Hello from Wanaka where autumn is fast approaching! It's amazing to experience the changes in the weather here. We arrived in summer, where long lazy days could be spent lounging around the lake (albeit after several hours of cleaning!) though we understand from the locals that it has been a strange summer, rather wet (apparently the pattern here follows that of the northern hemisphere) but wow, the temperatures then dropped fast. Only last week, on our day off, we were prevented from donning bikinis and heading for a sunbathe & swim because of a phone call confirming that Su's passport had been lost by Courier Post and she had to report it as lost or stolen to the Police and apply for a new one asap (more of this below…) This Wednesday on our day off, we woke up unable to move from beneath our lovely warm duvets in Buttercup as the air was absolutely freezing (the gap around the door through which you can see the outside world doesn't help) and when we did poke our cold little noses out of the caravan we could see a healthy sprinkling of snow on the top of the mountains and spent the day in thermal tops, fleeces AND our coats as a southerly had brought in a healthy helping of penguin poo! Luckily Winston, our knight in shining armour, turned up the other morning with a heater to keep us warm in the mornings, although with the electrics in Buttercup we don't plug anything else in while it is running! Thankfully it seems to have settled a little now and for the last couple of days the nights and mornings have been very cold, but clear, and the following day has been bright, sunny and warm - Saturday was in fact sunburn weather until the sun disappeared, then it was back to fleeces and blankets. This is apparently proper autumn weather for the area although sadly we will have left by the time Wanaka is drenched in the golden autumn colours for which it is famous.

So what else has been happening in our last few weeks in Wanaka, and in employment for that matter?

Courier Post lost Su's Passport

Yep, they actually managed it! Even as I wrote the last blog I was convinced that it would turn up somewhere, just a little mistake, after all how can a tracked piece of mail actually go missing? Well it can, and according to the Police, the British Embassy in Wellington and the girl who worked in the photo shop where replacement passport pics where taken, it happens quite often with Courier Post, often enough to be a little concerning about the staff they employ. Luckily for Su, Immigration NZ felt so bad about this that they offered to reimburse Su for the new passport and to waive the $80 fee for a replacement visa. The only problem was that only the Queenstown office could issue another visa, obviously we weren't too keen to use the services of Courier Post again, and we were planning to leave the area in less than two weeks so we had to get a replacement passport in that time and still have enough time to drive back to Queenstown for the visa! No problem then! After a conversation with a useless robot in the British Embassy Su was starting to feel, unsurprisingly, a little stressed! Then we found the details online for David Morrell, High Consul for the South Island and the person to contact if you run into difficulties while here. He was amazing, very calm, extremely reassuring and most importantly helpful. He ran through the list of forms we needed to download and complete (as he was going through a car wash!) and also asked us to email him the details so that he could speed things up for us with the people in Wellington who issue passports. The only problem was that, as in England, somebody who has known you for 2 years has to sign the back of the picture to verify you are who you say you are. Slight hitch. So what we had to do was find a Justice of the Peace for New Zealand who could verify this on the basis of Su's driving licence and photocopy of the lost passport. Luckily David had an old family friend, Helen Matthewson, who was a JP and who lived just 5 minutes drive from us. And she was also good to us, agreeing to see us at 5pm sharp to go through the paperwork. So by now it was 3.30pm, we had to eat lunch, Su had to wash and dry her hair for the pictures as her hair had been under a scarf all day, we had to get to town, get the pictures, fill in the forms and get to the house in 90 minutes. As you can probably tell, it was quite a relaxing day! Anyway, we made it, David was true to his word and spoke to his contacts in Wellington, and the new passport was issued on the same day they received all the forms and made its way back to us safely, with Courier Post, as there is no other option.

Next part, obtain the new visa. Immigration have been so helpful but sadly unlike the Passport Office they cannot issue a visa in a single day so we have no alternative but to entrust it to Courier Post yet again, though we have decided to drive over and collect it as this will probably be safer and if anything happens to it this time it will hold us up from leaving. Anyway, so that's the passport saga for now - we'll let you know if we get it back safely next time. Who needs Eastenders eh?

Life in Wanaka

Throughout our last few weeks in Wanaka, it has felt a little as though Su and I have had an unspoken agreement just to chill for a while and enjoy being here, and enjoy being still for a while, as after here we will be moving on every few days until we get home at the end of June. We had planned another trip away to Tekapo but abandoned this when we discovered the price of the Night Observatory, and you know what? We both felt quite relieved. We've become used to lovely old Buttercup, and have settled into a bit of a routine as we get ready in the mornings as there isn't room for the pair of us to stand side-by-side, so instead we dance around each other, so that we can both reach our clothes and get dressed without knocking each other over! We've become used to bedtimes where, as our beds are both on the same side and on the same plank of wood, as soon as one of us turns over, or simply tries to get into bed, the other bounces up and down until they are settled! Poor old Buttercup did finally succumb to the rain a couple of weeks ago when, after a day of almost constant rain, a fairly substantial leak developed above my bed just as I was about to bounce into bed for the night. So at 9.45pm I ran up to Robyn & Winston's to get the laundry key to grab a few towels to mop up the water. Robyn came down a few minutes later with a key to a spare room in case we needed to make a run for it, and a few minutes later Winston appeared, having been woken up, clad in raincoat & shorts with a hat and head torch, and proceeded to stomp his way around Buttercup muttering lots of words that I just know the website will not let me use here, trying to block the leak. As it was too wet for his original plan, he moved to option 2 and let down the tyres on one side so that Buttercup was lopsided and the rain would run off instead of gathering and finding its way inside! Genius! Luckily we were tipped towards the walls and not in danger of falling out of our beds! And just in case you're wondering, the hole has been properly plugged now and we are sort of even again.

