landed in Oz and snorkel on the reef

Hey gang
We landed in Cairns yesterday and the wall of heat and humidity hit us straight away! It is 32 and humid today. This morning we went out on the Calypso Dive Boat to snorkel on the Opal reef, part of the Great Barrier Reef. Amazing!! We drove out to the Opal Reef from Port Douglas for about 90 minutes and set anchor on the reef. It was beautiful. Many different coloured fish and reef formations. We swam for about 30 minutes and continued on to two more spots on the reef, swimming for 30 minutes or so at each spot. In between swimming, we had a great lunch and plenty of cakes and snacks to keep your energy up. We are now just getting ready to go out to dinner at a place named Salsa, where all the locals eat apparently. Sounds good. Tomorrow we are going back out to the reef with another company and on Saturday we head north with a tour company to see the rainforest and some crocs in the wild. Can't wait...
Love the comment from our friends and families. Keep them coming!
p.s. we are taking donations to help us get home if anyone is interested in sponsoring the remainder of the trip. Our tickets are all paid for but we'd like you to feel like you are more involved in this journey so we are offering a chance to be a part of a greater thing. Join now and for the next week we will take pics of us doing fun things with your money and send you a signed copy!! Can't beat that!
Be good and get out there and have some fun...

antarctic tour and off to Oz

A rainy day convinced us to go from Dunedin directly to Christchurch.  This resulted in a night of camping in one of the less fancy camp sites we have been to.  The evening was saved by take out from a great Noodle place and a nice chat with some fellow travellers.

Two nights in a hotel was a pleasant change after sleeping in the Spaceship for so long.  Standing up while you get dressed and leaving your toothbrush in the bathroom instead of carrying it back and forth is a luxury we had previously taken for granted.  We spent a great day at the Antarctic Experience, a lovely display of Antarctic research and survival.  There was a 4D movie (it was actually 3D with some extras like water splashing, fog and bubbles – time was not altered), a drive around in an Antarctic vehicle (the driver was crazy, so it was very much like a roller coaster) and a blue penguin colony.  We paid a little more and the 2 of us got a special tour of the blue penguins which allowed us into the enclosure where they swam around for us.  Plus we got to go into the vet treatment room where one of the penguins was placed on the floor right in front of us.  All of the birds in this colony are rescued after sustaining an injury due to human interaction (hit by boats, tangled in nets etc) and they would not survive in the wild – so captivity is their only chance. 

We waved good-bye to our Spaceship yesterday and this morning we were up at 3:30am in order to head to the airport.  Look out Australia, here we come!

One Tough Morning....

Yesterday we got up and headed out early.  It was one tough morning, endured to please our blog audience.  First we went to the farmers market in the old railway station.  We sampled cheeses and had a lovely lamb kabob.  Then we wandered over to the Cadbury plant where we took a tour.  It included a giant dumping of 1 ton of melted chocolate (Colin got splashed a little), and they gave us a free bag of samples.  Everytime they asked a question and you answered it correctly they gave you more chocolate.  Colin is a true trivia buff so he got a lot of extras, which he gave away to the children.  Finally we toured the Speights Brewery.  It was a beautifully organized tour with all of the details of how the process was done in "the old days" and how it is done now.  At the end the taps were open for 30 minutes of free sampling.  We tried all 5 beers and the cider - a hard go!  The tour included lunch and a half pint of your favourite.  How we suffer for you people!  We drove over to Portobello in the late afternoon to watch the albatross fly.
Below is also a picture of the world's steepest residential street.  Every year Cadbury makes large chocolates that are assigned individual numbers.  Then they sell off the numbers in a lottery to raise money for cancer research.  The candy that crosses the line first wins someone a prize.

Cruising the Fiordlands

So we spent a night cruising on the Fiordland Explorer.  We took a ferry (you know what we mean boys...), then a bus to get to the ship.  We spent the day going down the Doubtful Sound (named by Cook when exploring the area because he was "doubtful" it was deep enough to explore).  We shared a room containing 4 bunks with Paul and Milly.  Paul was a professional pianist before he retired and he treated us to a few songs at one point!  Brilliant!
During the cruise there were amazing views, dophins, fur seals and blue penguins (also called fairy penguins).  We met some lovely people along the way.  The meals were really well done, especially when you consider the size of the kitchen they came out of.
We checked out the bridge and were amazed by the sophisticated equipment involved.  They have an electronic picture of the sound with the exact position of the ship.

