After a week on the beautiful South Island and a forgettable flight through ex tropical cyclone we were finally in Auckland, gateway to the Bay of Islands, Waheike island and other stuff, but we were in Auckland.  Having never been so happy to be on “solid” ground (as solid as the ground can get in NZ), there was nothing Auckland could do to make us not love it there, but it tried.

We stayed out of the CBD, having not realised until told the flat taxi rate from the airport only counted to the CBD and not to an inner city suburb, somewhat closer to the airport (had it not been so wet and James not been so shaky it would have been cheaper to catch a fixed rate cab to the CBD and another one back to our place), in a great area called Ponsonby.  This was the place to be in the rain, full of awesome restaurants and bars, it was the perfect location for us to put on some extra kilos after all the shredding we’d done ex-streaming down South.

There was one break in the weather, however, and we made the most of it, taking the ferry away from Auckland to the stunning island of Waheike.  We were hoping for a day of getting back to nature, to really appreciate more of the flora of this spectacular country so set off tramping over the hills it a direction James chose completely at random.  You really wouldn’t believe the surprise on our faces when, not 10 minutes later, we stumbled across a cellar door with views back towards the city!!  And what’s more the one up the road happened to have a reservation under our name not 40 minutes later!  (NB: Grapes count as flora.)  What’s even better is there was a bus that could pick you up from one winery and drop you at the door to another, what??  Having worn heels and a dress to go tramping, Lea decided this was the better option, and James reluctantly tagged along.

Our final night in NZ was all set to be huge as we’d cleverly booked tickets to see the Foo Fighters and Weezer months ago!  However, our small break in the weather didn’t last long and it bucketed down all day leading up to what we discovered was an entirely outdoor concert.  Neither of us wanting to be the first to call it quits and thereby being the one blamed for missing the concert if the sun came out, we just drank at bars on the docks and awkwardly stared at each other in a strange game of chucken, constantly chicking both the weather and how much the tuckets had cost us.  (I’ve got another confession to make…after a guy in a sailor’s hat near the buses to the show spewed near my feet in the rain on my last day of holiday…there was no way I was going to go sit in the rain for 8 hours before getting on an early flight with a temporary carrier. But there was no way I was going to give in first!!)

Finally, after realising, no amount of footos would help improve the weather, we made the call and headed back to Ponsonby to drink with our new besties from Madrid.  This coincided with the moment the rain stopped.  Stressing over our wines at a cool little music bar and feeling totally fooked over, we trawled the webs and managed to find people to offloading tickets up to $400 for free, news that they’d run out of ponchos for sale and photos of hard-core fans lining up one by one at security (flat out confiscating umbrellas) in the rain for what must have felt like for everlong!  How happy these photos made provided a shocking insight into our humanity.  I guess it really gave us foo for thought.  We ended up having a great night, content in our decision and happy we didn’t have to sit through the irony of Weezer opening their set with “Island in the Sun”.

After having been told by so many that the beauty of the South far surpasses the North, we jumped on a plane from Blenheim back to the North island…a 20 minute flight over the Sounds (seated 1A and 1B thank you, not keen to hang out with the riff raff back in rows 2 to 4) in what I had expected to the the most harrowing flight of the trip. In retrospect I wish I knew then what I know now and enjoyed it more. A healthy serve of potato gems in the lounge and we were back in the air, destination Queenstown!

En route, as we counted our dollars on the plane, it was a perfect day to see the South island (so good that James was too distracted and left his iPad on board meaning the world would be deprived of hearing about some duck’s holiday for a few more days), culminating in Mount Cook (tick) and Lake Wanaka (tick) before the spectacular approach into Queenstown. A town so named because it was once thought that only royalty would ever be able to afford to stay there. DINKS having not yet been invented. You’d expict the kiwis to be pretty good at fleecing, but this town takes it to a new livel! It made me glad I don’t have access to our credit card to be able to see the damage. Normally this kind of lux just ain’t for us, but we thought we’d live that fantasy.

Having said all that, we loved it and packed as much into our 2 days as possible. We took the gondola up the mountain not just for a glass of wine but, craving a different kind of buzz, we rode the luge!! The views from the course were so surreal, you could almost say they looked like an i-luge-ion…Afterwards, perhaps in reaction to me making that ‘joke’, Lea tripped down the stairs on the way out! For real, but the angry looks I get when we tell people she fell down the stairs when explaining an ever increasing number of bruises are palpable! At best I can only hope they think we were filming a Once Were Warriors sequel.

