Freshfields Village, Seabrook Island, SC

Betty, Sue and Madison out for Sunday morning coffee on a bike expedition in South Carolina where it is HOT, HOT, HOT!!!

Best and Worst of Our Trip

It's all over but the crying. We're in the Red Carpet Club in San Francisco with some time to reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly:

AIRLINES:

Best Airline: Air New Zealand

Best Cabin: United First (upgrade) to Frankfurt, however, we may be getting Air New Zealand's newest cinfurguratioin home t San Francisco so we reswrve judgment n this ne.

Best Business Class Cabin: Air New Zealand

Best Airport Lounge: Air New Zealand Sydney. Honorable mention - Turkish Air Istanbul

Best In-Flightt Service/Food: Thai Air First (upgrade)

Best Champagne: Thai Airways (Dom Perignon)

Best International Airport: Singapore (Betty) Bangkok (John)

Best Domestic Airport: Koh Samui, Thailand

Worst Cabin: Turkish Air

Worst Airline Food: Shanghai Air

HOTELS:

Favorite Hotel Overall: Les Suites Orient, Shanghai / Rambagh Palace, Jaipur

Best Hotel Food: Regent Rotorua, Rotorua, New Zealand

Worst Hotel Food: Nadesar Palace, Varanasi, India

Best View: Les Suites Orient, Shanghai

Worst View: Limes Hotel, Brisbane

Best Room: River Birches, Tungari, New Zealand (Betty) Fraser Suites, Sydney (John)

Worst Room: Limes Hotel, Brisbane

Best Service: Naumi Hotel, Singapore

Best Value: Les Suites Orient, Shanghai

DESTINATIONS:

Most Surprising - Positive: Shanghai (John) New Zealand (Betty)

Most Surprising - Negative: Koh Samui, Thailand

Most Exotic: India

Most Expensive: Australia

Cheapest: Thailand

Best Weather: Bangkok

Worst Weather: Hong Kong (AGAIN!!)

Best Food: Thailand

Worst Food: China

Best Food Value: Langham Place, Hong Kong (not there were special considerations here. We had club floor open 24-7 with food and drinks always available. Because the weather was so rotten we spent a LOT of time there, consuming most of our calories in HK. The Langham also holds a worst value mention for the expensive 3 Michelin starred Ming Court where Chris John and I ate a highly mediocre meal with the ambiance of a slightly upscale dim sum joint. Capped off with marshmallow bunnies!

Best Scenery: New Zealand

GENERAL:

Scariest: Taxi to the train station in Shanghai

Funniest: Night at the Windmill Bar in the Intercontinental, Shenzhen with Chris Lambert and other top executives who might have helped my presidential campaign.

Sent from my iPad

Champagne Johnny Auckland to SFO flight

This travel is just hell on wings ;)

Kayaking in the Ohau Channel

Lake Rotorua and Lake Rotoiti. It's longer than it looks and it is full of black swans. This entire area is one big geothermal wonder -- you can see steam venting all over the place and bathe in the mineral waters. The water in the channel was crystal clear but pretty chilly. It was a hot sunny day, but we weren't planning on a swim unless we capsized. We came close when we got caught up in the current and slammed into a big spiky plant on the edge of the channel.

Hobbits for breakfast

The movie set for Lord of the Rings is on the Alexander family farm, about 2 hours south of Auckland and 1 hour north of Rotorua where we have been for the last few nights. We could not resist a stop on our way to the airport. They are about to start filming the new movies, The Hobbit (2 parts), so the set was in beautiful condition. They had 45 hobbit holes, the Green Dragon Tavern, the party tree, grounds and lake with bridge. There were loaded apple and pear trees, pumpkins and onion fields, and they had already harvested the fields of corn, sunflowers and other crops that were grown to make up the set. Very cool. The only really fake thing on the set was a reconstructed oak tree above Bag End. They cut, disassembled, and then reassembled a 26 ton oak from nearby Matamata. They then had fake leaves and acorns wired into it to create the perfect specimen of a huge oak. Unbelievable what they do to create the perfect set. We took lots of pictures but they swear if you post them on a website or email them that they will shut down the website and track you down and beat you. We simply couldn't risk a shutdown of our cheesy blog.

Maori show: turning up the tourismo

We generally avoid this kind of thing like the plague but alas, it had to be done. Pay your 85$ per person, get picked up at your hotel in a bus, go to the fake old Maori village where warriors arrive in a canoe. Then a show begins with story telling, singing an dancing. The show was actually very good and we were in the front row for all the performances. Following that we ate our buffet plated traditional hangi meal (basically everything is steamed over rocks/dirt using the heat from the natural underground thermal springs giving it a smoky-earthy flavor). The food wasn't too bad!

Mountain bike Betty

A momentary break from tearing up the trail.

Mountain biking

We did this fantastic mountain bike course today outside Rotorua, NZ, including a stretch through some redwoods. We both loved this. We expected it would be on something like logging roads but it was actual trails through the woods. Don't be deceived by this picture. Most of it was nothing like this. Fun AND great exercise.

Watching the Masters

Live at 8:25 am in New Zealand on Skysport Live.

Hot Spot

This thermal area was about 10 miles from the main road but well worth the side trip on our way to Rotorua, New Zealand. Accessed by a small boat across a lake the thermal pools dump over 20 million liters of hot water into the lake each day. Geysers, boiling mud pots, the works. Very cool.

