A warm spell?

Since our last post, we've had Adrian here to stay. Adrian was involved with Scouts with us up in Auckland, and was the MC at our wedding. Pete, who married us, was also planning to come down but due to family reasons unfortunately had to pull out at the last minute.

With Adrian here, we took the opportunity to explore the options for possible Gold Level Duke of Edinburgh award expeditions down around here. It's possible that some of the kids from All Saints Birkenhead might be coming down here in a couple of years for a tramp, so we wanted to show Adrian the possibilities. We took Adrian down to Glenorchy to show him each end of the Rees-Dart track, which looks to be the most promising option. We also did a short walk through to Lake Sylvan, which we did earlier in the year as part of another tramp. http://gregandandreajarvis.blogspot.com/2009/04/going-bush-again.html

It's a short walk through Beech forest, coming out at Lake Sylvan - giving Adrian an idea of the kind of forest the kids can expect to see.

This photo is the Rees Valley, the start of the tramp.

This weekend, we decided to head up on Friday night to give night skiing a go. The weather has warmed up a lot in the past week or so, and the snow conditions have deteriorated. On Friday night we were basically snowboarding on wet crushed ice, which had been pushed into 2 foot high moguls. We're still pleased we went up, but the conditions made the boarding less than impressive.

On Saturday, with the weather still warm, we headed out to explore a new hunting area and have our first day tramp of the season. True to form, we managed to pick an area that was steeper than planned, and then made it progressively harder for ourselves by deciding to climb ridges to see if we could spot any wildlife (verdict: only sheep). The track we decided to take back to the car was mostly covered in snow, varying between ankle deep and waist deep. Very hard going! But loads of fun.

Here's Greg, halfway up the steep ridge we decided to climb:

And here's the view from the saddle, a couple of minutes walk from the car on the way back. We were up the back of Gibbston Valley, looking across at the Crown Range.

Rachael, Dave and JJ come to visit

It turns out that Jeremy (our nephew) is the bringer of snow. On the night he was born (last July) we had the biggest snow fall to lake level that Queenstown had seen in years.

This is our house on the morning of July the 5th, 2008. JJ was born the night before.

And here are Andrea and Jen in our backyard with the snowman we all built. We named the snowman Jeremy.

The snow season this year started with a bang, but after that there had been very little snow for 8 weeks. Until the day before JJ showed up - when we received almost half a metre of snow up on the fields, in about 24 hours. Not that we were complaining! The weather cleared out just in time for their flight to land, and stayed clear for the weekend, and packed in again on the evening after they flew out.

While they were here, we tried to help JJ experience lots of fun things.

Like swings and slides. This is the playground down by the little beach we wakeboard off. It turns out Jeremy prefers to be upside down on swings.

At the top of the slide, showing off the jumper that Gran (Louise Houltham) made for him. Sorry Aunty Jen, he had dispensed with the beanie by then!

Jeremy also discovered that he likes ribs.

On their last afternoon here, Dave and Jeremy came for a walk with the two of us along the beach. It was the coldest we've ever seen the beach - the sand had frozen! It was like walking on concrete - quite a bizarre feeling.

And of course we took him up to the snow. He wasn't so sure - everything was just so different to what he's used to. But he loved the chair lift!

And last but not least a picture of Aunty Andrea holding JJ in the carpark before we took off to hike for some fresh powder snow. Sorry about abandoning you guys for an hour or so, Rach and Dave.... but on powder days we have no friends... or relatives.

Skipper's Canyon

Being winter and with no fresh snow for 8 weeks, and having guests here (thanks for the excuse, Jen, Bex and Carmen), we decided to take a drive through Skipper's Canyon. Skipper's Road is an historic road from back in the gold mining days - it winds through Skipper's Canyon from the Coronet Peak access road. It is strictly 4WD only, not open to rental cars, with signs that say things like "Vehicle Damage Possible" and "No turn around for 6km". It's a little scary in summer, so it made perfect sense to go through in winter.

The road was mostly alright.



The water falls didn't really fall so much anymore. They were roaring in summer!


The same waterfall/icicles from another angle - the icicles were about 40 feet in height! And probably about 30 feet in width. Quite breathtaking!


The second part of the road involves driving along a very narrow ledge with a sheer cliff below. This is the view out across to the tablelands on a not-so-steep part.

The historic Skipper's bridge. An awesome feat of engineering! It sways as you drive across it. And today with the ice on it, it also made cracking noises when we drove across it. Not exactly reassuring....

And last but not least, the view back up the canyon from just across the bridge. Did we mention it hasn't actually snowed for 8 weeks? So that snow down there has sat there for all of winter so far. We're pleased we wrapped up warm.

PS: As we write this, it's trying really hard to snow outside. We're expecting a few cm to fall overnight... fingers crossed!

Vanuatu

We had a fantastic time in Vanutatu over the past week. We did everything we wanted to do and a bit more while we were there - day spa massages, game fishing, 4wd buggying, snorkelling, sailing, kayaking, parasailing, horse riding, village visits... plus of course a bit of relaxing!

