Month: October 2018

October 27-29

Wanting to round out our Australia visit a bit, and on the recommendation of our good buddy Leigh from the Antarctica and Capri portions of our trip, we found our way to the Northern Territory to visit Uluru. We made it to the Outback! We made it to the bush!

Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, is a large sandstone rock formation. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. It is a sacred site to the Pitjantjatjara Anangu who are the Aborigines in the area. The name Uluru come from the Anangu. The name Ayers Rock comes from 1873 when a surveyor named William Grosse saw the landmark and named it in honor of the Chief Secretary of South Australia at the time, Sir Henry Ayers. The land was inhabited for over 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived. In the 1920’s the land was declared an Aboriginal reserve with the first European settlements beginning in the 1940s. The Australian government returned ownership of Uluru to the Anangu in 1985.

Our first view of Uluru:

Except that isn’t Uluru. It’s actually Mount Connor which is the site from which Grosse first saw Uluru. So we kept driving a bit further through this incredible expanse of nothing but dust, clay, pockets of grass, some bushes and cows who roam freely on the road making the drive quite dangerous.

Uluru is one of Australia’s most recognizable natural landmarks and stands 1142 feet high with a circumference of 5.8 miles. We chose to hike on the path around the rock which ended up being just about 6 miles long.

A theme you’ll find in this post is that we didn’t prepare properly for this trip to Uluru. I was in dark pants and a dark shirt and we were worried about hiking 6 miles in the middle of the day in full sun and heat.

What we should have been worried about was the incredible hoard of aggressive flies that attacked us for the roughly two hour hike.

I am not standing still in that picture. I am walking with a brisk pace and the flies are just content to hang out on me and relax until they are rested enough to dive bomb my ears again. It was basically an exercise in not going crazy.

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It’s a shame because the hike would have been really enjoyable if we weren’t trying to finish as fast as humanly possible. The rock formation is incredible and there is definitely a sacred feel to it.

Most of the holes and ridges in the rock are caused by rain runoff.

I would definitely recommend people come visit, but with a fly net covering their face. Other people, better prepared, had them. This is a disadvantage of nonstop travel – you don’t always do enough research before arriving to a location.

Uluru has great cultural significance for the Anangu people. There are many Anangu traditions and stories that accompany Uluru. Apparently the Anangu women were the story tellers in the communities and were responsible for keeping the traditions. Many of the tales correspond to cuts and boulders at Uluru which speak of serpent beings, war and death.

The stories we read about spoke of morality and the proper way to behave. In cases of people making the wrong choices by stealing or being lazy, they were murdered and their bodies were left at Uluru as a reminder to future generations. There was also a great story that outlined a woman’s requirement to trust her instincts and protect her family at any cost, no matter how brutal. The stories were passed down from grandmother to granddaughter as family inheritance.

In the picture below it looks like a profile of a skull.

With such dry weather, there is obviously a constant concern of fires. In the picture above, it seemed like a fire had just swept through this bunch of trees. I could even still smell the charred smell, although Michael disagreed.

The holes in the below rock come from marsupial moles. They spend most of their time underground and only come out after rain. They are blind, have soft, golden-colored fur, and are small enough to fit in your hand. They use their front paws like spades to tunnel horizontally just under the surface.

The flaky surface of Uluru results from the chemical decay of minerals and it looks rusty because it… you guessed it… is rust. The sandstone has iron in it which turns to rust when exposed to oxygen. Chemistry.

Did you know that eucalyptus covers roughly 227 million acres of Australia? Me neither! It is the tallest known flowering plant on Earth.

The scent of eucalyptus is overpowering in many areas that we’ve visited in Australia. I love the smell. It makes me think of walking into a Ben Franklins craft store, which then makes me think of penny candy.

One of the main features of Uluru is that it appears to change colors depending on the time of the day and the year. Most significantly it glows red at sunrise and sunset.

We were excited to see Uluru at sunset, so we sat around for a few hours to see the crazy red glow of the rock!

Getting closer!

And then this happened:

Beautiful clouds, but we lost the sunset behind them. So we didn’t get to see the amazing red glow. Time to get on the road and drive back.

Besides the plethora of cows, there were also kangaroo crossing signs. We saw a few unlucky kangaroo that seemed to have been hit by unlucky cars. Michael caught a glimpse of a few running along the road later that night which required slamming on the breaks and some added anxiety. This was just after another incident where we had to slam on the breaks to avoid hitting three cows that were hanging out on the road. With no streetlights, driving at nights was a mistake on our part, but we were unprepared. We had planned on driving out one day, staying in a hotel and driving back the next day. But by the time we looked into hotels, the few that were in the area were all sold out. All of them. So instead we had the good fortune of driving back to Alice Springs the same day. It was an incredibly tense drive, but Michael really nailed it.

We stayed in the nearest large town, Alice Springs, which is 280 miles away from Uluru and is the third-largest town in the Northern Territory. The town lies on the Todd River, although that river is typically dry – as you can see from this picture I took while running along the river. Google maps thinks there is water there.