Taranaki Falls

Hiking to Taranaki Falls in the Tongariro National Park. During this 2.5 hour hike we experienced every sort of weather you can imagine except snow. Boiling hot at times and freezing cold and raining at others. Sort of a trademark of this part of New Zealand. We were just below the famous Tongariro Alpine Crossing which was experiencing gale force winds the day we were there. A wild and beautiful part of the country.

Betty in the vines

This seems like her rightful place. Taken at the Mission Estate Winery, Hawke's Bay.

Have WIFI will blog

Our last place had great WIFI which has been very tough to find since we left Asia. So when there is WIFI we take advantage.

They start early in NZ

Take a look at this slide. Check the size. Look at the kid climbing up the ladder. Can you see this in the U.S.? We've seen a lot of playground stuff which seems to point these kids toward the extreme sports NZ is so famous for.

More early training

Here you see really small kids trying a reverse bungee in the park and using a mini zip line at the playground. This kind of thing seems to be everywhere and these little kids are eating it up.

Turangi: Trout fishing capital of the WORLD

Yes, the weather has to be pretty bad to get me into the National Trout Center for some education about trout. It was but after seeing the clear lakes and streams here, I would want to hang here if I were a fish.

We are somewhere over the rainbow

In a place called Turangi on the south side of the huge Lake Taupo and close to the Tongariro park where we will hike tomorrow. The weather has changed about 50 times since we got here a few hours ago, with swings of 10-20 degrees. From cold and rainy to hot and sunny. And as you look at the mountains near our lodge and turn 360, you can see about 4 or 5 different weather conditions all at once. During one weather transition we saw an enormous and spectacular full rainbow. It was so big and close we couldn't get it into a single photo. Then it got sunny, we drove a bit down the road through bright sunshine. Then rain. Then another rainbow even bigger an better than the first. These pics from my iPhone don't do it justice!

Sunrise and breakfast in Napier

View from our hotel at Perfume Point on Hawkes Bay and breakfast at a cafe in downtown Napier. More to follow from the ring of fire ....

Cannonball

Kids diving into the harbor in Wellington. The water was so clean that people were actually swimming right off the main dock in Wellington Harbor.The temperature I believe was something else but they were sure loving putting on a show for the cameras.

Leaving Wellington

Container ship and pilot boat leaving Wellington Harbor.

The Spirit of New Zealand

Under full sail in the Cook Strait on our way in from Picton on the ferry.

Saturday afternoon in Wellington

A very warm day so nothing like a beer on the lawn. But keep it inside the rope please. This is on the Wellington waterfront at about 5pm Saturday.

Fall colors

It's a beautiful fall in New Zealand, the air is crisp at night, apples are ripe, the leaves are starting to change color, and the wine harvest is in full swing. As a matter of fact, daylight savings time ENDED last night and we set our clocks back this morning. It will be really odd to go directly from autumn to spring on our return trip. Now that's what I call missing winter - all in 12 hours.

Sailing through Queen Charlotte Sound

Stunning! Now through the Cook Straight and into Wellington.

Most beautiful dining room ever

We biked to the Herzog family estate (not related to the Herzog labels you might see in the US). They are couple who used to run a Michelin starred restaurant when they lived in Switzerland. Now they make wine and have about the best food in the region. Outside you sit under a canopy of chestnut trees with roses, herbs, olive and lemon trees and every other schoen thing you can imagine, looking out over the vineyard. Delightful and the food so good we returned for dinner. Eva, in your honor, I wore my last three bindi. I had purple and a pale yellow on one ear representing the grapes and a green on on the other ear, for the vines!

Through the mountains

Once we left the coast road we turned inland and drove several more hours through the southern alps to reach Marlborough and the wine region. The drive through the mountains was almost as nice as the coast drive. We followed this river through a gorge and saw almost nothing and nobody except sheep and cattle for hours. It did give Betty a chance to walk across the longest swing bridge in New Zealand. I really wanted to try it but who would have taken the pictures, right? It was probably 100 feet above the river. It takes a special sort of person to live out here in this isolation but if you are willing and don't get lonely, what a life. I can also tell you that in 2-3 hours we only saw one kayaker on this river. You could just go for miles and see no one.

Franz Josef Glacier

Late afternoon at the Franz Josef Glacier on the west coast of New Zealand's south island. We drove here after getting off the TranzAlpine train at Greymouth. It took about 2 1/2 hours but the drive was beautiful and really gave us a chance to see this part of NZ up close. It is an incredible combination of high mountain peaks, rainforest, farmland and ocean, all right next to each other. Although we had planned to hike to the bottom of the glacier the next morning (you can get to within about 100 meters depending on conditions) we decided to press on to the north. It was a good thing that we left early because the coast drive was so incredible that it took us about 8 hours to get from the glacier to our next stop here in Marlborough.

Blogger's Breakfast

One of the best times to post is early in the morning - assuming we have wireless internet, which has been a big assumption in both Australia and NZ. But we have it this morning so a little snack and of course some champagne (from Cloudy Bay which is right down the road) makes it that much more enjoyable.

Ah to be a teenager

Most of one car on the train was filled with a group of backpackers that were just young kids. I walked through the car a couple times to get to the open viewing car in the rear of the train. Not only were these kids not looking at the scenery, they had actually pulled the blinds because the sunlight was interfering with the screens on their laptops/mobiles. In this picture they have the blinds drawn and are playing cards. The were happy to have me take their picture but when I asked about their lack of interest in what was passing outside they looked at me like I had three heads.

Tranzalpine Rail

Scenes taken from the train passing across the southern alps in New zealand from Christchurch on the east coast to Greymouth on the west coast.