Breathtaking Bora Bora

Here is the video of Jude swimming with the sharks as promised. You can see from the video that no pushing or shoving was involved and there were quite a few sharks around.




Whenever anyone talks about exotic tropical islands in the South pacific, most of us picture blue oceans, pure white sand beaches and grass huts perched on stilts over the water. Bora Bora turned out to be exactly like the brochures promised.

Can you imagine waking up in your little private hut and looking out the front window to see Dolphins jumping next to your porch.

We rented a cool little yellow dune buggy to set off and expolore the island on our own.

There is only really one road which goes around the island but there are great views no matter where you look.

Bora Bora is actually an older volcano that has had a coral reef build up around the outside and then the mountain slowly sank while the coral was built up higher and higher. What is left is series of coral reefs and atolls around the outside enclosing a huge shallow lagoon and a relatively small volcanic mountain in the middle. Here you can see the ship parked inside the only passage formed by a river outflow throught the coral reef.

Many of the hotels located here are on the outside perimeter islands with only a dock for the ferry service on the center island.

Along the southwestern shore of the island we found a beautiful beach where you could walk out in the lagoon for a mile without the water getting higher than your chin. The beach just seemed to be calling to us so we had no choice but to float the afternoon lazily away in the warm calm turquoise waters. It just seemed like the perfect place to relax and watch the world drift by.

Unfortunately we only had one day in Bora Bora but I have a feeling that we may be back someday.

The Exotic Islands of Tahiti and Moorea

The second stop planed on the cruise itinerary was the island of Raratonga in the Cook Islands but unfortunately, the seas were too rough for us to land so all we could do was scan the shore and wave as we circumnavigated the island. The ship then headed off for French Polynesia and the island of Tahiti but we did get the good news that we would dock a half day early and get an extra night in the main port of Papeete .


Most of the shops were closed but we did manage to find a bar which also was a micro brewery and stopped with Mike and Maree from Australia for a pitcher or two. One of the great parts of a cruise is meeting lots of new people and on this cruise again we were lucky to have a great group at our dinner table.

The next day we set out on a circle island tour to check out the sites and learn more about Tahiti and its people. This bay is where the Mutiny on the Bounty happened and also where several of the movies were filmed.Our tour guides were very well informed, especially about the native flora and we stopped at several waterfalls and botanic gardens.

The plants were very colourful as you can tell by these huge blooms.

The next stop, within the same chain of islands in French Polynesia, was the island of Moorea which we knew very little about but turned out to be even more beautiful than Tahiti. Jude and I thought we would start out with a similar island tour but as the old van we were riding in started to chug up the steep hill to the Belvedere Lookout point, a rad hose blew and clouds of steam started to spew out from under the hood. We started to panic and at one point almost began to walk back towards the ship but I filled up some water bottles at a nearby stream and the van managed to run well enough to chug back down the hill and get us back to port. Not wanting to risk another tour (although the same guy convinced a new group to head off with him!) we grabbed a jeep taxi to a beach a few miles down the road.

This proved to be a wise move as the beach was gorgeous with shallow blue water, pure white sand and even a coral reef to snorkel on. Here, with the help of Photoshop, I put together a panoramic view of the spot.

In the afternoon we headed out in a covered boat to the edge of the reef for a tour that was a little more adventurous than we expected. We knew that the area had wild Stingrays that would congregate to be fed their daily meal of fresh fish but we didn’t expect them to be that aggressive as you stood in the waist high water with dozens of the creatures coming right up and actually running right into you.

The guide was also very knowledgeable and showed us how they move, how they eat and where the stingers were located on the tails. If that wasn’t enough what followed next freaked out Jude and mostly everyone else a bit as a dozen or so black tipped reef sharks moved in for their share of the fish as well.

Here I am diving down to get a closer look at these scary looking fish that were circling just off the shallow sand spit we were swimming on.

