San Franscisco in four days.......

We arrived here in San Fran on Friday morning after leaving Auckland on the afternoon of the same day, so time travel is possible if you cross over the international date line.........

"Painted Ladies" with San Fran skyline

After a whirlwind transfer from the airport to the city centre in a mini-van driven by a Russian ex- rally driver, we were deposited  at the calm oasis of 679 Page Street aka Patrick's Place and our accommodation for the next four nights. Feeling slightly zoned out after the long flight and time differences, we did well to drop off our bags, get washed and find something to eat.

Compared to our experiences in New Zealand, our first impreesions of San Franscico were that it seemed  huge and was a trifle cold. But talking to people who live here, at the moment it is unusually cold (they were expecting their first snow in over 35 years....thankfully for us it didn't amount to much). However the blue skies and sunshine have more than compensated for the icy wind.

Jet lag here has not been as nasty as Singapore and with so much to see and do in the city, I'm glad we haven't suffered too badly.

San Franscisco is a city of very distinct neighbourhoods, all with their own flavour and feel. Like Auckland, once you get away from the downtown core, there is a strong independent flavour to the coffee shops, stores and restaurants. This surprised us a bit as we though being the US, things would be more mainstream. But we've read that this is one of the most European feeling cities in the States. The fact that it is build on some big hills with a good transit system means people walk and use public transport and the car isn't king here. Also, lots of Californians like to stay fit, so bikes are very popular, as is jogging and roller bladding.

Street scene

Much of our time has been spent walking around, checking out places recommended by Patrick and taking photos. It's extremely photogenic and Andrew's camera has been running hot.

One thing that has struck us both is the large number of homeless people.  Don't know if it's a sign of the times (budget cuts, recession, etc.) or just a fact of American life.  But we've never seen so many in one place.

On Saturday morning, we headed down to the farmer's market at the Ferry Building beside the water. To use an American phrase-it was awsome. The quality and variety of products on sale is staggering. It helps that they can grow just about everything within a small radius of the city and do. And of course they have a bit of a reputation here for baking good bread...so the baked goods are enough to set you salivating.....sorry to anyone who's reading this before they've eaten! I had to tie my hands behind my back as most of the stuff is not air travel compatable.

Saturday Market

Saturday Market

Sourdough Bread - Lots of it

On Sunday, we went to Golden Gate Park which is massive  On Sundays they close off some of the roads to traffic so loads of people were there walking, cycling, picnicing and even the local swing dance club were in action.  There are several museums and attractions, we spent a good few hours in a fantastic gallery called the de Young Art gallery. The building itself was pretty spectacular and has won all sorts of major architectural prizes. It sits beautifully in the park and inside, it's stunning. We saw lots of American art we had never seen before as well as furniture, ceramics and sculpture. You can also visit the observation tower which is a seven story building attached to the main gallery space and the top floor is wall to ceiling glass with 360 degree panoramic views of the whole city. We couldn't recommend it highly enough. Great cafe as well........

Sunday Morning Swing Dancing in Golden Gate Park

Inside the de Young Museaum

de Young Museum Viewing Gallery

We also spent an afternoon down along the water front which includes the famour Pier 39 and lots of places offering crab bisque in sourdough breadbowls.

Today Andrew and I did our own thing. I wondered round some of the bigger shops down town to pick up a few souvenirs and Andrew went on a bit of a mega walk including a stroll which included a walk part way across the Golden Gate bridge. We met up in a another neighbourhood called Japan Town for some Japanese food, before making our way back to write up this blog and pack up for the final time on a journey that will have taken us around the globe in 42 days.

San Fran has been absolutely terriffic, however we've really only scratched the surface here - there are so many things to do and see.  Guess we'll have to come back someday??!!

We have had a fascinating time visiting new places and seeing lots of differnt things. But it's time to head for home and we both feel that 6 weeks has been about the right duration, without feeling too travel weary or jaded.

Penultimely - The Golden Gate Bridge

Lastly - One of the Cable Cars

Thanks to everyone who's been following this blog and remember if the photos posted here haven't been enough for you- we have another 762 or there abouts which we can always share with you if you have a spare 5 hours.............

Joanne

Auckland- The City of Sails

Auckland harbour and Sky tower

We have been here in Auckland for three days now and are at the end of our travels in New Zealand.  It’s by far the largest city in the country, however once to leave the downtown area (or CBD-Central Business District) you quickly come upon some quite distinct neighbourhoods that have a village feel to them. Apart from central downtown, no one lives in flats here and most people live in small detached homes.

