Week 9: Tokyo. Now we’re talking.

Wow. Where do we start?

Firstly, you’ll all be very pleased to know that we’ve been here five days and it’s been absolutely freezing!! No more beach pictures, but plenty of hats and warm coats! I’m sure that will make you all feel at least a little bit better about reading this blog.






(Warming ourselves on hot noodle soup in the Imperial Gardens.)

Secondly, man, this place is brilliant! We absolutely love every element of being here in Tokyo; it is so so much fun. We feel excited all the time, as everything is so great and such an experience. So, let’s try and break it down a little for you, as you’ll tell just from our smiley pics that we’re enjoying it.

It’s such an experience. Getting the skyline train from the airport, and navigating the tube around the city, is a fun experience and actually really easy. The people are amazing. You spend two seconds looking a little bit confused and someone has helped you out and told you where you’re going, how much it will cost and what to do. Trying the little of Japanese we have learnt…brilliant. It’s actually really easy to communicate here what with our pigeon Japanese, everyone else’s much better English and plenty of nods, smiles and hand gestures – it’s just so much fun. It’s fun, because everyone is really really nice. Everyone is excited, and we’re excited, and it’s contagious. 

We are staying in an area called Ueno (in Northern Tokyo) and seem to have picked our area perfectly. It’s a fantastically busy area, with loads of shops, markets, restaurants, bars, parks, museums, lights, and whilst its built up (as is most of Tokyo) lots of people live around here which gives it a great feeling. The main shopping street is, as you would imagine, full of the bright lights and signs that you associate with Tokyo. Duck behind the main street and you have an enormous market area, which is not only full of every type of goods you could imagine but is also jam-packed with restaurants and bars. The variety is enormous, from small five or six-seater traditional Japanese bars and restaurants to big fast food joints, and I’m pretty sure you could eat out every night for a year trying a different place each time. The food is fantastic. Again, a massive variety - noodle soups, sushi and sashimi, meats and many other things we can’t quite decipher. Eating out is good fun as we’re never quite sure what we’re going to face as we enter a new place but so far so good!

We’ve been doing lots of sightseeing and given that it’s early spring (despite the cold) it’s the heart of cherry blossom season. This is a big thing in Japan and the cherry blossom (national flower) is loved by everyone and photographed constantly. Camera’s and camera phones surround us in the parks as the locals photograph the beautiful blossoming trees. And everywhere there are blossoming trees – and therefore people - there are small stalls selling an even greater variety of food from fruit to fish on sticks. Where there are large clusters of trees the area is pretty packed, and this can also be said of some of the temples and smaller markets, but on the whole Tokyo seems way less crowded than we expected. Yesterday we took a long walk through the neighbourhoods, down by the river and to one of the central museums and passed very few people along the way. Definitely not what we were expecting. Other things, such as our ability to understand, eat and get around all seems way simpler than we thought. And despite accommodation and train travel being expensive every day expenditure such as eating, drinking and sightseeing isn’t as expensive as we thought it would be. That said, this is Tokyo and Tokyo is of course a very modern city. In a few days time we will be heading down to Osaka and then in to the truly remote Japanese countryside and back in time. We are under no illusion that the next step of our journey is going to be quite as straightforward as here. But for now, we are having an amazing time. This city is clean, tidy and highly organised. The people are polite and friendly – we feel totally safe and astonishingly, thoroughly at home here.

Here are some additional pics to give you the idea...

Week 7 and 8: Queenstown: Play-town!

This is tons better! We are surrounded by the amazing scenery that wowed us so much the first time around. Queenstown is a relatively small town on the edge of lake Wakatipu and is surrounded by amazing Mountains – The Remarkables! Lake Wakatipu is enormous. In fact, it is so big it even has waves! It is 80km long and on average 320m deep. However, what most people come to Queenstown for is to have some fun. So…that’s what we set out to do.

We spend several hours on Quad bikes touring the mountains… 

(Yes, that is Jem under there!)

Four hours on horseback…exploring mountains and rivers…(and yes, we do pay for that for the next four days!)… 

And of course the biggy…Phil FitzMorris throws himself of a bridge…luckily with elastic attached. Phil has been keen to do a bungy since missing out on it on our first visit so this time it’s definitely in the bag. We drive out to AJ Hackett (the original) and within a few mins he’s weighed and strapped up standing on a bridge over a 43metre drop to the river below. 

