Skiing in slo' mo'

This was taken a few weeks ago when on a ski trip to Queenstown.  I appear half way through wearing a bright blue jacket.  It felt like I was flying down the slope, kicking up powder and blinding the skiers behind me, with danger and adventure the names carved on my skis.  The reality is a casual stroll in the park as children a fraction my size zip past me as a mere blur out of the corner of my eyes.... 

Well it’s about time I hear you say!

Sorry it has been a long time since I last wrote a bit of an update.  There are of course all of the same old excuses of being busy, work and holidays, but none of them can really be considered acceptable reasons to be so slack with keeping you up to date.

It is coming up to three years since we left Australia and headed across to New Zealand for a change of scenery and a bit of an adventure.  And the adventure continues.  Time has moved along at a pace that it hard to distinguish a difference between when we left Australia and what I did last week.  It all seems to have blurred in to one.  Maybe this is a sign of the adventure we are on, or maybe it is a sign of getting older.  Either way, it feels good.

We moved to a new house earlier this year. The little cottage we were living in was the original family home of our landlord, and she wanted to move back in after a relationship break-up.  There was no hurry for us to move so we took our time to search for the next great house to make our home.  We found one in April and moved what little we had with no fuss.  The new house is bigger, much newer and warmer so there were some nice changes.  It is also closer a tiny settlement which has a store and a great coffee shop (the only two buildings in the village) which we can walk to for any last minute supplies or a coffee in the sun on our days off.  It is also closer to the coastal town of Raglan, our most loved corner of New Zealand.  We did sell our cows though, which was a bit sad to see them go.  They all went to the same hobby farm somewhere near Auckland so I am sure they are happy.  The yard is bigger so more room for the dogs to run around and the view looks right out into the landscape compared to our last house which was nestled in a bit of a valley.  So, all up, it has been a good change in scenery.

We have been travelling around as much as time permits.  We spend a little over a week in Vanuatu in April.  We have gone out to a Pacific Island each year we have been here and so we hope to get to Tahiti next time.  We also travelled around the east coast of the north island which was the last of the regions in New Zealand that we had not yet conquered.  Can cross that one off the list now.  The most recent big trip ended just yesterday, after a week-long skiing/snowboarding trip to the South Island staying in Queenstown and Wanaka.  It was sunny the entire time so the skiing was great, although very bright, and school holidays had just finished so the place was relatively stress free.  Wanaka has been a favourite place ever since visiting there on our first trip to NZ and it has proved yet again why.  It was so peaceful and serene.  In many ways it reminded me of when I was living in Norway with the steep glacier formed valleys and countless waterfalls tumbling from the slopes.  Our next trip is already booked and that will again be to the South Island but we will go out to some of the islands that have become refuges for NZ’s rarest of birds as well as a visit to the sounds in Fiordland

Work is going well.  I am currently the acting Team Leader of Mammals which is a long way from what I thought I would get to do over here.  My boss is away on a long holiday and I got nominated to take on the role until she returns.  I have been filling in for her on her days off but nothing for as long as this.  What were they thinking, eh?  It is a good way to learn a lot very quickly and a small part of me will be disappointed when she returns.  There is an opportunity looming to become a team leader in the next few months, but there are so many other things to consider.  Like I started off saying, it has been three years and I find myself thinking of home more and more.  As for Phil, he is also growing a developing himself.  Apart from doing a lot of tiger training and becoming a primary keeper of the carnivore section, he is also one of the heads of the design team involved with building a new gibbon exhibit and modifying the tiger exhibit to accommodate more tigers.  Our year way from Australia to learn a few more tricks is really paying off for both of us.

The dogs are all good.  I am sure Flinders misses having goats to chase like he did in Australia, but we take them to the beach often and walking around the country roads around the house.  There is one goat down the road which likes to chase the dogs if they get too close, so that is their ‘fix’ of herding animals.  We also left our chooks at the previous house, so it’s just us and the dogs now.  A far cry from the days of our farm at Rockleigh back in Oz with all the goats, chooks, peacocks, pigeons, frogs, snakes, geese, emus, fish, guinea fowl and everything else.  I miss having lots of animals around us at home, but we really don’t spend as much time here as we did back in Oz.  Our days off are often used up going places and walking or skiing or just taking the dogs to the beach.  We wouldn’t have time to appreciate or properly care for anything else these days.  It will probably change upon our return to Australia although it has been good not having to organise someone to feed a hoard of critters when we go away.

As always, if you want to know more, I am still maintaining my blog that I started when I left Australia although I don’t update it as much as I would like.  It is now being archived by the National Library of Australia as material which they said was of national significance.  I’m not so sure about that, but just glad to hear that someone is reading it.

