New Zealand is a delightful place - better than the UK in many ways. However internet access is not one of them. Wi-Fi is available in many campsites but, where it works at all, it is tempermental and slow. So this is the first time I've been able to get propery online for several days. Since my last blog we've picked up our camper van, travelled down the east coast through Dunedin to Invercargill at the southernmost tip and then back up to Te Anau at the edge o...

My friends Claudine and Claire, having endured looking at my photos of Peru (only 100 - carefully selected from over 1,000!) challenged me to limit myself to a selection of one a week on this trip. So here's the first. A theme of the first week was seeing cities by night from up high. Hong Kong from The Peak and Christchurch from our B&B in Cashmere Heights. This a photo taken from the B&B of the city and the house next door.

Christchurch is now best known to most people for the earthquakes that occurred in September 2010 and February 2011 - the latter killing 185 people. Today signs of the damage caused are still everywhere. These range from the minor - walls propped up, patches on roofs where a chimney fell down, collapsed garden walls - to major. Empty lots are a sign a building was destroyed and has been cleared whilst the Central Business District is still cordoned off and most...

Get up very early. Train to the airport. 12 hour flight to Sydney. Frankie meets us at the airport. Taxi to hotel. Drink with Frankie. Go to bed late. Get up very early. Taxi to airport. Flight to Christchurch. Taxi to B&B. Worth it all for the view from the loo.

A day of two-halves. This morning we went to Lantau Island to see the Big Buddha. Lantau is probably as close to rural idyll as one can get in Hong Kong. It is a largely undeveloped island that must be much as Hong Kong was when it was first settled by Westerners - covered in semi-tropical forest. The Big Buddha is exactly that. The largest seated Buddha in the world, it was erected in the late 1980s at the Po Lin Monastery. This being Hong Kong it's not exactl...