Author: tederick
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Home of the Horse Lords
Christchurch – Screaming out of Aoraki yesterday morning with a wet sky behind us and the buzz of the helicopter flight still on our mind lead to a quick chat about the quest for the Perfect Life, which, if it can be found anywhere, can probably be found here; we were thinking of the helicopter…
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Paradiso
Aoraki – It’s at the point now where we’re becoming playfully annoyed with the whole thing, coming around yet another corner to see yet another vista that must be witnessed and photographed and enthused over. Enough already, New Zealand – WE GET IT. Rocketing up from Wanaka through Twizel (Pelennor Fields – rah!), we arrived…
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Southern Cross
Wanaka – Every couple of days our landscape completely changes, though even by that notion I have to admit I never expected to come upon a friendly little beach community when arriving at Wanaka. All of a sudden the desire to keep pushing forward, forward, forward has been melted out of me – I could…
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Top of the world
Milford – Did we crank the Hobbit score, tracks 22 to 27, when driving a winding mountain road through wet forests in fog so thick you couldn’t see the tops of the mountains? Damn right we did. Day trip to Milford Sound today, which took us out of “regular New Zealand” and into “crazy Jurassic…
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At world’s end
Te Anau – a quiet, flat community in the middle of nowhere, whose purpose quite completely eludes me. It seems to be a way station for people headed elsewhere, but the elsewheres in question (Milford, Doubtful Sound, Keppler Track) are all a good distance further away. In the meantime here’s Te Anau, a town made…
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Breathless
On the Road – We departed the human-sized Venus flytrap that is Queenstown – we have heard several hundred variations of “I came here X years ago and never left” from every expat Brit, Aussie, Canadian and Scot we’ve come across, but have yet to meet any actual kiwis – and headed south. Queenstown Adventure…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “The Icarus Factor”
“Anbo-jyutsu! The ultimate evolution in the martial arts!” One is called upon to wonder exactly what keeps Riker, a career Starfleet officer, out of the captain’s chair that is trotted out for him so regularly on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (IRL, we know the answer: the producers want to keep him on the show.…
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Green ring around brown
Queenstown – a.k.a. the nexus of extreme activity for the entirety of the planet earth, Extremeopolis, where stores supplying equipment for various dangerous outdoor activities outnumber food establishments by a ratio of 60:1. On (our) Tuesday, and after a delicious first hike up and down Bob’s Peak, we made the mandatory stop at Fergburger and…
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Five flights and a bag
New Zealand – Some people “pack” “stuff” for long holidays; others show up on the other side of the world with nothing but the clothes on their back and figure shit out. Not that I intended to be in the latter category, but I’m a light packer anyway, and emergency tacky t-shirt shopping to replace…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Time Squared”
“We may be on a road that has no turns.” From the ridiculous to the sublime – if “The Royale” is my least favourite episode of the year, “Time Squared” is certainly its opposite number. I flipped my lid over this thing when it first aired, achieving something like a contact high by the time…