A Little R'n'R

Well, we’ve reached the end of our long trip. We made it to Slovakia last Sunday healthy and in one piece, with all our luggage and intestines (for the most part) intact. I didn’t believe it until we landed in Bratislava that we survived almost 8 months of traveling without major injury, sickness, heavy turbulence and with only one small theft from our car (of a cheap iPod transmitter) and only one loss (of my baseball hat). Our sigh of relief when we dropped our bags for the very last time was great.

It’s hard to process the whole experience now that we’re jumping head-on into the fury of job and apartment search, but I will try to recap our two weeks in Thailand best as I can.

Thailand turned out to be amazing. We don’t know why we didn’t plan 3 months there instead of 2 meager weeks, but, of course, in retrospect you’re always wiser. At the end, two weeks actually turned out to be just enough for us, travel-weary and broke backpackers, but we agreed that Thailand deserves another, more proper visit, because it is such a fascinating place. Even though Thailand is a huge mainstream tourist destination, it is a place whose soul seems unaffected by a sort of growing global cultural uniformity. Even with Coca Cola signs and tourists everywhere, it is a wildly exotic place with an air of “a far-away land” where you can still feel like a real traveler exploring an unknown world. The dazzling golden temples, smells of curries and noodles being cooked and eaten in the streets, millions of scooters, food vendors, Buddhas and street tailors, the jungle, tigers, monkeys and rice patties – every day is a feast for the senses in Thailand. And since your money goes far, you can still see all of this in style.

However, you can’t do Thailand without a guidebook. Without the help of instructions in your native language, you’re deaf and mute, street names look like a bunch of squiggles, food is unidentifiable, you get taken for shopping rides you didn’t ask for and pay 3 times as much as a local would. We didn’t realize this until we bought a used Lonely Planet book in our guesthouse and started to read about the myriad of Thai cultural customs, social taboos, hygiene habits and shopping scams that a typical Westerner would have no idea about – and a bunch of which we had already transgressed or fell victims to.

Armed with this new found understanding of the Thai culture and way of life, we really started to enjoy ourselves. We explored old Bangkok, ate loads of street food, breathed in a lot of smog and - just absorbed the unique life of this megalopolis. After about 3 days, we followed a tip from fellow English backpackers and took a local train to Kanchanaburi, a smaller town about 3 hours northwest from Bangkok. The main tourist attraction there is the famous Bridge on the River Kwai (Kwae), but there are also loads of other things to do in the area, so we thought this would be a perfect place to spend a few days away from the craziness of Bangkok.

We stayed in a charming guesthouse ($6/night!) right on the bank of the mighty river and walked the 2 km to the bridge on our first evening. It is a rather unimpressive black iron bridge that is the center of a small bustle of tourist activities (souvenir markets, upscale restaurants and groups of scooter taxis waiting to take the weary tourists back to their hotels). If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, here’s the story of the bridge: It was part of the “Death Railway” from Thailand to Burma that the Imperial Japanese Army planned as a supply route during WWII. The Japanese used 30,000 Allied prisoners of war, as well as thousands of imprisoned locals, to build this railway in extreme jungle terrain and under horrendous conditions in 1942-1943. It is said that 16,000 of POWs and a hundred thousand of laborers died during the construction of this railway, of which the bridge on the River Kwai was the most murderous to build. The bridge was subsequently bombed by the Allies, then reconstructed, and today it is still in use, although the Thai government has since dismantled the rest of the Death Railway.

So, the bridge might not be much to look at, but considering that it was built with hand tools by starving men ridden by dysentery, malaria, rotting jungle sores and brutal treatment by their guards, it is an awesome and depressing sight. Even more depressing is the small JEATH War Museum that was started in town by a monk from a neighboring Buddhist monastery. It is a replica of a bamboo shed that the prisoners used to live in and it is full of photos and paintings made by the prisoners. Even in the boiling mid-day heat, these images gave us cold shivers.

On a lighter note, one day we rented a scooter (by far the most popular means of transportation in Thailand) and rode around town like locals to visit gorgeous Buddhist temples and on another day we went to bathe with elephants. I wish I could say that the expensive elephant bathing was an unforgettable experience, but it was only a good photo opportunity. That’s actually exactly how the locals organize this outing – as a photo op for western tourists. There was not much interaction with the animal, we were quickly photographed with one elephant, then we were whisked off to another elephant, taken for a short ride around a “traditional” village and then we rode the elephant into the river, scrubbed its hairy head and got sprayed by water from its trunk. All this was heavily photographed by the young village elephant trainer, the mahoud, and our Thai driver who were both very digital-camera-savvy. The best part about this elephant bathing was that we got to cool off in the river.

Knowing how these tourist activities go, we saved our money and didn’t go to a tiger temple or the national park for a dip in a waterfall – we just stayed in our lovely hotel, ate a lot of pad thai and watched evening movies in the hotel restaurant. After 3 days in Kanchanaburi, we took a local bus to another small town called Lop Buri, whose claim to fame is the army of cheeky monkeys that inhabit the city’s temple ruins and, in fact, the entire city center. Now, this was a completely different animal interaction!

Just like any visitor to this town, we could not believe our eyes – there were monkeys everywhere! The local residents are used to the monkey antics and ignore the animals or try to avoid them, since they can get pretty moody and even aggressive. They swing from power lines, crawl over shop and street signs, sit around on sidewalks or balconies, roam around rooftops and climb up TV antennas. Everywhere they go, they snatch whatever is not attached and try to eat it. They’re really, really funny, but sometimes you get the weird feeling that you are the one who’s being watched by an ever-present beady little brown eye… For the most part, the monkeys ignored us, but when we visited the “monkey temple,” some curious youngsters got brave and started to get very close. I allowed one baby to jump on me, which was a big mistake because within seconds I was attacked by about 5 of his friends, all pulling on my shirt, swinging from my skirt and pulling out my hair. Luckily, my bag was zipped up, so they couldn’t steal anything, but by the time I shook them off, my shirt was ruined and I lost a few hairs. But they didn’t mean any harm, they’re just monkeys!

Beside these cheeky little buggers, the town of Lop Buri had a great evening market overflowing with the typically Thai sensory overload: meat and fish sizzling on the grills, fragrant curries bubbling in large pots, mountains of alien-looking fruits, wall-to-wall crowds of hungry locals (Thais love to eat), Asian pop music blasting out of the CD stalls and vendors calling out to buyers… all this veiled by the omnipresent malodorous mix of car exhaust fumes and stench of rotting puddles in the street. Even though it is the most common everyday routine for locals, a Thai street market is an experience in itself for a western visitor.

By now, we were getting pretty sick of the sticky heat and were ready for a beach. It was my idea to take a bus to the island of Ko Chang off the northern shore to cool off near the sea for the last time before settling in the shoreless Czech Republic. According to our book, Ko Chang is a largely pristine island covered by rain forest and hemmed by gorgeous white sand beaches. It did mention that Ko Chang is up-and-coming, but we were assured that backpacking still flourished on the island thanks to a myriad of cheap accommodation. Well, that information was way old.

The whole island is now a big tourist rip-off. As soon as we landed, we were hit by an astronomical taxi fee, which we had to pay, since there were no more taxis to take us to the beach town. In the town of White Sand Beach (just an endless strip of seafront resorts and souvenir shops), we did not find a single affordable guesthouse, so we inquired about the one cheap room we saw a sign for ($6/night). When we were shown the room, I had to laugh – it was a dump with rags nailed to the window (presumably as mosquito nets) and a disgusting non-flushing concrete bathroom. There was an even cheaper option, which was a bare hut comparable to what POWs in Kanchanaburi slept in, so we gladly paid double of what we paid in Bangkok for a nice modern room with cable TV. By now we were starving. Ryan had been feeling sick all day from Thai food, so we went to look for some western food and were shocked by the absurdly high prices of any non-Thai fare in the many pretentious restaurants catering to middle-aged white men in need to impress their Thai girlfriends. After another long search along the strip, we committed a crime in the land of amazing food: we got hot-dogs from 7-Eleven! By the time we went to bed, we were broke and really pissed off.

