Paul's NZ Observations

This is a picture of Franz Josef. The glacier looks better from far away, in the picture we posted with us right in front of it, it looks "dirty" with the rocks and sand that it picks up along the way, but I snapped this from a different hike I took.

All in all the weather gods have continued to look favorably on us. It has rained a bit during some of the drives we have done and a bit on the Milford Sound cruise, but other than that we have had pretty clear and crisp days. Crisp translates to just over freezing most days. Luckily we came prepared with lots of layers and they have all seemed to do the trick. We picked up gloves and hats for the skiing and have gotten good use out of them. Night time has been the most striking difference from Fiji. The same way as Fiji doesn’t seem to attempt to do anything to compensate for the hot nights, Kiwi’s don’t seem to attempt to compensate for the cold nights, other than provide a warm blanket. The small space heaters in most motel rooms automatically go off every hour and don’t project much heat to start, so unless you are in the habit of getting up every hour it gets a wee bit nippy in the middle of the night. All in all, not much to complain about and it caused more worry for Deb than it actually caused lack of comfort for the kids.
Definitely a lot more animals than people here, and it isn’t just the 20-40 million sheep. Kids and even grandma got a laugh out of mom and dad constantly stopping to attempt to get the perfect picture of the animals with the dramatic back drop of snow capped mountains, unspoilt valleys and oceans. We made reasonable attempts at capturing pics of sheep, deer, cows, and even llamas. Mostly farmed animals (even the deer) didn’t really come across as much true ‘wildlife’.

NZ Amazing Scenery

Now that we are on the south island of NZ, we have been getting up every day before sunrise. That is an easy thing here, since the sun rises at 8am and sets before 6pm. It’s like being in Alaska or something.

This is a pic of Elise in Milford Sound. It was rainy and overcast that day.

When we arrived in Christchurch, I said to Paul, “Ahhhh, back to civilization.” It is so easy to travel here. We picked up our minivan from the car rental agency and away we went. Paul did pull out on the right side of the road but quickly corrected himself at the first roundabout, where people were honking and yelling at us. The bathrooms are clean, (I mean in grocery stores, gas stations, mom & pop restaurants, national park toilets – hey we’ve got 4 kids and did a ton of driving, they go on the side of the road too.), we can charge everything, the roads don’t have potholes everywhere, and we can drink the tap water. Like I said, civilization. The drawback is, that it has Western prices, it’s expensive.
We drove over 1400 miles here in 8 days. That’s like driving from Chicago to Salt Lake City, but we can’t fly down the highway doing 80mph because: a) the roads here are all 2 lane highways, b) we drove through a lot of winding mountain passes, and c) there are lots of one lane bridges (more than two lane bridges). The one lane bridges don’t have lights, you pull up cautiously, look across and then decide if it’s safe to go. It basically depends on the drivers’ courtesy.

Since Jacob did a nice summary, after Queenstown, we went to see Franz Josef glacier on the west coast and then drove to Christchurch, where we are now.

What can I say about NZ? The words: striking, stunning, majestic, and amazing come to mind. The driving has really been something, around every turn is another gorgeous lake, surrounded by beautiful mountains and only a few ranches and sheep in the valley. It is really scenic. We think it resembles the Colorado Rockies at times, Switzerland or the big island of Hawaii at other times. The most amazing thing is how unspoiled and not developed it is. This island is like the size of California and has this rich, natural beauty and all the different landscapes: lakes, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, beaches, rainforest, fjords, but there are only 1 million people living here. I mean, just picture yourself driving around California for 8 days and seeing all the gorgeous scenery there, with only 1 million people living in the whole state. That is what this island is like. Queenstown, which is the "adrenaline capital of the world" has a population of 13,330. It’s this cute little ski town, like Vail or something, set in the mountains on a lake with barely any people living there. Gorgeous. This picture is of Otago Peninsula which is on the east coast of the island.