Thanks to Brian & Sheryl

We met a lovely couple, Brian & Sheryl, at the Queenstown Top 10 Holiday Park.  They helped us arrange all kinds of fun stuff, so we want to give a shout out to them! 
The first thing we did was go on a jet boat along the Shotover River.  To get to the boat you first needed to travel along this NARROW, winding road along the side of a mountain.  The road was the original cart path to get supplies into the goldrush prospectors.  At times it seemed like we were a couple of centimeters from the edge - rather spooky!  The boat itself went up to 80km/h down this shallow river with canyon walls on either side, also rather fun!
After a brief nap we went down to the docks to get on a steamboat that took us across the lake to a sheep farm.  They gave us a beautiful meal (lamb of course) and then we watched a sheep shearing demonstration.  We ate with a great group of people, but the steamboat was mainly filled with a seniors tour.  It reminded us of Peterborough!
All of this activity was in Queenstown, a beautiful little town that we could have spent a lot more time in.  It was expensive, however, I was trying to find socks and most of them were around $25 - 38 a pair!
Yesterday we drove to Te Anau, a quiet town on a lake.  We just relaxed and kicked around for the day.  This morning we head to Manapouri where we will catch a boat across a lake.  Then after a short bus ride we will get on another boat where we will stay overnight.  This boat will cruise us around Doubtful Sound - we will give details about this trip soon.  Please know we will not have internet during this time, so don't go looking for us on Skype and wait patiently for our next posting!

Travel to Queenstown

Today was a big travel day, we drove from Franz Josef to Queenstown.  The whole thing took about 6 hours, a lot of it on windy mountain roads. This country also has a lot of crazy one-way bridges, the signs indicate which direction has the right of way and which direction must wait until it is clear. We even went over one that was also the bridge for the train - we assume the train gets the right of way in this case.

On the way here we stopped in Wanaka at the Puzzle World. It is a collection of strange illusions you walk through.  There is a room full of 3-D faces on the walls that follow you and a room that makes you look tall if you stand at one end and short when you stand at the other end.  The craziest room has a steep slope going one way, but the walls and floor look like they are horizontal.  This means you are very disoriented when you walk because you think you are walking on flat ground, while you are actually trying to go up a hill - it made us dizzy. Outside there is a tilted clock tower that, if you stand in the right place and pose properly, it looks like you are holding it up.  In the picture Colin was actually 50 feet away.

We have come to love a couple of things here in New Zealand, our Tom-Tom and Tim-Tams.  Our Tom-Tom is our GSP navigation system, it has a sweet female voice and gives great directions.  Tim-Tams are amazingly yummy cookies!  We have only tried one kind yet, but there is lots of time to try them all because you can get them in Australia as well!

What we don't appreciate are gas prices - $2.38 per litre!  OUCH!

We just got back from a great meal at Kim's Korean - the food was on par with Matsu Sushi's Korean food (but we still missed our Mr. Kim).

Tomorrow we go jet-boating and then go on a cruise that includes dinner at a local sheep farm.  Look for details tomorrow!

The Most Amazing Thing We Have EVER Done...

We just came back from one of the most amazing things we have ever done.  We took a HELICOPTER ride up to the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers.  We got in the helicopter with our pilot Ben and when we took off it felt like we were lifted by a string.  Then we flew up and over the Franz Josef glacier, which is 63 km long.  The glacier was white and blue with huge cracks in it.  The snow that lands at the top takes 6 months to work its way to the bottom.  It is hard to describe how massive it is, we saw another helicopter fly by and it looked like a little toy.  Then we landed on the Franz Josef glacier and got out to walk around.  I don't have the words to describe how beautiful it was.  On the way back we flew over the Fox Glacier, it is smaller but still magnificient.  We have decided if we become rich we need to buy a helicopter (and get Ben as our private pilot).   If you are interested we were flying at approximately 3500 feet!
Yesterday was also fun, but it did not work out as well as we planned.  We went to the Pancake Rocks and Blowholes (no jokes please, we didn't name them) which are a series of rocks by the shore where waves come crashing in.  The waves smash into the rocks, then move into caverns with huge force.  The waves end up coming up through the ground and spraying everywhere (thus the blowhole). 
We did not get to do the make your own knife thing we planned, it was all booked up.  Instead we rode around on a dune buggy through mud and water.  Seemed like fun, but our first buggy kept breaking down so we switched vehicles half-way through.  Then we ended up beaching our buggy in a particularly deep section.  We didn't get too muddy and we felt slightly disappointed by this.
We also didn't get a tour of the brewery, the pamphlet said there was a 7pm tour, but the last one went at 6pm.  False advertizing sucks!  We did manage to have a couple of beers while watching a rugby match in a bar, so it all worked out in the end.
We hope things are going well in Canada, remember you are all pooling your money to buy us a helicopter for Christmas!