The next morning we were determined to take a taxi to a less touristy and expensive part of the island, only to hear that we can get there “only” for about 3-times the fee that we thought it should reasonably cost (and almost the price of one hotel night). Since we had no idea whether the situation would be any better in the smaller town, we scratched that plan and went to check out the beach. It was a disappointingly mediocre, gray stretch of sand with muddy surf and no snorkeling possibilities. By now we just wanted to find a cheaper room and get out of Ko Chang the following day. We found a room slightly cheaper and closer to the beach, but it was such a dump (with dirty walls, threadbare sheets and a window into an ugly yard with a TV blasting in it) that we gladly went back to our original “hotel” across the road and for almost the same money got our nice room with TV. We enjoyed the beach only for a short while and spent the rest of the day watching movies, which was almost just as good.

We left the overpriced island the next morning. On the last day I admitted that it wasn’t all that bad (it was just no good for penny-pinching backpackers used to the cheapness of Bangkok) and that maybe we just had bad luck and bad timing, but we simply couldn’t afford Ko Chang. The most irritating part about Ko Chang was that the garbage-strewn beach was not worth the glamour that the resorts were making it up to be. But at least it made us appreciate Fiji that much more.

After this faux pas, we spent the last 4 days in the beautifully cheap Bangkok. We saw the famous giant reclining Buddha, Wat Arun temple, shopped on Khao San market street and we got sick from pad thai. On different days we each spent 24 hours in the agony of persistent nausea and slight fever. To top that, our room seemed to be particularly hot in this guesthouse even with the fan on full speed and that made the sickness much worse. We later figured out what it was – the guesthouse laundry was being dried in an industrial dryer right below our floor and the rising hot air turned our room into an oven! This sickness prevented us from seeing the famous red-light district and a Thai-boxing match, but we could hardly care anymore. With a fragile stomach, walking in Bangkok’s smelly streets was a real ordeal, so we were happy to be leaving on June 7.

We had a comfortable 12-hour flight to London (Thai Airways is really great!) and spent 2 days there in Covent Garden with our good friends from DC, Marc and Eileen. It was amazing to be back in a land of mild weather, long summer days and street markets where food not only looks recognizable, but also safely tasty!

And now we are in my hometown of Stara Tura, where we’re getting ready to start a life in Prague. We’re doing a lot of apartment and job searching on the internet and when we’re not doing that, we hang out with my brothers, play with 5 little kittens that live in our garden or stuff our faces with my mom’s delicious Slovak cooking. Our newest Thailand photos are up online.

This is the end of our half-around-the-world trip. We’re happy we made it. Thank you for reading.

Sawat dee ka from Bangkok!

(That's hello in Thai, as you might have guessed.)

We are drenched in sweat, sitting at the New Siam I hotel down a small alley in the middle of Bangkok. Outside of our hotel lobby scooters, hot pink taxis and pimped-out tuk-tuks (3-wheeled passenger scooters) are spewing noxious fumes, "Asia's Best Hits from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" is playing on the radio and tourists are sipping Singha beer, trying very hard not to drown in sweat. The air doesn't move much in Bangkok, the heat is stifling and everyone has a thin, shiny layer of sweat on their sunburnt faces - including us. Oh, and our room has a fan and no blanket - but, who needs a blanket when the air drapes over you like a warm, wet rag?

It's hard to believe we arrived only last night because we've already done all the essential Bangkok tourist activities - all in under 24 hours: we had street Thai food, got a Thai massage, visited the Grand Palace, took a tuk-tuk ride through the city, saw the Sitting, Standing and Sleeping Buddhas, ordered a fine cashmere suit for Ryan and a silk dress for me from Bangkok's finest tailor shop and dodged about a hundred people offering us overpriced tours, souvenirs and other services. Without a Lonely Planet (we were too cheap to buy one) this might have been quite a challenge but, fortunately, we had the help of a couple of friendly Thais along the way. And now we're realizing that we are nearly cashed out. So, woe is us - no elephant rides, jungle treks or bamboo rafting down the river - just Tiger beer, green curry and maybe a few more massages for the next two weeks. Or there's always the ping-pong show... uhm, I mean the beach.

Not much more to say for now, we've only been here for 24 hours, after all. Did I mention we are sweating a lot?

P.S. One more thing we forgot to mention about Uluru - we got engaged there! Stay tuned for photos.

P.S.S. For those of you interested in knowing more about Ryan's brush with Sydney's criminal underworld, here's his account:

Ok, it was our last day in Australia. We were parked in front of our hostel, packing up our things in the campervan when I heard the front door close. I looked in the front seat and noticed the camera was missing. Some guy had walked by and snagged it (with ALL our photos from the past 3 weeks). So, I jumped out of the van and he bolted. I chased the SOB for 4 blocks and into some crack house. We were running up the stairs when I lost him. On the street, fellow low-lives were trying like hell to distract me with "he went over there" and "no, he went behind the building", etc. I figured the camera was gonners. Back at the van, my "FUCK, FUCK, FUCKs" attracted the attention of a local who helped me find the police. The cops went with me back to the "hotel" that I chased scumbag into. The "manager" said he lives in room 16 but he's not there. So the police gave him an "open it up!" and we went up. They asked me to wait outside the door as they went in to grill some cracked out floosy inside. I heard shouting and pleading, and several minutes later they actually came out with the guy! He was sweating like a pedophile in a playground! A few minutes later the other cop comes out with our camera....can you believe it! Then they asked me to go wait downstairs. I heard some serious screams and cries from that guy as i waited. They must have been giving him a real good working over. Anyway, we got our camera and I gaurantee he'll make sure noone's in the back seat next time.

Outback Survival (continued)

Signing in from Melbourne....

If you checked our photo gallery recently, you know that we are alive and weren't swallowed by a hungry croc or died of thirst in the burning outback. No, Ryan and I are alive and well, very well, indeed, it's just that we've had absolutely no time to write an update on our Australian adventure - we haven't been around computers much in the last 12 days. In fact, we haven't even been around much civilization in the last 12 days!

Excluding the last two days, which we already spent back in the civilized world where people, fuel and water can be found in every few miles, instead of every few hundred miles, we've spent the last two weeks crossing the vast and forbidding Australian outback. Overall, we've been very busy since we arrived in this country on May 1 - we've crossed 4 of Australia's 6 states and one of its 2 territories, visited 4 of Australia's 5 major cities, drove on average over 500km a day and saw the most cosmopolitan, as well as the most remote and desolate regions of this crazy country.

And with all this, we haven't even started to scratch the surface of all that this country has to offer! Australia is an amazing country! A truly amazing, fascinating place filled with sunshine, friendly people, weird-looking animals and plants, mind-boggling natural landscapes and vibrant cities that will blow your socks off! It's just like another planet - you arrive here from the pastoral, temperate-climate New Zealand that looks much like Ireland or Austria with its pine forests and steep mountains, and then you're here - on an unbelievably flat continent with ghostly skeletal gum trees (the ever-present eucalyptus), red earth, strange birds and weather-worn people in bush hats and you almost can't believe you're on the same planet! And you though that you're practically just next door to New Zealand...

So here's my meager attempt to summarize what we've done and seen since we arrived in Sydney on May 1:

Sydney - we loved it!
We had no expectations of Australia, so everything came as a surprise to us here. But I knew I was going to like Australia as soon as we got off the plane in Sydney and walked through the airport's arrival terminal that had walls plastered in life-size photos of scenes from "the bush" - with objects helpfully named in their exotic Aussie outback slang, like dunny, Sheila, esky, swag and swagman...

We heard about the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry months before we even set foot in Australia. (If you happen to meet an Australian who's partial to one of these two cities, one of the first things she will tell you about Australia is how crap the other city is. Sydney is boring and business-like, Melbourne is funky and all about culture...etc.) So we heard that Sydney is the commercial city, while Melbourne is the culture city, and we expected Sydney to be a concrete jungle overrun with business suits and traffic jams - just the typical, anonymous, overcrowded and polluted city. But it was none of that!

Already on our way from the airport on a shuttle, we saw that Sydney was filled with lots of quaint and quiet neighborhoods with distinctly local atmosphere and establishments. We checked in to a hostel in one of those quaint neighborhoods called King's Cross and one of the very first things we saw when we walked out of the hostel on our way to the city was a pair of parrots feeding on some bush flowers. Wild parrots right in the middle of a city that were so unafraid that you could almost touch them! Amazing. We instantly knew we liked Sydney.

