Holiday '97

Note: Footnotes and images added in June 2022

Perth

Rising Moon over Perth

The trip started in Perth (Australia) after a long flight from Heathrow. This actually helped me to avoid too much Jet Lag as I was able to stay awake until dinner time before going to bed on the first day. To past the time before then I did some exploring of the city and, much to my disgust, located the IBM building (it's way too close to the Western Australian parliment buildings). The next two days were spent in more properly exploring Perth. This city I rate as the best city I've visited, with a very pleasant environment, friendly people and while having skyscrapers manages to make them scenic. During the evenings I headed out to King's Park (which overlooks the city) to watch the moonrise and the appearance of the Southern Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri.

Indian Pacific Train

Railway at Cook

I then took the Indian Pacific train from Perth (leaving lunchtime on the Friday) to Syndey (arriving lunchtime on the Monday). This was an impressive way to get a feeling (and I have to say only a feeling) for the true size of Australia. It's still a little hard to realise that when the train stops at a place called Cook to refuel (Cook's *only* reason for existence is as a refuelling and passing place for the trains!) there's no other habitation for tens of miles and no other town for hundreds. I saw a glimpse of Adelaide and did manage to see some Kangaroos from the train later in the journey (and I had to have the Kangaroo meat in one of the meals on the train, I travelled first class for this trip of course!)

Syndey Opera House

Syndey Harbour

Syndey proved to be a bigger and busier city than Perth, and much windier too! The Opera House is amazingly photogenic and Syndey's harbour is superb. I wish I'd had more time to explore Syndey and time to explore the surrounding country (a common complaint for almost all of my holiday :-).

Kauri Tree

Switchboard at the Wagener Musuem

Then onto Auckland to join the coach tour of New Zealand. In retrospect, this was the right choice since there's alot to see in NZ and I wouldn't have seen as much on my own. However next time I now know where to concentrate on, so that I don't feel like I haven't had enough time to explore a given area. The first day the coach headed north and I heard probably more than I want to know about NZ's Kauri Tree (an oak-like conifer tree which grows (slowly) to very large sizes and makes excellent wood (which is why there ain't much of it left). The second day we headed to the top of New Zealand and saw the meeting of the Tasman Sea and the pacific (seeing waves arriving at right angles to each other as they pass over some shallows is a bit weird. In the afternoon we visited the Wagener's Museum, a place which if you are ever in the area I strongly recommended visiting. The Wageners were a wealthy family that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, collected 'junk', e.g. old telephone exchanges, typewriters, penny arcade machines, chamberpots......

Auckland Skytower

A Warning Sign in Rotorua

]The next day back to Auckland, where I can easily believe the estimate that one in four of the million+ inhabitants own a boat(yacht) of some sort. Its oneupmanship is shown by having a sky tower six metres taller than Syndey's.... It is also built on over sixty extinct volcano cones..... On the next day we headed south to Rotorua, which is the centre of Maori people and the main geothermal area. Walking through a town where the drains are steaming from geothermal heat and in places the steam comes up through the paving stones is interesting, as is walking on a nature trail where warning signs advise you to stay on the trail as the solid ground you can see near a boiling pool is only a few centimetres thick and liable to break and drop into literally boiling water.

Steam from Mount Ruapehu

Wellington

Then onto Lake Taupo (formed when a large (i.e. several miles wide) dome of rock exploded). From here I took a scenic flight to see two of NZ's three active volcanoes, and I did catch steam from Mt. Ruapehu on film. We travelled onto Wellington for a night (unfortunately Wednesday and the observatory on the hills above the hotel only opens on Tuesdays and Saturdays).

A seagull chasing the inter-islander ferry

The South Island starts with the inter-lander ferry between the north and the south islands. The seagulls optiministically assumed the ferry was a large fishing boat and/or had sussed that the tourists are easy marks, and flew very close to the ferry (I managed to get a good picture of one). Once on the South Island, we continued onto Nelson, a small town on the coast. Here we stayed at one hotel on the tour that had real character. I had an excellent walk from the hotel to the 'centre of New Zealand', an unimpressive monument on top of a hill. The next day was onto Greymouth, which has to be said is a pretty boring place, although my view may have been coloured by the cold I had gained and the steady change in the weather from sunny to rain. (It should be noted that this change is normal due to the way the air flows up from antartica across the southern ocean, warming up and gathering moisture and then hitting the South Island).