We stayed at Iririki Island Resort, which is a small island just off Port Vila (the capital). The staff were really friendly and helpful and the food and drink at each of the 3 restaurants was excellent. The buffet breakfast every morning was great - we both got slightly addicted to the local passionfruit and even went to the local markets three times to buy more! They are bright yellow or dark red and about twice the size of the purple ones we get here, with way more flavour.

(Iririki Waterfront "Fares" (pronounced "faa-ray" - meaning bungalow) at sunset from the wharf)

The location of the resort was great - a quick 5 minute ferry ride back to the mainland and we were at the pick up point for any of about 300 different day trips you could do. The only thing we were a little disappointed about was the lack of white sandy beaches - the only sandy beach on the island was about 100m long, and man-made. We've since been told that white sandy beaches on Vanuatu are few and far between - and not that great (if there is no coral, there are no fish, and, unlike where we were, not great snorkelling).

Which brings us to the snorkelling. We saw sooooo many fish, of all sizes and colours, including plenty of clown fish ("Nemo" fish!) - some of which were so tame they came right up to your hand to see if there was any food for them. We took a day trip to Hideaway Island, which boasts the best snorkelling on Efate (the main Island of Vanuatu) and we weren't disappointed - although we snorkelled at Iririki two days later and found it almost as good!

(Hideaway Island)

The highlight of our trip were the 4wd buggies. These are like 4wd go-carts, complete with rollcages, and had a top speed of around 90-100km/hour. There were particular places where our guide told us we had to go flat out or we'd get stuck - such as in the long tall grass he took us through. A little scary when you're losing sight of the guide and the buggies in front and behind you - at 90km/hr! It cuts the grass pretty effectively though! We definitely ended up worse off than the couples in either of the other two buggies. Greg must have found every mud puddle on the track, and went through them at high speed. The guide got off his bike, looked at us and cried with laughter... saying only one word: "CAMERA".

In the morning, on the same day we went on the buggies, we went horse riding. Andrea had never been on a horse before (with the exception of primary school gala day pony rides) so we decided it was as good a chance as any. The horses pretty much played "follow-the-leader" but she did manage to get hers up to a fast trot (not quite a canter!) a couple of times. The horse was called "Enana" and was a bit stroppy - Greg commented that they matched the horse to the rider quite well....

The resort had "Happy Hour" with half price cocktails, between 5 and 6 pm each night. It was really popular with all the guests - the staff handed out free bowls of banana chips (salty and deep fried, not like the ones here!) and there was often entertainment. The local tour operators made the most of the captive audience and came over to hand out "raffle prizes" which were usually 2-for-1 vouchers. We won a 2-for-1 voucher to go parasailing and decided to give it a go. It cost less for both of us to go up than it would have cost for both of us to go here in Queenstown - and a new perspective on the surrounding area was great!

(Andrea up above Port Vila)

(Greg took the camera up with him - this photo shows Iririki Island just to the right of the parasailing rope, and Port Vila in the background, to the left)

On the last day, Greg finally managed to book in a spot of game fishing. Unfortunately, the other guy on the charter only wanted to go for 6 hours, not 8, but they still managed some great strikes from a marlin or two (but failed to have a hook up) and he landed this beautiful Mahimahi, by casting a popper towards a navigation buoy.

All said and done, we had a great time away and are already talking about our next holiday! The last photo below, shows one of the three resort pools right on sunset. Which happened to coincide with happy hour - you can see why happy hour by the pool was so popular!

More videos!

Third Video: Andrea getting REALLY first tracks on an untouched slope

Fourth Video: The Grin says it all - Greg getting knee-deep

Opening Day at The Remarkables

This morning we were lying in bed trying to decide whether or not we could be bothered with the icy conditions and long queues usually associated with opening morning. We'd seen on the website that all the lifts were due to open on the first day, which is quite unusual, so after some umming and ahhing we decided to haul ourselves out of bed and head up to catch up with our friends.

Well, it turned out to be a good idea. The snow was soft, the queues were non existent and we were once more up above the inversion layer - basically a bluebird day.

We hit some untracked snow on our first run off the lift (under Alta, Jen!) and decided pretty quickly that we should head further afield and do some hiking to get more of the fresh stuff. Watching the long "ant trail" of people heading across to "the chutes" we decided to go in the other direction, for our tried and true powder stash up the back of Sugar Bowl.

First Video: Greg getting fresh tracks

We spent the next 2 hours hiking and re-hiking all our various little spots we came to know last year and had loads of fun. Hopefully the videos will all download for you - if anyone (eg on dialup) has any problems let us know and we'll send you a CD.

2nd Video: Andrea getting some almost-fresh tracks (going over Greg's tracks from the previous video)

Ho Hum, just another Saturday....

Up above the inversion layer! Taken from Coronet Peak looking out over a sea of cloud across to the Remarkables ski area.

Looking towards Cecil Peak and down towards Kingston. Queenstown is down under the thick fog (that's Queenstown Hill you can see poking through in front of Cecil Peak) and stayed that way all day. The inversion layer is normally typical of Wanaka in winter, where it's quite often colder below the clouds than above, but is quite unusual in Queenstown. It was 3-4°C up at the ski field this morning but didn't get above 2°C in most of Queenstown all day.