Although we experienced no problems while we were in town, Alice Springs has a lot of issues with strong racial divide. From what we could tell it was definitely a poor town with problems typical of a poor town. There were quite a few people living under the bridges and wandering around town who seemed to be homeless and/or unemployed. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza that is next door to the casino. We walked over our first night to get dinner and the casino is like a casino you see in a poorer community. The place is depressing with people whose eyes have glazed over from staring at the screens mindlessly popping their paychecks into machines.

The city center was not much better. It had a very depressed feeling to the entire town with many of the stores and restaurants closed when we wandered through late afternoon on a Saturday.

We have now spent a few weeks in New Zealand and Australia, two countries that often seem too good to be true. The locals are kind and have a relaxed attitude towards life, and both countries really have an excess of natural beauty. It is a bit of a (very selfish) relief to find out that these countries have their own problems. Well Australia at least. New Zealand may still be perfect. We had heard anecdotes about racism towards Aborigines in Australia, and similar to some of the problems we have in the US right now, there is a lot of animosity towards non-white immigrants.

While in Barossa I had the chance to watch the 2008 Baz Luhrmann movie, Australia, with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It was a bit long, which made it feel that much longer when I made Michael watch it just a few hours ago. But I think the film helped me understand at least a sliver of Australia’s history with the Aborigines. It spoke of the “Stolen Generations” which were the mixed-raced children who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and put in church missions for roughly 65 years ending in the 1970s. It’s shocking to me that it was still happening so recently. It is believed that between 10 and 30 percent of indigenous Australian children were taken during this time. The thought was to assimilate the children into white society.

Not surprising, the children of the Stolen Generations ended up less likely to have completed a secondary education, three times as likely to have acquired a police record and twice as likely to use illicit drugs verses Aborigines who grew up in their ethnic communities.

All of that info is from Wikipedia and I’m by no means even close to being properly educated in this area. However, the movie helped shine a bit of light on it and helped me to understand more about the history of this area. It was also a pretty entertaining love story set in the Australian Outback. If you have a chance to see it, you should. Michael even enjoyed it despite his groaning about watching it originally. I found it on Netflix, but it may not be available on Netflix in the US.

Tomorrow we will be flying back to a major city: Sydney!

October 23-26

The next stop on our tour de Australia is Shiraz country: Barrosa Valley. We flew into Adelaide and then drove an hour out of town to our delightful airbnb in the small town of Angaston. We had a couple of days where we drank great wine, cooked in the airbnb and relaxed. Here’s a hilltop view overlooking a sculpture garden and the valley:

The Winery Rundown

Thorne-Clark: first winery and a big hit. We especially loved their big fancy bottles of Shiraz (no surprise we like the expensive ones).

Henschke: this winery sells $800 bottles of wine called Hill of Grace. We didn’t sample that wine. We did try some of their other stuff which was pretty good. They have extensive distribution in the US so we’ll be on the lookout for that when we’re back. Also, Hill of Grace can be found in the US if any of you are looking for a homecoming present for us.

Rockford Wines: this place was pretty cool – really solid wine and great atmosphere.

Lambert Estates: we liked these reds, but I was more pumped by the name and sent pictures off to my friend Cris to try to get a friends and family discount… no luck.

Also, Lamberts had all the hokey signs that I equal parts love and hate:

Langmeil: this was some of Michael’s favorite from the region.

David Franz: this winemaker is the son of Peter Lehman which is one of the really huge, old producers in the region. His dad sold the family winery some time ago to a huge corporation and now David runs a small winery. The space was beautiful and a great chance to relax and check out the view.

Yalumba: these wines were great, especially the Cab Sauv, and they had possibly the best rose of the trip.

Plus Yalumba has a coopery on site where they make their own oak barrels. How cool is that?

Elderton: this place had beautiful grounds and the wines were delicious, but the place was a bit pretentious.

Yelland and Papps: this was one of our favorite stops. It is a small shop with a husband and wife team. The wines were all easy drinking and super accessible. Plus we liked the guy a lot. It had more of a brewery vibe than a winery vibe.

Besides the great wine, I told you there was delicious food. We had a great Asian fusion dinner at a place called fermentAsian. Points for the clever name. This place had the highest recommendations from everyone we spoke to which is hilarious because before the recs we had actually walked by and I noted how terrible the place looked, based strictly on this sign:

The fish just looks gross. The recs were all absolutely correct and the food was incredible, but that picture is icky fish.

The best food we had though was the stuff Michael grilled for us:

That steak was so good! Plus Michael tried his hand at baking fresh bread and I tried my hand at baking boxed brownies. Neither were our best attempts.

We nabbed some pretty good fruit and vegetables while we were in town as well – some great strawberries, asparagus and rock melon which is what Aussies call cantaloupe. Why did the two melons have a long engagement?

We also got a few good runs in. The area was a bit hilly, but we did find a nice bike path.

Now there was a “danger falling rocks” sign that made me a little nervous to run through this area. But otherwise the views were great!

We had a wonderful time exploring the area. After the younger wine regions in New Zealand, it was cool to see some old vines again.

Look at how gnarly that is! Some of the vines in the region are over 130 years old. That’s old. This is our last wine region of the trip and although we’ve loved checking out all of the different styles of wines, we’re a bit burnt out on wine tasting. We’re ready for our next Australian adventure!

