Quick one. I'm a little peed off with my new Handspring Visor which has developed a bad habit of crashing and losing its short term memory when I change the batteries (which it seems to need new ones of every 20 minutes) and I've lost a long piece I was going to post here as a result. However, I've been in Nelson (where I was before) learning to paraglide; I've now done three high (High!) flights and am halfway towards the basic PG1 certification. Here's the rest of the Nelson paragliding shots (there'll be more from Queenstown in the next edition!)
As my instructors Andrea and Richard left for the weekend, I went down in my new (New? it's 20 years old and cost $300 US) car to Hokitika. That's half way down the incredibly beautiful west coast of the South Island (of NZ). The first two hitchhikers were dour German scientist Mark and Sylvana, a glamorous blonde Swiss snowboard instructor. We saw the hanging bridge, a seal colony and the very cool pancake rocks at Pukitika National Park. My hitch-hikers bought me a beer after I dropped them in Greymouth. This was pretty freaky as I ended up narrowly escaping a drinkdriving charge (having initially failed a compulsory breath test then passing the more accurate one they use to check it) at the edge of town. No 4th Amendment here!! The trip down the very beautiful west coast of South Island NewZealand is here.
I had an interesting time at the Wildfoods festival in Hokitika, incluing eating HuHu grubs, grasshoppers, Mountain Oysters, etc, etc. All the photos are here. The full set includes me eating lots of disgusting things and some others including Patty, Jason and a couple of random Kiwis who's marriage I think I ended.. (This was the first place on my trip where I met many Americans, BTW).
I next went down to Franz Josef Glacier and had a great day being guided around inside the canyons, crevasses and tunnels up on the glacier. The Glacier walk is here.
I was supposed to go on a big hike (the Copland Track) with Patty from Oregon but she flaked and went without me a day earlier than we'd arranged. So instead, the next day, I went with a couple of hitch-hikers (Darrow from New York and Monika and Amelie from Germany) down to Wanaka, stopping off at a bunch of places including Ship Creek where we saw a wonderful impromptu show from the dolphins out in the waves. The Dolphin show
is here.
In Wanaka I went to the Puzzle World, played Golf (it was everyone's first time except for me but it only cost $10 NZ!) including parring 3 out of 9 holes (pretty flash, eh!) and on the Wednesday went on a beautiful hike with amazing views of the lake Wanaka, and went to the very fun Cinema Paradiso--a combined cinema/gourmet resturant run by a mad and amusing Scot. The movie was "Y Tu Mama Tambien" which is Mexican and full of sex. I tried in vain to encourage my hot date Nicola from Cockfosers into the spirit of things! Here's the drive to and fun in Wanaka up.
The shots of the Diamond Lakes trail in Wanaka, and my contunied paragliding adventures in Queenstown will be up soon. Oh yeah, I'm in Thailand again now, but you'd have guessed that wouldn't you!