After that, the city got only better - we walked through the Royal Botanic Gardens and were amazed to see more wild parrots, fruit bats and ibises and other interesting-looking creatures just walking around, while people were relaxing on the impeccable lawns and elegant skyscrapers were silently looming over the scene in the background. And then we got to the opera and it was such a pinch-me-am-I-dreaming? kind of moment that it took us a few hours and a lot of staring to finally believe that we were in Sydney. The opera is magnificent - a truly spectacular building that deserves all the fame it gets and we stared at it for a looong time. And then we walked passed it and the view that opened up was even more spectacular - the massive Sydney Harbour Bridge hung over the large bay with sun setting behind it and to our right the skyscraper skyline was gleaming and ferries and tugboats were zooming by in the water - and the whole scene was so serene and relaxing! None of the busy crowds and loud traffic that we were expecting.

The thing about Sydney is that it's not on the way to anywhere else. If you end up in Sydney, it's because you spent a lot of time and money to be there. You were not on your way to Paris, it wasn't a short drive from your grandma's - it's so far away that you have to produce a fair amount of effort to get there, so when you're finally there it's just sort of unbelievable. You're in Australia, in Sydney, you're looking at one of the most famous and iconic structures in the world - and you can't believe you made it! Anyway, Sydney is great. The city has class and elegance; it has gorgeous beaches, fine dining, the bridge, the opera, wild parrots and, contrary to expectations, really nice locals. It's, in my opinion, one of the great cities of the world - no matter what Melbournites might say.

The next day we rented our van, slept in it on the street in King's Cross, and took off from the city the following day. We were heading up north to Queensland's Gold Coast to visit my old friend Alica. It took us two fairly uninteresting days of driving to get to Gold Coast - the Florida of Australia. Gold Coast is a long stretch of a magnificent beach surrounded by chrome-and-glass development of high-rise hotels, beach resorts and first-class shopping. The weather was getting progressively warmer as we headed further north and, after two months of freezing in New Zealand, we shed our socks, shoes, long-sleeved shirts and long pants - and were in the summertime again!

We met up with Alica and her boyfriend Alex and spent a night with them. I was overjoyed to see my old friend. She and I took our very first flight to the US together 12 years ago, when we were headed for our one year at New Jersey prep schools. We hit it off during that scholarship program, but we haven't seen each other for 10 years! So we had a lot to catch up on and I was so excited that I didn't notice how much cheap wine I drank. Not surprisingly, I was suffering quite heavily the next day, while Ryan and Alex took a board and went surfing at the nearby beach. After I recovered enough to leave the toilet alone, we took off for Nimbin - a place Alex and Alica told us about.

Nimbin is a self-declared marijuana capital of Australia and every year the town organizes a festival called Mardi Grass - it was the last day of this festival that we were going to catch that Sunday night. Nimbin was fun, as you can imagine (you know who you are!) - hippies of all ages in all stages of intoxication were strolling down the colorfully painted main street that was lively with concerts, movie projections and other peaceful and loving activities... We stayed overnight, bought souvenirs the next morning and backtracked to Gold Coast to say good-bye to Alica and Alex and to head north to Brisbane.

The subtropical capital of Queensland, Brisbane, was our gateway to the outback. After talking to Alex and Alica, we decided that despite paying an astronomical amount for fuel, we were going to drive to Uluru - the mighty red rock in the middle of the continent. It was our original plan for Australia, then we thought it's simply too ambitious a plan, but then Alex persuaded us that we should not miss out on such an opportunity. After all, we had a van that we could comfortably sleep and cook in and we had 3 weeks to do the drive, so when's a better time to undergo this sort of adventure? So we decided we would drive the 8,000km from Brisbane to Sydney via Alice Springs, Adelaide, Melbourne and Canberra. Why the hell not?

After checking out Brisbane - another ultramodern, sleek and elegant city full of street art (and even a man-made beach right in the city center!) - we took off for the inland. For a day and a half we were crossing little townships and miles and miles of cattle stations. We were in "the bush" - the section of Australia that separates the urban east coast from the "outback" - the real Australian wilderness that not even many Australians visit. On this initial stretch of highway, we started to see loads and loads of roadkill - hundreds upon hundreds of dead kangaroos lined the highway in the most gruesome contortions. At least we finally saw that Australians didn't make up those kangaroos - there were really out there, just not alive. I started craning my neck to spot some live ones, but I must sadly report, that during our 12 days in the outback, we spotted only 5 live kangaroos near the road. (We were slightly more lucky with emus and eagles.) Disappointing, indeed. If I had one definite expectation of Australia it was taking a photo of a group of kangaroos gently hopping into a desert sunset. No such luck. With the kangaroos, not the sunset, that is. The sunset we saw every night - and every night the sunset over the endless plains was stunning - an explosion of pink and lavender colors, illuminating the whole horizon with the most subtle and beautiful colors you could ever imagine.

So within a day and half of driving, we were finally in the outback. Vegetation grew sparse, as well as human settlements and anything else. We left towns, villages and big trees behind and were in the land of scrubs, lonely gums, herds of cattle and fuel on every 200km. We measured our driving by the distant outback towns, in each of which we had to get the precious fuel. Fuel is a life-giving liquid out there - you never want to run out of fuel in the outback. Even though we were driving on the one paved highway that is relatively busy with passing campervans and trucks (you pass a few every hour), we would have been in a very dire situation had we run out of fuel out there. The massive road trains - trucks that pull as many as four trailers over massive distances in the outback - cannot easily stop for stranded tourists. And what if there were no other tourists passing by for hours? Or days? Lucky for us, it is autumn now and the outback is warm, bordering on hot during the day and pleasantly cool at night, but in the summertime it gets lethally hot. Murderously hot. If people don't get rescued in a few days, they die of thirst and heat exhaustion. So, we made sure we always had enough fuel and water in our tanks just in case.

It took us 6 days of dedicated driving to get to Alice Springs, the famous outback town that is located smack in the middle of the country. We passed about a dozen little outback towns that are nothing more than a collection of a few houses surrounding a roadhouse - a place with fuel, food, campervan park and a bar. Sometimes the dot on the map wasn't even a town, but only the roadhouse that offers petrol, very simple accommodation and a selection beef pies. The scenery changed every day - we passed scrubby and bushy plains, plains covered lushly with spinifex (the maliciously prickly grass), plains dotted with thousands of red termite mounds the size of small children, trees and scrubs again...and all this time the land around us was impossibly flat as far as eye could see...

We heeded the oft-repeated advice not to drive during dusk (that's when the roos come out of the plains onto the roads and cause accidents - or more often just their own tragic end), so every evening right before sunset we pulled up to a roadside rest stop for the night. Normally, we would have a view of a gorgeous sunset from one side of the car, and then in the morning we'd have a view of a gorgeous sunrise on the other. It beats waking up in a wet, cold tent, that's for sure! The only thing that was missing were those kangaroos hopping gently on the horizon...

A lot of people believe that once you're in Alice Springs, you're next to Uluru, but that's far from the truth - Uluru is another day's drive from the town, so after flying across the world to Australia and then driving across a whole continent to Alice Springs, you find out that you still have to drive almost all day to get to this big red rock! You have to be really determined to get to see this damn rock, and maybe that's why you're in such awe when you finally see it. It's a rock like no other.

We got there just before sunset, but it was cloudy, and without sun rays the rock just faded into darkness without its famous explosion of red color. Unfazed by this misfortune, we left the park, camped out on the side of the road and returned for sunrise the next morning - and it was perfect! We were staring at the rock with about a hundred of other tourists (most of whom were wheeled off by their "off-the-beaten-path" luxury adventure tour couches before the sun rays even touched the rock !) and then - now with the tourists gone, in the serene stillness of the desert, the sun came over the clouds and the rock was on fire. Now, this amazing view was well worth the travel across the world! Next to the rock, the Kata Tjuta National Park also has an amazing cultural center that explains all about the spiritual meaning of Uluru to the local Aborigines, but we couldn't take pictures, so we can tell you that what we learned there, in a nutshell, is that Uluru is a very sacred and spiritual place.