Georgina Street, Ponsonby where we stayed

We were in a really lovely old area called Ponsonby with higgledy piggledy streets full of characterful wooden homes, many of them with covered porches and fancy fret work.  It would be a great place to have a place.  And as with lots of NZ towns & cities we’ve been to-the restaurants and cafes are pretty special, and there are lots of vintage and one-off small (non chain) shops selling everything from clothes to furniture to textiles and everything in between.

Inside St Kevin's Arcade

On Wednesday we were lucky to be able to spend the day with Tom and Marlene.  Tom worked with Andrew in Paris and on rotation in Algeria.  He currently works month on month off in Kazakhstan I think .Marlene, his girlfriend, is a Kiwi who we had met briefly before in Paris. Just by chance Andrew got an email from Tom to say he would be in Auckland the same time as us and that we meet up.

We had a really nice day with them. They organised a fantastic picnic in the park, then we went to Auckland Museum in the afternoon and finished off with fish and chips by the sea.

Picnic with Tom and Marlene

When we get to a city we often just wonder round on foot, go to some parks and the odd gallery or museum and of course stop for coffee/tea and food as often as we can.  Our three days here have been no different and have gone in a bit of a flash.  We noticed a lot of construction activities going on – Auckland seems like a city on a bit of a growth spurt.



St Heliers Bay Auckland



And now it’s off to San Francisco via a short stopover in LA. We cross the International Date Line which is very surreal and means we have to put our watches back a full 24 hours hours and will arrive in the States earlier than we left Auckland!  We are due to depart Auckland airport at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Friday Feb 25^th and arrive in San Francisco at 11:30 am on the same day.

Well I’ll sign off here and I think Andrew and I will do a short entry about our impressions of NZ sometime soon while it’s all pretty fresh and before some major jet lag sets in......

Bye for now.

PS – Meant to send this from Auckland airport but ran out of time and had to wait till we arrived in San Francisco.  While at the airport in Auckland we spoke with an American women who was en-route following 5 weeks of work in Antarctica and got caught in the Christchurch earthquake.  She was on the second floor of a building at the time, in her words the earthquake tossed her round and sounded like a freight train.

A short note about the Christchurch earthquake

Andrew and I arrived safely in Auckland early Tuesday afternoon to the awful news of the devastating second earthquake that had just hit Christchurch. The woman who owns the apartment we are in had the TV on when we arrived and she was quite upset as she has relatives who live in the city.We spoke to her later and she said they were safe.
 At first we thought it was the first earthquake back in September that was being talked about again. Unfortunately it wasn't.
 It's been very harrowing watching the coverage and we don't know anyone there and didn't visit the city during our time on the South Island.
However as you travel around New Zealand, you are aware that it is a pretty volitile country. Wellington sits on multiple fault lines and the museum there has a whole section  on previous natural disasters that have happened. When we went to Napier, we learned about about the massive  earthquake in 1931 that killed over 200 people and flattened most of the inner city.
They have a special commission here called the EQC(Earthquake Commission) that provides insurance cover for peoples home and belongings in the event of earthquakes and other natural disasters . It also has an educating role.
The reason New Zealand  is so vulnerable is because it straddles the boundary of two of the earths great tectonic plates -so earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslips and tsunamis are a fact of life for people living here. When we stayed in the Coromandel,  we were warned of the tsunami alarm that blasts of each Wednesday evening and of the evacuation route.
But none of this helps people who have family and friends killed or missing as a result of Tuesday's disaster . Our thoughts are with them.

The Coromandel

Poukeko in Rotorua

On the road again....... this time for our last long car journey of this trip, driving from Napier to Hahei Beach at the top of the Coromandel peninsula. When we were booking the trip back in Scotland we had no idea of the number of twisty turny, winding roads there were in New Zealand.  How people do it in camper vans we have no idea and we are pretty glad we went for the car option. You are not given much clue as to the level of formula one skills you will need as a driver here, either by guide books or the tourist information centres.  Osmosis seems to be an essential  key skill  –for all sorts of things........

A brief pit stop in Rotorua was enough for us. This is the hot springs tourist mecca of New Zealand and the smell of sulphur does take a bit of getting used to.  I think it is the most touristy place we have passed through in our journey to date and everything is set up for coach tours and large numbers. It was onwards and upwards to the furthest reaches of the Coromandel......(well not quite, but that’s how some of those roads make you feel.)