Then four, three, two, one, he’s jumped and the silence of the surrounding mountains is broken by a high-pitched girlie scream!!! Admittedly, this is Jemima who is watching from the sidelines but hey – looking back at the DVD I’m sure we can claim its Phil! Hee hee. The man himself after completing his first bungy!! 

We break up our stay in Queenstown with an overnight cruise through Doubtful Sound in Fiordland. Fiordland is a remote part of New Zealand’s southwest and for the most part is only accessible by boat. We manage to plan our trip to Doubtful Sound with excellent precision, avoiding the beautiful sunny weather and arriving just in time for wall-to-wall mist and plenty of rain! You would think spending 24 hours on a boat in this weather would be pretty awful but actually it is really great fun. The rain has created hundreds of waterfalls crashing down the glacier carved mountains on every side of us.

There are only three tour operators allowed to run trips around here. The biggest takes 70 people on a boat at one time, but luckily that’s not what we’ve opted for. We go out with a small family run business that takes 12 but fantastically for us only has five passengers booked on. Chris the Dad drives the boat and runs the tour while his son Travis cooks in the kitchen. The trip is amazing. Aside from the fantastic scenery, that we eventually get to see when the mist lifts, the whole experience is just wonderful. We are served crayfish for lunch (we’d call lobster at home), which has been caught fresh that morning. We then set about catching our tea!! Phil has done a bit of fishing before but for Jemima this is her first time! (With the exception of sitting down the canal with Stephen and Chris at the age of eleven!)

And the results are plain to see…

At least one of us will not be going hungry tonight! 


In total Phil and I catch about ten between us. Groper, Blue Cod, Rass, stripey things…. and others. 

We then do away with our fishing rods and try the old fashioned stand in the water and grab with your hands. Jemima manages to tackle a shark and Phil pulls out an octopus. (Okay, that’s not quite how they made it onboard the boat…they were caught up in the crayfish pots…but it’s a good story!)  

A couple of our fellow passengers manage to reel in some Tarakihi which makes fantastic sashimi, so within an hour of catching our fish, we are eating the freshest of fresh sashimi!! 

After a fantastic dinner of freshly caught fish, venison pie and roast pumpkin and veg, we moor up for the night and settle down for a very peaceful and very calm and sound sleep.

The weather has improved the next morning and we manage to photograph many of the sights we were unable to capture the day before and make our way contentedly back to Queentsown.

We spend our last week in Queenstown, enjoying the scenery, taking day trips to local towns and lakes, relaxing and making the most of our quite time before we head off on 27^th March to our next adventure…Japan! Bring it on! 

Week 6: Christchurch: Slightly sleepy…

Travelling down the east coast of the South Island is fundamentally different to what we witnessed on our last visit where we travelled up the west. Gone are the rugged mountains that drop into vast lakes being replaced by the ‘Canterbury Plains’. And yes, it is very plain! Acres upon acres of vast, flat agricultural land with roads that go straight for hundreds of kilometres. However, we finally make it to Christchurch and with the weather in tow we set out on some high-octane activities.

We ride the tram...


We punt on the river…


We walk through the park…It's high energy stuff!


Christchurch is the largest city on the South Island and prides itself on its Englishness! Which is all good and well, until you’re like us, leaving England and travelling the world looking for new experiences. It is also pretty proud of its old buildings some of which date back 150 years….! Hmmmm.

In all, Christchurch is a very ‘nice’ place. It is actually probably a great place to work as it has a fantastic outdoor, bistro, park, lifestyle to it, but for visitors, we’re not sure it really has the wow factor. I think a lot of this is probably down to the lack of scenery. We have been completely spoilt by some of the amazing places we’ve seen so far, beautiful bays, rocky harbours, dramatic mountains and vast lakes – which make Christchurch just a little bit dull. However, it does have one thing that is well worth recommending which is the Antarctica centre. New Zealand is one of the principal countries working in and exploring Antarctica and they have a great centre near the NZ base which is quite eye opening. Phil and I…for some reason…sign ourselves up to stand in the ice cave where they wrap you up in coats and rubber boots and drop the temperature down to minus 18 so you can feel what it would be like in Antarctica in a wind storm…although they regularly have minus 50 down there. Minus 18 is definitely enough for us and we leave wondering why we thought it would be a good idea to stand in an ice cave and get frozen. Hmmmm. However, we do get to see some penguins on the way out – so all is well in the end! 


