Alright, alright. I know it's been a couple of months. Just got busy and forgot that I have 3 amazingly loyal blog readers. Thanks guys.
I just need to finish the report of our trip to New Zealand. I miss that place so much. What a beautiful country. Here's the unedited report Candace wrote on the iPod, together with some pictures. Hope you enjoy. Here's also a map of where we went those days:
Driving easier. One tree hill. Hills. Animals. Breakfast. Beaches. Wh is pronounced F. Whangamata beach. Beautiful and scary drive. Hot water beach. People dig holes and hot water comes up from the ground. Natural spas. Seashells. Hahei. Unbelievable view. Fernando didn't want to leave. Cathedral cove. Hike. Cute old couple on moderate hike. Had to explain Babe movie because I said "bah ram ewe" to a sheep and fer looked at me crazy. Pretty pictures.
Rolling hills littered with animals. Green grass, bright green, green all the way down to the water for every stream, you can't even see dirt. Pretty pasture and then there's a palm tree right in the middle hen you realize you're in the middle of a tropical island. Maybe like Maui? Holes naturally have these striations kinda like the Peruvian hills the they dug out to farm on but smaller dig outs and it's natural. It definitely helps the animals. So pretty.
One Tree Hill
Auckland from One Tree Hill
Sheep everywhere
On the way to Coromandel
Whangamata - So beautiful. Oh, the beach is beautiful too.
Whangamata
Hot Water Beach.
See the holes people dig to get super hot water?
Hot Girl in Hot Water Beach
Hahei - Hike down to Cathedral Cove
Sheep on the hike down
Hahei
Cathedral Cove
North Island countryside
Matamata- Hobbiton was here
Day 2 driving in nz. Left side of the road is a breeze now. Going to Te Puia cultural centr recommended by cousin mark... Reviews are mixed online. But we are sucker tourists for this kind of stuff even if it can be cheesy so bring it on.
Te puia was interesting. They make you feel a part of the place. For the performance they bring you in as if you were a neighboring tribe. They needed an English speaking "chief" and since we were with a bunch of Asians and one family from Malaysia so obviously they singled Fernando out and asked him to be chief when no one volunteered (or as Fernando says they begged after swing your brilliance, when really it was just 5 min of silence that had them begging). So I got to handle the camera and video camera at the same time while he played chief. Then because I was the chiefs wife I had to participate in dances. Let's leave it at that.
Our tour guide was a darling. Everything was "you see love" and "little darling". Very cute.
Rotorua
Our Guide and Fernando, the chief
Dancers
Geisers
Hamilton Temple
Piha beach is unreal. Black sands but not rocky. Very soft. Multiple colored shells with golds and greens and blues and purples. Steep cliffs in the water. Deadly waves and suicidal surfers. Eddie Bauer apparently almost died here.
Piha Beach
Piha Beach
Our little car
Piha Beach
Random Observations: Kia ora means a lot of things. Our hotel claims it's "green" when it doesn't do one thing green. Kiwi birds are kinda like the dodo bird, no wonder they're going extinct. Gaisers are so smelly it turns your stomach until it makes you want to puke. Houses are smaller here. I'm allergic to sulfur apparently. Road signs are all about a bird telling you how to drive, yet a bird just kamakazied into our car and got ran over so how smart was that? Roads are smoother here. All roads are backroads here but you take them at 60 mi/hr. Orange cones are skinnier here. Technology doesn't exist here: i.e. Hotels don't give you hardly any megabytes(10) but they think it will take you 30 minutes to use it. The mauris performing were immediately attracted to Fernando's phone. I was taking video with it. Multiple of them came up to me mid performance and asked me what it was. Very little iPhones have been seen here. One way bridges where you can't see on coming traffic you have to yield to is scary! Houses are better kept here than australia. The Hamilton NZ temple is a mini LA temple. Fernando learned the word colt. There are no bakeries! I want French bakeries with fresh bread baked daily! Everything closes early. I thought that was France but apparently not.
Words they can't spell: tyres. Veges. Centre.
Perfectly good words they have given up for more confusing ones: stroller for pram, elevator for lift, parkinglot for carpark, pharmacy for chemist. Shopping cart for trundler.
Fernando says worst thing about driving on the left side of the road is the person sitting on the left side of him. Funny boy.
9/8/2010. Martin place. Fun place that feels like NYC. Lots of beautiful buildings and beautiful stores. People are very well dressed. Everyone has an iPhone. Old barracks where they kept prisoners brought from England in the 1800's. Church. Old and beautiful inside. Hyde park. Just a pretty park with statues. Cockatoo island. Ok, Cockatoo island. (Sigh). This one island in the middle of the harbor. Creepy creepy creepy. Island completely empty. And people actually pay to camp there! Felt like Shutter Island. Spent an hour there because the ferry only came every hour. Thanks, travel guide. The Rocks. Amazing pastries. Paddy's market. Lots of cheap souvenirs and fruits and vegetables. Capitol theatre. Went there to see how much tickets were. Told to come back in a couple of hours and wait in line to try to get cheap tickets. Then subway and Coles. Then rest then dress up to go out again.
