I’m typing this settled back at home in Sydney in the middle of my usual domestic chaos, but I still have fresh and happy memories from my recent travels. The break this time was an extended one: my dad is getting on in years and while is fit and healthy now, has to grapple with the reality that he may not be up for traveling so much in the near future. He wanted to make sure that he & I had a chance to spend some quality one-on-one time together, so we planned a separate trip for just the two of us to ride the Indian Pacific together.
In my last update I still had a couple more days left of train life and it turns out they were some of the best parts of the trip. As I mentioned in my previous post, we stopped at Adelaide and a bus whisked us off to the Barossa Valley where we had a brief wine tasting and dinner and live entertainment at the Seppeltsfield Winery. I had been taking antibiotics due to a random attack of cellulitis from what looked like a mosquito bite that I got before my trip started, so while I did sample the wines a tiny bit I refrained from enjoying more than the food. The meal was great, the vibe was a little too cruise-shippy for me (does anyone really enjoy Neil Diamond or do we all just sing along to Sweet Caroline out of social obligation?), but it was a pleasant evening overall because my dad and I landed with an interesting young couple living in the UK but one was from Russia and one from France! I think the part I most enjoyed otherwise was the drive through Adelaide back to the train. I hadn’t been there since the early 2000’s and it was interesting to see what had changed.
The next day broke and we crossed the border from South Australia back into New South Wales where we stopped very early in Broken Hill. For each stop the train made, we often had a choice of which activities we wanted to take part in. I knew next to nothing about Broken Hill, but when I saw that one of the options was a walking tour with a drag queen, I told my dad that was what we needed to do. I think he was slightly scandalised or at least well out of his comfort zone, but he needn’t have been because we both had a blast with Shelita Buffet and learned lots of cool facts about both the town’s history and neat little details about various filming locations for Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
The morning ended with a drag show at The Tipsy Camel which was excellent fun and where I won a t-shirt (thrills!) despite losing at Bingo and also coming up with an incredibly wrong-headed answer during a game of “Who Am I?”
Our final stop was the following day at Mount Victoria station in the Blue Mountains. After a short stop at Govett’s Leap, we had a tour of the Hydro Majestic, which I had never been to before (only its classier cousin The Carrington in Katoomba). The tour was interesting and full of awesome views, and then we sat down for an execllent, gut-busting high tea.
We got home to Sydney later that afternoon, where I had a little over 24 hours to herd cats and make sure my husband and kids were packed and ready to go. On the morning of Good Friday, we got up and out the door to get to the airport and catch our flight to Auckland. My dad had already flown out the morning before, and my stepmum beat us by a few hours on Friday morning. We settled into our holiday apartments, right near Wynyard Quarter and Victoria Park near Auckland’s CBD.
We didn’t get up to much during the Easter long weekend, partly due to health concerns (my antibiotics from the cellulitis gave me hives, and I ended up having to seek out a walk-in clinic that was open on Easter Sunday to get something to stop me from itching and scratching myself all night long). But we enjoyed the waterfront area, and the kiddos and grandpa made it out to the Maritime Museum without me.
The first big activity we made it to was Auckland’s Museum of Transportation and Technology, which is highly recommended for good nerd times. There was a huge range of things on exhibit, from steam engines, slide rules, old computers and media, historical trams, airplanes, a mini-post-colonial-New-Zealand historical village, and more modern sciency stuff. Kids and adults both really enjoyed something and had a good time. If you were so inclined it’s also right next to the zoo, so you could do a two-for, but we didn’t have enough spoons for that all in one day. Rounding out the museums, we also hit the Auckland Museum the next day, which I had been to once before 20 years prior when I was in Auckland to collect my permanent residency visa for Australia. I didn’t remember much from my previous trip, but we enjoyed the natural history and ancient cultural areas that were on display.
On the pop-culture-nerd-side, as a Peter Jackson fan, I managed to convince everyone to join me for a tour of Weta Workshop Unleashed. I’m pretty sure everyone enjoyed it, although it felt a tiny bit rushed. We easily could have spent the entire day there, poking around at all the material on display, instead of being ushered through a 90 minute tour. It was a little on the “buy our merch” overly slick side, but you couldn’t deny the artistry and creativity on display, so it didn’t bother me too much. And I’m a bit of a behind-the-scenes junky so I got a lot out of it personally.
After that, our activities took more of an outdoorsy turn. Before my dad and stepmum went on to their next leg of their trip in Taiwan, we managed to book ferry tickets to Rangitoto Island for the day. This place had special significance for me and my dad, because I was hiking up to the summit on Rangitoto when he called me one day in 2003 and I shared with him the good news that I had my visa and was ready to return back to Australia as a permanent resident. We didn’t go up to the summit on this trip, but we had some beautiful walks around the island and enjoyed the ferry trip there and back.
At that point our activities were paused for the arrival of Cyclone Vanaiu which meant that one of our booked activities was canceled due to the wind and rain forecast. We had one very rainy day where we played boardgames and watched One Piece, but fortunately we weren’t too put off by the weather for long. We made the long drive down to Waitomo and had a really magical experience walking through and floating through the glow worm cave. Sitting in a little rowboat in the pitch black, in silence, with hundreds of little bioluminescent “stars” (which were basically bug poop!), was trippy and memorable.
The final activity was also really special. We were lucky to be able to re-book our canceled wild kiwi spotting tour to the evening before we flew home. I’m now one of a select group of people who was able to see a kiwi bird in the wild! It was great to be able to clearly see the Milky Way and the Southern Cross and so many stars as well.
And that was the end of the trip! A really memorable time despite some hiccups with health issues and the weather being thoroughly uncooperative. I felt really restored by having that time away from the daily grind. Especially being on the train in areas where I couldn’t even get internet access on my phone, I really appreciated just being able to be still, quiet, read when I felt like it, nap when I was tired, and look out the window watching the landscape flow by.