We are also lucky enough to be there during the Chinese Lantern Festival which celebrates Chinese New Year. There are some amazing lanterns that have been shipped over from China and watching the dancing and singing that's put on in the park makes us very glad we're heading to China on our trip.

  


Moving on from Christchurch we visit Omaru and then Dunedin before we head to our final destination of Queenstown. Both of these places we spend far too little time in unfortunately, as they are well worth a good visit. Dunedin is designed to mimic a Scottish city – Edinburgh in particular – and is crammed full of interesting old brick buildings. It’s a university town and has a really lovely atmosphere. As nice as all this is, we’re starting to get itchy feet and decide it’s time for some fun and dramatic scenery so we pack our bags and head off to Queenstown.

Week 5: Abel Tasman: This week is brought to you by the letter ‘B’.

This week is brought to you by the letter 'B'! Beaches, Bays, Boats and BBQs!!!

That just about sums up what we’ve been up to this week. We arrive on South Island and head straight up to Tasman Bay just south of the Abel Tasman Park (very near the top west corner). The weather is beautiful (for the most part) and we are ready for some relaxing and outdoor lifestyle. We have a quaint little house in the middle of nowhere, with no Internet, no phone or mobile reception and only two TV channels! Yes, we are definitely feeling isolated! It is surrounded by fields and sheep, has a beautiful ‘English Country Garden’ and an outlook over the Tasman Bay.

It is not difficult to slow down here. We spend the first few days exploring the area and coming home to BBQ fresh steak and delicious fish – all of which are cheap as chips.

We find a great little beach (lower Katiteriteri) that for the most part we share with a maximum of ten other people.

We break up our indulgent respite with a boat trip around the Abel Tasman coast, exploring beautiful bays along the bay. It is then time for some hard work as we’re dropped off part the way through and set off on a ‘tramp’ (hike) through the park from one bay to the next. It is pretty basic up here, but the views and the tramp are a real treat - forest-laden mountains and craggy hillsides that drop straight onto the golden beaches and azure-ocean below. With that under our belt, we feel justified in slowing down again and it’s not long before we’re back on the beach! It’s been a hard, hard week.

The seals on the local islands were in vehement agreement that all this relaxing is hard, hard work!

This week was brought to you by the letter 'B'.

Next week will be brought to you by the letter ‘C’ – Christchurch!

Week 4: Napier. Home of Vineyards and Art Deco.

Napier, in the heart of Hawkes Bay, is our next stop and we have the pleasure of staying with friends at their home, a vineyard, that they own and run. John and Jane, and their two boys (Phil’s Godsons) - Daniel (Age 7) and Sammy (Age 5) – the two dogs (Max and Bobby) and not forgetting the cat (Sulley).

Having never been to New Zealand, they upped sticks from Yorkshire four years ago, and having never worked in the wine trade before are now running a successful vineyard – living the dream.

This may sound very glamorous but do not underestimate the effort and stress involved. It is definitely a 365-day a year job and alongside the usual stresses of running your own business you have to deal with the unpredictable weather, which so far this year has not gone quite according to plan.

However, they still manage to take plenty of time out to show us the area and in keeping with our ‘celebration day wherever we go luck’ we arrive just in time for Napier’s Art Deco Weekend.

The Navy Band has followed us down from Waitangi and is this time supported by an aerobatic display, old cars and plenty of people dressed up in their 1920s costumes. It’s a great day out and we’re amazed by the effort everyone has gone to.

...Always one to be prepared! And Phil thought Jemima was mad when she included her flapper girl outfit in her packing...!

We have a great time with the guys, soaking up their New Zealand lifestyle, taking the boys to the park, playing with the dogs, eating lots of yummy food, drinking lots of very locally produced wine and generally hanging out and having fun.

Thanks Jane, John, Sammy and Daniel for looking after us and look forward to seeing you again soon! xxx

Taking a quick 'peak' at the Craggy Range Winery in Hawkes Bay.