Theater. Didnt make it. Then wondered around downtown forever. What a beautiful city. Australian Hotel restaurant at the Rocks: Fernando's
Kangaroo Pizza - marinated kangaroo in native pepper with roasted capsicum and native berries. Fancy
shoes. Wonderful pizza. Super expensive, but worth it. Then walked back down to Circular Quay for the last time to see the Opera house at night.
9/9/2010. Airplane from Sydney to Auckland. Busy airports and duty-free shops around the whole terminal. Not really a duty-free store, more like the whole terminal was a duty free area. Watched A-team on plane. Wonderful airline and great food. Debacle at rental car company. Europcar now has 2 strikes. Right side steering wheel, left side driving, scary! GPS works perfectly. Hurray! Check in at hotel. Not as nice as Sydney's, but not bad. Walk around small downown. Indian food (Delicious!!!). Crazy architure in city. Empty. Queen street fun. Early closing time.
Just wrote this article for my company blog. Wanted to share it here too.
When was the last time you had an amazing airline experience? Mine happened exactly one month and seven days ago on an Air New Zealand non-stop 13-hour flight from LAX to AUK on the best flight of my 30 frequent-flyer years. Having traveled overseas several times, I was expecting the usual sub-par treatment: two incredible movie selections such as Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 or a shortened 4-hour edition of Avatar on a 12 inch screen sitting 25 feet from my seat, and a mildly improved version of Lean Cuisine’s Chicken Marsala for dinner with a 3-month old chocolate cake for dessert.
I also came prepared to endure the unavoidable boredom. At times like these, I thank the technology gods for my beautiful and unfailingly reliable gadgets. I had my iPod Classic fully equipped with 30GB of hand-selected music; an iPod Touch with 3 of my favorite movies and a handful of mind-numbing, brain-draining games; a Microsoft Zune with 2 months of podcasts; 3 books on paper plus my HTC EVO Kindle App ready with one extra book; and of course, the up-to-3-charges external battery pack.
To my astonishment, what I experienced showed me that perhaps hope is not completely lost. Picture this: smiling crew members, gourmet dinners with ice cream for dessert, 75 movies and over 250 TV show episodes to choose from on a 9 inch personal screen, 180 music albums, free leather covered headphones and an on-board concierge that could help me with everything from currency exchange rates to city maps. All this flying non other than coach. My gadget-filled carry-on was untouched from take-off to landing.
But although my fantastic transpacific experience brought back a slight glimmer of optimism, I’m slowly succumbing to negativity and despair. And recent highly publicized airline merges just add more fuel to my skepticism. Reality set in when I boarded a crowded Delta Airlines flight from Salt Lake City to Indianapolis shortly after my New Zealand trip. Why are they turning my premium mode of transportation into nothing more than Greyhound with wings? Do they really think that stale peanuts, 28 inches of leg room and extra-baggage fees will keep me coming for more? The sad answer is yes, they do. When your options are limited to Mediocre Airlines and SadFlight USA, make sure your stomach is full, your batteries are charged and your Dramamine is handy.
This is day 2 and 3 of Candace's account of our trip. Enjoy!
…Continuing on with my journal from our trip to Australia and New Zealand this month (the zoo and Bondi were probably my favorite places in Australia, besides staring at the opera house of course)
9/6/2010. Let's take this opportunity to talk about time… 3pm Monday at home is 8am on Tuesday here in Sydney. That means home is 17 hours behind. It took us three days to figure that out. Ok moving on.
Caught the ferry to the zoo. How often do you get to take the ferry to go to the zoo?! And what a ride. The views are beautiful. Once docked we take the gondola to the top of the zoo. Traveled above the elephants, while seeing the city across the harbor. Wow.
First exhibit? Koalas we promptly feel in love with. Mother and her baby were adorable. Then there was the obnoxious one who enjoyed waking up the fourth koala by launching itself over to the other koala’s tree.
Platypuses (no picture, they are nocturnal, and abnormally small), Tasmanian devils (video), emus, and kangaroos (did I mention I got to pet a kangaroo?) -- Hey, Fernando did too, but the picture I took ended up too blurry, which happened to 98.7% of pictures I took (italics written by Fer) We also saw little wallabies and Pygmy hippo and tigers and giraffes and lions and elephants and the coolest native birds ever... We're making a little kids photo book. It's easier.
