Around the World in 70 Days

Australia, July 20-25

A few hours after we left Chet, we headed to Auckland International Airport and boarded a quick flight to Sydney, arriving right at the beginning of rush hour into Australia’s largest city.  Ben and Jerm decided to take the subway into the city due to the traffic and surprise, it was pouring down rain.  We got into King’s Cross, the Aussie version of Amsterdam’s Red Light District, and walked through the Cross to Potts Point, dodging the rain, cars, and drug dealers, to meet at Dawn’s place (Jerm’s friend from Miami).

Once we met up with Dawn and her boyfriend Devin, we dropped off our stuff and went straight for dinner.  The weather made us change our plans but we went to Opium Den (not what it sounds, it is a great Thai place) and we all got different tasty curries and tried some local brews!

Thursday morning we woke up to more rain, which cancelled our outdoor plans.  Not to be detoured, we found the 2010 World Photo Exhibition at the New South Wales State Library, a collection of the best photos in the world.  It was a FREE exhibit that not only had amazing images; they all told a story on sports, real life struggles, politics, and much more.  After a few hours at the library, we walked around downtown Sydney trying to find an AMEX store to replace Ben’s traveller’s checks (yes these are the same checks Ben has been trying to replace for 8 weeks now) and finally gets his checks reissued.  Lunch time, we were told to get meat pies at Harry’s (similar to KFC’s chicken pot pies) and were sadly disappointed that they didn’t live up to the hype.  Luckily Harry’s had tasty hot dogs so Ben and Jerm decided to get one of those for dessert which was much better.  We walked back to Dawn’s place in the rain, threw all of our now-soaked clothes in the dryer, popped in a movie and relaxed for the afternoon.

Dawn and Devin came home from work and they decided to invite some friends over for homemade shrimp tacos so six of us enjoyed Devin’s culinary skills, with homemade guacamole on the side!   As you may or may not know, food costs in Sydney are ridiculously high, so Ben and Jerm gladly accepted Devin’s dinner proposal (a $10 dinner in the states would probably cost $25 in Sydney)!  After another movie, we all were pretty exhausted and went to bed shortly afterwards.

Friday morning was our big trip up to New Castle, or “Newie” as the locals call it, to meet up with our friends Sam and Josh.  We got on the train and Ben quickly realizes that he left our present for them at the breakfast place we went to earlier, so we turned around, luckily picked up the present, and continued our route to Newie only to show up an hour late.  Sam met us at the train station and took us on a quick tour of town and then off for lunch.  Later we took a tour of all the beaches, but had to stay car-side since the rain hadn’t subsided and the winds were picking up.  We hung out with Sam all afternoon until Sam’s family made us a pot roast dinner which they forced us to eat, along with some Vegimite, and then headed out for the evening.

Our friend Josh was having a house warming party for his new apartment that had an American theme (in our honor it turned out).  Ben and Jerm didn’t realize that everyone else at this party was dressed in their most ridiculous “American” costume they could come up with, which we had nothing.  We met a lot of their his friends, listened to 80’s and 90’s American music, and even had an American hot dog eating contest around 2 AM Saturday.

Saturday morning we reflected on the American themed aftermath, and then went down to grab a quick bite for breakfast at the “cool” Mackies that was downtown.  Yes, as in McDonald’s.  Only our second time for the trip!  We enjoyed our sandwiches and headed off to Black Butt Nature Reserve to see if we couldn’t spot some koalas and roos.  The rain had almost stopped by this point, but we had a nice casual walk around this free outdoor nature reserve and saw some great local animals.  We decided we hadn’t had enough animals for the day, and Josh wouldn’t quit whining about how great these huge bats were, so we gave in and he directed to another nearby park where he knew the bats secretly hung out.  Get it?  Hung out.  Bats.  Get it?  Ok, moving on.

The bats were great, but we were running late so we made haste to the train station to catch our ride back down to Sydney.  A beautiful ride it was, along the Eastern coast of NSW with the sun now shining, and we were back before we knew it.  We showered and changed, grabbed a bit to eat, and were ready to be picked up by our long lost South African friends Cheryl and Wendy (if you recall, Cheryl’s house was the first stop on the trip and her sister Wendy was in ZA visiting, now Cheryl was in AU visiting!) to take us to the TriNations Australia vs. South Africa rugby match.  We made it through the traffic we were both quite excited for this true rugby match.  Well, we were quickly disappointed as both teams brought their B teams and the crowd just wasn’t as hectic as we had anticipated.  Nevertheless, the rain had completely stopped and it was a nice night to watch a match, especially in the great seats we found.  We made it back to Potts Point after the game and met up with Dawn and Devin who were out with some friends.

