Prologue

Three months have passed since we farewelled our old friend "The Great South Coast Walk". Reflecting on the great experiences that it provided has given us many happy moments. However, as I mentioned in the epilogue of the photodiary, The Great South Coast Walk taught us that, to feel fulfilled, you need to constantly provide yourself with a challenge.

The time has come for that next challenge and, on September 18, the fair Nello and I fly out on a one-way ticket to New Zealand - Aotearoa - The Land of the Long White Cloud. It will be a different adventure than the previous one, as we don't plan one long single walk, but rather a series of shorter walks and trips on some of the wonderful walking tracks of New Zealand. In between, we plan to be a bit more relaxed and try and absorb some of the culture of our next door neighbours. There is no real travel plan or time limit and our trip will be a slow ramble from north to south - we will know that it is time to come home when we reach the bottom of the South Island and look out towards distant Antarctica. This photodiary will focus on the various walks in different parts of New Zealand's diverse and beautiful landscape. The first entry will probably appear near the end of September, as we need several days to get ourselves organised with a vehicle and equipment upon arrival in Auckland.

Australians "bushwalk", Americans "hike", others "ramble" or "trek". New Zealanders "tramp", so please feel free to join us via these webpages as we tramp the land of the long white cloud.

Postscript:

Those who followed our walk down the south coast of New South Wales may remember that I lamented the loss of some photos due to a "crash" of the smart media card in my camera. While getting ready for this trip, I found the old card and on an off-chance took it to a camera store - they were able to recover all the photos from the corrupted card!! The moral is; do not despair when your card crashes - the pictures may well still be recovereable. The link below will take you to the best of those that I thought lost. These formed part of our walk across Green Cape and include a photo of the rare and endangered ground parrot.

View the "lost" photos