After Uluru, we hurried back to civilization through a few more thousand miles of the ever-changing desert. One stop that is worth mentioning was the mining town of Coober Pedy - the opal capital of the world. For miles before entering the town, we drove through stretches of the most desolate and arid landscape that was dotted as far as eye could see with thousands of conical mounds - the opal mine shafts. Then we entered the town and learned all about these shafts, opal mining, opal and about just how unique this place is. Coober Pedy is a town without grass, every other shop on the main street sells precious opal and half of the town's 3500 residents live in dugouts - large underground homes that retain a year-round comfortable temperature of 24 degrees Celsius - even in the worst heat of the summer. I would definitely call this "extreme living." But, many people have found their fortunes here, as opal is plentiful, profitable, and you only need to get a $50 license to start digging.

Once we finally reached the populated area of the south coast, we checked out Adelaide, the capital of South Australia (albeit briefly because we wasted over 2 hours of our time watching the worst movie of the decade - Spiderman 3!) and continued to a city that we definitely wanted to see more closely - Melbourne, the capital of Victoria.

So how does Melbourne fare in the rivalry match with Sydney? Well, I can see what Melbournites mean when they say that Sydney is all business and no fun: compared to Melbourne, Sydney does seem a little culturally impoverished... Melbourne is a city of theaters and movies, art and culture, that's obvious as soon as you get to downtown. Plays and musicals are advertised everywhere, every street is adorned with street art, buildings are funky and unique...the whole city seems to thrive on creativity. We happened to be in town for Buddha's birthday festival, so we got some Asian food, watched Asian cultural performances and, since it was bitter cold and the weather was no good for good pictures, we splurged on a trip to the observation deck of the Rialto Tower, the tallest tower in the southern hemisphere, for a sunset view over the city. That made up for the crappy weather quite well - and chocolate cake from the cafe was amazing, too!

Unfortunately, we could not stay in Melbourne for long, so we took off the next afternoon and headed for the nation's capital, Canberra, about 700km north of Melbourne. We got to Canberra the following day - and by this time we were probably already a little travel-tired - so we kind of blew Canberra. But who cares about Canberra anyway? It's amazing that we even made the effort to get there because no one goes to Canberra. No one who doesn't have to, anyway. In a country that likes to announce distant cities with road signs like Darwin -3,355km, Canberra wasn't announced on one of the highways that lead to it until 200km before it! We saw signs for Sydney for a day before we saw one for the capital! That shows how much Australians care about Canberra - and when we got there we knew why. It's one of those pre-planned, widely spread out, official-looking and socially dead government cities that were always meant to entertain only government workers, lawyers and lobbyists. Kind of like DC. (What a nasty flashback!) But, no, Canberra isn't that bad, I'm sure, it was just - rather empty and quiet. We visited the national gallery and then decided that we don't really care about seeing Canberra anymore, so we took off - there was only one more thing that we had to see while in Australia...

Kangaroos! We had to see live kangaroos! So we headed back for Sydney to visit a wildlife park, so that we could finally see and touch all the weird Australian animals that were so elusive during our 12-day drive through the interior. So we did it this morning and had more fun than little children on a school trip. It was amazing! We got to pet kangaroos who just hopped around all over the place, we petted a koala, got close to wombats, cassowaries, Tasmanian devil, dingos and untold number of parrots and peacocks and all sorts of other creatures. Just wait for the pictures - they're great! We're happy we have the pictures at all because shortly after the wildlife park, our camera was stolen out of the van! But Ryan bravely chased down the scumbag and, with the help of local policemen, went to the junkie's putrid hideout a few blocks down and retrieved the camera. So, after a few moments of very high stress, we got our precious pictures back. Uff!!!

Gotta go. It's late and tomorrow early we fly to Thailand for 2 weeks. What a trip this has been!

The Last Kiwi Rant (And Some Travel Tips)

Hello everyone!

So here we are, at the very end of our journey through New Zealand. We sold our car, gave away the knick-knacks we picked up on the way and packed away the road atlas. We are done with the endless packing and unpacking of the tent, cooking soups in the dark of night, brushing teeth with bottled water and peeing in smelly outhouse toilets... We are done with camping!

Well, ok, we might still have to pee in smelly outhouse toilets in Australia, but our accommodation will be upgraded to a rented campervan. Not only are we sick of tenting, we also think of all the toothy and toxic creatures that lurk in the Australian wild. Building a tent after dark is really much safer in New Zealand, where all you might encounter is a curious weka or, more likely, a swarm of sand flies. Not that we're really all that worried about the venomous nature of Australia, but - why not be smart about it?

So we're back in Auckland after our last 3-day side trip to the nearby Coromandel Peninsula. After the hectic 2-week race through the South Island, it was nice to take it easy again and not have to drive 5 hours a day. We soaked in hot pools, visited a mineral gem museum, toured an ostrich farm, hugged a giant kauri tree, visited the famous hot water beach (where you can dig in your own little hot tub in the sand), passed under the magnificent Cathedral Cove - a passageway through a rock of cathedral size that leads from one beach to another, and we played in the weird wonderworld of Waiau Waterworks - an amusement park powered by water pumps and a lot of engineering creativity. (Check the photos later!) After all this, we concluded this little trip with a fire on Cook Beach - the original landing place of Capt. James Cook on his discovery voyage to New Zealand. What a perfect ending to our NZ adventure!

It's been really great here. After 3 months, we can say we saw most of the country, but not nearly everything. In terms of landscape, New Zealand is spectacularly beautiful almost everywhere, otherwise it's "just" plain picturesque. In terms of culture, New Zealand is like a colony of Brits who moved to southern California and took up surfing, but didn't give up cricket. They drive on the left and have the Queen on their coins, but wear Billabong clothes and speak in 1980's California slang. They love to travel, but have a hard time distinguishing east from the west (maybe because they have that upside-down view of the world?). They put canned spaghetti on toast and beet root on burgers, but will never EVER serve you a bad cup of coffee. They call themselves Kiwis and shorten every word that is over 6 letters: grandchildren=grandies, Australian=Aussie, mosquito=mossie, breakfast=breakie...etc. They love travellers and have created probably the best country to travel in. And the weather here is a perpetual spring. If you're feeling inspired to come and explore this wonderful country, here's a few travel tips:


Tips for Backpacker Travel to NZ:

1. Guide book: if there's one country, in which you don't need a guide book, it's NZ. If you're going to rent or buy a car and drive around (the best way to see NZ!), save the money you'd spend on a Lonely Planet and buy a good road atlas with campgrounds and points of interest. Every town in NZ has an I-site (information center) with heaps of brochures and helpful staff. You'll never be lost. Backpacking is a way of life in NZ and you can learn all you need to know from brochures, museum visits, roadside info panels and fellow backpackers.

2. Gear: Don't wait to buy any outdoor gear in NZ - you'll pay up to 3 times as much as you would in the US. Our tent was $200 in DC, but it was $600 in Queenstown(!) Regular Teva sandals cost $100 in NZ! So don't forget to bring all the essentials with you!

3. Work: If you want to work in NZ, you'll absolutely need 2 things: a tax IRD number and a NZ bank account. Both are free to get whether you have a work visa or not, but IRD number might take about 10 days to get, whereas opening of a bank account is immediate. If you're in NZ in the fruit picking season (Feb.-October), you're practically guaranteed to get work without any need for a work visa. There's such labor shortage in the fruit areas that orcharders couldn't care less whether you have a stamp in your passport or not. Do not waste your money on work permits unless the employer actually asks you for one, otherwise you might end up with an expensive sticker in your passport that no one cares to see. (That happened to us.)

4. Traveller's Cheques: Does anyone still travel with these? All you need here is a piece of plastic and you can get cash from any ATM at the best current exchange rate. Your overseas debit card gets treated here as a credit card, and a lot of places accept credit cards, but not all. EFTPOS, the local debit card, is accepted everywhere. Anyhow, getting around with your bank card from home will still be amazingly easy.

5. Trade Me: In NZ, anything that can be sold, can be found on the auction website trademe.co.nz. It's the Kiwi equivalent of craigslist in the US. If you want to buy and sell a used car for your trip, that's the place to go.