October 17-22

We arrived in our final country before heading back to the United States. Round two of Australia! This time we started in the southern most part – Tasmania – which is an island state of Australia. Tasmania was originally settled by the British as a penal settlement in 1803.

There are some cool animals in Tasmania. We didn’t get any photos, but we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a few of them. So all of the below pictures are hijacked from google images.

Wombats – they’re about three foot long with stubby tails and the google picture is pretty cute. We didn’t see any in real life, but Tasmanians loves their wombats. There were statues of them and habitat groups raising funds for them everywhere we went.

Platypuses – Michael saw one of these swim by while we were fly fishing. Apparently you only find platypuses in the wild in Australia (including Tasmania). Also, platypuses are the only mammals that lay eggs instead of having a live birth. I thought live birth was a requirement for mammals. Apparently it’s not. To be a mammal you have to have a neocortex, hair, and mammary glands. The neocortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for sensory perception, cognition, certain types of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language. The more you know…

Wallabies – the term wallaby is an informal name for any macropod that is smaller than a kangaroo. Michael saw one of these while we were driving with our fishing guide.

Tasmanian devils – unfortunately we didn’t get to see any of these.

I know, I know… but the joke is just too easy and too funny. Plus the cartoon version is much cuter that the real deal:

As mentioned, we got out of the city one day to do some fly fishing at Arthur’s Lake with our trusty guide, Glenn. There is hope that we may be able to get a few more pictures from that day, but for now we’re only working with this:

We should have gone fishing in New Zealand but the timing didn’t work out. So instead we had Glenn take us out on a pretty unsuccessful trip. It was a good chance for me to work on my casting. Lots of practice. Lots of casting. Not a single bite. Plus the weather was pretty cool and even though we had waders on we were chilled early on. But Glenn was a really interesting guy who had some great stories about living in Tasmania and fishing in Tasmania. I think we’re both glad we did it and it was great being more intimately involved in nature, but we both were pretty willing to head back into the city at the end of that day.

About 40 percent of Tasmania’s population lives in Hobart which is the state capital. This is also where we stayed for most of our visit. We loved Hobart.

It had great seafood, a cool harbor vibe and the largest market in Australia every Saturday which we were pumped to check out.

I wish I could say that Michael bought that hat. We didn’t buy anything too crazy, but we did do some replacement shopping. Michael got new jeans and new casual shoes and I got a new purse. The past year had done a number on this poor purse. With broken clasps and broken zippers, it was no longer the super safe and secure travel purse that I started this journey with. Plus I spilled a bunch of sour cream on it which is just really gross.

Thank you for your service.

Besides the market and the harbor, I’d like to give a shout out to two amazing things from the city.

1. The Cathedral Church of St. David which was just beautiful.

2. This spicy Aztecan hot chocolate. It was good enough we went back and bought a package to bring home with us.

We originally were planning on spending half our time in Hobart and half in wine country up the Eastern coast, but we loved Hobart enough that we only spent one night on the coast. That gave us a chance to pick up some fresh mussels and cook in our airbnb. Now, we didn’t have the best kitchen set up. But we MacGyver’d the entire situation and ended up using this hot pan to steam the mussels and cook the pasta pasta. Plus we grilled a bit of fresh salmon.

It was really delicious and quite a feat with the tools Michael had available to him.

Besides our delicious mussels, we also visited a couple of wineries. The best stop was Pooley where we really enjoyed the rieslings.

One of the best parts of the Tasmanian wineries was this guy landing on our windshield:

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He must have come over to check out the great music.

We stayed that one night up in Coles Bay in the Freycinet National Park which we explored just a bit the next morning before heading back to the city.

Here’s me enjoying a drive through the park while Michael is getting killed by the hills on his long run.

The state of Tasmania actually includes the main island along with 334 surrounding islands. We visited one of those islands – Bruny Island. Is anyone else nervous about how easy it would be for me to drive our rental car right into the sea?

After the short ferry ride we were able to enjoy the beauty of this island…

… and the oysters:

Besides eating all of the seafood, we also took some time to check out the MONA.

The Museum of Old and New Art is just a 30 minute ferry ride from the main harbor in Hobart. It is a mostly underground art museum that is pretty controversial. Having been to a few modern art museums, I don’t typically get that scandalized by modern art any more. Usually there is a lot of nudity, often for nudity’s sake, which I don’t think is clever. And then usually there are few exhibits that I think are really interesting. The MONA did have some things that were truly grotesque and shocking. Like this:

This piece is called Cloaca and it is a digestive system. The word “cloaca” is Latin for sewer. The museum apparently feeds the machine food twice a day, the food works its way through machine as food would work its way through a human’s stomach and intestines, and then the machine poops once a day. I didn’t get too close. It smelled terrible and we didn’t wait to see it poop. This falls into the category of “art” that I don’t understand. I just do not get the purpose.

That said, they had some cool stuff, like this machine that tracks a person’s heartbeat and then shows the heartbeat as flashing lights.

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I also liked these:

Random bowl on a chair with goldfish and a huge knife:

A lot of the art was interactive including an exhibit by Jane Baker called The Inward Eye – A Psychoacoustic Journey. It dealt a lot with how you hear and how you process sound. I think.

