Coming Home

Well the time has finally come for me to pack up my luggage for the last time on this trip and begin the long trek home.

By the time I reach San Francisco I will have traveled over 22,000 miles, taken 12 flights, stayed in 7 hotels, survived two large earthquakes, narrowly avoided a mountain landslide, stayed less than 2 miles from New Zealand's largest terrorist bust in history, lost plenty of money in casinos, scuba dived in the Great Barrier Reef, jumped off the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge, eaten countless amazing dinners, kicked some local ass at pool in a gay bar in Auckland, among other things. The one thing I didn't get to do which I'm bummed about is sky dive over the Southern Alps. My booking was canceled because bad weather swept into the region :( I think I'll make it up to myself by doing it over San Francisco.

It really has been the trip of a lifetime but I'm really excited to get home to my dog, see familiar faces and most importantly crawl into my own bed. I will leave some parting thoughts on Australia and New Zealand as they relate to America however. They really have it good down here. The airports, for better or worse, aren't like state prisons. You can bring liquids on board, don't have to strip practically everything off to go through security, etc. etc. The people are extremely friendly, the landscapes and cities are beautiful, clean and safe. Overall it's just entirely a different pace of life and I find it extremely refreshing. It forces me to entertain the question, what the hell is wrong with our country. Somewhere along the line we really got it wrong and continue to do so.

Jake made a really good point the other day when a stranger sat down next to him at an outdoor cafe in Auckland. Jake immediately became defensive thinking that this man was going to rob him or was going to beg for money but all he wanted to do was have a friendly chat. How sad for us that as Americans we've been programmed to put up our guard and expect something negative out of virtually every stranger we encounter. That mentality just doesn't exist down here that I've witnessed. Our cities are dirty, wrought with crime, homeless and drugs but you don't see that here on any comparable scale. Why? I would give serious thought to moving down here at some point in my life just to get away from the daily bullshit that we all have to put up with but don't even realize anymore because it has become so ubiquitous. America definitely has it's finer points but I think I'm finding less and less of them the more I travel abroad.

Anyway, there's my "deep thought" for the day. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you SF people when I get home and all you Austin people when I come back for Thanksgiving! This is Nick Down Under signing off.

Mother Nature Hates Us

So we obviously had that huge quake last night. The whole town was abuzz about it this morning. We woke up, had breakfast and boarded our massive coach which was to drive us 4 hours deep into the rain forests and into the Southern Alps on our way to the fiords where we were to take a boat cruise through the mountain lakes and sounds. The drive was great until we started to get up into the tight narrow roads on sheer cliffs of the mountains where we were informed there was a high risk of avalanches today. Of course we were on edge after that tidbit of info. Suddenly we turned a corner and discovered that meer minutes before there was another 6.0 earthquake which triggered a landslide across our road. This literally happened minutes before we reached the slide area as there was only 1 car between us and the debris. We were stuck up there for a while before the rangers declared the road closed and informed us about the earthquake. Our guide was told to get us out of the mountains quickly for fear of additional quakes and slides. It was a tense, speedy 4 hour drive out of the rugged terrain. Alas we're finally back to our hotel no worse for the wear. TIME TO DRINK!!!!

CAN'T GO BACK TO BED

It's just after 1:30am on Tuesday morning here in Queenstown and I have so much adrenalin going through me right now that I can't go back to bed. I was in an extremely deep sleep when I was rudely awakened by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake which had it's epicenter 67 miles from my current location. There was an after shock soon after and I'm expecting more. The bed was TOTALLY shaking and things were making noise as they swung about. Here's a link to the USGS site on this particular quake. Think I'll have a little whisper of something from the alcohol family to calm my nerves.

WOW WOW WOW

We just landed in Queenstown on the south island of New Zealand and let me say HOLY SHIT. This is the coolest place on earth. It's almost like a mountain town in Colorado but it sits on a 50km long mountain lake, is surrounded by snow capped peaks and by far has much more to offer than anything in the U.S. Jake and I just walked into our luxury suite complete with a washer/dryer, kitchen, entertainment room, dining area, master suite and incredible bathroom...not to mention the lush green courtyard just out our back door. I'm in heaven. If you don't hear from us over the next few years, come visit room 105 of the St. Moritz in Queenstown.

This is the lake that sits just 100 feet from our back door.