Sunday morning was the first sunny day in Australia, so we went and had a great greasy breakfast at Maggie’s, and then headed off to see the city!  We walked through the botanical gardens and quickly found ourselves at the Sydney Opera House.  While it looks really white and all one piece on postcards, it turns out it’s not that white and it’s all tiled.  Who knew?!  We walked around and enjoyed seeing and photographing the iconic spot.  We continued walking down into the harbor to snag a quick ferry ride out to Watson’s Bay, one of Dawn and Devin’s favorite spots.  We roamed around the beautiful area overlooking the Sydney skyline to one side and the ocean on the other for the afternoon and enjoyed some fresh fish and chips at Doyle’s before heading back to the apartment.  Dawn and Devin decided to have some friends over for dinner so we started cleaning and cooking to prepare for the company.  We enjoyed the night, but kept it low key since we only had one more day of traveling and D&D had to work in the morning.

We woke up bright and early Monday morning and headed out to explore on our last day in Australia, and lucky for us it was absolutely beautiful.  The first stop was the famous Bondi Beach, where Ben and Jerm enjoyed strolling along the boardwalk and watching graffiti artist do their thing.  After a couple hours we kept moving on and made our way back downtown, grabbed some pasta for lunch, and headed straight for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  We both decided against the $220 four hour climb up the bridge, and opted for the $6 student price to climb one of the four towers.  We had great views of the city and learned a lot about the bridges construction on the way!  We had an hour to kill after the bridge, so we stopped in a local pub and took in our last beer of Australia, and of our summer together.  After some good laughs, we continued on home, back through the botanical gardens, grabbed some sushi for dinner in Kings Cross, packed our things, and off to the airport we went.

And there it is.  70 days, 13 countries, 5 continents, and 3 silly MBAs. 

July 19^th-20^th – Auckland, NZ

We woke up rested and loving our different hostel in Auckland, Ponsonby Backpackers.  We showered, had some tea, and then headed out to check out a few things we didn’t get to the first two days in Auckland.

The first stop was to check back with the two old guys that ran the antique watch shop so that Chet could get a matching black strap for his new Omega, and since neither man could see very well the process took a while.  From there, and since the weather was near perfect at 60 and sunny, headed into downtown for some food.  After eating, we walked down to the Viaduct area which is really just the Kiwi’s name for the harbour.  We did some exploring and then made are way into the Maritime Museum which was our goal.

The lady selling the tickets explained to us that for just a few dollars more we could go out on a somewhat newly built “old” sailboat that the museum now owns and gives rides to visitors.  We all thought it would be a cool experience, so we paid the money and made our way onto the boat with 45 young Chinese children on a field trip.  It was a fun hour long ride, but the wind wasn’t on our side and we only ended up actually sailing for about 15 minutes coming back into the harbour.  We got back and headed into the museum.  After a pretty creepy and very strange initial video, we walked into the main part of the museum which traced back the history of boating and sailing in NZ.  It was an extremely well done museum with some great exhibits, some hands on displays, and the three of us had a good time spending the afternoon there. 

We decided we were all a little tired but could make  the trek back up the hill to Ponsonby.  We relaxed for a while, checked some email, and then grabbed some great pizza from a local establishment called The Chapel that we knew had a special deal on Tuesday nights from the previous Tuesday.  We called it an early night and headed back to the hostel for a good nights sleep, and sadly Chet’s last night on this epic journey.

We all got up early to see Chet off, as his flight back to the states was a few hours before Ben and Jerm flew to Australia.  All packed up, we hugged and Chet went on his way.  Jerm and Ben enjoyed their last bowl of soup they bought on the South Island, packed up themselves, and then headed to the airport.

Chet was done, headed back early for a close friend’s wedding on the East Coast.  Jerm and Ben had just a week left in Sydney, AU.  It was a sad day splitting up after a summer together, but excited to see what would be next for the three.

July 17^th-18^th – Mt. Cook, New Zealand

We left Queenstown and drove 2 hours north to a small town called Wanaka, that was supposed to resemble Queenstown on a much smaller scale.  When we got there we had an amazing breakfast at Gusto Cafe, including freshly squeezed orange juice that was only $8 a glass; sounds pricey but definitely worth the money.  Then we walked around the nearby lake, found a playground and played on the toys.  Yes playgrounds are just as much for 27-30 year old MBA graduates as they are for little kids!  As we left Wanaka, we continued north to Mt. Cook, the tallest point in New Zealand. 