I can't think of anything else to add right now, but will update this as I think of it. I guess there's really not much to worry about when visiting NZ - it's an amazingly easy country to travel in. If you can make it, we definitely encourage everyone to come and see this place.

For now, we have to sign out. We will write back from Aussie. Until then - have a great spring and take care!

The Complete South Island Whirlwind Tour and back to the North

Hello again!

Where were we? Queenstown, right...

So, the town of Queenstown, where we ended up after our Wanaka reunion with Mark and Erica looked truly awesome and worth staying in for the whole winter or summer season. The town sits on the shore of a tremendously huge (52 mile-long) lake Wakatipu, is surrounded by the imposing mountain range, The Remarkables, as well as other mountains, and has a wild river perfect for river sports. That sort of landscape offers just about any adventure sport you can imagine, so it's no wonder that the town is full of backpackers, outdoor gear stores and adventure booking offices.

We arrived at dusk and had to quickly find our campsite by the lake, so we checked out the town from the car. We spent a miserably cold night cooking our food outside and mummifying ourselves in our sleeping bags, only to wake up to an even colder morning. We were hoping for a clear, sunny morning with splendid reflections of mountain peaks on the glass-like surface of the lake, with puffs of mist caressing the rocky cliffs and the town peaking into view in the distance...but no. We woke up in the wintertime! Chilly gusts of wind were blowing right through our pathetic sweatshirts, our hands were numb, faces stiff and the mountains around the lake were, yet again, completely lost in clouds. So we headed back to town, warmed up in a McCafe (do they have those in the US?) and took the Gondola cable lift to the top of a mountain that's so close to town that you just walk for 2 blocks out of the city center and you're there! From the restaurant on the top we had the magnificent view of the town at our feet and the impenetrable whiteness all around it. #$%*! Disappointed, we took the Gondola down and got stuck on it for half an hour with our asses freezing off (the wind was so strong, the service had to be interrupted) - but this was our lucky moment: the clouds lifted for a few minutes and revealed the Remarkables in front of us with a fresh dusting of first snow! No wonder it was so cold - it was snowing all around us!

With spanking new fleece jackets from the Warehouse, we drove further down south to the border of the Fiordland National Park, passed the tourist town of Te Anau and set up camp in the dark somewhere between the highway and the enormous Te Anau lake. In the morning, we walked down to a lovely pebbly beach and, hallelujah!, the sun was out and shone right on the deep green Fiordland wilderness in front of us on the opposite shore. We couldn't wait to see the highlight of our trip - the Milford Sound fiord.

The Fiordland National Park covers the entire southwestern corner of the South Island and is one of the most pristine, untouched and rare areas of pure wilderness in the world. Milford Sound is the northernmost fiord of the park's 14 fiords and the only one accessible by a highway (only one other fiord, The Doubtful Sound, is accessible by a road). Naturally, this is why Milford Sound is a huge tourist attraction. We drove for over an hour deep into the tightening glacial valleys and further away from civilization and gas stations and yet, we were passing (or were being passed by) dozens of cars, vans, motorhomes and luxury couches all heading in the same direction. Nevertheless, even in this lively traffic, once you cross the Homer Tunnel, you can't help but feel the remoteness of the place. All of a sudden, you are enclosed on all sides by silent and almost vertical rocky cliffs and the only way out is through a narrow hole blasted into a mountain that is now quickly disappearing behind you. There's only one way now - forward - and you hope very much that Milford Sound will be a town that sells food and a gas...

What can I say? Milford Sound was an amazing experience. We took one of the dozens of boat cruises offered that day (a more snug 70-person capacity boat, not one of those 450-person ferries) - and were off for an up-close and personal look. It was all that we expected and more. The deep, silent waters; the massive cliffs drenched in myriads of waterfalls that plummet for hundreds of meters straight down into the sea; the mighty Mitre Peak that looms at 1690m right above your head; the new captivating views at each new turn; the silent beauty of it all... It's one thing to enjoy the view of a gorge that a lively river took thousands of years to cut into limestone - it's another thing altogether to stare at something that took 4 ice ages(!) to form. Over many millions of years, the glaciers that used to cover the mountains, carved valleys that finally reached the sea, so the sea filled the valleys and went further inland. You just can't stop staring up at the magnificence of it. It's bigger than life.

The boat drove us to the windy mouth of the fiord where we watched mesmerized as hundreds of birds (including one albatross) dove into the waves, then on the way back we spotted a seal chilling out on an outcropping rock and watched a group of bottlenose dolphins swim by. It was awesome - and we had good weather the whole time! We took off from Milford Sound straight after our cruise - we felt there wasn't more that we could do to leave a more memorable impression in our minds than what we had just seen. Also, we had the rest of the island to see.

After our cruise, we drove back into civilization, and camped by lake Monowai, somewhere on the southern edge of the Fiordland Park. We had to drive for 5 km off the main road, so for once we wouldn't hear the traffic noise from our tent... In fact, it was weirdly quiet in that forest, really, really quiet, not a single blade of grass stirring...but also much warmer, thank god.

The following day (by now, we can't keep track of what day it is anymore), we hit the bottom of the island. I was sad to see the Southern Alps disappear behind us - they were our companions for a week now - but they were hidden in clouds once again, so there was no view, anyway. The landscape quickly changed from rugged mountains to endless sheep and cattle pastures - and stayed that way practically for the rest of our trip on the island. We drove south through quiet countryside for hours, passed through the oldest town in the South Island and reached the (almost) southernmost point on the island by late afternoon. There was a lighthouse, impressive waves crashing on outlying rocks and - to our disappointment - no seals to be seen anywhere. On our way back to the car, Ryan was poking around in the bushes when I heard a scream - he almost got attacked by a massive sea lion! The beast obviously wanted to be left alone on his stroll and didn't care much for posing for camera, but that didn't deter us, of course. We snapped a few shots and the sea lion disappeared into the bushes. Well, that was at least something!

That night (this was Sunday, I believe) we camped at Curio Bay at the windy bottom of the island. The campground was just meters away from rocky cliffs falling into the raging sea, but luckily, the camp sites were hidden in a growth of tall grasses that effectively blocked the wind, so we had a comfortable night. After a night in a eerily silent forest, we were falling asleep to the distant thunderous roar of the high tide hitting the cliffs. How different every day could be!

On Monday morning we checked out the cliffs and foamy waves that we heard all night, the gorgeous beaches of the neighboring Porpoise Bay that is a home to the rarest species of dolphins (we didn't see any, it's past their season) and walked over to the petrified forest - another one of those curious attractions that abound in New Zealand. I think I could say that Ryan and I weren't the only people who originally imagined "petrified forest" to be an actual forest of standing ancient trees frozen in time, something like a rose dipped in gold. Luckily, though, we heard the disappointment of other tourists who expected the same, but saw only rocks remotely resembling pieces of logs lying at their feet. So, correcting our expectations accordingly, we could at least enjoy the fact that the rocks resembling fallen logs that we saw in the low tide were trees 160 million years old - they grew in the time of Gondwanaland, before the land of New Zealand even existed! It's not everyday that you get to see a forest from the Jurassic era - pretty cool!

After Curio Bay, we started our long way back up along the eastern shore and, I must say, the tour of the South Island just went downhill from there. We crossed endless, flat pastures dotted with identical towns, occasionally interrupted by some minor attractions, like big boulders on a beach, a cheese factory or a penguin colony area (you can only see penguins after dusk, which doesn't work for us, since we don't like to set up camp after dark). So we pushed on to the city of Dunedin, where we spent a well-deserved night in another YHA hostel (to peel off our thermal underwear, wash up, groom and feel like humans again!) and had a few beers in a local bar. On Tuesday we chose something different for a change - we toured the Cadbury Chocolate Factory. There were no Umpa Lumpas and the chocolate waterfall didn't work, but it was very informative (do you know how they make hollow Easter eggs? Ask us next time we see you!) and we scored loads of freebie chocolates, which we are still eating. Unfortunately, this left no time for us to drive to the nearby Otago Penninsula to see an albatross colony, so we just headed north again.