This exhibit was cool:

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The words are chosen based on words that have the most hits on the internet during a certain period of time.

Then we had several rooms with lights and strobes and other anxiety and aneurism inducing art.

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The below exhibit was just huge pools of motor oil. You know you shouldn’t touch it, but you just want to put your finger in it so bad. It is just so smooth and perfect.

Somehow we both walked away without any oil on our clothes.

And then the main event!

At the bar they had this roulette machine that chooses a beer for you. Seven of the beers come from the same brewery, while the eighth beer is the “bad” beer, which in this case is a Fosters. Australian for beer. Too funny to pass up, Michael took it for a spin.

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That definitely put a light ending on an odd day at the museum.

It was definitely worth a visit out to the MONA island, but modern art makes me tired.

We did get a great travel reminder while on the MONA ferry from one of our favorite people:

October 13-16

First stop on our ten or so hour drive down to Queenstown was a detour to Nelson. This is home to the famous Nelson hops that are used in lots of hoppy beers all over the world. Below is where you’ll see rows of hops later in the season.

They love hops so much they make their light fixtures hop shaped.

Then it was down the west coast.

Buller River:

These bushes are really similar to some we saw in Ireland. Bright yellow flowers with huge thorns. All the super green fields and the sheep also are quite similar.

Cape Foulwind:

We thought we saw some kiwi run into these bushes but they ran away before we could confirm.

We saw some of these birds later. Not a kiwi although I really wanted it to be:

Crow Bay:

Greymouth where we stopped for the night:

We found where Andy is from originally. Now we just need him to share his gold.

Lake Ianthe below. Tell me that isn’t an insane view.

Franz Josef Glacier:

Fox Glacier:

Thunder Creek Falls:

Some awesome sheep:

Lake Hawea:

We were planning on hiking Roy’s peak when we got into Wanaka. Turns out, they close this hiking path for a little over a month each year for lambing. This required me to google what “lambing” is.

Apparently it’s when lambs are born.

It actually makes a lot of sense. So we got stared down by some saucy momma lambs and then we drove away.

Plan B: sit by Lake Wanaka for a bit and enjoy the scenery. This was a better idea than climbing 5 miles up a mountain anyway.

We made it into Queenstown and loved the town. It is basically just a ski resort town. Great restaurants and cutesy shops. Plus the views are great.

We also had the second best meal of the trip. It was at a place called the Bunker. Scallops and boar and hare and snapper and a tom yum broth.

So good.

We said we weren’t going to do any more tasting menus because it’s too much food and we get so sleepy, but here we were doing it again. It was a huge success. Second best – after our lunch in San Sebastián with Johnny.

We took a day trip out of the city to the Milford Sound.

Gorgeous drive down, of course.

Funny about this… the Milford Sound is not actually a sound. It is a fjord that is misnamed. But apparently when the European explorers came here they weren’t familiar with the word fjord. They knew sounds and they knew inlets. So they chose the closest word. Sounds are river carved. Fjords are glacier carved, like our fjords in Norway that we visited with Liam and Sofia. Actually, a lot of New Zealand reminds us of Norway.

Below you can see a u-shaped valley which is consistent with a fjord. Rivers carve sounds in a v-shape.

It was really windy and pretty cold.

This waterfall is from that scene in X-Men Originals Wolverine where he dives off a waterfall.

We dipped under the waterfall a bit, so Michael and I got hit with some glacier melt.

You can see some seals lounging on the boulder above.

Super beautiful.

Now we’re driving to Christchurch for the last seven or so hours of our New Zealand road trip.

We popped back into Wanaka even though it was a little bit out of the way. Apparently the first time we stopped to check out the lake we filled up our gas tank and forgot to pay. Hmmm… Apparently this isn’t an issue in New Zealand. They called the rental company who shot us an email asking us to reach out. We were obviously embarrassed and wanted to resolve the issue immediately but they told us just to swing by whenever we had a chance. When we went in to pay they were largely unconcerned. I don’t know what would have happened in the US if we did this, but I can’t imagine it would have been the same outcome. The woman behind the counter simply said, “It’s a small country. We can find you.” Fair enough.

On the drive to Christchurch we saw some more beautiful sights.

And we finally got a glimpse of Mount Cook. It’s the highest mountain in New Zealand.

It’s this one:

So that’s it. Tomorrow we fly to Tasmania. Two weeks is not nearly enough to see New Zealand. But it’s a start! We’ll definitely be back here at some point.

October 11-12

Our first stop on the South Island was wine country… again. This time it’s Marlborough which is where New Zealand’s best Sauvignon Blancs come from. Sauvignon Blanc is the varietal that put New Zealand wine on the map. While we drink mostly big, bold reds, I love a crisp, fruity Sauv Blanc – especially on a warm beautiful day. That said, the weather for our few days in Marlborough was less than ideal. It was rainy and cold – not really ideal crisp whites. They get just two or three rainy days a year and we happened to make it for two of those days. Boo. But we must soldier on in this tough life of ours.

Our first stop was Spy Valley Wines. So apparently the area has a secure communication facility called Waihopai Station. It is claimed to be run by New Zealand’s Communication Security Bureau which I assume is their NSA equivalent. But it is believed to be part of ECHELON which is the worldwide network of “signal interception” facilities run jointly by intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. So it’s a spy base.