We stopped and pulled off the road several times to take pictures of the mountains, all the snow, and the numerous lakes.  Around lunchtime we got out of the van at Peter’s Lookout.  We went down to the banks of the river, took some great pictures of Mt. Cook and the surrounding mountains and then walked back to the van to head to the mountain.  Shortly after we left, we realized that we were down to fumes on gas, so Ben made the decision to head to the mountain in hopes of finding a filling station.  Luckily after driving 40 km and reaching the base of Mt. Cook, there was one gas station, with snow banks taller than Chet covering half of the pumps, and we were saved!  After the gas we parked the van, went outside to heat up some soup, and capped off the lunch with some mint chocolate fudge Jerm bought in Queenstown the night before.

There was some debate on what to do that afternoon but we eventually decided to do a 2-hour trek on Mt. Cook to a place called Kea Point (apparently a Kea is an Arctic Parrot, not sure if they can talk though).  Now as an aside, in the States if there was a path to climb up a mountain, there would be signs every 50 or so feet clearly marking the route.  But this is New Zealand, where the only reason why we kinda, sorta knew we were going the right way was the foot path in the snow of people who had walked it before.  The views of the mountain range were great, and definitely worth trekking even though all of us almost fell into the snow multiple times.  When we got back fully exhausted from our first serious physical activity in over a week, we decided to drive north and stop where ever we could find a place. 

An hour or two later, we find a place on our map called Fairlie, that appears to be a big town on our map, so we decide to go there.  When we got there however, we realized this town was one main street that was only about 5 blocks long.  Not being discouraged, we stayed and went into this old hotel/restaurant (it looked like an old hotel straight out of the 1920’s).  It actually ended up being quite a lucky decision to stop there.  Thirty minutes into us arriving there, Steve who was the owner of the place, heard our American accents and came up to us talking about Hank Williams and Texas Country Music.  None of us are huge country fans but we played along pretending to know a lot about the genre.  3 hours later, after watching an old 1979 live concert of Billy Joe Shaver at Austin City Limits and seeing several country music videos from his personal jukebox, Steve let us park our van in the back of his hotel for the night, let us have free internet on his computer, and told us we could have a hot shower the next morning.  This was like a message from the heavens because, as you could imagine living in a van, we hadn’t showered in about 3 days. 

The next morning was our final drive back to Christchurch.  We snuck into the hotel to take quick showers then jumped on the road for our last day on the south island.  After an hour or so dangerous pass that Ben navigated us through, we decided that this place would be a great drive for Jeremy to learn how to drive a manual car.  So not only did he have to drive on the wrong side of the road, have to drive with the steering wheel on the opposite side of the car, he had to learn (Ben and Chet were great coaches) to drive a manual van, something he had never done before.  Two hours later and only 2 stalls at red lights, the successful experiment landed us back in Christchurch. 

When we arrived in Christchurch, we wanted to see how the two recent earthquakes had changed the landscape of the city.  Many of the streets downtown were completely blocked off, fencing is everywhere, and it is quite eerie to see one building completely destroyed while the very next building was barely damaged.  After walking around the city, we became hungry and quickly ate brunch, returned the van, and headed to the airport.  Unfortunately our flight got delayed (another consistent theme of our trip) three times, but finally took off.  We arrived in Auckland a little after midnight, took a taxi to our hostel in Ponsonby, and went to bed after an exhausting but exciting week on the south island!

July 14^th – July 16^th – Queenstown, New Zealand

The 6-hour drive to Queenstown was an adventure in-and-of-itself.  Luckily Ben was driving through the crazy curves, the drastic changes in elevation, and the constant change of snow, to rain, to snow, to dry roads (oh and did we mention most of this driving was at night with zero light to rely on).  And another thing we might not have mentioned, we had NO heat.  Several times throughout this drive we turned on the mini-stove cooker to warm up the van for brief spurts at a time.