We had one of the most amazing experiences ever on the Shotover river in an incredible jet boat. With only 6 passengers in sometimes less than 2 inches of water the skipper (a mere child who was previously the bus driver) went nuts and damaged the boat in the process. It was ruduculously brulliant! Having a Fergburger just before, however, wasn’t the best idea. As the old agage goes: “never eat within 30 minutes of a dozen 360 spins in a jetboat over rock”. The night before we’d been on a slower paced cruise on the lake’s 105 year old steam boat. A real life working steam engine was open for viewing! Although this time the kid shovelling coal into the furnace didn’t seem so stoked to be doing his job…but so Watt. Afterwards we even had time to catch some of the ladies tennis, where we got to see shorts so tight they gave new meaning to the term “player’s box”.

The best quote of our time in Q-town was from Lea as we sat at a bar, gazing over the view: “I like it here, let’s get a bottle”. It sums up our trip/life, but I’ve included it as a reminder to self to get this printed on a T-shirt for her, and would have used it as a headline had I not included so many ‘Royals’ references.

From QT we set of for a long drive to Doubtful Sound (in a Corolla, but we don’t care, we were drivin’ Cadillacs in our dreams). With so many Sounds to choose from and only one night allocated, it was super difficult for us to choose which one to visit (given we can’t choose a restaurant if we have more than one choice), so Doubtful seemed the most apt selection. There’s not much I can say about the night on the water, the photos say plenty, but still not enough. I guess it can be summed up by them naming the ship’s bar after me, “JAS’s bar” (see pics for proof). We swam in the 26 degree water, kayaked and we even had 5 munutes of silence to listen to the water, trees and birds and get an understanding of why they call these bodies ‘Sounds’**.

**Fun fakt: the sounds in the Fiordland national park are not really sounds, but fiords, carved out by glaciers back in the ’80’s.

Following our time on Doubtful Sound we rented a small, stone guest cottage on a winery in the Gibbston valley, a picture pretty valley just outside of Queenstown. We went to the Gibbston wide renowned Tavern, sat on the grass outside our place watching the moon rise over the mountains and went cruisin’ down the highway in the hot, hot sun listening to “How Bizarre” and visiting the wineries. Wanna know the rest? Hey….buy the rights.

After an amazing moon rise on the first night in Gibbston, we were very excited about watching the eclipse on night 2. Unfortunately, however, we managed to find ourselves covered by our second ex cyclone in almost as many weeks. Unlucky as the whole valley is pretty much a desert. I guess it only rains once in a super, blood, blue moon….

Not only did the ex cyclone ruin our moon, but most of the next day also as we were due to fly through it from Queenstown to Auckland. And as they say at Air NZ: “Wi’ll whither the wuther whativer the wuther wither ewe like it or not…”. As we sat at the airport, flight after flight was cancelled leaving us wondering if we were scheduled on the only Super cyclone proof plane they had available? We weren’t. Just a normal aluminium tube hurtling through monsoonal clouds at right angles, dropping 100’s of feet at a time before seeing any clear air at cruising altitude 40 minutes later. 30 minutes of normal cyclonic induced turbulence, then repeat the take off experience while landing. On the bright side, James’ bowels were cleared pre-flight in expectation of what was to come, so no troubles on board…apart from squeezing Lea’s hand so hard she lost feeling in 2 fingers…no bruises though.

After a number of amazing nights on the North island, we took the ferry from Wellington to Picton, through the Marlborough sounds. It was a three hour journey on a really bug shup, where they were so proud to announce their ‘world famous scones’ over the PA for only four fuffty and, adorably, ran a colouring competution for the kuds.

We had an interesting experience picking up our car in Picton, the struggling Fijian lady, who took as long to sort out one customer as her contimpories dud sux, finally got us into a car after being schooled by Lea while James stood back waiting to chip in with “you’d think they’d have the ‘Picton of the litter’ to choose from here…hahahahhahaa” But, thankfully, it didn’t come to that.

A short drive from Picton and we were in the Marlborough wine region, where the plethora of wines in their neat, sweet, petite rows make you feel like the world is safe and organised again…and winey. We stayed at a bnb which ended up to be on top of our own winery (after 5pm at least…a blessing which turned out to be a curse), where we spent the majority of our time looking over the view of the region.

Stunning location, stunning view, stunning wife, everything was going swimmingly when Lea decided to take that a tad more literally. We’d hired bikes and had vusuted many lovey cellar doors before Lea made the brave call (5 wineries in) to head 10km for Saint Claire, for little reason other than we’d had a strange experience with their wine at a Perth restaurant in 2007 and would never return again, but we won’t name names (unless you ask… it starts with the last and first letters of the alphabet…then ‘feranos’)…and we’d managed to find our way into a personal tour of the winery from a winemaker earlier in the day. Make sense?

Ok, slight digression there, but now we’re back on track…or at least Lea was for a minute. But then as she tried to change the song playing on our speaker, she took the idea of streaming to a new level and managed to ride into a creek** next to the cellar door. She survived with several big bruises, that people secretly blame on her husband anyway.