On this past holiday I promised I would try to write to family and friends more often so I hope this finds everyone happy and healthy and rest assured that I think of everyone often.

Hugs from Aoteroa

John

Never enough.

When reflecting upon holidays past, I often find myself wishing I had enjoyed and appreciated the time more than what I remember doing.  I know it doesn’t make sense really.  In such cases, the perceived act of hindsight can become a curse.  Now here I sit, on the last day of a magnificent holiday to the heart of the New Zealand Alps and I can sense that thought looming again.  It is just waiting to flood my head with guilt as soon as I am back on home soil.  The longing to have created more fun and joy during this holiday has already begun to creep in to my head.  And it is this which now confuses me because I knew it would happen so I did try to amplify my experiences, thoughts and impressions.   I looked at every minute detail of the panoramas, so as to not miss a thing.  I breathed the alpine air deeply, filling my lungs with mountain freshness in the hope of remembering it better.  I ate glorious food with passion, using all my senses – the smells, the colours, the textures.  And yet, here I sit, wishing I had done more………..and so I learn, it just isn’t possible.  I just have to sit back and relax in this moment of tranquillity.

 “Once you have travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

Did you know.....

In New Zealand it is illegal to wander the streets at night with your face blackened, and it is lawful to take a leak in the street provided that you maintain one hand on the rump of the horse while you leak, and you aim for the ground where the horse would leak onto. (Police Offences Act 1906).


Here are some more strange facts about New Zealand, just in case someone ever asks.....

	No capital city in the world is further south than Wellington.
	No part of New Zealand is more than 128 km from the sea.
	French Pass, which separates d'Urville Island from the South Island coast, is the only place in the world where two different levels of ocean can be seen at once.  This causes tremendously dangerous currents - sometimes the tide flows at up to 8 knots through the narrow Pass.  [The only time we went through there, we didn't know that.  Jeff said that was the closest he's ever come to putting our boat, Lady Fair, on the rocks.]
	More fresh water gushes up from cracks in the limestone at Waikoropupu, near Takaka, Nelson province, than from any freshwater spring anywhere in the world.  Over 2,100 million litres of water gush up every 24 hours.
	Fiordland National Park is one of the largest in the world at 1,228,348 hectares.  It is also one of the wildest and least populated.
	Fossil-bearing rocks in the Cobb Valley near Nelson have trilobites that are 550 million years old.
	Each year some 400 significant earthquakes are recorded in New Zealand, of which roughly 100 are likely to be felt without instruments, but aren't of sufficient importance to warrant public notice.  The biggest New Zealand earthquake in historical times was near Wellington on 23 January 1855.  It had a magnitude of about 8 on the Richter scale and was felt over about 940,000 sq km, tilting a block of land 50 m wide and 190 km long.  In Wellington the uplift was 1.5 m; great stretches of shore became permanently exposed (including what is now the airport).  The centre lay along the Wairarapa Fault, whose horizontal movement is estimated to have been at least 12 m compared with about 6 m for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  Despite this huge movement, only 12 people died in the quake, because Wellington was still sparsely populated at that stage.
	Less than 5% of the population of New Zealand is human - the rest are animals, giving one of the highest ratios of humans to animals in the world.
	The first all-female group of pallbearers was six sisters who carried their father's coffin in 1974.  Mr James O'Brien died on 1 June 1974, leaving eight daughters, 6 of whom officiated as pallbearers.
	More rainbow trout in the 2-3 kg category are caught annually in New Zealand than in the rest of the world put together.
	Energy consumption per head in NZ on a kilogram-of-coal equivalent is around 3,000 kg.  This compares with 6,845 in Australia, 10,888 in North America and 4,023 in Western Europe.
	New Zealand has more bookshops per head of population than any other country; one for every 7,500 people (compared with one for every 19,000 in England and one for every 50,000 in the USA).
	The shortest term of a New Zealand Prime Minister was seven days: Harry Atkinson was appointed on 28 August 1884 and resigned on 3 September 1884, beating the record of his immediate predecessor, Robert Stout, by six days.
	The youngest person ever elected to a city council in New Zealand was Miss Vicki Buck, who won a seat on the Christchurch City Council in a by-election in May 1975, at the age of 19.  Her majority was in excess of a thousand.  (Vicki Buck went on to become mayor of Christchurch.)
	A total of 194,000 men (67% of all NZ males between 18 and 45) served in World War II.
	There are more Scottish pipe bands per head of population in NZ than in Scotland