On Wednesday, after a day with no attractions whatsoever, we reached Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island and, possibly, the second largest in the country after Auckland. On Thursday, after getting lost between Hanmer Springs and Christchurch, we ended up driving for hours through empty lands of national parks (instead of the inhabited ocean route), so we got our last and unexpected look at South Island's mountains before reaching Picton - our last stop before the ferry to the North Island on Friday. It was already after dark, it was cold and we were stressed out because in Blenheim, we thought that the long driving messed up the car's engine (luckily, adding 2 litres of motor oil fixed that), so we treated ourselves to another hostel room to relax.

On Friday, we crossed the Cook Strait, drove half across the island and camped at good old Reids Farm by Taupo, where we had frolicked for 4 days with Mark and Erica at the beginning of our camping trip, back in February. This time, no one was floating down the river, of course - we're in the southern hemisphere's version of October, so the nights and mornings are damn cold. The next morning, we found the campsite enveloped by thick and frigid fog, so we quickly got out of Tuapo, drove in and out of fog all day to stop at the famed Hobbiton, the one and only filmset leftover from the filming of The Lord of the Rings. What a disappointment it was to find out that the only way to see Hobbiton was to take a $50/person tour of the privately-owned premises! $50 a person for an attraction that the owners didn't have to spend a penny to build! $50!!! This was 2 to 3 times the price of attractions that families spent lifetimes and fortunes building up from nothing, like the Buried Village or the Owlcatraz. Unbelievable!! Well, you can take your Hobbiton and shove it. We'll re-watch the movie, thank you very much!

And now we're back in Auckland. The weather here is balmy and sunny and we've been able to leave the thermal undies in the car for the first time since we left the orchard in Motueka. We spent Saturday night out on town with Matt and Nathyn (who was up here from Hawke's Bay for a Slayer concert), and spent Sunday slowly recovering, so we had a nice little reunion at the end of our trip.

We'll be leaving NZ for Australia next Tuesday. We already found a buyer for our sturdy little Silver Bullet, so with that burden off our shoulders, we are heading off to spend the next few days on Coromandel Penninsula with its picturesque beaches and hot springs. After Coromandel we'll spend the last weekend in Auckland and we take off to Aussie. We can't wait!

Hope all of you up north are having a lovely spring and that you're all doing well!
We'll be back one more time before we head to Aussie - I'm sure we'll have a few more stories to tell...

The South Island Whirlwind Tour

Uff, the last week has been a blur of fun activities, amazing sights and freezing cold. Where to start?

Maybe I'll start with our farewell "barbie" in the orchard. The party was, in my opinion, a great success. At 6PM it didn't look like anything, but by 8PM we had a lovely fire going in the fire pit (firewood courtesy of Thomas Bros. Orchard) and burgers, sausages and steaks sizzling on a large grill (also courtesy of Thomas Bros.). We had a steady crew of twelve partiers all night and since it consisted of 2 Czechs, 2 Irishwomen, 2 Hungarians, 1 Slovak, a bunch of Kiwis and Ryan, you can imagine that the thirst for beer was enormous. We ate, drank, sat around the fire and talked all night and the next morning, the scene "after the battle" was truly impressive. The ground as far as eye could see was carpeted with empty beer bottles and cans (I haven't seen such a sight since my college days AND back then it took us a week to collect such a garbage dump!) - all in all, it came out to almost an entire carton of beer per person. A great party, indeed!

The next day was a sunny Sunday and, given the circumstances, you can imagine it took us quite a long time to clean up, pack up, say good-byes and get on the road. It was already 3pm by the time we took off, so in a few hours we had to set up camp in a river gorge somewhere between 2 national parks and in the middle of a lot of wilderness. It was a pretty, but unremarkable spot called Lyell, which was strange, since it was just a little grassy patch of ground in the middle of a river gorge. Soon though, I was shocked to learn that over a hundred years ago this very spot used to be a lively gold-mining town with no less than 5 hotels, a prison, post office and a store(!) The only access to it for a long time was by rafts (imagine early settlers transporting grand pianos and fine English furniture on white water!) and the houses were built on stilts right up against the steep slopes of the gorge. The forest around the town was all cut down and - this I noticed on many other old photographs - the town sat in the middle of a clear-cut waste land - the kind you see today around surface coal mines and such. I have to say that we are a wee bit kinder to our immediate environment these days... Already in the early 20th century Lyell had been a ghost town, vacated after people realized they weren't going to find gold in the river, and now there is nothing left (except for the info boards) to suggest that this dot on the map used to be a lively town. Interesting.

On Monday we reached the Tasman Sea, or the western shore of New Zealand, and headed south to inspect some weird geological phenomena called the Pancake Rocks. The Pancake Rocks are stacks of striped rocks that, of course, resemble very tall stacks of pancakes. They stand on a windy shore, beaten constantly by large and thunderous waves, which makes for a very impressive display, but not good photos. The blowhole that's advertised together with the pancakes is only active during high tide, so it's mostly a disappointment, as it usually doesn't blow when YOU are there. It was a pleasant stop on the way, but I would say that Shantytown, a much less visited but no less fascinating tourist destination some miles down the road, was a much more interesting break from driving.

Shantytown is a living museum of an old gold-mining settlement from the age of the gold rush (NZ, as well as Aussie, had their own gold rush just like the US) - and as far as we could tell, it really used to be a town and Shantytown was its real name. It was great! We visited a real old-times confectioner's store, bank where people used to cash out for their gold, a shoe store, barbershop, a mine, "Chinatown," a hospital with a surgery room, a Freemasons Hall (still in use), fire station AND we took a ride on an actual steam-engine train. (As you can tell, we are not hard people to amuse...) The place was filled with tons of old, cool stuff and you could almost smell the history in the air. You could even dress up as a saloon owner (Ryan) and a bar harlot (me) and have an old-looking photo taken, which, of course, we did because we allow ourselves to be cheesy from time to time. We didn't do the gold panning, however - that seemed like too much work for extra admission AND you didn't get to find any real gold. Maybe next time. Anyway, Shantytown was an interesting history lesson. New Zealand is very much like the US in many ways - in the 1800's NZ was a harsh frontier just like the old American West used to be(minus the rattlesnakes and combative natives). Early settlers had to cut through mountains and raft on wild rivers to start fragile existence in the bush. In the towns that survived, they left behind the cool Victorian frontier hotels that you'd expect John Wayne to walk out of. We see these hotels everywhere and we think that NZ looks just like the American southwest sometimes.

Our next destination, one of our main destinations in the South Island, was the glacier country. At dusk we arrived at a campground that was just at the doorstep of the Southern Alps, the magnificent mountain range that stretches almost along the entire west coast of the South Island. In the morning, we looked over the lake at which we camped and got our first glimpse of the snow-covered peaks. But only a glimpse - the mountains were mostly covered in thick clouds and we hoped that by the time we'd get to them and their glaciers, the clouds will miraculously dissipate and reveal their full splendor.

They didn't. We drove up to Franz Josef Glacier, a little town of lodges and restaurants catering to the busy tourist traffic going to see the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, fixed some car trouble and went to book a helicopter flight over the glaciers. We were more than ready to spend $300 for 20 minutes of a most amazing view and a landing on the top of the glacier, but, alas, the weather wasn't with us. The last little hole in the clouds that gave us hope closed up within an hour and all helicopter flights were cancelled. Now we had two other options - to walk TO the glacier or book a guided hike ON the glacier, for which we would have had to stay for another day. Hiking on an ancient mountain of ice would have surely been very cool, but we sort of weren't in the mood and we didn't have the adequate attire, so we chose the easy walk instead.

Only about 4km down the road from the town, we reached the carpark and walked with literally hundreds of other tourists to a rocky expanse, from which we had a view of the light blue ice in the distance. In 1750, Franz Josef Glacier reached to about a mile before the carpark, in the 1800's this rocky expanse was filled with ice, in the 1930's this spot was a glacial lake where you could row between icebergs, and now you have to walk on it for about 1km and cross many icy streams to get to the edge of the mountain of ice. But surprisingly, the glacier doesn't only shrink these days. In the 1970's, the glacier was reduced to a tiny trickle that you couldn't even see from this viewpoint. Since then, the ice has expanded again to a considerable size, filling back up the massive valley it had carved so long ago. The barriers at this point didn't deter any of the livelier visitors from the 1km or so of a further walk closer to the ice. So we walked and enjoyed the awesome sight in front of us. (I personally also enjoyed the smell of snow that filled my lungs - this smell and the slight chill on the cheeks was what I longed for in the steamy tropics).

