Honeymoon's over (as far as the blog's concerned)

So here we are at last, just one month shy of our first year anniversary (zomg!) and it's my official last post of the honeymoon. For our anniversary we're off to Georgia (the country) and I'm crossing my fingers to manage to blog it live(ish) as we go.

Our last honeymoon activity (besides driving home) was a walk on the Museggmauer, the 14th century city wall which offers beautiful panoramic views of the city. Four of the nine towers on the wall are open to visitors in summer, and they're free! (Who said Switzerland was expensive?)

Jules in front of the Zytturm (clock tower). It houses Lucerne's oldest city clock, built in 1535. My favourite fact about the Zytturm clock is that it has the "right" to chime one minute before all other public clocks in Lucerne. I'm not sure whether it goes early or the others go late, but either way, it seems prestige counts for more than accuracy in this corner of Switzerland. 

The clock's so impressive it needs a pair of giants to hold it up. It was made to be large enough for even the fishermen on the lake to read the time

View from the Zytturm on the wall below

Jules being manly at the Männliturm

The views from the 33 metre-high Männliturm are SPECTACULAR. There was a wee bit of waiting around at the top as people lined up to take the best selfies, but it's well worth it.

The Männliturm from outside

The Schirmerturm, dating to 1420, traditionally marked the entrance to the city from the surrounding countryside. It also has some lovely views.

It was mid-October by this time, still beautiful, warm and sunny as you can see, but with autumn foliage appearing

The Watchtower or Heu (Hay) Tower was formerly used to store gunpowder. Disaster struck (literally) in 1701 when the tower was hit by lightening, causing the gunpowder to explode and rain chunks of stone on to the city below, causing considerable damage and some loss of life. 

Apart from the exploding tower, a fabulous end to a fantastic trip. I couldn't have asked for a better honeymoon, nor, of course, a better husband to share it with 😍

Like a rolling stone

There have been several days on the trip that have essentially just been driving days. The longest drives we did in one go were around 6 hours on paper, but it inevitably takes longer with breaks and so on, plus we aimed not to drive at night, so it was quite easy to spend most of a day driving. These days tend not to be wildly exciting, so I've glossed over them mainly, but I have a few photos from the trip between Queenstown and Christchurch which are quite nice, so I'll use the opportunity to write a little bit about life on the road.

Most days, we were up around 8 and out of the campsite around 10, which was usually check out time. Campground life usually doesn't lend itself too well to lazy mornings in bed, plus we had plenty of early starts, so were pretty much in a rhythm of getting up at a reasonable hour. It is possible to "freedom camp" i.e. just park your van any old place, in many areas in New Zealand, as long as your camper is self-contained (has a toilet, essentially). We never took advantage of this, mostly so we could plug in to electricity each night and also in order to use the facilities like toilets and showers. There is a toilet in the van, but what goes in must come out, so it was pretty much for emergency use only. I, personally, classed needing the loo in the middle of the night as an emergency. Jules tried to argue that I should get up and use the campground facilities, but I argued that represented an undue burden on me, since I always have to get up at least once and he never does (TMI?) I won that round, although since he was the one who ended up emptying the toilet, one might question who was, in fact, unduly burdened by that arrangement.

I've never been particularly attracted to the idea of camping. Sleeping in a real bed instead of in a tent made things a lot easier of course, and for the most part it was fine.
Things I didn't like:
- even in not in the middle of the night, it's a pain to have to go out of the van and inside to use the bathroom/shower etc. It was always a dilemma, since I've not a big fan of wandering about in public in my nightwear, but on the other hand I basically want to be in my jimjams as soon as I'm "home" for the evening. A dressing gown my mum got me came in handy for this.
- talking of the bathrooms, none of them were horrible, but a shared campsite bathroom is never going to be that great. Sometimes you had to queue for the showers, sometimes they were cold, or you had to pay, or they were on a timer, or they weren't that clean, etc.
- we had great kitchen facilities in the van - an oven, four burners, a microwave, a fridge-freezer, etc., so we can't really complain. But we did learn that we had to scale down the ambition of some of the things we wanted to prepare. We didn't have a pot large enough for pasta, so ended up making spaghetti in the frying pan, for example, and anything that required multiple pots and pans at once was pretty much impossible due to space constraints. We started off basically wanting to cook like we did at home, but it just needed a different mindset, really.
- Obviously, the van's pretty big, so good for sleeping in, not so great for popping down to the shops. Parking and manoeuvring was sometimes an issue. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with a motorhome in a city.