Our days are taken up with an average of 5 or 6 hours work per day, and the cleaning is generally divided into two areas of work: cleaning the motels and self-contained units, which is where we spend most of our time; and cleaning the cabins and communal blocks. I prefer the motel side, it tends to be less dirty, but the communal area is good for a change and Su loves it as she gets to drive 'the shagin wagon'. This is an old van, even more dilapidated than Buttercup, covered in spider's webs, which carries all the equipment around. The seat is so far back she has to perch on the end to reach the pedals, she keeps forgetting how to drive a manual and changes gear without the clutch to a lovely grinding noise, some of the windows are made up entirely of duct tape and it spews out an inordinate amount of black smoke every time it moves. And whoever drives it before us has a horrible habit of either leaving it in gear, or reverse so that we kangaroo manically for a little while upon starting. And no, it isn't allowed on the road! Anyway, so that we never forget it we have taken some pictures of us doing 'the other side': driving in the shagin wagon, cleaning the toilets (Su finds the image of me with a toilet brush so funny she had to preserve it forever!) and our novel method for drying the floors. Ah, the glorious life of travellers!

Of course it helps that we work with a good bunch of people, a mix of locals and other travellers, led by Robyn & Winston, the owners in charge of the cleaning & maintenance side of things, and people dedicated to ensuring that we live in comfort. They have been amazing to us, we have blankets and a heater so that we do not suffer from the cold, a constant supply of meat as Winston cannot understand how we survive without it and use of the washer and dryer for our personal needs. We also work with Judy, originally from Dunedin, who along with her husband Colin is a lover of classic cars. She drives a 1967 Wolseley into work every day, but upon engaging her in a conversation about it, we discovered that they also own a 1900 Wolseley. She was in turn fascinated to learn that Su & I have both lived in Brighton as they dream of being able to do the London to Brighton car run one day, so we arranged for Dad to send over some pictures of the London to Brighton for them, and they were so delighted that they brought their gorgeous old car over one day to give us both a ride as a thank you. It is such a beautiful car, the only one left in the world from 1900 (possibly the only one built in that year) and the first Wolseley to be built with a steering wheel. We each had a ride along the lake towards Glendhu Bay, grinning like idiots and waving manically at anybody who looked at us with Colin frantically double-clutching to keep her going, until we reached a hill where she practically ground to a halt which seemed a good point to turn around and head back again! Once back here it was like a magnet for every man on the holiday park who gravitated towards the car to inspect it, one of who even climbed in, without asking, so his wife could take a picture of him sitting there! But it was really special, and so kind of them. We felt even more honoured when we learnt that they only take the car out about 4 times a year and made this trip especially for us, and a little guilty when we learnt that they had a flat tyre on the way home which turned out to have 4 separate punctures in it! Sorry!

Generally speaking our last few days off have been rather chilled affairs, taken up with a welcome lie-in, fried eggs for breakfast, a hot chocolate in town, a stroll along the shores of Lake Wanaka, and my haircut which was rather exciting, well for me anyway. Like Su I had a cut by Aimee, a girl who was training in a local hairdressers, and this was the first time she'd had a client with curly hair, so the trainer & head stylist, actually did 90% of the cut, simply talking her through what she was doing. And I ended up with probably the best haircut I've ever had in my life, for only $15 (about 6 GBP). Which pleased me immensely. We had one exception to our lazy mornings, and this was on our anniversary of arriving in New Zealand. As it was a gorgeous morning I decided I wanted to do the Diamond Lake walk again, but this time climb right to the Rocky Mountain summit from where you have amazing views to Wanaka, the lake and over to the Mount Aspiring National Park and the Rob Roy Glacier. And this was a proper lung-buster of a walk, 90 minutes of almost pure vertical climbing (or at least it felt that way), fortunately mostly in the shade, until we reached the summit, and the view was worth it - in fact it was so good we had to sit there for ages to take it all in (nothing to do with the fact we had no energy for the way down, honest!) We were planning on spending that afternoon sunning ourselves, but this was the day we found out about the passport, so our afternoon was a little disrupted, but we still had our anniversary meal of steak and chips, washed down with the Saddleback Pinot Noir Su had bought for my birthday, and enjoyed on our picnic table outside Buttercup, enjoying our views of mountains in the early evening sun. It was a fitting celebration.

This weekend we had a special treat in the form of the Wanaka A & P Show (Agricultural & Pastoral) which is rather like the country shows we have back home, and a huge event for Wanaka - people travelled from all over the South Island for this. We all whizzed through our cleaning that morning, as everybody wanted to go, and we got there just before midday and had such a fun afternoon: dog trials, sheep shearing, competitions for the best sheep, cattle and alpacas (which I adore - they have such gentle, huge doe eyes), lots of horse competitions - best hack, best pony, various jumping trials and show jumping, and a building full of entries for the best rose, best flower, best vegetables, best photographs, quilts, cakes, animals made from food, etc, etc. All such good fun and very New Zealand. We munched our way through the day quite happily, steak burgers, chips, fresh berry sundaes, little cute donuts (no calories) and lots of cheap fruit to bring away with us. We took lots of photos and have included several on the blog.

And I think that's about it. We're now getting ready to pack up and move on and in just a few days, passport excepting, we'll be heading back up the West Coast and back to the sea which we both miss enormously and are longing to be reunited with. So thank you to Wanaka Top 10 for employing us, giving us Buttercup for a couple of months and looking after us. Time to be free again!

With all our love, Jo & Su, xxx

p.s. 5 against Real, 4-1 at Old Trafford!!!!! You'll never walk alone……..