New Zealand!!

Here we are! After a good but frustrating time waiting for my working holiday visa in Sydney we made it here and I got the visa on my birthday a couple of days after we got here. Staying in my friend Adam’s house in Christchurch, we based ourselves here while looking for a car. After two years living in Herbert the van we had enough of that lifestyle for now and are enjoying living in houses, especially as the weather is getting colder!

The car we managed to get is a Nissan Cefiro (also known as Maxima) called Fiona as she is big and green like Shrek’s wife. It is a Japanese import as the country is flooded with them and makes it easy to get a good car for not much money.


Adam lent us his roofrack bars and with the windsurf kit and surfboard on the roof, we set of on a road trip. First stop was Wiamate to visit Jimmy, Mary and Lucy who have been almost two years in New Zealand after moving out from Ireland for good!
We had lots of fun here for a few days making butterflies, going to garage sales and doing up a bike for Iris that we found (more on that later).


On the way form their house we stopped by a harvest fair just south of Oamaru where the love their old Victorian era things and saw some cool old things.



Next stop was Dunedin, a cool student town and very Scottish. I got out for a windsurf here and it was howling! The water was certainly colder than what I have been used to in WA but it was great to get out!

After that we went west into the mountains stopping at a nice campsite in Laurence which had lost of animals. There are lots of small towns like Laurence here that were once busy goldmine towns during the gold rush and are now very quiet indeed.
Stopping in Alexandra we found a job picking grapes for 3 weeks near Cromwell so we now had a bit of a plan and were looking forward to some money coming into the bank account for a change!

With a week until the start of grape picking we continued with out plans and went to Queenstown to stay nearby in some Department of Conservation (DoC) campsites. These places are great to stay as they are in the countryside, often beside lakes or rivers with wonderful scenery around. Near these campsites there are usually some sort of DoC walking and mountain biking trails where Iris got her first taste of mountain biking and absolutely loved it! In one of the places however we missed the start of the track and found ourselves cycling and walking up a river through the water in places to get to the track. This was part of the fun though and we had a great time!
After a look around Queenstown area and some shopping in the op shop for great cheap outdoor gear we made our way back to Waimate for a couple of days.




There was a motorcycle street race on in Methven that weekend that I had organised to go to with Adam on the motorbikes so we quickly nipped up to Christchurch for that. Unfortunately plans changed as they do and we went by car instead. The racing was good though with a huge variety of bikes racing from old rusty bangers and old shiny bangers to very fast F1 bikes. There were some close races and a few crashes just across the hay bales making the day quite exciting!

Finding accommodation in Cromwell was quite easy, we found a nice ensuite room in a warm house with good housemates and moved in the day we saw it! The work however did not start well as we only done three days in total in the first two weeks! Just enough to cover the rent! With all this free time I decided to start my PG2 paragliding seeing as Queenstown is just down the road and I could continue on from my PG1 which I done last time in NZ.

It was fantastic to be in the air again and had two great days of flying; Iris even got a free tandem go for driving their bus down the mountain for them!
The same weekend we went to visit my friend Will who I had travelled with for a while in Australia who was working and living in a lodge at the top of the mountains nearby.






Next week at work didn’t last too long either with only two and a half days so we had another long weekend to fill. The decision was made to go to Waimate to see Jimmy, Mary and Lucy. We also wanted to finish Iris’s bike and bring it with us as she was pretty excited about cycling. We got the parts we needed in Wanaka recycle centre on the way and it’s good to go, cycling like a brand new bike!
Jimmy and I went mountain biking on the hill beside Waimate and had the best cycle for a long time. We cycled up the road and on the way down done it in sections to do some jumps a few times to get the feel of them.

This week we actually had a full week in work for a change and cycled most days. Nice to start getting fit again although it’s cold in the mornings!
Next week hopefully we will have a few days work before we leave Cromwell as I doubt we will find another job in the area before the winter season starts.