We'll be spending the rest of the week here enjoying all the natural wonders and activities. Jake just now booked his bunjee jump for the day after tomorrow and I just booked my sky dive for the same time. It has been 10 years since my last sky dive and I can't wait to do one over the Southern Alps!!

I think we're losing it

Yesterday we arrived in Rotorua, New Zealand and I think the family is starting to lose it a bit as the past 24 hours have been filled with laughing and hysterics. We were picked up from Auckland and our tour bus began the 5 hour trek to Rotorua. Rotorua is basically like Yellowstone. We're sitting in the caldera of a volcano. There is a lake just off my balcony and in the middle of the lake is the volcano cone. There's also steam and gases rising up everywhere and it basically smells like someone ate too much broccoli 5 hours ago but I'm getting ahead of myself.



Our first pit stop on the way here was at the Waitomo glow worm caves. This was pretty nifty. You descend into these limestone caves until you reach these cathedral rooms with glowing blue dots all over the ceiling. There were these four women on our bus that were just unbelievably rude. They were shoving my family aside in these caves because, ya know, you get a big white trash prize for beating everyone to the glow worms. Once back on the bus our group of 10 made it our personal mission to talk trash about these women and make their trip as uncomfortable as possible. Here's where things start to go down hill as we pretty much laughed from 12pm through 10pm. After the caves we stopped at "The Big Apple" for lunch. Think less New York City and more country bumpkin kitchen in the middle of a very scenic no where. They also had a massive fiber glass apple with the words THE BIG APPLE written across it. This "thing" had an opening which would allow you to climb up to it's "observation deck". Bwahahahaha, laughable. Lunch at this establishment was even more humorous. It was buffet style and almost as if they couldn't quite decide on a cuisine as there was just a menagerie of different styles of cooking...nothing cooked well.

We finally made it to our hotel, got settled in and after a few cocktails ran down to the lobby to be picked up for our authentic Maori (indigenous people) dinner extraveganza. Don't start giggling yet, it gets better/worse. The bus is already filled to the brim with the geriatric crew; red flag number one. The entire family starts looking at each other as if to say, oh fuck what did we get ourselves into. The bus departs, literally turns a corner and pulls into the building adjacent to our hotel. We all immediately burst into boisterous laughter as we're thinking, hell we could have walked. It turns out that this is simply where we stop for our "orientation and the first two part of our adventure". We're ushered into this little room with some lame setup where we're shown a 60 second video about the migration of the Maori's from Tahiti to NZ. I shit you not, it's about 60 seconds. After that video we're told to follow the path through the atrium to another room. As we enter the room we quickly realized we're in another video viewing type room. This video too was about 60 seconds. By now the family is suppressing thunderous laughter. We're trying to be respectful as we were told by our Maori guide that this all is a very serious deal but it's not working well. We get back on the bus and begin driving up the hills to the Maori village. During the drive we're instructed that we must pick a "chief" from our bus load of people. This chief will have to engage the real Maori chief in an authentic ritual to allow us into their village. The guide picked this man on our bus from the U.S. named Marion and his wifes name was Ginger. Ok, that's it...we're now the obnoxious American tourist group who is laughing so hard we can't stop. Where's Gilligan and the skipper too?? The other bus passengers HATED us. So we get there and begin this ritual but the hard part was that we couldn't smile or laugh during the ceremony because it would be considered an insult. These guys were jumping around sticking their tongues out at us in loin clothes and I can't laugh. Shit. I'll spare you all the other parts of this evening but I will say that it turned out to be extremely interesting. They danced and sang us native songs which were incredibly beautiful and well rehearsed. The ride home was another story. The family is still laughing at every little off colored thing and then our driver decides that each group from each country must single a song to the rest of the bus from that country. We picked B-I-N-G-O and bingo was his name-o, but that didn't go over well. NOT ONE PERSON CLAPPED FOR US but everyone else clapped after the other songs. Suddenly the driver starts singing, "she'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes" and pulls 15 looks around a roundabout at high speed in the bus. We were virtually flying all over the place and uncontrollably laughing more. When they finally dropped us off this woman looks at me and says in a snide voice, "hate to see ya go". I looked at her and said, "liar".

