EC-Rider Travels

Today has been somewhat frustrating – almost the only one since I left three and a half months ago. Just before we were about to leave for the airport we received news that our Air New Zealand flight to Melbourne had been delayed by three and a half hours. Quite boring… particularly as we shortly had to drop off the car. Anyway our friends at budget kindly allowed us to bring the car back a little later and indeed the nice people at Kinross said we could stay there a little longer too. So, we spent a happy morning in the sun with views over the Kinross vineyard and the very sweet ducks. A few hours later we had news it had been delayed a further hour. Frustrating, but not the end of the world.

We headed off to the airport, stopping off at Lake Hayes for a quick walk and arriving at the assigned time to drop off the car.

I was rather sad to say goodbye to it, despite its bossy ‘grabbing of the wheel’ and beeping if you went over a white line, it had served us well over the last 3,600km. We checked in, went through the very stringent security and were sitting at the gate, when I received a further text saying our flight had been cancelled 😡. No apology, just we were booked on a flight tomorrow afternoon. Grrrrr! I then heard an announcement about another flight to Melbourne and amazingly, after a lot of back and forth, I managed to get the last two seats on a JetStar flight.

JetStar, I think is NZ’s ‘EasyJet’, no frills and the most charmless staff, but they got us to Melbourne and despite being six hours late, darling Sarah and Tim Dehn were there to meet us and take us to their dear little home in Surrey Hills.

I can’t really believe our New Zealand adventure is over. Although it seems long ago we were at the hilarious Great Ponsonby Art Hotel in Auckland, it has gone so fast. We have had a really lovely time and laughed a lot. The weather has only been quite kind but it has rarely stopped us doing anything we had planned and goodness we were lucky yesterday ….. it would not have been the same in the rain.

What I have really loved and hope will always remember, is the extraordinary beauty of this country. People have always said it, but it is way beyond anything you can imagine and even tops Scotland. I didn’t think anything could be more lovely than the North Island, but the South Island really is on another level. It is just so varied, with alpine to rainforest to the sea in a couple of hours. I know I have been going on about the colour of the water, but the turquoise blue of the sea, rivers and lakes has to be seen to be believed; and as for the amazing trees and wild flowers….. The endless stretches of (main) road, with not a soul, house, shop or petrol station was pretty extraordinary, as indeed was the fact that everyone knew everyone! It is a truly wonderful place, if perhaps caught in a rather charming time-warp.