Paul’s mom made a funny comment about our accommodations, “Well, at least when you get home, you’ll appreciate not cooking a meal in your bedroom.” We’ve been staying in holiday parks here. They have everything: tent camping, RVs, cabins and motel rooms. We’re staying in the motel rooms so that we have a bathroom attached. If we were in a cabin, it would be cheaper but then we’d have to use the shared bathrooms. Anyhow, my only real complaint are about the heaters. The heaters are set on one hour timers, so at night they go off and it is absolutely freezing, since we aren't getting up every hour to turn the thing back on. Ridiculous. We thought it was because we were staying in "cheap" accommodations, which the timer thing is part of that, but we just came back from having a very pleasant dinner at a friend of my cousin's (who is here on assignment) and she said the same thing. NZ gets cold and Kiwis do not know how to heat their homes. In their newly built rental house, they don't have central heating. They have these space heater things and there are no heaters in the bedrooms! Maybe a visit in the summer would be better for this country.

NZ mid-trip summary by Jacob

At the moment we are in New Zealand and yesterday we went skiing in the middle of July. The temperature was a perfect 32 degrees in the mountains and 40 at the base. It was pretty snowy for the first 2 or 3 hours except for it cleared up and we had an awesome view of the valley where we are staying in Queenstown. If you have a map of New Zealand you can trace our route. We landed in an airport at Chirstchurch and drove down the coastline to Dunedin and then we went to Te Anau. After that we went to Milford sound where we took a cruise and drove to queenstown. So far we have seen many views, went skiing, played at the sand dunes, went to a water park, played at many different playgrounds and stayed at 3 different holiday parks.


I just wanted to add some pictures to Jacob's post. At the sand dunes, a sea lion came out of the water and walked up the beach near us.







Here's a pic of the boys skiing at Coronet Peak. It was a lot like Alta in Utah, big open spaces, not a lot of trees, good snow, but too many out of control snowboarders. Charlie and I had a terrible wipe out trying to get on a T-bar rope tow for the first time. I’ll never ride one of those again!
Henry was a trooper. He fell a bunch of times in the morning, but then he got the hang of it and was skiing down blue runs faster than I could keep up. I can not keep up with my 6 year old skiing. Paul was overjoyed with his progress. It makes me feel old and decrepit!

More about Fiji

I just wanted to add a few things to our Fiji trip. I didn’t get to finish my last blog post with what we did on the island for 6 days. Here's a pic of Paul scuba diving with a nice couple we met from Texas.

As I said before, we snorkeled everyday, including one day at the island where they shot “The Blue Lagoon” with Brooke Shields in the 80’s. One of the Fiji islands is also where they shot the movie “Castaway” with Tom Hanks. It’s in our guidebook, I think the resorts near there run excursions to that island too.

The food at our resort was pretty good, the kids said it was “awesome”, which I could not understand, since they barely ate anything except the white rice or potatoes. However, they served the meals at 8am, 11:30am and 6:30pm, with no snacks in between. So by the time we went to dinner, the kids were really starving so they did eat the lamb stew, curried chicken and fresh tuna steaks. We had pumpkin at every dinner & papaya at every meal. They grew those on our island. And we had bok choy or cabbage too. We drank water at every single meal and the only drink you could buy was beer. I thought that was interesting, because if they had sold soda, they would have made more money, but Paul said he thought it was because there would be too much trash that they would have to get off the island, so they didn’t sell snacks or sodas.

Paul & Jacob went fishing one morning with a couple from NZ. They caught 8 fish (Jacob caught one) using sand crabs as bait. They did not use fishing poles & reels, they just had fishing line on a spool that they let out and then had to pull it in, hand over hand. They had weights on the end so the line would sit at or near the bottom. After they finished, the guy tried starting the boat and ended up pulling out the ripcord of the motor, so they were stranded. He ended up calling his buddy on the island using his cell phone and they were eventually picked up 45 minutes later. The rest of us were at breakfast, wondering why they weren’t back yet. (They left at 6am and were supposed to be back by 8 for breakfast.) But we just thought they must be catching fish, so maybe they were just staying a bit longer. We ended up eating the fish for lunch. Yum! Yum!

They had so much fun that the next morning Paul took all 3 boys out again with the guy fishing. Henry caught 2, Paul caught 2 and Jacob caught 2. We ate those for lunch also. Delicious!

We chatted with the workers at our resort and found out that the place was owned and operated by their village. There were 4 resorts and 4 villages on Nacula Island, the one we were staying on. Later in the week, we took a tour of the village and met the chief. Here is a picture of one of their houses.

