New Zealand Tour – Summer 2009

Squash & Beyond – World

John Illig, Middlebury College, Squash Coach 
 
 

      Care to travel to one of the most beautiful countries on Earth, eat great food, see exotic sites and play top-level squash?  Then a squash-tour of New Zealand is right for you! 

      Our small group of five had a magical time in New Zealand (August 2009), on Squash & Beyond – World’s inaugural tour “down under.”  With me were Hilary from Boston, Chris and Avi from New Jersey, and our fearless Canadian, Christien, from Vancouver Island, British Columbia.  Our two-week trip found us mingling with the Kiwi’s, experiencing Kiwi cultural, traveling through the countryside and playing some great squash.   

      New Zealand is not for the faint of heart!  The first thing to know, though, is that the long plane flight there is perfectly painless, as Qantas Airlines is wonderful and they make the trip comfortable and easy.  This was my first trip to New Zealand, and I was thrilled at the prospect of traveling to what some call “the most beautiful place in the world.”  America’s summer is New Zealand’s winter, of course, and the Kiwis that we spoke with during our plane flight kept apologizing to us for the severe winter weather that we were about to encounter.  They left me imagining that we’d be tramping through snow every place that we went for two weeks.  Upon landing in Auckland, however, I was happy to find that there was no snow on the ground.  Generally-speaking, the temperatures hovered at about 50 degrees F. for the two weeks, and we got by wearing only light-weight jackets.  There were one or two drizzly days, but overall we had a fair amount of sunshine, and there was constant crisp, clean air to breathe.   

      Meals found us alternating mostly between British (“fish ‘n chips”), Italian and Thai cuisine.  And all the Kiwis we met were exceedingly friendly and gracious.  As is the design of the S&B-W tours, we spent half of our time on squash courts in the various cities to which we traveled, and the other half of our time experiencing the sites, people and local culture.  Kiwis are outdoor enthusiasts and exercise junkies who, on the whole, struck us as happy people who live seemingly low-stress lives.  Sure that’s a generalization, but they seem to be living the good life.  They welcomed our visit to their country.   
 
 

TRIP SUMMARY: 

      Our first city was Aukland.  We trained squash in the mornings, and in the afternoons we rode to the top of Aukland’s Sky Tower, and we drove out for dinner along Tamaki Drive to the resort ocean-side towns on Okahu Bay.  On our second afternoon, we saw the live penguins in the Kelly Tarlton Antarctic Encounter & Underwater World, then we donned wet suits and swam inside indoor tanks alongside eels, stingrays and fish of all kinds.   

      After a few days in Aukland (north side of the North Island), we drove southeast to the small coastal city of Tauranga, where we played more great squash in the mornings, and in the afternoons spent more time strolling the streets and taking in Kiwi life.  One afternoon, we drove to the tip of Tauranga’s peninsula where we climbed up Mount Maunganui, a small mountain which dominates the landscape and offered us a 360-degree view out over the ocean and beaches.  After the climb, we bathed in an outdoor hot mineral pool at a small public spa.  The town of Mount Maunganui is New Zealand’s “Surf City” and there we rummaged through surfing and skateboard shops.   

      One of the highlights of the trip came in the day-and-a-half that we spent driving southward from Tauranga to Palmerston North, as the route took us through the interior lake district of the North Island, where we stopped at Lake Rotorua for “Zorbing,” and go-carting, and a sky ride;  and then we stopped at Lake Taupo for some impromptu bungee jumping (by parental consent!).  Snow-covered mountains line the horizon, southwest of the lakes, and the scenery there is beautiful.   

      Getting down to the bottom of the North Island, we resumed our squash training in Palmerston North, and our squash highlight of the trip came as our illustrious four campers competed in the Wellington Junior Open, matched up against New Zealand’s finest.  There was great competition, and also tremendous hospitality extended towards us at the club.  The Kiwi players were engaging and asked us lots of questions about America and Canada.  The tournament was a great experience for us, and the squash level was high.   

      On day #11, we returned our rental van and boarded the Inter-Island Ferry, and we rode the open water across the southern Pacific from Wellington on the North Island, to the tiny port of Picton on the South Island.  The boat-side views were terrific.  Equally stunning was the ride that we took upon picking up another rental van and driving southward along the coast to Kaikoura (seals and sea lions lying on the rocks).  From Kaikoura, we took an inland drive and looped through mountains filled with Lord of the Rings scenery and arrived at our final stop on the tour, the city of Christchurch.  Meals of sushi and also India cuisine complemented our normal fare, and we spent some time inside a giant shopping mall in Christchurch.  A final highlight came in a day trip from Christchurch to the mountain resort of Hanmer Springs.  As New Zealand sits on the divide of a major tectonic plate, hot springs and other evidence of geothermic activity is ubiquitous on both islands (north and south), and this helps provide for the distinctive characteristic of the land.  All-in-all, it was a wonderful tour.  Bungee jumping videos and photographs adorn the Facebook pages of the “campers” and we were left with some amazing memories of the sites and the people of New Zealand.