In the background on the left you can see two white domes. That’s the spy headquarters. Apparently there is a huge radar antenna in each of the two domes which are actually called “radomes”. The radomes are suppose to protect the antenna from weather and conceal the equipment from view. I’m not sure those two huge domes are all that inconspicuous in wine country. Thank you Wikipedia for all of your great knowledge.

We tried to get a little closer but all the roads were closed to the public. Figures they’d try to keep it extra hard to approach.

So Spy Valley Winery incorporates a lot of clever spy lingo and pictures into their buildings and their bottles.

Plus they use Morse code on their bottles. It was a lot of fun.

Next we popped into Nautilus. It was fine – a bit unremarkable. No pictures. No anecdotes.

For both nights we stayed at a really cute airbnb on a vineyard. Here’s the view out our back door:

It gave Michael a chance to cook a few meals (bolognese one night and rack of lamb the other night). Plus we got to meet a few new friends.

This picture does not do that rooster justice. He was a BEAST! Twice the size of the hens. The next day at one of the wineries we saw that someone had a portrait made of him.

For as delightful as the airbnb cottage was, the stay was a comedy of errors. First the internet was broken. Not a huge deal – especially since most wifi we encounter is not that reliable anyways. Then the next night the electricity went out for three or so hours. It was a large issue that required the electric company to come out. Then that same night a pipe burst at the cottage so we didn’t have water. We were there during a very rare freeze. I told you the weather was a bit crappy. But the guy was super nice and responsive and it was fine. And Michael was clever enough to finish dinner by boiling water on the grill to cook our pasta.

On day two, our first stop was Cloudy Bay.

Then we had a tour of Hans Herzog. This winery is another organic farm. Since they don’t use any pesticides they get these amazing wild flowers growing in between their vines. I just love it. The winery next door just had dead brown grass between their vines from the pesticides.

We had our tasting in the cellar which was delightful.

The above varietal – Zweigelt – was one that we were not familiar. It is the most widely grown red grape varietal in Austria. It is apparently a cross of St. Laurent and Blaufrankisch. Ahh – that clears it up.

The wines were delicious enough that we opted to stay for lunch as well. Before coming to Australia, the winemaker had a two Michelin starred restaurant in Switzerland, so we new the food was going to be delicious. And we were right.

Not the prettiest to look at, but this leek soup was possibly the best soup I’ve ever had.

All in all, Hans Herzog was our best stop in Marlborough.

The last stop was Fromm Winery. I was immediately excited when we pulled up.

Their logo is the Marianist logo! It turns out that this is the city emblem of Malans, Switzerland, where Georg and Ruth Fromm are originally from. But with the red and white here, it made my mind jump right to this:

Lots of Marianists on the brain in New Zealand. The wines were delicious – they do a lot of good Pinot Noirs which are not typically our favorite. But Fromm had some really great ones.

That’s it for Marlborough. Next we were off to start our trip south to Queensland.

October 7-10

The next stop on our road trip was Waitomo where you can find glow worm caves – something I was super excited about.

Our drive to Waitomo was incredible.

I know what you’re thinking:

These types of incredible scenery have became the norm for us while here in New Zealand. Every turn around each (often precariously) tight turn of the road led us to a view more incredible than the last.

We got in late to our bed and breakfast and then left quite early to go see the glow worms! When we got near the caves we looked into tickets. It was going to be around 120 New Zealand Dollars!! That’s nearly 80 bucks to do a super touristy attraction. So we passed on that real fast and moved on to our second choice: the Forgotten World Highway. Michael had picked up a pamphlet about this road in the B&B. It is basically just a 150 kilometers of road, some unpaved, that is beautiful and empty.

Here are the highlights:

Editor’s note: I’m doing my best not to mix up pictures here, but everything is super green and picture perfect, so… well… I’m doing my best.

After about three hours on the Forgotten World Highway, we started a new adventure and drove inland towards Taupo Lake.

We arrived at our airbnb right off the lake and settled in for the night. We arrived early enough to grab a run (for me) and a walk (for Michael). Yes – we’re all shocked that’s how the evening turned out.

Then next day we were on the move again to Hawke’s Bay. But first we popped over to see Huka Falls which were recommended by our great Airbnb hosts.

These falls are amazing. This river system produces about 15 percent of New Zealand’s power.

The Waikato River is up to 100 meters wide, but it abruptly narrows to just 15 meters as it crosses a volcanic ledge just north of Lake Taupo. This causes the huge volume of water to be funneled through this rocky gorge.

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Look at those incredible colors! About 200,000 liters of water plunge nine meters every second. Huka is the native word for “foam”.

Then it was off to Hawke’s Bay for a bit more wine tasting.

First stop was Trinity Hill. Last fall we attended a charity event in Rick Bayless’s backyard with Betsy and Andy and had an incredible time. Yes, I am using this as an opportunity to humble brag about how cool it was that we went to this event. Rick (because we’re on a first name basis) keeps bees in his back yard. Also, he invited Trinity Hill’s winemaker to the event. He supplied the wines and we chatted him up for a little bit at the event. So we knew that this winery had to be on our list when we arrived. The wines were good – although I will admit they tasted better in Rick’s backyard while eating incredible Mexican food with great company.

