Blog

Last month (December 2019), John and I allowed three days to cover what we could of the top half of the west coast of the South Island by car, starting from Nelson. What a mistake! Just shoot down to Hokitika from our Westport-base, and then up to Karamea we'd thought. But it wasn't easy.  As the drama of the Tasman Sea whipping at beaches and rugged cliff faces,  prehistoric-looking copses of nīkau standing perfectly straight and tall, and the rātā splashing red along the hills unfolded, we slowed down in places to nearly a crawl, and stopped often. [caption id="attachment_495" align="aligncenter" width="2379"] Rugged west coast[/caption] But first there was Westport which sits  just behind where the Buller River meets the sea. A lovely two-storied 1860s house remodeled into a hostel,…

John and I had a wedding to attend in Melbourne in February 2019. In spite of the time of year, we added Alice Springs to our itinerary. I've visited every capital in Australia, and with my family - I was 10 - lived briefly in New South Wales, then later when I was 15, we were two years in Queensland. However until this trip, I'd never been to the 'Red Centre.' Alice Springs - of Nevile Shute's A Town Like Alice, and Uluru fame, sits nearly 300kms north of the South Australia border in the Northern Territory. 29,000 people live there and the temperature sat at, or just under, 40 degrees while we were learning about the middle of Australia. [caption id="attachment_327" align="aligncenter" width="763"] Looking over one part of Alice…

Over three thousand metres high in fact! While in Peru in August, I visited Hauraz, a small city north and inland from Lima. It is snuggled against the foothills of Cordillera Blanca -a small mountain range not part of the Andes, yet according to my research, nearly as high as the Himalayas. Here I found a laid-back town in a basin where wild water from the snowy mountains still rushed over huge rocks down through its centre, and sheep lay on the side of a main street even though there was a footpath, trussed up like chickens, and big swathes of greenery were sold as food for the cuy (guinea pigs), which were bred in the kitchens of some of the locals. Huaraz suffered a huge earthquake in 1970 and…