A couple of weeks ago Viv & Vince arrived from Ireland for a two week road trip of NZ. They saw a lot, climbed a lot and tramped places I’ve not got to (yet!). It was lovely seeing them.

The only sad thing was that, of course, they left again. Really shouldn’t be allowed.

Maaike and I had planned a trip up to Kaikoura to see Val & Dom. It was a simply fantastic weekend. Kaikoura is Maori for “plentiful food”. There’s a really good reason for this. As you may/may not know, New Zealand is half on one tectonic plate and half on another. Good design eh. At Kaikoura there’s a deep trench very close to the short. Within one km of the shore it’s one km deep. Lots of rich waters well up close to the land and basically, marine life goes berserk. Also, the van clocked 200K

Dom had caught Paua and Crayfish (like a lobster only less vicious) which we had on the BBQ on arrival. Perfect end to a Friday afternoon!

The next day while Dom was at work, Val & Maaike and I went for a bit of a bike ride.

I took along my new HTC Desire HD (a smart phone!). I was pretty annoyed that the GPS pretty much failed to work for most of the trip. However, now (a week later) I think I’ve got that mostly sorted. There’s little worse than the anticipation of something entirely hip and groovy being anything less than perfectly so!. Snowpool app to follow in a few months.

In the evening we went for a snorkel (will update with pictures later) and Dom caught a couple of cray and some fresh Paua. Paua is abalone and it’s just the most delicious (and unique) food. It looks like the left, and comes in the shell on the right.

Then the evening was spent with a couple of wines and many many games on Dom’s XBox Kinect. Very very fun, I had pain in my side for 3 days from “throwing the javelin”. Honestly.

On the Sunday Maaike gave me a very generous and slightly early birthday present. A Whale watch flight with Dom.

Most of the pictures came out quite badly. It’s hard to take a decent picture with a small lens in a moving helicopter. However, I was really very happy with this pic.

Well, thanks to all for a brilliant start to my 33rd year on the planet.

Up to Palmy for Christmas. Cousin Thomas was over from the UK, and lovely to see him again. We gave eachother a poker set (identical) and it saw quite a lot of use over the next few days. Irritatingly, Maaike, once introduced to the game did quite well. I have a theory (Theory A) which has as it’s axiom:

1) Boys don’t like loosing to girls.

Therefore, in a poker bidding war, boys will continue to up the stakes against a girl. This leads to doom when your opponent does, actually, have a decent hand.

Anyway, it was lots of fun. We took the cousins on the Gorge walk, which is a 5 hour (easy) walk just outside of Palmy. I don’t think either my Aunt or cousins had done the walk in quite a long time. It’s a lovely walk, the perfect thing to work off some of the Christmas Turkey.

There were some excellent branches to swing on (if you’re < 70kg)

And some good views of the wind turbines throughout the area. I’m not quite sure where they come up with these stats.. but apparently this area of NZ has “the most reliable strongish wind patterns on the planet”. I’d like to see the sources for (Alisters) claim on that one!

Next it was off to Taranaki to meet up with our friends (and housemates) Steve and Michelle. Steve is from ‘the naki’ and understandably proud of a stunning part of the country. We met up in New Plymouth where we enjoyed the festival of lights. Even going for a row in a pirate boat! ARRRRGGGG

We also had a quick walk up to the top of an old leftover volcano.. and a nice view of the sea.

Next day it was off to Taranaki (Mt. Egmont) where we went on a 3 day tramp. The last time I was here was a long time ago (2003) with my friend Maeve. It’s a stunning place, gets metres of rain a year and is just wonderful. Mind you, last time I was here in the rain and it was much more pleasant this time around.

They’ve been carrying out some extensive stout trapping here. We saw hundreds of traps – but I think we only saw one actual capture. Still, bettern’ nuffink.

We visited a waterfall (Bells falls), and had stunning campsites for the premier of the pitching of our new tent (Macpac Olympus)

New Years eve was a little cold and windy, here a picture of Michelle responding to Steve’s request to pass his bag across, but not willing to risk getting out from under the sleeping bag. We woke up to these funny shaped clouds. I’m pretty sure they’re ‘lenticular’ clouds, and indicative of high winds.

After a quick breakfast we headed up the mountain to the top. It’s only a 1000m climb, but quite steep, quite hot, and with lots of scree. Technically it’s not hard (at least in summer), but claims the most lives each year. Probably ‘cos there’s lots of traffic on the mountain, and the weather can change very rapidly.

An excellent trip – really great to get to the top of a decent mountain again.

Stew and Juliana are two friends from the Canterbury University Tramping Club and they’ve been going out for ever and finally decided to tie the knot. They chose an entirely beautiful place to tie said knot – up at the Cheeseman ski field. It was quite a low-key event, but really beautifully done.

Here is a picture of the bride walking along a narrow path to where the service took place and a picture of the happy couple.

One key difference from Ireland is that the celebrant is the legally registered entity, not the place. This means that you can get married anywhere. This also means it can be a lot less expensive to have a wedding as extortionate prices can’t be charged by a limited number of (monopolising) venues. So… yes… a brilliant wedding – simply done but really great.

We stayed the night (drinkin’ and dancin’) and then back to Christchurch to meet some friends of Maaike’s who had arrived from The Netherlands.

I’ve said it before, and I’m quite sure I’ll say it again, the Dutch have an excellent sense of humour (at least the ones I have met). Ruud and Noor were absolutely great fun, we were merrily slagging eachother off after about, oh, 5 minutes of conversation – just like it would be with the Irish. Great times – would love to see them back here again.

And yes, the Dutch go in for double vowels a lot.

Apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve been busy!. Not so much in the play sense, but in the working sense.

I started work at Egressive a few weeks ago and have been busy ever since. It’s a great company with really nice people in it. Course I have to say that ‘cos they may easily have subscribed to the RSS feed to keep tabs on what I say ;) hehehe, no, kidding aside it really is a great place.

Dave, one of the directors, is as much a programmer as a .. well.. evangelist? .. for Open Source and Free Software. It was definitely one of the aspects that drew me to the company. Since starting I’ve been mainly doing support work for their clients. The framework that Egressive uses is Drupal, which is an Open Source CMS.

Anyway, this is all very heavy for this little blog! Basically, it has been great to learn and be stretched again. Of course, I do miss the flexibility that I has in my old job of being able to take lots of unpaid leave, but being kept interested does make up for things.

So, it was a good move, I’m definitely happy and on my way to becoming more and more comfortable with Drupal. Still heaps and heaps to learn. Which is great.

This was entirely Maaike’s idea – and full credit goes to her for picking it.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain were in town, and I would highly recommend going to see them if you get the chance. They’re absolutely talented, and extremely funny. I haven’t laughed so much at a concert ever!

Firstly we had to get past the protesters (no pics unfortunately). They had banners saying “Say no to Uke’s” and “Keep NZ Uke Free, Think of the children”. Fantastic.

Anyway.. here’s a short video (not from NZ) which will give you an idea of what they are like. They came back for about a 20 minute encore.