New Zealand in retrospect, pictures to follow

Wish I could say it's been completely "no news is good news" on the blog front, although I have to say the past week has been ... unusual.  I am typing this in the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel near Nadi, Fiji, where we have been since Sunday night, when we caught the last flight in from Sydney.  Our frequent flier miles only allowed this routing, via Nadi to LAX, so we decided to extend the layover and make it a holiday at the end of our sojourn.  I haven't uploaded pix from the fun we had last week so I will do a skeletal of our New Zealand trip in hopes of filling in a little.

Last few days in Sydney were filled with some social engagements (thanking people who had helped us, dinners etc) and some grading (there was less of a sense of urgency than sometimes, in part because the program finished earlier than the Davis quarter) and lots of packing / organizing.  We went to Alex's school concert, again marveling at how easy it is to meet people late in the game when you have something in common--if we were here for more time we would have a lot more of a social life than we did, which is both a positive and a negative, given my work habits!

By Dec 5th we had split our bags into a leave-in-Sydney pile and a take-to-New-Zealand pile, and and thanks to an incredibly generous offer from our friend and colleague Lorraine we were able to dump the Sydney pile in her storeroom and not store in a hotel for 10 days.  Then it was off to Christchurch on Air New Zealand, complete with the new "Welcome Aboard Air Middle Earth" inflight briefing that you can view on YouTube.  Pretty cute how the whole country has tapped into the marketing swing this way--probably the biggest thing the country has ever had in that line.

Thankfully all the arrangements that my sister Kate had made for us turned out great--including the weather: we checked into our little airport motel on the outskirts, then had dinner with Am's old friend Dave who drove up from Timaru (that's loyalty for ya) so we at least took him out for dinner.  He finised by taking us on a tour of what remains of the Ch-Ch downtown, which is incredibly sobering: after the earthquakes there are giant scars where buildings used to be, lots of street work, and a general sense of rolling-up-sleeves or else this place will die.  Most impressive to me was a 10-story Rydges hotel still standing but eerily dark, not a light on anywhere: condemned to come down like so many others because of internal structural damage. 

Next morning back to the airport for a short flight to Queenstown, the adrenalin-sport capital of the world.  Alex was impressed that the plane only had four seats across, and that there was no security check-in.  That said, he was pretty gripped when we started bouncing around over the Southern Alps.  The plan was that we would meet Kate Rob and Kieran in the airport when they arrived from Palmerston North, the closest airport to their home in Wanganui, and sure enough we were all together in an hour or so. 

Though I had had a great visit from Kate in July, I hadn't seen Rob in 20 years, and hadn't seen Kieran since he was 3, so it was all quite amazing.  We picked up our Toyota Previa rental and mashed all the Stenzel-Mel gear in before heading for our palatial motel in Q.  There was a little drizzle but nothing like what the place often features--Am and I took a little walk up the hill trying to find a view after I had bailed out to a cafe for some grading for a couple of hours.  Once again I marvelled at the ways NZ was set up for different types of tourists, from campers to conventional motel-dwellers.  These holiday parks / motor hotels all featured a variety of modes from tents to RV pads to self-contained units like the ones we packed into, with better appointed kitchens in some cases than our "boutique apartment" in Mosman.

Next day we drove down to Te Anau, winding through lake country redolent of the Tolkien movies, slotting in a picnic by the far arm of Lake Wakatipu in between rain showers, before another motel just across the road from Lake Te Anau from whence weather willing we would take a bus to a boat to Milford Sound.  That's when Kate's weather karma really kicked in: unlike the other 300 days of the year, we had beautiful clearing skies, enough recent rain that the waterfalls were running, AND the road to Milford was open again after being closed for several days by a slide. 

More: our deadpan-delivery bus driver, the amazing boat journey, the stunning drive, the glow-worm caves, the return to Q complete with sunny swims, last night in Q, then John learns to drive on the left in a rental car, up to Wanaka and thence over Haast Pass and dow to the West Coast, etc.