ANYWAY, you really had to be there but I have some of this on tape. Painful stuff. We're packing up right now and about to head to the airport to fly down to Queenstown on the south island for three days of action packed adventure. Jake is going to bungee jump at the birthplace of bungee jumping. We're taking a jet boat at high speed through the canyons of the southern alps and apparently a lot more. Pray for us ;)

Auckland

So we've been tooling around Auckland since yesterday afternoon. This city of about 1.4 million people has a land area by far larger than that of the greater LA area. It's very spread out and extremely beautiful. Everything is green and there are volcanoes everywhere. Last night Jake and I were going to go out to sample the gay nightlife but we had a huge family dinner and were just wiped out afterwards. Therefore we've earmarked tonight to go hit Karangahape Rd. (the gay district so we've been told). Hopefully there's some eye candy worth gawking at.

This morning we took a nice tour of the city to get the lay of the land and did a fair amount of video dancing. I've been forcing the family to do these utterly retarded dances in front of landmarks during the trip which I plan to splice together and put to music. So far it's hysterical. Grandma is the only hold out but I'll crack her.

This afternoon I had a bit of an adventure. The Sky Tower is not only the tallest structure in Auckland but in the southern hemisphere as well. I just finished base jumping by wire off it. You take this elevator up from the base to the top deck. I was actually having second thoughts while on the elevator because part of the floor was glass and was looking down a huge drop. Once I got out on the deck of the jump point I REALLY started having second thoughts. Base jumping is too dangerous in the traditional sense off this building because of the height and proximity to other downtown buildings so they have you rigged up to this system which allows you to fall but controls the speed at which you do. Either way, once I stepped out onto the platform I felt relatively fine until they made me grab two poles, lean over the edge and start to count down from three. I just had to tell myself to leap out. ACK!! People looked like ants on the streets below but it was such a rush!!! I have pictures and Jake caught part of it on film from the ground. Here's a picture to give you some scale of what I jumped off of. The Sky Tower is that massive needle building towards the right.


This obviously isn't me (I'll have to scan my pictures in off a hard copy) but this is the exact same platform I jumped from.

Adios Australia

So we arrived in Cairns yesterday and I'm officially in love with this place. The city is pretty much a tropical seaside community of roughly 140k people but it's stunning. To the west it's entirely surrounded by lush jungle mountains and to the east is the Coral Sea. The people are friendly, the seafood is second to none and I don't want to leave.

This morning we woke up and trekked north to Port Douglas where we boarded a massive high speed catamaran to the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (Agincourt Reef to be specific). It was an experience of a life time. GORGEOUS! Jacob, Tierney and I took our crash course in scuba diving while on the boat out there and once we arrived at what I'll describe as a tiny floating city on the reef we headed to the dive section. Here's a picture of the boat docked at the platform on the reef.

We opted to wear the protective dive suits since someone was stung by box jelly fish last week. Didn't really want to end up recovering in a hospital for the next few weeks. Anyway, we got all geared up and took our first steps into the water for an initial introduction to the art of breathing under water. That was an extremely strange experience and really took a bit to get used to. So we finally began our slow descent into the reef. I'll never forget it. We swam down to a giant clam that was easily 4 feet in length and were allowed to put our hand into it to feel the fleshy inside. It ended up not liking that and slammed its mouth shut. There was such an amazing variety of wildlife...simply awe inspiring. Fortunately they filmed most of our dive and I bought it on DVD to show interested parties.

We're now back at the hotel and are in for a very short nights sleep as we have to be on our way to the airport by 4am. We'll be off to Brisbane to catch our connecting flight out of Australia and on to Auckland, New Zealand. Talk to you all soon from the land of Kiwi's.

Sydney

I've been busy/lazy and haven't posted since arriving in Sydney, so here goes. We arrived yesterday morning and checked into the Intercontinental Hotel. Yet another stunning temporary abode. This isn't my personal picture (haven't finished uploading the new ones yet) but this is actually a picture from the same side of the building that I'm on, thus this is the view out my window.

