Wander the world with Bill and Cindy

No self-respecting country tour guide is complete without at least one “top ten” list.   Well, Bill and I had a lot of long drives across the New Zealand countryside to come up with a couple of them.  Our top ten favorite places in New Zealand may come in handy if you are planning to visit, and our top ten (OK, in reality we could only come up with six) “worst” list may save you from repeating our mistakes!  Both lists hopefully provide some humor at our discoveries here on these little islands.

We really struggled with our top 10 list, it could have gone on MUCH
longer.  Many people have asked us what our favorite thing about New
Zealand was, and my response is always that it is impossible to pick just one – but at least we tried to narrow it down!

Our favorite New Zealand spots and activities (in no particular order)

1.  Poor Knights Island
Heaven on earth for scuba divers, if you can survive the water temp
2.  Tongariro National Park
Pray the weather cooperates, if it does don’t miss the Tongariro Crossing
3.  Waipu Cove
Shhh, don’t tell anyone and you’ll have miles of beach to yourself
4.  Doubtful Sound
Worth the buses, boats and kayaks and yes – hats with earflaps to see it
5.  Te Papa Museum (Wellington)
Rivals any museum in the world for ingenuity and design
6.  Abel Tasman National Park
Kayak or hike or both, enjoy the sunshine
7.  Routeburn Track
Beautiful alpine hike, a great alternative if your heart was set on Milford
8.  Lake Marion
Our favorite day hike into a high alpine glacier lake, just watch for roots!
9.  Akaroa and Wanaka
Relax, chill, enjoy
10.  Franz Josef
Touristy as he%*, but you can’t beat climbing on a glacier

OK, you’re thinking New Zealand was perfect!  Why don’t we just all move there and live in paradise?   It is pretty close, but here’s a few things to warn you about before you give up Starbucks for good.  We couldn’t even come up with ten things, but here they are:

1.  The coffee SUCKS.  Yup, even in Starbucks (we did a comparison, believe me) – the result was two coffee addicts giving up on coffee completely during our stay.  Yes, it was that bad.

2.  Internet access.  I’m writing this from a village in Mexico and even here has better internet access.  After almost a month on the road we almost cried when Bill spied a sign for free Wifi – but we were let down when it was so slow we couldn’t even check email.  Sniff.

3.  Mussels in a jar.   This may sound like a “duh” moment, but when trying to come up with creative camping dishes each night, adding mussels to pasta sauce sounded good at the time.   Too bad the mussels were practically pickled in some sort of salty concoction.   We tried to eat them, I swear.

4.   A non-tropical rainforest.  Translation – a lot of cold rain.   I think some of our stuff is still drying out.  Don’t let it stop you, just be prepared and don’t forget New Zealand rule #1 – don’t go anywhere without a raincoat!

5.  Lack of fish in the grocery stores.   Here we are on an ISLAND surrounded by water and presumably lots of fish, yet the fish selection in the grocery stores was meager at best – maybe one or two (on an exciting day) types of fish to choose from.   It is still a mystery we have yet to solve.

6.  Vegetable selection.  Another mystery.   Here we are on an island where the #1 industry is agriculture, and many times we’d be staring at the veggie selection wondering if we could eat kumara (the local sweet potato veggie) yet again.  At one point Bill was so desparate and excited to find snap peas (there were exactly 7 in a container for $4) that he was willing to pay this outrageous sum – that is until I pointed out they were also moldy.   I guess the sheep get the best pickins’

With that we say farewell to one of the most amazing countries for outdoor enthusiasts on earth and headed home to the coffee and vegetable paradise we call California!