I didn’t think Jude would ever go out and swim with the sharks but she took to it really well so I wanted to get a blog worthy video to commemorate the event. All I asked was that she back up a bit so I could get more of the sharks in the frame but when a gave her a very gentle push in the right direction she didn’t seem to appreciate my help and mumbled something about the value of her insurance policy into the mouth piece of her snorkel. Oh well, I did manage to get some decent shots despite her uncooperative nature, women!


(I will publish the video when we get back on Hawaii, I tried from the ship and it wouldn't quite work).

Bay of Islands, Auckland and Waitomo Caves

The Bay of Islands is well known as the beach resort area for New Zealand so we booked a nice little apartment right on the beach and headed up for a look. It’s now late autumn here so the weather is a bit cooler and changes almost constantly. When we headed out on our inter island cruise the sun was shining but a few minutes later a rain shower would come across, soon be replaced with more sunshine and great rainbows. This one was interesting in that it was a sideways rainbow and I caught it while a sailboat was coming across in front.

We didn’t find the pot of gold at either end but we had a pleasant cruise through the islands, listening to their history (Captain Cook came through here and mapped the area on his second voyage) and the weather turned sunny again as we approached the “Hole in the Wall” at the furthest point from the harbour during the cruise.

The next two days were spent in Auckland, which is by far the largest city in New Zealand at 1.2 million people. It is even more cosmopolitan than Toronto with many Polynesian and Asian immigrants along with a large Maori population. Auckland also has a smaller version of the CN tower, which you can see in this picture.

What really makes Auckland special is that it has two large harbours, one on the west side of the island and one on the east side and more pleasure craft (over 135,000) than any other city in the world such that it is called the city of a thousand sails. Here is a view across one of the boat harbours and you can see what they mean.

We also made a trip out to the Waitomo caves so see the famous (?) glow worms which were well know to the Maori but only discovered by the European settlers about 100 years ago. While in the cave we walked more than 1.5 kilometres underground including several chambers with different types of crystal formations, like these stalactites perched over our heads.

The highlight of the tour are the glow worms, which are actually fly larvae, so they should really be called glow maggots but that didn’t really seem to attract many tourists so they stuck with glow worms. They are about the size of a matchstick with the head of the match being the part that glows and it is used to attack other flies and bugs towards they. The worms attach themselves to the roof of the cave and drop sticky web filaments down to trap the bugs which they then haul up and eat. It’s really hard to get a good picture due to the dark conditions but you should be able to see the webs hanging down in the bottom of the picture and the blue dots at the top are the glow worms. In the main cavern there were thousands of them so that it looked like the stars out on a clear night sky at the cottage.

We are now on the Celebrity cruise ship the Millennium, headed back towards Hawaii with a few stops in between.

Here is a picture of us as we sailed out of the Auckland harbour at night with the lights of the city behind us.
It will take about two weeks to get back to Hawaii with several stops at some of the Polynesian Islands along the way. Here I am taking over for Captain Stubbing and taking the ship out for a spin. How hard can it be to find one little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Well if the blog ends here, you’ll know why!

Geysers, Zorbing and Hobbiton

After a bit of shopping and touring around in Wellington, the next stop on the North Island was Rotorua. The whole area is geo thermally active so that when you look at say a park or even a schoolyard in town, an area of bushes and trees will be fenced off and steam will be rising up from the ground. Depending upon the wind direction, you can usually get a whiff of sulphur in the air, even inside the hotel. There are a number of large Thermal PowerStation’s scattered around the countryside as well.
We visited the Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland to have a closer look at the Lady Knox geyser which was discovered just over 100 years ago. Here is a picture of the geyser going off at 10:15am, right on schedule.

In the park you can walk right up to and even stand inside the hot steam and sections of the water are bubbling away right beside you. The smell isn’t the most pleasant (or is that just that I have been using the same hiking boots for 3 months).




Here is the champagne pool with the multicoloured artists palette pool in front. All the colours are from the various minerals contained in the water which includes gold and silver.




In the afternoon we decided to try something we had never done and was invented in New Zealand… Zorbing!! We dove (ya like superman) into a clear plastic ball, with some warm water inside and were shoved down basically a ski hill! Here you can see the two of us flopping around inside the huge ball, bouncing down the hill.




