With our great friend Joe Rice and my parents visiting, we ventured to the far north to celebrate the longest day of the
year, and my dad's birthday, in Russell, NZ (pictured on the beach). Russell has deep roots in NZ history: as the Waitangi Treaty was signed between the throne of England and the Maori in 1840, just a stones throw away, Russell's bars and brothels were thriving. Now it's a quaint little town with NZ oldest standing church where Charles Darwin once gave money - we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was in Russell for the church.The region is appropriately named the Bay of Islands, and on the longest day of the year we went on "The Cream Trip" - the historic boat trip to deliver milk and mail to the island dwellers which now serves the dual purpose of being a great tourist day tour. To our great delight, we saw pods of dolphin and orca (despite my great dolphin pics, we'll share Joe's more impressive video).
Joe treated Claire and
I to a kayak / wine tour (pictured) in the evening where we met two characters - one the wine maker, the other our kayak tour guide who shared with us he has gone a decade without owning a pair of shoes.
The next day we drove up to the most Northern part of NZ to Cape Reinga (pictured with lighthouse) - where the Maori souls depart this world from the roots of an ancient Pohutukawa tree for the afterlife. Afterwards, Claire and I boogie boarded down some 100+ foot high sand dunes... as one does.
For Christmas we returned to Auckland, and Joe set off for a South Island tour on Boxing Day, my parents headed back to the U.S. a couple of days later, and then Claire and I
flew to the South Island ourselves. We spent two days driving from Christchurch to Queenstown - seeing stunning turquoise lakes (pictured) - and up to Mt Cook - one of the few places on earth where icebergs exist in mountain lakes (pictured).
In Queenstown we met up with Joe, Chad and his girlfriend Divya, and stayed in a bach - rather luxury apartment with floor to ceiling walls of windows with stunning lake and mountain views. No one wanted to leave.
On New Years Eve, we went on the Central Otago Wine Trail and after a few vinyards I decided to make Claire my wife the old fashioned way (pictured).
On New Years Day we climbed Mount Iron near Lake Wanaka with Evan and Amanda - our friends from London whose family has a bach near Queenstown as well (pictured).
On our last evening - just down to Joe, Claire and me, we took the gondola up the mountain and had a couple of rides on the luge (pictured going up the chair lift - don't miss Joe in the background)
Now we're back to work and spending our weekends trying to complete the laborious NZ residence application while also trying to figure out where we can have a wedding in Oxford.
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