We couldn't take our eyes off the icy cliffs ahead of us - it was such an amazing and unfamiliar sight. The wonderful thing about NZ is not that it has glaciers (and these glaciers, I'm sure, are not the most spectacular or the biggest in the world), but the fact that it has two glaciers that are so easily accessible from the main road. You don't have to be a mountaineer with crampons, thousands of dollars of Goretex gear and years of experience under your belt to see a natural wonder that is quickly disappearing from the world. You can simply walk to it, or book a guided hike on it. You can be just a Jo Schmo driving by in your dilapidated campervan and practically run into it even if you didn't know it was there (since it would be hard to overlook the signs pointing you to it)! It's easier to get to these glaciers than sometimes getting to a public toilets is. Amazing. We didn't touch the ice - we respected the 4 "extreme danger" signs at the end of the walk and enjoyed our view from afar. Beyond this point, only the experienced and the guided were allowed to go. But that was enough for us, we had other places to see...

After Franz Josef, the weather was getting worse. We skipped the neighboring Fox Glacier because of the starting cold drizzle and because we had to be in the ski resort town of Wanaka by that evening. We drove in fog and rain past the Southern Alps whose splendid and snow-covered peaks were all disappointingly hidden in thick cloudage and pushed on in thick rain through Mount Aspiring National Park not concerned about the views we were missing because we couldn't wait to catch up with our backpacker friends Mark and Erica (whom we met on the North Island and who had just recently relocated to Wanaka) - and we were looking forward to a night on a couch!

We spent 2 nights in Wanaka with our friends. We peeled off our long underwear for a good wash, cooked some real breakfast and talked for hours. Wanaka is an Alpine-looking little town filled with lodges and surrounded on all sides by attractive mountains, but it was miserably cold and windy, which prevented us from seeing much of it. We were much more interested in staying warm in Mark and Erica's new apartment (which was pretty cold as it is, since Kiwis do not believe in central heating and we couldn't figure out the electric heater) and in catching up on all the new experiences we've all had, which was A LOT.

From Wanaka we headed, predictably, to Queenstown, the next town on the route to the Fiordland and another cool, adventuresome ski-resort town. Actually, Queenstown is supposed to be an "adventure capital of the world," which we could believe, since its streets are lines with bungy, jet-boating, white-water-rafting, skydiving and everything else booking offices. The town is absolutely awesome - nestled snuggly between much grander, bigger and more formidable mountains than those around Wanaka, filled with fancier hotels and bigger shopping malls...

To be continued next time...

Packhouse Blues

G'day everyone!

Tomorrow we celebrate: after two weeks of torture, we are at last emerging from the purgatory of a fruit packhouse job!

We are so happy it's over. It wasn't as hard, dirty and miserable a job as apple picking, but it was bad enough to make us count minutes till the end of the ordeal. My heart goes out to those poor souls who feed their children and pay rent on this sort of job. For us, it was just about making a little bit of play money for the rest of our holiday, so really, we can't complain.

Here's what happened: Last Monday, a few hours after writing our last blog entry, we set up camp in the kiwifruit orchard behind the Thomas Brothers packhouse outside of Motueka and on Tuesday we punched our timecards at 8AM for the first time. Ryan, the youthful healthy hunk he is, was immediately assigned to stacking full boxes, which, as it later turned out, is a job better suited for Bulgarian weight-lifters, not normal humans. I was put to one of the packing lines where I was happy to hear that I only had to worry about helping the apples into their trays and weeding out the ones with bruises, stem rips, stem punctures, discoloration, spots, rots, russet and any other "blemishes." And did you know that apples can also get sunburn? Sunburn was out, too. So for the next 8 hours, I stood by a conveyor belt staring at apples pouring onto my line as Ryan stacked 20kg boxes onto pallets 8 rows high. It seemed easy enough at first, but my back, neck, legs and shoulders started to stiffen after the first morning break and Ryan - poor Ryan. He and two other stackers were the galley slaves...

Here's our daily routine: Our alarm clock rings at 7AM, it takes us 15-20 minutes to motivate to get out of our warm sleeping bags and out into the cold and dewy orchard. At 8AM we clock in, girls put on their sexy hair nets, and we file in with dozens of other packers, graders and stackers into the bowels of the large and dusty packhouse where machines are already humming urgently. In a minute or so the hateful sound of apples falling on the lines is heard and we are busy at work till 10AM - the first "smoko." 10:10AM we are back, work till lunch that starts at 12:00PM. We wolf down sandwiches and are back at the lines and boxes at 12:30PM. We brace for the worst part of the day - the longest stretch till the next break at 2:50PM. We are all getting sore and bored, we complain to each other when we have time to look up from our work for a milisecond. We all think: "This is mind-numbing shit. Why am I here? I quit tomorrow. If they want me to pick out another f#$%ing bruise/stack another f$*#ing box, they better slow down the lines!" We all count seconds till the break. You hear the Irish girls laugh in the background - only the Irish can laugh in this sort of situation. Sympathetic glances, quick arm stretches, micro-conversations. The radio is blasting "the worst of the eighties, nineties and today", but luckily, the clicking of machines drowns out the howling of Avril Lavigne and Blink182. Then we exhale in relief - the break is here. We drink more coffee and tea (it's free!) and at 3:00PM we file in one more time. This is the home stretch, only an hour and a half to go - we can do this! At 4:30PM, the last fruit comes down the lines, the machines stop. We can't get out of there fast enough. We clock out and can barely stand, we're so exhausted. Ryan's face has a bluish tint from the blue dust that comes off the blue print on the boxes. We are happy the work day is over. If we take it one at a time, we can survive another day of this crap. So we go to our tent, rest, cook dinner in the kitchen, take a shower in the ancient orchard hut, go to sleep at 8 or 9PM. We notice that the orchard smells faintly like something died in it, and it's not until somebody explains to us that it's the kiwifruit - the fruit "that looks like sheep's nuts and smells like ass," as Ryan deftly put it.

And so this is pretty much how it went for the last 14 days. The lines were viciously fast every day and Ryan did some calculations with his fellow stackers: On an average day, they stacked about 90 pallets of boxes. Each pallet was 8 rows high, each row had 7 boxes. Each box is about 20-22kg. There were 3 stackers, so you do the math... Each stacker lifted about 1,600 boxes a day, which makes about 32,000 kgs in 8 hours(!) That should qualify Ryan for...something.

We got to know many of our fellow sufferers and thus met a bunch of fun and nice people - Kiwis, Irish, Hungarians, Czechs, Koreans and Americans - with whom we'll have a "barbie" tomorrow to say our goodbyes before the last leg of our NZ adventure. Blowholes and Big Ice, here we come!

Kia Ora, South Island!

So here we are, on the South Island at last!

If you read the previous post, you can guess that we eventually got safely off that windy and sheepshit-speckled hill. But as if being beaten by wind for 4 hours wasn't enough, at the end of the hike we got wet in the rain and then the gale continued whipping our tent viciously enough not to let us relax in it for another few hours. But our wonderful Mountain Hardware Light Wedge 3 held up bravely to the test, which made us pretty happy. (If you want to backpack comfortably and superlight, we recommend this tent wholeheartedly!)

The next day the wind died down and we went for a much nicer walk on another surrounding hill, taking pictures of the nervous sheep and the splendid views. On Friday we returned to Haumoana near Hastings, hoping to celebrate my birthday with Nathan and Hanka, but Nathan was in Auckland, so we had a quiet evening with Hanka, catching up on our favorite NZ soap, Shortland Street, then the Wife Swap, America's Next Topmodel and other TV trash that becomes such a special treat when you're on the road. On Saturday we celebrated the b-day by going to Napier's ocean hot spa, Mongolian Grill restaurant and renting movies for the night.