At the bottom of the hill they unzipped the door and we looked like drowned rats, but it was a lot of fun!


The next day we drove out to Hobbiton (in Matamata), which is the site that Peter Jackson chose to film the Hobbit scenes in Lord of the Rings. The site was and still is a sheep farm so they gave a sheep shearing demonstration.



Jude also got to feed some of the lambs running around the farm.





Some of the original burrows used in the movie remain and the tour describes to what extent they would go in order to remain true to the Tolkien books. Here is a view looking up the hill with the Hobbit houses in view, minus the flowers, paint and hedges that were in the original movie.



We are sitting in front of Bags End where Bilbo lived and where a number of scenes were shot. In the movie there was an oak tree overhanging this house because it was described in the book. Since the location did not have a huge tree over this spot they cut one into pieces and put it back together including attaching by hand thousands of oak leaves and branches for just 30 seconds of time in the movie!


I always knew that Jude had me in the palm of her hand…..but I didn't think she could turn me into a hobbit!




Tomorrow we continue heading north up the North Island to the subtropical Bay of Islands area and then we will head south to the largest city in New Zealand, Auckland.

Milford Sound, Bungy Origins and Mount Cook

The drive to Milford Sound has been described as one of the most scenic in New Zealand and the area is well known for the “Milford Track” which is a 53.5 Km walk that starts at Te Anau and ends at Milford Sound. About 14,000 people per year do the 5 day hike (we thought about it for about one millisecond) so you need to book ahead and you can only stay in park huts, no camping is allowed. The area is also well known for rainy weather, with 7 meters of rainfall average per year, but we picked a perfect day to drive out to the sound. This first picture is from right next to the highway, along the Milford Track and shows a crystal clear mountain stream in the foreground and the snow capped peaks in the background.

Even though this next picture is the best one I have taken on the entire trip so far, it still really does not give you the full impact of being there and seeing it live. This is the spectacular view of Mitre Peak and Milford Sound that you would get after hiking 5 days through a mountain rainforest along the track, or drive 2 hours along winding roads and through a 1.5 km tunnel right through the last mountain as we did.

One of the best kept secrets in New Zealand is the sandflies which aren’t really shown in the brochures or talked about much in the guide books. They are a lot like our black flies but they bite harder and don’t disappear after two weeks, Judy wasn’t impressed! The pennisula you saw in the last picture is actually called Sand Fly Point and it marks the end of the Milford Track. Can you imagine spending 5 days hiking through the bush to come out to such a beautiful view and then be chased back by a swarm of the little biting buggers!
We boarded the Milford Wanderer for a 3 hour nature cruise through the sound which we were told is misnamed because it’s actually a fiord. Apparently, sounds are formed by rivers and fiords are formed by glaciers so this should have been called Milford Fiord. Whatever you call it, it is a beautiful and very special place with almost an eerie calm and silence to it.

The majestic cliffs plunge from a height of 1692 meters into the dark, almost black waters and there are waterfalls and lush vegetation as well. In some spots, the steep cliffs bear the scars of “tree avalanches”. Due to the lack of topsoil, the tree roots knit together to support their common weight. After the trees reach a certain age, they start to rot and weaken. During a heavy rainfall, which happens almost every day, the tree roots can give way and the whole mass plunges down the slope into the water.

The water is dark due to the amount of freshwater, from all the waterfalls and streams, floating on the surface of the seawater. In this picture (and the one above) you can tell the relative size of the peaks by the “small” boat in the lower right hand corner, which is actually about three stories high and about 90 feet long!

The sound is about 15 Km long but very narrow in sections and was actually missed by Captain Cook as he sailed by so another explorer (who I can’t remember the name of) named it after the wife of his boss “Milford”.

There are dolphins and even penguins there at times which we didn’t get to see but we did come across some seals basking on the rocks. They like these rocks because there is usually a breeze which helps keep the sand flies off.

