In March 2008.  I took a two week holiday in New Zealand. I flew to Singapore in the first instance and spent three nights there at my brother James's flat. James joined me for the first week of the holiday.

    We flew, via Singapore Airlines to Auckland on March the 17th. Here is a view out of the window of the plane as we approached Auckland airport.

    On the same day we flew south to Queenstown, via Air New Zealand.   Here is a view out of the plane window as were getting close.

   In the evening we took a cable car up to "The Skyline." There we were given the view of the holiday.

    Please click on this photo!

    I'm a looking a little tired and jetlagged here, but James looks to be quite fresh.

    Another view from the same point. The mountains are prepared and known as The Remarkables. Much of the town and be seen in the foreground.

   Following day we went jet boating down skippers Canyon.

   Here is a bridge on which many people do bungee jumps. That was one activity upon which I passed.

   We did do some paragliding, but that is someone else doing it.

    Here is the shore of Lake Wakatipu, the third largest lake in New Zealand, from outside of the hostel where we were staying

    We went for a voyage across Lake Wakatipu in the SS Earnslaw, a steamship which made its maiden voyage in 1912.

    Here is a nice picture taken during a bus journey on the way to Tekapo, our next destination.

      Here is Aoraki Mount Cook viewed across Lake Pukaki taken during the same bus journey.

    Here is part of the village of Tekapo. A nice picture of the Moon at dusk.

      Here is Lake Tekapo.  It is a glacial lake. The turquoise colour is due to particular minerals in the lake, scattering the light

    James went for a bathe. I didn't, as I couldn't stand the cold!

    Here is the Church of the Good Shepherd, built in 1935 to the glory of God as a memorial to the pioneers of the Mackenzie Country.

    Here is James by the collie dog statue. His bronze statue was commissioned in 1857, in recognition of their service to the first settlers in Mackenzie country.

    Many tourists stay at Tekapo for a couple of hours, and see the church and the dog statue or taking a bus journeys between Queenstown and Christchurch. We stayed a couple of nights there, and we had a date tour of the Mount John Observatory.

    This telescope is the Cook Astrograph, the oldest at the Observatory and built by J. W. Fecker in 1936. is no longer in use, but was instrumental in photographing the start of the southern sky.

    This telescope is called the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics).   It records microlensing events and can be used, studying extrasolar planets, stellar atmospheres and dark matter.

    Here is a lake Alexandrina, on the opposite side of Mount John.

   We played a little minigolf.

    We had hoped to do some observing during one of the night tours of the mount on observatory. Despite having glorious weather during the day.  It was cloudy, both evenings, unfortunately.

      The next stop was Christchurch, the largest city in the South Ireland.  This city was named by the Canterbury Association in 1848. John Robert Godley, the man depicted in the statue here, suggested the name.

    Godley was educated at Christ's College, Oxford. There's Christ's College, Canterbury, the city's posh public school, founded in 1850.

    The river even run through Christchurch. One can go punting on it.

    And indeed we did! As James is a Cambridge graduate, he was reminiscing!

    On our voyage, we spotted a couple of Paradise ducks, the two on the right. The female has a white head, the male has a black one.

    The paintings on the panels below the rose window are the work of Salviati & Co of Venice and represent Christ’s six classic acts of mercy.

   Closer to the Cathedral stands Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the brave explorer who led an expedition to the South Pole in 1910, only to find that some Norwegians had beaten them to it, and subsequently never made it home. :(

    After James headed back to Singapore, I briefly visited the Christchurch Art Gallery, before visiting the International Antarctic Centre, a museum close to the airport, the aerial gateway to the Antarctic and shipping port.

   For a few additional New Zealand dollars, one could take a ride in a Haglünd, vehicle originally used by the military is adept at traversing crevasses in the Antarctic.

    Inside the museum there is information about climate, of flora and fauna, the geography of the geology in the Antarctic and also stuff about the people who work there.

    There are some dead animals,

  The highlight of the tour is the feeding of the little blue penguins.   They are the smallest species of Penguin are not native to the Antarctic, but to New Zealand  (you can't really have Antarctic attraction without any penguins).

    Here is a film I took of them.

   Here they are again. They might be courting,  even though it was the wrong season.

      Here is the Court Theatre. In the evening I went there to see Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood", which was nice.

    On Easter Sunday, I was expecting to spend most of their travelling by bus and then by ferry to Wellington. However, things didn't quite go according to plan and ended up having to take a flight. That wasn't such a bad thing though, because it meant I arrived in Wellington, five hours earlier than I would have done on the boat and it only cost 10 NZD more ( shouldn't really be the case...).
   
    That meant I had time to visit Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand in the afternoon.

    The museum contains all kinds of exhibits. Here's the marine animals section.

    Here is a huge ammonite, which was discovered at a Waitomo caves,  which I visited later in the holiday.

    This is the Zhang Heng's directional seismograph, made in China in 132 AD. in the event of an earthquake, a rolled within one of the dragons' mouths pushes the ball out into the mouth of the toad below.

    Here is a view from the Mount Victoria Lookout point, looking towards Lampton harbour.

    Here is a view from the same place, but looking southeast, towards Evans Bay. The airport runway is on a land bridge, on the right in this photo.

  Here's Lampton harbour again, by night, view from the fish restaurant where I had my dinner.

    The following day, I took the The Wellington cable car up to a high point on the northside of the city centre. Here is a view looking back towards Lampton harbour.

    Here are a couple of the domes of the Carter Observatory, an observatory which opened in 1941 and was initially used for solar observations.

    On the left of the picture is a Krupp Gun.

      Here is a sundial. On a plaque in the centre, every day of the year is marked on a loop. if you stand at the   Point where the current rate is marked, your shadow marks the time, looking at the stones around the outside.

    I visited the Karori wildlife sanctuary for one of the night tours. The sanctuary covers comes to 153 ha and lies just to the west of the city. the aim is to protect many of the native species of New Zealand's flora and fauna whose populations are being decimated by the introduction of mammals, brought by European settlers.

   An 8.6 km fence encloses the sanctuary, which is designed to keep out all of the mammals.

    There were quite a lot of tuis, and very audible, they were too.

    Black parrots, kakas, are granted with nectar to drink, as the forest has yet to completely mature. indeed, that will take another 500 or so years.

     During the the tour we also encountered saddlebacks (who laughed quite a bit),  black teals (black-headed ducks), wekas (a flightless bird similar to kiwis) & wetas (grasshopper-like insects). We heard plenty of Kiwis calling, but didn't see any.   Also in the sanctuary are tuaturas, a reptile closely related  to the dinosaurs. Mating is a slow process for them. Their gestation period lasts 18 months,  and so there was plenty of time for rats and opossums to eat them up when they arrived.

    On the morning of March 25th I took a balloon ride. The best time to ride is just before dawn. This required me leaving my hostel in Wellington at 5:15 and then   An 80 minute drive to the launch point in Carterton.

And now the air is heated, so that it is of lower density.

Below are shots I took during the flight

   Livestock were frequently disturbed whenever the heaters were blasted.

Click here to see a film of sheep on the move.

And landed safely.


    In case you're wondering, it was raised onto the truck afterwards.