From Oamaru we went to Catlins park area, which we didn’t plan initially, but turned out to be one of the nicest places we visited in New Zealand.

On the way, at a place they call Nugget Point, we met two blokes who were
enjoying themselves driving two very fast radio controlled cars on the beach. I
enjoyed shooting a lot pictures there. Some turned out quite nice, but the fun
framing those fast beasts was even more fun than the result. I’m sure they had
fun driving them too

When we saw a few seals at Nugget Point we thought we saw something. Later
we managed to get a few feet from big sea lions at Surat Bay and later at Abel
Tasman kayak close to the seals and have dolphins swim around us. Stuff like
that happens in NZ about as commonly as cars get stolen in CZ.

• All photos

Since it’s about 5000 pictures and 13.3GB to go through, I’ll be posting my
New Zealand images in batches. This first batch covers the first three days of
the trip with a single shot from the 38 hour flight . CZ is almost exactly on the other side of the globe and we had a lot of waiting between the flights (PRG>AMS>KUL>AUC>CHR).

We arrived in Christchurch after waiting for the last plane in Auckland. We
totally looked like zombies there. I managed to leave all contact info for
Glynn at home, so we wandered around
Christchurch on our own. NZ towns look way more american than anything else
I’ve seen. Wide roads, everything orthogonal. That’s quite a contrast to the
roads out in the open, where it’s not uncommon for it to become dirt roads and
back to “state highway” again. The highway only has one lane per direction
though. And most of the bridges merge into one lane in both directions. Oh and
we even went on a bridge that shared the line with a train. Very funky.

Of course driving on the wrong side of the road got me a honk honk
at the very first crossing in Christchurch . I got used to it later on
(driving on left, not the honking), but at one point we stopped at a nice place
to make some pictures and when we got back on the road I said to Iva that it
wasn’t the safest place to park. And she replied with “Shouldn’t you be driving
left?”. At the second I got back to the right lane a speeding toyota truck went
past us just when we were going out of that curve. One second. Phew.

The weather in New Zealand was changing day to day, and later on even minute
to minute. Overall it wasn’t too bad, although the kiwis said this summer was
very cold. I found it funny when a complete stranger approached us in New
Plymouth, asked about where we come from and apologised for the weather The
people in NZ are the firendliest I’ve ever met.

We had some snow around lake Tekapo, yet the next day we got sunburnt on the
Hooker valley track near Mt Coook village. It doesn’t take long for a european
to get burnt even when you try to avoid it.

• All photos

So before I left for vacation I wanted to make sure my mailbox doesn’t
explode while I’m away, so I added a brutal procmail rule to really get rid of
all spam.

Unfortunately I didn’t notice the header also contains the string
tests=BAYES_00. You should see my face when I realised I
have nuked all my december mail.

In czech we have a saying to measure twice before cutting. Lesson learned.
If anyone reading this sent me something important in December, please resend
it. I am more sorry than you can imagine.

Just got back from vacation, about 10G of photos to sort out, hopefully you’ll get to see something interesting in a not so distant future. I’m happy we chose New Zealand instead of the other option we had, Maldive Islands. Eeeek.

Lots of catching up…