That same day we drove back to stop again at Queenstown, on our way back to Christchurch and the road followed the Kawarau river. One of the bridges over this river was the site of the first commercial bungy jumping in the world so we stopped and I grabbed a picture. No, this is not me jumping off the bridge, I decided that it wasn’t on my “must do list”. Apparently it was on our daughter Jessica’s list because she called us two days later after she did a tandem bungy in Nanaimo with her friend Devon, much to Jude’s dismay! (Don’t worry Nana, Jess is still in one piece)

One of our best lunch stops was just outside a little town called “Twizel”, believe it or not, on the shores of Lake Pulaki, with Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain, clearly visible across the lake. The lake colour is caused by the limestone sediment in the glacier runoff which is where the lake gets its water from.

The area around Twizel was also used in the filming of Lord of the Rings due to the expansive grassland plains with few trees and the mountains looming in the distance. The battle scene with the large elephant like creatures was filmed here.
After a day of touring in Christchurch we are turning in our Campervan and headed to Wellington on the North Island.

I've had trouble updating the blog lately (sorry Trish!) due to the slow and unreliable connections at some of the places we have stayed. In some cases I couldn't even upload one picture without the connection crashing. We just take for granted in Canada high speed cheap internet access but in Australia and New Zealand you pay by the minute or even by the MegaByte and it's not usually very fast. Many people don't have access at home so there are many internet cafe's around and that's where I am now.

Here is the video of the Shotover jet from the last blog, hopefully now you can see how much fun it was.

Glaciers, Canyons and Hobbits

We stayed in Nelson overnight which is almost right at the north end of the South Island, if that makes sense. Most of the things in New Zealand have fairly basic names (ie. North Island, South Island) their one dollar coins are called one dollar coins and even a large bridge over a gorge with a tumbling river below is usually called Bridge 4208 or something plain like that. We then started a long drive down the west coast which is really spectacular between Westport and Greymouth with turquoise waters, high cliffs and pounding surf.


Our next stop was the Franz Josef glacier and we hiked a little ways up the river bed until we came across a rope barrier that was there to allow only guided tours to get closer to the ice wall. Apparently a few years ago two hikers were injured by falling ice so they are more careful now. If you look closely at the bottom right side of this picture there is a tiny line of people which gives some idea of scale since the peaks around the glacier are about 3000m high.

The next day we woke up in Queenstown, on the shores of beautiful lake Wakatipu , and the extreme sports capital of the world. This is where modern Bungy jumping was invented. We had the choice of whitewater rafting, skydiving, paragliding, jet boating, sledging, tramping and of course ten kinds of bungy jumps including swings. We decided on Jet Boating up the Shotover Canyon and only later read in the paper that a local driver has charges pending after someone had been killed in a jet boat accident (but with a different company than the one we used).

The ride was super exciting, especially when the boat comes within inches, at high speed, from smashing on the rocks.

(note, I tried to download a video into this spot but it got hung up so after 5 trys I have given up until we get somewhere with a faster internet connection)

The area around Queenstown was a major location for all three Lord of the Rings movies so we trekked up a hill called Deer Park Heights to see exactly where a number of scenes were filmed. The hill overlooks Queenstown and has great views of the “Remarkables” , a north south mountain range with rocky peaks. Here is the view from the hill with the Kawarau river in the foreground, which was also used throughout the movie as the “Anduin” in Pillars of the Kings.

This rock marked LOR 6 was the spot where the Rohans look over the cliff for Aragon and where in the battle with the Wargs he gets dragged off his horse, for all you LOTR junkies (I know this would make sense to you Lucia)!

The next spot marked LOR 2 is where Gimli falls off his horse.

This area was used for other movies and still had a fake Korean Prison which was built for the Disney movie “The Rescue”. It also had a number of animals running around that you could feed. Here is Jude feeding the Alpacas with the lake and Queenstown down below.

I even managed to make some friends here too! Funny how friendly they are when they think you are handing out food.

We are headed even further south to the famous Milford Sound to take a cruise through the fiord.