We arrived in Queenstown around 8 in the evening, and after driving circles through town about a dozen times, we finally pick a place to park on a road just a few blocks north from the mayheim which is Queenstown, the weekend after their first snow storm of the year.  After marking our territory there, we turned on the cooker and made a home-made spaghetti dinner that even Emeril Lagasse would be impressed with, knowing we had such limited resources and cookware.  Either way, it was our first meal that wasn’t soup or grilled cheese in a couple days, so it was a tasty treat for the three of us.  After dinner, Jeremy and Chet decided to go explore the town for a bit, while Ben played mall-rent-a-cop and protected our van since he had a fever, and really just went to bed.  Queenstown is like a much bigger ski resort town, similar to Aspen or Breckenridge in Colorado.  This would end up being the last night in our van without heat, pillows, and blankets, which was much needed since all of us had at least 5 layers of clothes on to sleep.

Saturday morning we woke up early, had our standard yoghurt and museli for breakfast, and then headed 10 km east to the Wicked Van Office.  Of course when we got there no one was there, so after walking around the area, and making a few phone calls, Erika who was supposed to be there 30 minutes earlier, finally arrived.  We explained our situation to her and she was nice enough to exchange vans for us for one that actually had working heat (something we assumed was standard for all vehicles made after 1970).  We unpacked everything from our old van just to repack it into our new van seconds later.  We were out of there by 10 AM and headed back to town, but this time with heat!

When we got back, we parked in a similar spot to the previous night and then split up.  Chet wanted to walk around town and do some exploring (and was also nice enough to post some of our blogs) while Ben and Jerm decided to be a bit more adventurous and try bungy jumping for the first time.  For those novice bungy jumpers, AJ Hackett invented the sport in New Zealand a half century ago, so Ben and Jerm decided it was only appropriate to do a jump from his company, in his town. 

We arrived at the staging area, got our measurements and signed our lives away (aka a legal waiver saying that they are not responsible for any injury…or death), and then got picked up to head to Nevis Bungy, a 40 minute bus ride outside of town.  When we got there, it was a little intimidating, a suspended “house-like” building was dangling 134 meters (roughly 430 ft) above a river and canyon.  With little time to realize what they had signed up for, Jeremy was the first person to jump and Ben quickly followed next.  The easy part was getting all the security measures attached to your harness; the hard part was waddling over to the platform with both feet strapped together, looking down roughly 50 stories below into a river, and then deciding to jump as far as you can and free fall to earth.  A crazy experience but something that gives you an amazing rush of adrenaline.  After the jump we got our harnesses off, bought our individual DVD’s (so ask Ben and Jeremy to watch it next time you see them) and then headed back to Queenstown to meet back up with Chet.

To celebrate their recent accomplishments, and to relax a little, the three went to Fergburger (a famous Queenstown institution) and ate massive burgers that were great!  But no one told us how big the burgers actually were, so we all ordered fries with the burgers that barely got touched.

After Ferburger, we walked around town, took some pictures of the sunset, bought some rugby balls (the 2011 Rugby World Cup is being held in New Zealand and starts at the beginning of September), and after a couple more stops, we went back to the van and were excited to have our first night of sleep with blankets and pillows.

Sunday morning we woke up early, grabbed some coffee and tea from Bob’s Weigh, a place that everyone who visits Queenstown should go to, and made our way north to Mt. Cook.

July 14 – Dunedin, NZ

We woke up early and checked out, as we wanted to explore Dunedin a bit in the daylight before heading on to Queenstown.  We walked around downtown, explored the campus a bit, and then hit up the beautiful Railway Station before heading back towards the main street in town for a tasty coffee spot that was recommended to us from some randoms in Christchurch. 

Before leaving town, we were told that we needed to drive by the steepest road in the world, a nice toursity treat that is the result of dropping the exact layout of Edinburgh, Scotland on to the topography of an entirely different city.  They wouldn’t give in to the layout (and for good reason, Edinburgh is a pretty cool place), and so some crazy streets, hills, and intersections were created.

We found Baldwin Street after a few misguided turns, and Ben decided that he would “give it a go” in the 20 year old Mitsubishi van without heat (and torque) and roughly 350,000 km on the odometer.  Much to everyone’s surprise (even the van’s), she made it up the hill after a long hard struggle and we enjoyed the lookout from the top.  It was short lived, as there isn’t really anything AT the top, so we piled back in and headed back down.  Thankfully the brakes work better than the engine and heat.

With our tourist activities accomplished, we headed out towards Queenstown. 