So yesterday we took a 3 hour cruise all around Sydney Harbor. The experience itself was fantastic but they just HAD to stick cruise director Julie on board to add her trite, if not fanciful history of the harbor. The only thing worse than a bad cruise guide is a bad cruise guide who attempts humor yet fails and is a raging bitch to boot. My uncle asked her a perfectly legitimate question regarding flags on the ships and she deferred the question to Aunt Flo who unleashed some veiled vitriolic verbal vomit (how's that for alliteration). That's V to the 4th power which is twice as annoying as your run of the mill verbal vomit (V squared). Seriously though, this woman felt that it was worthwhile to inform us all that, "just last week over there on the bank they held a wedding for 14 couples at the same time and I'll tell you what...not one of those bridesmaids had the same color dress!!!". Honey, if I wanted to hear about women with big hair wearing an array of putrid colored bridesmaids dresses, I would have passed on the 15 hour flight to Australia and hopped a shorter one to Lubbock thank you very much. Yet another prime example of a guidance counselor failing miserably at his job. I digress.

Following the cruise we moved on to an extremely over priced dinner at a lackluster restaurant. My proper southern upbringing prevents me from mentioning the establishment's name. It would be unseemly. Fuck, who the hell am I kidding...it's called Manta and I say two thumbs down. A now running family joke has formed about our first day experiences in Sydney. Though, if yesterday (while fun) ran a bit a muck, today over compensated for it.

We tore all over the city and saw some of the most awe inspiring views of my life. After our long trek the group fractured. There was the "Shoppers Guild", the "Walkabout Guild" and the "Insane Guild". I joined the Insane Guild as our self imposed mission was to walk to the base of the Sydney Harbor bridge, plop down $170 and sign up to fully climb the exterior arch of the bridge (fully exposed to the elements). Here's a picture of the structure we climbed. I have hard prints of us on top but need to digitally scan them when I get home.



This was one of the most incredible experiences. You have to go through a huge orientation during which you're required to take a breathalizer test.....I passed....WOOHOO! After you get all geared up in their jump suits you hop into a modest harness and clip into the meager cable at the base and begin walking. At first you're on wooden planks below the entrance ramp to the bridge (still over land). You walk a bit and a bit more and they you reach the massive stone pylon at which point you begin climbing some internal catwalks (very behind the scenes type stuff of the bridge). The next thing you know you step out, the wind is blowing and you're on a tiny steel grate which flexes when you walk on it looking straight down into the bay. As if this wasn't unnerving enough, you now must climb 4 vertical ladders which your feet barely fit into and which you can see straight out all around up through the actual road deck where cars are zipping by your head before you reach the massive steel arches that you can see in the picture above (we're talking the larger of the two arches). At that point you walk up the top battling 35 mph winds which are strong enough to upset your center of gravity. I'll admit a certain degree of trepidation but ultimately that melted away to pure adrenaline. IT ROCKED!!! Out of our group of 10 only 3 of did it. Bragging rights ;)

Anyway, to make an already long story short, we then went to a fantastic dinner at a restaurant on Darling Harbor called Nick's (yes, I know..I'm branching out). If any of you visit here, go to Nick's and order the Bay Bugs; you most certainly will not regret it. After that we hit the casino and while Jake doubled his money, I ended up down. So we're back at the hotel room, drinking and typing out blogs for everyone to enjoy. Tomorrow we're catching a flight to Cairns (pronounced Cannes). Since tomorrow is going to be a moderately low key day, travel aside, I'm probably going to hold off on posting until Thursday night (your Thursday morning) since we'll have just returned back from scuba diving off the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef.

Later!

Human Target

Today was long, exciting and has completely wiped me out. Most everyone decided to go shopping this morning but my uncle and I opted out in lieu of watching the Melbourne Marathon and hitting the casino. He won some, I lost some, what can ya do. Before reaching the casino however Mike pointed to this ice cream van and told me to go stand next to it for a picture. I didn't get why and he told me to read the side....this picture was the result:



After lunch our guide picked us up and drove us an hour and a half south to Phillip Island. This area of Australia is surprisingly green and lush. It reminds me a great deal of northern California. We hit a myriad of picturesque spots here and there but finally we ended up at this nature conservancy filled with Koalas and Wallabies. Their signs around the park were hysterical. There were plaques with pictures instructing you to not scream at the koalas, not to touch the koalas asses and above all not to shake the koalas out of the trees. Well that certainly took the wind out of my sails ;) Our next stop took us to these unbelievable cliffs at the very southern edge of Australia (about 1800 miles north of Antarctica) where millions of gulls were nesting and where we were to watch the penguins emerge from the ocean. I decided to ditch the family and wander on the decking the wound all around the cliffs. This proved to be a mistake as I pissed off a few of the gulls all which unfortunately wound up on camera. The video was too large for blogger so I had to upload it to youtube; you can watch it here.