Good things:
- We never did freedom camping, but we also never booked anywhere in advance. It was great having the freedom to adjust our plans, knowing in the absolute worst-case scenario, we would always have a bed for the night. It was easy to decide on the fly to stay an extra night somewhere or move on earlier.
- Everything in the van always needs to be stowed away securely before you drive, otherwise the consequences range from annoying rattling to potentially dangerous objects flying around. This took a bit of time each day, but you quickly get into a routine with it. It's definitely quicker and easier than having to haul bags in and out of a hotel and live out of a suitcase the whole time. There's something kind of nice about the "a place for everything, and everything in its place" set-up, and the van has all kinds of cute little buttons and latches and hidey-holes, so it can feel quite fun tidying up!
- The cost. We didn't have to pay rental fees, of course, but paying for campsites was at least half the price of any motel rooms we saw (and I imagine those are not your fanciest motels). It usually cost around $50 a night, which seems a bit steep considering they don't have to clean up after you or provide anything much beyond electricity and a bathroom (and even then, they sometimes charge you to take a shower), but it still definitely helped our budget.

Overall, I'm probably not going to be signing up to spend a week in the woods in a tent, but the motorhome lifestyle is quite fun!

Some things we ran across in our travels -

Ye olde New Zealand custom

Kind of didn't want to put my hand in here

The real white man's burden: having to come up with names for everything all at once. 

(There were many such imaginatively-named "no. 1 and no. 2" landmarks. I think the record was up to about no. 10 or 11.)

Back to our drive from Queenstown to Christchurch. We toyed with the idea of breaking the journey at Tekapo, staying the night and doing a tour of the observatory there. Supposedly it's a great place to see the stars, due to the lack of light pollution. However, it was a cloudy day with more clouds predicted for the evening, so we just made a brief stop at Lake Tekapo and kept going.

We crossed over the middle of the South Island via the Lindis Pass, 971m up

"Roaring Meg", a stream flowing down from a dam, generating hydro electricity

Mt. Cook, NZ's highest peak, is hiding in the clouds there

We hadn't been intending to visit Lake Tekapo, but I heard so much about it on the internet and from people in real life, that we decided to make the small detour to go see it. All the photos you see online of it are basically this:

Source

Well, when we got there, it was a bit cloudy, all of those flowers (lupins?) were pretty much dead, and we were suffering from major lake fatigue. Over the previous few days, we had been to lakes Wanaka, Te Anau, Manapouri, and Wakitipu, so when we got to Lake Tekapo, we were a bit meh about it all, to be honest. It's a fine lake, but for once, not really living up to the postcard image.

Beautiful clear water

A tale of two towns

After our heroic morning scaling small gravelly paths near glaciers, we drove to Wanaka, where we stayed for two nights, mainly just chilling out. It’s a nice place to do so, with plenty of cool bars, cafés and restaurants, a relaxed vibe, and of course, a pretty lake ringed with mountains. I also came across Glowing Sky, a clothing company that actually makes their clothes in NZ (a rarity these days). Their main product line is merino wool, but I was drawn in by the brightly-coloured dresses they had in the window. I ended up buying four in the same "Marilyn" cut, but with different colours and patterns. Very pleased with my purchase, look out for them on the blog soon and keep an eye out for the brand if you're in NZ!

We had an annoying group of 20-somethings across from us on the campsite, who basically seemed to sit there drinking all day and swearing every second word. On day two, I actually went and asked to change campsites to get away from them. I realise this makes me sound like a grumpy 80 year-old woman, but seriously, I think we all had enough of 20-something young men when we were 20-somethings ourselves. Their dulcet tones are not exactly what I want to listen to on a relaxing holiday.

The Haast River

Lake Hawea, next door to Lake Wanaka

Wanaka's lake and mountains

Lake Wanaka

We actually went to Manapouri/Doubtful Sound before coming back up to Queenstown, but because of the million photos of Doubtful Sound I have to upload, and because Wanaka and Queenstown are pretty much linked in people's minds, I'll do them both here.