Mission Estate Winery was our second stop. I was super excited about this one because it seemed like it had a cool story. However when we tried to get info from the woman doing the tasting she was not very nice and seemed annoyed that we even asked any questions about the winery.

So not the best tasting, but I’ve found info online about this place and I was right. It is super interesting! Mission Estate was established by French missionaries in 1851 when vines were planted to produce sacramental and table wine. They were New Zealand’s first winery. The first record of a commercial sale dates back to 1870.

Since this time the brothers of the order have travelled to France to study and learn viticulture and winemaking skills. The current winemaker has been at the Mission for over 30 years and was trained by the priests. What order of priests and brothers? Thank you for asking!

They’re Marianists! Most of you know that Michael and I have quite a history with Marianists. We were bummed we couldn’t find someone more interesting to talk to at the winery, but were still pumped that we happened upon this place!

Our final stop was Urban Winery. They do make their own wines, but they also showcase smaller producers that are too small to do tastings in their own location. We went specifically to try some Sacred Hill which was available there. It was a great stop – the wines were good and we got to see their concrete eggs and their French barrel egg. We haven’t seen a French barrel egg before. We saw some concrete eggs when we were in Mendoza with Phil and Krystal. Apparently the wine maker here went to Mendoza also and after seeing the concrete eggs wanted to buy them but they were crazy expensive to ship to New Zealand. So now he manufactures concrete eggs and sells them to other winemakers in New Zealand and Australia.

After the day in Hawke’s Bay we drove down to Wellington for two days.

This entire week we were in the North Island we kept hearing how everyone loves Wellington and hates Auckland. Well… we didn’t quite agree. As mentioned in my last post, the small bit we saw of Auckland was lovely and everything we saw in Wellington was seedy. There seemed to be a lot of aimless young people – maybe homeless, maybe not. But not really heading in any good direction and it seemed more by choice than by circumstance. Perhaps grungy is a better descriptor?

We did pop into Garage Project for a few beers which was pretty good. The beers were delicious and everything on their food menu was fried or had a bunch of cheese in it. So I was happy.

We also got just out of the city to the nearby national park to do some hiking. We hiked the Orongorongo River Path in Rimutaka Forest Park. Now, we know it isn’t a race, but we did the hike in about 2 hours 20 minutes which included about 15 minutes at the river while they suggested it was going to take us four hours. So it wasn’t exactly what we thought we were getting into, but it was still beautiful. Plus it made us feel like accomplished hikers. A bonus – in those 2 plus hours we only saw one other couple and one family the entire time. The area was almost completely ours for the morning.

That’s it for the North Island – now we’re off to another ferry to go visit the more beautiful of the two islands. Hard to believe, right? We’ll let you know if the rumors are true.

October 4-6

We landed in New Zealand, our last new country on this trip. It makes us a bit sad that it’s almost over, but we’re also super excited for this country and excited to be heading home in a few weeks.

We flew into Auckland, on the North Island, and rented a car. We’re going to drive around the country for the next two weeks. We had just one night in Auckland before heading out to see what we could see in this country.

We liked Auckland a lot. It reminded us a bit of Seattle or Toronto with a beautiful waterfront and some great restaurants. We have heard nonstop from people in the North Island of their strong distaste for Auckland, but what we saw was delightful.

The next morning we boarded a ferry and rode out to Waiheke island.

This beautiful, small island is about an hour boat ride from Auckland and is home to a bunch of wineries. We visited 8 wineries while on the island: Tantalus, Te Motu, Stony Ridge, Passage Rock, Poderi Crisci, Jurassic Ridge, Mudbrick, and Man O War.

Tantalus was our first stop and one of our favorites.

That’s a light fixture made out of old vines. How cool is that?

It was also delightful because it housed Alibi Brewing as well.

Jurassic Ridge was also one of our favorites. The wine maker was doing the tastings. At first he was super pompous and snooty about how his wines are made and the organic process. But by the end he had warmed up to us a bit and we ended up having some good conversation with him about wine – and lees aging. Most important his wines were delicious.

Those rocks are old – from the Jurassic period or something. They found them on the property which is why the winery is named Jurassic Ridge.

Poderi Crisci was great because they had delicious food and Italian wines.

All in all we had a wonderful two days there, including great pizza on the beach for dinner one night.

All of the wineries were incredibly picturesque. We could have hung around for a week. But we have other things to see!

With New Zealand being as beautiful as it is expect more pictures than text for the next few posts. Although I’m not sure there is a single picture that we’ve taken since our arrival here that is as beautiful as real life.

Maybe this one. This is a really great photo.

October 1-3

We flew into Cairns in Northwestern Australia, one of the main airports that services the Great Barrier Reef. We rented a car and drove north to Port Douglas of which we had heard a lot of great things.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system with over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching over an area of approximately 133,000 square miles. It can be seen from outer space and on google maps. The reef lies along the continental shelf with slopes down to depths of more than 1.25 miles while the reef itself is on average only 115 feet deep. The reef is like a barrier along the edge of the shelf, hence… the name…

The first morning we hopped a boat out to see the GBR.