We bought some of the trinkets they were selling: necklaces & bracelets made of collected shells and seeds. We estimated that there were about 15-20 people staying at our resort on average, 7-10 workers at the resort (making meals, serving meals, maid service in the bures, raking the property of leaves, raking the beach of seagrass, etc..) and there were 589 people who lived in the village. So our tourist dollars were basically supporting the whole village of close to 600 people. Crazy.

They took a liking to Henry and especially Elise. We took this pic the last day, before we left.

Paul's birthday was July 18. I surprised him by asking the resort to bake him a cake for his birthday. They made this really cute chocolate cake with frosting with a really nice "Happy Birthday Paul" design on top. We shared it with the other guests and the staff.

After that, we headed out to the catamaran on our skiff. I thought it was interesting since there's no dock or anything like that. We had to carry our bags out and wade into the water (like a foot or so deep) to get into our skiff.

I'll write about NZ next. We've been in NZ for about 6 days now.

Fiji Adventures

Well, we have been in Fiji almost 12 days now. We had no internet access until now. I don’t know why we think we will have good internet access on this trip, since most of the places we are going are developing countries, and internet is the last thing these people need, as they are living in huts. In any event, I will try to sum up our stay here on the beautiful islands of Fiji.

The trip started off a bit of a disaster….note to self: pack a change of clothes on the plane for the kids! The 3 younger kids peed in their pants 3 hours into our 10 hour red-eye flight, (they were sleeping) and as I said earlier, we did not have a change of clothes with us. GROSS.
Then after we arrived in Nadi, Fiji we thought we scored at the rental car desk, when the girl there was going to give us a minivan at the mid-size car price, because they had run out of mid-size cars. But when we tried to start it, the battery was dead, so instead they gave us a manual transmission pick up truck. Paul was funny, he eyed the girl and said, “It’s not supposed to rain is it?” She hesitated and then said, “No.” So we threw our luggage in the back of the truck, piled the kids in the back and headed off with Paul shifting with his left hand because the driver’s side was on the right. In Fiji, you drive on the left hand side of the road, thanks to the British. Anyhow, of course, half an hour in, it started to rain. So we drove about an hour in the rain to our first hotel. Our stuff wasn’t too wet, the rain was drizzly, not a huge downpour, but it figured. Paul said, “The truck is fine, as long as it doesn’t rain on the way back.” which of course it did, but I digress.

So we spent our first 5 days in Korotogo on the Coral Coast on Viti Levu (the main island of Fiji) at Vakaviti, in their slightly run-down, spacious 2 bedroom apartment across the street from the beach. It was perfect for us, I think it was the owner’s house and he was away vacationing with his family, so we had legos, books, DVD player and satellite TV (for a few days, until it got cut off because they hadn’t paid the bill). They had this great veranda overlooking the ocean where we could sit and read or have a cup of tea. So pleasant! The best part was that they gave us the 5th night free, so I think we paid $53/night! Here is a picture of the apt. and the view from our veranda.

While we stayed there, we went to an Eco Park to see native Fijian birds, iguanas & plants. The kids held iguanas and snakes & fed sea turtles there. Paul went scuba diving and saw reef sharks & turtles. He said it was a 7 out of 10 dive. It was rainy or overcast the first few days, so at our beach across the street we looked in tide pools and collected sea stars and crabs.

The last 2 days were sunnier, we snuck into the 5-star Intercontinental one day and enjoyed a day at their beautiful, kid-friendly pool and snorkeled at their white sandy beach. We did 2 hikes, one to a waterfall and one to some sand dunes.

Here is Jacob’s journal entry on the day we visited the sand dunes:

The Sand Dunes
6 soldiers trekked through the forest to aid a company working to destroy 2 gun emplacements. Suddenly we saw the sand ahead. As we emerged from the forest canopy, Elise fell wounded by a sniper. Charlie, Henry and I took out the sniper and Dad carried Elise. Soon we came upon a field of wreckage where bodies and equipment lay on the ground among which was one gun emplacement completely destroyed. We heard shots ahead and hurried forward to assist in the battle. We flew into a trench and started firing at the few surviving enemies. Then we advanced and I blew the gun in half with a grenade. Finally I raised a flag of victory.