This biking day was also Australia Day and was on track to be the bist one ivver…until we managed to lock ourselves on our balcony. And by ‘we’ I mean the ‘we’ that had previously noticed the balcony’s door to tend to lock itself, so smugly took our keys out with us to watch the sunset. After resampling many of the day’s wines and solving the issue of world poverty (but being too drunk to remember how) we noticed the door had, as anticipated, locked us out. HAHA!! Stupid door, we have the keys, uddiot……but as it turns out they were keys to every other door than the balcony and everyone downstairs had gone home. Classic NZ humour.

In typical Stewart style we didn’t panic. Instead we crawled into fetal positions, cried and debated about who was keen to jump over the balcony..with ExStream Lea being first in line…yep, same girl who had, a few bottles earlier, managed to ride off a flat, bitumen road into a creek, was now almost insistent on jumping off a second storey ledge as if there were no more conceivable solutions. Luckily it didn’t come to this as we used our 2% phone battery to call our bike hire man to come and rescue us, our very own Marlborough Man.

In true Kiwi style, we can dufunutely say that of all the beautiful wine regions in the world we’ve vusuted, thus was surely the most recent….

**Lea would like to add the word “almost” before “riding into a creek”, but I thought it would spoil the flow, which is almost impossible to read as is, and based on the sounds I heard behind me, the bruises and, dare I say, sheepish look on her face, I’m not sure I’m convinced of the almost’s requirement.

Wilcome to New Zuland, Australia’s siventh and most choicest state! Almost…they could have bun, they may as well have joined, it’s so eerily familiar that we’ve been all ‘suxes n sivins’! They’re dollar is sumular, the cash notes, the roads, the North island scenery, the Draconian alcohol laws, the ANZAC memorials, pavlovas and smashed avos are all virry famuluar. So much like home we even drove past a Mountain named ‘Bruce’.

The only difference so far is the comedic accent they’re all sticking wuth to great iffict! But everyone is just so lovely that it’s hard to find anything to write about. And besides, taking the puss out of someone doesn’t quite sound right and we don’t want to come across as ducks.

It’s really only a minor difference in the accents (a lot of people have assumed we’re locals, or at least ‘Willingtonians’), but what a dufference! I have no idea what they thunk of us when we walk into a winery and order a ‘six pack’ to take away or when you spill wine on your lap and ask if they have any chux out the back to help clean it up. Make sure you answer correctly when you’re asked if you think the wine your tasting is ‘bitter’ than the last one and be careful describing your chardonnay as being ‘buttery’. Lea also pointed out that they must have had the least confronting of the punk movements over here, with the youths of the time struggling to choose between ‘hot punk’ or a more ‘pastel punk’.

Another difference is that all the fush n chups restaurants seem to be attached to Chinese restaurants. One can’t help but wonder which came first?? Did it start with a few dum sums and escalate from there?? Or vice versa? I guess it’s a bit chucken or the igg. (NB: ‘Chicken’ is what you do before boarding a plane over here.)

We flew in to Napier first, over the rugged country side, a patchwork of mountains and rivers that had cut beautiful valleys into the land. I’m not sure what they are called, but I think they’re gorgeous…

Napier is a cute seaside town full of art deco buildings ‘thanks’ to being razed by an earthquake in the early 30’s. And it didn’t take long for us to start enjoying the sumple pleasures in life, like screaming with delight when ‘Slice of Heaven’ plays on the car radio and the many pre-midday wine tastings being socially acceptable.

We caught up with the lovely Asha, vusuted some stunning wineries, had great dunner and tramped drove to the top of the Te Mata peak (not sure how that’s pronounced, but I guess you say tomato…I say Te Mata) before lunching in the Craggy Range vineyard below.

Next stop was Martinborough, a tiny country town surrounded by vineyards all within walking distance. Thus doesn’t really sound like our kind of town so we weren’t sure if we would like it there, but as it turns out, we dud. We perficted our own form of tramping as we drunkenly stumbled from winery to winery while watching others do the same on bike. We had’t seen this many ‘puss hids’ on bikes since….Rotto I giss??

Final location for North Island take 1, was The Wundy Sutty of Willington. We really enjoyed our two nights here, a thriving mitropolis with more cafes and restaurants per head than NY NY. And I thunk we managed to vusut thim all!!!

There are also more sheep per man in NZ than anywhere else in the world. And it’s noticeable! And to be fair to the stereotypes, they are quite pritty.

Fun fakt: the term “you beauty” actually started in NZ as “ewe beauty”, traditionally exclaimed by a farmer upon finding that spicial mimber of the flock. The phrase leverages the other famous exclamation of “eureka’, the dufference being instid of a fat guy yelling while inside a bath…he’s in…NZ…and there’s a sheep involved.