On Sunday we finally left Hawke's Bay area and drove south towards Wellington. We camped somewhere on the way and visited "Owlcatraz" - a family-run bird zoo where we learned about the NZ owl morepork, flightless wekas and kiwis and played with the parrot Joey - and got to Wellington where we stayed at the aforementioned YHA backpackers hostel.

We didn't hang around the capital city for very long. On our only full day there we visited the famous Te Papa, NZ's national museum, and took a cable car to the botanical gardens to have a view of the lovely bay city. We already knew that Auckland has more population than all the other NZ's major cities combined, so that wouldn't leave much for Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, but Wellington is even smaller than you'd expect. Its center crouches between the Wellington bay and a string of surrounding mountains, and some of its neighborhoods creep up the hills, but you can pretty much see it all from the Botanical Gardens viewpoint.

To save $70 that we paid for our hostel room, we scouted the city outskirts for an "informal" campsite and we finally found one near a rocky surf beach in the neighboring Lyall Bay. It also happened to be right next to Wellington airport, so you can imagine the quality of sleep we got there... Actually, the planes stopped landing over our heads after about 10pm, but they were still taxing on the runways, not to mention the wind that was rocking our tent and keeping us awake all night. Actually, Ryan slept through all of it, I got about 3 hours of sleep. The highlight of that night was the lingering purple sunset, though. We didn't realize until the morning that what we took pictures of the night before was our first glimpse of the South Island shore...

The following day, Wednesday, we finally crossed the Cook Strait on a Bluebridge ferry to the South Island. It seemed that the ferry was full of backpackers like us, all of us braving the chilly wind on the deck and taking hundreds of photos of the impressive Tory Channel and Queen Charlotte Sound -a mountainous pass that leads to the tiny ferry harbour town of Picton. Since it was already late in the day, we drove straight to the nearest campsite and, as soon as we got out of the car, a wild weka, the flightless bird we learnt about at "Owlcatraz," walked fearlessly right up to us and hung out for a while, probably contemplating what it could snatch from us (they're known for stealing). Wekas are apparently almost extinct on the North Island and so to see this bird in our first hour on the South Island - it was like a special greeting. Or a good omen?

In the few days we've been here, we passed Nelson, a backpackers haven on the north shore, camped on another beach with purple sunsets, visited the nearby Abel Tasman National Park and walked the "world famous" Abel Tasman Coastal Track, which is beautiful, but after 3 1/2 months in Fiji it was just a string of sandy beaches to us, not a natural wonder. (No offense, Tasman!)

Now we're in Motueka, a small hippy town north of Nelson. It's a sunny fruit bowl and wine country just like Hawkes' bay is in the north, and we're here for apple jobs. Looks like we just got one - packing apples in a pack house just near here. Yay! It will be a nice area to hang around - there are sandy beaches here, the Abel Tasman National Park is just a few kms away, lots of cafes and even great shopping, should we need some new Converse sneakers or Doc Marten boots. It should be good.

We'll keep you posted. We're putting up the photos as fast as we can, so please bear with us and keep checking back.

Winded In Wellington

Well, it's already been a few weeks, again. You know, life on the road is so rough - no internet, iPods always low on battery, a cell phone usually without a signal... But we're not complaining, don't get us wrong! Sitting here in a fancy YHA backpackers hostel in the NZ capital, Wellington, with all its amazing comforts that rival those of a fine hotel, we are reminded of how wonderful the camping life is. We have a car, a tent, 2 sleeping bags, a box full of canned food and an amazing country to explore on our own schedule. Hostels are for pussies! (Well, ok - we need them for an occasional hot shower and recharging of all those batteries. And they're pretty cool!)
Anyway, we've finally made it to the south of the North Island and the city we've heard so much about. We arrived in Wellington last night and haven't seen much yet, but we love it already. It's smaller, funkier, artsier and all main museums are free! But we are not staying this time - we have the whole South Island to explore and only a month and a half left! Wellington is the gateway between the two islands because of its ferry services, so we will have to come back this way after our southern adventure and that's when we'll explore this lovely city. We are heading down south tomorrow on a Bluebridge ferry to Picton and we will have to immediately find work again in the wine country around there. By now we're both proud owners of a seasonal work permit and a tax ID number, so we're legal and eager to make a buck again.

Speaking of work, I didn't mention much about our orchard work in Hawke's Bay around Hastings - you can imagine why. It wasn't all that exciting - we toiled 9 hours a day picking Royal Galas and Galaxies, breathing dust and getting sunburned. The apples were delicious, but the work was monotonous and back-breaking. The first day nearly killed us, but it got easier with each new day and at the end it was just boring. We were staying at Nathan's and Hanka's with the intention of finding free camping in the area, but there was no free camping and by the time we established that, we were done with picking, so we camped out in their backyard the whole time anyway. Which was great because we desperately needed hot shower and good sleep every night. After just over a week, we got some bad weather and cancelled days at work, so we took this opportunity to get out of Dodge and go hide where apples don't grow... We decided to stop picking early and camp out while we wait for our tax ID to get paid and get the hell out.

The first night we camped illegally on the lovely Waipatiki Beach just about an hour north of Napier. It's a perfect sandy beach tucked in between two massive rock bluffs hidden from the main roads by miles of sheep pastures and pine forest. The early morning was glorious - sun was lighting up one of the bluffs to a warm golden color, seagulls were running around on the sand, foamy surf was rolling in with a constant thunder. And we were there alone with only two other illegal campers. Aaahh. This is the life! Camping, not hostels!

After this we drove further back north and further away from the coast on a frighteningly winding road to a free camp site at lake Tutira. It was a lovely place - we picked a site right on the bank and immediately had a welcoming committee of four graceful black swans greeting us. The swans, together with ducks, herons and the wonderfully goofy-looking and talkative pukekos were daily visitors to our site. The pukekos provided a real show - they're blue and black hen-like birds with extremely long and gangely legs and a very nosy and loud personality. They must have the funniest gait in animal kingdom when they hurry - they sprint in these super long strides while their heads bob forward and backward. They look like carton characters!

The area around the lake was all pasture land with some easy walks, so the next day we decided to go on the longest one of them. We figured that after Tongariro Crossing, this would be a 4-hour piece of cake and so we didn't even notice the heavy wind that was blowing off the lake towards the hills that morning. I mean, we noticed that it was hard to start a fire on the gas stove to make our coffee, but we didn't think much of it. We should have.

We followed some sheep trails for the first half hour and then ascended the quaint pasture hills while passing cows and sheep and climbing over countless wire fences. It was lovely - and windy. The wind was getting fiercer the higher we got, as the air was being obviously funneled up the hills in these large wind tunnels. The aspen and cedar trees were roaring in the wind and our hats were being blown off. We took pictures of sheep with their looks full of suspicion that we are about to run after them with butcher knives and continued slowly up the trail. On one hill top we were laughing and filming ourselves leaning against the wind. It was good fun with a splendid view. The sheep were like: "What the hell are you doing out here, silly humans?"

Then we continued up more hills. This time wind was starting to push us upwards and the trees were looking like they might start shedding branches on top of our heads. We reached another peak and this time (our hats were already packed away), the wind was hard to face. We held on to a pole and were blasted by winds with probably 50mph force. It was harder to see and hear now with dust pummeling us like needles and my hair whipping my eyeballs. When Ryan's sunglasses were blown off his head, all I saw was him disappear after them like a little ball of tumbleweed being thrown in a storm. When I let go of the pole and made a step to follow him, I was tumbling, too. Uncontrollably, with the gale-force wind pushing me forward, I was sprinting downhill towards a barbed-wire fence and I knew I couldn't stop myself unless I threw myself into the cow and sheep shit, which is exactly what I did. That's when I thought to myself: "This is not funny anymore."

By now it was apparent to us that we were too far to go back and this was getting a little too dangerous to mess around. So we had to push on - half blind and half deaf - towards the edge of the hill where the trail took us, unbelievably, right to the side of a steep and high cliff. Holding on with both hands to the slope on our right (and grabbing thorny weeds in the process), we continued carefully on a trail no wider than one foot and hoped the wind wouldn't turn and blow us off the mountain, instead of pinning us to it. The easiest walk was a struggle and the emptiness only inches away was really unnerving. I was scared and couldn't get off that damned hill fast enough...

To be continued...