The view from the zoo was amazing, since we were directly opposite the main part of the Sydney Harbor. And then there was the posing Giraffe who seemed to move his head directly over the opera house every time our camera went to our eyes.
Next, took ferry back to Circular Quay only to take a longer ferry past the zoo and to Manly Beach. Walked around in very soft golden sand, watched the surfers for a while, ate a burger at Burger Me with the most amazing fries (they had pepper, salt, and lime juice), ate ice cream and went back on the ferry 3 hours later. Perfect. Plus, all this in beautiful 70 degree weather.
Botanical gardens are next with 2 hours till dusk. A little nervous because we don't have too much cash left (transportation took it all). One source said the entrance fee was five dollars and the other said fifty! Wandered around forever trying to find entrance until we realized that all the little plants around us had labels! So somehow we made it in. Hoping that it was free and an open format the whole time, we explored. No, we weren't trespassers. It really was free! Took pretty awesome pictures of the all the trees and gardens, the city buildings (discovered that one of the buildings seems to have a temple on top) and stayed till dusk. At dusk we (and by we I mean Fernando) took my favorite picture of the Opera House and the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
Braved the supermarket on the way home. Everything you can imagine at a ridiculously high price. Speaking of a ridiculous price… I have figured out why locals are so dang skinny... You can't actually afford to feed yourself here! Earlier, a little set of 4 bite size profiteroles cost twelve dollars! Course that was at the Lindt Chocolate café, but we (now by we, I mean me) couldn’t pass that up! Only exception is the Subway Restaurants where you can get a 7 dollar footlong (and yes a footlong is still a footlong even though you’re in a Metric world!). This will be our backup food though. Would rather experience the local food. What is local food? Not really sure. It seems like American food although I did see a kangaroo burger but couldn't bring myself to order it. Asleep by 7:30pm. Fer stayed up and watched Australian X Factor. He said it was good. 9/7/2010. Woke up at 3 then 4 then 6. Out the door by 8am. Off to see the temple to take a few pictures. Not enough time to go through a session. Lets pause a second to make some observations about Sydney. They are probably completely unfounded, since I am only observing what is next to the train tracks. First, the city is truly an immigrant city. You can see each community as you pass on the train. There were Indian areas, Arabic areas, Asian areas, etc. Second observation… everything is pretty run down. It seems like maybe they have an excess of space that they don't bother to rebuild when a building gets run down so they just abandon it. Or maybe they just can't afford to. But even lived in homes are falling apart. No fresh coats of paint. No tailored lawns. I would guess that they had a massive explosion in immigrant population in the 1950s because it seems most residential areas (disclaimer again. I only saw the areas immediately adjacent to the train tracks) seem to be built in the 1950s with little to no renovations since. As you get further out on the train, you hit more of a suburbia feel with business centers and more cars. Residential looks a little better kept, although still the same time period. Cars here look just like the US (aka not Europe tiny). But buildings are definitely not a US feel because of them being run down. Ok. Moving on. Temple was small and beautiful. Stained glass with red and blue and green that you can't really see during the day but must look awesome at night. Temple grounds include a variety of buildings like distribution center, institute, family services, mission home, etc. An entire complex. The surrounding area was clean (still a little run down but nicer than the other areas). Walked back to the train station and met some nice Mormon missionary boys from Utah and Arizona with auzie accents. Took the train a ways with them and talked for a while. They said there are 5 stakes here in the state and they cover pretty big areas.
Next on to the 2000 Olympic area. But it was completely abandoned. Maybe because it’s a workday. Not nearly as entertaining as Munich Olympic area. So prettier but more boring because we are obviously visiting in the off season! Although the fountains Fernando thought were really fun.
All in all, this train ride was horribly long and boring. Going to Bondi next in hopes we'll get our fill of people and shops. Hoping that would wake us up. And it certainly did! Bondi was cold! More beautiful than Manly Beach but cold and not as many shops (I hear they have a market up on weekends but it wasn't a weekend) and to be honest there were too many creepy people there (not really creepy, but someone thought everyone was... including the nice little 80 year old lady and the beautiful family with 3 kids and the mom pushing a stroller). Strange people wandering around a high tourist spot by themselves is a little strange. Fernando’s favorite spot though and he said there were no creepy people. I think I was a little tired and in a strange mood so oh well. Paranoid Candace.
Went back to hotel and took a break. Relaxed till dark and then decided to go to George street. Posh designer stores. Queen Victoria Building turned mall was stunning. And to top off a night of high fashion, we ate at burger king... Er... Hungry jacks. I know. We're fancy. Fer ate a burger called "The Australian"and they put beets in it. Beets?!! What are they thinking? Of course Fer threw the beets away.