The penguin portion of the evening, to my complete dismay, forbid you from taking any sort of photography, video or otherwise as it disturbs the animals. Essentially we sat out on this private deck and right after sun down these small, ADORABLE penguins began to flock out of the sea in droves and would walk up the beach and hike up the hills into their little burrows. It took great restraint not to stick one under my coat to smuggle home. They're just so damn cute waddling around and trying to keep up with one another.

In any event, we're finally back to the hotel and completely sapped of energy. Tomorrow is an early one as we have a 9am flight to Sydney. More antics to come......

So the adventure begins

Well we all made it down here in one piece. After meeting up with the entire family at LAX Thursday night we proceeded with our typical alcohol fueled "what have you been up to" conversations before boarding the plane. Of course there was some slip up with Qantas and in lieu of our party of 9 being seated in close proximity we were scattered through out the 747. I had the distinct pleasure of being seated next two two children who relished annoying each other (and myself) at every possible opportunity. No matter, three cocktails and an Ambien was all I needed to tune them out for the remaining 15 hours. I have to admit it was fairly cute when I woke up half way through the trip to find the 7 year old boy out cold, curled against me. He looked so peaceful sleeping that it almost pained me to hit the rug rat over the head and shoved him over to his sister. All kidding aside the flight was surprisingly pleasant and we were on the ground in Melbourne before I knew it....minus a fairly horrifying landing (plane swerved all over the wet runway)

The family scattered a bit since it took so long for us all to get off the plane thus some reached immigration before others. Jacob was the last one through and for what ever reason he decided to tell the authorities that he was traveling alone in Australia for the next 7 days. This apparently raised a red flag and unbeknownst to him they marked his card as a possible security threat. Much to my luck Jake and I walked through customs together where I was immediately branded suspicious by association. We were pulled to the side and the gentleman, while very polite, informed us that because we had been flagged we were subject to complete inspection of our luggage and a lengthy interrogation process. I thought about cracking jokes about packing Asian sex slaves but that probably wouldn't have helped the matter. YAY INTERROGATION!! My sister at this point is walking through customs and when our officer noticed that we were making too much eye contact he nabbed her as well and had her join our little convict party. This all really was more or less a light hearted situation and after conversing with 3 of his superiors they deemed us an unlikely terrorist trio and sent us on our merry way. Fools, they'll let anyone in this country ;)

We arrived at our hotel (The Langham) with mouths agape. This place is ridiculously ostentatious. Of course we collectively looked like the rag tag Americans typified in movies like The National Lampoon's European Vacation. Once checked in, cleaned up and very jet lagged we hopped on our private tour of the city with our guides Bruce and Katie. They were extremely knowledgeable and fantastic guides. We spent the next 4 hours zipping all over Melbourne and I have to admit, I'm thoroughly impressed. It reminds me of a larger, cleaner San Francisco and I'd consider moving here at the drop of a hat. The picture above is the view of their city center from my hotel room. That picture doesn't do the city justice so I'll be sure to send more soon. Oh, I should mention that we officially saw our first bushman while on the tour. Bruce and Katie took us to this fantastic coffee/tea house for afternoon tea and as we were leaving I look over to see some kid in his mid twenties squatting down to inspect the under carriage of his car. He should have spent more time inspecting his own under carriage as his lack of belt coupled with gravity had a southerly pull on his pants. This all in full, hairy view of my family who spent the next 30 minutes cracking up through a jet lagged, caffeine induced haze. Hence, our first bushman of the trip.

The tour was followed up by a fantastic dinner at this Italian restaurant on the renowned Lygon St. (reminds me of 6th St. in Austin but full of restaurants instead of bars). We all turned in fairly early to catch up on sleep and of course still moderately being on Pacific time I woke up well before sunrise and couldn't fall back asleep.

Today the plan is to get breakfast and then we're heading out of the city down the coast where we'll eventually end up at some island around 7pm be able to walk through a massive colony of wild penguins. I'm sure there will be many an interesting pictures of this to share ;)

I hope all is going well with everyone back home and I'll keep these posts coming!!