A fantastic view of Queenstown from the Wanaka road

We were first going to spend two nights in Queenstown, and then mostly for time reasons, adjusted that to one night, arriving in the evening and leaving at lunchtime. And once we got there and looked around in the evening, we decided one evening/night was enough. As I said, Wanaka and Queenstown kind of go together. They're not far apart, they're both on the shores of a lake, they are both ski towns in winter, and they both pride themselves on adventure tourism. Queenstown is the bigger and probably more well-known of the two, and it had a correspondingly busier, brasher vibe.

Fluffy hills en route to Queenstown from the Te Anau side

Driving along Lake Wakatipu

Lake Wakatipu from Queenstown

Me and the founder of Queenstown or whatever, plus sheep wife

It's a bit unfair really, since we did actually have annoying drunken youths bothering us in Wanaka, but the entire population of Queenstown seemed pretty much made up of irritating gap year types, so we cooled to it immediately (can you say that?) There were also a tentful of young women next to our van getting ready for a night on the town saying things like "that's hot" in faux American accents as though this was 2004 and they were an entire gang of Paris Hiltons. But they left reasonably early and didn't wake us up coming home, so I can't hold it against them too much.

Our one must-do in Queenstown was to try Fergburger, an apparently legendary local institution. Once we saw the queue stretching out the door, we followed the pro tip I had seen on the internet and phoned in our order, ready for us in 15 minutes after a pleasant stroll around the town. I've got to say, pretty tasty. Jules went for a classic, if jumbo-sized burger, and I got a pork belly and hash brown extravaganza. Yum!

Mmm, pork belly

Peach teats

Wai-o-Tapu was a pretty full-on morning, so we were both pleased to only have a short drive to our next stop, Taupo, where again we were getting out of the van for a night on terra norota. This time, we were staying at my parents' place, which is actually up for sale. It just so happened a real estate agent was showing prospective buyers around when we turned up, announced (politely, of course) that we were staying there and that it was our first time visiting the house. The real estate agent finished up and left without checking our credentials at all, so I think I might be on to a great scam here. Just turn up to an open home, tell them you own the place and then ring up a few days later with a funny voice and tell them you're taking the property off the market. Badda bing, badda boom, free house! Flawless plan. (Or at least just wait until the agent leaves and then steal a lot of stuff.)

We had two reasons for visiting Taupo - my parents' place and I have a cousin living there. Otherwise, it had usually been a drive-through kind of place on my itineraries through the North Island. Which is kind of crazy when you look at it, because although the town itself isn't the prettiest, it's on the edge of a huge and beautiful lake, fringed with impressive mountains.

There's even a bit where you can try to get a hole in one on a floating green!

The photos just show a tiny slice of the lake. I think you have to drive around Lake Taupo to fully appreciate just how big it is - 616 square kilometres. More impressive than its size is the fact that it occupies a volcanic caldera formed by the eruption of a supervolcano about 26,500 years ago. This was the largest known volcanic eruption in the last 70,000 years. It's truly impressive to sit on the edge of the lake and think that here was once a massive volcano, and to imagine the forces required to create a huge crater where it once sat. And there on the horizon are the volcanoes of Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro, as a reminder that New Zealand is still very much prey to volcanic and seismic activity.

In fact, I and my family were there during one of the most recent major eruptions of Mount Ruapehu, during the night of 25 September 1995 (celebrating my parents' Silver Wedding anniversary). We were staying at a hotel at the foot of the volcano, so had to be evacuated off the mountain. It wasn't a spectacular firey eruption, rather ash clouds, gases and mud flows (lahars), but still a pretty good story!

Driving on towards Wellington the next day, we got to get a better view of the mountains from the Desert Road. I teased Jules a little bit with this one, implying we were going through a real desert. In fact, it's just an area where little vegetation grows, due to the impact of volcanic eruptions through the centuries (I actually thought it was because of lack of rainfall, but apparently that's not true, it's because of the poor quality of soils and seeds and dry winds). Whatever the reason, it makes for a very different and impressive landscape. The variety of landscapes in a relatively small country is one thing that makes New Zealand so special.

With Mt Ruapehu, the erupty one

Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe (and Tongariro??)

The Desert Road

A van with a view!

Heather on the Desert Road

Mmm, Peach Teats. Calves love 'em!

The hills densely covered with NZ's signature sheep