Geraldine (it's the name of a town)

So on the way to Geraldine we stopped off at Wood Shed Creek for more hiking (including visiting an old miner's pit - lots of the early Europeans came to New Zealand hoping to make their fortunes mining). But on getting back to the van I noticed that we had a puncture.

At first I thought of Namibia and of having to change the wheel in the middle of nowhere, but the tire didn't look completely flat, so we decided to try and drive on it, and in fact Sarah reckoned it felt fine. Obviously we took it easy to the next town, which luckily was only a few kilometres down the road. Also luckily, the very small town happened to have a garage, and a very well equipped garage at that, and the puncture was very professionally fixed up in about 20 minutes, and for only $20 (the culprit was a huge fencing nail which we no doubt had picked up on the unsealed road out to 'Edoras').

Whew - so much relieved we were back on the road in no time and stopped off to do a couple of fabulous hikes at Sharplin Falls and through the amazingly prehistoric Peel Forest to Acland Falls, having a lovely sausage sandwich lunch at the spectacular falls themselves (leftovers from our bangers and mash dinner the night before).

At this point I suppose I should mention that from now on just about every reference to a hike, or the scenery generally, in New Zealand will, by necessity, need to be prefixed with superlatives of the like of 'amazing', 'gorgeous', 'fantastic', 'stunning', etc. So I suppose that would just become tiresome for all involved, so I'll just leave try and leave them out completely, and see how it goes. But of course, needless to say, just about everywhere in New Zealand really is, genuinely, spectacularly, and majestically, beautiful - it really isn't all hype or the usual tourism propaganda.

For the record though - it's still not quite on a par with my memories of Nepal, but then the highest mountain in New Zealand (Mount Cook), is only 3,700 metres, whereas the Himalayas have a number of peaks over 8,000 metres. Nepal's scenic beauty is just on a completely different scale, but Nepal also has the other-worldly cultural experiences of being a Buddhist nation, and the cuisine is 'culture-shocky' too, but in a great way - dahl bhat, the national dish, is one of my all-time favorite dishes, incredibly basic and simple though it is (possibly because the main ingredient is potato, and of course I'm a die-hard paddy)!

Anyway, after our puncture, and subsequent (amazingly beautiful - whoops!), hikes, we arrived in the late afternoon at Geraldine, and I headed straight across the road from our camper park to the outdoor heated swimming pool. I thought it was a lovely wee town, and we ended up staying 3 nights. I cooked the first of many Thai green curries the first night, and the next day we hired bikes for a full day riding around the area (including stopping at a cool local church, riding through a nice small gorge, and the weather held up right until we came back, when the light rain started). We also saw the movie 'Black Book' in the cool, quirky local cinema (with really comfy couches for the punters and an intermission for snacks or beers).

In fact, the relaxing few days we spent here turned out to be very well timed, as it was here, while doing not very much, that we had the only serious rain of our entire three month stay in New Zealand.

So after our 3 days in Geraldine it was on towards one of New Zealand's major tourist attractions, Mount Cook - but first we stopped off at Lake Tekapo, for no other reason really than that we could!