Franz Josef Glacier

Franz Josef Glacier Mouth

The following day, however, was, for me the highlight of the holiday. The destination for the evening stop was the Franz Josef Glacier and for the braver and more 'robust' members of the tour, we could arrange to get a guide and actually an hour or two on the glacier itself. The Franz Josef Glacier is very impressive (despite some drizzle), as it flows at up to four meters per day (and in recent years has been growing¹). It's even more impressive as our guide took the seven of us right up to the front of the glacier and then led us up the front of the glacier and onto the body of the glacier. The feeling of achievement was amazing and as I say, this was the unexpected highlight of the holiday.

Queenstown

The next day onwards to Queenstown. The climate difference between the west coast and the inland side on the other side of the southern alps is dramatic. If you ever need a demonstration of 'rain shadows', this was the place for it. We had two nights at Queenstown. Normally this is the place for those action activities (e.g. bungee jumping, jetboat rides in the lake and rivers etc). I, however, didn't want to do much as it was the first anniversary of the death of my sister.

Two photos of Waterfalls at Milford Sound

The next day on the coach we travelled to Milford Sound. This is an area of outstanding scenery, best seen just after a lot of rain. The 'a lot of rain' was no problem. However the 'just after' was a problem. Some of the coach party was disappointed, but given it rains here 350 days of the day I saw no reason to be upset and we did see the spectacular waterfalls (just no way to photograph them...²)

Penguin in shelter

Penguin

Thence onwards to Dunedin. There was the chance to visit the Otago Peninsula which has albatross and a sanctuary for yellow-eyed penguins. My mother tells me that from an early age I was fascinated by penguins at zoos, so she was unsurprised to learn that this was an opportunity I wasn't going to miss. Despite the gloom I got a couple of excellent pictures³ and throughly enjoyed the visit.

Boiling Mud

More Boiling Mud

From Dunedin, the next stage was Mt. Cook. Here I took another scenic flight and watched Mt. Cook change colour as the sun sets out of view. In the late evening I did some more Star-gazing. Here, despite the fact that Mt. Cook village is smaller (I estimate smaller than Stanford-in-tthe-Vale) and the nearest other settlement is 50 or so miles away, your night vision is still easily ruined by headlights from cars on the roads! Christchurch was the next stop. Christchurch is a very pretty city, which was only marred by the sighting of an IBM Building. (The damn things kept leaping out at me when I least expected them!). I was also surprised by the eruption of a nasty looking red rash on my chest, arms and legs. Fortunately it turned out that this was (most likely) an allegeric reaction to some cold sweets I had. Oh well, it added to the excitement of the trip! Then back to Wellington, this time on a Saturday, so in the evening I spent a pleasant time up at the observatory above the city. The tail end of the tour was the route back to Auckland. This travelled through Napier (a good town if you enjoy 'Art Deco' Architecture, but unfortunately it makes little impression on me (either good or bad)). We also visited a different part of the Lake Taupo Thermal area and a Kiwifruit Orchard.

Exploratorium

Cable Car

The final part of my holiday was San Francisco. The overnight flight across the date-line was relaxing, mainly because of the anti-histamines I been prescribed in NZ (and, as in the UK, the pharmicist recommended just buying the drugs as it was cheaper that way than paying the prescription charge....). These made me drowsy and having a three seat row to myself made it particularly easy to sleep on this trans-pacific flight. I was feeling nervous about the states, as it is not known for being a friendly place, but in fact San Francisco is quite a safe city (at least in daylight :-). I explored most of the local musuems in SF and travelled several times on the cable cars, whilst attempting not to spend too much in the bookstores etc. I'm not too sure what to say about SF, other than to say I enjoyed my visit there⁴.

In retrospect, it turns out this was a 'look and see' type of holiday, which is unsurprising given my nature. I highly enjoyed the whole trip and intend to visit NZ again in five or so years time⁵.

Footnotes

Update from 2022 - the glacier stopped advancing in 1999 and has since retreated as the following image taken in 2016 from wikimedia shows
↩
Turns out my notes from 1997 lied - though the photographs I did get were from the boat cruise and not from the coach... ↩
Though with camera shake due to the lack of flash (rightly prohibited to protect the penguins ↩
The place that still sticks in the memory from San Francisco is the Exploratorium. They had an exhibit showing how a geyser works, which still sticks in my memory nearly 25 years later ↩
Which didn't happen. I did plan to go back in 2020 and even got the trip booked. And then Covid-19 intervened... ↩