Dec 1, 2011

It’s a fact: you can go to straight to Paradise from Queenstown. And although you might think you’re already in Paradise when you first see Queenstown, you aren’t. It’s 67 kilometres away, past Glenorchy and across the Jordan River. Paradise is not everyone’s idea of fun. If you’re strictly the shopping/sipping latte type, go somewhere else....

Aug 13, 2011

I was jumping around the internet the other day and came across these cool travel videos. They’re all by the same small team and have been created using a kind of stop-motion effect, recording short clips of video and stitching them all together. There are three videos – Move, Eat and Learn – that were all taken over the length of one huge...

Aug 11, 2010

You always think that tropical islands are something that happens to other people. And yet earlier this year, I found out I was lucky enough to be able to visit North West Island – a tropical island in the Capricornia Islands about 6 hours off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Right now, I’m sitting in a house in Hervey Bay in Queensland – an...

Jul 1, 2010

A while ago, a guy I know in Timaru was mountaineering in Nepal and collapsed. He woke up in a hospital in Kathmandu with serious blood clots in his legs. He ended up missing his flight home to New Zealand and had to stay at the hospital for a number of days under intensive care. Luckily for him, he’d got some travel insurance sorted before he left so he...

Jun 24, 2010

Recently I’ve been having a chat with Mark Inglis through Twitter, for which I’m completely honoured, and humbled. If you were to ask anyone in the know in New Zealand about famous New Zealand mountaineers, you’d hear Inglis mentioned amongst some proud names such as Rob Hall, Russell Brice and, of course, Sir Edmund Hillary. Mark Inglis has a...

Jan 5, 2010

In my last post I talked about my relaxing wine tour around Gisborne during my visit to the in-law’s. Gisborne is a nice place but it’s downside (and probably it’s upside too) is that it’s pretty secluded. My uncle once joked that if you fell off the world you would land in Gisborne. You can’t fly to Gisborne from Christchurch...