New Zealand Synopsis

I’ve been procrastinating on my blog lately. However, it is time to bite the bullet and catch up on things. Here goes.

My December-January shift really flew by. As I had been doing mainly 4 week shifts, it was the longest shift I’d had in over 6 months (37 days). A couple of things helped speed it along. The first was that I was extremely busy for about a 3 week period relating to correctly carrying out our heavy year end accounting procedures. The other thing was an epiphany of sorts. I’ve been working here over two years and finally realized that getting a decent night’s sleep makes a huge difference. In the past, I would always sleep from 10pm-5am. In December, I decided to add an hour by going to sleep at 9. Not only did it give me more energy, but it also made the days go by quicker (work-sleep-work).

Like always, I was ready to get out of here when my departure date came. I departed Dubai at 8pm to Singapore. Since I was not traveling on my default route (back to Canada), I had to downgrade from business class to economy in order not to have to pay. I had to do the same to go to Brazil last year. I do admit that I have gotten a bit soft by traveling business class the past few years, but I will never ever complain about a free flight. The flight to Dubai was about 8hrs followed by a short transit stop and then another 11hrs to Auckland. All went very well and I arrived at the hostel at 1am to find that Melissa had safely made it to NZ about 12 hrs earlier from Canada.

Our intent in going to New Zealand was to see as much of the country as possible and experience some of the amazingly diverse countryside that we had heard from others. To accomplish this, we picked up a rental car in Auckland and spent just over 3 weeks touring around before dropping the car in Christchurch. In the end, we put 5,000 KM on but that was peanuts compared to the monster road trip we did in the summer. We stayed either in hostels (while in the cities) or holiday parks. The holiday parks are simply campgrounds that have small cabins to rent. They all have shared kitchen facilities and averaged about $50 CDN/night.

New Zealand has experienced a sharp increase in tourism since the blockbuster ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies came out a few years back. Between that and traveling mid-summer, we pre-arranged all of our overnight stops which was good as it took the pain of dealing with all of that away.

The country is gorgeous with similar diversity to Canada but only a small fraction of the size. This made it a great place for a road trip as you could experience very different scenery all within the same day. The highlights for us were the two kayak trips (one on the ocean and the other in the massive fjords of Milford Sound) and the day hike on the Fox Glacier, one of only a few glaciers in the world that isn’t retreating.

The costs in NZ are reasonable when it come to food and lodging. Gas was a bit more than home, but not much. The tourist trips and attractions were quite expensive though. Luckily, we are quite resourceful when on the road, so our vacation was fairly cheap. Throw in the free flights and it was a bargain.

On my last day in NZ, Melissa and I flew from Christchurch to Auckland. After a short transit time, I continued on to Dubai and she headed into the city for a few more days before heading to Perth, where she is right now. I am back in the routine of work, which suits me well after being in a different bed every night in NZ. I am spending my free time doing a bit of research for our next stop in Asia. 25 days to go.