller version of the Grand Canyon, only in a more tropical setting so they were covered in eucalyptus trees. We didn’t time to do much hiking with only one day, so we mostly drove around to different viewpoints and did a couple small hikes. Maybe the most memorable stop of the day was at the visitor center. We’ve been to many National and State Park visitor centers in our day, and they all try to give you an overview of the landscape, it’s geology and of course the flora and fauna, usually with some stuffed versions of the local wildlife. The Blue Mountains visitor center had all that but also took it a step further, with an unexpected number of stuffed animals that bordered on creepy. Where it got really weird were the bags of animal bones that were sitting around. Hey, I found the skeleton of a rabbit in the woods, what should I do with it? No, no, don’t leave it there, put it in a bag and bring it to the visitor center!