Hahei Beach



We stayed in a studio apartment very close to the beach in the small resort of Hahei for the first three of our six night stay in this area. It was owned by Jill, a straight talking Kiwi who spent most of her adult life in the US, returning to New Zealand  to retire about 10 years ago. She painted local beach scenes and sold them from her garage studio. She’s not what you would call a typical artist- telling us she “  churned out”  4,000 paintings over the past 10 years  catering mainly to the tourist market.... At least she was honest and forthright. She had a lot of strong opinions on a wide range of subjects, particularly her home country. But she provided one of the most comfortable places we have stayed in to date and the coastal area she lived in was pretty outstanding, reminding us more of a tropical island than anything else.

 After a lazy day around Hahei we spent the next day driving to Coromandel Town and Whitianga, the two biggest spots on the peninsula. If you were a surfer or owned a small boat, you would be in your element here. And we saw the most breath taking stretches of coastline that were virtually deserted on warm sunny days. It’s just not busy anywhere.  Although to be fair it is the end of the summer and the children are back at school. Also we read that the global recession has had a fairly significant effect on tourist numbers here- thought to be down 20% on figures  5 years ago.



Lovely gallery at Hot Water Beach



Digging for the elusive hot water......



 As we may have said before on the blog, we have found it quite expensive , with food and petrol prices in particular coming as a bit of a shock. And house prices are not dissimilar to the UK .

The second part of our stay in the Coromandel has been inland in an area where they have mined for gold for almost two hundred years and in fact still mine today. It has quite a different feel to it. Our cottage is along the Karangahake gorge and yesterday we went on a fascinating and pretty spectacular gorge walk that took us through two mining tunnels, over a series of small swing bridges and up the gorge valley following the Waitawheta  River . The remains of the old mine shafts and tunnels  as well  as dilapidated plant and machinery could be seen all the way up the gorge. Plus quite a few waterfalls. Today it’s a very popular area with locals who know all the best river water holes to swim in.

Tomorrow we head for Auckland and our last stop here in New Zealand.  We’ve covered quite a few miles over the course of the last 5 weeks or so and can’t believe where the time has gone........

After a post about the sights and highlights of  Auckland,  the plan is to do a short summary of our impressions of New Zealand, hopefully before we leave.........so watch this space!

Guest Blog Number 2 - Heading North

We're still well behind blog-wise after being without wifi at the last two places we stayed, so I'll try to bring you up to date following Joanne's post yesterday on Wellington.

On the last morning in Wellington we picked up a new rental car and had a long drive to Napier on the east coast.  It never seems to look far on the map however there are so many twisty / turny roads here it's impossible to keep a good average speed going.  I do my best but have to slow down when Joanne starts leaving permanent fingernail marks on the dash!

On the way to Napier we stopped in Martinborough for a lunchbreak and nosy.  Martinborough is a small town in the heart of wine country. It looked a bit more what I'd expect an Australian wine town to look like - so much for preconceived notions of what things should look like.  More wineries, wine shops, cafes, and shops.  Here's a couple of photos (do you like Joanne's new sun glasses?).

Martinborough Main Street

Joanne Delaney - Or Hobbit Movie Star?

Our Napier digs a "French style" cottage about 8 kilometres from Napier.  It was on the side of a hill overlooking Napier in the distance.  For your viewing pleasure....

Cottage Near Napier

View of Napier from the Cottage

Napier itself was quite interesting, and very different from anything we'd seen elsewhere in NZ.  An earthquake in 1931 essentially flattened the city and once they scraped together some recession years money they rebuilt in the fashion of the day - i.e. Art Deco.  Apart from one or two places in California / Florida, Napier has the highest concentration of Art Deco architecture anywhere.  I took way too many photos, here's three examples.



Napier Art Deco (now open for accommodation!)



More Napier Art Deco

Looks like California to me

Napier was very California to me.

We decided to go to a winery for lunch; we selected the Black Barn Winery (from a list of about 35) - however when we got there we found out it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays!  So we explored nearby village of North Havelock which was very nice indeed and much to Joanne's liking as it probably had the highest nice cafes per capita that we've seen yet!

Black Barn Winery near North Havelock

We're now in a small place called Hahei Beach on the Coromanel Peninsula (which thankfully has wifi).  Joanne will update in a few days - stay tuned.