There it is! You can see some of the reef under the water and then that line where the waves are breaking is the continental shelf. I thought it was awesome that you could so clearly make out that break.

You can kind of tell from the above picture – the water was really rough. But even with the rough water, the views were just stunning.

Super rough. Luckily Michael has a stomach of steel! And I have Dramamine.

They urge all snorkelers to wear these awesome Lycra suits because of the jelly fish.

It is hard work looking this good.

The snorkeling was incredible. Michael and I have both gone a few times before – but only in the Caribbean. The colors and the amount of different fish we saw were just astounding.

We rented an underwater camera and I was shocked at how great the photos turned out!

We saw a lot of beautiful blue fish:

Here is a huge clam in the top center of the below picture.

Michael was following this huge fish for awhile trying to get a photo:

There is another clam in the picture above (bottom left corner) and the fish in the picture below were my favorites. About a hundred of them were following me around the third time I jumped in the water.

After the last stop, one of the crew members congratulated people coming out of the water and called it the “roughest water” that they let people snorkel in. It definitely felt rough. I struggled on the final stop and definitely took down a bit of salt water. But the ride back to the marina was the worst. At least half of the people on board got sick heading back. Michael and I kept it together, but just barely.

Besides the Great Barrier Reef, the area is also well known for the beautiful beaches along the coast.

No – we definitely didn’t go hang gliding off the side of some cliffs next to the highway. We’re happier with our feet on the sand.

One of the coolest things about these beaches are the ghost crabs that live there. The crabs are active at night and spend the day in spiral burrows where the sand acts as insulation to keep them moist and cool.

I couldn’t find information on why they create these designed. Also, there is a chance that they’re called soldier crabs, but the internet is not the most conclusive on the topic. Regardless of what they’re called, look how cool this design is. It looks like an angel below! There were also a lot of star and flower shapes. The internet suggested that the designs may be for mating or protection.

The area is also known for the jungle. We drove up to the Daintree Rainforest for a day.

The jungle comes right up to the beach.

Apparently so do the crocs.

We didn’t end up seeing any crocadoodles on the beaches we visited, but we dropped into a crocodile sanctuary to see a few upclose.

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Besides the incredible “nature-y” things to do here, Port Douglas also was a really cool resort town with a nice variety of food. We got some tacos, fresh seafood, Vietnamese, burgers and some pizza. After being in Asia and having such limited choices (although delicious food), it was a nice change of pace.

Michael took this hazy picture of the beer… still a chance for instafame? Not likely.

We also got to taste the “Best Ice Cream Ever”. That is how they marketed it – as in THE best in the history of ice cream.

It’s made by Betty:

My vanilla was really good. Michael’s was just ok. Best ever is a tough statement to make on ice cream although we did really enjoy it.

We also got to see some koalas at the crocodile sanctuary. We had the option to hold them, but we didn’t feel right about it.

They seemed sad or tired or something. The sign said that they are only allowed to “work” for 30 minutes a day, so there are a lot of limits to how much they are touched by strangers, but the one we saw being held by a child didn’t look too thrilled, so we opted out.

Now it’s time to take a hiatus from Australia – we’re off to New Zealand for two weeks!

September 28-30

After so much hard work traveling through Southeast Asia we decided we needed a vacation. So we booked a flight to Bali. Really, we knew we wanted to make it to an island in Indonesia – something exotic and wonderful – but we didn’t have an exact location until Michael found a great restaurant on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. It is an all dessert restaurant that is called Room 4 Dessert. Chef Goldfarb does tasting menus – entire tasting menus of just desserts.

So, we went to visit Bali so we could eat a lot of dessert. Seems about right.

Ridiculous? Yes it is. But also delicious. And the “meal” had cocktail pairings, because of course it did.

Besides eating desserts, we also checked out some fancy coffee. Bali is known for their luwak coffee. So here’s why it is so famous: Asian palm civets eat the coffee berries and then poop them out. Every day, at Lumbung Sari coffee farm, employees wander around the farm picking up their droppings so they can find the undigested coffee beans. Then they treat the coffee beans the same way that any coffee beans are treated. They are roasted and then ground to make coffee. What makes the coffee better is that the civets only choose to eat the best cherries and also fermentation occurs as the cherries pass through the civet’s intestines. Too much information? Agree. There is some concern about the ethical aspect of this type of coffee. Some farms keep the animals in cages and force feed them. However, the farm we visited relies on wild civets.

Here is a picture of an Asian palm civet:

She is actually pregnant. The farm only has two civets that they “keep”. One is kept in a cage and the above has a cage that they leave open and that she chooses to stay in. I don’t know why – I guess she likes being taken care of. Neither of those two civets will eat the berries. Apparently they are pampered now and will only eat fruit. However, wild civets come in at night and eat the berries and 💩.

Here is a cacao tree at the farm.

Besides the coffee, this farm also makes a handful of different teas, cocoa, and flavored coffees.

And finally, we drink!

The full cup was the fancy coffee and it was delicious, as promised. It was pretty sweet without any added sweetener. The rest of the coffees and teas were delicious as well. We’re bringing some poo coffee home so you all can try it too!

