Saturday 23 August 2025 – Roger We boarded the Qatar Boeing 777 around 1pm for the 17 hour flight to Doha. We have passed through Qatar many times over the past few years, since Emirates fully pissed Sylvia off through really bad customer service and we switched to Qatar. The airline has some backward-facing centre […]
Saturday 2 August 2025 Steve and his wife, Karen, picked me up at 0515 and drove us to the Auckland Airport. Steve and I caught the 0640 flight to Queenstown. Arriving just after 0830 we walked to the nearby car park and picked up my truck, then headed south down the east side of Lake […]
We spent last weekend in Christchurch and I took the opportunity to visit The Giant’s House in Akaroa. This incredible place is the work of artist Josie, who fell in love with the site many years ago and has since restored the house and gardens and made hundreds of whimsical mosaic sculptures in the garden. […]
A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to take a day trip to Mou Waho, a small island at the northern end of Lake Wanaka. It was a cold and foggy morning when we met at the pier in Wanaka. All the documentation stressed we be there 15 minutes before boarding at 9am […]
Sunday 29 June 2025 After breakfast we headed out to find a banteng bull for me. At the wetlands we headed west again, further than we had been before. Leaving the truck we headed northeast on the high ground. We had only gone 500m when we encountered a mob of 4 bulls. After sneaking in […]
Sunday 22 June 2025 Sylvia dropped Ross and I off at the Queenstown Airport, where, after the normal kerfuffle with security, we passed the time in the lounge before boarding our flight to Brisbane. It was a pretty comfortable flight in Row 8 on the 737-800. Yep, economy class for this 3.50 hour trip. The […]
Friday 21 March 2025 We were on the plane, about to fly to Auckland for the weekend when the captain came on the PA system stating there had been a bit of an incident and they were checking with Auckland to see if the plane was safe to fly. It turned out some clown had […]
Thursday 6 March 2025 It’s around 11.00 am when we leave our place at Queensberry, near Wanaka. Right now it’s really dry with a contrast between the green irrigated paddocks and the almost white unirrigated ones. The hills are bare and almost black in places. We cross Lake Dunstan at Cromwell, stopping to look at […]
Monday 9 September: West Greenland – Sylvia We woke this morning as we entered the Inukassaat fjord system north of Disko Island. The fjord is flanked on both sides by tall snow-capped mountains and dotted about with some rather large icebergs. there are a couple of tide-water glaciers deep into the fjord that obviously calve […]
Thursday 5 September: Pim Island, Buchanan Bay, Ellesmere Island – Sylvia We cruised south overnight, occasionally crashing and shuddering as we broke through the ice. We arrived this morning at Pim Island. This is the site where the remaining members of ill-fated Greeley expedition team were rescued after wintering over with limited supplies in the […]