PS - We were watching the TV news last night, the annual Haka competition is underway.  There are 40 teams competing, all slapping their thighs, sticking out their tongues and bulging their eyeballs.  I'd love to see what a judges scoresheet looks like.

Grrrr

Wellington -The windy capital

 The Wellington Cable Car

 I'm running a bit behind with blog posts as we've been without internet access for a few days. So apologies to anyone who's been checking the site.

We left the South Island on the Interislander ferry last Friday afternoon. It was a beautiful cloudless day  sailing out of the Marlborough Sounds ,which are pretty spectacular, and across the Cook Strait to Wellington. We spent most of the crossing on the outside deck and were lucky to see lots of dolphins! They are really hard to capture on camera, but I did manage to get one good shot .....

Marlborough Sounds

The ferry takes you right into the city of Wellington and we spent the next three days wondering around, eating some good food and trying to get a bit of a feel for the place (well, as much as you can do on a short visit). The first thing that strikes you is the geography of the city. It seems most of  the houses are scattered over a series of very steep hills that encircle a fairly compact downtown business and shopping area. That means almost everyone gets a spectacular sea view. But the price to pay are some of the steepest climbs imaginable. Private finiculars seem to be a must in  places that are much too steep for cars and driveways and barely manageable by humans.

Our impression of Wellington is that it's a pretty happening kind of place where the retro trend in clothes, furniture and even cars abounds. And there are lots of hip people spending time in the gazillions of cafes and restaurants around.

We spend a few hours in the national museum Te Papa which is really imaginatively laid out and fairly interactive. But I have to say one of the high-lights for me was Wellington public library. It is in the heart of the central civic area and is really interesting building architectually with great details such as bespoke designed chairs and lovely metal fern heads as part of the outside landscaping. But it is the quality of the library itself that was stricking. It had a brilliant children section, the best selection of magazines anywhere  a whole area with multiple copies of current best sellers and even a bustling cafe on the first floor. And it was full of people! Young and old , all shapes and sizes. If you want a model for a great library look no further.

Although it was described in the guide books as the windiest city in the Southern hemisphere, we were lucky with the weather on our visit. Of slightly  more concern was the other fact we came across- that there are  multiple fault lines running through and under the city, making it a bit of a seismic hotspot, but luckily for us no cracks when we were there....

So all in all we would rate Wellington pretty highly on the must see list of places in NZ. Pretty cool, hip and happening (as if we'd know...).

Moari Totem at the top of Mount Victoria overlooking Wellington

And one final aside. The first eveing there we were walking around and who did we happen to walk past but several of the stars of the new Peter Jackson film The Hobbit. Andrew hadn't a clue why I was nudging him and saying look it's whats his name and thingymabob. But the next day on the telly here they announced shooting was about to begin and put names to the faces.....

Blenheim

Driftwood on Rarangi Beach

We arrived on the East Coast of the South Island in heavy rain- which is a liitle bit ironic as this is supposed to be the driest part of the country so far. But we're not complaining as the weather to date  has been really good. Our hostel in Nelson was busy and noisy but the B and B Driftwood Cottage  on Ragangi beach is  quiet and restful which is great. We have been taking the opportunity to slow down a bit and yesterday swapped the car keys for a kayak paddle. Gabriella the B and B owner recommended a tour by a fellow driftwood enthusiast Will Parsons of Driftwood Eco Tours. After a phone call or two we met up with him late yesterday afternoon and spent most of the evening into the night paddling along the Opawa River and around a protected wetland area called Vernon Lagoon. It was a real treat. Will was a character and a half with huge amounts of local knowledge and a love of  birds. It was just Andrew and I on the tour which was great . We saw black swans, spoonbills, caspian terns, gannets, oyster catchers, a NZ kingfisher, plovers and those are just the ones I remember. Will is also a bit of a mean cook and provided us with great muffins and tea plus smoked salmon and basil rolls saying that what he doesn't grow himself he gets from neighbours or at the local market.
We paddled back in almost complete darkness with little lights on the kayaks. It was a special night.

Spoonbill

Late Evening - Guide and Joanne

Shags in Silhouette

Tomorrow morning we pack up again and head up to Picton to take the inter island ferry to Wellington- the capital city of New Zealand . We drop out hire car off at the ferry terminal and will pick up a second rental in a few days as we head out of Wellington.

I'll sign off now and hopefully either persuade Andrew to do guest block number 2 or write a few words on the sites and sounds of the capital. Until next time.