We also took a trip to some rice terraces. They were beautiful and gave us the chance to wander around a bit.

These are the kids that sold Michael some postcards.

They had his number, big time. After selling him much more than he needed (what we needed was zero), they were then not even pleased with his purchase and immediately started trying to sell him more. Then after we got off the terraces another little girl tried to sell us the same cards with a starting price of 1/5 what Michael had paid. Haha. You win some, you lose some. I guess if we’re going to “lose some”, I’d want it to be to some kids in Indonesia.

And, of course, we had a chance to check out some gorgeous beaches.

And these sunsets!

Plus, some random locals shooting off fireworks. It may not be a Fourth of July display, but it was fun to see them.

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While relaxing on such a beautiful island, we also got very lucky. In August, Bali was hit hard by a 5.2 magnitude earthquake. Then while we were in Bali another Indonesian island, Sulawesi, was hit by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake. The most recent news I have is that 1400 people died in the quake and the 20 foot tsunami that happened shortly after. There are still over 1000 people missing and over 70,000 who are now homeless. Then a volcano erupted on the same island (although in a different area of the island which is about the same size as Missouri). It sounds like the volcano eruption isn’t currently impacting anyone as the area doesn’t have inhabitants, but still – come on! This island deserves a break!

We feel very lucky to have been able to visit this country without experiencing any of the horrible effects of these natural disasters. What we saw of Indonesia was amazing and hopefully they’ll have some time to recover after so much devastation and so much loss.

So that’s it for Asia. The next day we hopped a super early 1am flight to Australia. In the words of Michael, “the sun is setting on the Asia portion of our trip”.

September 24-27

A bit sad to be flying solo again, but excited for a few more days in such a cool city! With quite a few days, we were planning on relaxing a bit, getting our post cards cranked out, catching up on the blog, and cooking Thai food! And we were successful on all of those things except getting caught up on the blog. I’m losing steam on this a bit. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

Our first night in town we popped out for food and found the Sunday market that we were hunting down last week with Ken and Janine.

And, of course, found some delicious food:

The next morning we were off to the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery school. This is the same school that Michael took a class in 14 years ago when he last visited Thailand, so that’s cool. Our first stop for the class was the market.

The market sells these little bundles to use in soup. It is the right amount of kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, ginger, and everything else you need to season your soup. I thought it was clever to sell this way.

The below is a Kaffir lime. Michael has cooked with the leaves before, but I had never seen the actual fruit. It’s too bitter to use for cooking, but you can zest the skin for soaps and candles and such.

Then it was off to class with an Irishman named John and a woman from China named Sateen. The woman teaching the class was named Garnet and she was the most delightful human I’ve ever met. I apologize in advance – you’re getting a lot of photos of our food that we cooked. It doesn’t all look that professional, but we did it and it tasted awesome. If it does look professional, then it might be a photo of Garnet’s example dish.

Here is the hot and spicy prawn soup:

I’m not sure what I’m so excited about above. I may be teasing about how Michael’s dish turned out.

Here are our fish cakes.

The first plate is mine and the second that looks like someone was murdered over the plate was Michael’s. I think the carrot flower gives me an unfair advantage. That and my superior plating skills.

Plus we made green curry with chicken:

I think my curry was the first one again, but I’m not really sure any more.

And we made Pad Thai:

And spicy pork salad called larb:

And we finished with a delicious water chestnut and coconut milk dessert:

We were planning on coming back the next day for a second class, but we had such a great time with Garnet that we changed our plans to come back the day after that and have round two with her.

The next class was shared with two guys from the US. They both were huge value adds to the day. The one, Brennan, is a baker so he had great cooking knowledge. And the other guy, Kyle, had just finished living 3 years in Cambodia, so he knew some of the local language and had a lot of interesting things to say about Southeast Asia.

Day two we had Chicken and Coconut Milk Soup, Red Curry with Fish, Vegetable Stir Fry, Crispy Fried Noodles with Pork, Banana Cake, and Papaya Salad.

Plus we had another great day with Garnet!

We don’t have a picture of the stir fry, but here is Michael easily executing the dish:

I’m a little less comfortable with the wok:

We ate a little less on our second day of cooking, so we were able to go check out Wat Phra That Doi Suthep after class.

The temple is about 10 miles outside Chiang Mai and is up on a mountain, so there are incredible views of the city.

Plus they had orchids in crazy colors!

After visiting the temple, we walked over to the chocolate factory, a place Janine found for us earlier that week while reading up on Bangkok.

We ordered two types of chocolate lava cake and demolished both of them. There are no pictures of the food.

It was really good. Plus the view of the river was beautiful and just far enough outside of the old city to be calm and peaceful.

And that’s basically it. The rest of our time was spent relaxing, wandering around the city, eating, and detoxing. We had a few great runs around the old city and got to check out the cool gates and walls. Plus we got in cheap massages and cheap haircuts. My haircut is one of the best I’ve ever had and was under 10 bucks!

Plus we got to see this guy who was trying to videotape the pigeons at their level. It was a ridiculous sight and he chased them around for a very long time.

We were well rested and well fed by the time we left Chiang Mai. It was definitely one of our favorite cities in Southeast Asia and we will definitely be back! Now off to Bali!