July 13 – South Island, New Zealand

The next morning we woke up shivering, as we realized that not having blankets, sleeping bags, or pillows, was a bit costly.  We also should have mentioned that about an hour into our departure from Christchurch with this van we discovered that there was no heat.  Not even a little heat!  So waking up freezing seeing our breath, sitting on the ocean, and knowing that the van wasn’t going to warm us up, we decided it was best to head back into town and pick up some cold weather gear.  We luckily found an outdoor shop with some nice mid-winter sales and went to town on gloves and socks, two key things we hadn’t needed on our trip thus far.  We called the 24 hour help line for the van company, but were told that we had to make it to Queenstown before the heat issue could be resolved.  Shucks.

We headed south from town towards Dunedin, but made sure to stop along the way at the Moeraki Boulders based off a suggestion from a local in Timaru.  These boulders were quite odd – almost perfectly round boulders sitting on the shore of the ocean.  There is some explanation about how these formed over millions of years, but we’ll let you google that one.  Either way, they were pretty neat to see and take some pictures of, so that’s just what we did.  Jerm had a minor mishap, as poor timing of the waves lead to a somewhat failed attempt to jump atop one of the half submerged boulders, and was thus left with completely soaked socks, shoes, and half soaked jeans…in New Zealand…in the middle of the winter…with a van without any sort of heat whatsoever.  Costly mistake!

Being the entrepreneur that he is, Jerm figured out a way to tie his shoes to the back of the van to hope that the air would at least help dry them as we drove the rest of the way to Queenstown, and felt confident that he boyscout-ish knots had his only pair of tennis shoes firmly secured to the rear windshield wiper. 

Off we went into the mountains, making haste towards Queenstown with Chet at the helm.  We decided to explore some side roads to try to find a great place for lunch, and after making the trip up a bumpy dirt road we realized, much to Jerm’s dismay, that those failsafe knots were no match for the New Zealand elements and his shoes were no longer attached to the van.  It’s one of those situations where you are a little uneasy at the beginning, but after consistently looking back to confirm that the shoes were still there you begin to check back less and less often.  Unfortunately we were all pretty confident by this point that his shoes were safe, so it had been quite a while since the last “shoe check” was done.  Costly part two.

We decided he probably needed shoes for the rest of the trip, so we turned around and slowly drove back the way we came, like hawks looking out both sides of the van for these now infamous shoes.  Luckily, we found them, and actually only took about 10 km of backtracking.  They were in one piece, knot still tied, but a little dirtier and still soaking wet.  C’est la vie.

We continued on our way, pulled off to eat some soup in the van (at this point we were just cooking in the van, which was HIGHLY discouraged by every warning sign through the van, but we were doing anything for some heat) and arrived in Dunedin that evening as the sun was setting.  We quickly found a hostel, a cold beer, and even some 18 year old college guys that were there studying (Dunedin is a big college town, that reminds Ben of his new home, Madison, Wisconsin).  They convinced us they would show us the town that evening, and being the old chaps that we are, much obliged their invitation and enjoyed a very random but extremely entertaining night.

July 12 – Christchurch, NZ

After some research as to the best way to get down to the South Island of New Zealand, we quickly figured out that the 24 hours and $500+ option of train-ferry-train down from Auckland wasn’t feasible and instead booked ridiculously cheap flights.  An early morning flight put us in Christchurch around noon, and we hopped aboard the bus to head into town to pick up the camper van that we had rented for the next 7 days.  After some help (and debate) from a local woman that we were chatting with on the bus and the bus driver, we found our stop and walked a few blocks until we found our van rental place called Wicken Vans.  We filled out some paperwork, learned how the van worked, loaded our gear, and were off to explore the adventures of the South Island for the next week.

Our first stop was the grocery store Pak-n-Save, a Cub’s food/Walmart-esque economy grocery and we enjoyed romping around the isles figuring out what we could consume and also reasonably prepare in the back of a van.  Cheese, bread, noodles, yoghurt, soup – we weren’t preparing for the gourmet life.

After a failed attempt to fill the tank of the van with petrol (at a tear-inducing $8.15 per gallon), we finally got ‘er filled up, picked up some butane for the portable gas grill that was included, and headed south from Christchurch towards Dunedin.  After putzing around in Christchurch, and being so far south in the middle of winter, darkness crept up on us after only a couple hours of driving.  We stopped in the next “big town” that we came across, Timaru, found a local pub for a quick and refreshing brew (and so we could steal 5 liters of water that we needed for our van’s sink to function), and headed down to the ocean front to set up shop for the night.  It was brisk, but we managed to huddle around the grill outside and make some tasty grilled cheese before the three of us hunkered down inside the van for the night.