Kategorie: Travel

Remote, rugged, beautiful. Cape Palliser. That’s were we headed to Monday morning, taking it slow through the Hutt Valley and then a superbly scenic drive down to and along the coast. Wow. It’s really hard to stay focussed on the road here with fantastic ocean views on the one side and sheer cliffs or bluffs…

Hamilton? Hamilton! Hamilton? Wtf are they doing in Hamilton? That doesn’t make any sense, logistics wise. True. But I always thought that the traveling salesman should be fucked up his NP-complete arse anyway. It was the Reisebegleitung’s birthday and the NZ Sevens Tournament was on and I’d bought tickets for the finals day as a…

Here’s a confession: I really like Wellington. To me, it’s one of the nicest cities I’ve ever been to. Even though the weather tries to convince me otherwise each time I visit. Maybe that’s part of the appeal, who knows. This time, it all started out very smoothly. We arrived Wednesday afternoon and walked in…

On the spur of the moment we decided to actually forfeit two of the three nights we had booked in Surat Bay and drive up to Tapanui instead after we’d finished the Catlins River-Wisp Loop Track. I found something really nice on the loathsome AirBnB portal, super value for money and we got there shortly…

So, it’s the Catlins once again, an area I’ve first travelled to and through 14 years ago. Back then, all the roads were gravel and there weren’t too many people around. I’ve been back twice since and the main road is sealed (fortunately side roads are not) and there’s a lot more people now. But…

Stewart Island had some more things to offer … a telephone connected to a tree, clear and unambiguous signage, and last but not least some shots from the Rakiura track.

While on Stewart Island it would’ve been criminal not to do the Rakiura track, and since we’re nice people we did of course not want to cause offense. ☺ We did not want to spend a night on the track for logistical reasons though so we decided to do it as a long day walk.…

So, next stop Stewart Island! Excited, I’ve been to NZ so many times, but never to the third largest island. It has the reputation of being always rainy, muddy, full of sandflies etc etc etc. And the ferry crossing is supposedly nasty. So we drove our fat arses to Bluff on Wednesday afternoon and found…

As I’d said, I had to find last minute accommodation on Sunday night for the Queenstown area. Of course it wasn’t our plan to go back to Queenstown, we only did it because we had to pick up the bloody bag. But hey, we thought we might at least make the best of it. And…

Our Kea friend ambushed us again on the way down to Brod Bay, very insistent fellow! 🙂    Also, some great views to be had, Lake Te Anau, Lake Manapouro, and the mountains of course. Luxmore hut looked really good, too. Need to come back and do the full Kepler one day.