The day we left Korotogo, there was a torrential downpour. We had no choice but to load all our luggage inside the cab of our truck. The boys sat on top of our luggage and Elise sat in the front seat with me, we were wedged in with all our daypacks. We were cursing the Budget rental car girl the whole way back to the airport. From there, we caught a 7am bus that took us to the port and then got on the 8:30am catamaran that went out to the islands. It made a lot of “stops”, where it would stop in the ocean between some islands and small skiffs would pull up alongside and people would transfer on and off the boats while riding up and down in the waves then take the people back to their resorts. We rode the catamaran for over 5 hours (it rained the whole time and the ocean was choppy), but luckily when it was time for us to get off at the last stop, it stopped raining.

We ended up staying 6 nights on the small island of Nacula, part of the Yasawas Group of islands. I didn’t know this, but Fiji has over 300 islands. Just in the Yasawas, there are over 30. I thought it would be more like Hawaii, a few big islands and maybe a few small ones like the Channel islands off the coast of California, but it’s different. Fiji has a couple big islands, then tons of these little islands with one or 2 resorts built on the beach and indigenous villages on the islands. There is a slick little backpacker-type island hopper pass that you can buy which includes all the boat rides and accommodations on a bunch of different islands. Most of the people we’ve met fall in this category, they’re in their early 20’s and they bought the island hopper, so they come and stay 2 nights then head off to another island resort. The catamaran is expensive, especially since there are 6 of us, so island hopping isn’t really feasible for us, so we decided to stay put and just enjoy this little slice of paradise.

We stayed at a rustic? resort called Safe Landing in a cute “bure”, a thatched hut, right on the beach. By rustic, I mean 1) we have electricity only 4 hours/day from about 6-10pm when they run the generator, 2) we have a small water tank on top of the bure that is heated through solar panels and that’s all the hot water we get. On overcast days, the water is lukewarm, on sunny days it’s slightly warmer. And, 3) we’ve been drinking collected rainwater the whole week, no fancy bottled Fiji water here. It’s comfortable, there’s a hammock right outside our door, the beach is beautiful, we’ve snorkeled everyday, and we’ve gone on some neat excursions, like an afternoon 4 stop snorkel trip for only $25 USD for the whole family. With food included for the 6 of us, it cost us $150 USD/night, not including the excursions, so it wasn’t too bad. The water was amazingly aquamarine blue and the visibility underwater must be 40-50 feet.

We're feeding the fish here, can you see all the zebra fish in the water below the kids?

Next stop, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Central America Souvenirs

"Well your trip couldn't get any worse than having maggots growing in your son's skull," my cousin Marcella said to me last week. So we are leaving for our RTW trip in 4 days and I'm a little apprehensive because of our "incident" that happened after we went to Central America. Jacob came home with 2 botfly larvae growing under his skin on the top of his head. If you google "botfly", you can watch youtube videos of other travelers to Central America lucky enough to have gotten bit by a mosquito carrying the botfly eggs. Seriously, the videos are so gross, you won't believe it. My friend Sandra looked up the videos and said, "it's like a car accident, I didn't want to look, but then I had to." It gives you an idea of what I had to deal with over Memorial Day weekend.

It's a long story. After a misdiagnosis that it was an infected mosquito bite and 10 days of antibiotics that didn't work, I took Jacob back in to our pediatrician's office and saw our regular doc who properly diagnosed him with botfly larvae. He's a 35+ year veteran pediatrician and had never seen it before, (he and his associates looked it up on the web and guessed that was what it was, given that we had just come back from Central America.) Paul's aunt died that week so he had to fly out of town for the funeral, so I took Jacob to the appointment where our pediatrician cut his head open and extracted one of the larvae (it was dead), but couldn't "find" the other one. (Jacob had 2 bumps, so we figured he had 2 larvae.) The extraction of the one was not an easy feat, as we were there for an hour and 1/2 and Jacob must have gotten 15-20 novacaine? shots and I am not exaggerating. So he sent us home for the long weekend in hopes that we would extract the other one the following week. Luckily I called my friend who is an infectious diseases doctor, Dave, who researched online for me and told me what to do, and my other doctor friend, Mark, actually came to my house Saturday night to help me extract the other *live!* one out of Jacob's head in my kitchen. Basically we suffocated the thing with vaseline & by using Mark's doctor's sticky saran wrap (I forget the official name) and the grub came to the surface trying to get air and then he took it out with his fancy doctor tweezers. Crazy.

So we didn't tell the younger kids about it, so don't mention it around them if you see us. And if I seem a little apprehensive about the trip, just look up "botfly" and you'll know why.